Changing Vatican rules on sex abuse

Two-thirds of bishops have allowed priests "accused" of molestation to remain in active ministry?? I am more concerned about the numbers who have allowed priests "convicted" of molestation to stay in active ministry. An accusation should not lead to removal from ministry - a conviction should. Now, the bishops should cooperate with law enforcement officials in investigating accusations of abuse (as should journalists, Rob, especially if they always drop secret, inside knowledge of abuse, but never what they did to inform law enforcement officials of this criminal activity).

By the way, the moral difference between making making "mistakes" that can be blamed on psychologists and therapists, and "aiding and abetting pedophiles" is, well, the difference between making mistakes that can be blamed on psychologists and therapists, and aiding and abetting pedophiles.

By the way, the moral difference between making making "mistakes" that can be blamed on psychologists and therapists, and "aiding and abetting pedophiles" is, well, the difference between making mistakes that can be blamed on psychologists and therapists, and aiding and abetting pedophiles.

Exactly. Several of the cases Rod describes, though, sound an awful lot like the latter.

Ok, yes, accused and convicted are two very different things. But therein lies the problem. How many of the accused have gone on to trial to be convicted or acquitted? Not many? Has any of them? When someone does something that is illegal, no one should be able to stand in the way of the law. The fact that the church was allowed to "handle" these cases makes me sick. They shouldn't have had anything to do with the handling of anything. Law enforcement should. Maybe I feel more strongly about this because my father was accused of molesting my sisters. He went through trial. Our family went through hell. He was not guilty, he was found not guilty. But the servant of God next door gets accused and gets a get out of jail free card handed down by God? Ummmmmmm....no, I don't think so.

Thomas, the number of bishops know perfectly well knew what they were dealing with, but turned away, are more than a few. The 1985 Doyle-Mouton Report, produced by Fr. Tom Doyle, then of the Vatican embassy in Washington, was given to all the US bishops that year. It warned them in great detail what was at stake here, how widespread the problem was believed to be, and how devastating it would be to the Church if they didn't deal with it.

They didn't deal with it.

In fact, this report has been key to any number of court cases against this or that diocese, helping to establish that its bishop knew, or should have known, what was going on. The idea that bishops had little or no clue is simply false.

It wouldn't be fair or accurate to say every bishop who shuffled a molester priest around is equally guilty of all the others. But isn't it telling that the Vatican has found not a single American bishop's conduct in this matter to have been sufficiently egregious to merit his reassignment (with the possible exception of Law)? As Lee Podles has documented in gruesome detail in "Sacrilege," there is, based on observable evidence, nothing that any US bishop can do with regard to this crisis that will merit action from Rome. People like my friend Mark Shea will make a theological argument explaining and justifying Rome's inaction. He and I have been round and round about this, and I don't want to get into that again.

What it comes down to, though, is whether or not a bishop's having an extensive record on shuffling pederast priests, thereby facilitating the sexual molestation of Catholic children, is sufficient to cause his removal from office, because his demonstrable and documented indifference to the grave suffering and scandal of clerical sexual abuse cannot be trusted to exercise proper pastoral care to his flock. I think it does. Rome thinks it doesn't.

And it is a very difficult thing to come to believe that in the end, the leadership class of the Church considers children and families of the faithful to be expendable to the broader mission of keeping the machinery rolling. Coming to believe that that is true is what finally broke me.

I don't want to argue whether or not I reached the right conclusion in the matter. We've had that argument before, and I don't want to criticize, or be taken as criticizing, Catholics who stuck with the Church. Understand that. I know very many of you believe I chose wrongly. Again, I don't want to dispute that now. Let's agree to disagree.

Rod, whatever our other disagreements may be, I respect you for not backing down on this issue, and I am grateful to you for your work in bringing it to light. That was important. Even if the bishops refuse to repent and the Pope declines to make them, I believe many children have been spared simply because you and other reporters dragged the facts into public awareness. You will never know who they were, but I believe that saving them will be accounted to you as righteousness.

What I find really puzzling is why none of the bishops were prosecuted criminally. I mean, if a crime has occurred it's not really a matter covered by Church law. As far as I know, the Vatican refused requests by at least one cardinal to be removed, and ordered him to stay in his archdiocese and answer questions. In that case, the Vatican seems to have done their part to see to it that the criminal charges are investigated. Is there any evidence that the Vatican tried to cover up for bishops and interfere with the investigation of their crimes? Why haven't any of them been prosecuted? Is it that, in most cases what occurred was legal--i.e. the seduction of an adolescent male? For example, Archbishop Weakland's affair is often given as an example of the crisis, yet the man was well beyond adolescence. As far as making amends is concerned, the bishops were subjected to all sorts of lawsuits that resulted in very large damage settlements. I have no enthusiams for most of today's American bishops. I find most of them to be spineless and morally confused administrators who have ruined the lives of thousands of children, watered down doctrine, made a mockery of the Roman Rite....need I go on? Their harshest words seem to be directed toward political conservatives and liturgical traditionalists. They are probably some of the worst bishops in the history of the Western Church. However, I do not see any evidence of a Vatican-organized cover-up, or even of negligence.

It seems that Absp. Levada had become quite adept at using rhetoric to cover the institution's biological seat cushion, shall we say. But he and many of the pro-Catholic correspondents on this blog forget one thing: Whatsoever is done to the least of Christ's brothers and sisters is done to Christ himself. Just look at Matthew 25.

What's the point? The bishops and the late pope allowed Christ to be sexually molested by perverts and did nothing!!!

Erin Manning and Mark Shea, if that fact doesn't shake you from your cliched rationalizations, then there is no hope for you.

"But isn't it telling that the Vatican has found not a single American bishop's conduct in this matter to have been sufficiently egregious to merit his reassignment" Rod

I do think a few should've been reassigned or laicized. Still what do you think removing them will accomplish? What will be the actual benefit? As I recall they have to retire at 75-80 anyway and many of them were quite elderly when this came out.

Also I think I must have a much more cynical view of people than you. When you have a fraternal organization it'll be proned to develop an "in-groupishness" that protect its own. This occurs with cops, school administrators, the military, and clergy of other faiths. In the case of the American bishops you have a group proned to believe that "forgive and forget" is the solution to everything from serial killers on down. That the Vatican hasn't pounced on the American church more is disappointing, but not entirely surprising as it's harder to do that now. In an ideal fantasy-world I relished the idea of the Church going "Medieval" by putting Massachusetts in interdict and banishing the various priests to gulag-monasteries in the Yukon. However the Church exists in the real-world as an international organization where real-actions have real consequences.

KB"take it out of the church, and put it into, say, a multinational corporation"

TR: You really can't do that because they're not the same thing at all. Even if you take the premise that the Catholic Church is a total fraud, they're still not the same thing at all.

There's a psychological/emotional component to a group of men in a vocation that is not the same as people working for a multinational corporation. Even if that vocation is the worship of Xenu or Birdman. If it's equivalent to anything in the secular world it's more equivalent to the sex abuse among UN peacekeepers. And I think it's debatable that they've done a great job on a similar issue.

I'm saying realistically a multinational corporation is not analogous to something like the military or a religious organization. It will not, and probably can not, respond the same to legal issues no matter how much someone might wish it to. This is true if the religion is the Hare Krishnas, the FLDS, or mine.

Nevertheless yes, on some level I consider the Catholic Church above the laws of ephemeral nations or Empires. In many ways this is a great and wonderful thing. Catholic Churches were above laws about racial segregation. They are above Chinese laws about mandatory abortion. And it's not just the Catholic Church. If the Copts were forbidden to have paintings of Jesus I'd hope Pope Shenouda would object. Orthodox were above Soviet or Albanian laws that mandated irreligion. I do not consider any multi-national corporation to be above any law. They can choose to disobey unjust laws, but if they do so their justification does not come from any value or tradition within themselves.

Not that this matter is relevant here. Sexual abuse is obviously against the laws of both God and Man. The actions of bishops and priests subverted their own purpose or laws. Still what to do about that is probably not as simple as you're wanting it to be. It really can't be. (And the same is true of the UN. Imagine if they found out all the sex-abusing peacekeepers were from France. Do you think they'd therefore ban France from peacekeeping? Do you think they'd get away with doing so?)

Thomas R, that is a good post. Maybe in some ways the Church should not have to kow-tow to either the state or to the media. Media does not like not being able to set or control the Pope's agenda, but see if I care about that.

Concerning the sex abuse thing there is evidence that canon law works both ways. A priest can not be dismissed or removed from ministry on a simple single accusation, but there are procedures for determining this to end in dismissals but it is evident that this was not followed in all too many instances. So such lack of action can produce pressure for the state to put pressure on the system.

Thomas R, I would think that with the time line of the actual sexual abuse being concentrated in the 1960's and 1970's, this two-thirds of the sitting bishops who allowed prists to remain in the ministry in 2002 is suspect. Most of the 4000 priests who were accused of something between 1950 and 2002 were long gone from the ministry in 2002. So the information was probably dated in 2002. And about 25% of bishops active in 2002 have retired by now anyway.

When the bishops allowed someone accused to serve often it could well have been pending investigations as the normal practice. This was not parsed out. The main question is what has been the actual enforced action/policy trend in the past 10-15 years.

As is evident from the internal correspondence of bishops, the Vatican did not want even the worst abusers removed from the priesthood. The American bishops, in letting abusers continue in the priesthood, were responding to the signals that they were getting from the Vatican.

Notorious abusers like Maciel and Brother Gino were protected by the Vatican under John Paul II, but Benedict disciplined them immediately after becoming pope. I presume that Benedict thinks it unjust to discipline bishops for only doing what the Vatican under his predecessors wanted them to do.

The deeper question is why the Vatican did not want abusers removed. Was it the Italian desire to make a bella figura, not to show any faults in public? Or is it something far worse? As Peter Damian discovered, pederasty was widespread in the medieval clergy. Mediterranean pagan pederasty had found a home in the clergy, and when Justinian made pederasty a capital crime, two bishops were immediately executed as an example to the rest of the clergy.

I think it is a bit of a streatch to imply "The Vatican did not want abusers removed". Maybe we can say "The Vatican did not lean hard enough on bishops to remove abusers, or maybe the Vatican did not take sufficient action". But to say "The Vatican did not want abusers removed" puts one far closer to Bill Mayers than one may realize.

This is like the case of Lee Podles who has done some good and interesting work on problems in the priesthood and the Church but on this sex abuse thing I wonder if he, along with Rod have gone off their moorings. Richard John Neuhaus writes in 'First Things': >"Leon Podles’ Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Crossland). It is a rambling essay of more than five hundred pages on a potpourri of items picked up from the public media and the ­blogosphere, including, along with the kitchen sink, stomach-turning details of abuse, mainly with boys, and a scathing, if familiar, indictment from a conservative perspective of liberal depredations that brought things to this sorry pass. Regrettably, the tone is shrill, and even righteous anger does not justify the author’s suspension of caution and charity in attributing motives.

Lee Podles: "(A cardinal) said he had personally pled with John Paul to make a forceful statement about the abusers. The pope replied that he would love to, but 'they wouldn't let me.'"

Lee, if that statement is true, then JPII was far more of a coward than anybody realizes on this issue -- and the Vatican is far more nefarious than anybody wishes to realize. He was the Vicar of Christ and he allowed others to make decisions for him regarding a fundamentally heinous crime that threatens to destroy the Church's moral credibility? Yet he could, at the same time, concentrate his rhetorical efforts on opposing the Iraq war? Who the Hell is running things in Rome?

As far as Neuhaus is concerned, Neuhaus never took the clerical sex-abuse crisis seriously until it was too late. His critique of Podles' book is nothing but an attempt to cover his own backside regarding his earlier positions.

Besides, what does this swishly, limp-wristed comment about "even righteous anger does not justify the author’s suspension of caution and charity in attributing motives" mean? Since when do ecclesiastical bureaucrats who allow the innocent to be molested (thereby violating Christ's words in Matthew 25 about doing to him what has been done to the least of his brothers) deserve the "suspension of caution and charity" if the evidence dictates otherwise?

Neuhaus is the perfect example of the contemporary Christian zeitgeist that ignores God's fundamental righteousness and demands for holiness. He's also the perfect example of someone who worships his confessional identity as God rather than God as God.

Fr. Neuhaus, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world...but for Rome?

Not for nothing did Pope Paul VI state that "the smoke of Satan has entered the sanctuary."