Catholic Leaders Shirked Duty in Sex Abuse Cases, The American-Statesman, July 9, 2011

Catholic Leaders Shirked Duty in Sex Abuse Cases

The American-Statesman
July 9, 2011

http://www.statesman.com/opinion/insight/catholic-leaders-shirked-duty-in-sex-abuse-cases-1595441.html

Jim Harrington is a civil rights attorney in Austin, where he is director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which promotes racial, social and economic justice through education and litigation. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

Like their counterparts in the Senate, members of the Texas House reached the end of the 82nd Legislature's special session without having effected genuine fiscal stability.

Writing about how the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has shielded itself over myriad years from the judicial system and accountability for clergy abuse resonates with me at different levels, legal and moral as a civil rights attorney, a philosophy postgraduate, a Catholic and a victim.

I only recently came to terms with the abuse I endured as a seminarian in the 1960s at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Ohio, which is directly under the Vatican. Ironically, Cardinal-to-be Bernard Law, who became the cold-hearted face of the hierarchy to victims, was finishing his last year at Josephinum when I entered.

Ultimately, I left the seminary, not because of the experiences I describe, but because I did not feel I could work effectively for social justice within the institutional hierarchical confines of the church. Had I stayed in the seminary, I would have been ordained in 1972. Still, over the years, I remained involved in the church, serving in various teaching and leadership roles.

For almost half a century, I somehow suppressed my memory of what I went through and its aftermath until late one evening last year, when it all flooded back painfully. But this is not about my experiences, other than disclosure in terms of this article and to admit I now have a deeper appreciation of what victims have gone through. Many suffered far worse experiences than mine. I also now have a personal understanding of "delayed memory" in abuse cases.

Nor is this piece an attack on the church itself or a blanket condemnation of the countless good priests, nuns, bishops and brothers who have given their lives to serve and who by far outnumber the villains.

Rather, it is a reflection on how the hierarchy, as an unaccountable institution, nurturing itself with a monarchical style and dress of eras past, has aggrandized its own power, on how bishops and popes shielded themselves from moral and legal responsibility to those whose lives they severely damaged. Many people were irrevocably scarred, and some took their own lives.

I still love the church as the community it was meant to be and its message of social justice and spirituality, and I try to live accordingly. But my time has come to raise a prophetic voice, meager as it may be, against the grievous sins committed by many bishops, and even popes, who allowed clerical abuse to thrive. Clergy abuse occurs in all religions, of course, but there are unique contours in how the Catholic hierarchy has handled it.

The final straw for me was when the American bishops recently tried to slough off their burden for the pain and injury of countless victims, and shirk responsibility, with their John Jay College clergy abuse report, a consummate whitewash, blaming the 1960s and 1970s for a culture that supposedly gave rise to priest abuse.

I found the John Jay study (http://bit.ly/jTWPOv ) so disgusting that I had to speak up about this, as I never had before. Blaming the 1960s and 1970s is absurd. It was precisely the culture of those years that drew many of us to the seminary, to do good with our lives. It was the era of the civil rights movement, idealism, the Peace Corps, the great changes of Vatican II, expanding justice in the Great Society, and personal sacrifice, like the Freedom Riders. Woodstock, despite the pope's and bishops' disingenuous insinuations, was not what defined us or the priests who mentored us. I resent their implication otherwise. Besides, it's the job of the clergy to help lead society, not vice versa.

My career doing civil rights work with the poor and underserved has brought me into contact with many clergy over the years. I have been astonished, and often shocked, at how bishops have covered up for deviant priests and blocked legal action against them, even to the point of warning them to leave the country to avoid prosecution. We know now through leaked documents that the Vatican was intensely complicit in a policy of avoiding criminal prosecution of errant priests. Even then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the revered John Paul II had a hand in this scheme of avoiding secular law enforcement authorities, who should have been called in. Those priests ought to have been on the sex-offender registry like other lawbreakers.

Bishops should not be shielded from criminal law if in fact they were complicit in covering up conduct that led to a child being abused. There is a concept of reckless endangerment in our criminal law — that is, acting recklessly without reasonable caution and putting another person at risk of injury or death (or failing to do something with the same consequences). In February, a Philadelphia grand jury indicted a top aide, a monsignor, of former Archbishop Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua's for endangering children by shielding pedophile priests from detection and shuffling them into unsuspecting parishes where they continued their perversions. The grand jury considered indicting the cardinal himself but did not do so, probably because of his age (87) and dementia.

Whenever priest abuse happened in the seminary, it was covered it up. One professor was a serial abuser. He just disappeared one night. Rumor had it he was transferred to New Mexico for therapy and then to a parish, as was the custom. Perhaps. The point is, the authorities never told us anything, never counseled us, never worked with us to understand the enormity of the transgression and its effects on victims. Nor did they ever tell us of any adverse consequences to the priest. We assumed there were none.

This was the same when I finally had the courage to report my abuser, who even stalked me. It was frightening, but I feared I would pay a price for reporting him. Others had experiences much worse than mine, but the officials' reaction was always the same and typical.

The message they telegraphed was not the message they should have taught: Don't do it, and, if you do, there are consequences for the abuser and for the victim. The bishops cannot argue, as they do, that understanding pedophilia is something recent. Perhaps so, but abuse is abuse, and has been that way since the first recorded word of the Bible. They have no excuses, no reasons, for what they did and failed to do. Power corrupts, as the axiom goes.

The John Jay study should have measured the frequency of abuse against the bishops' pathetic and cynical reactions, case-by-case, as the abuse occurred. The study's own data shows that, only when the inevitable scandal rocked the church and court judgments rolled in (now perhaps as much as $1 billion), did the bishops do anything. The blame lies at the bishops' feet, as one can read between the lines of the John Jay report. No matter how the study tries to couch its findings to be less accusatory than they should be, the information speaks for itself. The report goes easy on the bishops because they paid for it — $1.8 million of the faithful's hard-earned money. The bishops should have used the $1.8 million to help the poor and accepted moral responsibility for this sordid mess. Instead of closing ranks, they should have acknowledged their structural sin. They should have knelt before their congregations, confessed error and asked forgiveness. Blaming the 1960s and 1970s is wrong-headed and mean-spirited.

The bishops limited the study to the years after 1950, which is curious, especially when the data chart shows a high incidence of abuse in 1950. What was happening before then? Likewise, the data show a consistent rise during the 1950s and a sharp incline at the end of the 1950s. They can't fault the 1960s and 1970s for that. They obviously should have realized then, if not before, that something was terribly amiss, and the trajectory was moving toward disaster and tragedy. Had they exercised discipline, accountability and respect for victims early on, in the 1950s (or even before), they would have prevented considerable suffering, and even deaths, and not have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars of people's contributions.

Nor does blaming the 1960s and 1970s in America explain wrenching priest scandals in other parts of the world like Australia, the Philippines and Europe. The problem is systemic and internal to a nontransparent, isolated and self-perpetuating hierarchy, not to the culture of a time or place.

The bishops strongly proclaim their "life" agenda in American politics, usually on the single issue of abortion, but their "life" agenda did not extend to the victims of their own negligence and malfeasance.

In the old days of the Latin Mass, we began with the Confiteor ("I confess"), a prayer of contrition, during which we struck our chests three times and said "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" ( "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault").

Until the bishops and pope muster enough moral responsibility to say "mea maxima culpa" for the lives they ruined and trust they betrayed, all their distracting studies are for naught and, I dare say, hypocritical. In the meanwhile, I will not give them one more dime but will send my Sunday offering directly to charity. I may still be a believer, but I find it difficult to convince my kids and friends that they should be.

Jim Harrington is a civil rights attorney in Austin, where he is director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, which promotes racial, social and economic justice through education and litigation. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

Reporting sex abuse cases

If you suspect or witness child abuse, call the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services at its toll-free, 24-hour abuse hotline at 800-252-5400 or report online at www.txabuse hotline.org.

To report child abuse in a different state, please call the National Child Abuse Hotline at 800-422-4453.

Reporting abuse to the diocese

To report abuse in church setting in the Diocese of Austin, call 512-949-2400 and ask for the Office of Ethics and Integrity in Ministry or the Vicar General's Office.