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Cloaked in Secrecy: Experts on Sexual Abuse By Catholic Priests Say the Church Still Hasn't Faced the Problem

Posted on: Saturday, 11 March 2006, 18:00 CST

By Lawn Griffiths, The Tribune, Mesa, Ariz.

Mar. 11--Two of the nation's staunchest critics of the Roman Catholic Church's response to sexual abuse by priests say real reforms won't come until the church is challenged by larger forces, be they unified Catholics demanding change or government pressure and legislation.

Abuse victim David Clohessy, the national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, and Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer and Dominican priest, spent more than two hours at a forum Sunday in Tempe saying the Catholic Church is unwilling to make radical changes to forever end abuse.

"Bishops are still allowing perpetrators to be out there, but even worse, there is no evidence of an organized attempt to change the fundamental way of thinking," said Doyle, who first warned the church in a 1985 report that widespread abuse could lead to a scandal. Even after the church was rocked by widespread abuses, denial, nonchalance and secrecy continue, Doyle told about 65 who attended the forum at the Church of the Epiphany Episcopal, sponsored by the Arizona chapter of Call to Action, a national Catholic reform group.

In a report while working at the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C., Doyle warned that unless pedophiles were aggressively purged from the church, it could face a billion dollars in legal costs. But the report went unheeded, and he said he was told that "no one's ever going to sue the Catholic Church." But settlements exceeded $1 billion by 2005, and several dioceses declared bankruptcy.

"The only way that the institution, as an institution, will respond positively to any attempt to change its methodology, its attitudes and its actions . . . is when an organization or institution or force, larger than itself, looms up before it and says, 'I am bigger than you are. You are going to do what I want,' " Doyle said.

Despite the U.S. Conference of Bishops responding by adopting its Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in June 2002, the Catholic Church has failed to make systemic changes or to make protection from abuse a top priority, he said. "The children, adolescents, vulnerable adults still are treated as the enemy, are reacted to with viciousness, with lack of belief," he said.

Clohessy, 12-year SNAP director from St. Louis, appealed for anyone victimized by clergy at any time to come forward.

"When victims stay silent, nothing happens," he said. "Every victim who comes forward helps the church." In essence, he said, "If you don't do it publicly, it almost never happened."

Clohessy, who has appeared on "60 Minutes,""Good Morning America" and "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to tell his story, called for legislatures to change statutes of limitation so that older abuse cases can be prosecuted. He also urged greater use of public pressure through media disclosure and speaking out through Catholic reform groups or letters to the editor.

He gave updates on new abuse cases and revelations in the nation's five largest dioceses, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Houston. "If the bishops before were ignorant (of abuses), what is their problem now?" he asked.

Clohessy, who addressed the bishops' 2002 meeting in Dallas, compared the charter's rules to "speed limits with no cops," that there have been no consequences and no shake-up in the church's hierarchy from the abuse.

Doyle saluted members of SNAP, the nation's largest self-help group of abuse victims, "for the awareness and the courage to keep this abominable issue alive." He said he has devoted 22 years to researching sexual abuse and has found it goes back to the earliest centuries of the 2,000-year-old church. The Council of Elvira in A.D. 309, for example, called for penalties for priests who engaged in man-boy sex acts, including barring priests from communion. Some offenders were executed.

Catholics historically have allowed themselves to be at the mercy of the priesthood, he said, reading from a 1906 encyclical by Pope Pius X: "It follows that the church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the pastors."

Doyle called that "absolutely pure heresy," and said that dichotomy between clerics and the laity persists. "This is 2006, and the horror stories are still going on," he said. Victims of abuse often live in fear, shame and guilt, and are ostracized and threatened when they speak out, he said.

The priest said the church is so steeped in rules and orthodoxy that "you can't see Jesus on the other side." He described the Catholic Church as a monarchy "obsessed with its power" and unwilling to consider sharing power with the laity. Doyle, who has said the abuse has been "killing the souls of the victims and, in many cases, killing their faith in God," calls for lay Catholics to reject clericalism, which conveys to priests a "father knows best" authority that leads to submissiveness and being taken advantage of.

"For the whole two millennia, the institutional church has never wanted to look at one of the key issues, mandatory celibacy, and say, 'Is there something wrong with this?' " Doyle said. "They never want to look at their own management system."

While celibacy is called "a great gift" and "the crown jewel" in the priesthood, Doyle said mandatory celibacy has been widely violated from the beginning, partly due to "no attempt to acculturate you into a celibate lifestyle" in seminary training. "You were told that anything you did sexual was a double sin . . . That makes as much sense as to saying, 'From now on, I will declare I will will that my hair never grow.' "

What happens, he said, is "you are confronted with priests whose sexuality, in many instances, is that of a 12-year-old." He told of research in Ireland where he talked to families recovering from abuse by priests. "I listened to these good and decent people tell me about the pain in their lives, the confusion and fear of even talking about it." Community ostracism put one family out of business, he said.

In Ireland, he said, "they are taking on everything when they sue the Catholic Church, they are taking on the government, the culture, their heritage, history, the whole nine yards, and it took incredible courage."

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Source: The Tribune

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