Reforms Must Shake Church to Its Core

This Friday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will release a report by the National Review Board, composed of 12 laypeople, on the causes of the clergy abuse crisis. More than 100 people -- bishops, theologians, psychologists, prosecutors, abuse survivors and authors, myself among them -- have been interviewed by the board. In contrast to Vatican investigations, which are secret, this is the first church-sanctioned probe by laypeople. The board will also release a report, compiled by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, on the number of priest offenders, victims and financial costs.

Scandal-battered bishops are bracing for a highly critical report. But will it also recommend structural change to manage the crisis?

Some priestly abuse data were leaked last week. CNN reported a preliminary finding of 4,450 priests who were accused of abusing about 11,000 children over the last 50 years. This would suggest that about 4% of priests have abused youngsters, which tracks a 1990 estimate by A.W. Richard Sipe, a psychotherapist who has testified for many victims of clergy sexual misconduct. The new figures on perpetrators would exceed the 1993 estimate of Father Andrew M. Greeley, a church sociologist, who extrapolated data on 23 priests from the Chicago Archdiocese and estimated that 2,500 to 3,000 priests had abused youths. But Greeley’s estimate of 100,000 victims is probably closer to the truth than the John Jay data, as most child molesters have many victims.

“The bishops were forced into this report because of media coverage,” contends Paul Baier, a software entrepreneur and founder of Survivors First, a Boston group that has been gathering and analyzing data on clergy perpetrators. The bishops have a strong incentive to steeply underreport the number of victims, he claims.

Last week, the Los Angeles Archdiocese released a report it compiled identifying 244 clerics accused of abusing 656 minors since 1930. The number of victims is relatively low. The archdiocese refuses to hand over clergy personnel files to a county grand jury investigating priestly abuse. Church attorneys claim that the files are protected by the state’s constitutional right to privacy and the 1st Amendment’s freedom-of-religion clause. But grand juries in Boston and New York’s Long Island got similar diocesan documents.

The National Review Board’s report is sure to reverberate at the Vatican and in Western countries where clergy abuse has become a highly charged issue. In Ireland, North America and Australia, the court systems allow plaintiffs broad powers of discovery. As journalists obtained the legal documents and survivors spoke out, the clergy-abuse scandal became international in the 1990s. But the issue never amounted to much in Italy because its legal system is more restrictive in civil litigation. Facing little pressure from the Italian media, the Vatican stood detached.

A 2002 USA Today poll found that 87% of Catholics surveyed wanted any bishop who reassigned child molesters -- as dozens of bishops have done -- to be removed. Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati and Bishop John McCormack of Manchester, N.H., entered plea bargains over their handling of predatory priests, and the Cincinnati archdiocese paid a fine. Yet, both bishops are still in office.

Here’s how the board could begin to correct such a situation:

* It should identify bishops who have similarly betrayed their trust and recommend an alternative church mechanism to remove them. Under canon law, only the pope can remove a bishop.

* It should recommend that Pope John Paul II meet with an international delegation of abuse survivors for a conference, not just for a few hours. The pope should listen and bear witness to their accounts of how they were sexually assaulted, and how bishops and cardinals lied to them, sheltered the priests who abused them and often, through lawyers, counterattacked them. Such a conference should also be recommended for the next pope.

* It should address the dynamics of the gay priest culture. All available data show that the majority of clergy-abuse victims were teenage boys, not young children. Conservatives want to blame gay priests for the whole scandal. But bishops have concealed all kinds of sexual misconduct among clerics. The board’s report should not scapegoat homosexual priests, but all Catholics are owed a frank, honest analysis of gay priests who created cliques in dioceses and seminaries, fostering an environment riddled with narcissism and cynicism toward celibacy, and the use of parish funds for their lifestyles.

* Give lay parish councils the right to overrule a pastor with extravagant spending habits or autocratic hiring and firing tendencies.

* Rejuvenate the priesthood by urging change in the celibacy law -- not revoking it, but making it optional. John Paul, in romanticizing celibacy as a form of spiritual chivalry, is aloof to how vastly the church has changed since the Middle Ages, when the law was imposed, in great measure, to ensure that bishops would not pass on church property to their heirs and create dynastic lineages. Propping up this clerical system and its mentality of sexual secrecy has cost the church hundreds of millions of dollars in civil litigation. The board can certainly use polite language to argue that this archaic system should be brought into the 21st century. To do that would be a direct challenge to Vatican authority, and that is the greatest hurdle the U.S. bishops and National Review Board face.

The Vatican is betting that the report will generate bad news, after which the bishops and Roman Curia will go back to business as usual.

But a return to the status quo would not be good for the pope. The church desperately needs a separation of powers, with the equivalent of an independent court system. Under canon law, the pope can halt any proceeding; the system is top heavy in deference to bishops. Without a set of independent mechanisms for justice within the church, there is no way to counter the Vatican’s cynical detachment from the outrages of clerical abuse. This is a potential church-state legal minefield, because a panel of lay consultants would be urging structural changes in a religious institution, something the Vatican would be quite sensitive about. But the National Review Board is the only independent commission of lay Catholics ever asked by the bishops to take on such a task.