SALT LAKE CITY (UT)
Cheyenne Post [Cheyenne WY]
August 28, 2022
By Kimball Shinkoskey
Tad Walch, the LDS church beat writer for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, recently posted an informative article on various Christian church views on sexual abuse reporting. The article indicated that churches largely consider priest-penitent confessions confidential and even sacred, but can still facilitate voluntary reporting.
Some studies have shown mandatory reporting laws may not increase reporting by clergy and may be stressful for survivors, who in some cases would prefer having control over whether any reporting is done. Moreover, confession works for the truly penitent.
But what about the many who are not truly penitent and are just looking for a temporary penance fix? Favoring the private approach to dealing with sexual abuse amounts to favoring the moral and legal superiority of the church over the government. Essentially, the argument is that the church cares more about perpetrators and victims than government does, and better knows how to rehabilitate them.
This is exactly the approach the Catholic church took during the Middle Ages until it became widely apparent that the church had lost its spiritual, moral, and legal moorings and that fresh alternatives were needed in societal affairs. Most particularly, what was needed was less hierarchy/autocracy in both church and government affairs. Churches and governments were protecting power not people. Democracy in both church and government administration restored trust and effectiveness.
Walch advanced one Catholic priest’s view that mandatory reporting turns priests into police informants. It traps penitents in a relaxed and loving private religious setting, only to ensnare them and ship them off to the devil’s-own realm of public sentencing. But is the system of public judgment of criminal behavior so inept that it cannot be trusted to treat fairly with perpetrators and victims? Is not a judge a confessor as well?