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  Dean Shocked by How Other Dioceses Failed to Discipline Abusing Priests

By Ann Rodgers
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [Rome]
June 19, 2005

ROME -- Twenty years as a canon and civil lawyer for Catholic institutions did not prepare Nicholas Cafardi for what he encountered as a member and chairman of the National Review Board charged with overseeing the U.S. bishops' response to accusations of sexual abuse by priests.

"It's been a dark night of the soul," said Cafardi, 56, dean emeritus of the Duquesne University School of Law. He has just completed a three-year term on the board, including a final stint as chairman. Now he is on an academic sabbatical in Rome, where he will do a doctoral thesis on the early but ineffective attempts by U.S. bishops to respond to accusations of child sexual abuse.

He believes the bishops have now taken steps that will all but eliminate molestation, and that any church workers who molest a minor will be removed and reported. The Catholic Church, he believes, has set an example that other helping professions should follow.

On Friday, U.S. bishops, meeting in Chicago, voted to extend that policy, which permanently bars abusive priests from church work, for another five years. The Vatican is expected to approve the extension.

Cafardi says that in his work on the review board, he encountered depths of perversion and pain that were incomprehensible to him. He found pockets of resistance to his work. Even a close friend in the priesthood accused his board of treating priests as the enemy.

"The harm done by some priests to children in their care was ... I don't know what to call it -- it was more than reprehensible," he said. "And the knowledge that some bishops turned a blind eye to this behavior makes you think things about the church you love that you would prefer not to think. It was more than disillusioning."

Cafardi was appointed to the newly created board in 2002 because he already had nearly 20 years of experience in such matters, but that still did not prepare him for what he discovered.

"My personal experience in the Diocese of Pittsburgh was that these men were not reassigned, they were not put back into parish life. It was a shock for me to find out other dioceses weren't doing the same thing," he said.

In 1993, he had written a controversial but influential article for a canon law review, arguing for zero tolerance on child sexual abuse. At a time when most canon scholars stressed the canonical right of a priest to receive an assignment, he argued for the canonical right of the faithful not to be placed in harm's way. He believes that article led to his appointment to the board.

When Cafardi was appointed, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, then president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told him that the National Review Board would hold four meetings a year.

That wasn't true. In its first year it met 15 times.

The board had no authority to tell bishops what to do. It was to advise them and make public reports on their efforts to keep their promises to respond to all accusations, remove all known perpetrators from ministry and put prevention programs in place. They also were to submit to outside audits of their compliance with those promises.

"I learned very early on that not all of the bishops were aware of what they had created. Most bishops were solidly behind our work, but there were some who questioned the existence of the board," Cafardi said.

Of 195 diocesan bishops, perhaps two dozen resisted, he said. One threatened to sue the board.

"To have some bishops fighting us every step of the way was disillusioning because we thought we were doing what the bishops asked us to do. They are men whose teaching authority I believe in. To just have them disdain our work or question our motives was very difficult," he said.

He believes that those men were reacting to what they perceived as lay encroachment on their canonical authority, however, and were not trying to cover up ongoing abuse.

"These are not bishops who are ever going to reassign a sexually abusive priest. What they don't like is the structure the bishops put together to monitor their policies," he said.

Victims groups have long complained that the only bishop to lose his post for reassigning known child molesters was Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, in whose archdiocese the scandal broke when court records were released in early 2002. Law resigned about a year later.

The board has no power to remove bishops, Cafardi said.

"Since only the Holy Father can remove a bishop, and that happens very rarely, the only way a bishop is going to removed is if he looks into his own conscience and says, 'I blew it, and I blew it so badly that I can't really function as a bishop again,' " he said.

"Perhaps there should have been a few more bishops who did that."

Ineffective treatment But he draws a distinction between bishops who made a good-faith effort to rehabilitate offenders, efforts that often proved ineffective, and bishops who transferred known predators without seriously trying to stop the behavior. His dissertation will be on what he calls the failure of the "treatment method."

"It is not true that most bishops did nothing," he said. From at least the mid-1980s, he said, many accused priests were sent to psychiatric facilities for evaluation and rehabilitation. But treatment was often ineffective, and the diagnosis should have been used to declare the priest unfit for ministry, he said.

"We didn't treat crimes as crimes. We treated them as sexual peccadilloes, for which there would be psychological counseling and treatment," he said.

When the National Review Board commissioned a study of the extent of the abuse since 1950, it found that about 4 percent of priests had abused minors. The reported incidents rose rapidly in the late 1960s, peaked in the 1970s and had been declining since the 1980s. Most accusations in the 2002 scandal were more than 20 years old.

When the molestation was at its height, Cafardi said, the bishops had no idea that they were in the midst of an epidemic.

"The bishops were not talking to each other about their problem priests," he said.

"I don't think any diocese knew how bad it was in the next diocese. I don't think there was a national picture when this was happening. We now have a means of reporting, so they will never be in the dark again. That doesn't excuse anything, but it does explain why more group action wasn't taken earlier."

Since 2003, the bishops' Office for the Protection of Children and Youth has sent former FBI agents to each diocese to audit the bishops' compliance with their promises. There were strong objections from victim groups last year when this was revised so that dioceses that received a clean bill of health could do a self-audit the next year.

But there are built-in safeguards, Cafardi said. Complaints from victim groups that a diocese isn't following the rules and any inconsistency in the self-reported data both will trigger outside audits.

"There will be a system of rolling audits, where every three years or so it is face to face," Cafardi said.

Cafardi believes that the reports the board commissioned on the extent and causes of sexual abuse in the priesthood are groundbreaking. No other profession or organization that works with minors has done such work, let alone made it public, he said.

"The question of protecting our children is something that should be put to other professions as well. Eventually that is going to happen," he said.

Cafardi believes that the bishops have no one but themselves to blame for the lawsuits that have bankrupted several dioceses. But he does not believe the courts in some states should have struck down the statute of limitations in cases involving priests. He would like to see dioceses find creative ways to help victims in older cases that are tailored to the individual, and where attorneys will not get half the money.

For instance, he said, if someone is unemployed and saddled with student loans because the abuse left them too depressed to finish college, the diocese might pay off the student loans and help them start over.

"I think the legal system did its job. The legal system helped to surface and deal with this problem," he said. "But when you see verdicts and settlements in the $100 million range, you do have to think of the price that the rest of the church is being asked to pay for the bishop who did not deal with this problem properly. What does this do to funding for our schools and works of charity? How much good is not going to get done now because we have to pay, not just victims who should get paid, but also their lawyers?"

Cafardi has encountered false accusations, but believes that they are the result of memory transference rather than con games. He believes that the publicity about priests caused some people who were abused by other authority figures to imagine that it was a priest rather than their fathers or other significant persons.

He worries that the pendulum has swung from an era when accusations against priests were never believed to an era when they are instantly believed. He wants dioceses to hire professional investigators to interview potential witnesses and produce some kind of corroboration before permanent action is taken against an accused priest.

"You can at least prove that they were together and alone. You may find others who had similar experiences," Cafardi said. "I think some priests have been removed from ministry too quickly, simply because of a feeling on the part of a church official or review board that the story is credible."

 
 

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