Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk

That’s the big news out of the John Jay College Final Report on the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests, due out at 2 p.m. today, according to David Gibson’s scoop for RNS last night (followed swiftly by NYT’s Laurie Goodstein, who also scored a copy). To wit:

[T]he researchers found no statistical evidence that gay priests were more likely than straight priests to abuse minors—a finding that undermines a favorite talking point of many conservative Catholics. The disproportionate number of adolescent male victims was about opportunity, not preference or pathology, the report states.

What’s more, researchers note that the rise in the number of gay priests from the late 1970s onward actually corresponded with “a decreased incidence of abuse—not an increased incidence of abuse.”

Over at In All Things, Jim Martin rings the changes on why this will come as a surprise to many, pointing specifically to the shortage of “‘public’ models of healthy, mature, loving celibate homosexual priests.” (Mychal Judge, the Franciscan father who died at Ground Zero on 9/11 while serving as chaplain to the FDNY, is a rare exception.) Martin declines, however, to point to the role of those conservative Catholic talkers in fingering gay priests as the problem–above all the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue.

Here, for example, is Donohue back in 2006, arguing on behalf of the Vatican’s decision to keep men with “deeply rooted homosexual tendencies” (whatever that means) out of seminaries:

As I have said many times before, most homosexual priests are not molesters, but most of the molesters are gay. The John Jay [interim] Report made this clear: 81 percent of the victims are male and almost as many are postpubescent. This is not called pedophilia—it is called homosexuality.

But the final report demonstrates (through reliance on diocesan records and live interviews) that just because the victims were boys doesn’t mean that the molesters were gay–any more than the fact that most prison rapes involve male victims doesn’t mean that most prison rapists are gay. For priests, boys were the most readily available targets of sexual opportunity.

Donohue will no doubt embrace the final report’s finding that most offenders were not pedophiles in the strict sense (one of his favorite talking points); the large majority of cases involve boys over the age of 10. But the punchline to the point is that the way to prevent child abuse by priests is to keep gays out of the priesthood. And that, the final report makes clear, is just not true.

Update: Donohue sticks to his guns: “A homosexual is defined by his actions, not his identity.”

No doubt about it, the Vatican’s latest missive has laid an egg. Styled as an encyclical to assist national bishops conferences in developing guidelines for dealing with clergy accused of sexual abuse, the letter utterly ignores what everybody outside the Church hierarchy itself acknowledges to be the central problem: the bishops themselves.

Take Philadelphia, please. The U.S. bishops conference didn’t merely have guidelines, it had Vatican-approved norms–which were ignored by Cardinal Justin Rigali and his henchmen. As for the archdiocesan review board, tasked with reviewing all cases, it was kept in the dark and then used to provide cover for episcopal misbehavior, according to its chair, Ana Maria Catanzano. That’s the problem in a nutshell.

Always eager to safeguard its prerogatives, the Vatican insists that if the conferences want to go beyond guidelines and actually establish “binding norms,” then “it will be necessary to request the recognitio from the competent Dicasteries of the Roman Curia.”  OK, let’s go with that.

To deal with the problem of recalcitrant bishops, the conferences should be obliged to establish binding norms, which norms must include a zero tolerance policy for bishops, comparable to the American zero tolerance policy for priests. That is to say, if there is credible evidence that a bishop has covered up a case of clerical sexual abuse, he will be suspended from office by Rome, and removed if the case is proved. Assuming Rome wants to get the bishops’ attention, that’s the two-by-four that would get it.

Now that we have entered the final week of the Harold Camping-certified End Times, it behooves us to consider the signs. Here goes.

* Osama  (the false Antichrist) Bin Laden killed by Barack H.  (not the false Antichrist) Obama.

* Forces of Repression (viz. Gog and Magog) at work all over Middle East.

* House of Representatives kills off Medicare. (Who needs it?)

* Head of IMF (aka Root of all Evil) arrested for sexual assault.

* Poll numbers of Barack H.  (not the false Antichrist) Obama headed north.

* Palestinian protestors killed on way to Tel Megiddo (Armageddon).

* Mike Huckabee removes hat from presidential ring. (Talk about the Great Disappointment!)

* Newt Gingrich, convert to Catholic Church (i.e. astride Whore of Babylon), jumps into presidential ring.

* Democrats threaten to capture NY-26.

* All Facebook pages inscribed with number “666.”

* Lots of earthquakes, tornadoes, floods.

* Yankees drop three in a row to Boston at the stadium.

* Doonesbury recognizes End of World at hand.

It turns out that, in deciding whether he’s going to tell Fox viewers tonight that he’s actually running for president in 1012, Mike Huckabee is not only praying on it, but also asking us to do the same. Which is pretty cool, when you think of it–and not just because the Huck-a-Pray form will give Mike an email list of everyone who fills it out. But since I’m not sure I want to be on the list, and am confident that my prayer will be heard equally well whether I do it there or somewhere else, I’m going to do it here.

Dear Lord,
I’d really like you to encourage Mike to take the plunge. As I’m sure you know, I’ve been claiming that he’s going to be a candidate for some time now, and if he ends up doing so, that will definitely enhance by street cred. Plus what could be better for anyone in the religion-and-politics biz than having Huck as the GOP nominee? I mean, the guy was present at the creation of the national religious right–press secretary to James Robison when they rolled the thing out at the National Affairs Briefing in August 1980! He’s be the culmination of a generation of evangelical political agitation!

OK, Lord, I can hear you saying, “But that’s all about you, Mark. What about what’s good for Huck? What about what’s good for THE COUNTRY? I confess, I have no idea what’s good for Huck? I mean, what’s really going to be best for his own personal lifestyle choices? Will foregoing the Fox paycheck mean he has to delay his plans for his house in Florida? Or can he guarantee the big bucks simply by running for a few months? Jeez, I dunno. As for what’s good for the country, well, I’m pretty sure Huck couldn’t do worse than any of the other GOP candidates. So if there has to be a Republican in the race, why not him? Amen.

Update: And I’m wrong!