'Painfully candid' report: review board's work praised, though skeptics question whether recommendations will be enacted

National Catholic Reporter, March 12, 2004 by Joe Feuerherd

Asked his view of the causes of the clergy sex abuse crisis, the bishop, tongue firmly in cheek, told members of the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People: "If you're conservative, homosexuality is the problem; if you're liberal, celibacy is the problem. So tell me who you are, and I'll tell you what the problem is."

It's not so simple anymore, though the central findings of the review board's 145-page report are straightforward: Over the past half-century, 10,667 children were abused by 4,392 clerics because the church failed to weed out candidates unfit for the priesthood while too many bishops put Other priorities, such as "fear of scandal," ahead of protecting minors.

Yet the report is nothing if not nuanced, exploring numerous explanations for the crisis beyond homosexuality and celibacy.

As the anonymous bishop, quoted in the report, knows, those who blamed gay priests for clergy sex abuse used "homosexuality" as shorthand for a broader set of concerns, including the "culture of dissent" in the post-Vatican II church and the resulting "crisis of fidelity."

Likewise, those who argued that "celibacy" was a contributing factor to clergy sex abuse didn't simply mean that unmarried men are more likely to abuse children than those with wives; celibacy, instead, is the visible representation of what many church progressives see as a closed clerical structure incapable of policing itself or unwilling to do so.

That's where the 12-member review board came in. Initial assessments of the review board's work indicate a level of common ground on a controversial issue not seen in the American church for decades.

From the church's conservative wing: "The report from the National Review Board is really a very sober, honest and painfully candid assessment of nonfeasance and malfeasance on the part of many bishops and is therefore a document that potentially represents a historic movement for possible reform in the Catholic church in the United States," Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things, told NCR.

And the liberals: Author Eugene Kennedy called the report "a remarkable achievement" that demonstrates the "theological sophistication" of the American laity. Fr. Donald Cozzens, author of Sacred Silence: Denial and Crisis in the Church, said the board provided an "important service to the church and to society." He said, "I hope it signals a new day for the laity who are calling the bishops to be faithful to what they said they would do."

From the 11th floor conference room of his downtown Washington office on the Monday following the release of the report, attorney Robert Bennett drew a parallel between the work of the 12-member National Review Board and his work defending subpoenaed presidents, indicted congressmen and accused corporate chieftains.

Get facts out

"I've been involved [as an attorney] in almost every scandal since Watergate," said Bennett. "One thing I have learned ... is that you get all the bad facts out, you reform, you apologize, and you move on. Otherwise it will fester. And that is a lesson that the church, at least up to this point, has not learned."

Bennett offered a harsh bottom line: "If [the bishops] had dealt with these things more forcefully, more directly, more openly, we would not have the crisis we have today."

The crisis was quantified in another study commissioned by the board, this one by a team of researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The researchers, using anonymous data provided by dioceses and religious orders, found that more than 4,392 priests abused 10,667 young people between 1950 and 2002, with the greatest number of cases occurring between 1960 and 1985. Roughly 4 percent of priests in this period had a "credible" accusation of abuse made against them, according to the John Jay report. The church has paid more than $572 million to settle abuse claims, excluding recent payments such as the $85 million settlement to victims in the Boston archdiocese.

John Jay's researchers offered the facts--what occurred?--while Bennett's committee dealt with the less quantifiable question of context: Why did it happen? How did sexual predators thrive in the priesthood, molesting children with little fear of reprisal?

Over the course of 18 months, the review board's research committee interviewed approximately 100 people who offered theories and firmly held views on the whys and wherefores of clergy sex abuse.

Among them were more than a dozen cardinals and bishops--the Vatican's Francis Arinze and Joseph Ratzinger and Americans Anthony Bevilacqua, Roger Mahony, Edward Egan, William Lori, Theodore McCarrick, Francis George, Timothy Dolan, Harry Flynn, John McCormack, Adam Maida, Sean O'Malley, Rembert Weakland and Michael Sheehan. Some bishops met alone with board members; others brought their lawyers.

Authors (Fr. Andrew Greeley, Jesuit Fr. Thomas Reese, Jason Berry, Eugene Kennedy, Leon Podles, A.W. Richard Sipe and George Weigel among them) were queried. Victim advocates talked to the board, as did lawyers, psychotherapists, and government prosecutors.