a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Institutions that are founded on or dependent upon a belief that the people in them are the good people and the others, outside, are bad guys, inevitably turn into cultures of hypocrisy. The leaders of such institutions are the ones who have received word of their own and their followers’ goodness from some source that is higher than they are –some transcendent source or some source in the authoritative past.  No matter what kind of institution they preside over, the leaders are in a hieros class, priestly or like priests, and the institution is a hierarchy under them. This means that they are in charge of absolving all the important members of hypocrisy, starting with themselves, and in charge of preserving the image of the institution as a bastion of goodness.  It also means that they transmit prejudice down the line, particularly against the lowliest and most vulnerable in the institution, which usually means against the women and children. Women and children are most like the outsiders, that is, bad.

A lot of people have become furious with the Catholic Church because it has become a culture of hypocrisy in which protecting the hierarchy and the image of the good Church has meant vast suffering for thousands of children.  Particularly angry are members of groups with names like Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), which are made up of victims of the downward flowing prejudice in the Church and of the Church hierarchs’ frantic efforts to preserve the Church’s image. In today’s New York Times (5/19), the current national director of SNAP, David Clohessy, outlined the motive he finds behind a May 18^th report commissioned and partly paid for (about half the $1.8 million invoice) by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.  Referring to “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States,” Clohessy speculated that the bishops’s plan is “ to act as though the crisis has been clarified and is now past. It’s deceptive and disingenuous, but shrewd public relations…” He is not alone in suspecting that the bishops, having acted hypocritically in the past, are now acting hypocritically again, to cover their hypocritical tracks.

The report, written by a social science group at John Jay College of Criminal Justice after nearly five years of reviewing statistics, contains many claims, but the one that most provoked Clohessy was that the incidence of priests abusing children grew in the 1960s, peaked in the 1970s and declined after 1985. This very questionable claim, which was first advanced by an earlier John Jay Report in 2004, is now, as it was then, being used to support two conclusions emanating from diocesan public relations offices all over the country.

The first is that if something in the 1960s caused the growth of child abuse in the Church, that something can be identified as “the 1960s.” It is hard to imagine how anyone could take this claim seriously while a huge scandal is currently in course in Europe.  One diocese after another –in Belgium, in Germany, in Spain—is being exposed as a haven for priests who abused in the 1980s and 1990s, during one of the most conservative “family values” periods in the Church’s modern history…But, nonetheless, for conservative Catholics “the 1960s” means:  families breaking down, sexuality breaking out, children running wild, young priests breaking under the strain of living through a cultural revolution that shook the Church itself, producing the dreaded Vatican II reforms.  (Actually, 70% of the abusing American priests cited in the 2004 report were ordained before the Vatican II seminaries.)

Second, if something in the mid-1980s halted or slowed down the abuse crisis, this could be the Church’s response to the crisis. Perhaps the response was not as “no tolerance” as it became in 2002, when knowledge of how to prevent child abuse had allegedly progressed in the Church.  But the Church did establish a program for sending abusing priests into therapy. Further, the Church began its concerted effort to roll back the reforms of Vatican II, so it was lessening the confusion allegedly caused in young priests by those reforms, the work of the Church’s hated liberal wing.

Variations of these two ways of avoiding the issue were flying thickly through the Church news services when, two days in advance of the publication of the recent report, the Vatican stepped forth to issue a directive.  Its bishops everywhere were given one year to create “clear and co-ordinated” policies for dealing with abusive priests and for co-operating with secular authorities. Since we are in the year 2011 and not the year 1985 or even 2002, the Vatican’s directive is, in effect, an admission that the bishops did not act effectively in the mid-1980s, have not acted effectively since, and are never going to get clear and co-ordinated orders from the Vatican itself to submit sex criminals to secular jurisdiction. It is also a demonstration that the Vatican still does not get the jurisdictional problem, despite the report and despite so many  years of scandal.

The directive contains no clear message that priests who abuse children, which is a criminal offense, should come under secular jurisdiction.  It contains no recognition that  the American bishops, when they declared a “no tolerance” policy in 2002,  did so only after strenuous insistence by civilian or lay boards in their dioceses—not because the Vatican gave any guidance or the bishops themselves were concerned about the children in their parishes. Similarly, it contains no recognition that the 2002 “no tolerance” policy was without an enforcement mechanism. The Vatican is not saying now that it is going to take responsibility for turning abusive priests over to the police if the bishops do not do so themselves. No level of the Church hierarchy is saying that crimes have been committed and the Church has been harboring criminals. The line from within the Church is still  “we police ourselves,” or, in effect, “we make our own law” or “canon law prevails.”  (The John Jay Report revealed that even after their “no tolerance” policy was declared, American Church officials contacted the police over less than a quarter of the priests accused of abuse.)

Unfortunately, it is also the case that no one in American political life has responded with an admission that our democratic state has for forty years been harboring and subsidizing  and welcoming “faith-based initiatives” from an institution that declares itself outside the laws that have been made –starting in the 1960s–to protect our children.  In fact, the political process helped put the Catholic Church (and other churches, too) outside of the laws.

Back in the 1960s, when pediatricians developed x-ray techniques that enabled them to prove that a child had been physically abused, so that police and prosecutors could go after physical abusers, mandatory reporting policies were legislated in all fifty states. They were extended to sexual abuse in 1974. Pediatricians and all professionals working with children were taught to recognize child abuse and report suspicious cases to the child protective services that were set up to investigate.  But, in the original and subsequent  mandatory reporting legislation, church officials and priests were not included.  Of course, no priest would harm a child! Priests are good! So, churches were encouraged to police themselves –that is, encouraged to be outside of the civil laws that protect children.  The first state to pass a law requiring religious officials to report abuse of  children was Massachusetts– in 2002.

Over the years, the problem of hypocrisy in the Church and in relation to the Church has gotten ever thicker. Catholic Church officials realized that they could appear to be investigating the child abuse problem by arranging to investigate their institution.  To their “we police ourselves” stance they added  “we research ourselves.”  The researchers at John Jay College were working for the institution they were investigating, as had their colleagues who issued “The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States,” known as the John Jay Report, in 2004.  The earlier team was also commissioned by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and, even worse, based their report on surveys completed by the Roman Catholic dioceses. The surveys revealed no names of accused and/or convicted priests, so none of the information presented could be independently checked by the academics and, of course, none of the accused or convicted priests could be interviewed by the academics.  Less than one quarter of the priests who were accused during the 1950-2002 period studied were ever reported to the police. Church data was speaking in the John Jay Report, and sheerly statistical data at that.

Quite a different matter was a report co-written in 1985 by Rev. Thomas Doyle, a  canonical lawyer with the Vatican Embassy in Washington. Without benefit of any hired social science, Rev. Doyle simply warned American bishops and the Vatican that child abuse by priests was a big problem in dioceses across America. Pope John II, who had made the Church such a bastion for anti-Communism (particularly in his native Poland), and who had been such a champion of human rights for so many groups (not women, not children, certainly not homosexuals), ignored Doyle’s whistle-blowing report. The Pope also ignored a 1979 letter he received from a Mexican priest who had been abused as a boy by Father Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ, one of the Pope’s most important allies in promoting the Church as a bastion of goodness in a godless world. The Mexican anti-Communist pedophile’s legendary fund-raising enterprises went on uninterrupted; not even a 1998 canon law case brought against him by a group of his victims effected his power in the Church hierarchy or his steady opposition to any allegedly communist influenced Liberation Theology trends in South America.

Dissident reports from within and hired reports from without typically have had no effect on cultures of hypocrisy except to make the hierarch’s cling more tenaciously to their enabling rationalization: that they are the good guys and they must defend against the bad guys –especially if the bad guys have begun to infiltrate the institution. Children who speak up about having been abused enter easily into the category of Church-destroyers.

Defenders of the Church hierarchy are quick to point out that other institutions where  sexual abuse is endemic –like public and private schools—behaved no differently than the Church, letting abusers go unpunished or moving them to other schools.  Is the Catholic Church any different?  Is the number of abusers in the institution higher?  Yes, if you believe the John Jay Report, about 4% of priests sexually abuse, most of them on a small scale, and a few –accounting for the majority of victims—repeatedly, over years.  But what really distinguishes the Church is its level of hypocrisy, the way hypocrisy defines its culture.  Hypocrisy is obvious in the Church’s “we police ourselves” and “we make out own laws” attitudes, which are so prejudicial against children. But the hypocrisy is even deeper: it is right in the anti-sex and particularly anti-homosexual sex sexual theology of Catholicism, which has no equivalent in schools.

For example, the first John Jay Report claimed that 81% percent of the child abuse victims were male, while in the general population at least 80% of child sexual abuse victims are female and the vast majority of perpetrators are heterosexual. The Report also indicates that the Church has a higher percentage of homosexuals than are to be found in the general population. But, unlike other institutions, it requires celibacy of its members and, worse, requires the homosexual ones not only to lie about their sexuality but to preach against homosexuality, to damn themselves day in and day out (and, if they are caught abusing,  to go to therapies that are often aimed at converting them to heterosexuality and thence to celibacy).  The Church creates tormented souls. Except for those who truly desire and are content with celibacy and can sustain a spiritual life in a culture of hypocrisy, the Catholic Church has made an Inferno on earth while it threatens one in the afterlife.

Only 7% of the priests profiled in these reports were, by their own admission on surveys, abused as boys; in the general population, around 30% of abusers are abuse survivors. But no statisticians ask the Catholic homosexual boys who chose the priesthood if one reason for their choice was to escape the homophobia of their Catholic homes or schools –that is, to escape prejudice by entering an institution where they were and are respected and esteemed, where they could be priests and rise further up the hierarchy as long as they subscribed to the belief system that condemns them.  Nor are they asked what it feels like to then be required to hide and lie while living in an all-male environment where denying their sexuality would be maximally difficult.  One can hardly imagine a situation in which being honest with yourself –and thus able to be honest about abusive behavior around you—would be harder.

It can happen that an investigative report commissioned by the institution to be investigated can be very illuminating –and a catalyst for change. That was certainly so with The Pentagon Papers.  But, of course, the history of the Vietnam conflict the Papers presented was meant to be secret; the writers of the Papers were encouraged to be honest and use all available sources, without filter. Their work was not part of (or useable in) a Pentagon image-saving effort.  But the honest truth never would have been the catalyst for change that it was –briefly–had it not been leaked to the New York Times and other newspapers.

The people who can tell the truth about the Catholic Church’s institutional hypocrisy and its theological hypocrisy are its priests.  The ones who are survivors of abuse by priests have been key to survivors’ networks and they constitute, in effect, a Survivors Network of Those Abused by Being Priests.  What you can find on the internet and in the press from them or from studies by therapists who have talked with them  –like the psychoanalyst Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea in her Perversion of Power and Sexual Betrayal in the Catholic Church (2007)– is certainly a great deal more illuminating than the second John Jay Report made available this week.