Catholic Sexual Abuse Study Greeted with Incurious Contempt, by Scott Stephens, ABC

Catholic Sexual Abuse Study Greeted with Incurious Contempt

By Scott Stephens
ABC - The Drum
May 27, 2011

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/27/3229117.htm

Pope Benedict XVI visits the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site, in Jerusalem's Old City May 12, 2009. (Reuters: Ronen Zvulun)

I suppose I should no longer be surprised by the self-righteous cynicism and seemingly wilful ignorance of the media when it comes to reporting on Catholic affairs.

But it was the way that the Australian press allowed the findings of a recent study into The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010 to sail past with little more than a perfunctory acknowledgement of its existence, much less a serious engagement with its substance and implications, that has left me bristling.

The study, released late last week, was the product of a five-year investigation conducted by a team of researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York - the second such investigation carried out by CUNY researchers since the appalling magnitude of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church first became clear in Boston and then Ireland in 2002.

Like the first study on The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002, released in 2004, the Causes and Context study was commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Department of Justice. The researchers were granted unprecedented access to diocesan records, the testimony of abuse victims, advocates and treatment centres, as well as the Office of Child and Youth Protection.

Taken together, these studies represent the most probing, thorough examination of the incidence, character and potential causes of sexual deviance in an organisation ever conducted.

Moreover, given that only scant data exists for other organisations, and that the sixty-year span of the reports encompasses the sequence of seismic shifts that buffeted and redefined American life and social values, I would have thought that, by any reckoning, the Causes and Context study in particular merited more attention than the short shrift it received from the media.

Or at very least, that the study would have tempered somewhat the language used by the media in reporting on and analysing the incidence of sexual abuse in the Church.

But instead, as if to add insult to injury, what coverage the study did receive - especially in Australia and the UK - was haughtily dismissive. It was brushed aside as somehow tainted, inherently flawed, or otherwise implicated in some malign Catholic apologetic. All this because the Causes and Context study was neither as salacious nor as simplistic as the media's own favoured cadre of disaffected priests - each one a variation on the preposterous Hans Kung - and anti-Catholic jingoists.

And so it appears that a meticulous, restrained and even-handed study - which brings a much needed sophistication, even nuance, to the description and analysis of this whole sordid affair - is far less newsworthy than Kung's familiar rants against the evils of celibacy, or Geoffrey Robertson QC's delusional fantasy about Pope Benedict XVI at the helm of the Vatican's "command and control centre" or as the head of a "global paedophile trafficking ring," or Christopher Hitchens's grubby slur about the Church's "no child's behind left" policy, or Richard Dawkins's execrable, fact-defying description of the pope as a "leering old villain ... whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence."

Does this not confirm Hilaire Belloc's extraordinarily prescient description in 1929 of what he termed the "Modern Mind" - that cultural conceit that has been formed through the intermingling of arrogance, ignorance and sloth - and the "instrument" which feeds and deepens its malaise? "The popular Press," writes Belloc, tends to present

"as objects for admiration a bundle of things incongruous: a few of some moment, the great part trivial. Above all it grossly distorts ... Thus the 'Modern Mind' dislikes thinking: the popular Press increases that sloth by providing sensational substitutes. Disliking thought, the 'Modern Mind' dislikes close attention, and indeed any sustained effort; the popular Press increases the debility by an orgy of pictures and headlines. The 'Modern Mind' ascribes a false authority to reiteration; the popular Press serves it with ceaseless iteration ... In all these ways and twenty others the popular Press as we have it today thrusts the 'Modern Mind' lower than it would otherwise have fallen, swells its imbecility and confirms it in its incapacity for civilization and therefore for Faith."

It is precisely this form of sneering, stultifying pseudo-morality so often adopted by the modern media - whose self-promotion to the status of judge and arbiter of what warrants public attention, coupled with its fickle affections and compulsive dalliance with social media - that represents the realisation not just of Belloc's predictions, but of Kafka's nightmares.

Now, it must be said that Pope Benedict XVI has consistently been more gracious toward the media on this matter than I have been. While he has expressed his frustration at those self-appointed authorities who speak from "the tribunal of the newspapers," he says that "the media could not have reported in this way had there not been evil in the Church herself."

Moreover, in a biting riposte to the self-serving and characteristically fatuous remarks by the Dean of the College of Cardinals Angelo Sodano, that the Church is being persecuted by an orchestrated media campaign, Benedict insisted that "attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church."

Nonetheless, the Pope has acknowledged that the media clearly exhibits "some pleasure in exposing the Church and if possible discrediting her." And this points to the likely reason why the Causes and Context study has been largely ignored: there is little in it that panders to the exaggerated and frequently demagogic language used by the media about the sexual abuse crisis. Hence the manifest tendency to "sex up" the study's findings when it is not being dismissed - to give it a place, in other words, among the "orgy of headlines."

So, if you were simply to accept the ABC's meagre coverage, or that of the Fairfax papers (which could manage little more than to lift the story from The New York Times), you would quickly reach the conclusion that the Causes and Context study somehow exonerates the Catholic Church (it doesn't), or that it minimises the extent and depravity of the abuse itself (rather, it quantifies and precisely defines the nature and victims of abuse), or that a more sympathetic disposition on the part of the researchers was bought with the bishop's lucre (the John Jay College of Criminal Justice has self-evidently conformed to the academic conventions and rigours of independent research).

In an effort to set the record straight, let me lay out some of the study's more apposite findings (keeping in mind, of course, that these findings relate quite specifically to the Catholic Church in the United States - although similar patterns are emerging elsewhere).

First, the study confirmed that the sexual abuse of children by priests is not an endemic or ongoing "crisis" within the Catholic Church. As was already clear from the 2004 Nature and Scope study, there was a sudden and disturbing increase in instances of sexual abuse from 1960, reaching its hellish pinnacle in 1975, followed by a "sharp and sustained decline" from 1985 to the present.

Using the number of children confirmed each year in the Church - who are thus in contact with priests - as a stable indicator, the report found that cases of abuse have continued to fall from 15 for every 100,000 confirmations in 1992, to 5 per 100,000 in 2001 (that compares to 134 cases of sexual abuse for every 100,000 children in American society as a whole in 2001). In 2010, there were 7 reported cases across the entire Catholic Church in the United States.

But while over 80 per cent of known instances of sexual abuse had occurred before 1985, only 6 per cent had by then been reported. In fact, over one-third of all incidents of abuse came to light in 2002 alone. It is thus with some justification that the Causes and Context report describes "the 'crisis' of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests" as an "historical problem." (I would be tempted to add that those who incessantly call for an end to sexual abuse in the Church are effectively trying to break down an open door.)

Second, the study demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of victims of sexual abuse between 1950 and 2010 were male (81 per cent) and between the ages of eleven and fourteen (51 per cent). Meanwhile 27 per cent were aged fifteen to seventeen, 16 per cent were eight to ten, and only 6 percent were under the age of seven.

Because the majority of the victims were pubescent or post-pubescent, the Causes and Context study rather controversially claims that it is not therefore strictly correct to refer to "paedophile priests" (paedophilia being defined as "the sexual attraction to prepubescent children"). While this is neither here nor there, and has no bearing on the methodology or substance of the study itself, it is a technical point that has generated unwarranted consternation among many in the media.

Third, perhaps the most significant findings of the study relate to the profile of the priest-abusers themselves. According to the data collected in the 2004 Nature and Scope study, over 43 per cent of those priests that would subsequently commit abuse were ordained before 1960. This coincides with a 53 per cent increase in the number of seminaries between 1945 and 1959, and corresponding growth in seminarians training for the priesthood.

Among this cohort of pre-1960 priests, they had on average 12 years in ministry prior to committing an act of abuse. But among those priests who were ordained in the 1960s, the number of years in ministry before committing abuse dropped to 7, while for those ordained in the 1970s it is just 4 years. These figures correspond to a quadrupling of the number of resignations from the priesthood between 1966 and 1969, before levelling out again in the late-1970s.

In other words, those ordained before 1960 tended not to commit abuse until the 1960s and 70s, while those ordained in the 1960s and 70s tended to commit abuse very shortly thereafter. This would suggest that the fetid cultural soil of the 1960s and 70s proved uncommonly conducive to the commission of sexual abuse.

It would also suggest that the dramatic influx of seminarians at Catholic institutions in the 1950s and 60s bore along with it a vile cabal of paedophiles, pederasts, ill-disciplined pissants and even outright predators who precipitated the true sexual abuse "crisis" of the 1960s and 70s.

But this influx also clearly included those who were simply not prepared for the discipline of celibacy or the rigours of the priesthood itself. And, alas, there was seemingly little in their priestly formation that impeded the progression of either group into parish ministry.

The introduction of spiritual formation programs throughout Catholic seminaries in the mid-1980s, and the continuing refinement of those programs over the following two decades had a measurable effect on the incidence of sexual abuse by priests, which declined from 975 reported cases between 1985 and 1989, to 253 between 1995 and 1999, and then to 73 between 2004 and 2008.

And this brings me to the final observation - or proposal, rather, because it represents a second-order interpretation of the data - put forward by the Causes and Context study: the confluence of factors that created ideal conditions for this eruption of almost unimaginable perversity among the priesthood.

While the "scourge of celibacy" as the root cause of the sexual abuse crisis has taken on a kind of canonical status within the modern media (against which Sarah Coakley has written compellingly and at length), the study discounts celibacy per se as a compelling factor.

"Given the continuous requirement of priestly celibacy over time, it is not clear why the commitment to or state of celibate chastity should be seen as a cause for the steady rise in incidence of sexual abuse between 1950 and 1980. Andrew Greeley makes the same argument, joining it to the obvious statistical observation that the vast majority of incidents of sexual abuse of children are committed by men who are not celibates."

The greater problem was not celibacy as such, but the sexual experience of abuser-priests (which frequently included having been abused themselves) prior to taking the vow of celibacy. In other words, those priests who were sexually active (with other adults) before entering the priesthood, or who were sexually active (again, with other adults) at seminary, were far more likely to be sexually active as priests, including with minors.

According to the study, far more significant for explaining the magnitude and concentration of the sexual abuse crisis are those discernable cultural patterns which indicate the deepening of a certain social anomie during the same period. Let me quote from the study at some length:

"Sexual abuse of a minor by a Catholic priest is an individual deviant act - an act by a priest that serves individual purposes and that is completely at odds or opposed to the principles of the institution. Divorce is an act also made for personal reasons that negates the institution of marriage. Illegal drug use and criminal acts violate social and legal norms of conduct, presumably at the will of the offender. The recorded or reported incidence of each of these factors increased by 50 percent between 1960 and 1980. If the data for the annual divorce rate are compared to data for the annual rate of homicide and robbery, the time-series lines move in tandem. From stable levels in 1965, the rates increase sharply to a peak at or soon after 1980 and then begin to fall. This pattern is indicative of the period effects that can be seen in the ... data on the incidence of sexual abuse by priests."

This line of reasoning has been characterised as the "blame Woodstock explanation," designed to give the Catholic Church some alibi for its crimes. It does no such thing. Indeed, there can be no more damning indictment than that the Church had so imbibed the proclivities of the age that it reproduced them in its own life.

That being said, only someone who is wilfully naive or intractably bigoted would refuse to acknowledge that the social antinomianism and fetishisation of sexual liberation in the 1960s and 70s, along with the valorisation of the pursuit of individual pleasure and free experimentation with transgressive sexual practices, created the conditions for a dramatic escalation in deviant behaviour - including paedophilia - both within and without the Church.

One could point to Canadian-feminist Shulamith Firestone, who wrote that once the incest taboo was overturned, "relations with children would include as much genital sex as they were capable of - probably considerably more than we now believe." Or to that iconic soixante-huitard Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who wrote thus about his experience as a kindergarten teacher:

"My constant flirt with all the children soon took on erotic characteristics. I could really feel how from the age of five the small girls had already learned to make passes at me ... Several times a few children opened the fly of my trousers and started to stroke me ... When they insisted, I then stroked them."

And yet on those occasions that Pope Benedict XVI lamented as much, that "a theory was even finally developed at that time that paedophilia should be viewed as something positive," the suggestion is almost invariably met by self-righteous howls of protest from the media and the wider public.

I must emphasise once more that such cultural patterns are not a complete explanation of the occurrence of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, and the Causes and Context study never claims they are. But to discount what I have called "the foetid cultural soil of the 60s and 70s" as a factor out of hand, quite frankly, suggests an almost delusional belief in the health and progress of Western culture.

On this very point, it should also be remembered that, in the 1960s and especially in the wake of Vatican II, the "punitive approach" prescribed by Canon Law for incidence of clerical sexual deviance (Canon 2359 of the 1917 Codex Iuris Canonici) was widely criticised as being mediaeval, unenlightened and altogether ignorant of the restorative possibilities of psychotherapy.

While it would be wrong to minimise the role played by sheer indolence, inattention and arse-covering expedience on the part of many bishops over the past six decades in allowing sexual abuse within the Catholic Church to reach its hellish proportions, there was at the same time a manifest tendency among bishops to pander to the spirit of the age by adopting the more "pastoral" therapeutic approach of restoring abusive priests through treatment, counselling and relocation.

It is therefore extremely significant that the reinstatement of the so-called "punitive approach" to sexual deviance in Canon Law (Canon 1395 of the 1983 Codex Iuris Canonici), along with John Paul II's radical reform of seminary life and the spiritual formation of priests - which culminated with his magisterial 1992 apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis - precipitated what the Causes and Context report calls the "sharp and sustained decline" in incidence of sexual abuse in the Church.

While the reform of a priesthood that had become increasingly dissolute was one of John Paul II's most enduring legacies, it has fallen to Joseph Ratzinger to carry out reform among the bishops. This commenced in earnest with the 2001 papal directive Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela, requiring all cases of sexual abuse to be reported to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (of which Ratzinger was the Cardinal Prefect), and has continued without abatement into Benedict's pontificate.

Benedict XVI's determination to purge the Church of what he has repeatedly called the "filth" of abuse and concealment, his pastoral care of so many of the victims of abuse, and his insistence on the Church's "deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice," distinguishes this pope not merely as the person who has done more than any other to eradicate sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

He is also the man who can best bring this desperately evil chapter in the Church's existence to a close.