Posted on 06/18/2007 5:48:34 AM PDT by Aquinasfan
Many informed American Catholics are familiar with the actions that the bishops took at their Dallas meeting in 2002, when they adopted the zero tolerance policy for priests who had sexually abused children, a policy that, with the approval of the Apostolic See, became canon law for the United States. This was a drastic measure, meant to deal with drastic facts. It resulted in the removal of over 700 priests from ministry. However, very few people are aware of what led up to Dallas. What did the bishops do before 2002 while the disaster was building?
In the middle of the 1980’s a crisis of historic proportions exploded in the Church in the United States. In 1984, in the small diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, a parish priest, Father Gilbert Gauthe, was arrested and charged with multiple counts of child sexual abuse. The first victims’ parents to come forward had not originally gone to the civil authorities, but rather to the Lafayette diocesan chancery. Only when diocesan officials failed to act did the victims’ parents turn to the police.
Lafayette is “ground zero” in the priest-child sexual abuse crisis that dominated the history of the American church in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Soon after Gauthe’s arrest, two other priests of the diocese were charged with similar sexual crimes against children. Once the dam of silence was broken in Lafayette, more victims in more dioceses across the country came forward, and more priests were indicted or sued in civil court (together with their bishops) for the sexual abuse of children. Lafayette became a national epidemic, and Lafayette’s handling of its abusive priests proved to be paradigmatic.
It is clear beyond cavil that diocesan officials in Lafayette knew about Father Gauthe’s sexual abuse of children long before he was arrested. It is also clear that they failed to treat Father Gauthe’s actions as the violations of Church law and civil law that they clearly were. Instead, diocesan officials asked him to undergo therapy, which he refused to complete, at which time he was simply re-assigned to another parish, where he went on to sexually abuse other children.
This pattern repeated itself in diocese after diocese. Parents would complain to diocesan officials about a priest who had sexually abused their child. Diocesan officials would act sympathetically. Father would be sent away for treatment because he was “sick.” Promises would be made that no more children would be harmed by this man. The child and the family would be offered counseling to be paid for by the diocese. Sometimes money would change hands, rarely large sums, and usually accompanied by a “confidentiality” agreement, binding the family never to talk about the incidents. In three months, or six months, sometimes longer, Father, after a turn at therapy or treatment, and some professional assurance that he was no longer a risk, was assigned to another parish in the diocese, usually as far away from his previous assignment as possible. At the second parish, Father would find more young victims, whose parents would complain to diocesan officials, who would purport to be surprised by the allegations, and the same vicious cycle would perpetuate itself.
As news of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests began to break in dioceses across the country, there was panic in the chanceries of the land. What was to be done? How could this crisis be contained? Most bishops turned to their canon lawyers for help, help that, unfortunately for the Church in the United States, was not very apt.
The sexual abuse of a child by a priest is a canonical crime, and has been for centuries, yet canon lawyers did not advise the bishops to treat these matters as canonical crimes. There was no investigation of these crimes, no citation for them, if the charges were found to be credible, no canonical criminal process in which the victims could tell their stories and priests could offer a defense, and no penalty for those priests who were proved to have committed these crimes, all as the Code of Canon Law required. There was, in fact, an almost total breakdown of the canonical system. Rather than face a canonical process for their crimes, priest perpetrators were coddled, sent off to some of the most expensive treatment centers in the nation, many of them Church-run, in an extravagant reading of the Church’s canon law, which many canonists claimed, favored “pastoral solicitude” for these priests over pastoral firmness.
In the middle of this crisis, the national body of bishops, then known as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) was in almost complete paralysis. Every year beginning with 1985 and continuing thereafter, in the executive sessions of their semi-annual meetings, the bishops discussed the problem of priests who had sexually abused children. They had educational sessions on how to prosecute these canonical crimes. They had advice from their national staff on the legal, pastoral and public relations issues involved. However, all of this came to naught in adopting a national policy to deal with priest child abusers because a small number of bishops managed to stymie the national body every time it tried to take uniform national action on the matter. In this, they were aided by the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which ignoring the promise of Vatican II on the role of the college of bishops, had vastly limited both the teaching and the legislative role of national bishops conferences. Unless Rome either asked for or approved of national legislation on priest child abusers, the U.S. Bishops Conference was powerless to do anything. And Rome chose not to act.
Only in 1992, after yet another major national scandal, when the many dozens of sexual abuse victims of the former Father James Porter of the diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, came forward, were the bishops spurred to something like group action. That year in their November meeting, the bishops adopted a five-step program to address the crisis. The program was still only advisory, because the bishops had no ability to legislate on this issue, but the program included:
1) report all allegations promptly
2) where sufficient evidence exists, remove the priest from ministry and have him psychiatrically evaluated
3) meet all civil law reporting requirements
4) reach out to victims and their families
5) deal as openly as possible with the members of the community about the incident
This was the best that the bishops could manage in late 1992, a full eight years after the crisis of the clergy’s sexual abuse of children had seized the national attention. Nothing in the five steps referred to treating child sexual abuse as the canonical or civil crime that it clearly was. Nothing referred to prosecuting the priest for this crime. The priest offender, rather, was to be medically evaluated and treated. Nonetheless, this program finally did give the impression that the bishops had seized hold of the problem and were at least trying to deal with it effectively as a body. Aided by a piece of good luck that occurred at the start of 1993, namely the foolish prominence that the national media gave to flimsy charges of sexual abuse against Cardinal Bernardin, only to look extremely foolish when the charges were withdrawn, the bishops were no longer on the defensive.
So why then did this crisis explode one more time, with an even greater vengeance, almost ten years later? It was well understood by the end of 1992 that the Catholic Church in the United States had an extremely serious problem with sexually abusive priests in ministry. The fact that abusive priests had been sent back to parishes after “treatment” and had abused more youngsters was in the national knowledge bank. Yet, in the court of public opinion, the Church, with the actions that the bishops took in 1992, was seen as having learned its lesson. With the false accusations against Cardinal Bernardin in 1993, the public spotlight was finally off, it was almost as if the American public was saying, “Okay, bishops, you have made some serious mistakes, but you have also promised to change. You are on probation. Don’t let it happen again.”
However, it did happen again. Some bishops did keep sexually abusive priests in ministry long after 1992-1993. When this became public knowledge with the revelations of the Boston Globe in 2002, the terms of the Church?s public probation were off, and the entire Church was penalized for its infractions as far back as memory ran. It was the failure of only a handful of bishops to follow the 1992 NCCB recommendations and to understand that sexually abusive priests, even after treatment, could not be re-assigned to parishes that allowed the clergy child sexual abuse crisis to fester in the United States after 1992-1993 and then to erupt with such violence in 2002.
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Nicholas P. Cafardi is both a civil and canon lawyer. He served as Dean of the Duquesne Law School from 1993-2005 and is now the Dean Emeritus and Professor of Law at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was an original member of the USCCB Committee for the Protection of Children and Youth (the National Review Board), appointed by Archbishop Wilton Gregory in 2002 to oversee the USCCB’s child abuse prevention policies often referred to as the “Dallas Norms”.
The most important points that I can gather are:
-a handful of bishops were sheltering abusive priests.
-these bishops failed to prosecute abusive priests under existing canon law.
-the USCCB was unable or unwilling to adopt a tough and mandatory disciplinary policy for these bishops outside of existing canon law
-the Vatican failed to enforce canon law.
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I still have a hard time drawing conclusions from these limited facts. I'm averse to giving national bishops conferences more power. Tradition is clear that bishops are the ultimate authorities in their dioceses. But the bishops should be accountable to the Vatican. For some reason, the congregation responsible for priestly discipline within the Vatican (don't know what that is) failed in its duty to discipline the bishops who were shuffling abusive priests around.
I was also looking at this article. Interesting historical summary for those who think everything came to light in 2002. The Catholic media was on the story from the start back in the 80’s but the national media didn’t get it until 2002.
-— Paulist Press will be publishing his upcoming book, Before Dallas: The U.S. Bishops’ Response to Clergy Sexual Abuse of Children, in March 2008. This book deals with the early years of the crisis, primarily between 1984 and 1993 when the Church in the United States was first trying to deal with the problem of sexually abusive priests. This story is told from inside the Church, analyzing why canon law was not more helpful, why the bishops were not well served by their own legal system, and why the bishops turned away from law and into therapy to deal with sexually abusive priests. It is also the story of the bishops’appeals to Rome for help with abusive priests, and the slow Roman response, which served to intensify the crisis. Primarily, Before Dallas is the story of the many opportunities that the Church missed to take control of this crisis and deal with it effectively.
Father Kos was a customer of mine at several diocese in the area and I believe that he worked very hard to make a difference to those under his ministry. He seemed like a true gentleman.
When the allegations came to light I was shocked that it could involve him. The Catholic Diocese transferred him to San Diego (IIRC) and later he went to prison.
I have to believe that the allegations were accurate enough to have a person sent to prison for life. But I feel that he was like being a little tree in the path of an avalanche and Fr. Kos was going to be sacrificed by the Catholic Diocese and by the prosecutors to keep the larger scandal quiet.
Very sad. The priests accepted into the ministry in the Sixties have nearly destroyed much of the ministry of the Anglo Catholic Church in our area.
Rather interesting. I see a fundamental breakdown in society (any society) of people upholding judicial processes. Based upon your article, I wonder if this isn’t true with the Church/churches today.
In retrospect, it seems like the perfect storm. I see the acceptance of modern psychology within the Church as a major cause of this disaster.
First, Catholics were beginning to see homosexuality as an illness rather than a moral failure. Thus, there was less reason to restrict homosexuals from the priesthood. Once homosexuals took control of the training of seminarians, they used psychological tools, like personality tests, to weed out orthodox and moral applicants. Some dioceses, like Albany, seem to have collapsed entirely.
For the same reason, bishops decided to treat child sexual abuse therapeutically, rather than as criminal. Even newspapers like the Boston Globe originally praised this modern approach. But as the failure of therapeutic treatment of child abusers became widely known, the house of cards collapsed.
The part of the puzzle that I don't understand is the Vatican's inaction in all of this. My best guess is that Pope John Paul II regarded this as simple media hype.
There's also the fact that the pope isn't a 'strong man' dictating from some lofty perch. He's a bishop and so are the ditherers. The ditherers had the primary responsibility for their own dioceses, may God have mercy on them. To 'appeal to Rome for help' seems like shirking a hard duty that they agreed to take on when they were ordained.
I think they too easily conformed themselves to the world when they deluded themselves by thinking that psychology held a viable solution. Predators remain true to their nature and they are impervious to talk therapy. They are sociopaths.
What’s left out here is the fact that the things that the bishops did through the late ‘80s and into the ‘90s, although incomplete, imperfect, often bumbling, and not uniform across dioceses, actually reduced the problem by an order of magnitude by the mid-’90s.
The scandals that broke in 2002 or so had to do with decades of cases that had been handled confidentially, but that had peaked in the mid-’80s, and had already declined dramatically by the time the scandals broke.
Another piece that’s missing here is that in many jurisdictions, civil authorities preferred that the Church handle her own problems. I’ve read of cases where families went to the police to report abuse, and the police took the families to the bishop.
In fact, this “courtesy” wasn’t extended only to priests. When I was studying clinical psychology in the early 1980s, it was still considered controversial that we would be required to report all child molestors to law enforcement authorities. Many still believed that these matters were best handled outside the judicial system. Thus, molesting professionals of all sorts - doctors, lawyers, accountants - any sort of person considered to be an upstanding pillar of the community - usually got a pass on this.
sitetest
Do you have any citation for this or anywhere you can point to? It's a disturbing possibility, not just in the priesthood but elsewhere in society.
http://www.culturewars.com/2002/may02_ggm.html
http://oregonmag.com/GoodMen802.htm
Excellent thread material. I thought your summary in post #1 was spot-on in describing the problem.
Indeed. The common view is that the pope is a kind of monarch. The truth is that only in cases involving faith and morals can he exercise monarchial authority. And even in his infallibility he is more like a Chief Justice than a king. Maybe we are better off referring to the Orthodox conception of his being first along equals. IAC. he is but one man with limited knowledge, and even when he decides to act, the efficacy of his word depends on many intermediaries. No doubt in my mind that the same sort who in each dioceses protected the rapists had their counterparts in Rome.
I think this scandal sucked in the “careerist” type men as well. In my home diocese when I was a child Monsignor Schumacher was the priest there, nothing untoward happened in the church with the kids, but he apparently ended up an aid to the Ft. Worth Bishop and got sucked into the scandals. He apparently spent a big chunck of his “career” flacking for abusers as a “Vicar General,” then lost that position and I guess the next rank he was probably bucking for. Sacrificed himself, sexually chaste as far as I know, to protect child abusers in the heirarchy and even ultimately sacrificed his “career.”
Some stories I pulled off google.
The job of reviewing clergy files and turning over records on abusers probably fell to Monsignor Schumacher, Father Wilson or both men, he said . . . The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram fought that in court and last month won release of more than 700 pages of material. It showed that Bishop Delaney and his aides helped predators stay in the ministry for two decades while hiding information from police and the public.
http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/121606dnmetfwdiocese.2918044.html
Fort Worth’s new Catholic bishop, under pressure to release records about clergy-abuse allegations, is replacing two top officials who have long handled such matters.
During the lawsuit, the diocese surrendered records on seven other accused priests to the men’s attorney, Tahira Khan Merritt. She said Friday that she could not discuss their contents because Judge Wade has not yet released the documents. But she did say that “Chancellor Wilson and Vicar General Schumacher, because of their key positions in the diocesan hierarchy, were central in the decision to hire Father Thomas Teczar in 1988 as well as assisting him in leaving the state of Texas while he was under investigation by law enforcement
http://www.tkmlawfirm.com/pages/in_news.html
Monsignor’s DWI charge dropped
Darren Barbee/Fort Worth Star-Telegram (9/8/05)
FORT WORTH - The Tarrant County district attorney’s office Wednesday dropped a charge of driving while intoxicated against Monsignor Joseph Schumacher, one of the highest-ranking members of the Fort Worth Roman Catholic Diocese. Tests showed that Schumacher’s blood-alcohol level was 0.04 — half the legal limit — when he was stopped July 4 by a Bedford police officer.
http://www.religionheadlines.org/heads_050908.php
I agree. As for Pope JPII, I think he regarded the entire US as out of control and hopeless; I remember reading an anecdote somewhere claiming that someone once asked him about the US bishops, and he just shrugged, and said, "the US, they'll do whatever they want to do."
And there is also the fact that he had a soft spot for psychology, like many of his generation, and perhaps was a little too willing to accept the assurances that it was a "therapeutic" problem rather than one of sin and crime.
That's a good point. We may never know what went on behind the scenes, but it sure looks like the Vatican did very little, and could have done more.
Thank you for the links. I read them — pretty shocking.
That's a good point.
Another piece that’s missing here is that in many jurisdictions, civil authorities preferred that the Church handle her own problems. I’ve read of cases where families went to the police to report abuse, and the police took the families to the bishop.
Wasn't aware of that.
In fact, this “courtesy” wasn’t extended only to priests. When I was studying clinical psychology in the early 1980s, it was still considered controversial that we would be required to report all child molestors to law enforcement authorities. Many still believed that these matters were best handled outside the judicial system. Thus, molesting professionals of all sorts - doctors, lawyers, accountants - any sort of person considered to be an upstanding pillar of the community - usually got a pass on this.
Ironically enough, I can remember the Globe praising Cardinal Law in his "enlightened approach" to the abuse crisis. This was probably sometime in the '90s.
I first read about it in First Things. I didn't have any luck searching the archives.
I'm pretty sure that it's also mentioned in Michael Rose's, "Good-Bye, Good Men."
It's pretty much common wisdom now in orthodox Catholic circles.
Very true.
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