Clergy Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church

Reflections 1984-2010 (part 2 in a series)
By Tom Doyle

Clergy Abuse -- Part of the Essence of the Institutional Church?

The second circle is much larger and actually enables the behaviors that make up the inner circle. This circle is made up of the men in positions of authority at various levels. Most are bishops but included also are major religious superiors of both male and female religious communities. As more and more victims approached the secular legal system for help the responses of bishops towards victims and their families and their behavior as unwilling participants in the legal process revealed a side of their personalities that many found almost impossible to believe because what we saw was so contrary to what we had been formed to believe about bishops. The evidence mounted as the legal discovery process produced documents and deposition testimony in case after case. Then came the grand jury investigations in the U.S. and the independent investigative commissions in Canada and Ireland. The combined information from the U.S civil courts and the Canadian and Irish secular commissions removed any doubt about the causal relationship between the abusing clerics and the hierarchical mishandling.

The third circle is comprised of the laity. Although well over 99% of the Church’s 1.2 billion members are lay persons (there are about 4500 bishops, archbishops and cardinals and about 408,000 priests or .00026% of the total), they have scant influence on the corporate behavior of the ruling class. The institutional Catholic Church is truly a stratified society with the bishops as a powerful aristocracy at the top and the laity beneath them. This description is not merely metaphorical but accurately describes the Church’s socio-political structure. In spite of the profound inequity in their respective standing the laity provides one hundred percent of the material/financial support for the clerical sub-culture and the hierarchical government yet lay persons have no effective voice in Church government.  The laity has the potential to influence the course of the clergy sex abuse saga but thus far they have scarcely realized it. A small but very significant group of laity have been moved to the point of radical action in response to the continuous waves of abuse revelations. The majority however are either removed and indifferent or angrily reactive to the revelations of internal Church corruption and the consequent demands for accountability. The complacency or negative reaction of the laity is perplexing in light of the harsh reality of what the clergy abuse “crisis” is all about.

The fourth and outer circle consists not of persons but of the ideology that provides the basis for the way the papacy and hierarchy have reacted to clergy sexual abuse. This ideology is a combination of theological definitions about the nature of the Church, Canon Law and the theology of human sexuality. The perplexing response of the popes and the bishops is explained by the official teaching on the nature of the institutional Church and the role of the bishops. The Church’s legal system, Canon Law, has not only been inadequate but counter-productive because of its fundamental nature as a legal system in service to a monarchical government. Finally, the completely inappropriate responses of the bishops and clergy to the horrific accounts of all manner of dysfunctional sexual exploitation and their excuses that they did not realize the serious effects of molestation and abuse can be partially explained by the traditional teaching on human sexuality and the impact of mandatory celibacy on the emotional and psycho-sexual formation of clerics. In other words this teaching so distorted the nature of human sexuality that clerics failed to comprehend the destructive nature of sexual exploitation.

The popes and other defenders of the official Church assigned blame for this volatile phenomenon to a materialistic, hyper-sexual culture, to secular society’s rejection of traditional Catholic moral teaching and to the sensationalism created by an anti-Catholic secular media. Perpetrating clerics were said to be the products of the wave of liberalism that followed the Second Vatican Council, fueled by the sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies.  No one from the ruling elite ever suggested looking within for possible reasons for this problem that would not go away.
END of Part II