NEW YORK (NY)
National Review
April 15, 2019
By Nicholas Frankovich
Rachel Donadio at The Atlantic weighs in on the long letter that Benedict, the pope emeritus, recently published on the sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. “Benedict said the crisis became most acute in the second half of the 1980s,” she writes. “This is not quite the case.”
Why? Because, she reasons, the public record includes allegations of sexual abuse that occurred both before and after the 1980s.
Either Donadio is not a careful thinker or she is and she’s trying to steal second base. “Became most acute in” doesn’t mean “is unknown to have existed before or after.” Here’s what Benedict wrote:
The question of pedophilia, as I recall, did not become acute until the second half of the 1980s. In the meantime, it had already become a public issue in the U.S., such that the bishops in Rome sought help, since canon law, as it is written in the new (1983) Code, did not seem sufficient for taking the necessary measures.
That sounds about right.
According to CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate), a unit of Georgetown University, cases of clerical sexual abuse alleged to have occurred in 1960–64 were nearly double the number for the preceding five-year period, 1955–59. The numbers continued to rise through the mid 1970s, at which point they plateaued before falling significantly in the period 1980–84. Then they began to plummet. The numbers for the period since 2000 are about 5 percent of what they were at the height of the crisis, in 1970–74.
Benedict’s account is consistent with that data. The National Catholic Reporter began covering the issue in the early 1980s, and in 1985 the case of a Louisiana priest who pleaded guilty to eleven counts of molestation became national news. Just as the problem in the United States was being exposed by the press, the number of allegations here began to decline. Whether that decline can be attributed to the media coverage or was mere coincidence, who can say. In any case, as Benedict notes, the problem had become “a public issue in the U.S.” earlier than elsewhere. It’s plausible that it took the Church elsewhere a few years longer, until the later 1980s, for the scale of the scandals to sink in.
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