The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by U.S. Priests, Part I

by Fr. Roger Landry - May 27, 2011

Last week we focused on a Circular Letter by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith giving guidance and a one-year deadline to bishops' conferences around the world to formulate guidelines to respond to allegations of the sexual abuse of minors by Church personnel and to create the formational environment that will provide a safe environment for children. Many of these guidelines derive from the principles and protocols developed by the U.S. Bishops in Dallas in 2002 in response to the crisis of the sexual abuse of minors in our country. As much as many U.S. bishops have been justly criticized for their failure to respond adequately to stop the sexual abuse of minors while it was occurring epidemically between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s, the present U.S. hierarchy has been resolutely committed to studying and learning from the disastrous mistakes of the past so as to be able to create a Church environment where such evil will not recur. On May 18th, we witnessed yet another example of how the U.S. bishops are taking the lead not only within the Church universal but also among all institutions in the United States in seeking to understanding the problem and vigorously respond.

At their 2002 meeting in Dallas, the U.S. bishops — in addition to formulating the "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People" and its corresponding "Essential Norms" — approved funding for two studies. The first, published in 2004, was a comprehensive statistical analysis by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the nature and extent of the abuse against minors by U.S. clergy between 1950-2002. It was a transparent presentation of "what" occurred so that no one, inside or outside the Church, would be able to remain in denial about the scope of the problem or to be able to posit explanations that didn't fit the data. The second study, released last Wednesday and entitled "The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010" (see pages 14-15), was an attempt to understand the "why" behind the "what." Conducted by an independent research team from the John Jay College Research and prepared for, rather than by, the U.S. Bishops, the report took five years to complete and cost $1.8 million. It is an unprecedented investigation, both in terms of breadth and depth, of the horror of the sexual abuse of minors, one that will likely be a reference point for decades. It is, moreover, one more piece of evidence of how serious the U.S. bishops want to get to the bottom of the evil that occurred. "This study," the authors write, "provides a framework for understanding not only the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests, but sexual victimization of children in any institution. No other institution has undertaken a public study of sexual abuse and, as a result, there are no comparable data to those collected and reported by the Catholic Church. Other organizations should follow suit and examine the extent of sexual abuse within their groups to better understand the extent of the problem and the situations in which sexual abuse takes place. Only with such an understanding can effective prevention policies be articulated and implemented."

The study is broken down in to six chapters. The first reviews the general statistics of clergy sex abuse in the U.S. Church and compares and contrasts it to public schools, child care settings, the Boy Scouts, the Big Brothers-Big Sisters organization, athletic organizations, the Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Jewish Community. It establishes the point that, although abuse within the Church has garnered by far the most attention, the sexual abuse of minors is a widespread social problem. To note that sexual abuse of minors is widespread is not to downplay the evil of what occurred within the Church; it does, however, help in the determination of causes and contexts within the Church because it is not an isolated problem that can be ascribed exclusively to Church teaching, discipline or practice.

The second chapter provides an historical analysis of the crisis, explaining the distribution of allegations within the Church over time. It concludes that the "crisis" of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is an "historical problem," which peaked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. To call it an "historical problem" does not mean that sexual abuse is no longer occurring — it existed prior to the crisis and will sadly never be totally eliminated — but the epidemic aspect of the "crisis," when scores of priests in certain dioceses were going after the young with seeming impunity, is, the authors conclude, a thing of the past.

The second chapter also debunks the idea that priestly celibacy was a cause of the crisis; if it were, they argued crisply, the crisis of the sexual abuse of minors would a constant of the celibate priesthood throughout the centuries, something for which there is not only no evidence but plenty of counter-evidence.

This chapter mentions that while there is no one cause for the crisis, among the most notable contributing factors was the combination of poor human formation in celibate chastity in many seminaries on the one hand and a widespread acceptance of "sexual deviance" flowing from the culture of the sexual revolution on the other. "The rise in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in American society generally," the authors wrote. "This increase in abusive behavior is consistent with changes in social behavior, such as an increase in premarital sexual behavior and divorce."

Many in the secular media tried to jump on this point, claiming that the researchers were puppets of a Church trying to scapegoat "flower children" or "hippies" for the crisis. The researchers were doing no such thing. They were merely stating what any objective sociologist studying the causes of a crisis would have to note: the revolution of sexual values that occurred in the late 1960s — which overnight overturned traditional sexual morés and basically began to treat all sexual expression outside of rape as a positive good — had a negative impact on some priests whose human vulnerabilities with regard to sexuality were not identified and addressed in the seminary. In an age when sexual boundaries were being dismantled, it shouldn't be shocking that some stepped over moral lines that the culture claimed should no longer exist. Moreover, at a time when vast numbers of Catholics, including priests, were rejecting Church teaching with regard to contraception in marriage, it shouldn't be shocking that some priests were conceptually and concretely rejecting Church teaching in other areas of sexual behavior. This is far from "blaming Woodstock" for the crisis, but it does imply — contrary to what many protagonists of the sexual revolution would like to admit — that when some poorly-formed priests began to follow the prevailing winds of the sexual revolution rather than the Gospel, there were catastrophic unintended consequences.

The third chapter looks at the crisis from the perspective of psychology. This is a very valuable chapter, giving the history of how the psychological sciences approached the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors and demonstrating how the psychological sciences were taken on a steep learning curve throughout the crisis. At first many in the psychological professions had confidence that molesters of minors could be treated and cured with classic psychological techniques, Many bishops consequently relied on their recommendations to restore abusers to ministry. "Prior to 1984, the common assumption of those who the bishops consulted was that clergy sexual misbehavior was both psychologically curable and could be spiritually remedied by recourse to prayer," the authors wrote. Even after 1985, they noted, "prompt psychological treatment for the priest was seen as the best course of action and became the primary intervention." The experience of the last thirty years has taught us, however, that not only was this confidence unjustified, but, the authors described, that psychology has been unable to identify clearly tests to predict future sexual abuse or to discover adequate psychological remedies for abusers. The authors imply the obvious conclusion: one of the contributing factors of the crisis was that bishops relied too much on those in the psychological sciences, many of whom made disastrous recommendations that priests were capable of being returned to ministry. Up until now, this has been one of the least studied aspects of the crisis.

Next week, we will analyze two other controversial aspects of the report that have gotten a lot of attention in initial media reports: the analysis of the "organizational response" on the part of bishops to incidents and allegations of abuse and the extent to which homosexual attractions in the clergy played a role in the crisis.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.