“This is an ancient, rigid, secretive, top-down, all-male monarchy. It always has been. It always will be. The answer is not to reform them, but to go around them and to contain them.”
So thundered David Clohessy, National Director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, to a throng of agitated members of Voice of the Faithful, another group that once claimed the mantle of reform.
Whatever constructive role these groups once played in the national “dialogue” about the abuses perpetrated by predatory, largely homosexual priests, it has long since past. In fact, they don’t seek dialogue at all. Clohessy now counsels against dialogue with bishops and instead urges Catholics to lobby state legislatures to exempt dioceses from statutes of limitation that prevent an endless stream of aging, often dubious, claims.
High profile plaintiffs’ attorneys are wasting no time. Attorney Jeffrey Anderson is taking advantage of California’s lifting of its statute to “sue the s*** out of [the Catholic Church] everywhere.” Cincinnati’s Stan Chesley successfully coaxed the nearby Diocese of Covington, Kentucky, to settle for $85 million, pocketing 30% of the take for himself and his co-counsel. Despite the fact that Chesley overestimated the number of claimants for Covington’s funds by a factor of two-to-one, he had the audacity to claim that 30% is a low figure, since he usually takes home between 33% and 40%.
Let’s gain some perspective here. As bad as the abuses brought to light during 2002’s “Long Lent” were, they pale in comparison to those committed by the employees of another venerable institution: the public school system.
The May 2006 Crisis magazine reports the findings of Hofstra University’s Charol Shakeshaft: 6.7% of all students in the United States report being sexually abused in a physical manner by an educator in public schools.
Catholic author and blogger Mark Shea recently wrote that
in a single year, 1998, the Dept of Justice listed 103,600 cases of sexual abuse in public schools. From 1950 to 2003, there were 10,667 reported cases of clergy sexual abuse. That's 10 times as much in one year as there were in 53 years in the Church. Yet nobody is passing laws singling out teachers for special exemption from ordinary laws. Only Catholics.
Shea calls what Clohessy and his attorney cohorts are urging “the suiciding of the Church.” And if these folks are successful, that’s precisely what it will be. Take Catholic schools, for example. Nationwide, approximately ten percent of elementary school students are educated in Catholic institutions. And although estimates vary, it’s a safe bet that half of the average parish budget goes to maintaining its school.
Tack onto each parish budget a share of the additional debt that tens of millions of dollars in settlements or successful lawsuits will create, and the recent wave of Catholic school closings will quickly look like a trickle. Are the supposedly over-burdened government schools ready to take on an extra couple million students?
Liberal activists often complain that federal budget cuts in the '80s either caused or exacerbated the homeless problem in our inner cities. Whether or not that’s true, what’s indisputable is that Church-run charities like food pantries and homeless shelters remained in these communities. “Suicide the Church” and not only will recipients suffer, but taxes to support government replacement agencies will go up.
Likewise, as businesses and residents have abandoned downtown areas, churches have remained, providing a needed cultural core. No dollars, no core. Catholics will be left to worship almost exclusively in the beige, bongo-filled barns that increasingly dot the suburban landscape.
This is real, folks. Hiding in the chancery, if you’re a bishop, or pretending that your parish will survive the deluge unscathed, if you’re a layman, isn’t going to work. What the Church needs are bold, sensible actions from all the members of the Body of Christ. Take Columbus’s new bishop Frederick Campbell. When the Ohio legislature debated the merits of lifting the statute of limitations, he took to the airwaves identifying the flaws in the proposal. “This undermines a fundamental right to a fair defense of a case…. When an accusation is made, it tars a person for the rest of his life.”
Thankfully, the effort in Ohio was partially defeated (the statute expires twelve years after an alleged victim turns eighteen, instead of the proposed twenty), but currently more than a dozen states are considering lifting their statutes. California, mentioned above, has witnessed its Catholic institutions shell out $250 million to plaintiffs now that its statute has been lifted, with no end in sight.
I recently had the pleasure of touring the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. The church proudly notes that it was paid for by the generous contributions of individual Catholics and their families during the 1950s. We cannot let the cultural treasure that our grandparents worked so hard to accumulate be squandered.
Francis X. Maier, the author of the May 2006 Crisis piece, said it best:
As a Catholic, I believe I have a duty to help sexual abuse victims heal. And I have an equal obligation to the Catholics who came before me, and the ones who will come after me, to pass along the Faith and the resources with which I was entrusted. They’re not mine to throw away.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Rich Leonardi, publisher of the blog Ten Reasons, writes from Cincinnati, Ohio.