As Judge Judy would say, "There's something wrong with you."
And, "You're an idiot."
He's not alone in defending pedophilia. Look at the Catholic Church:
For more than two decades, the Catholic Church has grappled with a series of clergy sexual abuse scandals and lawsuits. The cases have cost an estimated $2 billion in settlements and have shaken the faith of many of the church's members. Still more have expressed outrage with the church leadership, which has responded by making significant changes in its disciplinary procedures but often by characterizing the attention to the cases as an attack on the church.
As the sexual abuse crisis has unfolded, it has become clear the issue is more than a passing storm. The church is undergoing nothing less than an epochal shift: It pits those who hold fast to a more traditional idea of protecting bishops and priests above all against those who call for more openness and accountability. The battle lines are drawn between the church and society at large, which clearly clamors for accountability, and also inside the church itself.
The crisis also has pit the moral legacies of two popes against each other: the towering and modernizing John Paul II, who nonetheless did little about sexual abuse; and his successor, Benedict XVI, who in recent years, at least, has taken the issue of pedophile priests more seriously.
But a recent wave of disclosures in Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands and in the United States have led to increasing scrutiny of Benedict and his actions while a bishop in Germany and as a cardinal who later headed the Vatican's bureaucracy.
In May 2011, the Vatican directed its bishops to make fighting sexual abuse of minors by clerics a priority. The directives, detailed in a letter, are among the clearest to emerge from the Vatican since the sexual abuse scandal erupted in Europe. But the recommendations are not binding in church law and do not spell out any enforcement procedures or punishments for bishops who have been found to have violated church law.
Days after the announcement, a five-year study commissioned by American bishops to provide a definitive answer to the origins of the sexual abuse crisis was released. It concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame. Instead, the abuse occurred because poorly trained, stressful priests landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.
In the same month in Belgium, after a tumultuous year following the resignation of a Roman Catholic bishop who admitted sexually abusing children, the church agreed in principle to compensate some of the hundreds who claimed that they were also victims of clerics. A report by a commission set up by the church said in 2010 that 13 people were believed to have committed suicide as a result of sexual abuse by clerics.
In the United States, bishops disregarded victims’ advocates who had called for a more substantial overhaul of guidelines established in 2002 and in June voted to retain their policy with only minor revisions. The policy’s cornerstone, which stirred great debate among the bishops at the time, was a commitment to remove from ministry every priest credibly accused of abuse even once, a tenet referred to as “zero tolerance.”
That commitment has been called into question in 2011 with revelations that accused priests were allowed to continue in ministry in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph. Those bishops did not forward details about all the cases to their sexual abuse advisory boards or the police.
A scathing report released in July by the Irish government said the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests as recently as 2009, long after it issued guidelines meant to protect children, and the Vatican tacitly encouraged the cover-up by ignoring the guidelines.
Background
The chapter of sexual abuse of children in the church's history can be said to date from 1985, when the case of Rev. Gilbert Gauthe in Louisiana cause public outcry. Mr. Gauthe was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for molesting at least 35 children.
More people came forward with charges of sexual abuse by priests, but it took until 1992 for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to spell out policy recommendations that advised bishops in dealing with such cases.
After more cases of abuse emerged in Dallas; Santa Fe, N.M.; Fall River, Mass.; and Santa Rosa, Calif., many dioceses adopted the recommendations. They called for removing priests accused of abuse from service, sending them into treatment and providing victims with counseling and pastoral care. The issue faded from the public view.
Behind the scenes, however, victims were still stepping forward. Quietly, insisting that confidentiality was necessary for the victims and the accused, church lawyers settled hundreds of lawsuits, paying victims anywhere from a few thousand dollars to millions each. The church also quietly reassigned many of the priests to new parishes.
The issue erupted again in Boston in 2002 and in Ireland in 2009. In 2010, disclosures out of Germany cut particularly close to Benedict, who was defended by many within the church as having done more to reform Vatican policies than anyone else.
Boston
The sexual abuse scandal erupted in Boston in 2002, after a judge ordered the release of documents sought by The Boston Globe in the case of Father John J. Geoghan, a priest transferred among half a dozen parishes and accused of abusing more than 130 boys over three decades. In the following months, hundreds of people came forward to say they had been molested by priests.
There were calls for Cardinal Bernard F. Law, Boston's archbishop, to resign after documents were released which showed that he allowed a priest with a known background of sexual abuse, the Rev. Paul R. Shanley, to continue ministering, not only in Boston, but also in California and New York.
Pope John Paul II accepted Cardinal Law's resignation, after 11 months of revelations that the cardinal and other archdiocesan officials he supervised repeatedly allowed priests accused of sexual abuse to remain in the ministry, often transferring them from one parish to another without informing parishioners or law-enforcement officials about the accusations.
The Vatican's resistance to public action had by then become part of the controversy.
Philadelphia
Philadelphia is unusual in that the archdiocese has been the subject of not one but two grand jury reports. The first, in 2005, found credible accusations of abuse by 63 priests, whose activities had been covered up by the church. But there were no indictments, mainly because the statute of limitations had expired.
By 2011, the climate was different. When the grand jury issued its report on Feb. 10, 2011, the district attorney immediately indicted two priests, Charles Engelhardt and James Brennan; a parochial school teacher, Bernard Shero; and a man who had left the priesthood, Edward Avery, on charges of rape or assault. He also indicted Msgr. William Lynn on charges of endangering the welfare of children — the first time a senior church official has been charged with covering up abuse in the sex scandal in the United States.
When the archdiocese learns of reports of sexual abuse, it is now supposed to report them to the district attorney, which is what led to the most recent grand jury investigation. Extensions on the statute of limitations also made prosecutions possible this time.
But even with these changes, some were surprised to see the grand jury paint a picture of a church where serious problems still festered.
The possibility that even one predatory priest, not to mention three dozen, might still be serving in parishes — “on duty in the archdiocese today, with open access to new young prey,” as the grand jury put it in February 2011 — sent the church reeling.
Of those 37 priests, 21 were suspended; three others already had been placed on administrative leave after the grand jury detailed accusations against them. Five others would have been suspended, the church said in a statement in March 2011, but three are no longer active and two are no longer active in the Philadelphia Archdiocese. The church said that in eight cases, no further investigation was warranted.
The statement said the accusations against the 21 ranged from “sexual abuse of a minor to boundary issues with minors,” but did not describe them further. Nor did it name the 21 whom it suspended, drawing the fury of groups representing abuse victims.
The announcement was a major embarrassment for Cardinal Justin Rigali, who, in response to the grand jury report, had initially said there were no priests in active ministry “who have an admitted or established allegation of sexual abuse of a minor against them.”
A few days later, Cardinal Rigali placed three priests on administrative leave. His statement in March did not explain why he had made his initial assurances nor did it say why the priests had not been suspended earlier.
Growing European Scandal
In 2010, a wave of church sexual abuse scandals emerged in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, adding to the fallout from a broad abuse investigation in Ireland.
The scandals, especially those in Germany, cut particularly close to Benedict, who was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982, before spending more than two decades in charge of the Vatican's doctrinal arm, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is ultimately responsible for investigating abuse cases.
It also emerged that in 1998, top Vatican officials, including the future pope, did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin. The decision came after the priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, appealed to Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, for leniency.
The matter was one of several instances in which documents indicated that Benedict or his subordinates failed to act strongly against abuser priests-a failing that Vatican officials, cardinals and many bishops heatedly rejected. After angry counterattacks by the Catholic Church against its critics over the scandal, the Vatican struck a more conciliatory tone in its public statements. The Vatican issued guidelines urging bishops to report abuse cases to civil authorities when required by local laws and Benedict vowed that he would take action to deal with the widening scandal.
Ireland
In November 2009, a group appointed by the Irish government issued a scathing report saying that the church and the police in Ireland systematically colluded in covering up decades of sexual abuse of children by priests in Dublin. An earlier report chronicled the sexual, emotional and physical abuse of orphans and foster children over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools.
The Irish scandal, building for years, took on new momentum in March 2010 after disclosures that as a youthful priest 35 years ago, Cardinal Sean Brady had two boys sign papers promising not to tell anybody outside of a secret church inquiry—not the police, not their own families, not even by a silent wink, according to the covenant the boys were asked to sign—about their abuse allegations against an Irish priest.
The inquiry had the effect of shielding and prolonging the career of the priest, Rev. Brendan Smyth, who was exposed 15 years later as the most notorious child-abuser in the history of the Irish church.
By June 1, 2010, Pope Benedict had accepted the resignation of five Irish bishops over the sexual abuse crisis there.
In May, the Vatican said that Joseph Duffy, bishop of Clogher, and Francis Lagan, the auxiliary bishop of Derry, stepped down after reaching the retirement age of 75. Bishop James Moriarty tendered his resignation after an official report named him among Church leaders in the Dublin archdiocese who had covered up cases of child sex abuse by priests for 30 years. In March, the pope accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee, who was accused of mishandling complaints against priests in his diocese of Cloyne. In December 2009, Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick stepped down after an investigation into child sex abuse by clergymen accused him of ignoring reports of crimes by priests in his diocese.
In one of his most concrete actions since the scandal began in Europe, Benedict on May 31, 2010, appointed a high-profile team of prelates, including the archbishop of New York, to investigate Irish dioceses and seminaries.
The pope had announced that he would open the investigation in a strong letter to Irish Catholics in March. In the letter he expressed "shame and remorse" for "sinful and criminal" acts committed by members of the clergy.
Ireland's Cloyne Report
The Cloyne Report, a study issued by the Irish government, said in July that the church in Ireland covered up the misdeeds of predatory priests as recently as 2009 and that the Vatican had encouraged the cover-up by ignoring church guidelines issued by Irish clerics. Alan Shatter, the Irish justice minister, called the findings “truly scandalous,” adding that the church’s earlier promises to report all abuse cases since 1995 to civil authorities were “built on sand.” Abuse victims called the report more evidence that the church sought to protect priests rather than children.
In Germany in July, the country’s Roman Catholic bishops took new steps to bring previously unreported abuse to light. The German bishops said they would allow outside investigators to look for abuse cases in diocesan personnel records dating back at least 10 years, and in some cases all the way to 1945, though there were indications that some crucial records may have already been destroyed.
In both Germany and Ireland, the abuse scandal has touched the highest echelons of the church. The new developments showed the tensions between civil and ecclesiastical justice in a crisis that has shaken the church’s moral authority worldwide. The Irish report in particular revealed a complex tug of war between the Irish church and the Vatican over how to handle abuse, with a fine line between confusion and obstruction.
The Cloyne Report, drafted by an independent investigative committee, found that the clergy in the Diocese of Cloyne, a rural area of County Cork, did not act on complaints against 19 priests from 1996 to 2009. The report also found that two allegations against one priest were reported to the police, but that there was no evidence of any subsequent inquiry.
John Magee, the bishop of Cloyne since 1987, who had previously served as private secretary to three popes, resigned ini 2010.
The Cloyne Report is the Irish government’s fourth in recent years on aspects of the scandal. It shows that abuses were still occurring and being covered up 13 years after the church in Ireland issued child protection guidelines in 1996, and that civil officials were failing to investigate allegations. The report warned that other dioceses might have similar failings.
Most damaging, the report said that the Congregation for the Clergy, an arm of the Vatican that oversees the priesthood, had not recognized the 1996 guidelines. That “effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore the procedures” and “gave comfort and support” to priests who “dissented from the stated Irish church policy,” the report said.
Germany
The scandal in Germany has not reached the same scale as the number of abuse cases in Ireland but has nonetheless damaged the church's reputation and focused increasing pressure on Benedict to address his role in the handling of abuse cases over the years.
As archbishop of Munich and Freising from 1977 to 1982, the future pope approved the transfer to Munich for psychiatric treatment of a priest who had sexually abused boys. The priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, was quickly returned to pastoral work with children.
Even though a German court convicted Father Hullermann of molesting boys in 1986, he continued working with children for years.
He was suspended from his duties only in mid-March 2010, after new accusations of sexual abuse emerged, both from Father Hullermann's first assignment near Essen in the 1970s and from 1998 in Garching.
Benedict's supporters say that although he approved Father Hullermann's move to his archdiocese, they assume that he may not have paid attention to a memo informing him that the priest, who had sexually abused boys in his previous posting, was almost immediately allowed to resume parish duties.
The central focus of the church scandal in Germany has been sexual abuse, but corporal punishment in church-run institutions has also attracted public attention. Benedict's brother, Msgr. Georg Ratzinger, apologized in March 2010 for slapping children during his tenure as the director of a choir in the Bavarian city of Regensburg, where he worked from 1964 to 1994.
On April 22, 2010, German Bishop Walter Mixa, accused of beating children decades ago when he was a priest, tendered his resignation to Benedict.
The Netherlands
The Roman Catholic Church faced a new set of damaging allegations in the Netherlands in 2010. Nearly 2,000 people had made complaints of sexual or physical abuse against the church, in a country with only four million Catholics, according to an investigative commission that issued a report in December 2010.
Nearly all of the cases are decades old, with probably no more than 10 from the past 20 years.
The reaction of the church appears to have fueled the crisis. Asked in March 2010 on television about the hundreds of complaints already surfacing, one of the church’s most senior figures, Cardinal Adrianus Simonis, shocked the nation by replying not in Dutch but in German. “Wir haben es nicht gewusst” — We knew nothing — he said, using a phrase associated with Nazi excuses after World War II.
“A lot of people perceived it as an affirmation of the culture of covering up cases,” said Peter Nissen, a professor of the history of religion at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He stated that it meant to many, “ ‘We should have known’ or ‘We knew but we didn’t want to know.’ ”
In the interim report, a commission headed by Wim Deetman, a Protestant and former education minister, said it had received roughly 1,975 reports of sexual or physical abuse, some directly but others through a body set up for victims, called Hulp en Recht, or Help and Justice.
One central accusation in the Netherlands is that, as in other countries, known abusers were simply transferred to new parishes.
In late 2010, it emerged that a Roman Catholic order, the Salesians of Don Bosco, paid about $22,000 to settle an abuse claim against one bishop, Jan ter Schure, who died in 2003. The abuse is said to have taken place in Ugchelen between 1948 and 1953. The order declined to comment.
Meanwhile, Hulp en Recht is examining claims against a former bishop, Jo Gijsen who has been accused of having an abusive relationship with a student at the Rolduc seminary between 1959 and 1961. He has denied accusations against him.
Vatican Reaction
Many in the church hierarchy have grown increasingly aggressive in the face of sweeping criticism, and more specifically, at charges that Benedict failed to act against abuse cases. They have strongly denounced what they have framed as a campaign of denigration of the church and its pontiff.
The closing of ranks notably included a sermon delivered before the pope on Good Friday 2010 by the Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, the official preacher of the papal household, who equated the criticism over the priest sex abuse scandal with anti-Semitism, antagonizing both victims' groups and Jewish leaders. The Vatican's official spokesman disassociated the Holy See and the pope from the sentiment.
The Vatican on April 12, 2010, posted guidelines on its Web site directing church officials to follow civil laws mandating the reporting of crimes to authorities if required by local law.
Benedict, making a rare direct comment on the crisis, promised on April 21 that the Roman Catholic Church would take action to deal with the widening scandal.
The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on July 15 making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia. The overall document codified existing procedures that allow the Vatican to try priests accused of child sexual abuse using faster juridical procedures rather than full ecclesiastical trials.
Those measures fell short of the hopes of many advocates for victims of priestly abuse, who dismissed them as "tweaking" rather than a bold overhaul. The new rules do not, for example, hold bishops accountable for abuse by priests on their watch, nor do they require them to report sexual abuse to civil authorities — though the less formal "guidelines" issued in April encourage reporting if local law compels it.
But what astonished many Catholics was the inclusion of the attempt to ordain women in a list of the "more grave delicts," or offenses, which included pedophilia, as well as heresy, apostasy and schism. The issue, some critics said, was less the ordination of women, which is not discussed seriously inside the church hierarchy, but the Vatican's suggestion that pedophilia is a comparable crime in a document billed as a response to the sexual abuse crisis.
Vatican Directives
On May 16, 2011, the Vatican told bishops to make a priority of fighting sexual abuse of minors by clerics. It directed them to set out “clear and coordinated” procedures by 2012 and to cooperate with law enforcement authorities when required. The directives, detailed in a letter, are a response to a sexual abuse scandal erupted in Europe in 2010.
The guidelines note that the sexual abuse of minors by clerics is not only an offense punishable by church law, but also “a crime prosecuted by civil law.” Still, they play down the role of the civilian review boards that have investigated abuse in Ireland, the United States and elsewhere — and that have often faulted bishops for not stopping abuse — noting that those boards “cannot substitute” for bishops’ ultimate authority in adjudicating abuse cases.
The letter’s emphasis on the power of bishops did not go over well with some victims’ advocates, who have said that the bishops themselves have contributed to the problem by being more concerned with protecting priests than with protecting children. One victims' rights group criticized it, saying enforcement was missing and bishops who violated the guidelines faced few penalties, if any.
The letter states that bishops are required to investigate all claims and send all cases deemed “credible” to the Vatican for review. It says that bishops should also listen to victims, create “safe environment” programs for minors and properly screen seminarians. Local bishops, however, did not have to make their guidelines church law, as bishops in the United States have done, but could ask the Vatican for permission to do so.
Asked why it took the Vatican more than a year to issue guidelines that did not alter church law, a Vatican spokesman said the letter had to be vetted by multiple Vatican offices.
5-Year Study by American Bishops
A five-year study commissioned by American bishops concluded that the cause of the sexual abuse crisis could be traced to poorly trained, poorly monitored priests who began their work amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s. The report was released on May 18, 2011, by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington.
Bishops have floated the “blame Woodstock” explanation since the church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002; Pope Benedict XVI used such reasoning after similar problems erupted in Europe in 2010.
But the study is likely to be regarded as the most authoritative analysis of the scandal in the Catholic Church in America. The study, initiated in 2006, was conducted by a team of researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City at a cost of $1.8 million. About half was provided by the bishops, with additional money contributed by Catholic organizations and foundations. The National Institute of Justice, the research agency of the United States Department of Justice, supplied about $280,000.
The researchers concluded that it was not possible for the church, or for anyone, to identify abusive priests in advance. Priests who abused minors have no particular “psychological characteristics,” “developmental histories” or mood disorders that distinguished them from priests who had not abused, the researchers found.
Since the scandal broke, conservatives in the church have blamed gay priests for perpetrating the abuse, while liberals have argued that the all-male, celibate culture of the priesthood was the cause. This report will satisfy neither flank.
The report notes that homosexual men began entering the seminaries “in noticeable numbers” from the late 1970s through the 1980s. By the time this cohort entered the priesthood, in the mid-1980s, the reports of sexual abuse of minors by priests began to drop and then to level off. If anything, the report says, the abuse decreased as more gay priests began serving the church.
Many more boys than girls were victimized, the report says, not because the perpetrators were gay, but simply because the priests had more access to boys than to girls, in parishes, schools and extracurricular activities.
In one of the most counterintuitive findings, the report says that fewer than 5 percent of the abusive priests exhibited behavior consistent with pedophilia, which it defines as a “psychiatric disorder that is characterized by recurrent fantasies, urges and behaviors about prepubescent children.
That finding is likely to prove controversial, in part because the report employs a definition of “prepubescent” children as those age 10 and under. Using this cutoff, the report found that only 22 percent of the priests’ victims were prepubescent. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies a prepubescent child as generally age 13 or younger. If the John Jay researchers had used that cutoff, a vast majority of the abusers’ victims would have been considered prepubescent.
Robert M. Hoatson, a priest and a founder of Road to Recovery, which offers counseling and referrals to victims, said the idea that the sexual and social upheavals of past decades were to blame for the abuse of children was an attempt to shift responsibility from church leaders. Mr. Hoatson said he had been among those who had been abused.“It deflects responsibility from the bishops and puts it on to a sociological problem,” he said. “This is a people problem. It wasn’t because of the ’70s, and it wasn’t the ’60s, and it wasn’t because of the 1450s. This was something individuals did.” - - - The New York Times