While Some Catholics Leave, Others Remain Loyal

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While Some Catholics Leave, Others Remain Loyal

Sexual-abuse revelations shock many out of passivity.

Can the Roman Catholic Church survive 50 years of grievous sinning by priests and bishops?

Many Catholics have abandoned the church, never to return.

But a sense of loyalty and hopefulness is causing others to remain – at least to see whether change really is coming – according to Suzanne Morse, a spokeswoman for Voice of the Faithful, a Boston-based grass-roots activist group that is pushing for reform.

Why do Catholics remain in the church?

'There is a sense of being part of a community that is really important to Catholics," Morse told religionjournal.com.

People who have been raised Catholic also have "a bedrock sense of morality," she said. And that is why widespread revelations of priests sexually abusing children – and bishops covering up for them – have been so devastating for so many Catholics, Morse said.

The clergy have "failed so badly."

Some Catholics who have abandoned the church will never return, Morse acknowledges. Others will stay if they see that "there is a place for their voice to be heard" in changing the church.

The sexual-abuse revelations have shocked many, but not all, lay Catholics out of a lifetime of passivity, Morse said. "A lot of people raised and socialized into the Catholic Church were taught 'Don't question what Father says, or what the bishops say.' "

Some lay Catholics are now actively involved with organizations such as Voice of the Faithful, which is seeking change. For others, it "takes a little while to make the mental shift" to understanding that "you have a right" to be an important part of a healthy church and part of change.

Morse calls it discarding childish ways and growing up into an "adult form of Catholicism."

A lot of Catholics are highly educated and want to use their gifts and talents to improve the governance and administration of the church; to help it to become "a healthy institution – which it currently is not," she said.

Change – even if it comes – doesn't mean that the church will ever become a democracy, however.

"It is necessary to safeguard a balanced relationship between the role of lay people and that which properly belongs to the diocesan priest or pastor," Pope John Paul II said in a Jan. 10 address at the Vatican. "Pastors, in the exercise of their office, should never be considered as simple executors of decisions stemming from majority opinions coming out of Catholic assemblies. The structure of the church cannot be conceived on simply human political models." (See religionjournal.com 01/24/04.)

"The Catholic in me yearns to see a recovery for the church," says Catholic journalist and author Jason Berry, who calls the current situation the "worst crisis in the church since the Protestant Reformation."

"Yet many years of interviewing abuse survivors, seeing the terrible damage done to their families, and coming up, time after time, against the huge wall of institutional mendacity leaves the journalist in me skeptical of making any prediction," he said.

Berry has said in speeches and articles that the church cannot get past this crisis until John Paul or his successor meets with survivors and gets to know them as people.

"As St. Thomas doubted until he put his finger in Christ's wounds, so the pope must feel and see the spiritual wounds of those whom the church has most ruthlessly betrayed," he said.

"If the next pope does not oversee deep structural changes, the American church will continue to lose members to evangelical congregations, or at some point a breakaway Reform Catholic Church movement will begin. ... Anything less than a major structural overhaul will not halt the decline of the church as we know it in America."

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Report Details Shameful Abuse in Catholic Church
10,000 children allegedly victimized by more than 4,000 priests.

Roman Catholic priests were involved in abusing more than 10,000 children – mostly boys – over half a century, according to two extensive studies.

A total of 10,667 children allegedly were victimized by 4,392 priests from 1950 to 2002. The number represents about 4 percent of American Catholic clerics.

The staggering extent of abuse described in the studies still represents an undercount, say researchers, who depended on self-reporting by American bishops and by victims, many of whom might not have come forward out of fear or shame. Some of the alleged perpetrators are dead.

The studies mark the first time the Catholic Church in the United States has made such an extensive accounting of sexual abuse. They reported the number of accused priests; the number, age and gender of the alleged victims; and how much money the church has spent on legal fees, settlements and psychological counseling.

Both studies were highly critical of U.S. Catholic bishops who turned their backs on victims and protected and forgave priests without punishment in order to try to protect the reputation of the church.

The studies did not answer crucial questions such as who is responsible for covering up information pertaining to sexual offenders, whether guilty parties are still in positions of authority, and why only one bishop has resigned because of the cover-up of the sexual-abuse scandal, angry victims' rights groups said.

One of the studies is a survey of dioceses and religious orders conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. It found that the church spent $572 million on lawyers' fees, settlements and therapy for victims, and treatment for the priests.

Researchers told The New York Times that the figure did not include several recent settlements, such as the estimated $85 million paid to victims by the Archdiocese of Boston (see religionjournal.com 10/26/03), and that 14 percent of dioceses and religious orders provided none of the financial information requested by the researchers. A more accurate figure of money paid by the Catholic Church to sex-abuse victims is about $750 million, researchers said.

The other study is a review board's analysis of the causes of the crisis. It was written by prominent Catholic lawyers and business people whom the bishops had appointed. They interviewed 85 bishops and cardinals, Vatican officials, experts and a few of the victims, all of whom were promised that their comments would not be attributed, which resulted in much candor, the study said.

Researchers concluded that Catholic seminaries tolerated a gay subculture and that a small group of multiple offenders appeared to be responsible for a large share of the abuse.

The study singled out a few bishops by name, including Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who resigned as archbishop of Boston in the scandal; Cardinal Edward M. Egan of New York, who failed, in his former position as bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., to remove a priest who had a pattern of accusations; and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, who resisted grand-jury subpoenas that sought church files on accused priests.

Bishops told police of only 14 percent of the priests accused of abuse. The rest were never reported and never investigated. Researchers said they found no expression of outrage in church correspondence from a supervising bishop about any priest that the bishops knew had been accused of abuse, the Times said.

Bishops who sheltered abusers allowed the "smoke of Satan" to enter the church, said a person who read the studies and provided other details to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The church's canon laws were partly to blame because they favored the accused and made it hard for bishops to remove men from the priesthood, the review board's study said. There were avenues available in canon law to discipline the priests, but the bishops did not use them.

Among those interviewed, "some witnesses likened the clerical culture to a feudal or military culture and said that priests and bishops who rocked the boat were less likely to advance," the study said.

Interviews suggested that Vatican officials did not comprehend the gravity of the crisis or understand the seriousness of sexual abuse.

The two studies, commissioned by the American Catholic bishops in 2002 in response to accusations of a massive cover-up, provide the most comprehensive examination ever, in any institution, of sexual abusers of children.

It is not yet possible to determine whether Catholic priests are more prone to molest children than are other professionals who work with children, authors of the studies said. The review board's study mentions that more than 80 percent of the abuse at issue was of a homosexual nature.

Researchers told the Times they concluded that the abuse was a crime of opportunity because priests had more free access to teenage boys than to teenage girls. James Levine, who coordinated the study, likened the situation to male prisoners who have sex with men, not because they are gay, but because that is who they have access to.

Findings showed the abuse consisted of not just a pat or an inappropriate remark, as some church officials had suggested. In 27 percent of the cases, the cleric performed oral sex on the child; in 25 percent of the cases, he penetrated the child with his penis, or tried to.

Researchers also blamed lawyers who advised the bishops and the psychiatric professionals – most of them in Catholic-run institutions – who had a vested interest in claiming that they had rehabilitated abusive priests.

Researchers said there must be consequences for bishops, seminary administrators and church leaders, but the studies did not make recommendations for any particular reform, or judgments on whether church doctrine or rules need to be changed.

The studies send a message "that the days of secrecy and cover-up are over," the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, editor of the weekly Catholic magazine America, told the Los Angeles Times. "We can never go back to that. The church is now the most studied institution in America on sexual abuse." Bishops said they hope the release of the studies will mark a turning point in the scandal.

But figures do not provide the full picture, several observers said.

"Every kind of sex crime is underreported," said Michele Galietta, an assistant professor of psychology at John Jay who worked on the study. "This should not be regarded as the full extent of the problem."

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, told the Times: "We are a tad closer to the truth. The only safe assumption is we're still not seeing or hearing the whole picture."

Leaders of Voice of the Faithful, a Catholic group that helps victims, expressed outrage at the "absence of bishop accountability" in the studies. The studies stop "far short of providing critical information needed to ensure that this heartbreaking tragedy never happens again in the Catholic Church," the group said in a news release.

"The glaring omission in this report is that there is no accounting of the number of bishops who knowingly transferred sexually abusive priests," said James E. Post, president of Voice of the Faithful. Voice of the Faithful called on concerned citizens to sign petitions on its Web site calling for bishop accountability.

Steve Krueger, executive director of Voice of the Faithful, said Catholic laity "can no longer cede responsibility for the future of the Catholic Church to the institutional church." The laity "must find ways to be meaningfully engaged with the administrative affairs of the church, and that the truth that has been kept from Catholics for decades must see the light of day," he said.

"I have always embraced being Catholic and the tenets of my faith," said Suzy Nauman, a Voice of the Faithful member and mother of three. "But I cannot embrace this place the church's hierarchical leadership has taken us to. ... I know they must be held responsible for their actions if I ever expect my children to embrace their Catholicism."