Catholic Bishops Blame Everyone But Themselves for Abuse Scandal

A new self-serving report commissioned by the U. S. Council of Catholic Bishops again tries to shift blame for the world wide sex abuse scandal on society and factors other than (a) their own malfeasance, (b) the equivalent of a droit du seigneur that the priesthood continues to maintain in terms of doing whatever it pleases with children and youths, and (c) the Church's bizarre approach to all things sexual. The only good news is that the report finds that homosexuality was NOT a cause of the abuse. The other positive is that the report finds the problems stemmed largely from priests ordained in the 1940's and 1950's thus undercutting the claims of the far right that the liberalizing influence of Vatican II on seminaries was a cause. The New York Times has coverage on this attempt to yet again shift responsibility from the hierarchy which turned a blind eye to abuse for many decades, including on the watch of the less than saintly John Paul II. The cover ups and attempts to deflect responsibility clearly continue to go on. My advice to moral Catholic? Vote with your feet and try out the ELCA or the Episcopal Church. Here are some article highlights:
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A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.
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Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s. Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims.
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The “blame Woodstock” explanation has been floated by bishops since the church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002 and by Pope Benedict XVI after it erupted in Europe in 2010.
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The report notes that homosexual men began entering the seminaries “in noticeable numbers” from the late 1970s through the 1980s. By the time this cohort entered the priesthood, in the mid-1980s, the reports of sexual abuse of minors by priests began to drop and then to level off. If anything, the report says, the abuse decreased as more gay priests began serving the church.
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Many more boys than girls were victimized, the report says, not because the perpetrators were gay, but simply because the priests had more access to boys than to girls, in parishes, schools and extracurricular activities.
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The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies a prepubescent child as generally age 13 or younger. If the John Jay researchers had used that cutoff, a vast majority of the abusers’ victims would have been considered prepubescent.
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Even before seeing it, victims advocates attacked the report as suspect because it relies on data provided by the church’s dioceses and religious orders. Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a Web site that compiles reports on abuse cases, said, “There aren’t many dioceses where prosecutors have gotten involved, but in every single instance there’s a vast gap — a multiplier of two, three or four times — between the numbers of perpetrators that the prosecutors find and what the bishops released.”
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An essay in the Catholic magazine Commonweal last week by Ana Maria Catanzaro, who heads the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s sexual-abuse review board, which is supposed to advise the archdiocese on how to handle abuse cases, said that the board was shocked to learn about the dozens of cases uncovered by the grand jury. Her essay raised questions about whether bishops provide accurate data even to their own, in-house review boards.