Roman Catholic priests scandal

The Event: Widespread accusations, many confirmed, that large numbers of Roman Catholic priests had been sexually abusing the children and adolescents entrusted to their care

Date: 1990s–the early twenty-first century

Place: Boston, Massachusetts, and elsewhere around the world

Significance: The gradually expanding revelations of priestly abuse of young people rocked the Roman Catholic Church both because of the nature and the extent of the abuse and because of the additional revelation that church leaders had long been aware of the problem and had responded to it only by transferring offending priests to different parishes and spending millions of dollars to silence their victims.

The molestation of children entrusted to the care of Roman Catholic priests became a worldwide news story during the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, as increasing numbers of victims came forward to describe their sexual abuse. The first stories originated in Boston, when the Boston Globe reported on the abuse, but it was later revealed that similar abuses had occurred throughout the world. The most disturbing element of the emerging evidence was that the abuse had occurred over a long period of time.

After a police investigation began, police detectives found that church records documented many incidents of such offenses as priests trading drugs for sex with minors and telling their young victims that if they were to reveal their abuse to anyone, their parents would burn in hell. One of the primary reasons that the priests had been able to abuse children for so long without suffering any punitive consequence was the Catholic Church’s penchant for secrecy.

Church authorities were apparently long aware of which priests were guilty of abusing children but did nothing to have them prosecuted. Instead, the church usually sent offending priests to other parishes, where they repeated their crimes. The only other action taken by church officials was to place offenders in counseling programs. In some cases, the church paid victims and their families large sums of money in return for their silence. According to one unconfirmed estimate, the church may have paid out a total of nearly seven hundred million dollars.

The church’s outpouring of money to hush accusers caused it serious structural damage. One archdiocese had to file for bankruptcy shortly before trials of two of its offending priests were about to begin. That action signaled that any further civil lawsuits brought against the Roman Catholic Church would be settled in federal courts. In December 2002, Cardinal Bernard Law, the powerful Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston who had once been regarded as the face of American Catholicism, resigned in disgrace over revelations that he had long known about the abuse.

Eventually, it was revealed that at least 1,200 priests had been charged with sexually abusing children; some estimates went much higher. In response to the furor over the incidents in Boston, other American bishops created the National Review Board (NRB), a body made up of lay members of the church. The board commissioned John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York to investigate the scandal fully and determine the total numbers of molestations and offenders and any other behavior construed as abusive.

The college’s comprehensive report received the endorsement of 98 percent of the church’s American dioceses. According to the study, approximately 4 percent of all American priests who served between 1950 and 2002 had been accused of sexually abusing minors. During that period, there were 10,667 victims, with boys between the ages of eleven and seventeen being the primary victims.

The frequency of molestations increased greatly during the 1960s and peaked during the 1970s before declining for two decades. More than four thousand priests were accused of sexual abuse, but 56 percent of those accused had only one allegation against them. The bulk of the charges centered on 149 priests, each of whom had at least ten allegations against him. Estimates of the numbers of molestation incidents and victims by outside groups placed higher numbers on all the figures.

The NRB recommended that in the future “zero tolerance” be accorded to priests guilty of sexual abuse. This meant that all priests charged with molestation were to be expelled from the ministry, regardless of when their offenses occurred. Even if charges were unsubstantiated or pertained to incidents occurring many years earlier, accused priests could lose their positions. The NRB plan gained the acquiescence of bishops in the United States, but the Vatican rejected it, saying it was grossly unfair to priests who might have engaged in single sinful acts many years earlier and afterward acted with complete probity. Meanwhile, hundreds of lawsuits against the church were filed in the United States, and criminal convictions were obtained against some of the offenders.

Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, resigned from the College of Cardinals in July 2018 following allegations of sexual abuse. In August of that year, a grand jury in Pennsylvania found, after two years of meetings that involved parsing through thousands of documents and hearing testimony from several victims, that over three hundred priests in six dioceses in the state had sexually abused children over the span of seventy years and that cover-ups had been systematically orchestrated by some of the highest members of the church; over one thousand victims were identified. Additionally, many protested to have the statute of limitations removed to allow victims to pursue criminal charges. Only days later, in a rare occurrence since the scandal broke, Pope Francis published a letter meant for all Catholics condemning the priests' behavior and the church's response.

Bibliography

Boston Globe. Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church. Back Bay Books, 2003. Compilation of news stories on the priest scandal.

Bruni, F., and E. Burkett. A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church. HarperPerennial, 2002. Broad and critical survey of the problem of priestly abuse throughout the world.

Goodstein, Laurie, and Sharon Otterman. "Catholic Priests Abused 1,000 Children in Pennsylvania, Report Says." The New York Times, 14 Aug. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/us/catholic-church-sex-abuse-pennsylvania.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.

Jenkins, P. Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis. Oxford UP, 2001. Scholarly examination of the scandal.

Povoledo, Elisabetta. "'We Abandoned Them': Pope Francis Condemns Sex Abuse and Cover-Up." The New York Times, 20 Aug. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/world/europe/pope-sexual-abuse-letter.html. Accessed 3 Oct. 2018.

Steinfels, P. A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Simon & Schuster, 2003. Study of the devastating impact of the scandal on the relationship between the church and its outraged lay members.