Clergy Sexual Abuse And American Catholic History

ENGLEWOOD (CO)
Patheos [Englewood CO]

June 5, 2024

By Philip Jenkins

I have been describing my work on social problems and nightmares, and how that approach affects our understanding of mainstream American religious history. Last time I discussed the Satanism Scare of the 1980s as a critical factor in our understanding of modern evangelical and Pentecostal history. Today, I will talk about the role of clergy sexual abuse scandals as a factor in  American Catholic history.

The Roman Catholic church has long been the largest single institution in the American religious spectrum, usually claiming the adherence of around a quarter of the population. Catholic History is, naturally, a very sizable and thriving field of scholarship. But if you want to understand that history over the past half century, you absolutely have to understand the problem of clergy sexual abuse, and the financial and political impacts of successive scandals. Such scandals have utterly transformed the power, status, and influence of the hierarchical church. At the time of writing, 38 dioceses (out of a total of 196) have sought bankruptcy protection, and more will assuredly follow.

If you could travel back in time to 1974 or so and tell Catholic leaders then what their church would look like in 2024, they would be utterly shocked and probably incredulous. Dare I invoke the much-overused word “revolution”? I would argue that if the institutional church had not seen its moral authority so devastated by successive scandals and crises, it would have been able to offer much more effective resistance to the sweeping legal changes of recent years, including same-sex marriage and adoption. For better or worse, we would be living in a different country.

We cannot understand that vital story except through the lens of social problem theory – how problems arise, how they are constructed, and how they are made to mean.

As recently as 1980, that abuse issue simply did not exist as an acknowledged social problem. The behavior certainly existed, although we can argue about its prevalence, or whether Catholic clergy were any more or less likely to abuse than were other groups who worked chiefly with children, whether secular or religious. We still have absolutely zero reliable information on that point, and it is useful to recall that before making grand arguments about how celibacy supposedly leads to abuse. For what it is worth, our best estimate is that around 4.2 percent of Catholic clergy in the second half of the twentieth century were plausibly accused of abusive acts, but those plausible complaints were heavily concentrated in particular portions of that period, above all the decade of the 1970s. We can’t extrapolate that 4.2 percent figure to clergy in all times and places.

As a distinct problem, clergy abuse in 1980 was still unrecognized or, as we say, unconstructed. Anyone in the 1960s or 1970s, say, who publicly suggested that Catholic priests were abusing children would immediately be accused of recycling ancient anti-Catholic canards and slanders.

My book Pedophiles and Priests described how the issue acquired that problem status. Accordingly, I wrote about changing practices in litigation, and the new standards that for the first time made it possible and profitable to sue religious institutions. I also described new media attitudes to offering hostile reporting of respected institutions. Prior to the 1980s, the Catholic clergy close to untouchable in the media, because hostile stories or exposés invited ruinous boycotts. Even when “pedophile priest” cases began to emerge in the courts, the media were initially very cautious indeed about covering them.

So what changed? We have to understand the deep political and theological divisions within the American church at this time, which have been characterized as a “Catholic Civil War.” Following the Second Vatican Council of the mid-1960s, progressives desperately wanted more aggressive reform, including married clergy, the ordination of women, and more liberal views on sexuality and gender. Conservatives wanted to enforce traditional values, and to reassert the authority of the hierarchy.

When the abuse cases surfaced in the mid-1980s, both sides within the Church grabbed the issue enthusiastically for their own rhetorical purposes. Progressives claimed that this sort of misbehavior resulted from the enforcement of celibacy, and the code of silence enforced by a tight-knit clerical caste. Conservatives argued that abuse resulted from the tolerance of homosexuality among the clergy, and the collapse of obedience to episcopal authority. Whatever their different interpretations, each side gave maximum exposure to reporting the abuse cases, in a way that legitimized and even invited coverage by secular media. If Catholics could say such things about their clergy, then why shouldn’t secular outlets? Very rapidly in the mid-1980s, clergy sexual abuse was constructed as a distinct problem with its widely recognized characteristics and stereotypes that we know so well today.

But there was another factor in this story that we easily forget, namely that attitudes to child sexual abuse of all kinds changed radically during the late 1970s, so that this became a new social problem in its own right, and an explosively emotive one. If someone claimed in 1970 that a given institution was ignoring or underplaying child abuse cases, that would have had an utterly different resonance from conditions a decade or so later.

Today when we look at child abuse cases, we know that they are appalling and lethally damaging, so that they become candidates for being (almost literally) the worst thing in the world. It is very difficult indeed to recall that such a perception was quite new in the mid-1980s, and that over the previous couple of decades, attitudes had been utterly different, and trivializing. In writing this, please recall that I am assuredly not defending those attitudes, I am reporting them: don’t shoot the messenger.

If we look at the years between (say) the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, then overwhelming majority of professional, scholarly, or other expert authorities dealing with child sexual abuse did not regard it as a grave or pressing issue. Accordingly, the issue attracted little attention in terms of publications, whether scholarly or popular. The scarcity of expert or professional literature itself conveyed a message about the proper degree of concern about issues of sexual abuse, molestation, and pedophilia. Surely – one might have thought – if nobody was writing about a topic, it could not really be that serious or threatening? No book specifically on pedophilia was available in English before 1964, and even then, the material it offered was extremely slim. Not until 1977 was there an academic journal specifically devoted to issues of child abuse and child protection, namely Child Abuse and Neglect.

The writing that was available from prestigious psychiatrists, therapists, and criminologists in that older era suggested interpretations almost diametrically opposed from what today would represent conventional wisdom. According to these views, while molestation and sexual abuse occurred, it was not necessarily serious or devastating in its effects. Molesters were not considered to be persistent or compulsive offenders. Most of the literature portrayed them as confused inadequates, and their actions as isolated. The threatening image of the compulsive or persistent molester or pedophile was discussed only in order to be dismissed as hysterical media hyperbole, dating back to the preceding “sex fiend” era of the 1940s. The appropriate response to molesters was felt to be therapy rather than punishment, and leading psychiatrists suggested that such treatment, even for relatively short periods, could be highly effective in curing molesters. Following such an intervention, recidivism was highly unlikely. Again according to expert ideas prevailing at the time, formal interventions by police and/or courts were likely to traumatize a molested child at least as seriously as the original act of abuse. Parents were cautioned to consider these effects carefully before deciding whether to bring an official complaint.

Imagine the case of a sexually abusive priest that came to light in 1970 or so, when we find the diocese treating the whole affair in ways that to us seem intolerably forgiving, never involving the police, and at most offering the offender (never the victim) some period of therapy. Given the standard secular expert opinions prevailing at the time, what else were they meant to do?

In modern times, any institution dealing with children will assuredly have policies in place to respond to abuse charges. That might include, for instance, immediate removal of an accused person from contact with children; immediate reporting to police and child protective services; offering therapy to victims; careful screening for employees dealing with children, and mandatory training for all employees in abuse issues; and a “one strike and you’re out” policy where allegations are confirmed. These seem so obvious to us that we might be amazed that Catholic authorities did not have such policies in place in the 1960s and 1970s. Isn’t this all self-evident and common sense, which would have been totally obvious in any time or place? Well, no, it wasn’t. In that same era, literally no other institution, secular or religious, had any such policies, formal or informal, and I have spent a great many years looking for examples. Virtually no such institutions or agencies even mentioned the possibility of sexual dangers to children in their more general policy statements – not schools, reformatories, or children’s homes. Given the way in which the abuse issue was constructed in that era (or rather, not constructed as a serious problem) that was exactly what we would expect. The way a problem is constructed, or not constructed, wholly determines what people think of as solutions.

Matters changed utterly in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as a variety of social changes and political campaigns fundamentally changed views of the child abuse issue, its seriousness, and the nature of offenders. Even the phrase “child abuse” was new, or at least newly defined. Prior to 1977, the term implied domestic violence or “baby battering,” and only then did it acquire sexual connotations. So sweeping were the changes, and so sudden, that I have spoken of a “child abuse revolution,” which is discussed at length in my 1998 book Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (Yale University Press).

I stress the role of political and social factors in reshaping sensibilities on these issues – that is, in fundamentally reconstructing the problem. It was just not the case that growing numbers of objective scientists undertook countless empirical studies of the nature of child abuse and molestation, and on that basis sagely agreed that previous views had simply been wrong, and demanded to be rethought. The changes resulted primarily from activism by competing interest groups during a time of raging culture wars (that phrase was coined a few years afterwards). The most important such group was feminists, but we can identify the role of therapists, social workers, and members of the newly established child protection agencies. Abuse issues also became a political football in the ferocious political and cultural struggles of the era over gay rights. All the various activists worked in a rapidly changing media environment. The influential new scholarly research and publication that did occur coincided with that intense ideological work, but mainly followed it.

Whatever the causes, the impact of that revolution was obvious. When cases of sexually abusive priests came to light in the mid-1980s, they were viewed totally differently than hitherto. In retrospect, the casual and tolerant attitudes that dioceses had shown in the quite recent past now seemed insufferably callous. Just why had dioceses not had proper policies in place to deal with abuse cases? And in hindsight, it was now argued that at least a few such abusive priests had taken advantage of those easygoing attitudes to become truly compulsive serial offenders, with dozens or hundreds of victims. In the new environment, diocesan behavior from bygone years became a superb rhetorical weapon for whichever side in the “civil war” cared to use it. It also opened the way to gravely damaging litigation. We have been living with the consequences ever since.

If you want to understand the clergy abuse problem – how it came to light and how it was framed for public consumption – you have to understand the Catholic religious politics of the day. And if you want to understand modern American Catholic history, you have to know about that abuse problem, and where it came from. The one is incomprehensible without the other. We have to understand how social problems are constructed, and how those problems change over time, sometimes in quite revolutionary ways.

For me, the Social Problems approach, with its attendant theories, is an indispensable way of researching our modern religious history.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2024/06/clergy-sexual-abuse-and-american-catholic-history/