Last week Pope Francis hosted a four-day conference at the Vatican to address the child abuse scandal that threatens to destroy the Catholic Church as an insitution.
One hundred and ninety Catholic leaders sat through nine presentations followed by question-and-answer sessions, video testimonies from sex abuse victims, working group discussions, breakout sessions, a penitential liturgy, evening prayer times featuring victims of sex crimes sharing their experiences, and a closing Mass with final remarks from the Pope himself.
Those final remarks were much anticipated. Many in the church hoped that the Pope would finally, after decades of horrific revelations, announce a “zero-tolerance” policy regarding sex crimes against children.
“Until the day when a pope can say that any priest guilty of abusing a child, anywhere in the world, will be permanently removed from ministry, the church will have no credibility in this matter,” one church official commented to The Wall Street Journal.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, Pope Francis did not call for any specific actions in his summation. Remarkably, he cautioned against overreaction “provoked by guilt for past errors and media pressure” and noted courageously that child abuse wasn’t just the Catholic Church’s problem. Francis joined the long line of Popes who have had no answers for this horror and who have begged their worldwide flock for more time to address it.
“I don’t think we can rely on the institution to clean up its act,” Peter Saunders, a British sex abuse survivor and former member of Francis’s commission on the protection of minors, told The Washington Post.
“I didn’t see any concrete actions in the text,” The Wall Street Journal quoted Francesco Cesareo, chairman of the National Review Board, a body of Catholic laypeople that advises U.S. bishops on child protection. “It’s a lot of words that have been spoken over and over again.”
Actually, some of the Pope’s words, if not his actions, were new. Francis The Pope called child abusers within the church “ravenous wolves” and “tools of Satan.”
Yesterday it was announced that one of those monstrous animals and instruments of the devil that Pope Francis railed against is his own Vatican treasurer, Australian Cardinal George Pell.
Pell was convicted of sexually abusing two choirboys in 1996, just after he had been named Archbishop of Melbourne. Another trial for additional sex crimes against minors was cancelled after Pell’s conviction.
You know the story by now. Pell made his reputation in the Catholic Church for championing rigid enforcement of the its rules regarding sexual conduct. Pell vehemently opposed gay rights. When asked about a rash of suicides by gay students in Catholic schools, Pell commented cavalierly that “If they are connected with homosexuality, it is another reason to be discouraging people going in that direction. Homosexual activity is a much greater health hazard than smoking.”
Sexual abuse within the Catholic Church has been documented since the 11th century. The American priest Gerald Fitzgerald wrote a series of letters and reports to Church officials warning about abusive priests. But this history was not widely reported until 1985, when the Boston Globe published a series of articles that led to the prosecution of five priests for sex crimes. We will never know the full extent of such crimes, but here are some facts that demonstrate that child abuse within the Catholic Church is global, vast, has been committed by men at the highest levels of the church hierarchy, and has been aggressively covered up by the church leadership.
The Facts
• Charges of sexual abuse by priests and Catholic Church officials have been reported over the past forty years in Kenya, Tanzania, the Philippines, India, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden, England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Mexico, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru.
• Since 1995, more than 100 priests have been convicted of sex crimes in Australia. Forty victims of priestly abuse committed suicide in the state of Victoria.
• Hermann Groer resigned in 1995 as Archbishop of Vienna after being accused of sex crimes. He remained a Cardinal in the church.
• A 2011 Irish government report on child abuse, which ran to five volumes and covered the past six decades, found “systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary, endemic” sexual abuse in Catholic boys’ institutions and that church officials had long been aware of these crimes. The Guardian described the findings as “the stuff of nightmares.” Because of Irish government rules, no one was prosecuted or sanctioned.
• Father Marcial Maciel, the Mexican leader of the seminarian organization Legion of Christ, which is active in 21 counties, was accused over two decades for abusing minors and fathering six children by three different women. Pope John Paul II decided not to prosecute Maciel due to his advanced age.
• The Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn named more than 100 priests who have been credibly accused of sexually abusing a child.
• Roman Catholic bishops in New Jersey named nearly 200 priests who have been found credibly accused of sexually abusing a child.
• In 2018 the State of Pennsylvania revealed a “systematic coverup” of sex crimes by more than 300 priests in Pennsylvania.
• The Vatican has admitted that it has secret guidelines for how to deal with priests who father children, proof that he was hardly alone. (Spoiler alert: leaving the church is not mandatory.)
• Theodore McCarrick, the former bishop of Washington, D.C., was defrocked after allegations of child abuse.
• Last year Honduran Bishop Juan Jose Pineda resigned after allegations of sexual abuse.
• More than 300 former pupils at the Christian Brothers’ Mount Cashel Orphanage in Newfoundland claimed that they had been the victims of sex crimes. The local newspaper found evidence that the government, police, and church had colluded to cover up the abuse.
• Luigi Ventura, Pope Francis’ envoy to France, has been accused of sexual molestation.
• Irish priest Brendan Smyth was reported to have sexually assaulted twenty children in parishes as he was shuttled between parishes in Belfast, Dublin, and the United States between 1945 and 1989.
• A 2013 report by the Australian government concluded that 7% of all Catholic priests in Ireland had been accused of child sex abuse and that the average age of the victims was 11-1/2 for boys and 10-1/2 for girls. Claims of sex abuse were made by 4,444 against 1,880 priests.
• In Guam, two archbishops, a bishop, and fifteen priests were found to have been credibly accused of sex crimes from the 1950s through the 1990s. Archbishop Anthony Apuron was removed from office by the Vatican after being accused of sexually molesting young boys, and Louis Brouillard, a priest, has recently been charged with child rape.
• Georg Muller resigned as Bishop of Trondheim, Norway, after a newspaper published details of his sexual abuse of an altar boy. The Norwegian Catholic church was aware of the incident but never alerted authorities.
• Kit Cunningham and three other Tanzanian priests were exposed as pedophiles in 2011.
• Raju Kokkan, an Indian vicar in the state of Kerala, was arrested in 2014 for multiple rapes of a nine-year-old girl and removed from the church. That same year three other Catholic priests in Kerala were arrested for raping minors.
• In 2018 five Catholic Bishops and two priests in Chile resigned due to their role in a notorious sex-abuse scandal. Another Chilean priest was defrocked.
• The Irish government has documented that in three dioceses “tens of thousands of children from the 1940s into the 1990s were abused by priests, nuns, and Catholic church staff.
• The German Catholic Church reported in 2018 that 3,677 German children, most under the age of 13, had been sexually abused by priests between 1946 and 2014.
• Roger Vangheluwe resigned in 2009 as Bishop of Bruges after admitting to sex crimes.
• A 2004 study financed by the Catholic Church in the United Stated found that 10,667 victims had accused 4,392 Catholic priests and deacons who served between 1950 and 2002 of sexual abuse.
• Henry Sylvestre, a Canadian priest, pled guilty to 47 counts of sex crimes against females between the ages of nine and fourteen. He died in prison.
• Jozef Wesolowski, the Vatican ambassador to Santo Domingo, was defrocked in 2014 following allegations of sex crimes against minors.
• Micheal Ledwith, the President of a Catholic college in Ireland, resigned after allegations of sex crimes by him were made public.
• Pope Francis was quoted as saying in a 2014 interview that about 8,000 Catholic priests were pedophiles. The Vatican has denied that he said this.
And this is not the end of it by any means. There are new horrors coming to light about the sexual abuse of nuns.
While claiming to be the official voice of a religion that loves the innocent and the powerless, the Catholic Church as an institution has been shown to be a vast, worldwide criminal enterprise that preys upon children while behind the scenes uses its money, its exalted status as a religious organization, and its political influence to ensure that its horrific crimes continue and that the guilty go unpunished.
What Is the Remedy?
One obvious strategy is to use lawsuits to bankrupt the Catholic Church. This tactic has already achieved many notable successes:
• Between 1950 and 2009, Catholic dioceses in the U.D. have had to pay out more than $2.6 billion to settle more than 3,000 sex-abuse lawsuits.
• Eight dioceses in the U.S. have have declared bankruptcy due to sex abuse lawsuits between 2004 and 2011. Another five have been forced to file for bankruptcy protection.
• The Catholic Church in Australia paid out $268 million between 1980 and 2015 to settle 3,057 sex-abuse lawsuits.
• The Dallas diocese paid $30.9 million in 1996 to twelve victims of a single priest.
• The Christian Brothers’ Mount Cashel Orphanage in Newfoundland was bankrupted by sex-abuse settlements.
• The diocese in Orange County, California, settled nearly 90 cases for $100 million.
• The Archdiocese of Louisville, Kentucky paid $25.7 million in 2003 to settle 240 sex-abuse lawsuits.
• The Archdiocese of Seattle paid $48 million in 2007 to more than 160 sex-crime victims.
• The Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon, settled claims of sex crimes by priests by paying 177 victims $75 million in 2007.
• The Archdiocese of Los Angeles settled 45 claims of sex crimes by priests by paying $60 million to victims in 2006. The following year it paid another $600 million to an additional 500 victims.
• The diocese of San Diego reached a $198 million settlement in 2007 with 144 victims.
• In July 2008 the Archdiocese of Denver paid $5.5 million to settle 18 claims of child sexual abuse.
Here are a few other actions that could help end this heinous institutional practice, provide justice for the victims, and punish the guilty:
• Catholics need to stand up and demand action from their church.
• Journalists need to continue their ground-breaking efforts to expose abusive priests and give a voice to the victims.
• Politicians who do not take child abuse by priests seriously or serve as apologists for the Catholic Church in this matter need to be voted out of office.
• Law enforcement authorities need to be pressured to investigate and, when appropriate, prosecute, abusive priests.
• Laws need to be passed making it no longer possible for the Catholic Church to use the Vatican as a legal sanctuary for accused priests.
• The Catholic Church should be prosecuted as a criminal enterprise under all relevant national and international racketeering laws.
The Catholic faithful deserve a church institution that has not utterly corrupted itself by the practice of abusing innocent children and protecting tools of Satan. It is clear that the current institution is still willfully refusing to police itself or to live up to its own tenets. It must be dismantled.