Let's deal with apologists pretending that Church child abuse isn’t costly and continuing

   Clifford Longley's story of the Rotary Club Father Christmas forbidden to have children on his lap started an item headed "How can we deal with our collective paranoia over paedophiles?" in On Line Opinion of 24 Feb 2003, www.onlineopinion. com.au/ 2003/Feb03/ Longley.htm
   It was originally published in the British Catholic newspaper The Tablet of 25 January 2003 -- and the purpose of the article was to defend a British Cardinal from the news media reporting that commentators want him to resign, because he sheltered and kept employing a serial child sex-abuser.
   The rough-and-ready public does not have "paranoia," but we do have a "collective" problem with people supposedly representing the Holy Pure God of Creation corrupting children.
   So I say, let's deal with apologists pretending that clergy child sex-abuse is a small problem, and that the news media or public prejudices are the main problem.
   Mr Longley's article is in the same tradition as an article by Briton Tom Utley in The Telegraph's Nov 30 2002 internet version entitled "Paedophile obsession is killing trust in the Church" which was dusted off, given a new heading, and published weeks later in the Perth Catholic weekly The Record, as "Paedophile obsession can't kill trust in the Church," on Jan 2 2003, p 4.
   The article tried to say that the news media had an "obsession", but the true obsession is held by about 5 to 6 per cent (or more) of the clergy who want to start minors on the slippery slope of masturbation, pseudo-prostitution, liquor, etc. The matching obsession is that of the heads of religious orders and dioceses, who want to hide the criminals in their ranks.
   We've had the US's Fr Steve Rossetti writing in April 2002 that the clergy's sex abuse is no more prevalent than elsewhere in society.
   This gem was republished in Perth on Nov 7 2002. One would have thought that by November even the most starry-eyed Catholic writers would have realised that the U.S. abuse saga got smellier and fouler the more that the courts and the mass media delved into the cesspit.

How does his excuse square with the Acts and Epistles' description of how the "brothers" and "saints" behaved, and the modern emphasis on the Church being the People of God?
   Boston resident, a Harvard law professor, Mary Ann Glendon, in a November 4 2002 speech (promptly republished in Perth) at the Legionaries of Christ's Regina Apostolorum University, blamed the news media. "A narrative was being constructed about what happened," she said. "Nearly all of the cases took place long ago in the '60s, '70s and '80s." She denigrated the news media's apparent belief that the abuse was massive, ongoing, ignored by Church leaders and that it was a problem particular to the Catholic Church's celibate clergy.
   Well, well -- by November 2002 it was obviously a massive all-American problem, two priests had been caught in Canada mid-year (so how many were still undetected?), and the news media were NOT making out that only celibate clergy were sinning. May I ask, how is it that journalists could see there was a TREMENDOUS problem, and the failure of the Church leaders for years to prevent it, to halt it, and to rectify it, but a law professor couldn't see? How could the HYPOCRISY be so obvious to anyone, except those trying to make chalk into cheese?
   I wonder what Professor Mary Ann Glendon thought of the news the following month (Dec 13 2002) that the archbishop of her own city, Cardinal Bernard Law, was allowed to resign -- having secretly offered his resignation months before in April!
   Dr Law had known that "the game was up" in April because he knew there was a sewer full of corruption in Church files awaiting the judgement of the courts. The facts were not "dribbled" out by the media as Prof. Glendon claimed, but extracted against heavy Church lawyer pressure by the victims' lawyers, brave victims, district attorneys and police forces, and honest judges.
   There were Boston files about priests seducing would-be nuns, throwing a housekeeper down stairs, abandoning a dying mistress and her children, and having liquor and pornography parties with boys in the rectories. (The West Australian, Dec 10 02).

   And, such priests were given holidays masquerading as "treatments," would do "penance," and were sent to another unsuspecting parish or Church school or other establishment. And all without a word of warning to the parents and the children.
   All these "defences of the indefensible" are attempts to downplay the failure of the official Church to stop fostering certain priests' disloyal attacks on Christian living. And Prof. Glendon stated "The media attention to the story, particularly the massive coverage of the Boston Globe, is fuelled by a deep-seated and long-standing anti-Catholicism." She lamented that the Globe might win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism -- at the time of writing (early 2003) the Globe has won several journalism prizes, and people of good will hope it will win the Pulitzer [It did]. It and the brave judges and prosecutors have done more to wake the Church leaders up than many other people who have tried.
   The United States apologists have gone one better than the U.K. and Australia. They even have a book, From Scandal to Hope, published in 2002 by Father Benedict Groeschel of New York, with a laudatory preface by Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan. Reporters "doing the work of Satan" are driven to lie, Fr Groeschel writes, because they hate the church's moral teachings. (Ref: The Dallas Morning News, "Priest plays down abuse crisis, helps clergy keep jobs," www.dallasnews.com , by Brooks Egerton, Mar 2 03)
   The apologists want us to forget that the seductions have cost tens of millions of dollars, donated by people for worship and charitable causes, and that a big Church is getting deeper and deeper into sinful territory as it wriggles and twists trying to escape from the self-induced problem of continuing to employ people who are actually leading people away from Christ!
   We suspect that neither the Catholic nor Anglican Churches, under their present understanding of Christianity, will resolutely adopt and keep to the early Church's policy of expulsion of sex abusers. Jesus forbade harming the young (Matthew 18:6-7), and Paul wrote, "Remove the wicked from among yourselves" in his 1st letter to the Corinthians, 5:9-13. The Didache forbade sex with boys, and the Council of Elvira in 309 A.D. ordered permanent exclusion for boy-sex.

The penances during the Middle Ages included years on bread and water.
   Neither Anglican nor Catholic Perth leaders agreed to a request, made by petition three times (the latest being on January 22), to dismiss every paedophile Church worker. Other Perth Churches didn't, either.
   In response to requests made by petition three times, the latest being on Jan 22 2003, asking the major Churches to dismiss any Church minister or worker who sexually molested young people, the answers received up the March 18 2003 were:

• The Churches of Christ, dated March 4 2003, wrote that any form of child abuse would lead to immediate dismissal.
• The Anglican Archbishop of Perth on February 11 wrote that Anglican bishops had no power to move paedophile priests from place to place, because there was a nomination board system. The diocese had declared this year the Year of the Child, and was holding educational and prayer initiatives. [The Catholics have also declared this the Year of the Child.] Across Australia, particularly in the other States, about 5% of child abuse involved Church people, and 95% took place in the family.
• After mail to other people noted the lack of decision by the Catholic Church, its Perth leader wrote on March 5 that he agreed with the call of the petitioners to dismiss ministers and Church workers who had abused children, and that was the policy.

   We must rememember the Anglican scandals of Queensland (Dr Peter Hollingworth, etc.) and New South Wales, still unresolved at Mar 18 03. However, the evidence so far is that the heaviest burden is borne by Catholic children.
   In February 2002, just after the Boston Church-sex crisis hit world headlines, at Australind, a tiny Western Australian hamlet, a Catholic priest slid naked on an oily floor with five children under 13, and took films and photocopies of them sitting naked on a photocopier. He was in court within days.
   Early in 2003 the headings were "Priest admits abuse," and "Our trust was betrayed: mother" (The West Australian, Jan 22 2003).

   In the United States the Catholic Church has a serious, still ongoing endemic scandal of sleazy behaviour (two US boy-sex priests were caught over the border in Canada mid-2002, and a girl-sex priest was caught Dec 18 2002).
   These examples are quoted to scotch another favourite "fib" by the apologists, that the sex abuse occurred decades ago, and that the Churches have it in hand nowadays.
   Another lie is that the Church didn't understand. The Catholic Church claims it has existed for 2000 years, so it was its business to understand.
   In modern times: "The first [U.S.] public discussion of priest sexual abuse of minors was at a meeting sponsored by the National Association for Pastoral Renewal held ... [at the U.S.] Notre Dame University in 1967. All American Catholic bishops were invited to that meeting." -- A. W. Richard Sipe, psychotherapist (member Benedictine order 1953-70), in the Sipe Report, paragraph 22, www.thelinkup.com/sipe.html
   This professionally-prepared report gives enough facts to alert even the doziest of bishops that the sex abuse of minors cannot be "cured" by present-day Church methods, nor by modern science.
   The situation was so bad more than 15 years ago that the US independent newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter, on June 7, 1985, named every convicted US priest, in an effort to get the bishops to stop the clergy corrupting young people -- but the "forgiveness," "repentance," and transfers of serial paedophiles continued. That same year lawyer F.R.Mouton, Church canon law expert Father Thomas P. Doyle, and Father M.Peterson wrote a scholarly report on the problem, and sent it to every R.C. bishop in the USA. The report was discussed at their national conference.
   In 1986 Jason Berry won the U.S. Catholic Press Association Award for his coverage of clerical sex abuse. In 1992 Berry published Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. It won the Wilbur Award and a Catholic Press Association Book Award.

   In 1993 the U.S. R.C. bishops seemed to accept a special report on the sex-abuse scandal, and "on paper" adopted reform rules, but many, including Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law, kept the crimes going.
   In the U.S. the problem had started years before in some outrageous breaks with traditional holiness in their training establishments (seminaries), and a book about that aspect, entitled Goodbye, Good Men by Michael S. Rose, was published in 2002 in Washington.
   The global sex problem includes even teenage and adult abuse (including mistresses and nuns, both of whom have started organisations in various countries seeking redress!).
   Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), which started in Boston early in 2002, estimates that U.S. Catholics have been deprived of tens of millions of dollars in payments to victims (both "hush money" and real compensation and counselling), plus huge legal fees, plus giving the afflicted priests new addresses and funding.
   Insurance companies refuse to cover all the costs now, because they rightly say that the Church leaders have brought the problem on themselves by repeatedly "forgiving" predatory repeat offenders.
   In our view, many Catholic bishops have no real idea of ruling, possibly because they are recruited from celibate ranks. It is a truism that celibacy attracts too high a percentage of the wrong applicants, including those who are timid, and is a "snare" to the devout. Celibacy is not the whole cause, however.
   Some of the other religious establishments also have problem clergy (a married rabbi, Israel Kestenbaum, 54 or 55, of Highland Park, New Jersey pleaded not guilty on Feb 21 03 in an "internet date" entrapment, and in Britain a mosque staff member was accused in recent years).
   Regrettably, there is a daily stream of reports abut Catholicism including arrests, enforced "discoveries" of incriminating documents, compensation payments and "hush money," and criticism of the Church from the judiciary.

   There are attempts by Church lawyers to claim defences of religious liberty and separation of Church and State under the U.S. Constitution, attempts to remove the Church assets from the power of the courts, suicides (latest is Jeff Alfieri, 43, Feb 18, at Kirkland), attempted murder, and even an acquittal or two as the scandal continues.
   In Ireland some years ago a government fell because of a cover-up of clergy paedophilia. On Feb 7 03 it was revealed there has been a secret attempt to make the taxpayer foot much of the bill for the abuses in orphanages, even while a body is being exhumed regarding a suspicious death of an orphan.
   The incredible-sounding statements above are referenced in various books and news media. Websites include webpages starting at www.multiline.com.au/ ~johm/ ethicscontents. htm , The Boston Globe Spotlight, and The Boston Herald Clergy Abuse section
   Others include Yahoo's Catholic Church Abuse Scandal website, and the Courier Journal "Crisis in the Catholic Church" list (Louisville, Kentucky).

   In Australia we have the Perpetrators' List of Clare Pascoe Henderson at: www.pip.com.au/ ~chenderson/ perplist. htm
   The volume of reports can't ALL be a result of "mass media obsession," or even of "deep-seated anti-Catholicism" of The Boston Globe as one apologist put it. The editors who published those excuse-ridden articles ought to have realised that the only "obsession" was the desire for child sex among a surprising percentage of clergymen, and there was no "paranoia," but among too many leaders of Churches and religious orders there was a "paralysis."
   To get daily reports from the USA, obtain Poynter Institute Clergy Abuse Tracker by e-mail: www.poynter.org/ subscribe.to. clergy. tracker , and check other services on the ethics/outreach.htm webpage, at Newslinks. -- FAITH PURIFICATION PROGRAMME, Perth, Western Australia

   The original version was sent to "On Line Opinion", graham. young@ onlineopinion. com.au , on 26 Feb 03. This article is larger than the original, the section on the Churches' answers was updated on 18 Mar 03, and an error was corrected on 19 Sep 03.