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12 June 2011
This week, June 14-18, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is holding its annual summer meeting in Seattle. Among other issues they will be considering, I imagine and hope, will be an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them.
Although episcopal pedophelia has been a historical problem of the Catholic Church for centuries, it exploded in the news in the early 2000s with hundreds of abuse victims coming forth across the US, Europe, and other places across the world. The loss of court cases and the significant draining of Church coffers in payout settlements were significant enough to prompt the Church in 2002 to announce a set of guidelines called the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People for dealing with the crisis.
But rather than simply declaring a zero-tolerance policy for priestly pedophelia and promising to immediately defrock and excommunicate all identified abusers and their protectors, the document instead took pains to lay out a series of extremely weak and common-sense steps that most people would have assumed were and should have been in place from the start: Cooperate with civil authorities and comply with reporting laws; permanently remove abuser-priests from ministry; and establish majority-lay review boards to look at allegations against clergy to advise bishops whether to suspend the accused. The bishops also required priests, deacons, diocesan employees, volunteers, and children in education programs to undergo “safe environment” training.
Well, duh. The fact that these measures were apparently lacking prior to 2002 simply underscored the moral bankruptcy of this criminal institution. Nor did the Church bother to correct or even explain its concurrent high-profile actions to move blatant enablers of the clerical prostitution rings, such as US Cardinal Bernard Law, out of the reach of secular accountability.
This year, the other shoe dropped. Last year, the USCCB contracted with the John Jay Institute, a right-wing thinktank founded by a former Family Research Council and Focus on the Family associate, to to purportedly analyze and report on the causes of this explosion of episcopal pedophelia. This report was released this year; and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the report concluded that the cause of this explosion was – wait for it – the instability and sexual permissiveness of the 60’s!
Only the Catholic Church, font of so many incredible beliefs, would truly believe that to be a credible answer. Of course, the beauty of that conclusion is that the Church doesn’t have to concern itself with the issue anymore (let alone take any responsibility), since the 60’s are now long gone.
If the Church won’t take responsibility for itself, then it’s time for the rest of the world community to protect our children from this scourge of humanity. It has been over a decade since the latest spate of Episcopal pedophilia scandals erupted. Secular authorities have, perhaps unwisely, allowed Catholic Church leaders time to recognize the error of their ways and to clean up their rat’s nest of iniquity. If nothing more comes out of this week’s USCCB meeting, a campaign should be launched within the UN to not only strip the Vatican of its status as a sovereign nation but to have it declared a criminal organization and call on national governments to seize all church assets and arrest those leaders, including the Pope, who fail to resign immediately from the organization.
We owe it to our children and to the future of humanity.
