Vatican defrocks priest in abuse case

The Vatican has defrocked a local priest accused of sexually abusing an altar boy who later committed suicide, the Archdiocese of Seattle announced Monday.

Gerald Moffat, 75, most recently a pastor at St. Hubert Parish in Langley on Whidbey Island, had been on administrative leave since July 2002, when molestation allegations against him first surfaced.

Moffat continues to deny the accusations, according to his attorney Steven Moen, who represented Moffat in two lawsuits involving accusations of sex abuse.

The archdiocese's announcement comes little more than three years after one of Moffat's alleged victims, Jeff Alfieri, committed suicide in the parking lot of Holy Family Catholic Church in Kirkland.

Alfieri, 43, sued in 2002, contending that Moffat had repeatedly sexually abused him while he had been an altar boy at the church in the early 1970s.

Moffat considered Alfieri's death "very unfortunate," Moen said, but he has always maintained he is innocent.

The archdiocese settled the Alfieri case for $600,000 in June 2005, though his parents said at the time that the monetary award did little to assuage their grief or reassure them that Moffat would be held accountable.

The archdiocese formed a panel of lawyers, church officials and therapists in 2003 to review cases against priests such as Moffat and recommend whether they should be defrocked or allowed to return to the ministry.

In Moffat's case, the archdiocese and the review board recommended he be defrocked and forwarded their findings to the Vatican for final action, archdiocese spokesman Greg Magnoni said.

The Vatican concurred, and in a written statement released Monday, Archbishop Alex Brunett said the decision is final.

"I am deeply sorry for harm to any victim of clergy child sexual abuse," he said. "My hope is that this decision will bring resolution, healing and closure to all involved."

In addition to being stripped of his title, Moffat is also prohibited from wearing clerical clothes or publicly presenting himself as a priest.

Moffat has been retired for several years, Moen said, so the likelihood of his returning to the active priesthood was slim. In addition to Kirkland and Langley, Moffat also served at St. James Cathedral in Seattle and Our Lady of Sorrows in Snoqualmie.

As of this month, the archdiocese has settled more than 200 sexual-abuse cases and paid out more than $20 million, Magnoni said Monday. That count does not include abuse cases resolved without litigation, he said.

I believe that is something called suspension "a divinis," meaning they can't celebrate Mass or do any priestly activities, nor can they even present themselves publicly as priests. Probably if they totally defrocked him and kicked him out, he wouldn't be able to receive his pension or live on Church property. And we wouldn't want that to happen, would we?

Until these guys know that it's all over for them, they're not going to give up. What does somebody like that care about whether or not he gets to say Mass? Obviously, other things were more important to him in the past...but his pension, on the other hand - now that might get his attention. That's one thing that really annoys me, is that we the parishioners are still paying for these bums to live in a rectory or retirement home somewhere, get their auto allowance, etc.

Bring back the Inquisition! They really knew how to deal with guys like this. Not only no comfy chairs, but no pensions, to put it mildly. Incidentally,I have read that most of the people severely punished and/or put to death by the Inquisition in Mexico were clergy; in fact, the main initial objective of the Spanish Inquisition, despite popular ideas on the subject, was to quash heresy and immorality among the clergy. But even I admit that maybe their methods might have been a little extreme...

A celibate clergy is at the root of the problem.

The root of sexual disorder is deeper. We could marry them all off tomorrow and sexual disorders would only change their appearance. It remains for all of us to be vigilant.

April 05, 2002 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0405/p01s01-ussc.html

Sex abuse spans spectrum of churches
By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Despite headlines focusing on the priest pedophile problem in the Roman Catholic Church, most American churches being hit with child sexual-abuse allegations are Protestant, and most of the alleged abusers are not clergy or staff, but church volunteers.

These are findings from national surveys by Christian Ministry Resources (CMR), a tax and legal-advice publisher serving more than 75,000 congregations and 1,000 denominational agencies nationwide.

CMR's annual surveys of about 1,000 churches nationwide have asked about sexual abuse since 1993. They're a remarkable window on a problem that lurked largely in the shadows of public awareness until the Catholic scandals arose.

The surveys suggest that over the past decade, the pace of child-abuse allegations against American churches has averaged 70 a week. The surveys registered a slight downward trend in reported abuse starting in 1997, possibly a result of the introduction of preventive measures by churches.

"I think the CMR numbers are striking, yet quite reasonable," says Anson Shupe, anIndiana University professor who's written books about church abuse. "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."

At least 70 incidents a week

Dr. Shupe suggests the 70 allegations-per-week figure actually could be higher, because underreporting is common. He discovered this in 1998 while going door to door in Dallas-Ft. Worth communities where he asked 1,607 families if they'd experienced abuse from those within their church. Nearly 4 percent said they had been victims of sexual abuse by clergy. Child sexual abuse was part of that, but not broken out, he says.

James Cobble, executive director of CMR, who oversees the survey, says the data show that child sex-abuse happens broadly across all denominations– and that clergy aren't the major offenders.

"The Catholics have gotten all the attention from the media, but this problem is even greater with the Protestant churches simply because of their far larger numbers," he says.

Of the 350,000 churches in the US, 19,500 – 5 percent – are Roman Catholic. Catholic churches represent a slightly smaller minority of churches in the CMR surveys which aren't scientifically random, but "representative" demographic samples of churches, Dr. Cobble explains.

Since 1993, on average about 1 percent of the surveyed churches reported abuse allegations annually. That means on average, about 3,500 allegations annually, or nearly 70 per among the predominantly Protestant group, Cobble says.

The CMR findings also reveal:

• Most church child-sexual-abuse cases involve a single victim.

• Law suits or out-of-court settlements were a result in 21 percent of the allegations reported in the 2000 survey.

• Volunteers are more likely than clergy or paid staff to be abusers. Perhaps more startling, children at churches are accused of sexual abuse as often as are clergy and staff. In 1999, for example, 42 percent of alleged child abusers were volunteers – about 25 percent were paid staff members (including clergy) and 25 percent were other children.

Still, it is the reduction of reported allegations over nine years that seems to indicate that some churches are learning how to slow abuse allegations with tough new prevention measures, say insurance company officials and church officials themselves.

The peak year for allegations was 1994, with 3 percent of churches reporting an allegation of sexual misconduct compared with just 0.1 percent in 2000. But 2001 data, indicates a swing back to the 1 percent level, still significantly less than the 1993 figures, Cobble says.

Child sexual-abuse insurance claims have slowed, too, industry sources say.

Hugh White, vice president of marketing for Brotherhood Mutual Insurance, in Ft. Wayne, Ind., suggests that the amount of abuse reported in the CMR 2001 data is reasonable though "at the higher end" of the scale.

Mr. White's company insures 30,000 churches – about 0.2 percent to 0.3 percent of which annually report an "incident" of child sexual abuse. But he says that his churches are more highly educated on child abuse prevention procedures than most, which may account for a lower rate of reported abuse than the CMR surveys.

What all the data show is a settling that followed "a large spike" in the frequency and severity of church sexual misconduct claims from the mid-1980s, White says.

"Church insurance carriers implemented educational programs and policies that have helped decrease and then stabilize the trend," agrees Jan Beckstrom, chief operating officer for the church insurer GuideOne Insurance in West Des Moines, Iowa.

CMR surveys also show many smaller churches have lagged in starting such programs, while larger churches with more resources and management controls have led the way. And for good reason: They have more to lose, and a larger abuse problem.

{Excerpt of article}

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