Learning from the Past

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 1/4/07)

It's five years since the story of clergy sex abuse and coverup erupted in the pages of The Boston Globe and then spread like wildfire throughout the nation via other media. Despite everything that's been said since January, 2002, some key lessons of the worst crisis ever to hit the Catholic Church in the United States still haven't sunk in.
Meeting in Baltimore last November, the U.S. bishops approved the first installment of the million dollars they've committed to a study of the roots of abuse, to be carried out by New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. (Other sources are expected to come up with several million more.) During the discussion, a bishop complained that the study would extend over several years, guaranteeing still more publicity and pain. Couldn't the researchers hurry up? The answer was no.
It's easy to sympathize with the bishop's concern, but he was being unrealistic. Study or no study, ugly publicity will continue, off and on at least, as new disclosures come to light and new settlements of abuse cases are announced. As of a year ago, abuse was known to have cost the Church and its insurers a cool $1.5 billion over the past half-century, and by now the sum already is many millions higher.
In saying this, it's important to keep the real dimensions of clergy sex abuse clearly in mind. Although what happened was truly scandalous, the reality isn't quite so horrendous as sometimes supposed.
According to the best figures available, between 1950 and the present about 6,000 Catholic clergymen, almost all of them priests, abused approximately 13,000 minors in the U.S. The incidence of abuse peaked in the 1970s and dropped sharply after that. Abusers made up about 4 percent of the total number of priests active in the United States during the period in question.
Whatever anyone chooses to make of that, there are excellent reasons for not forgetting what happened.
One reason is that it's far from universally understood and acknowledged how much ecclesiastical clubbishness and the habits of secrecy it encourages contributed to turning what unquestionably was a very bad situation into an unmitigated disaster. Nor is it generally grasped how deeply entrenched these destructive attitudes still remain.
Back in 2002, six months after the scandal broke, the bishops adopted a policy of "transparency" on sex abuse. But much relevant information has yet to come to light, while transparency needs to be extended across the board to other areas of Catholic life, notably including finances.
Similarly, neither the Church nor the media have yet faced up to the implications of the corrosive hostility to the Church motivating some journalists in their coverage and commentary five years ago.
Some of the reporting was merely sloppy, conveying the impression that things that happened decades earlier had only recently occurred. But, according to Peter Steinfels, former religion editor of The New York Times, the problem went far deeper than that. Certain editorial writers and commentators—often, it seems, alienated Catholics themselves—seized on the scandal in a manner that "settled scores" with the Church over other, unrelated issues, Steinfels says.
On this anniversary, American Catholicism finds itself in a new, post-scandal era. For the most part, that's all to the good. But even though it's understandably tempting to put the recent unpleasantness out of mind, doing that would be a serious mistake. If we fail to absorb the painful but salutary lessons of 2002, we risk setting the stage for fresh problems not so far down the road.

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

Copyright (c) 2007 Arlington Catholic Herald