By Sandro Contenta
Toronto Star
March 20, 2010
http://www.thestar.com/unassigned/article/782686--vatican-failed-to-heed-sex-abuse-lessons-from-canada
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| Pope Benedict XVI, shown Feb. 10, 2010, has sent a pastoral letter to Catholics in Ireland, where two major reports last year revealed shocking stories of clerical child abuse and coverups involving thousands of victims from 1974 to 2004. |
Reports on sex abuse in Canadian Catholic church insisted that all allegations be dealt with openly
The tsunami of sex abuse scandals hitting the Roman Catholic church indicates it learned little from the trailblazing work done in Canada on the issue two decades ago, say experts in the church here.
"Anyone who was paying attention had to know, at least 20 years ago, that there's a right way to manage this and a wrong way," said Sister Nuala Kenny, professor emeritus of bioethics at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
"But that's where the systemic issues kick in: If you're (simply) trying to avoid scandal and you're into denial about some of these things, they don't go away," Kenny, a pediatrician, added in an interview.
Few know better than her.
In 1990, Kenny was a member of the Winter Commission set up by the Catholic church to investigate the sexual abuse of boys by members of the Christian Brothers religious order at the notorious Mount Cashel orphanage in St. John's, Nfld., in the 1970s and 1980s.
Two years later, she became a member of the Ad Hoc Committee on Child Sexual Abuse, set up by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. Its report, From Pain to Hope, was issued after the church and the Ontario government agreed to a $40 million compensation package for 1,600 men abused as children at two Catholic training schools near Ottawa and Toronto. Provincial police laid more than 200 assault and sex-related charges, which ended in 15 convictions.
Both reports were widely applauded for pulling few punches.
The Winter Commission called on bishops to question the power, accountability and celibacy of priests, describing the latter as creating "excessive and destructive pressures" on some in the church.
Allegations of child abuse, the reports insisted, must be treated as potential crimes, rather than internal church matters, and reported to civil authorities. The primary obligation, they stressed, is protection of the child.
Yet in subsequent scandals that erupted in Boston and Ireland, priests accused of sex abuse were simply moved to other parishes, while church authorities turned a blind eye to allegations, if not flatly tried to cover them up.
Rev. John Allan Loftus, who participated in From Pain to Hope, says the church worldwide is paying the price of barely noticing the report.
"I don't think they paid much attention to it, to their detriment," said Loftus, former president of Regis College, the University of Toronto's Jesuit faculty of theology.
"Canadian bishops have a great deal to be proud of at this point. Unfortunately, the pride has to be tempered with the fact that this is blowing up all over the world."
Pope Benedict XVI has sent a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, where two major reports last year revealed shocking stories of child abuse and coverups involving thousands of victims from 1974 to 2004. The text will be made public Saturday and read in Irish churches Sunday.
One report described the Dublin church as having a culture of concealment. Four Irish bishops have resigned. The church's top leaders were ordered to travel to Rome and personally account for their actions before the Pope.
Last month, it was revealed that the head of the Irish Catholic church, Cardinal Sean Brady, was present during meetings in 1975 when children signed vows of silence about complaints against a pedophile priest. Brady has so far resisted calls to resign.
The latest scandal is swirling around the pontiff himself. A psychiatrist who treated a priest accused of sexually abusing boys in the early 1980s says a German archdiocese, headed at the time by the future pope, neglected repeated warnings that the priest should not be allowed to work with children.
The priest was convicted of sexual abuse in Bavaria in 1986.
Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, as the Pope was then known, approved a decision to send the priest for therapy in 1980. But the psychiatrist told The New York Times he doesn't know if Ratzinger knew of repeated warnings about the man.
Sex abuse scandals have also broken out in Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
The almost weekly accusations obviously hurt the credibility of an institution with an estimated 1 billion followers. But the church has "withstood other periods in its history of just bizarre unfaithfulness to its call and mission," Loftus said.
"This is an institution that has had popes make their horses cardinals, that has had popes with several children from concubines."
Its leaders and bureaucrats at the Vatican also can become terribly out of touch, he added.
"The church at that level lives in a different world than most of us do. It's a world of propriety and of ancient texts and of liturgy and a different kind of faith – the rubber is just not hitting the road in lots of ways," said Loftus, a Canadian practising as a clinical psychologist in Boston.
"So I think it's going to take a lot longer for them to really get it."
There are also questions about the extent to which Canadian church leaders "get it," despite having been at the forefront of sex-abuse issues.
Kenny says Canada's Catholic churches have extensively improved the reporting and handling of sex abuse cases, and the screening and education of student priests.
But she says Canada's bishops have failed to deal with the underlying issues in abuse scandals – the power of priests over parishioners, their lack of accountability to bishops or parishioners, and the church's attitude toward sexuality in general, and the celibacy of priests in particular.
"In general, the approach that I see is not in the tradition of brave action for justice that I've come to respect the Canadian bishops for. I think it's: `Head down, if it didn't happen here, if it's not happening now, if we took care of that, let's move on.' We're not taking the opportunity for this larger conversation," Kenny said.
Too many priests are isolated from their parishioners, she says, lacking in the kind of a support that can keep them out of trouble.
"If you're on a pedestal, then nobody is your equal, nobody is your friend, nobody can give you the love and support you need when you start getting into trouble."
She also recalls a statement made by a group of Catholic nuns to the Winter Commission: "As long as we have the power structure totally dominated by celibate males, there's something not right about the way in which we then identify issues about healthy sexuality and about the appropriate way to be affectionate and responsive with children or others."
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