Culture & Ideas 2/11/02

BY JOHN LEO

The Sins of the Fathers

As late as last July, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston was still denying
that he shuffled child-molesting priests from one parish to another
without bothering to inform parishioners that a proven sexual predator
was on the way. "Never was there an effort on my part to shift a problem
from one place to the next," the cardinal wrote in his local Catholic
newspaper. But within a year of arriving as archbishop of Boston in
1984, Law shuffled Father John Geoghan to yet another parish. By this
time, Geoghan had been accused of abusing children for 22 years, and
Cardinal Law and his officials knew all about it. But nobody told
Geoghan's new parishioners at St. Julia's. After more accusations of abusing
children there, he was removed for treatment, then was assigned once again to St.
Julia's, where he allegedly preyed on and raped more
children. He is charged with abusing 130 or more children
before finally being defrocked in 1998.
A lot of information is now on the table because some of Geoghan's
victims won legal access to the archdiocese's files on pedophile priests
and the Boston Globe persuaded the courts to make those records
public. Among the revelations is that the archdiocese, to avoid public
scandal, paid off victims of at least 70 pedophile priests in the past 10
years. Presumably, other victims and other newspapers around the
country will use the same legal tactics to dig out files on dangerous
priests. So the whole story is likely to come out soon. Cardinal Law has
promised to report sexual complaints about priests to police. If other
bishops come under pressure to do the same, the culture of silence and
the private handling of sex-abuse cases may be ready to crumble.

Arguments among Catholics will surely escalate. In general, the
Catholic left thinks the celibacy rule and the church's patriarchal
structure are the culprits. The Catholic right is more protective of
celibacy but thinks the rule has become an attractive shield behind
which homosexual pedophiles can enter the church structure and
operate freely. Somewhere in the middle are Catholic psychologists and
psychiatrists who think the church does a poor job of screening
candidates for the priesthood and may have set standards much too low
when vocations to the priesthood began to plunge in the late '70s. In this
view, the church needs a greater effort to weed out sexually immature
and psychologically damaged applicants.

Silent treatment. The most astonishing aspect of the scandal is that by
the mid-1980s the Catholic bishops knew the problem they faced but
have essentially declined to do much of anything about it ever since. In
1984, the National Catholic Reporter broke the story of the first major
pedophile scandal to involve an American priest, Father Gilbert Gauthe
of Lafayette, La. This was around the time psychiatric evidence on
pedophiles was falling into place: Most pedophiles aren't people who slip
now and then; they are career predators who will never stop. Concern
led to a careful secret report on the priest-pedophile problem. It was
prepared for the bishops, but they refused to accept it.

One of the few small reforms since then was installed in Chicago by the
late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. He set up a nine-member board to
investigate sexual-abuse charges against priests. Only three of the nine
could be priests. The remaining six were lay Catholics and had to
include one victim of previous priest abuse and one parent of a child
victim. This structure prevented the clergy, bonded by training and
common experience, from controlling investigations of its own.

A greater role for ordinary Catholics may be part of the reform that must
come. All churches have pedophile problems, but scandals tend to be
rarer in Protestant churches because leaders of congregations vet the
candidates before they are called. They ask why he or she left the
previous post and under what conditions. Catholic parishioners may
want a similar role in checking out new priests before they are named.

The sad truth is that the bishops have spent a great deal of time and
money on damage control and image making, with little attention to the
severe damage renegade priests inflict on the young. When a diocesan
official shows up at the home of an abused child, all too often the goal is
to deflect attention from the crime and talk the parents into concern for
the church's loss of face if the story ever got out. Along the way, there
has been awful legal maneuvering and hairsplitting. In Bridgeport, Conn.,
Bishop Edward Egan, now cardinal-archbishop of New York, tried to
argue that his priests were "independent contractors" working for
parishes and thus not the legal responsibility of the diocese in
sex-abuse cases.

What's missing is an expression of clear and powerful moral attention to
this problem. By now, it's obvious that the church has suffered a great
loss of moral authority. It can't recoup that loss until it deals
convincingly with the terrible evils wrought by its priests.

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