A culture of clergy sexual abuse.

On July 23, 2003, Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly released a groundbreaking and finely detailed report entitled "The Sexual Abuse of Children in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston." (The eight-four page report is available in its entirety on the attorney general's website at www.ago.state.ma.us/archdiocese.pdf)

In January 2002, Catholic priest John Geoghan was convicted of molesting a boy and sentenced to ten years in prison. More than 130 people had accused him of sexual abuse over a period of many years and other criminal charges, as well as several civil lawsuits, were pending against him. Geoghan's case is important because it led to the exposure of massive scandals regarding clerical sex abuse of minors.

Clerical sex abuse of minors in Massachusetts is of public concern because it is a serious crime, as is the coverup of such abuse by ecclesiastical authorities. And such sexual abuse isn't confined to Massachusetts or the United States but it is long festering worldwide problem of staggering magnitude.

Sexual abuse of minors isn't confined to Catholic priest or even to clergy generally. Parents , relatives, teachers, scout leaders, various authority figures, and strangers are also guilty of these crimes. But nowhere has the abuse of minors been so protected or systematically covered up as in the nation's and the world's largest top-down-run religious organization. And rank-and-file Catholics are just as concerned about this problem as anyone else.

   In his introduction to the report, Reilly states:

   Based on my conclusions and in order to
   ensure that children will be safe in the
   future, this report is essential; it is essential
   to create an official public record of what
   occurred. This mistreatment of children
   was so massive and so prolonged that it
   borders on the unbelievable. This report
   will confirm to all who may read it now and
   in the future, that this tragedy was real

Reilly states that archdiocese records show "that at least 789 victims (or third parties acting on the behalf of victims) have complained directly to the Archdiocese," that the "number of alleged victims who have disclosed their abuse likely exceeds one thousand. And the number increases even further when considering that an unknown number of victims likely have not, and may never disclose their abuses to others.

Reilly's report adds:

For more than fifty years there has been an institutional acceptance within the Archdiocese of clergy sexual abuse of children. Clergy sexual abuse of children has also been shown to be a nationwide problem with some reports indicating that more than 300 priests were removed from ministry in 2002 alone as a result of allegations of sexual abuse of children, and as many as 1,200 Roman Catholic priests in the United States have been accused of sexually abusing more than 4,000 children. The staggering magnitude of the problem would have alerted any reasonable, responsible manager that immediate and decisive measures must be taken.

The report adds that the archdiocese's "investigation and discipline process ... protects priests at the expense of victims and, in the final analysis, is incapable of leading to timely and appropriate responses to sex abuse allegations."

   Reilly's report concludes:

   The Archdiocese's responses to reports of sexual
   abuse of children, including maintaining
   secrecy of reports, placed children at risk. Top
   Archdiocese officials ... decided that they
   should conceal--from the parishes, the laity,
   law enforcement and the public--their knowledge
   of individual complaints of abuse and the
   long history of such complaints within the
   Archdiocese.... The Archdiocese believed
   that Canon Law--the church's internal policies
   and procedures--prohibited it from
   reporting abuse to civil authorities in most
   instances.... and the resulting publicity would
   harm the reputation of the Church.... In the
   very few cases where allegations of sexual
   abuse of children were communicated to law
   enforcement, senior Archdiocese managers
   remained committed to their primary objectives--safeguarding
   the well-being of priests
   and the institution over the welfare of children
   and preventing scandal--and often failed to
   advise law enforcement authorities of all relevant
   information they possessed, including the
   full extent of the alleged abuser's history of
   abusing children.

An appendix to Reilly's report shows that between 1994 and 2000 the Boston archdiocese paid out $17,870,482 to settle legal claims from 402 victims, plus $1,157,219 for treatment costs to victims and $702,770 for treatment of priest abusers. Extrapolating from this data, it seems reasonable to agree with published estimates that since 1990 Catholic dioceses in the United States have paid out more than $1 billion to abuse victims--and that may only be the beginning.

In late August 2003 the Catholic Diocese of Covington, Kentucky, one of the church's smaller judicatories, released a report showing that since 1989 it had paid nearly $780,000 to abuse victims, $722,000 for counseling, and $218,000 in legal fees. The diocese also announced that it would begin talking with twenty-two people who have filed a $50 million suit charging clergy sex abuse. The Covington diocese also disclosed that 8 percent (30 of 372) of diocesan priests had sexually abused one or more minors over the past 50 years.

(Parenthetically, this enormous drain on the church's finances can hardly be disregarded as one motive for seeking more public funds for its faith-based schools and charities. Money, of course, is fungible.)

Reilly's report confirms and is confirmed by the extraordinary and important book Pederasty in the Catholic Church: Sexual Crimes of the Clergy Against Minors, A Drama Silenced and Covered Up by the Bishops (Pederastia en la Iglesia catolica: Delitos sexuales del clero contra menores, un drama silenciado y encubierto por los obispos), published only nine months earlier by Spanish psychologist Pepe Rodriguez. Rodriguez covers pretty much the same ground as Reilly but in greater depth and scope, replete with case histories, covering not only the United States but also Spain, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Rodriguez' book, up to date as of September 2002, makes clear that the problem of sexual abuse of minors by religious authority figures is aggravated by two factors: the understandable reluctance of victims to report abuse and the longstanding but largely unwritten policy of church officials, from the pope on down, to coddle abusers and go to great lengths to cover up abuse. Both Rodriguez on one side of the Atlantic (in Spanish) and Reilly on the other side On English) detail the church policy of transferring abusers from one parish to another, one diocese to another, and even one country to another.

Rodriguez notes that various estimates of the number of priests, and even bishops, who abuse minors range from 3 percent to 6 percent, though the figure for Spain may be even higher, with the Covington, Kentucky, diocese weighing in at 8 percent. The number of victims worldwide will never be known but certainly goes well into the many tens of thousands.

Rodriguez' 2002 book builds on his 1995 book, The Sex Life of the Clergy (La vida sexual del clero). In this remarkably thorough earlier book, the Spanish psychologist covers even broader ground. His studies in traditionally Catholic Spain show that 60 percent of priests are sexually active in violation of their celibacy vows. Of these, his study found, 53 percent had relations with adult females, 21 percent with adult males, 14 percent with minor males, and 12 percent with minor females. He notes that a large number of Spanish priests left the priesthood to marry and that others formed long-term relationships ignored by both the laity and the church hierarchy.

At the heart of the problem, Rodriguez writes, is the Vatican's unworkable, unscriptural, and unnecessary policy of clerical celibacy, as well as narrowness and inadequacy in training of clergy.. (As Catholics for a Free Choice President Frances Kissling remarked at a press conference about a year ago when asked what she thought of "abstinence education," she said, "If it does not work well in Catholic seminaries, why would it work anywhere else?")

As if symptomatic of the current cultural tragedy, between publication of Rodriguez' 2002 book and the July 2003 Massachusetts report, there appeared a new translation of the eminent nineteenth-century Portuguese writer Eca de Queiros' 1875 novel, The Crime of Father Amaro, published by New Directions. Margaret Jull Costa's new translation is superior to the 1963 translation by Nan Flanagan, which mistranslated the title as The Sin of Father Amaro; the author used the word crime.

Amaro is a young priest assigned to a parish in a small Portuguese town, where he ends up seducing the daughter of a more senior priest's mistress. The story ends badly, of course. But the novel is a thorough, readable exploration of small town hyperpiety, politics, and clerical hypocrisy, rich in detail and eminently readable. Amaro is reminiscent of the novel The Cathedral by the eminent Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibanez, in which young priests in Toledo, Spain, make fun of the old cardinal behind his back because he has a young woman living in his apartments. It turns out, however, that the young woman isn't his mistress but his daughter, the legacy of an affair the cardinal had as a young priest in a small town.

And just as Antonio Skarmeta's 1985 novel Burning Patience (Ardiente Paciencia) about Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in early 1970s Chile was transposed to 1950s Italy in the award-winning film Il Postino, so too has Amaro been transposed successfully in 2002 from 1870s Portugal to 2000 Mexico by Mexican director Carlos Carrera (available in video and DVD as The Crime of Padre Amaro). The film broke all box office records when it was released last year in Mexico. It tracks the original novel remarkably well. U.S. audiences may find some of the film hard to swallow but anyone familiar with Latin culture will recognize its essential integrity and authenticity.

That these artistic endeavors are all coming to the fore is indicative of the modern crisis within the Catholic clergy and larger Western society. And, being dealt with as it currently is, the problem isn't going away anytime soon. At the end of his 2002 book Rodriguez recommends that instances of sexual abuse be reported to police or civil authorities, as complaining to church authorities is likely to lead nowhere, though hopefully the expanding scandal over the past two years might possibly improve the situation.

Indeed, it is to be hoped that the exposure of clerical sexual abuse will lead to effective prosecutions and effective efforts by all concerned to clean up this very nasty problem.

Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious Liberty and immediate past president of the American Humanist Association, taught high school Spanish and history early in his career.