Counting the cost of sexual abuse.

Covington, KY -- Are settlements in cases of abuse, chiefly at the hands of homosexual priests, getting out of hand in U.S. dioceses?

In this small Kentucky diocese, on June 3, 2005, Bishop Roger Foys announced a settlement of $120 million to compensate victims of child molestation by priests and other employees. This, the largest settlement yet in the scandal which has rocked the Church in the past three years, was reached out of court. As well as compensation for individual victims, the money will go towards legal fees, counseling, and other costs.

In December 2004, the diocese of Orange, CA, agreed to a compensation fund of $100 million; in 2003 the archdiocese of Boston settled with its abuse claimants for $85 million. AP reports that today abuse claims total $1.6 billion in known settlements, with many claims still to be worked out.

The majority of current American bishops certainly feel a moral obligation to pay out to proven victims, but this is having a detrimental effect on the work of the dioceses, many of which already had financial problems due to factors such as rising labour and maintenance costs.

Boston and several other dioceses have already proceeded to selling church property, while the dioceses of Portland, Tucson, and Spokane have declared outright bankruptcy.

The question is, in the light of these troubling developments, what have the American bishops learned? Ten U.S. bishops, nine retired and one still active, have been found out to be "gay," because of successful charges against them. These include Rembert Weakland, formerly Archbishop of Milwaukee. There may well be others, with whom the law has not caught up. This factor may have influenced the Washington Times speculation that in their June, 2005, semi-annual meeting "U.S. Catholic bishops [would] sidestep the issue of whether gay men should become priests" (Catholic World News, June 16, 2005).

Since 2002, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has encouraged a zero-tolerance policy, removing permanently from public ministry any priest credibly proven to have sexually molested a minor; this policy has now been extended for five years.

Seminaries

Regarding admission to seminaries, a new Program for Priestly Formation has been drafted. Its reference to candidates with homosexual tendencies notes only that "guidelines provided by the Holy See must be followed"--guidelines anticipated in a Vatican document to be released in the near future. In an address to the conference, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago stated that homosexuals, according to the universal teaching of the Church, are not to be ordained to the priesthood (LifeSiteNews.com, June 20, 2005).

This would be a major reversal of the custom developed over the last 30 years when many vocation directors readily accepted men with a homosexual orientation. The cultural climate had radically changed from rejection before the late nineteen-sixties to acceptance, even legitimization, of "gay" activism throughout the following decades.

As is well known, there has been a history of lax attitudes for homosexual clerical molesters in the USA. In the years before the scandals broke in 1992, it was almost standard for complaints to be put on the back burner and for molesting clergy to be quietly moved to other parishes. These practices were highlighted again in documents released by the California diocese of Orange on May 18, 2005. The release reflects badly on Roger Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles who, according to insiders, "has been fighting for two years to keep similar papers secret" (Wanderer, June 2, 2005).

Finally, the issue of homosexuality within the priesthood, rather than paedophilia, needs to be addressed head-on, as was made clear in the findings of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice which, in 2004, completed a study of over ten thousand molestation cases on behalf of the USCCB. This report indicated that 81 percent of the victims were male, of whom the large majority were teenagers rather than pre-pubescent children. This fact was noted in a conference speech by Bishop John D'Arcy of South Bend, IN. He too, urged that only heterosexuals be ordained (Varied reports).