KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
February 19, 2019
By Jason Berry
Editor’s note: Jason Berry was the first to report on clergy sex abuse in any substantial way, beginning with a landmark 1985 report about the Louisiana case involving a priest named Gilbert Gauthe. In 1992, he published Lead Us Not into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, a nationwide investigation after seven years of reporting in various outlets. In the foreword, Fr. Andrew Greeley referred to “what may be the greatest scandal in the history of religion in America and perhaps the greatest problem Catholicism has faced since the Reformation.”
Berry followed the crisis in articles, documentaries, and two other books, Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (2004) and Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church (2011), which won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Best Book Award. Given the current moment and its possibilities and the fact that Berry is singular in his experience covering the scandal from multiple angles, NCR asked if he would write a reflection on the matter as the church’s bishops are about to gather in Rome to consider the issue. Below is the first of three parts.
As the heir to disastrous mistakes of John Paul II and Benedict XVI in their handling of the clergy sex abuse crisis, Francis is an existential pope, trying to chart a way out of the long, aching scandal by forging standards where few exist.
The upcoming meeting of the heads of bishops’ conferences from around the world is the latest evidence that what was once considered the scandal of “a few bad apples,” or the result of Western permissiveness, or hostile, anti-Catholic media is, in fact, a pathological sickness eating through the church’s clerical and episcopal culture. The scandal has gone global. Prosecutors in several countries have church officials under scrutiny for helping predators evade criminal prosecution.
The “cases” are often old. But as we saw in the Pennsylvania grand jury report, church officials showed Olympian insensitivity to victims, while abetting a criminal sexual underground. Survivors, like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, warn of a moral order being broken.
How did the crisis reach this stage? What feasible reforms can the pope engineer?
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