Conference Takes Stock of Church's Response to Abuse Crisis since 2002

By George Raine
Catholic San Francisco
May 15, 2012

http://www.catholic-sf.org/ns.php?newsid=1&id=59920

Ten years after the crisis of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests first captured the nation's attention, Santa Clara University on May 11 hosted a conference to take stock, to determine what needs to be done to reduce risk that any child is injured.

"We pat ourselves on the back for the successes, but we are not done," said Thomas Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara and conference co-host.

The conference title, "Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Decade of Crisis, 2002-2012," is the same as the title of a book co-edited by Plante, who has conducted 700 psychological evaluations of candidates for seminaries over 25 years.

The so-called 10-year anniversary of the crisis – the Boston Globe reported widespread abuse in Boston in 2002 – presented an opportunity for what Plante in an interview called reflection and discernment, and also a forum for critics of the institutional church response to assail the nation's bishops.

"Are kids safer in the church in 2012? Yes. But we still have to be vigilant to make sure no child gets harmed," said Plante. "We have the best practices, you have great policy procedures, but now you have to implement them, and it takes one bishop to mess up and they all come down," he said.

"Kansas City is a good example (where Bishop Robert Finn is accused of not telling police about child pornography found on a priest's computer) as is Philadelphia (where a grand jury report accused three priests and a Catholic teacher of abuse and said 37 other priests were in ministry despite "credible" allegations of abuse against them)," said Plante. "I would like to see more fraternal correction, because all of the bishops suffer by the behavior of one bishop."

He added, "If the bishop in Kansas City does not report child pornography for five months it is like all the bishops did not report child pornography for five months."

The lone bishop in the conference room was Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Daly of the Diocese of San Jose, who welcomed the conferees and said that when he became director of vocations for the Archdiocese of San Francisco in 2002 – the year the Boston story broke – a colleague at Marin Catholic High School, where he was president at the time, volunteered that the appointment was akin to "being a recruiter for Vietnam in 1968."

"In the midst of all this turmoil you are asked to speak to families and to parishes about the ongoing call to priesthood, vocations," said Bishop Daly. "It was a period of time the church was experiencing a cleansing and a humiliation, but it also led to a humility and a truth and a new generation of young men of great quality is stepping forth," he said.

In his remarks, Father Gerald Coleman, a member of the Society of St. Sulpice and the former president and rector of St. Patrick's Seminary & University in Menlo Park, agreed the quality of current seminarians is high. "There are exceptions to this, but they are highly mature, most of them have been in the world and have had very reputable, professional jobs. They come into the seminary having made a mature, professional decision," he said.

Even with such strides, including improvements in screening and detecting abuse, said Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, senior fellow at Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, "We have not dealt with the elephant in the room, which is bishops who aren't doing their job."

He added, "It is a disgrace that only one bishop (Cardinal Bernard Law, former archbishop of Boston) resigned because of his failure to deal with the sexual abuse crisis. The church would be in a much better place today if 30 or more bishops had stood up, acknowledged their mistakes, taken full responsibilities, apologized and resigned. A good shepherd is supposed to lay down his life for his sheep; these men were unwilling to lay down their crosiers for the good of the church," he said.

There was acknowledgment of protections put in place for generations of young people in the church to come, and that the number of instances of abuse shrank significantly after a peak 30 years ago – but even the total number of instances between 1950 and 2002, put at 15,000, was dismissed as illusory, because victims remain silent, and there was a sense, too, that victims haven't been truly embraced by the church hierarchy.

In May, 2011, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, which examined the causes and context of the crisis, concluded there was no single cause or predictor of sexual abuse, but said social and cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s manifested in increased levels of deviant behavior, including among priests.

There was some criticism of that finding, and Dominican Father Thomas Doyle, who has tracked abuse cases since 1984, made a reference to it in his remarks, saying that until the efforts to blame the secular culture, the sexual revolution … "Woodstock or Janis Joplin are abandoned and replaced with a fearless and probing examination of the clerical culture …, collective hope that this terrible nightmare will someday be the worry of a distant past will never happen."

Karen Terry of John Jay College, the researcher who did the report, and a keynote speaker at the event, said in an interview, "First, we did not say that Woodstock caused it. The point here is that there are a number of social changes in the U.S. over that time period, underlying social forces that have an influence over changing cultural norms. We are saying that the church was not immune to those social forces."