UNITED STATES
A Sound of Sheer Silence
Michael Boyle
Less than a month ago, I said I would stop talking about Roman Catholicism, and I had every intention of sticking to that. But I am going to break that promise to talk about the release of the report of the Royal Commission in Australia about clerical sexual abuse. The results are shocking–if the reports are correct, the scope of the problem in Australia was even worse than in the United States or in the UK/Ireland. To give an example, there was a reference to a Benedictine monastery in Western Australia in which 17.6% of the monks had an abuse allegation lodged against them at some point in the 1950s. Think about being in a room with a group of monks in which one out of every six of them had someone in the 1950s accuse them of committing a sexual violation on a minor. Think of how many complaints were not made in the culture of the 1950s. One in six. My God.
I had a twitter exchange last night with Maureen Clarke about the report, focusing on what is the obvious question–how did this happen? I’ve gotten this question before from various folks, and I decided it might be worthwhile to lay out my best effort at answering this question. I’ve talked about pieces of my thoughts on this topic in various places, but never in one place in a cohesive way. This is obviously only my own take, based on my own experience–I have no particular expertise other than having seen behind the veil of the Catholic priesthood. So, take this for whatever you think it is worth.
The first way to address this question, I think, is to divide the question “how did this happen?” into two parts, based on two different facets of the “this” at issue. The first “this” is “how did it come to pass that some number of Roman Catholic priests sexually abuse children?” The second “this” is “how did it come to pass that the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church covered up the fact that some number of Roman Catholic priests had and were sexually abusing children, either actively or passively, thus facilitating the abuse?” This distinction is important, I believe, because the causes for the two questions are different, and because much of the discussion around this issue confuses these two questions in a way that makes it difficult to get to the bottom of either of them. In this post, I want to focus on question #1, and leave the more complicated question #2 for future posts.
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