Here are two of the most recent stories about the scandal that refuses to go away. I offer them not to suggest that there is something uniquely wrong with the Roman Catholic Church, but to ask what the Episcopal Church can learn from this crisis.
First, the Associated Press reports from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles on the dozens of priests once accused of sexual abuse in civil law suits, who now live “unmonitored” lives.
The list of addresses, obtained by The Associated Press, contains nearly 50 former priests who live unmonitored in California, and another 15 in cities and towns from Maryland to Texas to Montana. More than 80 more cannot be located despite an exhaustive search by plaintiffs’ attorneys. Four are believed to have fled to Mexico or South America. About 80 are dead.
Lead plaintiff lawyer Raymond Boucher says it’s the only time anyone has put together a list of priest addresses in any other diocese or archdiocese nationwide. Lawyers hope to eventually make the names and locations of abusive priests available to the public, similar to Megan’s Law databases that exist nationwide.
“Many of these priests would be in prison but for the fact that the archdiocese essentially created immunity for them by hiding them and keeping the secrets. It’s essential that these documents come out because we know one thing: there is no cure for priests or anybody that sexually abuses a child,” said Boucher.
“Many of them are within a mile of multiple schools, day care centers and parks and they are a time bomb waiting to go off. The only way the public can ever protect itself is to have a full, complete knowledge about them.”
And then this via The New York Times from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia:
Three weeks after a scathing grand jury report said the Archdiocese of Philadelphia had provided safe haven to as many as 37 priests who were credibly accused of sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior toward minors, most of those priests remain active in the ministry.
The possibility that even one predatory priest, not to mention three dozen, might still be serving in parishes — “on duty in the archdiocese today, with open access to new young prey,” as the grand jury put it — has unnerved many Roman Catholics here and sent the church reeling in the latest and one of the most damning episodes in the American church since it became engulfed in the sexual abuse scandal nearly a decade ago.
The situation in Philadelphia is “Boston reborn,” said David J. O’Brien, who teaches Catholic history at the University of Dayton. The Boston Archdiocese was engulfed in a scandal starting in 2002 involving widespread sexual abuse by priests and an extensive cover-up that reached as high as the cardinal.
Andrew Sullivan writes:
The pattern is clear: homophobic doctrine, arrested emotional development of young Catholic gay boys and adolescents, a high proportion of priests either acting out sexually with boys whose age roughly approximates their own emotional maturity or coping with these pressures through drugs or alcohol. All of which is then compounded by a culture of hierarchy and silence and obedience that impedes airing this clearly, fails to protect children immediately and also allows these screwed up priests to stay in place.
There has been some progress in accountability and openness. But the core elements that made the Catholic Church one of the biggest pedophile conspiracies in the world for decades if not centuries remain: incoherent, irrational and data-resistant doctrines on homosexual orientation and sex in general; a Western culture in which fewer and fewer straight men are prepared to give up sex and love and marriage to serve the church; and a hierarchical structure designed to instill control rather than openness, and perfectly set up to enable cover-ups.
Catholic ecclesiology certainly lends itself to holding sensitive information in few hands, meaning that crucial, institution-defining decisions are made by a tiny number of people, who often have an interest in minimizing the appearance that anything is wrong. But that can happen in any organization. What do we do to minimize the instances in which this happens in our own Church?