Philip Jenkins
Excerpted from: First Things 60 (February 1996):
12-17.
Copyright (c) 1996
copyright © 1995-2002 Leadership U. All rights
reserved.
When the Pope visited the United States last fall, the media indulged in a predictably frenzied examination of the general state of "crisis" in the American Catholic Church. Oddly, though, few reporters devoted space to what only a few years previously would have been described as the Church's greatest crisis: the spate of cases involving the sexual abuse of minors by
Catholic priests. Though such cases continue to appear, some very serious (and often demonstrating a grievous insensitivity on the part of diocesan
authorities and their lawyers), it no longer seems plausible to speak of a general collapse of clerical discipline and celibacy, or of a systematic cover-up by Catholic bishops. Clerical sex abuse is today most often seen as a lamentable but rare occurrence. Some anticlerical Catholics had hopes that the abuse scandals might be the detonator that would bring down the whole clerical system, comparable to the sexual and financial misdeeds that led to the Protestant Reformation. But such historical parallels now seem wildly exaggerated; we are by no means standing at a new Wittenberg.
In fact, we are now sufficiently removed from the perception of an "abuse crisis" that reached its height in 1992-93 to place it in its broader context. What we find is a sobering lesson on the gap between the reality of a social problem and the ways in which it is presented in public discourse. Moreover, the main culprits in misrepresenting this issue as a specifically Catholic problem were Catholic activists themselves, generally working in what they considered to be the best interests of the Church. It seems hard to remember now that the topic of clerical sex abuse was regarded as untouchable before about 1985 and the massive attention devoted to a Louisiana priest named Gilbert Gauthe. The Gauthe affair set the pattern for dozens of later scandals: a priest who molested children in one parish was repeatedly reassigned after his predilections became known, without warning the new parish of potential danger. The attitude of Catholic authorities to victims and parents in these cases tended to be arrogant and even hostile. Incidents of this sort multiplied over the next decade and culminated in 1992 with the exposure of a serial pedophile named James Porter, who had molested dozens of children in his southern Massachusetts parishes in the 1960s. Each new scandal fueled litigation and media reports, which in turn fueled expectations of further cases. A sense of pervasive corruption within the Church was reinforced by the appalling (and quite unfounded) charge that
Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago had molested a seminarian in the 1970s. The endlessly repeated orthodoxy was that Gauthe and Porter were far from
isolated individuals. Perhaps 6 percent of Catholic clergy were "pedophiles," some six thousand priests in the U.S. alone.
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, commentators often employed the inaccurate term "pedophile priest." "Priest" made the problem look like the preserve of Catholics, and presumably the direct consequence of celibacy, though the misbehavior was distributed across the ecclesiastical spectrum.
And while "pedophiles" are men who molest prepubescent children, the vast majority of sexually erring priests were in liaisons with teenagers or young adults. While their acts were sinful and often illegal, such behavior does not typically exhibit the more extreme predatory and compulsive character of pedophilia. As for the numbers cited in these years, most derive from the kind of urban legend that transforms a vague estimate of something into a firm statistic for something completely different. "Six percent" apparently mutated from a working guess for the number of Catholic clergy with pedophile inclinations, not practice. (Similar estimates have been proposed for
noncelibate Protestant clergy.) The most solid assessment of clerical sexual problems is found in the Chicago study, commissioned by Cardinal Bernardin,
that examined the personnel files of all 2,252 priests who had served in the archdiocese between 1951 and 1991. Between 1963 and 1991, fifty-seven priests had been accused of sexual abuse, in addition to two visiting clerics. The commission reviewed all charges, not by the standard of criminal cases (which insists on proof beyond a reasonable doubt), but on the less stringent civil criterion of the preponderance of evidence, including legally inadmissible hearsay. Eighteen cases were judged not to involve sexual misconduct, leaving charges against forty-one priests, or about 1.8 percent of clergy. Only one instance probably involved true "pedophilia," the sexual molestation of small children. Before taking even these modest figures as secure, it should be noted that admissible evidence would have permitted convictions against no more than a handful of the supposed malefactors. The number of Catholic
priests convicted of criminal sexual acts is very small, and represents a minuscule proportion of the hundreds of thousands of the men who have served as priests. MORE....