Clerical Collateral Damage, by Pete Vere, Washington Times, March 4, 2008

Clerical Collateral Damage

By Pete Vere
Washington Times
March 4, 2008

http://washingtontimes.com/article/20080304/CULTURE/53499040/1015

When the Catholic Church's sexual-misconduct scandal became nationwide front-page news six years ago, the Rev. Philip Lee Erickson of the Archdiocese of Louisville was just 34.

The young priest had just obtained the canon-law license that would let him function as a lawyer within the church's internal legal system when the cover-up of priestly sexual abuse in Boston and elsewhere, mostly against boys and young men, became widely reported in early 2002.

"Newly ordained, as the saying goes, you're bright-eyed and bushy-tailed," Father Erickson told The Washington Times in a telephone interview.

Father Erickson

As the hard-hit Louisville Archdiocese's assistant judicial vicar, Father Erickson had to become a key player in forming and administering its response to more than 150 accusations of sexual misconduct against priests. His duties included overseeing the process in which convicted priests were reduced to lay status, ensuring that accused priests had access to outside legal counsel and helping the archdiocese draft a policy that would help prevent future occurrences.

"I found the sexual-abuse crisis in the church personally painful," he said, noting that he has seen up close how "a priest might use his clerical status to bring harm" to children and vulnerable adults.

In the years since "Boston" became a buzzword in the church, Father Erickson and other priests and church officials say much in the church has changed — for better and worse — in handling sexual-misconduct charges.

The Rev. Frank Morrisey, a retired professor of canon law from St. Paul University in Canada, called the church's recent response "a work in progress."

"Nobody would say this is over," he said. "We're still discovering new implications."

One of the biggest changes has been in the area of transparency, said Monsignor Angelo Caruso, episcopal vicar for the Diocese of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. The church can anticipate that any accusation against a cleric will become public today, which was not the case in the past.

"Right now, today, the climate of the world is that everything has to be transparent, both the positives and the negatives," he said.

The most immediate effect of the scandal is how it has tarnished the reputation of all priests, even though only 4 percent of Catholic priests from 1950 to 2002 even had an accusation leveled against them.

The Rev. Neil Nichols, who was a young, newly ordained priest for the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) in Elmhurst, Pa., when the sexual-abuse crisis first became public, said that because he wears his Roman collar in public while traveling across the country, he has gotten suspicious gazes in airports and restaurants.

"Being out in public and seeing a parent with a child," Father Nichols said, "you get the sense people look at you, look at the child, and say to themselves, 'I'll bet this priest is a pervert.' "

Father Nichols said such looks hurt more because he grew up in a big family with lots of children.

Father Erickson said, "Some people will see [my collar] with suspicion, fear and maybe hurt ... rather than the religious symbol that it is for me and that I wish people would see."

Father Nichols said the suspicion is now so great that many priests bend over backwards to avoid suspicion.

"You avoid looking at children now," he said.

Of course, many of the biggest changes affect accused priests themselves. For decades, some bishops had been handling accusations of sexual misconduct by moving priests from parish to parish or relying on dubiously quick "recovery" therapies. Under the norms the U.S. bishops adopted at their meeting in Dallas in the summer of 2002, this is no longer permitted.

Father Morrisey said the church is "now much more sensitive to the issues involved."

"We're much more aware of the long-term consequences on victims of things that were brushed aside years ago," he said.

The church has also become more strict about who can work in its name and more diligent in carrying out background checks of priests, seminarians and lay volunteers, Father Morrisey said. Canon law is still changing as the Vatican increasingly handles the cases as accusations come forward, he said.

Nevertheless, Father Morrisey worries that the rights of accused clergy have been neglected in the scandal's aftermath.

He notes incidents in which a priest was accused, the case was sent to Rome, and the priest was removed from the priesthood before he had the opportunity to defend himself. He also mentions incidents where a priest was vindicated in Rome but not in his home diocese.

"You cannot have rights for one without having rights for the other," said Father Morrisey, who declined to name the cases he was describing for reasons of privacy and professional privilege.

J. Michael Ritty, a lay canon lawyer who has defended many accused priests, shares Father Morrisey's concern that some dioceses have responded to charges of sexual misconduct by encroaching upon the rights of accused clergy.

"I don't know of a bishop who hasn't made some mistakes in this process," said Mr. Ritty, founder of the New York-based CanonLawProfessionals.com. "It's a matter of learning from these mistakes."

Some bishops made mistakes in good faith, Mr. Ritty said, while others did not, "and soon learned that the accused had rights and could appeal."

Still, Father Morrisey said, "If the accusations have any semblance of truth," a priest is "almost better today to ask to leave."

Two of the lessons that Mr. Ritty has learned from his experience defending accused clergy are that many accusations are false and that some of the cases where the accusations are true, much of the cause was poor psychological formation in the priest.

"We're also dealing with people who were psychologically the same age as those who brought accusations, and they in many cases were acting like the 15-, 16-, 17-year-old."

Numerous sources throughout the church attribute this immaturity to the process of priestly formation in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Father Morrisey has said that men usually then entered seminary while still adolescents and some remained psychologically frozen at that stage.

Though today's priests feel the brunt of public contempt for the Catholic priesthood, few do so to the point of regretting their ordination.

"You don't give up on marriage just because it might end in divorce," said Father Nichols, the FSSP's head of development.

"I'm in it for life, just as a married man is in for life," said Father Nichols. "In any crisis or cross, we derive strength from prayer, from God and his mother."

Despite the scandal, Father Erickson would not choose any other life, saying, "I really do believe Christ Jesus called me to this life.

"To share the joys and sorrows of my people, to bring them the light of the Gospel. I love my priesthood and could not imagine myself doing anything else."

And the crisis has not been without a silver lining, Father Erickson said. Sexual abuse is rampant in society, and the scandal has allowed society to speak about this evil more openly.

"This is a cross worth bearing," he said, "if sexual abuse can be prevented — not only in the Church, but in society as a whole."