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	More Emphasis on Confessing Might Have Helped By Mollie Ziegler Hemingway Wall Street Journal June 4, 2010 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704366504575278792116707282.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTThirdBucket The Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald, who founded a Roman Catholic religious order that helped troubled priests, began warning American bishops in the early 1950s that pedophile priests couldn't be cured. So sure was he that he made a $5,000 down payment on a Caribbean island to quarantine the worst offenders. The island plan was never realized, but the basic idea to keep problem priests away from young people wasn't new. St. Basil wrote in the 4th century that clerics who seduced boys should be publicly flogged, imprisoned and supervised so they would "never again associate with youths in private conversation nor in counseling them." Yet it wasn't until 2002 that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a zero-tolerance policy requiring that any priest who has engaged in sexual abuse of a minor be reported to authorities and permanently removed from ministry. The crisis has cost American dioceses more than $2.6 billion in settlements and fees since 1950. Some reform-minded Catholics have suggested that required celibacy contributed to the problem, causing priests to exploit minors for sexual gratification. Some traditional Catholics say the Second Vatican Council's window-opening reforms led to relaxed enforcement of old church rules that would have kept priests in line. But church leaders on both sides have agreed on at least one of reasons that clergymen known to be offenders were able to continue their pattern of abuse: an over-reliance on psychologists who advised bishops that perpetrators could be treated and returned to parish ministry. In its 2004 report on the U.S. clergy sexual-abuse crisis, the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People said that psychological treatment facilities must shoulder some of the blame for frequently recommending that abusers be returned to a parish after treatment. "Indeed, a few treating physicians actually told bishops that returning a priest-perpetrator to ministry was a necessary part of that priest's recovery," the Board found. The report also blames bishops for withholding damaging information about troubled priests from psychiatrists and seeking out lenient treatment centers. The idea that a problem priest didn't need to be removed from ministry but could be cured of his attraction to adolescents with a bit of group therapy and in-patient treatment was welcome news to some bishops. So how did the church go from flogging child abusers to shipping them off for a relaxing stay at a treatment facility? The work of Dr. Francis Braceland, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association who was named a knight by Pope Pius XII, did much to ease some of the early anxiety the church had with the emerging field of mental health. The books Dr. Braceland edited, "Faith, Reason and Modern Psychiatry" and "Psychiatry, the Clergy and Pastoral Counseling," influenced bishops starting in the 1950s. The Institute of Living, where he served as chief psychiatrist, was one of the treatment facilities that handled priests accused of sexual abuse. It was from there that the former Boston priest John Geoghan, eventually accused of molesting more than 130 children, was released with a note that he was "psychologically fit" to continue working with children. "It's true that psychologists and psychiatrists at one time believed that people could be treated, cured of their disease, and go back to doing whatever they wanted to do," says Thomas Plante, a psychologist who serves on the National Review Board and is the director of the Spirituality and Health Institute at Santa Clara University. "Most good, quality research on how to treat sex offenders didn't start to get published until the late 1970s and into the early 1980s." Media coverage of the sex-abuse scandals has focused on those bishops who protected offenders from criminal prosecution, shuffling them around from parish to parish. But in replacing theology with psychiatry, these church leaders also lost sight of the pastoral tools that could have encouraged abusers to confront the harm they've caused their victims. "The Church has crafted an institutional response that has tended to be legal and psychological. What has been sorely lacking is the pastoral dimension," says Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, a Catholic University psychologist who once headed a treatment center for abusive priests. A strong advocate of the church using modern psychology in collaboration with orthodox teaching, Msgr. Rossetti instituted a rule at his center that any past sexual misconduct with children meant an automatic recommendation that the perpetrator never be returned to any unsupervised contact with minors. Yet Msgr. Rossetti also sees a link between effective therapy and traditional church teaching on penance. The Catholic Encyclopedia says penitents should "with true sorrow confess their sins" to a priest. "One of ways you help sex offenders recover," he says, "is by having them admit that they have done something awful and are responsible for it-instead of blaming their victims, upbringing or society." In the midst of the media's renewed focus on the Vatican's handling of priestly sex abuse, the Church is making a point of reaffirming church teaching on sin, repentance and forgiveness. At a Mass in Rome April 15, Pope Benedict XVI preached on the Book of Acts, chapter 5, which discusses repentance and forgiveness of sins. "I have to say that we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word repentance, which seems too harsh," he explained. "Now, under the attacks of the world, which speaks to us of our sins, we see that the ability to repent is a grace, and we see how it is necessary to repent, that is, to recognize what is wrong in our life."
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