The Vanishing Accused Priests

Ten years after the clergy sex abuse scandal first exploded in the United States, lawsuits have been settled, reports issued, policies overhauled. But even as the crisis has shifted to Europe and the Vatican prepares to issue new guidelines on how to handle sex abuse cases, something glaring is missing in this country: the accused priests.

Although the vast majority were removed from ministry long ago - barred from celebrating Mass in public, administering the sacraments, wearing their clerical collars or presenting themselves as priests - church officials say they have no way to monitor where the men are now. Nor do they keep official data on how many were defrocked, or stripped of their priestly status; how many were imprisoned or placed on sex-offender lists; how many are working; and how many are dead.

The priests have largely vanished from public view. Their fates are often a mystery to their victims, their parishioners and even their attorneys.

Independently compiling data about what happened to the men is nearly impossible. Reports by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops show that at least 5,768 priests were accused from 1950 to 2009. Although the church deems most of the allegations credible, the vast majority have never been proved, and many of the priests have never been publicly identified.

The same is true in the Archdiocese of Washington and the Diocese of Arlington, where local church officials put the tally of accused priests at 42 without naming all of them. (At least five additional men who belong to religious orders have been accused in the Washington Archdiocese.)

But a comprehensive list of names does not exist. Victims groups often disagree with church officials on who should be included and maintain their own lists.

The Washington Post was able to identify 31 priests accused in the Washington area and locate nine who are alive. All declined to talk about their cases or their lives, but court documents and interviews with those around them offer glimpses. The outcomes vary so much that they defy sweeping generalizations about the way the allegations were handled by the church or the courts.

Many of the cases never made it into criminal court because the alleged abuse occurred decades earlier and fell beyond local statutes of limitations or made evidence difficult to gather. Sometimes the accusers did not want to press charges. But at least 11 men were sentenced to prison, and at least five were sued in civil court. Seven are dead, including Monsignor William Reinecke, longtime chancellor of the Arlington Diocese, who shot himself after a former altar boy confronted him after Mass. At least 10 were defrocked by the Vatican. Four of those convicted of crimes wound up on sex-offender registries.

-Read the full Washington Post article

Related articles

• Chicago: More than half of parishes had priest accused of abuse  (Queering the Church)
• Breaking News: German Cover-up of Abuse Revealed in Church Rep (Queering the Church)
• German Official Releases Damning Report about Handling of Abuse Cases in Munich Diocese (Bilgrimage)

Delaware Parish to carry $3m of record damages award.

A Delaware court has awarded $30 million dollars in compensation to a victim of clerical sexual abuse. The plaintiff of course, will never see that amount: the guilty priest is personally liable for most of this, and of course does not have it. But in an unusual move which should terrify every church-going Catholic in the US, the jury determined that the local parish where the abuse took place should pay 10% of the award, a hefty $3 million, because it had failed to exercise adequate supervision over its priest. There could be more to pay, too. This amount does not include any punitive damages, which could still be added to the existing sum.

A jury in Delaware on Wednesday awarded $30 million in compensatory damages to a man who said he was sexually abused more than 100 times by a Roman Catholic priest — the largest such award granted to a single victim in a clergy abuse case, victims’ advocates said.

In an unusual outcome, the jury decided that the parish where the abuse occurred, St. Elizabeth in Wilmington, must pay $3 million of the damages, while the perpetrator is liable for the rest. Parishes have previously been held liable in only one or two cases involving abuse by Catholic priests, according to records kept by an advocacy group for victims known as bishopaccountability.org.

-(Full report at the NY Times)

Pause a minute, and let that sink in.

At a time when so many churches are being closed for lack of funds, how many parishes could cope with a legal claim for $3 million and more, as well as the legal costs and administrative nightmare of defending  a case? It's not enough to simply say that in practice, the diocese will pick up the tab. They might, if this were the only case. It is not, not by a long chalk.

This is just one defendant. A recent study suggested that possibly half of all parishes may have had an abusive priest working with them in the past. Imagine if half of all parishes in a diocese were to find themselves in the same position as this one?No way could the diocese take on a payment of $3 mil per victim for half their parishes.

Adding salt to the wounds, is that the offences took place many years ago. The parishioners who failed in their supervision of the priest, are probably no longer around. The people who will be acting for the parish, and find ways to produce the money, are almost certainly not the ones who were personally responsible for the lapses of oversight in the first place.

But look on the bright side.  Far too many parish priests simply do not permit any meaningful lay oversight over their activities, and too many parish councils simply step back, and defer to the priests wishes. If they know that courts could find themselves responsible for earlier misdeeds of their priests, they might just be bolder in future, and be less likely in future to simply accept in good faith the priests' reassurances of good behaviour.

Related articles

• $30 Million Is Awarded Over Abuse by Priest (nytimes.com)
• Chicago: More than half of parishes had priest accused of abuse (queering-the-church.com)
• Bishop Morlino Involved In Another Crash On The Catholic Interstate (enlightenedcatholicism-colkoch.blogspot.com)
• Breaking News: German Cover-up of Abuse Revealed in Church Report (queeringthechurch.wordpress.com)

Hand Wringing and Blame

The pastoral latter is carefully constructed to address several groups of people affected by clerical sexual abuse, or implicated in it as perpetrators, or as complicit in their protection. Benedict speaks directly to the survivors and heir families, and to the rest of the Irish people.  He speaks to the priests who were guilty, and to the bishops who shielded them. He speaks also to the rest of the Irish clergy ,to those priests and bishops who were not implicated, but are now shamed by mere association with the rotten eggs in the clerical basket.  But - where's Wally? Who's missing from the line-up?

Vatican Cardinals:  Free from blame?

In treating this as an entirely Irish affair, in speaking only to the Irish priests and clergy, are we really to believe that culpability lies solely on those flawed Irish, and none in his own domain, the Cardinals of the Curia?

Abuse: Is it OK if everybody else is doing it?

An Irish prelate has lashed out at "the media" for making so much fuss about clerical abuse, when so much more abuse occurs elsewhere.

A senior bishop has attacked the media for singling out the Catholic Church for covering-up paedophile priests when 95pc of child abuse occurs in families and community life.

Christopher Jones, the Bishop of Elphin and head of the bishops' committee on the family, said in Maynooth last night that he strongly objected to the way the church was being isolated. "Of course we have made mistakes," Dr Jones added.

"But why this huge isolation of the church and this huge focus on cover-up in the church when it has been going on for centuries?

"It is only now for the first time ever that victims have been given their voice." Dr Jones said that it was known that "95pc of abuse out there is in families, communities and other institutions.

He is right, of course.  There is far more abuse outside the church than in it.  But that completely misses the point.  We do not point to "families" as at fault, because they do not represent a cohesive group, subject to the same  corporate rules and controls as the church.

But let's take Bishop Jones' figures at face value, and consider their implication.  If 95% of abuse takes place outside the chruch, then presumably 5 % is "within" . That implies that 5% of abusers are priests ( or other church staff).  Wikipedia gives the number of secular clergy in Ireland as about 3000, with a further 700 in religious orders.  Call it 4000 for round numbers, or even 5000 in case of undercount. The total population of the country is about five million: one person in a thousand is a priest.  So, 0.1% of the population are responsible for 5%  of the of the abuse.  That equates to a propensity to abuse which is 50 times greater than the general population (or 25 times more if we assume all abusers to be male). That is the point - not the total number of cases, but the incidence, especially in an institution that claims to be a moral guardian, guiding us in right living.

Abuse & Celibacy: Austrian Cardinal Opens the Can of Worms (UPDATED)

As the problems of sexual abuse within the Church continue to cascade across Europe, The Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna has called on the Church to investigate fully the causes of the problem, including the role of celibacy and methods of priestly training.  This is should be welcomed with enthusiasm:  observers and analysts outside the Church establishment have for years been producing convincing evidence that these are two of the crucial issues behind the creation of the enabling environment, evidence which most bishops have simply ignored.   In an odd sequel, though, Cardinal Schonborn later issued a "clarifying" statement that he was not calling into question the Vatican stance on compulsory celibacy.  In doing so, he brings into sharp focus the third of the factors widely believed to be behind that enabling environment:  excessive central control and abuse of power. For there is little point in "investigating" the causes if you rule out in advance certain conclusions that  might follow, or fail to act on the conclusions you might reach, but the Cardinal knows full well that an unfavourable conclusion on celibacy will be totally unacceptable to the Vatican - and so threatening to his own position.  It is not at all accidental that Bishop Geoffrey Robinson, through his extensive work with the Australian problems with abuse, reached the firm conclusion that celibacy was indeed central to the issue - but waited until his retirement before publishing those conclusions.

[caption id="attachment_5349" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Cardinal Shonborn - under his watchful eye."][/caption]

Still, every little step forward is welcome.  The institutional response is clearly "evolving", and will evolve a lot further before this is over.