Tag: Priests

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE SCANDAL REVISITED

A few days ago in this space I kicked off Holy Week with an expression of dismay over the Catholic Church’s incorrigible ineptitude in dealing with its never-ending child sex abuse scandal. I wrote about being stunned over the Church’s legislative campaign to make it more difficult for people to sue their rapists and molesters.

The subject was out of my wheelhouse. I am neither Catholic nor a theologian. Yet, the concept of the country’s largest Christian denomination serving, in effect, as a pedophile lobby seemed preposterously creepy. The post triggered more reaction than anything I’ve written since the inception of this site. It was read by hundreds throughout the United States and 12 other countries. Thanks to the comments, email and private messages it produced, I know more about this ecclesiastical quagmire than I did a week ago.

Here’s a smattering of what I learned:

• Holy Week is treacherous for many sexual abuse survivors. It ignites memories of torture that defy comprehension. For some, it means reliving a boyhood Good Friday ritual in which they were tied, naked, to large wooden crosses by their parish priests, and then molested. For other survivors, a term that carries more positive energy than “victims,” the week brings back images of when, at 11 or 12, priests sodomized them in a confessional.

• A 48-year-old man, after multiple suicide attempts and several breakdowns, finally came to grips with the reality that, at age 11, his priest repeatedly raped him, always assuring the boy that this was part of God’s plan. The statute of limitations in his state barred him from filing suit.

• A man in his 20s filed a complaint with Church officials detailing the sexual abuse he encountered years earlier by a priest who ran a boys prep school. After a lengthy internal investigation, the Church exonerated the priest. The man killed himself years before other victims came forward and the state lifted the deadline for filing suit.

• The statute of limitations issue is not just about money. For the survivors, it is about truth telling, pulling back the Church’s veil of secrecy that has draped this scandal, to one extent or another, since the beginning.

With apologies for burying the lede, that last bullet point is the most important one. I always believed plaintiff attorneys had their fingers crossed when they told jurors that, “This is not about the money.” These survivors have nothing crossed. The salve for their unimaginable wounds is not a seven-figure damage award. It is total and complete transparency. They want to open up every dark nook and cranny of this scandal and let the light of day shine in.

The civil court process rests on a foundation of discovery, a system requiring litigants to share records, documents and other evidence relevant to the dispute. The Church, I am told, is a masterful record keeper. Filed away in the deep recesses of parish and diocesan offices is the entire, unvarnished story of priestly pedophilia and the bishops’ cover-up. Thanks to the discovery process, a good hunk of that data is now publically available. But a lot more remains under the Church’s lock and key. Civil suits open the lock box. That’s why the Church is lobbying against lifting the statute of limitations.

If you want to see just how vile and entangled this scandal is, click here. It will take you to an amazing data base compiled by a group of Catholic laity under the banner of “Bishop Accountability”. You will find an “abuse tracker”, filled with letters, notes and documents representing more than 50 years of systemic child sexual assault and the Church’s elaborate efforts to keep it all quiet. Most of it came from litigation. Webmaster Kathleen Shaw, a former religion reporter for the Worcester, MA Telegram & Gazette, says she has logged more than 100,000 stories of abuse.

Through court records and crowd sourcing, the site has assembled an astonishing list of pedophile priests. There is a pull-down menu, like you were looking for a Starbucks in a foreign location. It goes by states, then cities. I picked small, remote towns I’d never heard of, only to see as many 15 or 20 priests entered there. There is another database for assignments, showing how abusers were moved from parish to parish by bishops who knew they were sexual predators.

These survivors do not want to be forgotten. They want their pain to make a difference, and that can’t happen if this full story, in all of its awful terror, is not made public. I got the sense that this is a tough time for them. This issue was front burner stuff for so long. There were Sixty Minutes pieces, magazine covers, an academy award winning film. We’d go to dinner parties and shake our heads over this tragic abuse. Then the story fades. But their pain does not.

I mean no disrespect to Catholicism and the spiritual nourishment it has given to millions, but there is no escaping this basic truth: the powerful men who run this institution are responsible for the largest and most pervasive moral organizational failure in recent history. They turned their collective back on massive child sexual abuse by their agents. Then they tried to cover it up. Now they wield their power to cut off the rights of those abused to file suit. It is a moral outrage larger than Enron, Arthur Anderson, Dalkon Shield or Ford Pinto. Those were organizations in business to make money that knowingly hurt people for the sake of profits. The Roman Catholic Church, in business to deliver God’s love, knowingly hurt its own followers for the sake of protecting the power of the men in charge. Only through pure artifice and audacity do these moral charlatans now ask state legislatures to protect them from their sins. They deserve the sternest rebuke possible.

LONG OVERDUE IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: JUSTICE FOR VICTIMS OF ITS PRIESTS

I am told there is a special perch in hell for anyone who speaks ill of the country’s largest Christian denomination on the eve of Holy Week. It’s a risk I am willing to take, because I’ve really had it with corporate Catholicism and its relentless and unforgiving campaign against the victims of pedophile priests. This is a tragedy of gigantic proportions that keeps finding new ways of inflicting pain on those whose suffering is beyond comprehension.

In the beginning, there was the cover up. The Catholic hierarchy was well aware that many of its priests were molesting and raping children. For years, the Church did everything possible to keep the sexual attacks quiet, moving its collared pedophiles from parish to parish when things got hot, letting them start from scratch with a new crop of unsuspecting altar boys.

That routine began to slowly fail in the 1980s when, one by one, victims of the Church’s atrocity stepped out of the shadows with stories the bishops could no longer silence. According to informed estimates, 17,651 American children were sodomized by their parish priest, a number that keeps growing as people now in their 50s and 60s finally come to grips with the pain they’ve silently carried for decades.

Until a few days ago, I figured this story had ended, except for the healing. I hadn’t thought much about it since I saw “Spotlight”, the 2015 film based on the Boston Globe’s stellar coverage of this nightmarish scandal. Then I came across a local news item about the Maryland Legislature finally passing a bill to extend the statute of limitations on filing child molestation suits. It was an intriguing piece. A legislator had tried unsuccessfully for years to change the law so that adults had more time to sue over childhood sexual assaults. The old law banned such litigation after the victim’s 25th birthday. The rationale for the change seemed solid: abused children bury the pain and trauma for decades. By the time they are ready to deal with it, the filing deadline has passed. The bill’s sponsor should know. C.T. Wilson, a Democrat from Charles, MD, was repeatedly raped by his adoptive father between the ages of 8 and 16.

As I read the story, I couldn’t figure out what the controversy was about. The bill struck me as one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie issues that should have unanimous support. Yet, until this year, the measure couldn’t even get a committee hearing. Ten inches into the story, the mystery was solved: “Wilson’s bill had been strongly opposed by the Catholic Church.” It passed this time with the Church’s blessing, only after Wilson amended it so that it would not apply to prior victims. The new law extends the age limit for filing child molestation suits from 25 to 38 only for those going forward. The Church managed to block all of its past victims from filing suit.

Christians will spend this coming week celebrating the resurrection of their savior, the original advocate for restorative justice, a preacher who told his followers to be peacemakers and reconcilers in order to transform brokenness and effect healing. Meanwhile, Catholic leaders are expending political capital to deny victims of its despicable sexual assault debacle access to the only forum that offers even a modicum of healing. Like it did in the beginning, and has ever since, the Roman Catholic Church has been anything but Christ-like when it comes to the thousands of children raped and assaulted by its priests.

That’s not to say that the Church hasn’t paid a price for its sins. According to one estimate, the scandal has cost U.S. Catholics nearly $4 billion. Bankruptcy has been declared in 13 dioceses. Some of the largest losses came in states that lifted, at least temporarily, the statute of limitations on sexual assault suits. That’s why the Church is trying to block further litigation by spending millions of dollars on legislative lobbying in heavily Catholic states like New York and Pennsylvania. From a business standpoint, it is easy to understand the desire to stop the bleeding. Clearly, barricading the courthouse door in order to turn off the spigot of compensatory and punitive damages helps the Church’s bottom line. But for a religious organization in the business of absolution, the strategy is far more Machiavellian than Christian.

Granted, tort law is not a perfect venue for closure. But, thanks to the Church’s earlier choices, it is the only place offering Catholic molestation victims a shot at justice. In the early 1980s, when the tip of the scandalous iceberg was first noticed, a group of priests, led by Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, drafted a manual for dealing with the problem. It called for immediate ministering to the victims, paying for their therapy and counseling, rooting out the offending priests and the bishops who covered for them, all as a way of saying this should never happen again. Their proposal was rejected by the U.S. Conference of Bishops. The Church thought it would be better off taking its chances with the courts and confidential settlement agreements. Billions of dollars later, it learned how foolish that decision was. As Fr. Doyle told the National Catholic Reporter, “The civil law arena has been the only path whereby victims and survivors could pursue justice with hope of success because the courts and the American legal world represent a power that cannot be controlled or compromised by the institutional church.”

Thousands of broken men and women, sexually assaulted by priests during their childhood, have carried their tortuous psychic and emotional wounds into old age. The courts are their only chance of being heard and at least partially healed. That could cost the Church another billion, a heavy cross to bear. Then again, it is worth noting, particularly during Holy Week, bearing a heavy cross is not foreign territory to Christians.