Godawful
Numbers
by Andrew Walsh
Yet again the nation’s Catholic bishops have seized
public relations defeat from the jaws of victory. On February 27, the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops released two tough reports on the
clerical sexual abuse crisis prepared by the lay National Review Board it
had empowered to establish the extent and causes of the crisis. The long
anticipated reports contained both shocking statistics and trenchant
criticism. Nevertheless, the church received more than grudging praise for
its belated attempts to fashion and enforce systemic reforms to safeguard
children and other vulnerable parties.
Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Illinois,
president of bishops’ conference, resolutely met the press and appeared on
news broadcasts to announce the reports and interpret their significance.
His message for the day: The church has put the scandal behind it.
“I assure you that known offenders are not in
ministry,” he declared at a news conference reported in the New York
Times and many other outlets the next day. “The terrible history
recorded here today is history.”
But on April 7, the Washington Post’s Alan
Cooperman broke a story suggesting that the leadership of bishops’
conference had “rejected the recommendation by a panel of prominent Roman
Catholic lay people that it immediately authorize a second round of
independent audits of sex abuse procedures in dioceses across the country.”
In mid-May the National Catholic Reporter published a slew of
correspondence including bitter exchanges between some bishops and the
review board.
“Correspondence made public Tuesday between leading
U.S. bishops in the Roman Catholic Church and Justice Anne Burke, head of a
12-member board of prominent lay Catholics charged with watchdogging the
implementation of a zero-tolerance policy toward clergy sexual abuse of
children, reveals a tremendously acrimonious relationship,” Cathleen Falsani
of the Chicago Sun-Times reported on May 12.
Burke, an Illinois appellate judge, was especially
angry that Gregory and other bishops had not informed the review board that
some bishops were trying to block the second round of audits before the
board met the press in February.
“It is hard to reach any other conclusion than that
the failure to tell the (board) about these matters in a timely fashion was
to make sure that they did not come up in any discussion with the national
media of February 27. In short, we were manipulated,” Burke wrote to Gregory
and through him to all of the nation’s bishops. “Those who said that the
bishops were never serious about breaking free from the sins, crimes, and
bad judgments of the past will be vindicated.”
Falsani reported that Burke was even angrier that the
national episcopal leadership had allowed members of the review board to
make a long report about plans for a second round of diocesan audits at a
meeting of the bishops’ administrative committee on March 23 without
mentioning the bishops’ plans to delay the audit until they could discuss
the matter at a meeting in November.
Then, on May 18, Falsani and Geneive Abdo of the
Chicago Tribune reported that the review board and the bishops’ Ad Hoc
Committee for Sexual Abuse had met in Chicago and reached an agreement under
which the bishops would take up the question of the second round of audits
at their June meeting in Denver.
It was a big mess in a long series of messes.
Since last fall, the sexual abuse story had focused on
Catholic efforts to define the scope and causes of the crisis, along with a
related discussion of whether Catholic bishops grasp the extent of the
crisis of confidence in their leadership that has developed since the Boston
phase of the scandal broke in January of 2002.
The largest cluster of stories surrounded the release
of the review board’s reports. One tracked the progress of 195 Catholic
dioceses in institutionalizing methods of preventing child sexual abuse and
responding rapidly and firmly to new charges of abuse. The other offered the
first apparently comprehensive assessment of the number of cases of abuse,
priests charged with abuse, and the costs of settlements with victims since
1950.
Characteristic of coverage throughout the nation was
the Washington Post’s lede in its story on the documents issued by
the National Review Board: “An epidemic of child sexual abuse by priests
tore through the Roman Catholic Church beginning in the 1960s and peaking in
the 1970s as seminaries failed to weed out sexually dysfunctional men while
bishops averted their eyes.”
At the heart of the report was the first summary of
statistics on the crisis issued by Catholic officials based on a survey of
diocesan records. Four percent of the approximately 110,000 priests in
service since 1950 had allegations of sexual abuse of children filed against
them; 10,667 alleged victims reported that they had been abused; and an
additional 3,000 have not filed formal complaints. The total cost of
settlements and treatment for priests and victims exceeds $572 million so
far, with perhaps hundreds of millions more to follow.
In the weeks preceding the release of the reports, a
long string of stories reported on the statistics gathered in individual
dioceses as part of the review board’s investigation. A typical example
appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on the same day as the
national report was released:
“The Roman Catholic bishop of Cleveland announced
Friday that 117 priests and one deacon were accused of sexually abusing
children in his diocese over the last 53 years,” Karen R. Long reported.
“Admitting he made managerial mistakes, a grim-faced Bishop Anthony Pila
said he was overwhelmed and saddened by the tabulation, part of a national
assessment of the prevalence and causes of clergy sex abuse.”
Almost everywhere, journalists and others expressed
interest in the statistics, as well as some skepticism that the church could
be relied upon to police itself. As early as January 6, ABC’s “World News
Tonight” reported that the church “announced today that it has made major
progress against sexual abuse committed by its priests…. Not everyone agrees
with the verdict.”
The statistical portrait—compiled by a team of former
FBI agents and analyzed by a group of criminologists and psychologists at
John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New
York—included a couple of unpleasant surprises. The finding that about 4
percent of priests had accusations filed against them was about twice the
rate of previous estimates. And at his press conference Bishop Gregory
reported that more than 700 priests had been removed from ministry since the
beginning of the latest phase of the scandal in 2002—again about twice the
number known previously.
While the report suggested that the crisis peaked
during the 1970s and early 1980s, it was widely conceded that it often takes
decades for charges to be filed in cases of child sexual abuse. Rates for
the late 1990s appear to have dropped back to the rates of the 1950s.
Eighty-one percent of the victims who have filed charges are male, and the
largest group of victims was between 11 and 14 when they were assaulted.
In its assessment of the causes of the scandal, the
review board emphasized the negligence of the bishops and the failures of
Catholic seminaries to screen out potential abusers. Bishops routinely
failed to report abuse to police, often allowed suspected abusers to
continue ministering to minors, and spent “at least $572 million on legal
settlements and counseling that kept allegations quiet.”
“Knowingly allowing evil to continue is cooperation
with evil,” Washington lawyer Robert S. Bennett, the principal author of the
report, told the Washington Post. “We make no excuses for the
bishops. Many bishops, certainly not all, breached their responsibilities as
pastors, breached their responsibilities as shepherds of the flock and put
their heads in the sand.”
The spin control efforts of Bishop Gregory and other
church leaders were hampered by another of the series of dramatic news
events that has dogged the church throughout the scandal.
Just a few days before the review board’s report was
made public, Bishop Thomas L. Dupre resigned suddenly as bishop of
Springfield, Massachusetts. He cited ill health, but almost immediately the
Springfield Republican broke a story containing allegations by two men that
Dupre had abused sexually them as teenagers.
“The first person who came forward was a 40-year-old
man who lives in California, and he was sitting out in his Southern
California home reading a newspaper account of Bishop Dupre, who had become
the most vociferous opponent of gay marriage here in Massachusetts,”
Boston Globe reporter Kevin Cullen said on the February 22 edition of
National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition.” According to Cullen, the man had
been involved as a teenager in a lengthy sexual relationship with Dupre in
the 1980s. “Seeing the arrogance and hypocrisy of the bishop, it made him
look at the relationship differently and he contacted an attorney,” Cullen
said.
Far more serious, however, was the news that the second
round of audits had been put on hold. As the Baltimore Sun put it a
few days after the story broke, “A decision to delay annual compliance
audits of dioceses on this matter could compromise any headway church
leaders have made in restoring their credibility.”
The flurry of reaction stories about the reported
postponement of audits was followed by a long pause until the National
Catholic Reporter published the collection of letters between Burke and
a number of bishops. The letters triggered stories with headlines like:
“Catholic abuse panel in turmoil” (Westchester, New York Journal News),
“Panel fears bishops will avert abuse measures” (Newsday), and
“Sex-abuse panel assails U.S. bishops” (Los Angeles Times).
Many of the 35 or so bishops whose letters ended up on
the National Catholic Reporter web site were unhappy about the
board’s pressure on them. The Denver Post’s Eric Gorski published a
lengthy piece on May 12 focusing on a letter to Anne Burke that Denver
archbishop Charles Chaput and his assistant had fired off to Burke on March
30. Chaput complained that the lay board “assumed the worst motives on the
part of the bishops despite the progress that has already been made. Your
language is designed to offend and contains implicit threats that are, to
put it mildly, inappropriate for anyone in your professional position.”
Chaput argued that audits were necessary only every
three or four years and that the lay review board was “overstepping its
bounds.” He went on: “It is not the [board’s] duty to interpret” the charter
adopted by the bishops in 2002 to guarantee uniform national standards of
handling accusations of child sexual abuse. “The board is an important
advisory board at the service of the bishops. It does not and cannot have
supervisory authority.”
Concern that the National Review Board was acting too
independently was shared by a number of the bishops. Writing to express the
views of all of Connecticut and Rhode Island’s bishops, Archbishop Henry
Mansell of Hartford wrote on February 12 that the bishops were “troubled”
that the review board and the Office of Child and Youth Protection appeared
to be “expanding their competence, responsibilities, activities, and studies
in a dynamic of autonomy.”
It was New York’s Cardinal Eagan who apparently spelled
out the strategy of delaying the second audit. An early February letter from
Eagan was also included in the file.
After the story appeared, it became clear that senior
bishops disagreed about how to proceed. For example, Anne Burke told Larry
Stammer of the Los Angeles Times on May 12 that Cardinal Roger
Mahoney had told her that the bishops of California had threatened, in
response to Cardinal Eagan’s proposal to delay discussion until November, to
boycott a meeting of the bishops in June.
Mahony told the National Catholic Reporter on
May 13 that attempts to delay the second round of audits were short-sighted
and that most American bishops support annual audits. “In Dallas (some
bishops) voted for this reluctantly, and never did like this involvement of
any review review board or a national office or anything else,” Mahony said.
“They feel, we got a report out of them, we got John Jay, now let’s get rid
of the whole thing.”
Mahony said the leaders of the bishops’ conference were
at first reluctant to reschedule their Denver meeting to include discussions
of the debate over the audits. First the bishops’ administrative committee
offered to set up a two hour-long discussion on the Saturday afternoon
preceding the meeting. Mahony told the Reporter that he pushed harder
and the bishops’ conference would now discuss the meeting on Monday
afternoon and evening and all day Tuesday.
“We’ve agreed on everything,” Burke told the Sun
Times’ Falsani after the agreement hammered out in Chicago officially
put the second round of audits on the Denver agenda. “You can conclude from
that that the National Review Board is happy today.”
So once again, when the bishops gather, the whole world
will be watching.•
|