Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil...

Saint Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle;
be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray:
and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits
who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.

This is hard to write about. Currently it is a hot topic running through the web and major news sources like wild fire. This seems to happen every few years now like a tide that rises before slowly ebbing back out to sea. Catholic Church sexual abuse allegations have flooded the airwaves. The Vatican hierarchy has been swamped with accusations concerning sexual abuse of children perpetrated by priests in Wisconsin, Germany, and Ireland. The emerging stories all suggest that church leaders had been, at best, grossly negligent in handling the abuse charges brought to their attention.

 Earlier this month a senior Vatican official disclosed that a German priest working in the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, while Ratzinger was the administrator, was accused of molesting boys. Church officials approved a treatment course of therapy for Hullerman in 1980, after which he returned to his pastoral duties. This was approached by Ratzinger at the time, but subsequently one of his subordinates has taken responsibility. Hullerman continued working with boys, and was convicted in 1986 on sexual molestation charges. Even after that he retained his position within the church until earlier this month when a man whose wedding was to be officiated by Hullerman revealed his criminal history to the church’s congregation. Only then was Hullerman suspended from his work as a priest. The German branch of the Catholic Church has committed to investigate Hullerman and all other accusations and has attained the help of an attorney. The Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, an investigative body commissioned by the Irish Church, recently ended its nine-year investigation of abuse allegations stretching back 60 years. In a five-volume report, the commission has collected testimony from more than 2,000 witnesses, who detailed that church officials used rape, beatings, and other tactics of humiliation. Benedict XVI released a pastoral letter in response to the report, condemning the abuse of children by priests in Ireland as “sinful and criminal.” Catholic leaders read the missive before their congregations throughout the country. Additionally, more cases of abuse are currently percolating in other parts of Europe, such as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

The Vatican has gone on the attack, accusing the media of an "ignoble attempt" to smear the pope and his church. In an interview today with MSNBC, Father Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Woodstock Theological Center, responded: "I'm afraid that in Europe they may be making some of the same mistakes that the American bishops made. It does no good to attack the media. This all sounds like excuses." This is an incredibly insightful point. The media has the ability to present information as facts, so of those “facts” are presented above. You can’t hide from facts and you can’t deny facts, no matter how much you may want to or how much you think it will serve your purposes. Thus the Church goes defensive, instead of presenting facts of their own. The truth of the matter is that the Church has always failed to meet these allegations head on. I know this may be a terrible comparison, but look at Tiger Woods. Does anyone dispute the fact that if he had come out right after the first mistress came forward and admitted what he did and that there were others, then he would have been in control of the situation. But, Tiger didn’t do that, and the media took control of the situation by parading mistress after mistress and torrid detail after torrid detail in front of the public. Tiger lost some of his credibility by keeping his mouth shut and trying to ignore it. The Church is doing the exact same thing by waiting for sexual abuse accusations to come out rather than being proactive to control them. The Vatican has failed to handle these situations properly. This doesn’t make them monsters, it doesn’t indicted every Catholic everywhere (though there are many who think it does), and it doesn’t call into question the validity of religion in modern culture.  It makes them human, which is all they are, humans trying to serve the people of the Catholic faith. Humans can be wrong and these priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes have all been wrong.

I want to clear the air of some rumors and falsehoods that surround the question of clergy sexual abuse. Some critical things to know about the nature of acts of sexual abuse committed by priests, its prevalence among Catholic clergy compared to its incidence among other groups, and the response of the Church to the sexual abuse crisis:

-          From available research we now know that in the last 50 years somewhere between 1.5% and 5% of the Catholic clergy has been involved in sexual abuse cases. The Christian Science Monitor reported on the results of a national survey by Christian Ministry Resources in 2002 and concluded: “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”.[ Mark Clayton, “Sex Abuse Spans Spectrum of Churches”, Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 2002] Sexual abuses within the Jewish communities approximate that found among the Protestant clergy.[ Rabbi Arthur Gross Schaefer, “Rabbi Sexual Misconduct: Crying Out for a Communal Response”, www.rrc.edu/journal, November 24, 2003]

-          About 85% of the offenders of child sexual abuse are family members, babysitters, neighbors, family friends or relatives. About one in six child molesters are other children, while most of the offenders are male.[Dr. Grath A. Rattray, “Child Month and Pedophilia”, The Gleaner, May 14, 2002]

-          According to a major 2004 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, nearly 10% of U.S. public school students have been targeted with unwanted sexual attention by school employees. The author of the study concluded that the scope of the school-sex problem appears to far exceed the clergy abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church and concluded in an interview with Education Week “the physical abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests”.[ Caroline Hendrie, “Sexual Abuse by Educators Scrutinized”, in: Education Week, March 10, 2004]

-          The Church is very conscious of the seriousness of the problem. The Code of Canon Law stipulates that priests involved in sexual abuse cases must be “punished with just punishments, not excluding expulsion from clerical state”. [CIC C. 1395 § 2] The American Bishops Conference issued in 2002 “essential norms for diocesan/eparchial policies dealing with allegations of sexual abuse of minors by priests or deacons”.

The issue is not wholly that of the prevalence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, but the prevalence of sexual abuse among everyone in a position of leadership or power over young people. Coinciding with that is the issue of how the Catholic Church has failed to handle these cases properly, like I mentioned before. Let us not lash out at inept leadership in the Church, but rather hold to Church accountable, which has become the major theme of sexual abuse cases in the United States. After all that the Catholic Church went through in the United States, it has come to realize that the best answer is for there to be an answer. The Church in Europe and the Vatican could take note of this if they ever want this tide of abuse scandals to subside for good. I’m not saying that this is a problem that can be fixed, but this is a problem that can be handled and controlled to prevent it from tarnishing a religion that has otherwise done great things for the world. The Catholic Church’s history is marked by the mistakes of its leaders, though somehow it has prevailed. That’s because the Catholic Church is not the men in robes sitting in fancy chairs in Rome…it is people like me and my family and my friends. The Catholic Church is its people and the Catholic people love the Church too much to watch it fold under the weight of its own mistakes.

*Note: I am not a papist. Papist is a term, usually disparaging or an anti-Catholic slur, referring to the Catholic Church, its teaching, practices or adherents. It was coined during the English Reformation to denote a Christian whose loyalties were to the Pope, rather than to the Church of England. Over time, however, it came to mean one who supported Papal authority over all Christians and thus became a popular term, especially among Anglicans and Presbyterians. I am a supporter of Jesus Christ, my savior. I show my support through participation in the Catholic faith. Very little, if any, of my loyalties lay with the Pope. If you are a Catholic and have read this or followed the news about the situation and feel you need to distance yourself from the Church or leave the Church, then what kind of Christian are you.