Friday, May 20, 2011 3:29:33 AM
Study: Homosexuality, celibacy didn't cause abuse
By RACHEL ZOLL AP Religion Writer
Posted: 05/18/2011 12:15:28 AM PDT
Updated: 05/18/2011 02:36:23 PM PDT
WASHINGTON—Researchers hired by the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops to determine the causes of the sex crisis that convulsed the church dismissed all the usual suspects:
Few of the offenders were pedophiles. The abusers were not acting on their homosexuality. Mandatory celibacy did not turn clerics into molesters.
Instead, most of the priest-offenders came from seminary classes of the 1940s and 1950s who were not properly trained to confront the upheavals of the 1960s, when behavioral norms were upended and crime overall in the United States spiked, the researchers said.
"There's no indication in our data that priests are any more likely to abuse children than anyone else in society," said Karen Terry, principal investigator for the report, at a news conference where the report was released Wednesday.
The analysis by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice was the last of three studies authorized by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002, when the scandal erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston, creating what bishops have called the worst crisis in American Catholicism.
The findings contained both good and bad news for a church hierarchy beaten down by years of criticism.
Church leaders hoped to learn how dioceses could identify offenders before they acted. Researchers, however, said they could find no single cause of the abuse, and said molesters generally haven't specialized in victims according to age or gender.
The study's authors said that U.S. bishops did, in fact, begin to respond to molestation cases starting in the 1980s as they learned the scope of the problem. Yet, until recent years, after victims began their advocacy, church leaders were more concerned with rehabilitating priests than with helping victims.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests dismissed the report as "garbage in, garbage out" because the bishops paid for much of the $1.8 million study, along with Catholic foundations, individual donors and a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Terry insisted the findings were independent. Researchers spoke with victims and their advocates, conducted surveys of bishops and diocesan officials who work with victims, and reviewed thousands of records, including a 1970s-era study on the psychology of priests and more than 1,000 case files of three treatment centers where abusive clerics received counseling. John Jay and others have also been collecting data from bishops about the number of abuse claims and victims since 1950.
"We did the writing," Terry said. "This is our report. None of the bishops had any influence on the findings of the study."
The authors said they found no "psychological characteristics" or "developmental histories" that distinguished guilty priests from clergy who did not molest children.
The majority of abusive priests were instead what social scientists call "generalists"—meaning offenders who did not specialize in a type of victim by age or gender or other characteristics. As an example, Terry pointed to the founder of the Legion of Christ religious order, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, who was recently revealed to have sexually abused young seminarians and also fathered three children.
Only a tiny percentage of the accused priests—less than 5 percent—could be technically defined as pedophiles, meaning adults with a primary, intense attraction to children who have not yet gone through puberty. The bulk of victims were ages 11 to 14. That finding was criticized by victims and others as minimizing the problem, since the American Psychiatric Association defines pedophilia as an attraction to children age 13 or younger.
David Finkelhor, who leads the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said nitpicking with the researchers over their criteria for abuse was pointless, since it's clear that the overwhelming majority of guilty priests were not pedophiles. Half of the victims were age 13 or older when they were molested.
. "Even some offenders who abuse pre-pubescent kids are not pedophiles," Finkelhor said.
About 80 percent of the more than 15,700 people who said they had been abused since 1950 were male. Catholics upset by the presence of gays in American seminaries blamed them for the scandal, but the John Jay researchers said that the offenders chose to victimize boys mainly because clergy had greater access to them.
"We looked at behavior of men before they entered seminary, in seminary and once they were ordained," Terry said. "Those who participated in same-sex behavior were not significantly more likely to abuse children than men who had not had that same-sex behavior."
The bishops have said they will use the results of the report to guide them as they consider possible revisions this year to their child protection plan, called the "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People." The policy bars credibly accused priests from any public church work, although it contains no penalty for bishops who keep the men in ministry. In February, a Philadelphia grand jury said the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had failed to remove some accused priests. Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali responded by temporarily suspending about two dozen of the clergy and hiring a prosecutor to review their cases. Bishop Blase Cupich, head of the U.S. bishops' child protection committee, dismissed Philadelphia as "an anomaly."
In fact, the researchers called the crisis "history." They found abuse claims peaked in the 1970s, then began declining sharply in 1985, as the bishops and society general gained awareness about molestation and its impact on children. Most of the hundreds of claims being made now involve allegations from decades ago by adults who have only recently come forward.
David O'Brien, a historian of American Catholicism at the University of Dayton, said the report was dangerous because it seemed to exonerate bishops. Researchers said that when bishops sent accused priests for treatment, then returned the clerics to ministry over the decades, they were following the best advice available to them at the time.
"This recalls an old tabloid banner headline from an early pre-Boston stage of this crisis—'Bishops Blame Society,'" said O'Brien, an advocate for a greater lay involvement in the church.
Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press
http://www.mercurynews.com/faith/ci_18085727 [no comments yet]
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Report on Catholic priests' sex abuse of minors finds no single cause
Karen Terry, the lead investigator from John Jay College, addresses the media regarding a new report on sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests.
By Eric Marrapodi, CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor
May 18th, 2011
02:44 PMET
Washington (CNN) – "No single 'cause' of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests" was identified in a wide-ranging report released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Wednesday.
The report was presented by a group of researchers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and was commissioned by the bishops group after determining the need for an outside group to review not only the scope of the Catholic sexual abuse crisis in the United States but to try to determine the cause.
The researchers found:
– Less than 5% of the priests who faced allegations were clinically diagnosed as pedophiles.
– Most priests who received treatment following allegations of abuse of a minor also reported sexual behavior with an adult.
– Researchers found no specific markers that would have been apparent across the board to disqualify candidates for the priesthood.
– Sexual orientation, specifically gayness, was not the cause of child sexual abuse by priests.
– The majority of abuse cases happened in the 1960s and 1970s and there was a sharp decline in the number of cases that began in the 1980s and continues today.
– Guidelines set up by the church to deal with the crisis when it came to light, including calling in civil authorities, were not adequately followed by most dioceses.
"The bad news is there is no test to give to seminarians to screen out abusers," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University who read the report. "We're going to have to be vigilant. We're going to have to continue to have programs to educate both priests and clergy, but also for kids and parents so that the opportunities for abuse are severely restricted."
As the researchers prepared to speak to the press at U.S. Conference of Bishops headquarters in Washington, Becky Ianni stood outside, holding a picture of herself as a young girl. A victim herself, and Virginia and Washington director of the group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), she criticized the report and said she felt it minimized her suffering.
Ianni had not yet read the full report but closely followed early press reports about its contents. "It concentrated on the priests but didn't cover the bishops who were the enablers, those who allowed those priests to move from parish to parish, those that covered up the abuse," she said.
This was the second of two reports by John Jay College on the sexual abuse epidemic that has plagued the church. The first report, "Nature and Scope," was released in 2004 and examined the breadth of the problem. This report, "The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010," examined why it happened.
While the researchers acknowledged "the 'crisis' of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is a historical problem," they said the scope of their investigation began in 1950 because of better access to people and documents. Information pertaining to prior incidents was nearly impossible to gather, they said.
The researchers compiled data from a broad range of sources including their first report; analysis of social behavior societywide (such as crime, divorce and premarital sex); seminary attendance and curriculum; surveys of a broad range of people, including bishops, accused priests, victims' advocates and laypeople; interviews with "inactive priests with allegations of abuse," and analysis of clinical files from three residential facilities that treated priests who abused minors.
The report, in part, pointed to social upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s as one of the reasons for the uptick in abuse cases.
"The abuse is a result of a complex interaction of factors, and there are number of social forces that were taking place in the 1960s and the 1970s that had an effect on a certain number of priests who had vulnerabilities that might have led to that abusive behavior," said Karen Terry, the lead investigator from John Jay College, at a press conference about the study.
"They also were trained in seminary at a time when there was no adequate preparation to live a life of chaste celibacy and they were not sufficiently able to handle those complex social forces that were taking place," she said. The report found that celibacy was not the cause of the crisis, she added.
In regard to social upheaval, Diane Knight, the chair of the report's National Review Board, a group of lay Catholics who helped oversee the study, said, "I want to emphasize that none of the information included in this report should be interpreted as making excuses for the terrible acts of abuse that occurred. There are no excuses."
Since the crisis broke publicly in the late 1980s, there were many inside and outside the church who had suggested the abusing priests were gay or pedophiles or both. The report spends significant time on both issues.
Terry said the data showed overwhelmingly that both of those assertions proved to be untrue.
The investigators labeled the majority of abusing priests " 'generalists,' or indiscriminate offenders," as opposed to offenders with exclusive sexual preferences.
"Very few of them were driven by a pathological attraction to a type of child and instead what we see is priest abusers are very much like sex offenders in the general population and many of them regress to the abuse of minors in certain time periods," Terry said. "What we also see is opportunities for them to abuse really played a critical role in who they chose to abuse."
The figure cited in the report - that 5% of abusing priests were pedophiles - came from analysis of files from three treatment facilities that had treated abuser priests. There the mental health providers determined how many of the priests had met the guidelines for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' (DSM) definition of pedophilia. The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association and is used by mental health professionals to diagnose mental disorders.
Another issue the report pointed to was seminary education for priests. Terry said where a priest went to seminary had no direct correlation to whether or not they became an abuser. When a priest went to seminary played a much larger role.
The human formation curriculum, added in 1992, is correlated with a low incidence of reported sexual abuse, the report said. The church added the new component to help better equip priests to live a chaste, celibate life.
The church response deemed inadequate
The report took a hard look at the church's response to allegations during the time period of the study.
The focus by the church, investigators said, was often on the priest rather than the accuser.
"Common diocesan response to allegations of abuse included administrative leave and assessment and psychological treatment for priests who had been accused of abuse," Terry said.
Their investigation showed many of the accused priests were treated by mental health professionals, who deemed the priests "rehabilitated," and they were returned to ministry. She pointed out this was commonplace. "The claims of the efficacy of psychological treatment for sex offenders were not unusual at the time."
Many priests were not removed from the ministry, or laicized, because the process was viewed as too complex and required consent from the Vatican. In many cases, not all the victims of a particular abuser may have been known when any administrative punishment was meted out, Terry said.
Bishop Blase Cupich, the chair of the Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People for the bishops' conference, said, "Bishops reassigned priests on the basis of receiving reports those priests were rehabilitated. That was the science of the day. ... That was a mistake. It was a bad mistake shared by a group of professionals, shared across the board in mental health care as well as bishops. We know better now and that sort of thing should not continue today."
While the church established guidelines in response to the crisis in the mid-1990s, which included complying with "the obligations of civil law regarding reporting of the incident and cooperating with the investigation," the investigators found that often did not happen. "Diocesan leaders were more likely to respond to the sexual abuse allegations within the institution, using investigation, evaluation, and administrative leave rather than external mechanisms of the criminal law. Many diocesan leaders' actions were not transparent to those outside the church," the report states.
The investigators said despite the decline in abuse instances and church leaders' vigor in tackling abuse cases, "the church must increase the level of transparency with respect to their response to this problem."
Response from victims
Victims' advocate groups like SNAP and groups aiming for greater accountability like BishopAccountability.org both said the report did not go far enough.
"From the beginning the study was designed to let the bishops off the hook and the child molesters off the hook," said Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of Bishop Accountability.org.
Doyle said the church is still too insular institutionally when it comes to dealing with sex abuse allegations and she did not think the report went far enough to challenge that. The church has not done enough since the crisis came to light, she said.
"If they were real shepherds, if our bishops really cared about our church and children, they would post the names of abusers and would aggressively seek out victims and they would encourage whistle-blowers to blow the whistle and encourage victims to go to the police. Those would be the actions of leadership really intent on routing out this corruption in their church."
Cupich and Terry both noted that abuse instances had continued their downward trajectory since 1985 and there were far fewer instances of abuse in recent years, although reports from prior years still continue to emerge. But with dioceses still struggling with the fallout and new cases emerging, like the massive case in the Archdiocese in Philadelphia, Cupich said he recognized more needed to be done.
"Even one number is too many as far as I'm concerned," Cupich said. "But when you think of a church of 60-some million Catholics and you think of the children we serve in our schools and various programs we are doing our best to make sure this does not happen and we have procedures in place."
© 2011 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/18/report-on-catholic-priests-sex-abuse-of-minors-finds-no-single-cause/ [with comments]
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Report's conclusion called 'absolutely absurd'
May 19th, 2011
08:47 AMET
Anderson Cooper speaks with Father Richard Hoatson [Founder, Road to Recovery ( http://www.road-to-recovery.org/ )] about a new report on abuse of minors by Catholic priests.
[video embedded]
© 2011 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/19/reports-conclusion-called-absolutely-absurd/ [with comments]
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Church Abuse Report Authors Defend Findings as Critics Weigh In
Barbara Blaine of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests placed pictures of abuse victims outside the news conference in Washington on Wednesday.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: May 18, 2011
WASHINGTON — The criminologists hired by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to study the sexual abuse crisis in the church defended their findings on Wednesday at the bishops’ headquarters — in particular their thesis that the abuse peaked in the 1960s and 1970s and dropped off significantly by the mid-1980s.
Sexual abuse victims and experts in the field began to absorb and criticize what is thought to be the most extensive study ever conducted of child sexual abuse within an institution, produced after five years by researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.
Karen Terry, the report’s principal investigator and the dean of research and strategic partnerships at John Jay, said Wednesday at a news conference: “The peak of this abuse crisis is historical. That peak is over.”
The report’s conclusion was counterintuitive to many Catholics and abuse victims, because the scandal itself did not peak until 2002 with the revelations that the archbishop of Boston had knowingly reassigned serial abusers to serve in ministries where they continued to have access to young people.
That practice appears still to have been at work until very recently, at least in Philadelphia, where a grand jury in February found that about three dozen priests accused of abuse and inappropriate behavior with minors were still in ministry.
Bishop Blase Cupich, chairman of the bishops’ committee on the protection of children and young people, said at the news conference that the Philadelphia situation was an “anomaly.”
Bishop Cupich said the bishops had made great strides in preventing abuse because of policies they adopted at their Dallas meeting in 2002, but he acknowledged: “If we want our people to trust us, we have to trust them. So we are doing our best to make sure that we are transparent with them.”
Victims groups accused the bishops of using the report and the researchers’ credibility to try to cap the 10-year scandal.
David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said in an e-mail: “America’s bishops hope this will be their ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment, like George W. Bush on the aircraft carrier prematurely and conveniently declaring victory in Iraq. Their plan is to act as though the crisis has been clarified and is now past. It’s deceptive and disingenuous, but shrewd public relations.”
Among the most controversial findings in the report is the mountain-shaped graph that shows the number of abuse victims climbing through the 1960s, peaking in the 1970s and sharply declining from 1985 onward.
The report theorizes that priests coming of age in the 1940s and 1950s, growing up in families where sexuality was a taboo topic, and trained in seminaries that did not prepare them for lives of celibacy, went on to violate children during the social chaos of the sexual revolution.
Ms. Terry said in an interview that she could not say for sure that the abuse did not predate the 1960s. The researchers were contracted to study only the 1950s and onward.
“We did not investigate the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s,” Ms. Terry said, “so we don’t know what the level of abuse was at that time. Did it occur then? Of course. It occurred throughout society.
“Was there more abuse in the 1950s than was reported in our graph?” she continued. “No doubt. However, there is still an increase in the 1960s. That’s been shown each year the data has come in.”
David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said he found much of value in the report. Mr. Finkelhor said there was a parallel spike in society in general of sexual abuse of minors in the 1960s and ’70s. But he said it might simply be evidence that sexual abuse began to be more widely reported in those years.
“We did see that,” he said, “but we said these are cases that have always existed, and we are just hearing about them at the time.”
The report relies on data from the church, other researchers, treatment centers and interviews with abusers, victims and church officials.
Experts in sexual abuse agreed that the episodes of abuse by priests had indeed dropped in recent years, because of increased reporting, better screening and preparation of priests in seminaries and prevention programs for children.
The report found that in 1992, the bishops adopted five very sound principles to prevent abuse. But they were only guidelines, and while some bishops adopted them, others did not.
“What is clear to us was that in many cases the bishops did respond, but they were responding to their priests,” Ms. Terry said. “They were looking to help the priest, to treat the priest, to help him overcome his sickness. What they did not do was focus on the victims and the harm to the victims.”
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/us/19bishops.html
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The '60s made them do it
Jon Carroll
Friday, May 20, 2011
We might want to be skeptical about all polls, studies and reports. They invariably - one might say inevitably - reflect the biases of whoever is asking the questions. Less obviously, the studies might reflect the opinions of whoever is paying for the poll or study. Third, until we know what questions were asked, and of whom, and when, we can't get a real handle on the reliability of such samplings of reality.
Not that studies aren't valuable. It's just that there's a lot of junk science along with the good stuff, and caveat emptor, as Cicero used to say.
Now comes a new report that purports to uncover the reasons behind the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals.
Here's what Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times has to say: "Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and '70s. Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church's hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims."
A few weeks ago, we had a prominent Catholic layman writing that, in essence, the gays made them do it. Now we have a slightly tonier argument prepared by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and paid for largely by official organizations of the Roman Catholic Church.
The argument is that somehow the zeitgeist got the better of priests and their vows. It was a time of turmoil. I remember the turmoil; I remember the debates. At no time do I remember anyone ever saying, "I'm sorry, but all this marijuana and dirty talking makes me want to molest boys."
I don't mean to be flip here - I was there, and it wasn't like that. Maybe somehow priests felt they had more permission, but the urge to criminal sexual behavior is a minority taste, and not even 100 listenings to "White Rabbit" could have turned a suppressed priest with legal tastes into an exploiter of children.
As a friend of mine said, perhaps we should blame the Inquisition on the permissive culture in 15th century Spain.
Of course, there could be another reason. The researchers at John Jay were basically studying the bishops' own records. It is possible that reporting went up, fueled in part by the sexual candor of the late '60s, whereas the incidence of child abuse stayed relatively stable. There's no way to prove that either way, but it's certainly a valid counter-theory to "The '60s made me do it."
There's also some controversy about the report's use of the word "prepubescent." In the report, the cutoff is 10 and under; the American Psychiatric Association favors the definition 13 and under. Only 22 percent of the abused children were 10 or under. If the latter definition is used, then over 50 percent of the children fall into that category.
It does lay the report open to charges of minimizing the nature of the scandal, which is what the bishops have been trying to do all along. On the other hand, the researchers may have had valid methodological reasons. Put that in the "not proven" category.
The report also has another interesting finding. Again according to Goodstein's story, the report says that as soon as gay men began entering the priesthood in large numbers (in the late '70s), the number of reports of sexual abuse of minors began to level off and then drop. I have no idea what that means, but it does indicate that the old canard about gay men "recruiting" little boys seems to fail the squint test.
Or maybe all that sexual freedom stuff had died out by the late '70s. Wait: No, it hadn't.
I'm all for the church trying to clean up its act. I am certain that lots of people within the church knew little of these scandals - that's how good the cover-up was. Commissioning studies and reports to delineate the exact nature of the problem is a good step.
I see the same divide in the church that I see in secular organizations. A very small number of people, almost all of them men, hold the secrets, smooth over the rough spots, protect the good name of the church while trying to hush up the people who have come forward with horror stories. The parishioners don't approve of the cover-up, but they are powerless to do anything about it.
Oligarchy rules, whatever arena we are in.
Where was the church when it was needed? Down at the Fillmore listening to "Piece of my Heart."
Who gives anything to poor Tom? Whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, and through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow and halters in his pew; set ratsbane by his porridge, made him proud of jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.
© 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/19/DD3S1JHQ9L.DTL [with comments]
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The Vatican Comes Up Short
Editorial
Published: May 18, 2011
The Vatican’s long overdue guidelines for fighting sexual abuse of children are, unfortunately, just that — flimsy guidelines for a global problem that requires an unequivocal mandate for church officials to work with secular authorities in prosecuting rogue priests.
Instead, the Vatican has issued nonbinding guidance [ http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=4218 ] that punts the scandal back to the authority of local bishops, who still will not face firm oversight or punishment for cover-ups that recycled hundreds of abusive priests.
The directive came two days before a new study of the abuse problem that cites the sexual and social turmoil of the 1960s as a possible factor in priests’ crimes. This is a rather bizarre stab at sociological rationalization and, in any case, beside the point that church officials went into denial and protected abusers.
The Vatican directive is also seriously defective for playing down the role of civilian boards in investigating abuses. The lay boards helped force the American bishops to proclaim a zero-tolerance policy that was finally more concerned about raped children than the image of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Vatican guidelines note that abusing children is a matter for secular law and call for dioceses to create “clear and coordinated” policies by next year. But the continuing stress on church priority in what essentially are criminal offenses is disheartening.
Vatican officials say Rome should not interfere with the traditional supremacy of local bishops. That was not the case earlier this month, when Pope Benedict XVI removed Bishop William Morris of Australia from office. The bishop, concerned with the shortage of priests, asked five years ago whether the Vatican “may well” have to reconsider the bar to ordaining women or married men.
No dramatic dismissal was ordered for bishops well documented to have overseen hush payments to victims and relocation of abusive priests. Splendid Vatican sanctuary was extended to Cardinal Bernard Law after he had to resign amid reports he covered up the scandal in Boston.
Most recently, ranking churchmen in Philadelphia rejected a grand jury finding that as many as 37 priests suspected of abuse should not still be serving. The diocese later suspended 26 amid public alarm. This should have been a red flag to the Vatican that diocesan prelates need a no-nonsense fiat in repairing the damage to children and the church from decades of shielding abusive priests.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/opinion/19thu4.html
By RACHEL ZOLL AP Religion Writer
Posted: 05/18/2011 12:15:28 AM PDT
Updated: 05/18/2011 02:36:23 PM PDT
WASHINGTON—Researchers hired by the U.S. Roman Catholic bishops to determine the causes of the sex crisis that convulsed the church dismissed all the usual suspects:
Few of the offenders were pedophiles. The abusers were not acting on their homosexuality. Mandatory celibacy did not turn clerics into molesters.
Instead, most of the priest-offenders came from seminary classes of the 1940s and 1950s who were not properly trained to confront the upheavals of the 1960s, when behavioral norms were upended and crime overall in the United States spiked, the researchers said.
"There's no indication in our data that priests are any more likely to abuse children than anyone else in society," said Karen Terry, principal investigator for the report, at a news conference where the report was released Wednesday.
The analysis by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice was the last of three studies authorized by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002, when the scandal erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston, creating what bishops have called the worst crisis in American Catholicism.
The findings contained both good and bad news for a church hierarchy beaten down by years of criticism.
Church leaders hoped to learn how dioceses could identify offenders before they acted. Researchers, however, said they could find no single cause of the abuse, and said molesters generally haven't specialized in victims according to age or gender.
The study's authors said that U.S. bishops did, in fact, begin to respond to molestation cases starting in the 1980s as they learned the scope of the problem. Yet, until recent years, after victims began their advocacy, church leaders were more concerned with rehabilitating priests than with helping victims.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests dismissed the report as "garbage in, garbage out" because the bishops paid for much of the $1.8 million study, along with Catholic foundations, individual donors and a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Terry insisted the findings were independent. Researchers spoke with victims and their advocates, conducted surveys of bishops and diocesan officials who work with victims, and reviewed thousands of records, including a 1970s-era study on the psychology of priests and more than 1,000 case files of three treatment centers where abusive clerics received counseling. John Jay and others have also been collecting data from bishops about the number of abuse claims and victims since 1950.
"We did the writing," Terry said. "This is our report. None of the bishops had any influence on the findings of the study."
The authors said they found no "psychological characteristics" or "developmental histories" that distinguished guilty priests from clergy who did not molest children.
The majority of abusive priests were instead what social scientists call "generalists"—meaning offenders who did not specialize in a type of victim by age or gender or other characteristics. As an example, Terry pointed to the founder of the Legion of Christ religious order, the late Rev. Marcial Maciel, who was recently revealed to have sexually abused young seminarians and also fathered three children.
Only a tiny percentage of the accused priests—less than 5 percent—could be technically defined as pedophiles, meaning adults with a primary, intense attraction to children who have not yet gone through puberty. The bulk of victims were ages 11 to 14. That finding was criticized by victims and others as minimizing the problem, since the American Psychiatric Association defines pedophilia as an attraction to children age 13 or younger.
David Finkelhor, who leads the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said nitpicking with the researchers over their criteria for abuse was pointless, since it's clear that the overwhelming majority of guilty priests were not pedophiles. Half of the victims were age 13 or older when they were molested.
. "Even some offenders who abuse pre-pubescent kids are not pedophiles," Finkelhor said.
About 80 percent of the more than 15,700 people who said they had been abused since 1950 were male. Catholics upset by the presence of gays in American seminaries blamed them for the scandal, but the John Jay researchers said that the offenders chose to victimize boys mainly because clergy had greater access to them.
"We looked at behavior of men before they entered seminary, in seminary and once they were ordained," Terry said. "Those who participated in same-sex behavior were not significantly more likely to abuse children than men who had not had that same-sex behavior."
The bishops have said they will use the results of the report to guide them as they consider possible revisions this year to their child protection plan, called the "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People." The policy bars credibly accused priests from any public church work, although it contains no penalty for bishops who keep the men in ministry. In February, a Philadelphia grand jury said the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had failed to remove some accused priests. Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali responded by temporarily suspending about two dozen of the clergy and hiring a prosecutor to review their cases. Bishop Blase Cupich, head of the U.S. bishops' child protection committee, dismissed Philadelphia as "an anomaly."
In fact, the researchers called the crisis "history." They found abuse claims peaked in the 1970s, then began declining sharply in 1985, as the bishops and society general gained awareness about molestation and its impact on children. Most of the hundreds of claims being made now involve allegations from decades ago by adults who have only recently come forward.
David O'Brien, a historian of American Catholicism at the University of Dayton, said the report was dangerous because it seemed to exonerate bishops. Researchers said that when bishops sent accused priests for treatment, then returned the clerics to ministry over the decades, they were following the best advice available to them at the time.
"This recalls an old tabloid banner headline from an early pre-Boston stage of this crisis—'Bishops Blame Society,'" said O'Brien, an advocate for a greater lay involvement in the church.
Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press
http://www.mercurynews.com/faith/ci_18085727 [no comments yet]
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Report on Catholic priests' sex abuse of minors finds no single cause
Karen Terry, the lead investigator from John Jay College, addresses the media regarding a new report on sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests.
By Eric Marrapodi, CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor
May 18th, 2011
02:44 PMET
Washington (CNN) – "No single 'cause' of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests" was identified in a wide-ranging report released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Wednesday.
The report was presented by a group of researchers from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and was commissioned by the bishops group after determining the need for an outside group to review not only the scope of the Catholic sexual abuse crisis in the United States but to try to determine the cause.
The researchers found:
– Less than 5% of the priests who faced allegations were clinically diagnosed as pedophiles.
– Most priests who received treatment following allegations of abuse of a minor also reported sexual behavior with an adult.
– Researchers found no specific markers that would have been apparent across the board to disqualify candidates for the priesthood.
– Sexual orientation, specifically gayness, was not the cause of child sexual abuse by priests.
– The majority of abuse cases happened in the 1960s and 1970s and there was a sharp decline in the number of cases that began in the 1980s and continues today.
– Guidelines set up by the church to deal with the crisis when it came to light, including calling in civil authorities, were not adequately followed by most dioceses.
"The bad news is there is no test to give to seminarians to screen out abusers," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University who read the report. "We're going to have to be vigilant. We're going to have to continue to have programs to educate both priests and clergy, but also for kids and parents so that the opportunities for abuse are severely restricted."
As the researchers prepared to speak to the press at U.S. Conference of Bishops headquarters in Washington, Becky Ianni stood outside, holding a picture of herself as a young girl. A victim herself, and Virginia and Washington director of the group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), she criticized the report and said she felt it minimized her suffering.
Ianni had not yet read the full report but closely followed early press reports about its contents. "It concentrated on the priests but didn't cover the bishops who were the enablers, those who allowed those priests to move from parish to parish, those that covered up the abuse," she said.
This was the second of two reports by John Jay College on the sexual abuse epidemic that has plagued the church. The first report, "Nature and Scope," was released in 2004 and examined the breadth of the problem. This report, "The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010," examined why it happened.
While the researchers acknowledged "the 'crisis' of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests is a historical problem," they said the scope of their investigation began in 1950 because of better access to people and documents. Information pertaining to prior incidents was nearly impossible to gather, they said.
The researchers compiled data from a broad range of sources including their first report; analysis of social behavior societywide (such as crime, divorce and premarital sex); seminary attendance and curriculum; surveys of a broad range of people, including bishops, accused priests, victims' advocates and laypeople; interviews with "inactive priests with allegations of abuse," and analysis of clinical files from three residential facilities that treated priests who abused minors.
The report, in part, pointed to social upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s as one of the reasons for the uptick in abuse cases.
"The abuse is a result of a complex interaction of factors, and there are number of social forces that were taking place in the 1960s and the 1970s that had an effect on a certain number of priests who had vulnerabilities that might have led to that abusive behavior," said Karen Terry, the lead investigator from John Jay College, at a press conference about the study.
"They also were trained in seminary at a time when there was no adequate preparation to live a life of chaste celibacy and they were not sufficiently able to handle those complex social forces that were taking place," she said. The report found that celibacy was not the cause of the crisis, she added.
In regard to social upheaval, Diane Knight, the chair of the report's National Review Board, a group of lay Catholics who helped oversee the study, said, "I want to emphasize that none of the information included in this report should be interpreted as making excuses for the terrible acts of abuse that occurred. There are no excuses."
Since the crisis broke publicly in the late 1980s, there were many inside and outside the church who had suggested the abusing priests were gay or pedophiles or both. The report spends significant time on both issues.
Terry said the data showed overwhelmingly that both of those assertions proved to be untrue.
The investigators labeled the majority of abusing priests " 'generalists,' or indiscriminate offenders," as opposed to offenders with exclusive sexual preferences.
"Very few of them were driven by a pathological attraction to a type of child and instead what we see is priest abusers are very much like sex offenders in the general population and many of them regress to the abuse of minors in certain time periods," Terry said. "What we also see is opportunities for them to abuse really played a critical role in who they chose to abuse."
The figure cited in the report - that 5% of abusing priests were pedophiles - came from analysis of files from three treatment facilities that had treated abuser priests. There the mental health providers determined how many of the priests had met the guidelines for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' (DSM) definition of pedophilia. The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association and is used by mental health professionals to diagnose mental disorders.
Another issue the report pointed to was seminary education for priests. Terry said where a priest went to seminary had no direct correlation to whether or not they became an abuser. When a priest went to seminary played a much larger role.
The human formation curriculum, added in 1992, is correlated with a low incidence of reported sexual abuse, the report said. The church added the new component to help better equip priests to live a chaste, celibate life.
The church response deemed inadequate
The report took a hard look at the church's response to allegations during the time period of the study.
The focus by the church, investigators said, was often on the priest rather than the accuser.
"Common diocesan response to allegations of abuse included administrative leave and assessment and psychological treatment for priests who had been accused of abuse," Terry said.
Their investigation showed many of the accused priests were treated by mental health professionals, who deemed the priests "rehabilitated," and they were returned to ministry. She pointed out this was commonplace. "The claims of the efficacy of psychological treatment for sex offenders were not unusual at the time."
Many priests were not removed from the ministry, or laicized, because the process was viewed as too complex and required consent from the Vatican. In many cases, not all the victims of a particular abuser may have been known when any administrative punishment was meted out, Terry said.
Bishop Blase Cupich, the chair of the Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People for the bishops' conference, said, "Bishops reassigned priests on the basis of receiving reports those priests were rehabilitated. That was the science of the day. ... That was a mistake. It was a bad mistake shared by a group of professionals, shared across the board in mental health care as well as bishops. We know better now and that sort of thing should not continue today."
While the church established guidelines in response to the crisis in the mid-1990s, which included complying with "the obligations of civil law regarding reporting of the incident and cooperating with the investigation," the investigators found that often did not happen. "Diocesan leaders were more likely to respond to the sexual abuse allegations within the institution, using investigation, evaluation, and administrative leave rather than external mechanisms of the criminal law. Many diocesan leaders' actions were not transparent to those outside the church," the report states.
The investigators said despite the decline in abuse instances and church leaders' vigor in tackling abuse cases, "the church must increase the level of transparency with respect to their response to this problem."
Response from victims
Victims' advocate groups like SNAP and groups aiming for greater accountability like BishopAccountability.org both said the report did not go far enough.
"From the beginning the study was designed to let the bishops off the hook and the child molesters off the hook," said Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of Bishop Accountability.org.
Doyle said the church is still too insular institutionally when it comes to dealing with sex abuse allegations and she did not think the report went far enough to challenge that. The church has not done enough since the crisis came to light, she said.
"If they were real shepherds, if our bishops really cared about our church and children, they would post the names of abusers and would aggressively seek out victims and they would encourage whistle-blowers to blow the whistle and encourage victims to go to the police. Those would be the actions of leadership really intent on routing out this corruption in their church."
Cupich and Terry both noted that abuse instances had continued their downward trajectory since 1985 and there were far fewer instances of abuse in recent years, although reports from prior years still continue to emerge. But with dioceses still struggling with the fallout and new cases emerging, like the massive case in the Archdiocese in Philadelphia, Cupich said he recognized more needed to be done.
"Even one number is too many as far as I'm concerned," Cupich said. "But when you think of a church of 60-some million Catholics and you think of the children we serve in our schools and various programs we are doing our best to make sure this does not happen and we have procedures in place."
© 2011 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/18/report-on-catholic-priests-sex-abuse-of-minors-finds-no-single-cause/ [with comments]
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Report's conclusion called 'absolutely absurd'
May 19th, 2011
08:47 AMET
Anderson Cooper speaks with Father Richard Hoatson [Founder, Road to Recovery ( http://www.road-to-recovery.org/ )] about a new report on abuse of minors by Catholic priests.
[video embedded]
© 2011 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/19/reports-conclusion-called-absolutely-absurd/ [with comments]
=====
Church Abuse Report Authors Defend Findings as Critics Weigh In
Barbara Blaine of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests placed pictures of abuse victims outside the news conference in Washington on Wednesday.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: May 18, 2011
WASHINGTON — The criminologists hired by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to study the sexual abuse crisis in the church defended their findings on Wednesday at the bishops’ headquarters — in particular their thesis that the abuse peaked in the 1960s and 1970s and dropped off significantly by the mid-1980s.
Sexual abuse victims and experts in the field began to absorb and criticize what is thought to be the most extensive study ever conducted of child sexual abuse within an institution, produced after five years by researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York.
Karen Terry, the report’s principal investigator and the dean of research and strategic partnerships at John Jay, said Wednesday at a news conference: “The peak of this abuse crisis is historical. That peak is over.”
The report’s conclusion was counterintuitive to many Catholics and abuse victims, because the scandal itself did not peak until 2002 with the revelations that the archbishop of Boston had knowingly reassigned serial abusers to serve in ministries where they continued to have access to young people.
That practice appears still to have been at work until very recently, at least in Philadelphia, where a grand jury in February found that about three dozen priests accused of abuse and inappropriate behavior with minors were still in ministry.
Bishop Blase Cupich, chairman of the bishops’ committee on the protection of children and young people, said at the news conference that the Philadelphia situation was an “anomaly.”
Bishop Cupich said the bishops had made great strides in preventing abuse because of policies they adopted at their Dallas meeting in 2002, but he acknowledged: “If we want our people to trust us, we have to trust them. So we are doing our best to make sure that we are transparent with them.”
Victims groups accused the bishops of using the report and the researchers’ credibility to try to cap the 10-year scandal.
David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said in an e-mail: “America’s bishops hope this will be their ‘Mission Accomplished’ moment, like George W. Bush on the aircraft carrier prematurely and conveniently declaring victory in Iraq. Their plan is to act as though the crisis has been clarified and is now past. It’s deceptive and disingenuous, but shrewd public relations.”
Among the most controversial findings in the report is the mountain-shaped graph that shows the number of abuse victims climbing through the 1960s, peaking in the 1970s and sharply declining from 1985 onward.
The report theorizes that priests coming of age in the 1940s and 1950s, growing up in families where sexuality was a taboo topic, and trained in seminaries that did not prepare them for lives of celibacy, went on to violate children during the social chaos of the sexual revolution.
Ms. Terry said in an interview that she could not say for sure that the abuse did not predate the 1960s. The researchers were contracted to study only the 1950s and onward.
“We did not investigate the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s,” Ms. Terry said, “so we don’t know what the level of abuse was at that time. Did it occur then? Of course. It occurred throughout society.
“Was there more abuse in the 1950s than was reported in our graph?” she continued. “No doubt. However, there is still an increase in the 1960s. That’s been shown each year the data has come in.”
David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said he found much of value in the report. Mr. Finkelhor said there was a parallel spike in society in general of sexual abuse of minors in the 1960s and ’70s. But he said it might simply be evidence that sexual abuse began to be more widely reported in those years.
“We did see that,” he said, “but we said these are cases that have always existed, and we are just hearing about them at the time.”
The report relies on data from the church, other researchers, treatment centers and interviews with abusers, victims and church officials.
Experts in sexual abuse agreed that the episodes of abuse by priests had indeed dropped in recent years, because of increased reporting, better screening and preparation of priests in seminaries and prevention programs for children.
The report found that in 1992, the bishops adopted five very sound principles to prevent abuse. But they were only guidelines, and while some bishops adopted them, others did not.
“What is clear to us was that in many cases the bishops did respond, but they were responding to their priests,” Ms. Terry said. “They were looking to help the priest, to treat the priest, to help him overcome his sickness. What they did not do was focus on the victims and the harm to the victims.”
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/us/19bishops.html
=====
The '60s made them do it
Jon Carroll
Friday, May 20, 2011
We might want to be skeptical about all polls, studies and reports. They invariably - one might say inevitably - reflect the biases of whoever is asking the questions. Less obviously, the studies might reflect the opinions of whoever is paying for the poll or study. Third, until we know what questions were asked, and of whom, and when, we can't get a real handle on the reliability of such samplings of reality.
Not that studies aren't valuable. It's just that there's a lot of junk science along with the good stuff, and caveat emptor, as Cicero used to say.
Now comes a new report that purports to uncover the reasons behind the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandals.
Here's what Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times has to say: "Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and '70s. Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church's hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims."
A few weeks ago, we had a prominent Catholic layman writing that, in essence, the gays made them do it. Now we have a slightly tonier argument prepared by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and paid for largely by official organizations of the Roman Catholic Church.
The argument is that somehow the zeitgeist got the better of priests and their vows. It was a time of turmoil. I remember the turmoil; I remember the debates. At no time do I remember anyone ever saying, "I'm sorry, but all this marijuana and dirty talking makes me want to molest boys."
I don't mean to be flip here - I was there, and it wasn't like that. Maybe somehow priests felt they had more permission, but the urge to criminal sexual behavior is a minority taste, and not even 100 listenings to "White Rabbit" could have turned a suppressed priest with legal tastes into an exploiter of children.
As a friend of mine said, perhaps we should blame the Inquisition on the permissive culture in 15th century Spain.
Of course, there could be another reason. The researchers at John Jay were basically studying the bishops' own records. It is possible that reporting went up, fueled in part by the sexual candor of the late '60s, whereas the incidence of child abuse stayed relatively stable. There's no way to prove that either way, but it's certainly a valid counter-theory to "The '60s made me do it."
There's also some controversy about the report's use of the word "prepubescent." In the report, the cutoff is 10 and under; the American Psychiatric Association favors the definition 13 and under. Only 22 percent of the abused children were 10 or under. If the latter definition is used, then over 50 percent of the children fall into that category.
It does lay the report open to charges of minimizing the nature of the scandal, which is what the bishops have been trying to do all along. On the other hand, the researchers may have had valid methodological reasons. Put that in the "not proven" category.
The report also has another interesting finding. Again according to Goodstein's story, the report says that as soon as gay men began entering the priesthood in large numbers (in the late '70s), the number of reports of sexual abuse of minors began to level off and then drop. I have no idea what that means, but it does indicate that the old canard about gay men "recruiting" little boys seems to fail the squint test.
Or maybe all that sexual freedom stuff had died out by the late '70s. Wait: No, it hadn't.
I'm all for the church trying to clean up its act. I am certain that lots of people within the church knew little of these scandals - that's how good the cover-up was. Commissioning studies and reports to delineate the exact nature of the problem is a good step.
I see the same divide in the church that I see in secular organizations. A very small number of people, almost all of them men, hold the secrets, smooth over the rough spots, protect the good name of the church while trying to hush up the people who have come forward with horror stories. The parishioners don't approve of the cover-up, but they are powerless to do anything about it.
Oligarchy rules, whatever arena we are in.
Where was the church when it was needed? Down at the Fillmore listening to "Piece of my Heart."
Who gives anything to poor Tom? Whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, and through ford and whirlpool, o'er bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow and halters in his pew; set ratsbane by his porridge, made him proud of jcarroll@sfchronicle.com.
© 2011 Hearst Communications Inc.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/05/19/DD3S1JHQ9L.DTL [with comments]
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The Vatican Comes Up Short
Editorial
Published: May 18, 2011
The Vatican’s long overdue guidelines for fighting sexual abuse of children are, unfortunately, just that — flimsy guidelines for a global problem that requires an unequivocal mandate for church officials to work with secular authorities in prosecuting rogue priests.
Instead, the Vatican has issued nonbinding guidance [ http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=4218 ] that punts the scandal back to the authority of local bishops, who still will not face firm oversight or punishment for cover-ups that recycled hundreds of abusive priests.
The directive came two days before a new study of the abuse problem that cites the sexual and social turmoil of the 1960s as a possible factor in priests’ crimes. This is a rather bizarre stab at sociological rationalization and, in any case, beside the point that church officials went into denial and protected abusers.
The Vatican directive is also seriously defective for playing down the role of civilian boards in investigating abuses. The lay boards helped force the American bishops to proclaim a zero-tolerance policy that was finally more concerned about raped children than the image of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Vatican guidelines note that abusing children is a matter for secular law and call for dioceses to create “clear and coordinated” policies by next year. But the continuing stress on church priority in what essentially are criminal offenses is disheartening.
Vatican officials say Rome should not interfere with the traditional supremacy of local bishops. That was not the case earlier this month, when Pope Benedict XVI removed Bishop William Morris of Australia from office. The bishop, concerned with the shortage of priests, asked five years ago whether the Vatican “may well” have to reconsider the bar to ordaining women or married men.
No dramatic dismissal was ordered for bishops well documented to have overseen hush payments to victims and relocation of abusive priests. Splendid Vatican sanctuary was extended to Cardinal Bernard Law after he had to resign amid reports he covered up the scandal in Boston.
Most recently, ranking churchmen in Philadelphia rejected a grand jury finding that as many as 37 priests suspected of abuse should not still be serving. The diocese later suspended 26 amid public alarm. This should have been a red flag to the Vatican that diocesan prelates need a no-nonsense fiat in repairing the damage to children and the church from decades of shielding abusive priests.
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/opinion/19thu4.html
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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