By John Beaumont in New Oxford Review (June 2010)
John Beaumont is a lawyer by training who works as a legal consultant and freelance writer on Catholic issues. He is the author of Roads to Rome: A Guide to Notable Converts from Britain and Ireland from the Reformation to the Present Day, forthcoming from St. August¬ine’s Press.
Let me start by saying that just one single act of sexual abuse is appalling. This is not just a mantra to be repeated for the sake of form. It is true, and to read of some of the cases of abuse is to know despair on the human level. But there is more that needs to be said, both on the general issue of bad deeds within the Church and on the specific questions raised at this point in time.
It is not surprising that even Catholics have been asking how the Catholic Church, founded by the God-Man and claiming as one of her defining marks that of holiness, can still claim to be the Body of Christ, the representative of our Blessed Lord in the world today, when those ordained to her sacred priesthood stoop to the very depths of iniquity by sexually abusing God’s little ones.
In fact, we can answer this question with some degree of confidence. The first step is surely to recognize that this is, of course, not a new problem. Anyone with a sense of history should know that, even in the highest echelons, such things can go on and have gone on throughout the life of the Church.
Perhaps the best way to respond is to refer to the witness of John Henry Cardinal Newman, the man about to be beatified by the present Pope. Newman was asked by an inquirer why the Catholic Church should be in many respects so unlike what we should expect and wish her to be. This was Newman’s answer:
Doubtless the face of the visible Church is very disappointing to an earnest mind, nay, in a certain sense, a scandal. I assert, rather than grant, this grave and remarkable fact. Another remarkable fact is this, — that it has ever been so. I do not believe there ever was a time when the gravest scandals did not exist in the Church, and act as impediments to the success of its mission…. It is also a fact, that, in spite of them still, the Church has ever got on and made way, to the surprise of the world; as an army may fight a series of bloody battles, and lose men, and yet go forward from victory to victory…. And it is a further fact, that Our Lord distinctly predicted these scandals as inevitable; nay further, He spoke of His Church as in its very constitution made up of good and bad, of wheat and weeds, of the precious and the vile. One out of His twelve Apostles fell, and one of the original seven deacons. Thus, a Church, such as we behold, is bound up with the very idea of Christianity.
What we have to appreciate is the vast risk that Christ was taking by building His Church out of people like us. The treasures of the Church are held in fragile earthen vessels. One of Newman’s biographers, Meriol Trevor, saw this clearly: “Because God created humankind with free will, ‘what is wrong with the Church’ in any age is the result of human fallibility, not a failure of Divine providence, which has always maintained it within the Way, the Truth and the Life. Catholics have always known this and have never seen any bad policies of Popes, corrupt practices of clerics, disciplinary injustices or devotional aberrations as invalidating the apostolic authority of the faith, or as interrupting the communication of Divine life through the sacraments. The Way is always there for all to follow.” If, then, the Church were merely a human institution, she would have collapsed long ago, as one earthly empire after another has collapsed during her 2,000-year history.
On the issue of the present crisis, Pope Benedict XVI has emphasized the crucial importance of prayer on behalf of the victims of abuse. One must also endorse the need for prayers for the Holy Father himself. In addition, in light of the unbalanced attack launched against the Church by such atheist celebrities as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, here are ten crucial points that we must bear in mind if we are to inject balance into the present discussions.
1. Christopher Hitchens claims that then-Cardinal Ratzinger told bishops that anyone who disclosed “child rape and torture by priests” would be excommunicated. In fact, Cardinal Ratzinger referred to a duty on the part of bishops to denounce such crimes and to automatically excommunicate those who failed to do so. What Hitchens stated was the complete opposite of the truth.
2. Fr. Lawrence Murphy in Milwaukee was abusing his victims from 1955 to 1974. The Vatican was not told about this until 1996. When the case was reported originally, the police did not believe the victims and absolved the priest. What no one seems to appreciate is that the proceedings brought by the Church against Fr. Murphy were never dropped. On the day he died, he was still a defendant in a Church criminal trial, as has been made clear by Fr. Thomas Brundage, the judge at his trial. Fr. Brundage stated that if he had been asked to abate this trial, he would have appealed to the supreme court of the Church, or to Pope John Paul II if necessary. He added that Cardinal Ratzinger was not involved in the case at all. Needless to say, no newspaper reporter has ever interviewed Fr. Brundage, yet he has been falsely quoted in the press.
3. It is interesting to note that accusations against the Pope in respect to the Murphy case are being made by Rembert Weakland, the former archbishop of Milwaukee. It is important to remember that it was Archbishop Weakland who at the time threatened the parents of victims of abuse, stating that they were guilty of slander. It was Weakland who shredded many copies of reports about predator priests. And it was Weakland who paid out $450,000 of archdiocesan funds to buy off Paul Marcoux, with whom he had had a homosexual relationship. Finally, Archbishop Weakland falsely stated in a letter to the Vatican that he had instructed Fr. Brundage to abate the proceedings against Fr. Murphy.
4. Cardinal Ratzinger only managed abuse cases after 2001. Before then, cases did not have to go to Rome. Only laicization cases in which the priest did not consent to that process went to Rome — and those did not go to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) headed by Cardinal Ratzinger. Only abuse cases involving the Sacrament of Penance went to the CDF.
5. Cardinal Ratzinger stopped the practice (found to be ineffective) of sending priests to therapists, a practice used regularly, of course, by secular bodies. Ratzinger fast-tracked the defrocking of priests and promoted cooperation at the diocesan level between the Church and the police. He waived the statute of limitations and included Internet offenses within the jurisdiction of canon law.
6. In relation to allegations of secrecy, there must always be an element of confidentiality until any trial is complete to protect the good name of the witnesses, to shield the victims from publicity, and to encourage other victims to come forward. Also, in a free society one can hardly start with a presumption of guilt in the case of the defendant, who has rights in law. Remember also the particular difficulty in respect to cases involving the Sacrament of Penance, in which a priest cannot break the seal of confession even to defend himself against an accusation.
7. Nothing in canon law prohibits or impedes reporting to the police. Since 2001 bishops must report to the police or social services all allegations of abuse. Since 2002 there are records of the exact number of allegations made, the action taken, and the outcome. No other organization provides this. There are also now clear and independent procedures nationally and in every parish and diocese for reporting allegations of abuse to civil authorities.
8. In view of the fact that the great majority of priestly abusers are homosexual, it is difficult to see how the abolition of the celibacy rule for priests would assist in any way. What has been much more effective is the definitive disavowal of the sexual-psychological theories of such as the late Carl Rogers, used at one time in many seminaries and religious houses.
9. As far as statistics are concerned, in the past forty years 0.4 percent of the priests of England and Wales have faced allegations of child abuse. Fewer than this have been found guilty. With respect to figures worldwide, the total number of priests and religious is approximately 400,000. In the past ten years the Holy See has received 3,000 complaints about sexual matters, of which 60 percent related to sexual abuse of minors. The media have claimed that thousands of children were abused in Irish Catholic institutions and that it was a “holocaust.” In fact, there were 381 claims of sexual abuse made between 1914 and 1999, according to the Irish government’s official commission, a period of time in which 25,000 people attended the institutions in question. Though the actual figure is not negligible, statistically it hardly qualifies as a “holocaust.” It is instructive to note that the figures for other groups in society are much higher — between 40 and 60 percent of sexual abuse of children is committed by family members, for example, compared with two percent by Catholic priests, which is comparable to figures for Protestant clergy. The rate of abuse among schoolteachers, psychologists, juvenile-prison employees, and athletic coaches is also significantly higher than among Catholic priests. Nevertheless, as stated above, even one incident is one too many.
10. Pope Benedict has repeatedly apologized for the shame of clerical sexual abuse of children, both to a worldwide audience and in the various places he has visited. This is unprecedented. He has met with victims. He recently disciplined an entire bishops’ conference (the Irish). In sum, he has been the most effective Church official ever in reacting to sexual abuse by priests, and has also taken the initiative in putting into effect strong measures to prevent abuse.
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The Church must respond to this scandal with penance, prayer, and fasting generally, and with genuine contrition where faults have been unearthed. This must be done in light of the truth, however, and the evidence is that some of the Church’s assailants have an agenda of their own and are prepared to use dishonest tricks to succeed in their aim. This is a difficult balance for Catholics to hold fast to, but at the human level the future of the faith depends on our succeeding.
