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To Atone for Abuse, 30 Pieces of Silver Is Not Enough

By Bill Coffin
Compliance Week
October 12, 2016

https://www.complianceweek.com/blogs/coffin-on-compliance/to-atone-for-abuse-30-pieces-of-silver-is-not-enough#.WAIx2fCLS01

When I was a child, my brothers and I served as altar boys at our local Catholic church. We were some of the longest-running altar boys in the church’s history in fact and, at one point, we had become such an institution that our pastor asked my brother and I if we were interested in pursuing theology, seeing as most kids our age quit serving years before.

One of the interesting aspects of serving the church was being behind the scenes of mass. We spent a lot of time, over the years, with various priests in the sacristy—a side room where the priest and we altar servers would prepare for mass—and it occurs to me now that we were very, very vulnerable there. Away from any other adults, the priests with whom we worked could have easily taken vile liberties with myself or my brothers. None ever did. The priests we worked with—like the overwhelming majority of clerical workers, I imagine—were good, decent people who would never think of hurting a child.

And yet, we have seen that it happens within the Church. We have seen it quite a lot, in fact, usually after extensive efforts to cover it up or to pretend that it never happened. In the United States, there have already been various high-profile cases of widespread sexual abuse by priests, and these cases have cost the Church dearly in terms of money and in terms of reputation and, most of all, in terms of trust. Trust, we all know, takes many years to build, and only one wrong moment to destroy.

Sadly, we have seen this happen yet again, this time in Germany, where the Catholic Church has agreed to pay settlements to some 422 individuals who have alleged having been sexually and physically abused while they were pupils at a choir school in Regensburg. The alleged abuses took place between 1953 and the 1990s, and the Church is offering to pay each of these victims between ˆ5,000 and ˆ20,000. All of the perpetrators, save one, are dead. Pope Benedict’s brother, Georg Ratzinger, ran the choir from 1964 to 1994, when most of the abuses were supposed to have occurred, yet Ratzinger says he knew nothing of any abuse.

The patterns here are familiar, and only stoke outrage. For Ratzinger to claim no knowledge of a 30+ year pattern of abuse strains credulity to its breaking point. But far more importantly is that the Church has offered such paltry sums in recompense to those harmed while in its trust. Even if every single one of the 422 victims were paid a full ˆ20,000, that’s a total settlement of ˆ8.44m. Put another way, ˆ20,000 spread out over 22 years (from 1994 to 2016) is merely ˆ909 a ear, or ˆ2.5 a day. That gets even smaller when adding another 30 years to it. That is a tiny sum to make up for the damage one carries after enduring abuse at the hands of a trusted adult. It’s not quite 30 pieces of silver—which at modern prices is worth about ˆ544—but it is close.

This is not about money, of course; money is merely a measure by which the offending party can express to its victims how much they believe the victims have been harmed. By any objective measure, this settlement seems far too small. One takes no pleasure in seeing the Church pay enormous fees to atone for its wrongdoing, but the atonement here appears to be small, indeed.

Organizations of any kind can learn much from this. When we strive to practice compliance, or to uphold the highest ethical values, we do so knowing we set for ourselves a standard that if unmet, or if violated, carries the worst kind of penalties. Loss of credibility. Loss of reputation. Loss of trust. What we pay to rebuild those things should be high prices, indeed, lest we fool ourselves into thinking that the price for failure can possibly be seen merely as a cost of doing business.

Continue the conversation at Compliance Week Europe: 7-8 November at the Crowne Plaza Brussels. Join us as we look at changes in global anti-corruption regulations, slave labour risks in your supply chain, and how to detect fraud, to name just a few topics. Learn more

 

 

 

 

 




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