The American narrative of the Catholic Church’s struggles with the clerical sexual abuse of the young has been dominated by several tropes firmly set in journalistic concrete: that this was and is a “pedophilia” crisis; that the sexual abuse of the young is an ongoing danger in the Church; that the Catholic Church was and remains a uniquely dangerous environment for young people; that a high percentage of priests were abusers; that abusive behavior is more likely from celibates, such that a change in the Church’s discipline of priestly celibacy would be important in protecting the young; that the Church’s bishops were, as a rule, willfully negligent in handling reports of abuse; that the Church really hasn’t learned any lessons from the revelations that began in the Long Lent of 2002.
But according to an independent, $1.8 million study conducted by New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and released on May 18, every one of these tropes is false.
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One: Most clerical abusers were not pedophiles, that is, men with a chronic and strong sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. Most of those abused (51 percent) were aged eleven to fourteen and 27 percent of victims were fifteen to seventeen; 16 percent were eight to ten and 6 percent were younger than seven. Males between eleven and fourteen account for more than 40 percent of all victims. Clerical ephebophilia (a sexual attraction to adolescents, often boys) was clearly a serious problem. But to label this a “pedophilia crisis” is ignorant, sloppy, or malicious.
Two: The “crisis” of clerical sexual abuse in the United States was time-specific. The incidence of abuse spiked in the late 1960s and began to recede dramatically in the mid-1980s. In 2010, seven credible cases of abuse were reported in a church that numbers over 65 million adherents.
Three: Abusers were a tiny minority of Catholic priests. Some 4 percent of Catholic priests in active ministry in the United States were accused of abuse between the 1950s and 2002. There is not a shred of evidence indicating that priests abuse young people at rates higher than do people in the rest of society. On the contrary: Most sexual abuse takes place within families. The John Jay study concludes that, in 2001, whereas five young people in 100,000 may have been abused by a priest, the average rate of abuse throughout the United States was 134 for every 100,000 young people. The sexual abuse of the young is a widespread and horrific societal problem; it is by no means uniquely, or principally, a Catholic problem, or a specifically priestly problem.
Four: The bishops’ response to the burgeoning abuse crisis between the late 1960s and the early 1980s was not singularly woodenheaded or callous. In fact, according to the John Jay study, the bishops were as clueless as the rest of society about the magnitude of the abuse problem and, again like the rest of society, tended to focus on the perpetrators of abuse rather than the victims. This, in turn, led to an overdependence on psychiatry and psychology in dealing with clerical perpetrators, in the false confidence that they could be “cured” and returned to active ministry — a pattern that again mirrored broader societal trends. In many pre-1985 cases, the principal request of victims’ families was that the priest-abuser be given help and counseling. Yes, the bishops should have been more alert than the rest of an increasingly coarsened society to the damage done to victims by sexual abuse; but as the John Jay report states, “like the general public, the leaders of the Church did not recognize the extent or harm of victimization.” And this, in turn, was “one factor that likely led to the continued perpetration of offenses.”
Five: As for today, the John Jay study affirms that the Catholic Church may well be the safest environment for young people in American society. It is certainly a safer environment than the public schools. Moreover, no other American institution has undertaken the extensive self-study that the Church has, in order to root out the problem of the sexual abuse of the young. It will be interesting to see when editorials in the New York Times and the Boston Globe demand in-depth studies of the sexual abuse of the young by members of the teachers’ unions, and zero-tolerance policies for teacher/abusers.
I was a seminarian in the 70's and was surprised at the number of effeminate men I studied with in the seminary. They were totally different then the priests I knew from my grade school days.
George,will you be visiting Cracow this summer? Hope to see you at St. Giles.if you come.
When politicians, sports figures, and celebrities use the "we're no worse than anyone else" defense, they're usually rewarded with scorn or, at a minimum, raised eyeballs.
For an organization whose entire premise is the espousal of a higher spiritual calling, adopting such a pedestrian stance is not just pathetic, but outright contemptuous of anyone who endured years of their indoctrination.
Perhaps a study commisioned by the victims and their families would skew a bit differently, don't you think?
"One: Most clerical abusers were not pedophiles, that is, men with a chronic and strong s*xual attraction to pre-pubescent children. Most of those abused (51 percent) were aged eleven to fourteen and 27 percent of victims were fifteen to seventeen;"
Well maybe not so much. From the DSM IV
302.2 Pedophilia
Topics Discussed: pedophilia.
Excerpt: "The paraphilic focus of Pedophilia involves s*xual activity with a prepubescent child (generally age 13 years or younger).
A person who has s*x with minors between the ages of 11-14 is most likely a pedophile. Sure, some children reach puberty before 11 but most don't.
I'm thinking the best defense against charges of liking young boys is unequivocally NOT "They're young men".
While I might agree that the Catholic Church has probably endured an unfair amount of unwarranted (we'll call it) abuse, they STILL brought it upon themselves. "It's only 5 in 100,000" isn't really a defense, either. Parents should be able to expect it to be zero. They call themselves men of God, for glory's sake. Comparing their foibles to those of society at large is silly.
Okay, I stopped reading after the author had to provide a breakdown of statistics to prove that it wasn't pedophilia that the Church was engaged in, but something else. Is that the best defense of the Church that can be mounted?
It would have been better to just accept the view and say that the Church will work hard to correct it. I don't think this article helps much.
I am an active Catholic and the reputation of our church is justly deserved because the Church put its reputation ahead of the safety of the children in their charge.
They did...and still do, protect preditory pedophilies. This problem has been going on for centuries and the Church deserves all the scorn it receives.
The arrogance put on display over the last 40 years is the real sin. There can be no gray area, ZERO tolerance for pedophilia is the ONLY answer...ZERO TOLERANCE!
Surely, you must be joking. As a mother of boys, I am baffled and distressed that you would try and gloss this disgusting behavior over as "well, it wasn't pedophilia."
Look at your statistics again. Nearly 75 percent of abuse victims were 14 and under. Too young to drive. Too young to enter into a legal contract. Too young to even be in high school.
How dare you say this isn't about pedophilia? Clearly, you don't have children. Because the parent of an abused 12-year-old would surely consider their child the victim of a pedophile.
Weigel's point is that if the results of this study and every other mainstream study are accurate - that Catholic priests are no more likely, probably less likely, than other individuals to commit child s*xual abuse - then the overhype of this problem as distinctly one of Catholic clergy is damaging children by causing their parents to overreact to one threat and underreact to another, more serious one. If it's true that your child is more likely to be abused by his soccer coach, substitute teacher, step-uncle, or next door neighbor than by a priest, then the microfocus on priests specifically is doing no one any good.
Of course it still remains true that from a Catholic Church point of view, Catholic and clerical incidents specifically are the ones they are directly responsible for preventing and the ones that must continued to be guarded against by the Church. There is no acceptable rate of child abuse, be it 4 in 100,000 or 1 in a billion. Good realtive results aren't the goal; zero tolerance is.
Nevertheless from a societal point of view treating child sex abuse as distinctly a Catholic priest problem is ludicrous and unhelpful to anyone but pedophiles. Yes, the Church needs to police the Church and not be crying foul over disparate reporting. But similarly, the educational system needs to police the teachers. Cops need to police the cops. Foster care agencies need to police their own. Jehovah's Witnesses and Long Island Public Schools and Mormon fundamentalists and so many other groups that have been found to have far greater rates of abuse than Catholic clergy need to clean up their problems, and not just sit back and forever point the finger solely at the Church.
Now some may disagree with the results of the study and still believe that child sex abuse is in fact disproportionately or overwhelmingly a Catholic clergy probelm. Fair enough. People believe what they want to believe, and certainly the amount of ink spilled on Catholic clergy abuse vs. public school teacher abuse has been far, far greater. But parents and society would do well to make sure that every major study on this matter is indeed flawed or fraudulent before they unthinkingly entrust their child to some random day care worker while carefully monitoring each moment spent within a half a mile of a Catholic priest.
I'm Catholic (though admittedly not an especially good one), and I'm often skeptical of these claims. Nevertheless, arguments 1 and 3 seem pretty shakey.
As to the ages of the victims and whether they technically fall into the category of pedophilia. It sound like 67% of the victims were between ages 8 and 14. These are prime alter boy years, and I guess the boys would be considered especially vulnerable. It might also explain why more victims are boys than girls.
As to argument 3, suggesting that priests are no worse than the rest of the population, isn't the expecatation that they should be better?
Maybe I'm just morally uncompromising and old fashioned, but I would have thought that God's instrument on earth would be able to, at an absolute minimum, be somewhat above average when it comes to avoiding child-rape. But hey, no one's perfect!
Mark A and others, you're completely missing the point, perhaps deliberately. Study after study, including the Jay one, shows that indeed Catholic clergy are indeed a lot less likely to be child abusers than other people are, contravening the CW. Less likely than other denominations' clergy, BTW (see Philip Jenkins' work). Read Weigels' point 3 - or read the study. Nevertheless the rate is not zero. In an ideal world, it would be zero. The goal within the Church is zero. No one disagrees with any of that.
But why should the public discussion outside the Church focus almost exclusively on the Church, unless of course this and other studies are wrong and child abuse is indeed practically an exclusive practice of the Catholic Church?
There is nothing surprising about the findings of John Jay researchers. Because it is highly likely that the John Jay researchers didn't find support for any homos*xuality-abuse connection because they were doing their best to dodge the evidence.
The fraudulent methodology some clinicians are willing to use is breathtaking. They pad their samples with girl victims, use a very high threshold of requirements abusers must meet before they are placed in the "homos*xual" category, etc. They've even declared that pedophiles "don't have a s*xual orientation" now -- even when those pedophiles abuse show a clear preference for one gender.
Some of the most eggregious examples of this practice can be found in Jenny et al's study, "Are Children at risk for s*xual abuse by homos*xuals?" External Link Jenny & Co. refused to categorize perps as homos*xual unless the staff noted in the patient's chart that the parent of the victim told the clinic staff that the abuser was gay. They also distinguished homos*xuals from bi-s*xuals, which lowered the incidence of "homos*xual molestation".
To see rock-ribbed moral absolutists like George Weigel scamper about in vain trying to find excuses for the ghastly and appalling moral failures of the American Catholic church (the protestants do it too! it's really the fault of the hippies! gay people are the real problem here!) is both entertaining and a bit sad.
I understand the point the author is trying to make, but I find the results mixed at best.
The broader point, that the rise in abuse was an extension of the broader social revolution in society, is probably correct. The almost unbelievable rise in crime in the late 60's and early 70's exposes what terrible damage the social revolution inflicted on society--in urban areas like Washington, D.C., the crime rates tripled, quadrupled, or in some case went up by a factor of ten(!). That message has never been popular with the media, which by and large celebrated the excesses of the social revolution, and so has consistently downplayed the impact of the social revolution on problems in our modern society, but that only makes them complicit in the damage it has wrought.
But as others below noted, the churches should have been different. The churches should have stood their ground against the social revolution and fought its influences within its own halls as much as possible, but in my view there was too much hidden sympathy for the social revolutionaries, and far too much sympathy for the criminals enabled by the social revolution. The churches should have done more to detect and fight the influence of permissiveness, libertinism, and abuse wherever they found it.
@Patrick J: Well put. And I think you have hit on a very critical issue: the issue of abuse within the Roman Catholic Church has been used to detract from more widespread problems elsewhere, particularly within mixed families, the daycare system, and the school system. (In the church I was active in growing up, I never heard any allegations of abuse; they were widespread at two of the public schools I attended, with virtually no disciplinary action for the teachers involved.)
The reason there wre so many victims is that the problem was not dealt with properly at the top when pedophile priests were exposed. It could and should be asked if that may be related to a system in which none of the authorities in charge have children of their own. Indeed, the priest is more like the bishop's "child" than the children in his diocese. And they were protected in that way, even if that meant the destruction of many more children.
Perhaps a biblical standard for church leaders should be returned to, such as "above reproach" and "He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity (but if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?)..." 1 Tim 3.
