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	Archbishop’s Journal: a Pastor’s Homily on the Church’s Failure By George H. Niederauer Catholic San Francisco April 21, 2010 http://www.catholic-sf.org/news_select.php?newsid=&id=57112 In recent weeks the issue of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy has been in the news, with an emphasis this time around on Europe and on accusations leveled at Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI. The Catholic Church in this country has learned that, in this matter, the first two concerns must be the healing of victims and the protection of children. For eight years now that has been our special concentration as a Church. Still, the present media storm has also caused dismay and confusion for Catholics and non-Catholics as well. I have asked the editor of Catholic San Francisco to reprint the following homily delivered by Rev. Msgr. Robert McElroy, Pastor of St. Gregory Parish, San Mateo, on April 11, 2010, Divine Mercy Sunday. To be sure, Msgr. McElroy did not do the impossible by addressing all the significant aspects of this complex issue within one homily. However, he did address three key questions in a clear and balanced way: 1) How could good men have moved previous offenders into other parishes? 2) What has changed in the approach of U.S. bishops in the protection of children and young people against such abuse? 3) What are we to think of the Pope’s role in these matters? I thank Msgr. McElroy for sharing this text with the Catholics of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. In today’s Gospel the risen Christ appears to the very disciples who had betrayed him in the greatest crisis of his life, and reveals the immensity of God’s unending mercy and forgiveness. For Jesus’ first words to those who had so fully abandoned him were not condemnation and recrimination, but the magnificently consoling “peace be with you.” As if to underscore that God’s measure of judgment is fundamentally different from our own, the Lord uses this moment of reunion with the disciples to bestow the continuing gift of the Sacrament of Penance upon the Church. In our very sinfulness God reveals once more the limitless nature of divine mercy. Typically on this first Sunday after Easter, the Gospel reminds us that in our own personal failings we find reconciliation through the grace of God. But on this particular Divine Mercy Sunday, the need for God’s mercy upon the whole of the Church seems especially apparent. For the Church itself stands guilty of sin in its past care for the protection of children from sexual abuse, and while we know that the Church as an institution both human and divine does sin, it is particularly painful to wrestle with the Church’s failure in this critical area of its life. But as people of faith we must wrestle with this failure and understand its origins and dimensions. Let us begin with the facts. The core failure of the Church on the issue of child abuse prevention is that during the last century significant number of bishops reassigned priests to positions in the service of the Church even after these individuals had been proven to have molested minors. How could this have happened? How could good men possibly have reassigned those who had been shown to have victimized children in their pasts? I believe that the failure to protect children in our Church arose not from callousness or indifference, but from the fact that for too many years the Church looked at cases of molestation through two defective lenses which have distorted its ability to address the abuse of children in a Christlike manner: the lens of psychological illness and the lens of forgiveness. These defective lenses were not confined to the Church by any means; they existed in society as a whole and created corresponding grave errors in the way in which other major social institutions – schools, families, the psychological professions and the justice system – dealt with the abuse of children. But the reality that our other major institutions also failed children is not a defense of the Church in this matter. For the Church is certainly called in a transcendent way to witness to how children should be treated in our world, and it failed in this call for far too many years. The lens of psychological illness led bishops and the Church to primarily approach the abuse of children as a mental illness of the abuser. During the period from 1950 to 1980 leading members of the psychological community told bishops that those who had abused children could frequently, with proper therapy, be healed so that they no longer posed a threat to children. By the 1980’s therapists no longer stated that abusers had been healed, but many therapists still advised bishops that abusers could safely be reassigned to positions which did not involve children, especially if their initial abuse had been linked to alcohol. As late as 1996 I remember the Archbishop receiving a letter from a prominent therapist who stated that a priest who had molested four minors could be safely reassigned with appropriate safeguards. The Archbishop did not reassign him. For the simple fact is that there are no adequate safeguards sufficient to prevent a priest or layperson who has abused from being a threat to minors in the active ministerial life of the Church. The defect of the therapeutic lens is that it is client based – it focuses on the person who is ill rather than upon his potential victims. And thus it led bishops to reassign in the false belief that the best knowledge which society had to offer indicated that there was not substantial risk to children. The second defective lens which distorted the Church’s handling of child abuse allegations was the lens of forgiveness. The manifest mercy of God reflected in today’s Gospel is a foundation for the entire life of the Church, and many who had abused minors pleaded that this had been the only instance of their failing, and that of all institutions the Church should place forgiveness at the center of its decisions. Bishops, priests and lay leaders were often drawn into this psychology of forgiveness as the pathway for dealing with cases of abuse. Sadly, this tendency was all too often deepened by the fact that decision makers often knew those guilty of abuse well, knew that they had other, splendid human and spiritual qualities, and typically did not know their victims. Forgiveness is a magnificent quality. But forgiveness can become a distortion when it is separated from justice. The Church was far from the only institution in which an ethic of forgiveness contorted justice on issues of the abuse of children. Indeed, forgiveness is often the lens through which families deal with genuine cases of sexual abuse. Families are told that they must forgive and put behind them the acts of abusers even when those abusers still constitute a threat to children within the family. Forgiveness in such cases is not Christlike; it is irresponsible, whether within the Church or the life of the family. Eight years ago, the bishops of the United States dramatically discarded the lenses of mental illness and forgiveness as primary prisms through which to judge cases involving the abuse of minors and replaced them with the only lens which should guide our Church, our schools, our legal system and our families in confronting this searing issue: the prism of an overriding focus on the protection of the young. The bishops established lay independent review boards with professional investigative resources to review and judge all allegations of abuse by priests, religious and lay employees or volunteers in the Church. In addition, the bishops removed all priests, religious and laity who had been found to have sexually abused minors from any public ministry in the life of the Church. They began comprehensive programs to educate children for self-protection, understanding that it is imperative for children to recognize the insidious methods which abusers often use to initiate their patterns of victimization. Finally, the Church now does background checks on both employees and volunteers who regularly work with children in the life of the Church; many of you present today have undergone such background checks, as have I. As the American bishops sought approval and implementation for these dramatic changes from the Vatican, there was one man who more than any other championed their cause: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI. Because Cardinal Ratzinger had been given in 2001 the job of examining the issue of sexual abuse within the Church, he had already come to reject vehemently the lenses of mental illness and forgiveness which had hobbled the Church’s efforts to combat what he termed “moral filth” in the life of the Church. And he has become the most ardent advocate for genuine reform on this issue in the Church throughout the world. Recent criticisms of the Pope’s past actions seem to me to reflect more western culture’s preoccupation with finding flaws in institutions and their leaders, at the expense of the wider truth that the current Pope has been the Church’s most vigorous exponent of reform in the global Church and has paid a heavy price for doing so. It is fair to criticize the Pope for actions that he personally took; it is not fair to condemn his moral character for actions in either the Archdiocese of Munich or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for which he was not responsible. We as Catholics are called to love our Church. That love also means recognizing that the Church is flawed. On the issue of abuse, the Church too often failed in its responsibilities to protect Christ’s little ones. Moreover, shame over the existence of abuse within the ranks of the priesthood led to a culture of secrecy and concealment that massively compounded this failure and resulted in additional grievous harm to children. The fact that these failures were also shared by other faiths and other societal institutions does not lessen the Church’s sin. Nor does the fact that the Church’s failures in this critical area of its life were often motivated by the mistaken belief that healing and forgiveness should govern the handling of abuse claims. Eight years ago the Church in the United States faced its failure and revolutionized its handling of abuse allegations. Now the Universal Church is doing the same. We should pray for the Church as it does so. We should accept that criticism in the press and society which is truly motivated by a fair-minded and balanced approach to the handling of child abuse, and reject that criticism which singles out the Catholic Church as the only object of criticism for a problem which tragically permeates our society as a whole. And we should be consoled that the risen Lord stands constantly in our midst, calling us to continuing conversion and assuring us that he will always be present to his Church in times of its greatest need. Homily by Msgr. Robert McElroy, pastor, St. Gregory Church, San Mateo, April 11, 2010.
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