Lessons Learned

By Russell Shaw
HERALD Columnist
(From the issue of 3/28/02)

What lessons should we draw from the ghastly debacle surrounding clergy sexual misconduct? The first and most obvious lesson has got to be this: Don’t do it. Other than that, however, people will be arguing for a long time to come. Herewith are three thoughts.

Lesson number one: Secrecy doesn’t help.

It is a fundamental principle of public relations that when disaster strikes, the right response is to get all the facts out quickly. The aim is to head off having bad news dribble out piecemeal. But the clergy sex abuse story first broke in 1984, and after 18 years a lot still isn’t known.

A few years ago an experienced American bishop wrote me as follows concerning a critique of secrecy in the Church that I’d published:

"As a priest formed in the cauldron of the Second Vatican Council, I don’t have any reluctance to proclaim truth, even in circumstances that seem difficult. More scandals come from attempting to control access to truth than even came from honesty and openness.

"The very worst scandal of our times in the Church has been the sexual predations of some priests. The attempt to keep such matters secret on grounds of protecting reputations through the years simply allow the evil to fester and grow, and when the dam of secrecy finally broke—as it always will—the whole Church suffered for its lack of candor."

Amen to that.

Lesson number two: Don’t blame the media.

Yes, some elements of the media are indulging in a feeding frenzy right now. Special agendas abound. Undermining priestly celibacy is one of them, undermining the moral authority of the Church another, collecting a cardinal’s scalp and a Pulitzer Prize very likely a third.

Still, the fundamental fact is that media didn’t invent the problem. This is a crisis grounded in painful reality. In uncovering and reporting it, journalists have done what journalists are supposed to do.

Obviously it would have been better for the Church to have cleaned its own house. Failing that, we can hardly complain because the media, with all their agendas and axes to grind, stepped in and did the job.

Lesson number three: Try to get the facts straight.

Sexual misconduct by priests is an enormous evil. But how many priests really are involved? And exactly what are they involved in?

Basing his calculations on a self-study by the Archdiocese of Chicago, Philip Jenkins suggests that the figure may be 2 percent of the total body of clergy. That is 2 percent more than it ought to be, but it hardly represents an epidemic.

Jenkins, a non-Catholic professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of the book Pedophiles and Priests (Oxford University Press, 1996), rejects the notion of a causal relationship between sex abuse and celibacy. There is "no evidence whatever," he says, that celibate clergy are more likely to be involved in sexual misconduct than non-celibate clergy or than non-clergy.

"However determined news media may be to see this affair as a crisis of celibacy, the charge is just unsupported....The ‘pedophile priest’ is not a Catholic specialty," he writes.

As time passes, furthermore, and more facts come to light, it looks more and more as if pedophilia properly so called were the lesser part of the problem. In many, if not most cases, it seems, what was involved was not true pedophilia but homosexual behavior. If so, that needs to be dealt with for what it is, not sloughed off by gay apologists as a different problem with a different name.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

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