Abuse at First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana (and elsewhere)

Southern Baptist Ed Stetzer is right to assert that Jack Schapp was fired as pastor of First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, over sexual "abuse" of a teenage girl Not "adultery."

Technically, Schapp was fired for adultery and the FBI is investigating whether the girl was the legal age of consent, not just in Illinois but also Indiana. But the problem is predatory abuse of power, by the pastor.

The power differential between Schapp and his victim made consent effectively and in some states legally impossible:

... the church environment is remarkably well-suited to the needs of predators, who carry out a form of rape. Dr. Gary Schoener, Executive Director of the Walk-In Counseling Center in Minneapolis which serves both offenders and victims of clergy sexual abuse, told the St. Petersberg Times that “17 states see even adult relationships with priests as a type of statutory rape. The victim can’t possibly consent because the power relationship so clouds the issue.”

More

• Clerical sexual offenders are worse
• Profile & techniques of clerical predators
• Why predatory clergy flourish
• Clerical sexual abuse of adults is commonplace
• Religious sex offenders are the worst

Stetzer focuses on the age difference and comes to the same conclusion:

A 54-year old pastor taking advantage, both sexually and emotionally, of a 16-year old girl goes far beyond the bounds of desecrating the marital bed and making immoral choices. This is a prime example of abusing the power and trust of an office. It was part of the problem at Penn State, and it is the problem in this situation.

Stetzer urges pastors to "speak up" about the abuse and in the comments Christa Brown takes him to task for saying and doing too little himself:

Southern Baptists have also had way too many child-sex-abuse and cover-up scandals among their clergy. The Southern Baptist track record is no better than the Independent Fundamental Baptists. There is a volunteer-compiled list of Southern Baptist scandals at StopBaptistPredators.

To Ed Stetzer and other Southern Baptists, I say this: Speaking up would be a start, but words are not nearly enough. You must implement cooperative denomination-wide clergy accountability systems similar to those that exist in other major faith groups and stop using “local church autonomy” as an excuse for denominational do-nothingness. Clean up your own faith group.

Stetzer is right (and Brown is right to in effect push it back at him) when he writes:

Those who justify enable more such scandals and endanger more children.

He cannot by that standard justify his failure to speak with equal force to the well-known Southern Baptist failure to protect children and others from abuse by pastors and church staff. It's an enduring national scandal. In 2008 the Southern Baptist Convention's refusal to create a central database of staff and clergy who have been either convicted of or indicted on charges of molesting minors, was one of Time magazine's top ten underreported news stories of the year. They use church autonomy as an excuse for inaction, and the number of lives avoidably blighted by abuse grows and grows.

Archbishop Fisichella stands his ground

Archbishop Salvatore (Rino) Fisichella is standing his ground against an eruption of U.S. "hyper-partisanship" into Vatican affairs. He isn't going to resign, apologize or lend further ink to his critics.

Five members of the 145-member Pontifical Academy for Life, which Fisichella heads, circulated a letter calling for his resignation.

Their campaign was supported by Judie Brown, president of the American Life League and in an essay by Monsignor Michel Schooyans, an academy member and emeritus professor at Belgium's Louvain University. Schooyans argued that Fisischella had fallen into a trap of "bogus compassion."

The letter was greeted with surprise by the Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi. CNS reported:

"It's a bit strange that persons who are members of an academy address a request of this kind without addressing it to the competent authorities," Father Lombardi said. "It's astounding and seems incorrect that such a document be given public circulation."

At issue is the March, 2009, case of a nine-year-old Brazilian girl, about whom Allison Hantschell wrote:

I had an Easy-Bake Oven, when I was 9. It made tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I read about the girl in Brazil.

I don't know her name, but she's 9 years old, living in Brazil. Brutally raped by her stepfather, multiple times over a period of years, and finally impregnated with twins.

Nine years old. And instead of playing baseball, or learning numbers, or baking tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, this little girl is at the center of a worldwide controversy over the Roman Catholic Church, its views on abortion, and, above all, the role of mercy and the incoherence of men.

In response to the abortion, the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho announced that he was excommunicating the doctors and the young girl’s mother. When that was not received well, the response was recast.

Anyone (with certain exemptions) who consciously worked to stop a birth excommunicated himself/herself, so:

Brazil’s Catholic bishops conference denied that the archbishop of Recife and Olinda, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, excommunicated the mother and doctors who practiced a legal abortion on a nine-year-old girl that was pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather. . . . The secretary general of the bishops conference, Dimas Lara Barbosa, said that the prelate “at no time excommunicated anyone."

Archbishop Fisichella's alleged sin was to write in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, that the public declaration of the already automatic excommunications was "hasty" and the nine-year-old girl, whose life was saved by the abortion of twins she was physically unequipped to have, "should have been above all defended, embraced, treated with sweetness to make her feel that we were all on her side, all of us, without distinction."

For this, he was accused of "pseudo-compassion" - no idle charge. And one he has rejected. For good reason. Indeed, the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a clarification in July, reiterating the Catholic Church's unwavering opposition to abortion and observing that Fisichella's words had been "manipulated and exploited."

An atrocity in California

Kitty Genovese

Accounts of the incident provoke natural outrage and moral concern. Although we don't know how well those accounts will withstand future examination:

A 15-year-old girl was gang-raped, beaten, and robbed by six to ten men ranging in age from 15 to their early 20s on Saturday in Richmond, Calif., after leaving her high school homecoming dance. More appallingly, police say, over the course of two hours, as many as two dozen people witnessed the crime, but didn't interfere.

Some have already ascribed observer reactions to bystander effect. They may be correct, although the phenomenon is complex and not well-applied from a distance. We simply do not know, and the best-known incident of this kind is a caution against rush to judgment:

At 3:15 a.m. on March 13, 1964, Catherine Susan Genovese was raped and stabbed to death by a serial killer in a widely misreported incident which prompted research into diffusion of responsibility and the bystander effect.

The event itself, however, was not as originally reported. There may have been no bystanders who were in a position to help, and who failed to act. The defamatory moral judgment passed on people living in the area at the time were apparently wrongheaded.

In 2007, Rachel Manning, Mark Levine and Alan Collins published a study of it in American Psychologist:

This article argues that an iconic event in the history of helping research--the story of the 38 witnesses who remained inactive during the murder of Kitty Genovese--is not supported by the available evidence. Using archive material, the authors show that there is no evidence for the presence of 38 witnesses, or that witnesses observed the murder, or that witnesses remained inactive. Drawing a distinction between the robust bystander research tradition and the story of the 38 witnesses, the authors explore the consequences of the story for the discipline of psychology. They argue that the story itself plays a key role in psychology textbooks. They also suggest that the story marks a new way of conceptualizing the dangers of immersion in social groups. Finally, they suggest that the story itself has become a modern parable, the telling of which has served to limit the scope of inquiry into emergency helping.

There may be either more wrong in Richmond, Calif., or less, than we can responsibly infer from published accounts.