UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
I’d like to recommend to you Michael Boyle’s four-part series on how the sexual abuse crisis happened in the Catholic church, and what’s to be done about it. As Michael says in the first installment in this series at his Sound of Sheer Silence blog, he was motivated to write these postings in response to the release of the Australian Royal Commission’s report about clerical sexual abuse, which shows one in five members of some Catholic religious communities including the Marist Brothers and Christian Brothers allegedly involved in child sexual abuse.
Michael’s postings (#2 and #3 are here and here) build to the following conclusion in his final posting of the series:
Summing up what was included in the last three posts, I would say that the Roman Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis was caused by:
1. a completely closed and insular clerical culture
2. which prioritized its own autonomy from judgment by non-clerical institutions, and
3. which developed a culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell” with regard to sexual indiscretions
4. formed in light of its own internal struggles around the fact that a majority of its members were closeted gay men, and
5. which was also struggling with shrinking numbers, and thus
6. was incentivized doing whatever possible to keep priests in the fold and on duty
7. while lacking robust tools to recognize the true harm and danger of the sexual abuse of children.
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