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	A Step Backward, Not Forward Boston Globe May 21, 2011 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2011/05/21/a_step_backward_not_forward/ IN ORDERING up a study on the causes of sexual abuse by priests, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops may have meant to gain a better understanding of a problem that has unsettled Catholics around the world. But the report that emerged — offering the peculiar conclusion that the level of abuse surged in the 1960s and ’70s because of the changing social mores of that era — is a step backward, not forward. Conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, the study zeroed in on some beside-the-point semantics — specifying in one instance that “pedophile’’ refers only to those who abused minors ages 10 and under — while chalking abuse up to priests’ stress, isolation, and lack of appropriate training. And by focusing so much on broader trends rather than the specific manner in which the church handled such accusations, the study comes off as a way of avoiding blame. At the least, it undercuts the concrete steps that Cardinal Sean O’Malley and others have taken to acknowledge and atone for victims’ suffering. O’Malley, who took over leadership of a Boston archdiocese that had become the epicenter of the abuse crisis, has come to embody the church’s efforts to repair the damage. He went to Dublin earlier this year to wash the feet of abuse victims and to preside at a “liturgy of lament and repentance.’’ The new study stands at odds with such welcome gestures. Abuse victims, and others alienated by the scandal, will be reassured not by dodgy sociology, but by real accountability.
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