The Catholic Church’s Child Sexual Abuse Scandal Revisited

By Bruce R. Nelson
Let's Think This Out
April 14, 2017

http://www.brucenelsonblog.com/2017/04/13/the-catholic-churchs-child-sexual-abuse-scandal-revisited/

A few days ago in this space I kicked off Holy Week with an expression of dismay over the Catholic Church’s incorrigible ineptitude in dealing with its never-ending child sex abuse scandal. I wrote about being stunned over the Church’s legislative campaign to make it more difficult for people to sue their rapists and molesters.

The subject was out of my wheelhouse. I am neither Catholic nor a theologian. Yet, the concept of the country’s largest Christian denomination serving, in effect, as a pedophile lobby seemed preposterously creepy. The post triggered more reaction than anything I’ve written since the inception of this site. It was read by hundreds throughout the United States and 12 other countries. Thanks to the comments, email and private messages it produced, I know more about this ecclesiastical quagmire than I did a week ago.

Here’s a smattering of what I learned:

• Holy Week is treacherous for many sexual abuse survivors. It ignites memories of torture that defy comprehension. For some, it means reliving a boyhood Good Friday ritual in which they were tied, naked, to large wooden crosses by their parish priests, and then molested. For other survivors, a term that carries more positive energy than “victims,” the week brings back images of when, at 11 or 12, priests sodomized them in a confessional.

• A 48-year-old man, after multiple suicide attempts and several breakdowns, finally came to grips with the reality that, at age 11, his priest repeatedly raped him, always assuring the boy that this was part of God’s plan. The statute of limitations in his state barred him from filing suit.

• A man in his 20s filed a complaint with Church officials detailing the sexual abuse he encountered years earlier by a priest who ran a boys prep school. After a lengthy internal investigation, the Church exonerated the priest. The man killed himself years before other victims came forward and the state lifted the deadline for filing suit.

• The statute of limitations issue is not just about money. For the survivors, it is about truth telling, pulling back the Church’s veil of secrecy that has draped this scandal, to one extent or another, since the beginning.

With apologies for burying the lede, that last bullet point is the most important one. I always believed plaintiff attorneys had their fingers crossed when they told jurors that, “This is not about the money.” These survivors have nothing crossed. The salve for their unimaginable wounds is not a seven-figure damage award. It is total and complete transparency. They want to open up every dark nook and cranny of this scandal and let the light of day shine in.

The civil court process rests on a foundation of discovery, a system requiring litigants to share records, documents and other evidence relevant to the dispute. The Church, I am told, is a masterful record keeper. Filed away in the deep recesses of parish and diocesan offices is the entire, unvarnished story of priestly pedophilia and the bishops’ cover-up. Thanks to the discovery process, a good hunk of that data is now publically available. But a lot more remains under the Church’s lock and key. Civil suits open the lock box. That’s why the Church is lobbying against lifting the statute of limitations.

If you want to see just how vile and entangled this scandal is, click here. It will take you to an amazing data base compiled by a group of Catholic laity under the banner of “Bishop Accountability”. You will find an “abuse tracker”, filled with letters, notes and documents representing more than 50 years of systemic child sexual assault and the Church’s elaborate efforts to keep it all quiet. Most of it came from litigation. Webmaster Kathleen Shaw, a former religion reporter for the Worcester, MA Telegram & Gazette, says she has logged more than 100,000 stories of abuse.

Through court records and crowd sourcing, the site has assembled an astonishing list of pedophile priests. There is a pull-down menu, like you were looking for a Starbucks in a foreign location. It goes by states, then cities. I picked small, remote towns I’d never heard of, only to see as many 15 or 20 priests entered there. There is another database for assignments, showing how abusers were moved from parish to parish by bishops who knew they were sexual predators.

These survivors do not want to be forgotten. They want their pain to make a difference, and that can’t happen if this full story, in all of its awful terror, is not made public. I got the sense that this is a tough time for them. This issue was front burner stuff for so long. There were Sixty Minutes pieces, magazine covers, an academy award winning film. We’d go to dinner parties and shake our heads over this tragic abuse. Then the story fades. But their pain does not.

I mean no disrespect to Catholicism and the spiritual nourishment it has given to millions, but there is no escaping this basic truth: the powerful men who run this institution are responsible for the largest and most pervasive moral organizational failure in recent history. They turned their collective back on massive child sexual abuse by their agents. Then they tried to cover it up. Now they wield their power to cut off the rights of those abused to file suit. It is a moral outrage larger than Enron, Arthur Anderson, Dalkon Shield or Ford Pinto. Those were organizations in business to make money that knowingly hurt people for the sake of profits. The Roman Catholic Church, in business to deliver God’s love, knowingly hurt its own followers for the sake of protecting the power of the men in charge. Only through pure artifice and audacity do these moral charlatans now ask state legislatures to protect them from their sins. They deserve the sternest rebuke possible.