Is clerical sexual abuse coded into the modern church's authority?

At The Immanent Frame, Mark Jordan of the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis writes:

The possibility of authorizing abuse theologically follows too easily from the always exceptional status claimed for modern church power. In modern Catholic contexts, official languages often pretend to be exempt from qualification, questioning, or appeal. They are absolute languages. They function in a state of exception. When that rhetorical character is extended to traditional images of a masculinized God or angel who ravishes—rapes—souls that are gendered as feminine, then erotic domination seems to receive divine blessing. I’m not objecting to mystical writing. I’m pointing to a consequence of moving older mystical or liturgical languages into a modern system that endows some church speech with an incontestable and literal authority. Under a regime that claims divine exemption for its decrees, mustn’t erotic metaphors of divine domination sometimes seem to authorize sexual demands by priests? Turn the question around: imagine what you would have to change in present claims for church language to prevent the violent misapplication of old metaphors for God’s love.

Which brings me to the last rhetoric I want to mention: the homoerotic undertone of ecclesiastical obedience. The documents from the Meffan case are not homoerotic in the obvious sense—they are not about male-male or female-female abuse. They concern sexual acts between a man and girls or young women. But the male and female bodies here allow us to notice another level at which the homoerotic can appear in church speech. Take as an example Meffan’s letter to Cardinal Law, with its touches of studied obsequiousness, its acts of enticing submission. Those rhetorical gestures reveal desires sedimented in now standard forms of clerical power.

Jordan's analysis is a part of Immanent Frame's compelling series, Sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

Half a century since prescient Catholic clerical abuse warning

Half a century ago, Gerald Michael Cushing Fitzgerald, the Catholic priest who co-founded the Congregation of the Society of the Paraclete, informed the Holy See of sweeping clerical sex abuse problems in the U.S. and recommended a solution:

...a more distinct teaching in the last years of the seminary of the heavy penalty involved in tampering with the innocence (or even non-innocence) of little ones." Regarding priests who have "fallen into repeated sins ... and most especially the abuse of children, we feel strongly that such unfortunate priests should be given the alternative of a retired life within the protection of monastery walls or complete laicization.

Fitzgerald's view of abusers was as relentless as the malady they suffer. In a letter to Archbishop James Byrne, his ecclesiastical sponsor and co-founder of the Paracletes, Fitzgerald wrote:

May I beg your excellency to concur and approve of what I consider a very vital decision on our part - that we will not offer hospitality to men who have seduced or attempted to seduce little boys or girls. These men Your Excellency are devils and the wrath of God is upon them and if I were a bishops I would tremble when I failed to report them to Rome for involuntary laicization....It is for this class of rattlesnake I have always wished the island retreat - but even an island is too good for these vipers of whom the Gentle master said - it were better they had not been born - this is an indirect way of saying damned, is it not?

Catholic clergy abuse crisis expert Patrick J. Wall explains that "The Holy See reacted to Father Fitzgerald’s warnings in line with tradition: The report was filed away in the Holy See’s Secret Archives and with no action."

So we have this week Kansas City priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, pleading guilty to five child pornography charges. The incidents were relatively recent (not decades ago) and Ratigan likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.

His bishop, Robert Finn, faces trial on Sept. 24 for failing to properly report the suspected abuse when he learned of it.

That will not be the first prosecution of a ranking church official.

Two weeks ago, Catholic Monsignor William Lynn was sentenced to three to six years in prison for his role in covering the sex abuse of predatory priests.

While in Australia the pattern of unspooling revelation repeats itself. And church concern about scandal and cost apparently continues to outweigh concern about the victims.

Clerical sex offenders are worse

Clerical sex offenders are more likely to use force than their peers who are not men of the cloth. A scientific study comparing matched samples of clerical and non-clerical sex offenders found:

The majority of cleric-sex offenders suffered from a sexual disorder (70.8%), predominantly homosexual pedophilia, as measured by phallometric testing, but did not differ from the control groups in this respect. The clerics were comparable to the other two groups in most respects, but tended to show less antisocial personality disorders and somewhat more endocrine disorders. The most noteworthy features differentiating the clerics from highly educated matched controls were that clerics had a longer delay before criminal charges were laid, or lacked criminal charges altogether, and they tended to use force more often in their offenses.

Church sex offenders in general apparently do more harm than their unchurched peers:

… that stayers (those who maintained religious involvement from childhood to adulthood) had more sexual offense convictions, more victims, and younger victims, than other groups. Results challenge assumptions that religious involvement should, as with other crime, serve to deter sexual offending behavior.

Special pleadings on behalf of clerical and otherwise churched offenders, pleadings like and more extreme than those which greeted Msgr. William J. Lynn's sentence this week, are indeed outrageous, as Susan Matthews argues. It will be good and just if the Irish Times is right and leaders who have protected and enabled predators are more frequently brought to justice.

H/T: Bilgrimage

The Guardian gets Williams, even if the Catholic hierarchy doesn't

Skipping the polling data we reviewed the Guardian in an editorial agrees with us [our bold face]:

This morning the BBC will broadcast [Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams] recorded remarks on the Irish Catholic crisis, in which he says, quite in passing, that the church there has "lost all credibility". This perception is so widely shared, and so close to the truth, that to say it out loud has provoked an enormous row. After the interview was made public, Williams produced an uncharacteristically political apology – which is to say that he regrets the offence he has caused, but not the offending remark; the Roman Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, could be heard on Radio 4 yesterday biting back the word "insult" when he was asked about it.

The Lead tipped us off about how understandable William's remark was. As the Guardian observed:

No one can blame Williams for pointing this out, nor indeed for getting his own back for years of patronising comments and aggressive behaviour from the Roman church. The official Vatican observer at the last Lambeth conference appeared to say that the Anglican communion was suffering from Parkinson's disease. Pope Benedict has personally encouraged the schism in the Anglican churches over homosexuality and most recently announced, to the consternation of even his own church here, a scheme to allow the Anglican opponents of women priests to convert in groups.

Both the conflict, and absent clear-eyed Catholic confrontation with the real circumstances, the decline to which Williams correctly alluded will almost inevitably continue.

Those children ...

Paddy Doyle led us to this victim's view of the historic lack of Roman Catholic clergy concern for the afflicted children:

The reason why the church covered up the abuse and moved priests about is because they did not blame the priests, they blamed the children. With this knowledge observe the reaction of church authorities. They look as if they would like to say it, but can’t.

And that is it. They can’t because they believe society is now over-sentimental about children and they would not be understood. This was confirmed to me when I met an old priest tucked away in a nursing home despite the fact he was not unwell.

At one point he suggested Cardinal Ó Fiaich should be canonised, I rejected the idea, pointing out he was involved in the cover-up of abuse.

The old priest said: “People should forgive him, after all we are prepared to forgive the children.” I asked: “Forgive the children what?”

He replied: “Their share of the blame.” Of course in that moment I realised he was himself an abuser, hidden away there.

The complete piece was originally published in the Irish Times under the headline, "Church blames Devil-inspired children."

Not a word about the children in Pope Benedict XVI's Easter Message

What of the children? No mention. Silence to the "petty gossip." Seek to still truthful critics. The reputation of the church (and of the Pope) comes first. Always.

Reuters terse, "Factbox" roundup is for those not comfortable studiously looking the other way.

The full, English text of the Pope's message.

Archbishop of Canterbury hits an Irish Catholic nerve

In answer to a BBC interviewer, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams told the blistering truth about the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland:

And an institution so deeply bound into the life of a society, suddenly becoming, suddenly losing all credibility - that's not just a problem for the Church, it is a problem for everybody in Ireland.

Without retracting, Williams responded today to the avowedly "stunned" Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, by saying he meant no offense and regretted any difficulties his remarks had caused.

Indeed, how could he retract? He was talking about a country where a recent poll by the Irish Independent found: "Just over half believe that Pope Benedict, who faces allegations of covering up sex abuse in the US and in Germany, should resign."

That poll is part of the evidence that both the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church are losing public esteem hand over fist, worldwide. For example, a similar poll in Austria found that 57% believe the pope should resign. While:

More than 53,000 people left the Catholic Church in Austria in 2009, and local figures for the first three months of this year hint that last year’s record number could be exceeded.

Likewise, a Stern Magazine poll found that only 24 percent of Germans still trust the Pope, whereas six weeks ago 38 percent said they did. And "19 percent of Germany's estimated 25 million Catholics were thinking about leaving the Church in response to the sexual abuse scandal."

A CBS poll found that in the U.S., 24 percent of Americans view Pope Benedict XVI negatively -- a startling change from 4% in 2006. While his favorable rating among Catholics plummeted from 40% to 27%.

Stinging fellow clerics who in passing state the obvious will not reverse the decline, and because sharp protests of the undeniable are not likely to be well-received, may accelerate it.

Church campaign against the messengers backfires

When Pope Benedict XVI's personal preacher compared allegations that the pontiff has covered up sex abuse cases to the "more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism," he called down fire. Speaking on Good Friday, a day already colored with a history of anti-semitism, the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa said he thought of the Jews because “They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms.”

The argument that Roman Catholic Church, by being held to account for decades of systematically concealed priestly sexual molestation and rape of young parishioners, has become the victim of a Holocaust, is jarring.

David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said "It's heart-breaking to see yet another smart, high-ranking Vatican official making such callous remarks that insult both abuse victims and Jewish people." He also said, It's morally wrong to equate actual physical violence and hatred against a large group of innocent people with mere public scrutiny of a small group of complicit officials."

Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, demanded an apology from the pope himself and said, "The remarks are shameful, inaccurate and a complete distortion of history." One cannot legitimately compare centuries of anti-Semitism which resulted in "the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people, to perpetrators who abuse their faith and their calling by sexually abusing children?

Rabbi David Wolpe, named the No.1 Pulpit Rabbi in America by Newsweek, wrote in the Washington Post that it was "one thoughtless, brutal remark by one man:"

Moreover, I think of the real victims of the church scandal; the children whose lives were permanently blighted by the cruelty and appetites of wicked men. To use the sufferings of the Jews as an analogy for the church's public discomfort -- given our painful shared history -- is indescribably tactless. And my irenic ecumenism starts to fade.

Even to the powerful, the posture of a victim is often easy and attractive. The church is not the victim. Some reactions may be wide of the mark. Some people may be unjustly swept in the net sewn by the actions of others. But I would remind Rev. Cantalamessa of the precise nature of the holocaust: Six million people, including one-and-a-half million children, were starved, gassed, shot, burned, humiliated, brutalized, murdered, not for what they did but for who they were.

As those and other blistering reactions poured in, The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said that Cantalamessa wasn't speaking as a Vatican official when he compared "attacks'" on the pope to "collective" violence against Jews, conceding that those parallels can "lead to misunderstandings and is not the official position of the Catholic church."

Yet Cantalamessa's attempt to cast the church as a victim of the still growing flood of revelations of the rape of women and children by Catholic priests was clearly part of a larger strategy of pushing blame back toward those reporting the facts.

Developing the theme of anti-Catholicism that is the heart of the campaign, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New Yrok wrote on March 30:

While the report on the nauseating abuse is bitterly true, the insinuation against Cardinal Ratzinger is not, and gives every indication of being part of a well-oiled campaign against Pope Benedict.

In that light, Cantalamessa's sermon can be seen as more of the same attack on a perceived opposition. It was intended to resonate with his audience and characteristic of Vatican neglect under Ratzinger of non-Catholic opinion.

Last January, for example, the Pope lifted the excommunication of four Society of Saint Pius X bishops, among them the ardently anti-semitic Briton, Richard Williamson. To which Israel’s envoy to the Vatican responded by saing the papal decision would “cast a shadow on relations with Jews.” And it did.

That shadow was darkened again, yesterday, and attended by a sense of the Roman Catholic Church as a political campaigner, made giddy by its own attack-ad campaign.

Former Vatican Canon lawyer: '...it's all about power'

Father Tom Doyle, now 65, was a canon lawyer for the Vatican embassy in Washington when he was assigned to investigate a Lafayette, Louisiana, case of a pedophile priest who admitted molesting more than 30 children. Ruben Rosario of Pioneer Press discussed in an interview with Doyle how the priest's local archdiocese officials decided to hide the crimes and transfer the child predator from one parish to another, where he abused again.

Doyle, a fellow priest and a criminal defense attorney reacted in 1985 by assembling, on their own initiative, "a 100-page report warning church officials to come clean about the abuses and respond to the needs of victims rather than protect abusive priests from secular prosecution or protect — at all costs — the church's status and image. The report, sent to virtually every U.S. bishop, was largely ignored."

His initiative and prescient warning were followed by victim advocacy -- a path which led to demotion, the status of a pariah and ultimately cost him his job.

He told Rosario that the church can regain its reputation and restore lost confidence in it:

Doyle: To begin the process of restoration, I believe that the current pope needs to stand up and make a public apology. Not that those mistakes were made in the past — they always do in the past tense and there's a subtle message there that this is in the past and not now. The pope should say: "I'm sorry for what I did in my negligence to allow this to happen. I'm sorry that I did not fire bishops when I knew they were covering up."

But I don't believe that will ever happen in my lifetime.

Rosario: Why?

Doyle: Because to protect their own self-identity, they will cling to the premise that they are appointed by the Almighty and are the vicars of Christ and the essence of the church. They believe this will dissolve their power. It's all about control, and it's all about power.

Read the entire interview here.

David Gushee sets the record straight: Update (I & II)

Christa Brown challenged Baptist ethicist David Gushee's echo of self-exculpatory Baptist propaganda in an otherwise now, as revised, excellent commentary on churches and sexual abuse. To his credit, Gushee responded:

Christa, I thank you for this challenge, and grieve along with you that the evidence leads where it does. I should not have written that last paragraph as it now stands.

The keystone statement in Christa's blog, to which Gushee's comment is attached:

There is simply no comparative data to support David Gushee’s suggestion that, for Protestants, the problem has more to do with married ministers who “have affairs,” while for Catholics, the problem has more to do with priests who abuse kids. To the contrary, the data that exists — two decades’ worth of insurance data gathered by the Associated Press in 2007 — suggests exactly the opposite. It suggests that Baptists likely have every bit as big a problem as Catholics with clergy who sexually abuse kids.

Update I

Gushee adds in a second comment:

Today a revised version of my article will appear on ABP that reflects the lessons learned through this exchange. Thank you.

Update II

Gushee revised his column. His introduction says:

(Editor's note: The original version of this column, published March 29, contained an assertion -- regarding differences in clergy-sex-abuse scandals between the Roman Catholic context and the Protestant context -- that many readers found unsupportable. The author agreed to change the column. The version published below contains a slight alteration to the second sentence of the second paragraph, elimination of what had been the eighth paragraph, and a replacement of the final paragraph.)

His revised conclusion [bold face is ours]:

An angry population of abused Christians and those who love them and advocate for them is demanding that churches of all types stop the child sexual abuse in their midst. While many other structures of modern life have heightened the protections offered to children, the churches have lagged behind -- with disastrous consequences. The Baptist situation may be no better than the Catholic, only shielded more deeply from view. This situation demands reform, immediately, for the sake of the vulnerable and abused children among us -- not to mention for the sake of the gospel witness, so desecrated by the abuse behind our stained-glass windows.

Please read the entire piece here.

Read the NY Times' predator-priest documentation yourself

Don't fall for anyone's spin. Read the underlying documents from the online repository the New York Times created for you. No one is out to get the pope, except perhaps the facts.

Did the New York Times corroborate BBC 2006 account?

Inaction and concealment involving the current pope and documented today by the New York Times make it difficult to believe the secret-keeping was not systematic, as alleged by BBC in 2006.

Please decide. View BBC's Friday, September 29, 2006, Sex Crimes and the Vatican:

[H/T: Pam Spaulding]

Catholic sex abuse scandal in the South

She did not say, "It's over." What Laurie Goodstein did write for the New York Times is:

Roman Catholic bishops in the United States received fewer accusations of sexual abuse by the clergy in 2009 than in any other year since 2004, according to an annual audit based on self-reporting from Catholic dioceses.

The self-reported nature of the numbers does raise serious questions:

David Clohessy, national director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, reiterated victims' skepticism about self-reported abuse figures. He said it's naive to think an institution that has concealed abuse and protected its own for so long would suddenly be honest and forthcoming

The same questions arose when Catholic Diocese of Charlotte press spokesman David Hains' tried to minimize the problem in North Carolina by arguing that his diocese hasn't had the extensive sex abuse problems of, say, Boston.

Returning fire today, Neal Evans wrote in the Asheville [North Carolina] Citizen-Times:

I beg to differ.

The St. Eugene's music minister who also taught at Asheville Catholic School pled to a 30-year federal term for child pornography while his boss, then-pastor of St. Eugene's, awaits trial for covering up that crime. There's the music minister's predecessor, who left after an internal investigation; the diocesan co-director of youth ministry, a priest reassigned to Virginia after allegedly abusing an adolescent; another priest who served in Tryon, Maggie Valley and Charlotte, removed based on “credible evidence”; the Charlotte priest, extradited from New Jersey, sentenced last year up to 10 years for sexually abusing an altar boy.

There's much more. Priests involved in sexual abuse and cover-up have served in every Catholic parish and school in Buncombe County. Abused at St. Joan of Arc in West Asheville and now representing SNAP (Survivor's Network of those Abused by Priests), I frequently receive calls from survivors and families, painfully but bravely sharing their stories of abuse and betrayal by their church.

Germany, Guam and Switzerland and other places an ocean away are by no means the only ones where new cases are surfacing. Every day, it seems. So that neither a papal pastoral letter of apology nor the processed-at-last resignation of an Irish bishop are solutions. They merely impinge on a problem whose sheer magnitude is still becoming apparent.

Clerical apologies should be no charm against enforcement of the law [Addendum]

Apologies from bishops apparently aren't considered an adequate substitute for enforcement of the law in Germany. According to CNN:

Investigators with the Munich State Prosecutors Office visited the Benedictine Abbey of Ettal on Tuesday afternoon as part of their ongoing investigation into allegations of sexual abuse of underage children by priests there.

,p>Authorities are now assessing evidence collected at the abbey, the prosecutors said.

The overarching scandal emerged in January, centered on a single school, and has been followed by a parade of disclosures whose pattern resembles that in Ireland and the U.S.

Once again, the Catholic church protected its authority, at the expense of the parishioners.

Addendum

What does the church do with offenders? The Irish Times, working from an Irish investigative report, found some had taken refuge, often still in the Catholic church's pay. The Belfast Times reports that some were or are in the U.S.

Victims of Dutch Catholic sexual abuse come forward: Investigation called for

One of the most powerful members of the Dutch Salesian order is among those accused of abusing men who are now adults, when they were boys.

Like the German revelations which erupted into public view in late January, this is snowballing as "the first testimonies of possible abuse at the hands of the Salesians in the 1960s and 1970s," first reported by NRC Handelsblad last week, provokes others to break their long silence.

Because the problem is believed to have been widespread, and involved the current bishop of Rotterdam, Ad van Luyn, Dutch elected officials are calling for an independent inquiry, reports Radio Netherlands:

Conservative MP and former public prosecutor Fred Teeven told NOS Radio, "Normally in such cases, there would be a police and justice investigation. But you can't do that now because the statute of limitation says the crimes are too long ago. In this case it would be wise if a team of experienced sex crime detectives is appointed in collaboration with the Roman Catholic Church, in order to conduct an independent investigation into what happened."

Following the revelations on Friday, Bishop Van Luijn of Rotterdam also said he wanted to launch an investigation. Bishop Van Luijn is currently chairman of the Dutch bishops conference. He was a teacher at the 's-Heerenberg school at the time of the abuse and he later became head of the Salesian order in the Netherlands. Immediately after the revelations a spokesperson from the bishop's palace turned down pleas for an inquiry, saying that it was up to the current head of the school to account for what may have happened, but Bishop Van Luijn said on Sunday he was appalled by the findings of the reporters.

Christian Democrat MP Marleen De Pater told NOS Radio that she first wants to see the results of Bishop Van Luijn's inquiry before deciding on the next step. She appeared reluctant to involve the police or legal authorities from the outset.

Ms De Pater said, "Bishop Van Luijn is taking the initiative to scrutinise his own organisation to find out what happened. That is a display of responsible behaviour, and I assume he will engage independent experts. On the basis of their findings we could decide whether more research is needed with the involvement of police and legal authorities."

The Irish did "more research" and found a sweeping, decades deep breach of trust by the Catholic Church -- part of what is ever more clearly an unresolved, multinational issue. Papal acknowledgment of the obvious -- that child sexual abuse is a "heinous crime" -- unpersuasive. Reluctant apologies for the long-concealed horrors, unaccepted.

A solvable problem, lacking only will

Christa Brown, the insightful proprietor of Stop Baptist Predators, explains how the American Baptist Churches can teach the Southern Baptist Convention how to take effective control of its profoundly destructive problem with sexually predatory clergy.

Or to be more precise, she relates how a group of Baptist pastors illuminated the issue in their online discussion.

As you would expect, it's a straightforward matter of setting standards, keeping records that make it difficult for credibly accused clergy to move with impunity from church to church, leaving a trail of victims as they grow. Yet the denomination discussed which does that is the American Baptist Churches, which somewhat like the SBC prizes local church autonomy. As they say on their Web page:

As early Baptists overcame oppression by establishing a congregational church system emphasizing local church autonomy and separation from state influence, so contemporary American Baptists continue to emphasize both the importance and the responsibility of every church and the individual believer before God.

Read it all here at Stop Baptist Predators.

Lullaby for a sleeping conscience

Christa wants to sing sleeping Southern Baptist Convention consciences awake to their neglect of trusting Baptist Children.