It Is Not a “Catholic Thing”

During what may come to be called the Great Lenten Humiliation of 2002, it seemed that every day the news included another report on a priest accused of sexually molesting a minor-in Atlanta, Amarillo, Texas, or the suburbs of Seattle. A reader acknowledges that a tu quoque (“You’re one, too”) defense always sounds petty, but he was curious about the often repeated claim that such abuse is as prevalent among other religious leaders. So he went to his Internet search engines looking for news stories about ministers and rabbis accused or convicted of such offenses. It makes a very thick dossier. He stopped after two hours when he had accumulated over three hundred such stories-from Bakersfield, California, to Chicago, Illinois, to a place aptly named Embarrass, Minnesota. They were all cases dating from 1997 to the present, whereas the publicized Catholic scandals are typically from twenty to thirty years ago.

What does this prove? Perhaps nothing, except that sexual abuse by clergy is more widespread than one might expect. And one might want to see a comparable search on abuse by other professions, such as teachers and social workers. Some might complain that the Catholic Church has been “unfairly” singled out for negative publicity, but that comes with being the Catholic Church. Certainly this reader’s findings excuse nothing. But they do provide a measure of perspective.

Just as I was thinking why there was little or no reporting on this in the media, the Christian Science Monitor of April 5 ran a long story on a study just done by Christian Ministry Resources (CMR). CMR is an organization that offers legal and tax advice to more than seventy-five thousand Protestant congregations and one thousand denominational agencies nationwide. The study indicates that over the past decade the number of allegations of sex abuse against churches and church agencies has averaged about seventy per week. The numbers peaked in the mid-nineties and have since been declining, largely because of pressure from insurance companies that insist that churches more carefully screen people working with children or else lose their insurance.

Why are there so many more reported instances of sex abuse in Protestant churches? Anson Shupe, an Indiana University professor who has studied the matter, says, “To me it says Protestants are less reluctant to come forward because they don’t put their clergy on as high a pedestal as Catholics do with their priests.” Abuse is more frequent among church volunteers than among clergy. Some larger congregations are now fingerprinting and doing a criminal background check on anyone over eighteen who works with children. Says one pastor, “If the check comes back with a blemish, they’re not working with kids. That’s all there is to it.” The story quotes others who have dealt with the problem and say that “churches are the perfect environment for sexual predators, because they have large numbers of children’s programs, a shortage of workers to lead them, and a culture of trust that is the essence of the organization.” In short, some of the very strengths of the churches are also their weaknesses.

Again, what happens in other religious communities in no way excuses what has happened in the Catholic Church. And yes, it may be unfair that the media tend to depict the sexual abuse of children and young people as a “Catholic problem.” Unfair but, for reasons frequently alluded to in these pages, hardly surprising. Leaving aside all the other factors-old-fashioned anti-Catholicism, eagerness to discredit a traditional morality most publicly represented by the Catholic Church, and so forth-look at it from a purely journalistic viewpoint: nobody is going to win a Pulitzer Prize for exposing rude things done to a fourteen-year-old boy in the basement bathroom of, say, Second Baptist Church in Indianapolis. Not even if the elders were informed and tried to hush it up.

The same story about a priest is obviously very different. With the priest the bishop is somehow implicated, and with the bishop the archbishop is somehow implicated, and with the archbishop the cardinal is somehow implicated-and, as everybody knows, all roads lead to Rome and so the story leads to You Know Who, the representative of the oldest and largest institution in the world. And the institution that bears the moral and spiritual authority that the modernity project has been trying to overthrow for three centuries. Catholics should not complain about the unfairness. It comes with the territory.