Roman Catholic priest sex abuse of children

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In the late twentieth century, Roman Catholicism was hit by a series of allegations, many of which have since been substantiated, concerning sexual abuse of children under the legal age of consent1 by priests, nuns and people employed by the Church. Well-publicized charges that the Church in some instances deliberately covered up such crimes have fueled criticism of the institution and its leadership.

Contents

The threefold allegations

The allegations concerned:

1. The sexual abuse by religious and secular clergy of children with whom they had contact in the community;
2. The sexual abuse of children in religious-run houses, orphanages and schools, by both clergy and laity;
3. The policy of Roman Catholicism in dealing with the abuse, namely a failure to report what were criminal acts to the local police, and efforts to pressurise the victims, their families and independent witnesses, into not reporting the incidents to civil authorities. Canon law (internal church law) was often given priority of secular criminal law, an action which led some Catholic Church leaders to be accused of "perverting the course of justice", itself a criminal act.

While not every allegation stood up to scrutiny, an extremely large percentage did, resulting in the criminal presecution of some of those who engaged in the acts. Senior church leaders, including Cardinal Law of Boston (US) and Bishop Brendan Comiskey of Ferns (Ireland) were forced to resign over their mishandling of cases in their dioceses and in particular their failure to report incidents to police. In the aftermath, some national hierarchies introduced new rules of childcare and in the reporting of sex abuse allegations. However critics accused some national hierarchies of not going far enough to prevent sex abuse of children. In the aftermath of the scandals over sex abuse allegations and cases, the Catholic Church experienced a drop in numbers of Catholics attending Mass and the Sacraments, and a substantial drop in income from weekly collections from Mass goers. Critics suggested that the controversy had the potential to become the biggest crisis to hit Roman Catholicism since the Reformation.

Sex abuse allegations against Catholic clergymen in the community

The largely unrestricted contact clergyman had with children (through teaching in schools and parish links with families) meant that a pedophile in the priesthood had a far less difficult task in getting access to children than any other pedophile other than pedophile parents or guardians. In part that was because priests and religious across all religions were viewed as trustworthy individuals, whom families allowed to get close to them. The clergy were involved in every aspect of their community's and its families' lives; from baptising the young to the weekly celebration of Mass, giving a child his or her First Communion to marrying couples and being the celebrant of their funerals.

Apart from that direct family associations, many Catholic families sent their children to Catholic schools, where Catholic priests either taught as teachers or visited regularly as the local parish priest or curate. Participation in the Catholic faith involved a close association with, and proximity to, priests. While the vast majority of priests never sought to abuse a single child, the small minority who did, or who were closet pedophiles, had as a result a degree of access to children only matched by their parents or close relatives.

One of the worst examples of a clergyman using his links with families to facilitate the abuse of children occured in Ireland, where one religious priest2 systematically between 1945 and 1990 raped and sexually abused hundreds of children. The scandal over the Fr. Brendan Smyth case, and the gross mishandling of his case by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland and his Norbertine Order, caused immense damage to the Catholic Church's credibility, as did other cases, such as a parish priest, Fr. Jim Grennan, who abused children on the altar of his local church as they prepared for First Communion, and Fr. Sean Fortune, who committed suicide before his trial for child rape. The abuse by Grennon and by others in the Diocese of Ferns in south-east Ireland led to the resignation of the local bishop, Brendan Comiskey while similar scandals in the Archdiocese of Dublin severely damaged the credibility of its archbishop, Cardinal Connell. In ten years, the percentage of Irish people attending weekly Mass declined from 63% to 48%.

Sex abuse allegations in Church institutions

Like most religions Catholicism has a direct involvement in other areas beyond parish work. Its many religious orders operate schools, hospitals, orphanages, reformatory schools and are involved in social work. Many of these institutions were heavily associated with allegations of sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children in their care. While the allegations made apply to only a minority of institutions and a minority of people working in that minority of institutions, enquiries have established the existence of both abuse and of a failure of the leaderships running the institutions, when confronted with evidence of abuse, whether physical or sexual, of acting for the best interests of the children or in accordance with the criminal law in their jurisdiction. In addition governmental institutions have been criticised for neglecting their responsibilities; many of the children in orphanages and reformatory schools were placed in those institutions by agents of the state. Yet state inspectorates failed to adequately ensure that the children were properly looked after, in some cases failing to properly inquire into allegations of improper treatment of children.

Some of the most serious allegations of abuse were made against clergy who either worked in the institution or who, in an era of unqualified trust in the clergy, were allowed unlimited visitation rights and access to children. Other allegations have been made against laymen working in these institutions. A small number of sexual allegations have also been made against nuns, but most of the allegations against nuns suggest physical and emotional rather than sexual abuse. As with the secular clergy in parishes, the majority of allegations have resulted in crimimal convictions, with the details of the abuse revealed in the court cases causing shock in the wider community but in particular among Catholics.

The Church's handling of allegations

Problems caused by religious/secular clergy distinction

In many cases, the abuse suffered was compounded by the chronic mishandling of cases. Part of the mishandling was due to the unique internal governmental structures within Roman Catholicism. Religious clergy (ie those in religious orders) are not in any way answerable to the local bishop, merely to their order. So in the case of Fr. Brendan Smyth, for example, bishops who were informed of Smyth's systematic abuse of parish children had no authority to act against him.

Abusers moved from location to location

However even more serious was the manner in which those with the internal church authority to intervene (bishops against secular priests in their diocese, religious orders against religious priests) handled allegations. Instead of being removed from locations where they might be have to gain access to children, priests were routined moved to new parishes or order houses, without any warning given to those in the new house or parish as to their past actions. Thus sexual abuse by clergy frequently occured over a wide geographic area, involving many parishes, many schools, many religious institutions.

While some of the moves in some cases many have been intended to protect the abuser, many dioceses submitted priests guilty of child abuse for intensive psychotherapeutic treatment and assessment, the priest only resuming parochial duties when the bishop was advised that it was safe for them to be so assigned. In response to questions, defenders of church actions suggest that in re-assigning priests for duty after treatment they were acting on the basis of advice from medical experts, given that in many cases treatments can be successful. Critics however question whether bishops are necessarily able to form accurate judgments on the nature of the recovery of a priest, or indeed whether they paid enough heed to the qualifications and warnings issued by medical experts who were outside the Church and so part of secular society.


Failure to report criminal acts to police

From a criminal law viewpoint, the single worst failure of the Roman Catholic Church was the widespread failure of those in authority, once alerted as to the behaviour of individual sex abusers and pedophiles under their authority, to report the incidents directly to the police in their state. This phenomenon occured in every country with rare exceptions. The Church, where it saw rules as having been broken, focused almost exclusively on its own rules and its own legal code, Canon Law, rather than the criminal law in their country. Though such a phenomenon exists widely in religion in general (where disputes regularly arise over non-compliance with planning regulations, anti-discrimination legislation, employment rights, etc) in the case of child sex abuse it proved to have catastrophic consequences. The Norbertine Order, for example, knew not merely of Fr. Brendan Smyth's pedophile tendencies but of allegations of sexually interfering with children from as early as 1945, yet it was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s that the two police forces in Ireland, the [[Garda Sioch�na]] and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were able to gather sufficient information, all from non-church sources, to prosecute Smyth.

Allegations of systematic plots to conceal evidence

Reviewers of the Smyth case differ as to whether it was a deliberate plot to conceal the nature of his behaviour, or whether much of what happened involved complete incompetence by his superiors, the Abbots of Kilnacrott Abbey, or perhaps a mixture of an institution presuming that what happened to its members was its own business, plus the complete incompetence of his superiors, who failed to grasp the human and legal consequences of the actions of a particularly manipulative paedophile, who found ways to circumvent whatever restrictions the abbots placed on him. (Cardinal Daly, both as Bishop of Down and Connor (where some of the abuse took place) and later as Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh, is recorded as having been privately scathing at the Norbertine 'incompetence').

The recently publicized 1962 document Crimen Sollicitationis, which encouraged silence in the face of a range of misdemeanors by clergy, may also have encouraged bishops to cover up accusations of child molestation.

However, unambiguous evidence of individual plots to conceal evidence does exist. In 1990, Auxiliary Bishop Quinn of Cleveland was secretly recorded recommending that evidence be removed from files of priests, and that if necessary some sensitive paperwork be given to the Apostolic Nunciature, the embassy of the Holy See, on the basis that the evidence would then be covered by diplomatic immunity. [1]

In the case of Fr. Jim Grennan in Ireland, who was accused of sexually abusing 12 schoolgirls who were preparing for their local Sacrament of Confirmation under his supervision in the local church, a police file on Grennan went missing. He was never prosecuted for lack of surviving evidence. The since deceased policeman supervising the inquiry subsequently received a church award.

Payments to victims to discourage reporting of the crime

Widespread reports even suggested that some members of the hierarchy paid off victims of the criminal offence of child abuse to prevent them reporting the crime. In the mid 1990s, the Roman Catholic Archibishop (later Cardinal) Connell of Dublin 'loaned' money to a priest who had abused altar-boy Andrew Madden, to enable the priest to pay "compensation" to Madden and prevent Madden reporting the abuse to the police. Connell later claimed never to have paid money to a victim, insisting that he had simply "loaned" money to a priest who just happened to use the money to pay off his victim.

This failure has perhaps caused the biggest sense of betrayal among church members. The belief that the institution thought itself above the criminal law, in the process endangering the safety of millions of children worldwide, caused widespread shock. Its defenders sought to suggest that, though a wrong reaction, the Church's handling was a simple example of how large organisations and institutions judge issues in terms of their own rules and regulations, "looking after its own", a phenomenon reflected in the activities of major corporations, sectors of society and even political elites in how they react to unacceptable behaviour by a minority of their own members; keep the issue 'in-house' and try to find a solution without involving 'outsiders'. In the Smyth case, efforts were even made to silence a critic of the Norbertine Order's behaviour, Fr. Bruno Mulvihill, while in the aftermath of the revelation of the full story of Smyth's behaviour in a UTV television, Suffer Little Children, the vicar to the head of the Norbertines, Abbot Benjamin Mackin of the De Pere Abbey in Wisconsin in the United States came to Norbertine's Irish headquarters to speak to the Order's priests. Far from apologising, he blamed the media for covering the Smyth story, saying it was out to "attack . . . the church."3

Critics note the tendency of religion in general to assume that it, as a religion dealing with the 'word of God', is superior to civil and secular society. Catholicism's belief in itself as the "true church" of Jesus Christ, they argue, made it believe that its own rules, created by its God-ordained elite, were morally superior to mere state law, hence the priority given to Canon law over civil or criminal law enacted by secular society.

An additional complicating factor centres on the Sacrament of Confession, in which Catholics believe that any wrongs confessed to God in the sacrament, in the presence of a priest as mediator, can be forgiven but also cannot be revealed with breaching the 'seal of confession'. According to Roman Catholic theology, a paedophile who convesses his activities in the Sacrament of Confession cannot have his comments and revelations made in confession reported by his confessor to any other person, inside or outside the Church.

Continued at Catholicism and Pedophilia

References

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