Priests and Pedophilia

The conviction of the defrocked priest John Geoghan for child molestation is only the most recent development in the Catholic Church’s problem with pedophilia. It is a problem that the Church has long tried to suppress while desperately searching for solutions. Unfortunately such information could only be suppressed because a compliant press was unwilling, at least until recently, to publicize the problem. This despite the fact that the Catholic Church in the United States has paid out hundreds of millions, (some--including me--would say the total amount is over a billion dollars), in order to settle court suits brought against it, most of which were ignored by the country’s media. Catholic Church lawyers have settled out-of-court as many as 1,000 priestly abuse cases, and in most cases the identities of the priests have never been made public. Although any case of child molestation is troubling, it is the repeated violation of children by priests which emphasizes the immensity of the problem. Hopefully both the Catholic Church and the media have learned an important lesson from this latest wave of accusations and incrimination.

It should be said that the Catholic Church has long tried to deal with the problem within its own bureaucracy. The Brothers of the Paraclete, founded in Massachusetts in the first half of the twentieth century to deal with troubled priests, monks, nuns, and other groups has long run rehabilitation centers dealing with alcoholism and sexual problems, particularly of priests. For several decades the Order had a center in rural Jiminez Spring, N.M., where they ran five-month sessions for up to 50 people per session, in an attempt to counsel and rehabilitate confessed sexual offenders (usually of children). Unfortunately as part of the rehabilitative process, priests, during the last two months of their counseling sessions, were sent out to work in underserved parishes in New Mexico where a significant percentage quickly reverted to the behavior for which they were supposedly cured. The situation became so serious and so costly (in monetary terms) to the diocese of New Mexico that the Archbishop refused to accept priests into his territory for treatment and the Jiminez Springs center had to close down. The Paracletes, however, continued to run a rehab center in another diocese. The Brothers of the Paraclete to their credit called on various groups of professionals, Catholic and non-Catholic (including me), to offer advice and assistance, but the professionals only emphasized the difficulty and the improbability of a cure.

What the Catholic authorities refused to do was publicize the problem and only rarely did they defrock those people who were continuing violators. Desperately they tried to find positions for the priests where contact with children was less likely and where they could be closely supervised. While some of the 80 priests in the Boston archdiocese accused of intergenerational sex (a nice word for pedophilia) are probably innocent of such charges, many are undoubtedly guilty. In an earlier scandal in Dallas the diocese removed nine priests out of the 78 in the diocese and paid $120 million in a costly settlement. Similar scandals have occurred in many other dioceses; one in Santa Rosa, California ran so deep that the Bishop himself was removed and reassigned to a non-episcopal position.

Forces even within the Catholic Church have tried to pressure the Church to act on the problem for at least the past two decades. The National Catholic Reporter has been covering the issue since 1984 when Father Gilbert Gauthe was charged with raping scores of boys in a Louisiana parish. In 1985, a canon lawyer then working for the Vatican Embassy in Washington, drafted an internal report about pedophilia in the priesthood, warning of a growing problem that could escalate out of control if the Church failed to establish a national policy. In 1989, the recently deceased Tom Economus founded the Chicago Survivors of Clergy Abuse Linkup to help Catholic victims confront the facts of their abuse. The list could go on.

For its part, the secular media occasionally gave some attention to the issue but mainly ignored it even though the problems the Church was having were widely known. When a friend of mine appeared on a talk show dealing with child abuse, he was warned by the host not to speak about Catholic clergy and abuse because this was off limits. It was only with the discovery of the widespread child molestation in the Boston area and the ability of the Boston Globe and WBZ-TV to get basic documents about the extent of the problem that the media finally picked up the story and the result has been a media frenzy. Each day new stories are revealed. A document released April 25, for example, disclosed that a Father Paul Shanley, an accused pedophilic priest, who was shipped from Boston to California, tried to blackmail the cardinal by revealing widespread homosexuality in the archdiocesan seminary. The documents also indicate that Shanley sought treatment for venereal disease in several cities; the earliest complaints about his activities with minors dated back to 1967. When he was transferred to St. Ann’s parish in San Bernardino in 1991, the Boston Archdiocese recommended him as a priest in good standing.

The point of this essay, however, is not to give a litany about sexually abusive priests but to suggest solutions. The first and most obvious one is to publicize the existence of problem priests, and for the Church to take decisive actions against those found guilty. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, the Archbishop of Los Angeles, for example, has promised that any allegation of the sexual abuse of minors will be investigated and the abusers will not simply be reassigned but encouraged to resign from the priesthood. Since his return from his meeting with the Pope, he has turned over the names of accused priest to the law enforcement officials.

It seems clear that the Catholic Church also needs to revise its seminary admittance procedures, and it has begun to do so. In the immediate past, .many adolescent boys made a commitment to the priesthood as 12 or 13 year olds and entered seminaries where contact with the real world was limited. Most authorities of adolescent development would urge that the entrance into seminary be delayed until somewhat later. Even if later admission eventually becomes the norm many may enter the seminary seeking refuge from sexual demons that never quite go away. In the past few decades the Catholic Church has done better psychological profiling of students since not everyone who expresses a religious commitment is suitable to become a priest, but a lot more needs to be done. A significant number of would be secular priests should probably be redirected to other kinds of religious commitment.

To its credit, the Catholic Church in the United States has within the last decade issued guidelines on how dioceses should respond to sexually wayward priests, but these have always been discretionary, and some dioceses in their need for priests during this period of priest shortages are willing to be more lenient. It is, however, not internal guidelines which are needed but a willingness to face the public and say we have a problem. If the Boston cases bring this about, they will have effected a significant change in Catholic Church practice. The importance of confession is a strong part of the belief structure in the Catholic Church, but what is needed in this case, is not a private confession, but an institutional one for the Church itself.

The Church has been wrong to try to repress and keep secret the failures of its priests, and it is only by public recognition of the humanity of the priests and their failings, that we as a country can begin to deal with the problem since the issue is not simply a Catholic one but one for all Americans whatever their religious beliefs or lack of them. Child sexual abuse exists, and in the past the Church made great efforts to keep secret about it, and the connivance of the media to ignore all but the worst cases, has been a more serious problem than the failure of individual priests. As long as confession is called for, the media itself could confess to its own failings to report news that might offend religious sensibility.

I should also add that if history has any value in such times of crisis and media frenzy, caution should be observed by all sides. I have no doubt that many of those charged with sexual molestation of minors will ultimately be found innocent. Americans have a tendency to overreact when confronted with issues that long have been more or less deliberately ignored. The McCarthy accusations back in the 1950's damaged the lives and careers of thousands of people while the scandal over child abuse in the nursery schools led to many innocent people going to jail because of overzealous prosecutors who came to believe that there were really dungeons in the basements of many nursery schools.

What worries me most, however, is that we will throw the baby out with the bathwater. Priests, ministers, rabbis, teachers, social workers, coaches, and others who work with children usually enter such occupations and professions because they have a feeling of warmth and love towards those with whom they deal. A hug or a kiss or holding hands is important and necessary to achieve normative development into a health adult. Though there are some, perhaps many, who have failed to live up to the trust we gave them to help our children grow, the overwhelming majority have. Hopefully the hysteria over priestly abuse will die down, and we can encourage those priests who remain to give the loving and kindly care to children that we expect of them. We need to assure them that this is part of their job. We need and want individuals, including priests, who are willing to devote their lives to helping make children grow up to be better persons.