- ReutersPope John Paul II holds his head in his hands during his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican, last Wednesday. United States Catholic leaders have been told by the Pope that he will no longer tolerate any more paedophile priests.
Ian Boyne, Contributor
AMERICA, for all its manifold vices, shortcomings and national arrogance, is still an important bastion of civil liberties and the protection of individual rights.
Not to be overlooked in all the plethora of reporting on the sex scandal in the Catholic church is the fact that were it not for a raucous, fearless and vigorous media and a culture which is litigious and zealous for justice, the United States' cardinals wouldn't have scampered hurriedly to Rome this week for an audience with the Roman Pontiff.
The Pope, widely regarded as the most powerful man on the earth and, who according to Catholic dogma, has special access to God as the visible head of His church on earth and successor to St. Peter, was forced to pay attention this week to the crisis which the Vatican was maintaining all along was "an American problem".
The powerful U.S. media dislodged the Vatican from its position and forced the Pope to issue his strongest statement yet on the profoundly embarrassing crisis which has gripped the Catholic church.
"There is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young," the Pope declared to cardinals after days of talks in Rome.
But the Pope and the U.S. Catholic hierarchy had known from the early I980s of the sex crisis in the church and were it not for the secular and democratic institutions of the West, the cover-ups and abuse would have very likely continued and perhaps increase.
It has not been a good time for the religious. The two biggest international stories, the Catholic sex scandal and the Middle East crisis, are both essentially religious.
These seemingly intractable crises strengthen the views of atheists and humanists that religion has a largely negative role in society and that it jeopardises freedom, democracy and rationality.
Paedophilia among Catholic priests is not limited to the United States. There have been reported cases all over the world, particularly in Ireland, Austria, France, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and even the Pope's Poland.
So why has there been so much focus on the United States which has just six per cent of the world's Catholics? Because of peculiarly American cultural characteristics, its justice system and its inquisitive, aggressive media.
LITIGATION SYSTEM
The Catholic church is faced with paying out US$1 billion to settle law suits and already many dioceses are finding trouble in raising funds.
The New York Times on Wednesday had an interesting article, "US Laws Pose Risk of Steep Penalties".
"Catholic churches in other nations are also grappling with abuse claims similar in magnitude and moral force, but they do so largely without the added risk of crushing money judgments", says the Times.
One professor, quoted in the story, makes the point that America relies more on juries than other nations, including Britain. Juries tend to exhibit stronger disgust and abhorrence of child sex abuse cases than would judges, who are usually men.
For example, a British judge awarded US$7,00 to US$68,000 to 13 plaintiffs sexually abused in Wales, while a Texas jury ordered Dallas to pay $120 million to 11 plaintiffs, including altar boys.
A professor at Cornell Law School told the New York Times that it is not that there are more cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy in the U.S. than in Europe, "just that the litigation system and the greater access to courts and higher recoveries in the U.S. would work to encourage such claims."
This is a very important point for religious zealots who are always trying to impose a theocracy on us, which is usually tyranny-in-the-making - secular systems and processes do far more to protect and enhance human rights than ecclesiastical systems.
While society, therefore, must be concerned about the growing hedonism, crude materialism and nihilism of Western secular society, we must ensure that the best features of the Western, particularly American, system are preserved.
The authoritarian nature of the Catholic church and the fact that power is vested in a few facilitated the abuse and cover-up which took place.
Clergy abuse and sexual misconduct take place in Protestant churches, too, but there are mechanisms and democratic procedures which can more easily flush out those culprits than in the hierarchical Roman Catholic Church where congregational power is severely restricted.
As clinical psychologist Thomas Plante told Time magazine in its cover story "Can the Catholic Church save Itself?" (April 1): "With Catholics there is more militaristic hierarchy. In other traditions, you have board of directors that hire and fire and evaluate their clergy and problems tend to get nipped in the bud, because you've got perhaps 30 pairs of eyes watching, observing, evaluating".
At the end of the week, commentators were expressing regret that the Pope had not announced a "one strike, you're out policy", contrary to what was enunciated by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington on Wednesday morning, who indicated that the American cardinals meeting with the Pope had reached consensus on that policy.
But the Pope's publicly released speech to the cardinals, carefully analysed, would show he would give no support to that "one strike" policy.
Instead, as the statement at the end of the Papal sex summit said, the American Roman Catholic cardinals will recommend to the meeting of bishops in the U.S. that the "notorious" priest who is "guilty of the serial, predatory sexual abuse of minors" be defrocked.
The Pope's statement that "the priesthood has no place for those who would harm the young" is open to conflicting interpretations, but most likely means that the behaviour is not tolerable, not necessarily that a priest guilty of one offence is beyond priestly redemption.
For those reporters who understand theological language, when the Pope said in his speech to cardinals that, "We cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God, which reaches to the depths of a person's soul and can work extraordinary change," he was certainly rejecting the view of the 75 per cent of Catholics polled in the U. S. who said a priest once guilty of abusing minors should be defrocked.
Further in the speech, the Pope talked about "pastoral charity" for the victims " as well as the priests."
Meanwhile, an article in the April 25 edition of the influential Catholic publication, America, by psychologist Stephen Rossetti, consultant to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Child Sexual Abuse, marshals arguments which reject "simplistic solutions" such as dismissing priests guilty of one violation.
Most of the offending priests, he notes, "abuse post-pubescent minors and are, all things considered, much more amenable to treatment. With treatment and supervision most adults who molest adolescents can go on to live productive lives."
He goes on to explain that "most priests who sexually molest minors are clinically more like the abusive father than the compulsive paedophile."
He says it is "only a particular kind of homosexuality" which results in sex abuse so "the solution, then, is not to ban all homosexuals from ordained ministry, but rather to screen out regressed homosexuals before ordination.
"Getting rid of homosexuals from the priesthood will not be as successful as some predict in ridding the church of child abusers and in the end may cause even more human damage".
This is the man advising the US Conference of Catholic Bishops!
HOMOSEXUALITY AND THE CHURCH
In an enlightening March 31 edition of Meet the Press on ABC television with Tim Russert, some Catholic priests raised the issued of homosexuality in the priesthood.
The media has been careless in reporting on the sex crisis in one respect. Most of the cases do not involve paedophilia, but sex with young boys.
Most of the cases highlighted involve sex with teenaged boys. Why is it that we are not hearing an equal number of cases of abuse of young girls or adolescent girls if homosexuality is irrelevant to the issue in the Catholic clergy?
Donald Cozzens, a Catholic vicar in the U.S. in his book The Future of the Priesthood quotes studies which say that the incidence of homosexuality among American Catholic clergy is as high as 50 per cent, though many say it is only two per cent.
One priest told Russert that while celibacy itself is not the issue, the fact that it offers a convenient cover for homosexuals who can avoid being asked about marriage.
Richard McBrien, Roman Catholic priest from the famed Catholic University of Notre Dame, is insistent that homosexuality is a major issue and that the church should drop the celibacy demand.
What is disturbing is that many abusive priests, who usually come from Catholic families, report that they themselves were abused as children or young boys, which indicate that the history of abuse and sexual corruption in the Catholic church stretches back very far.
Only the American legal system and a vigorous, aggressive American media, especially electronic, could help the victims of abuse and perhaps countless other potential victims from being destroyed.
I never thought I would live to say it, but God bless America!
BIGGER THAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
The problem of clergy sexual misconduct, however, is bigger than the Roman Catholic church.
Every month 1,300 protestant pastors in the United States are asked to resign over sexual misconduct. In 1998, a national survey in the United States commissioned by Leadership magazine, a major evangelical publication for pastors, showed that 23 per cent of pastors had confessed to "sexually inappropriate" relationships, with 30 per cent saying it involved members of their congregations.
In 1991, Fuller Institute for Church Growth in California in another national survey found that 37 per cent of pastors had been engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior.
Christianity Today magazine in 2000 found in a U.S. survey that as much 53 per cent of pastors said they visited pornographic Web sites and up to 75 per cent of pastors involved in sexually inappropriate behaviour said they personally knew another pastor who was involved.
Shockingly, the divorce rate among U.S. pastors is 65 per cent while the national rate is 50 per cent. Most of the divorce cases involve sexual immorality.
The entire Christian church faces a crisis of on the issue of sex and sexuality. It's not just a celibacy issue.
Focus is on the Catholic church because sex with minors is a crime; adultery, fornication and other sexual sins are not. And most abused church members suffer in silence.
Catholic priests who are heavily engaged in inner-city work where, like politicians, give out scarce benefits and spoils; they will hardy expect "beneficiaries" who are sexually exploited to bite the the hand that feeds them. They don't have a voice. And wouldn't be believed anyway.
A grave and unfortunate consequence of the Catholic sex scandal is that it besmirches the image of many good, decent, hard-working priests, genuinely helping in the cause of justice.
And it weakens the moral force of the church at a time when a voice is desperately needed to call a secular, pleasure-obsessed and sex-mad society back to some sanity. This is the greatest tragedy which makes not just Catholics, but all of us, the losers.
