BishopAccountability.org
	Flawed Analysis in Priest Report Ashbury Park Press May 24, 2011 http://www.app.com/article/20110523/NJOPINION01/305230069/Flawed-analysis-in-priest-report The idea that individuals are responsible before God for their sins and before the law for their crimes is nearly universal. But a report released last week that explores the context and causes of child sexual abuse by priests in this country at times seems to downplay personal responsibility and lays the blame on the permissive society of the 1960s and 1970s. That's a shame, and it calls for a firm and quick response from the church itself. The report, commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, was undercut by one of its main conclusions: namely, that the hippies of the '60s and the libertines of the '70s were in some ways responsible for some priests' reprehensible actions. Any attempt to deflect responsibility away from those who actually perpetrated the abuse (and those in the church hierarchy who aided and abetted it) is absolutely antithetical to the principle of individual responsibility, enshrined in both American jurisprudence and Christian theology. Elsewhere in the report, the authors use the word "vulnerability" in describing priests who committed the crimes. The use of that word is bitterly ironic as applied to these priests. It was they who found and abused their young, truly vulnerable victims. And priests are called to rise above sin, not descend to its most disturbing fringe. The report also makes a distinction between those priests who preyed on teenagers and those who abused prepubescent children. While that may matter to the psychiatrists who diagnosed and treated them, it is of no comfort to a 14-year-old abuse victim that his attacker was not, technically, a pedophile, but some other classification of deviant. In explaining the downward trend of such incidents since the mid-1980s, the report points to the victims' advocates groups calling for justice and tougher responses to abuse by bishops. But for far too long, Catholic leaders looked the other way. Many people, male and female, gay and straight, came of age in the decades marked by changing mores. However, very few of them ever decided, even at their most promiscuous, to sexually abuse a minor. Too many priests did. And they got away with it for far too long. The value of this study is in its painstaking and quantitive analysis of the scandal. Unfortunately, some of its conclusions are lacking the rigor of its statistical models. What is called for now is a response from the Catholic Church that recognizes the role of personal responsibility — for priests and for members of the church hierarchy who allowed these acts to go on for decades.
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