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

by Fr. Roger Landry - June 3, 2011

Last week we began an analysis of "The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010" (see pages 14-15), the 152-page report by a research team from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on the why behind the what of the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church in the United States of America.

Much of the criticism of the report, made within an hour of its release and before the report could have been thoroughly read even by the world's greatest speed reader, alleged that the report was a ruse that was trying to exonerate the bishops and scapegoat free-loving hippies. We analyzed last time the role that the sexual revolution played in tearing down the walls of sexual morality, boundaries that were no longer there to restrain certain priests poorly formed in celibate chastity from acting on their psychological and moral perversions with accessible children or teens. The independent report, written for rather than by the U.S. bishops, was not trying to pretend that the flower children were fully responsible for the sexual abuse crisis, but was drawing the rather obvious sociological conclusion that when these poorly-formed priests began to follow the prevailing winds of the sexual revolution rather than the Gospel, there were catastrophic unintended consequences.

With regard to the larger accusation of the report's trying to exculpate the bishops, it's obvious that the critics have either not read the report or are intentionally misrepresenting its clear findings. In its fourth chapter, on "The Organizational Response to Incidents and Reports of Sexual Abuse of Minors," the John Jay College researchers examined the reaction of individual bishops and the bishops as a body over the course of the last several decades to the horror of the sexual abuse of minors. They mentioned what the bishops knew and didn't know, what they did and didn't do. They noted that few bishops ever ignored allegations of the sexual abuse of minors, but many, especially in the early days, responded in a totally inadequate way, with one-third of accused abusers' receiving only a stern reprimand before being returned and another third's being sent for a psychological evaluation before the bishops reassigned them, acting on a psychologist's obviously erroneous recommendation that the offenders were safe to return to parish work. "When allegations of abuse were made," the researchers wrote, "most diocesan leaders responded. However, the response typically focused on the priest-abusers rather than on the victims. Data indicate that the majority of diocesan leaders took actions to help 'rehabilitate' the abusive priests."

They went on to describe that in 1985, the bishops as a body commissioned a report after details of the first notorious priest abuser, Gilbert Gauthe of Lafayette, Louisiana, came to light. They mentioned how the U.S. bishops went further in 1992 developed guidelines called the "Five Principles" that they committed themselves to following: to respond promptly to all reasonable allegations of abuse; to relieve credibly alleged offenders promptly of their duties and send them for medical evaluation and intervention; to comply with civil reporting obligations; to reach out to victims; and to deal as transparently as possible with the issue before the Church and society. The researchers said, however, that many bishops failed to follow the guidelines they themselves had developed. They implied that from that point forward, at least, the bishops were not acting out of ignorance, but were disobeying what they themselves had recognized needed to be done to respond to injured children, scandalized families, and abusive priests. They noted the lack of correspondence between the stated principles and diocesan deeds. "There is little evidence that diocesan leaders met directly with victims before 2002," they noted. "Diocesan leaders were more likely to respond to the sexual abuse allegations within the institution, using investigation, evaluation, and administrative leave rather than external mechanisms of the criminal law. Many of the diocesan leaders' actions were not transparent to those outside the church." They mentioned laconically, "these Principles were not consistently implemented in all dioceses." In perhaps their strongest criticism, they charged that even though society in general — and the psychological sciences in particular — lacked a deep understanding of the long-term damage suffered by victims, the bishops who didn't attend to the victims' needs cannot be let off the hook, because "the absence of acknowledgment of harm was a significant ethical lapse on the part of leadership in some dioceses." These bishops, in other words, failed morally.

But the authors clarified that that failure on the part of many bishops is not the whole story. They said that while there were among the bishops clearly some "laggards" — who responded in totally inadequate ways not only to victims but also to the implementation of the bishops' own standards — there also were many episcopal "innovators," who "led the organizational change to address the problems of sexual abuse of minors." The authors emphasized that "the media often focused on the laggards, even though they constituted a minority of diocesan leaders, which further perpetuated the image that the bishops as a whole were not responding to the problem of sexual abuse of minors." The media has made those ordinaries who failed far more infamous than they've made famous those bishops who championed victims. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the evil lives on in newsprint and the good is interred in the newspapers' own secret archives.

As helpful as the report is overall, however, it clearly has some weaknesses. One is methodological. We will never get to a full understanding of the causes of the sexual abuse of minors by sociological analyses alone. As the original anecdotal study of the causes and context of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, written in 2004 by the National Review Board chaired by Attorney Robert Bennett, stressed, "the overriding paradigm that characterizes the crisis is one of sinfulness," of abominable sins of commission on the parts of offending priests and horrible sins of omission on the part of some bishops in response to it. These spiritual causes are something a sociological analysis is incompetent to determine, and these are the questions that most Catholic and otherwise interested observers want to have answered: how could Church leaders not respond as true spiritual fathers to their wounded children after Jesus Christ himself emphatically promised millstones to those who harmed the young? In this regard, the Bennett report is a much deeper study of the causes and context of the abuse crisis. But this methodological limitation is something for which we really cannot fault the authors.

With regard to the second major weakness, we can: the authors' analysis of the role of homosexual molestation in the crisis. The 2004 John Jay College study of the nature and scope of the abuse documented that 81 percent of the allegations of abuse by clergy concerned male victims, of whom 78 percent were post-pubescent. That means that between 1950-2002, over sixty percent of clergy sexual abuse was the same-sex molestation of teenage boys. The Bennett report candidly noted: "most of the abuse was homosexual in nature." The present report, however, seemed to want to downplay this preponderance or treat the sex of the victims as somehow insignificant. "The data do not support a finding that homosexual identity and/or pre-ordination same-sex sexual behavior are significant risk factors for the sexual abuse of minors," they wrote. They did it first by trying to distinguish same-sex behavior from same-sex identity. "It is necessary to differentiate between sexual identity and sexual behavior, and it is important to note that sexual behavior does not necessarily correspond to a particular sexual identity." The second step was to characterize the incidence of the sexual abuse of minors as a crime of "opportunity": the only reason why the vast majority of victims happened to be post-pubescent boys was not because the abusers had same-sex attractions to them, but because the offending priests had greater access to them. While it is true, as the report notes, that there were few altar girls prior to the early 1990s, it ignores that most parish schools were co-ed and that most of the incidents of the molestation of minors happened after extensive "grooming" of victims, when abusers plotted over the course of weeks or months to earn the trust of victims to whom they were attracted and of their families. The researchers tried to give the impression that a more plausible explanation for the preponderance of abuse against post-pubescent boys is that those with heterosexual or bisexual "identities" groomed and engaged in same-sex "behavior" with teenage boys to whom they were not sexually attracted because these boys were simply more available than girls. The far saner scientific and commonsensical explanation is that those with same-sex attractions engaged in grooming and abuse with those to whom they were sexually drawn. This does not mean at all that priests with same-sex attractions are to blame for the clergy sexual abuse crisis or that a given priest with same-sex attractions is likely to abuse. But the data show that the real spike in the sexual abuse of minors between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s — what the authors describe as the peak of the crisis — was predominantly a spike in victimizing teenage boys. If we're going to understand the causes and context of the crisis so as to learn what to do to prevent its recurrence, we need to be capable of candidly stating and examining this inconvenient truth.

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.