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	Church Abuse Report Ultimately Unenlightening By Anson Shupe Journal Gazette June 7, 2011 http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20110530/EDIT05/305309996 On May 18, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City issued its highly anticipated report on sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the United States. The study, paid for by the Catholic Church, examines records of abuse accusations from 1950 to 2010 from most American dioceses. The report seems to have been intended by both researchers and the church itself to put to rest the impression that the church has a disproportionate number of such abusers or is different from such other institutions as Protestant denominations, the Boy Scouts or public schools. The report is nothing if not detailed. About 143 pages long, it has 481 footnotes and offers dozens of charts and tables. The report's basic conclusions are that the American Catholic Church has no more pedophiles within its ranks than other institutions, and that most of the sexual offenders are not even pedophiles. In terms of clearing up false impressions, the report notes that the child-molestation problem is not the result of predatory homosexuals in the priesthood (which has been known for some time). Most interesting, the overarching cause of the priestly scandals, according to the report, was larger social and cultural changes in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, such as sexual promiscuity, drug use, youthful rebellion, lifestyle experimentation, and "increased levels of deviant behavior." Catholic seminarians-later-to-become-priests were apparently haplessly ill-prepared to cope with such problems. The villain, it seems, was North American counterculture of the Vietnam and Woodstock eras. This explanation is akin to the "explanation" provided by Pope John Paul II when he visited Denver in 1993 for a World Youth Day Rally. The Pope blamed the entire American priest abuse scandal on cultural relativism and American religious pluralism, which provides, he contended, no sure moral anchor as his church provides. The priesthood and Catholic hierarchy assuredly were not at fault. How could they be against larger cultural forces? In the end, the report tunnels its vision, with a lot of data on perpetrator-specific trees and nothing on the ecclesiastical forest. Analyses by journalists, psychotherapists, theologians, sociologists, historians and others who have taken this problem seriously for decades are virtually ignored. In fact, the footnotes provide only an informational vacuum. Most of the report's footnotes are taken up with relative trivia, such as the psychodynamics of children reporting rape, that have little to do with why the Catholic Church has encountered such horrendous scandals. But for all the finger-wagging at the Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the free-love generation, the report totally ignores several salient points. First, the report is grandiosely myopic in a cultural sense. If the Woodstock generation's "moral relaxation" created the United States' context for the modern scandal, did we North Americans manage to infect the entire world? There have been voluminous reports of Catholic scandals in Canada, Italy, England, Austria, Germany, Ireland, and not just in Anglo-European countries but also on the African, Australian, and Asian continents. It is easier to make a list of countries with any kind of Christian contact that have not experienced Catholic priest scandals than to try to count all the places that have seen them. Second, the John Jay report seems carefully to steer away from implicating the Catholic Church in contributing to the "impression" of a pedophile scandal. Absolutely nothing is mentioned of internal church reports going back to the 1980s warning the American bishops of the brewing scandal and the ultimately expensive costs of ignoring it. Nor is anything mentioned of the bishops' repeated blanket denials that any problem existed (nor of punishments to whistle-blowing priests), nor of the bishops' intimidation and obfuscating stalling tactics and/or bribes for silence regarding victims, nor of the thousands of recorded cases of pedophilic abuse before 1950. Nor does the report realistically deal with the fact that only in 2002 were the bishops and cardinals brought very reluctantly into confrontation with the victims and their grievances after the Boston Archdiocese/Cardinal John Law pedophile mega-scandal. The John Jay report creates the impression that the appearance of a priestly pedophile problem is somehow uniquely modern. Meanwhile, many in the Catholic hierarchy and pews will undoubtedly feel relieved. But the phenomenon of priestly abuses remains and continues unabated, as any check of the Internet reveals. In reality the John Jay report settles nothing. Its wealth of statistics misleads more than clarifies. It is essentially an expensive, much-ballyhooed feel-good report, paid for a religious body intent on exonerating itself.
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