Correct - and AFAIK, no numbers have ever been published saying how many of the 4,392 clergymen have admitted to or been found guilty of sexual and moral crimes. But then again, no numbers have ever been published saying how many of the 4,392 clergymen have been exonerated of sexual and moral accusations, either.
If the InsideCatholic.com blog can be believed, two-thirds of all American bishops were complicit in covering up the immoral and illegal actions of 4% or fewer Catholic clergymen. All we can say with certainty is that 96+% - 105,302 Catholic clergymen - were never accused, yet 95 percent of all Catholic dioceses in the United States were impacted negatively. The numbers are more damning for the bishops then they are for the priests.
Lastly, it's worth pointing out that no numbers have been published about the levels of abuse committed by Catholic (or other) clergy worldwide. We have no way of knowing if that John-Jay-confirmed 4% accused ratio holds true of clergy outside of America.
I would point out that not all of the behavior of all these bishops was truly wrong.
When I was in graduate school the first time (back in the early 1980s), the idea that we psychotherapists (which is what I was studying at the time) would be obliged by law to turn in self-confessed child abusers was rather controversial. Our professors were generally against this violation of privilege, although we students mostly thought it was a good idea. But the orthodox view prior to this time was that handling these cases quietly was better for the victim.
Thus, in the Archdiocese of Washington, as an example, a priest discovered to be an abuser would be sent to therapy. If he was permitted to return to the ministry at all, he would get a job such as chaplain at the local maximum security prison. He wasn’t returned to ministry where he would ordinarily come into contact with children again.
In many cases, he would be removed from ministry altogether.
But as was the practice of the day, in most all of our social institutions, these men were nearly never prosecuted. This was often with the knowledge of local law enforcement.
As well, the Church began to take this problem seriously in the early 1980s, not long after Pope John Paul II ascended to the throne of Peter. If one looks at the Jay report, one sees the problem at its worst as the Church entered the 1980s, peaking in the mid-1980s, and then declining more than 90% by the early 1990s. Long before anything was reported in the Boston Globe.
So the actions taken by the Church starting in the 1980s began to substantially mitigate the problem over the next decade. Even if the solutions implemented were imperfect, even if the way abusers and victims were handled was flawed, the Church DID recognize the problem and DID work to resolve it. And was highly effective in reducing the incidence of abuse over time.
Experience has taught that some of the methods used - especially resolving specific cases privately - probably were not the best way to deal with them. But I’m not willing to heap much blame on bishops who acted thusly. Especially because in many dioceses, these cases didn’t come up often.
Think about it - there are nearly 300 dioceses in the United States. There were roughly 4000 accused priests over the course of 50+ years. That works out to an average of about one abusive priest per diocese about every four years.
Smaller dioceses may not have had more than one abuser a decade or more.
Many bishops saw fewer than a handful of cases.
Although the entire hierarchy had room for improvement in how to deal with these priests, the truly evil stuff was limited to a handful of large dioceses with large numbers of abusers, and especially with particularly vile repeat abusers. Cardinal Law’s Archdiocese of Boston became emblamatic of this subset.
And there were some bishops whose behavior was shockingly evil. When he was an auxiliary bishop, in Bridgeport if I recall, then-Bishop Egan knew of a priest who had abused FOURTEEN young men, none of whom knew each other or were aware of each other. Even though each young man told essentially the same story of abuse, then-Bishop Egan actually asked each set of parents, “How do I know your son isn’t lying?” to deflect these cases from this priest.
If it were up to me, Cardinal Egan would have been sent to Rome to a newly-revived Holy Office of the Inquisition and would have been sent to be burned at the stake.
And I’m sure that even though they didn’t all engage in the practices of Egan in Bridgeport, or the Archbishops of Boston (Cardinal Law took the blame for 50 years of bad archbishops there, not that he was a real peach or anything), many if not most of the bishops were aware of what was going on in the dioceses that were black pits of abuse.
Nonetheless, in most dioceses at most times over the past 60 years, there weren't great tidal waves of absue, and much of it, when discovered, was dealt with seriously and with at least some effectiveness.
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