When will the Church stop forgiving child abuse among the Clergy?

Clifford Longley's story of the Rotary Club Father Christmas forbidden to have children on his lap started an item headed "How can we deal with our collective paranoia over paedophiles?" in On Line Opinion. It was originally published in the British Catholic newspaper The Tablet of 25 January 2003 - and the purpose of the article was to defend a British Cardinal from the news media reporting that commentators want him to resign because he sheltered and kept employing a serial child sex-abuser.

The rough-and-ready public does not have "paranoia" but we do have a "collective" problem with people supposedly representing the Holy Pure God of Creation corrupting children.

So I say, let's deal with apologists pretending that clergy child sex-abuse is a small problem and that the news media or public prejudices are the main problem.

Mr Longley's article is in the same tradition as an article by Briton Tom Utley in The Telegraph's November 30, 2002 internet version entitled "Paedophile obsession is killing trust in the Church". It was dusted off, given a new heading, and published weeks later in the Perth Catholic weekly The Record, as "Paedophile obsession can't kill trust in the Church," on January 2, 2003, p 4.

The article tried to say that the news media had an "obsession" but the true obsession is held by about 5 to 6 per cent (or more) of the clergy who want sex with minors. The matching obsession is that of the heads of religious orders and dioceses, who want to hide the criminals in their ranks.

The apologists want to imply that it hasn't cost tens of millions of dollars donated by people for worship and charitable causes, and that a big Church isn't getting deeper and deeper into sinful territory as it wriggles and twists trying to escape from the self-induced problem of continuing to employ people who are actually leading people away from Christianity!

My experience is that neither the Catholic nor Anglican Churches, under their present understanding of Christianity, will ever resolutely adopt and keep to the early Church's policy of expulsion of sex abusers. Jesus forbade harming the young (Matthew 18:6-7), and Paul wrote "Remove the wicked from among yourselves" in his first letter to the Corinthians, 5:9-13. The Didache forbade sex with boys, and the Council of Elvira in 309 A.D. ordered permanent exclusion for boy-sex. The penances during the Middle Ages included years on bread and water.

In response to requests made by petition three times, the latest being on Jan 22 2003, asking the major Churches to dismiss any Church minister or worker who sexually molested young people, the answers received up March 18 2003 were:

• The Churches of Christ, dated March 4 2003, wrote that any form of child abuse would lead to immediate dismissal.
• The Anglican Archbishop of Perth on February 11 wrote that Anglican bishops had no power to move paedophile priests from place to place, because there was a nomination board system. The diocese had declared this year the Year of the Child, and was holding educational and prayer initiatives. [The Catholics have also declared this the Year of the Child.] Across Australia, particularly in the other States, about 5 per cent of child abuse involved Church people, and 95 per cent took place in the family.
• After mail to other people noted the lack of decision by the Catholic Church, its Perth leader wrote on March 5 that he agreed with the call of the petitioners to dismiss ministers and Church workers who had abused children, and that was the policy.

Although remembering the Anglican scandals of, for example, Queensland (Dr Hollingworth, etc.) and New South Wales, the evidence so far is that the heaviest burden is borne by Catholic children.

In February 2002, only weeks after the Boston Church sex crisis hit world headlines, at Australind, a tiny Western Australian hamlet, a Catholic priest slid naked on an oily floor with five children under 13, and took films and photocopies of them sitting naked on a photocopier. He was in court within days (The West Australian, "Priest in sex case hit in court," Tuesday February 26 2002, p 3). He admitted the offence at another court hearing early this year (The West Australian, "Priest admits abuse," and "Our trust was betrayed: mother," by Eloise Dortch, Wed Jan 22 2003 p 3).

In the United States the Catholic Church has a serious, still ongoing endemic scandal of sleazy behaviour - two US boy-sex priests were caught over the border in Canada mid-2002, and a girl-sex priest was caught December 18 2002.

These examples are quoted to scotch another favourite "fib" by the apologists, that the sex abuse occurred decades ago, and that the Churches have it in hand nowadays.

Another lie is that the Church didn't understand. The Catholic Church has existed for 2000 years so it is its business to understand. In modern times: "The first [U.S.] public discussion of priest sexual abuse of minors was at a meeting sponsored by the National Association for Pastoral Renewal held ... [at the U.S.] Notre Dame University in 1967. All American Catholic bishops were invited to that meeting." -- A. W. Richard Sipe, psychotherapist (member Benedictine order 1953-70), in the Sipe Report, paragraph 22. This professionally-prepared report gives enough facts to alert even the doziest of bishops that the sex abuse of minors cannot be "cured" by present-day Church methods, nor by modern science.

The situation was so bad more than 15 years ago that the US independent newspaper, the National Catholic Reporter, on June 7, 1985, named every convicted US priest, in an effort to get the bishops to stop the clergy corrupting young people - but the "forgiveness", "repentance", and transfers of serial paedophiles continued. That same year lawyer F. R. Mouton, Church canon law expert Father T. P. Doyle, and Father M. Peterson wrote a scholarly report on the problem, and sent it to every Catholic bishop in the USA. The report was discussed at their national conference.

In 1986 Jason Berry won the U.S. Catholic Press Association Award for his coverage of clerical sex abuse. In 1992 Berry published Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. It won the Wilbur Award and a Catholic Press Association Book Award.

In 1993 the US R.C. bishops seemed to accept a special report on the sex-abuse scandal, and adopted reform rules.

In the US the problem had started years before in some outrageous breaks with traditional holiness in their training establishments (seminaries), and a book about that aspect Goodbye, Good Men by Michael S. Rose was published in 2002 in Washington.

The global sex problem includes even teenage and adult abuse (including mistresses and nuns, both of whom have started organisations in various countries seeking redress!).

Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), which started in Boston early in 2002, estimates that U.S. Catholics have been deprived of tens of millions of dollars in payments to victims (both "hush money" and real compensation and counselling), plus huge legal fees, plus giving the afflicted priests new addresses and funding.

Insurance companies refuse to cover all the costs now, because they rightly say that the Church leaders have brought the problem on themselves by repeatedly "forgiving" predatory repeat offenders.

In my view, many bishops have no real idea of ruling, possibly because they are recruited from celibate ranks. It is a truism that celibacy attracts too high a percentage of the wrong applicants, including those who are timid, and is a "snare" to the devout. Celibacy is not the whole cause, however.

Some of the other religious establishments also have problem clergy (a married rabbi, Israel Kestenbaum, 54 or 55, of Highland Park, New Jersey pleaded not guilty on February 21 in an "internet date" entrapment, and in Britain a mosque staff member was accused in recent years).

There is a daily stream of reports of arrests, discoveries of incriminating documents, compensation payments and "hush money," attempts by Church lawyers to claim defences of religious liberty and separation of Church and State under the US Constitution, criticism of the Church from the judiciary, attempts to remove Church assets from the power of the courts, suicides (latest is Jeff Alfieri, 43, February 18, at Kirkland), attempted murder, etc. arising out of clergy paedophilia.

In Ireland some years ago a government fell because of a cover-up of clergy paedophilia. In February 2002 it was revealed there had been a secret attempt to make the taxpayer foot the bill for the abuses in orphanages, even while a body was being exhumed regarding a suspicious death of an orphan.

It can't ALL be a result of "mass media obsession," or even of "deep-seated anti-Catholicism" as one apologist put it.