Sexual Abuse & the church: what we've learned & what we still don't know.

There was a ritual quality to the February 27 release of two studies of the sexual molestation of minors by Catholic clergy. Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, voiced remorse and determination to do better. Representatives of victims' groups issued routine dismissals. Millions of Catholics felt fresh spasms of shame and indignation. All the usual headlines and newscasts. Then on to the Academy Awards.

I exaggerate. Washington attorney Robert S. Bennett did a round of television appearances that conveyed at least some sense of the breadth and depth of these reports. As chairman of the research committee of the National Review Board, the twelve-member panel of lay people appointed to monitor implementation of the bishops' Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, Bennett had directed one of the studies. The other was conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

The huge amount of data that the John Jay study gathered from the nation's dioceses should lay to rest any lingering tendency to minimize the sexual-abuse problem. Between 1950 and 2002, more than 4 percent of the Catholic priests and deacons in ministry were the objects of allegations of sexually abusing minors that church officials considered substantiated. While comparable data for other professions may not exist, one out of every twenty-five members of the clergy is a startling figure that demands further explanation.

The National Review Board, in its separate report on "the causes and context of the current crisis," summarily rejected the argument that celibacy itself was at fault. The board reminded readers of the other 96 percent of priests and of the widespread occurrence of sexual abuse within families. The board did insist, though, that celibacy was a "gift" that priests could live out only with strong spiritual and psychological formation, a solid prayer life, and support from other clergy and lay friends.

Many conservatives have blamed the scandal on a postconciliar "silly season" along with a "culture of dissent." Liberals have emphasized, on the contrary, a repressive culture of denial, silence, and secrecy, again focusing on sex, which marked preconciliar Catholicism and the seminaries in particular. Both decry the continuing force of these tendencies in today's church. The John Jay data show that substantiated allegations of abuse did indeed "surge" from some point in the 1960s, peak in the 1970s, and later decline, eventually sharply, in the 1990s. But the data also show that the majority of abusing priests were ordained before the council ended and over two-thirds by 1970. On the other hand, the cohorts of priests ordained in 1970 and in 1973-75 contained the highest percentages of abusers.

These findings suggest that neither the culture of dissent nor the culture of repression may have been as combustible as the convergence of both. The decade 1965 to 1975 saw sexual taboo-breaking publicly celebrated (whatever the reality in private) and a church where matters long taken as bedrock certainties seemed to be shaken overnight, maybe in seminaries and among priests even more so than elsewhere. It is not unthinkable that a segment of clergy reared and trained in a repressive, sex-denying atmosphere found in those developments a permission to set aside their celibacy and act out a distorted sexuality, while a segment of younger clergy, ordained in the midst of change, may have never taken to heart the challenge of that celibacy in the first place.

The decline in recorded allegations from the mid-1980s and more sharply in the 1990s also supports the view that well before 2002 some bishops had taken effective action. The John Jay data further challenges the assertion, frequently made, that church officials typically ignored or simply reassigned credibly accused priests.

Admittedly, the John Jay study is frustratingly unclear on this topic, a crucial one for Catholics trying to understand this history. More than one action was often taken in response to an allegation. A wide variety of actions might be taken in regard to a single priest over time. And a substantial number of allegations were made when virtually no action could be taken because the offending priest was already dead, resigned, retired, or laicized. The study's figures on pages 83, 84, and 86, which lump all these different cases together, are therefore not very illuminating. The study's Executive Summary does not speak to this question at all, and phone calls to the research project at John Jay went unanswered. It seems, nonetheless, that over time church officials, rather than either ignore or simply reassign offenders, suspended them and sent them for evaluation and treatment far more frequently than is often assumed. (Whether bishops' confidence in that treatment was justified or their post-treatment monitoring was conscientious are important but separate questions.) What is badly needed is information on how first and, say, second allegations were handled during different decades. These data can apparently be extracted from the diocesan reports the John Jay study gathered--and should be.

The study indicates the low incidence of victims reporting abuse to civil authorities (15 percent) and still lower reporting by church officials; but it also casts doubt on the idea that this problem can and should be handled by the criminal justice system rather than the church. Although police investigated almost all the reports, only a third of the persons investigated were charged with a crime, even fewer were convicted, and most of that group appear to have received minimal sentences. No doubt, the prompt reporting by church officials promised in the Dallas Charter will shift some of the burden to police, prosecutors, and courts; but the church will not escape responsibility for making careful decisions about many cases that escape the reach of the criminal law.

Finally, the study highlighted the importance of serial abusers. Over a quarter of all the substantiated allegations in diocesan records were attributable to only 149 priests. In Boston, seven priests accounted for more than half the allegations. No religious institution or youth organization is free of sexual abuse or even some serial predators; but the latter may in truth be a distinctly Catholic problem. Protestant, Episcopal, and Jewish congregations generally investigate the clergy they themselves select, contacting the previous congregations where these individuals have served, and flagging danger signs in their histories. Among Catholics, closely held records and closed-door procedures in assigning priests have kept this from occurring.

The John Jay study has limitations. The data is self-reported and it depends on the quality of church record keeping over a half century and also the accuracy of shorthanded diocesan staffs in filling out the surveys. I do not share the conviction of the victims' lobby that these are scoundrels still engaged in a cover-up. ("It's a carefully orchestrated, cookie-cutter PR effort," said David Clohessy, national director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.) But the possibility that when records are unclear the church is still getting the benefit of the doubt cannot be ignored. It would be reassuring if a sample of these diocesan reports could actually be audited by outsiders, and a closer look taken in cases that seem to be statistically unlikely. The more serious criticism is that many victims never report their abuse. This is undeniable; the study surely undercounts victims by a large margin and predatory priests, too, although probably by a smaller one. I suspect that many of the extraordinarily large percentage of priests (56 percent) with only one allegation against them in church records were in fact guilty of one or several others that went unreported. The offenders, in other words, were caught in the net of records though many of their victims were not.

Leaders of victims' groups continue to dismiss the signs of progress since the early 1990s on the ground that sufficient time has not passed for victims to come forward. This is almost certainly true for some cases, but if there were an unusually large pool of unreported incidents from the 1990s, it did not show itself in the mass of allegations (one third of the total) made after the scandal story broke in 2002 and after the repeated pleas by Bishop Gregory and others, pleas historically unprecedented in regard to sexual abuse, that victims come forward. My guess is that, for reasons of age and culture, incidents of abuse dating from the 1950s may be underrepresented as well. Altogether this means that the "surge" beginning in the 1960s and the improvement in the 1990s may be somewhat less than they seem--but still far from illusory.

Where the John Jay researchers crunched numbers, the National Review Board crunched interviews. Their report took bits and pieces from eighty-five people--bishops, victims, medical experts, lawyers, law-enforcement officials, pastors, lay-review-board members, seminary officials, and Vatican officials, including Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger--and forged a synthesis that is reassuring about the present ("effective measures have been taken to ensure the safety of minors in the church today") but unsparing about the past. Neither the bishops nor the Vatican grasped the nature and gravity of the problem. The bishops were insensitive and deficient in responding to allegations. Priests enjoyed a presumption of innocence. Canon law posed obstacles to effective remedies. Clerical secrecy was second nature and avoiding scandal the first priority. Bishops dragged their feet even after being alerted to the problem in 1985. Bishops relied uncritically on therapeutic models and opinion. Bishops subordinated pastoral responsibilities to hardball legal advice. Bishops didn't hold themselves accountable or make use of consultative bodies.

The list of multiple causes is matched with a list of recommendations: more research, continuing audits of implementation of the Dallas Charter, better screening and spiritual preparation for celibacy, best practices for lay review boards, less secrecy, more transparency, etc., etc.

The report's strength is in recognizing the multiple causes seen to have contributed to the scandal. The report's weakness is not in anything it says but in the fact that it says almost everything. It does not clearly rank causes in importance or flag the ones most pertinent today rather than twenty years ago. It is easily read as a catalog from which one can order up favorite items--or as an encyclical from which one can quote favorite passages.

At its best, the report combines balance with definite conclusions. For example, the board admits that the Dallas Charter's zero-tolerance policy, which the Vatican, many priests, and probably a good number of bishops would like to jettison, "may seem to be too blunt an instrument for universal application" and requires careful application, especially in the definition of sexual abuse. But ultimately the board declares the policy, at least for the immediate future, "essential to the restoration of the trust of the laity."

In trying to weigh homosexuality as a factor in the scandal, the report stresses that "there are many chaste and holy homosexual priests" who must not be blamed. But it cannot ignore the fact that 81 percent of the victims were male. (The John Jay study also found that accusations of true pedophilia--a distinct pathology involving sexual attraction to prepubescent children--and of sexual abuse of minor females varied less over the decades than sexual abuse of adolescent males.) One might conclude that behavior more closely reflecting "normal" homosexual desires, although destructive, sinful, and criminal, may have been more influenced by shifting populations, attitudes, or discipline in the seminaries or priesthood. The report puts a variety of opinions, some plausible, some eccentric, into the blender; it might have been wiser simply to declare the question still on the table.

The report is refreshingly direct in addressing the selection, assignment, and lack of accountability of bishops. Among those interviewed by the board's research committee, many

   expressed concern that the pool of available bishops has been limited
   too narrowly to those priests who have held positions in the Vatican,
   in seminaries, and within the diocesan hierarchy. The process needs
   greater lay involvement, both in putting forth the names of priests
   who might be considered for the episcopacy and in vetting those who
   have been put forward.... A "don't rock the boat" attitude prevailed
   among the bishops for too long.... According to many people
   interviewed by the board, outspoken priests rarely were selected to
   be bishops, and the outspoken bishops rarely were selected as
   archbishops and cardinals. The predictable result was that priests
   and bishops did not speak out when that is exactly what the situation
   demanded.

Beyond calling for an enlarged lay role in the selection of bishops and for the reinvigoration of consultative bodies like diocesan pastoral councils already required or recommended in church law, the board floated a proposal for periodic visitations of dioceses by bishops, priests, and lay people from elsewhere who would conduct something akin to the accreditation reviews undergone by colleges and universities.

Catholics should be extremely grateful to the members of the National Review Board, the researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and, yes, the harried church officials who gathered and assembled this material in less than a year's time. That gratitude would best be expressed not by using the reports merely to reaffirm what we already believe, or to experience a premature catharsis, but to correct our impressions; to separate truths, half-truths, and canards; and to identify the still unanswered questions and possible strategies for answering them.

The John Jay study has gathered material yet to be mined and analyzed. The National Review Board report is a skillful synthesis of knowledgeable opinion but not really a historical study. The board could not investigate precisely why there was not more action in 1985 when the bishops were alerted to the nature and potential dimensions of the sexual-abuse crisis. The board could not undertake comparative studies, say, of dioceses with good records and those with bad ones that might pinpoint what made the difference.

Of course, we Catholics need all the information we can get to prevent these kinds of crimes from happening in the future--although, frankly, I think the church is now better situated in that regard than many other institutions dealing with youth. But Catholics also need a cogent narrative that explains this sordid chapter of church history--one that might help us address other challenges to the church's integrity and vitality.

Peter Steinfels is the author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America (Simon & Schuster), and writes the "Beliefs" column for the New York Times.