It’s Woodstock’s Fault
Posted on May 18th, 2011 in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
The Catholic Church has commissioned a report which finds that the sexual abuse of children by priests is due to “social change” and “the rise of other types of ‘deviant’ behavior” in the 1960s and ’70s.
It’s absurd, of course—a blaming of the larger society outside rather than the internal mechanisms, dogma and confines of the church. Don’t blame us! say the people who claim to know how to make society better. It’s all your fault.
I wonder: If you can’t trust the Catholic Church to tell the truth about such worldly matters, how could you trust it to tell the truth about God? Why, in fact, should we listen to the Catholic Church about anything?
10 Responses
5/18/2011 1:41 pm
Gee, I thought you meant the bird in “Peanuts.”
5/23/2011 8:22 am
Here is another take on the report. I am not surprised by the claim that most abusers of children are relatives. More interesting are the comparisons between the incidence of pedophilia among Catholic priests and among other clergy and among schoolteachers.
5/23/2011 9:25 am
The main source upon which that claim is based, Harry, is Harvard law prof Mary Ann Glendon, who can’t be considered a disinterested or even trustworthy observer. A conservative Catholic, she is pro-life and George W. Bush’s former ambassador to the Holy See. More recently she declined an award from Notre Dame in protest of its speaking invitation to President Obama (Obama, you see, is pro-choice). She appears to have no particular expertise on sexual abuse. In short, the Herald couldn’t have chosen someone more likely to back up its contention that the Catholic Church doesn’t have a particular sexual abuse problem.
5/23/2011 9:44 am
I understand, but Glendon is not the only one quoted, and some of the statements are oddly specific. I don’t know the literature here, so I wondered. I am reminded of the panic a few years ago about how the whole Internet had to be re-architected so we could control the grooming and abuse of children by bad people they meet online. Turns out that the incidence of molestation by strangers whom children meet online is statistical noise, by comparison with the number of funny uncles, and you don’t hear much about that problem.
5/23/2011 9:56 am
By the way, none of that information about Glendon is mentioned in the article—only that she’s a law prof. The only other source is George Wiegel, mentioned as a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. More specifically, he’s a Catholic theologian and author of a hagiographic biography of John Paul II.
The omission of these relevant details is sloppy at best, deliberate at worst.
The author of the piece, by the way, is identified as “a lawyer and commentator.” In fact, she used to work for Dan Quayle and was appointed by George Bush to help gut the US Civil Rights Commission. None of this, of course, bars her from writing about the Catholic Church, but it would be helpful to know where she’s coming from; her commitment to civil rights is not exactly demonstrated.
5/23/2011 10:01 am
And that’s a fair point, Harry. But to me, the whole issue of how sexual abuse in the Catholic Church compares to the rest of society, while interesting, is something of a red herring. I suspect that, statistically speaking, Catholic priests *are* more likely to be or have been pedophiles than people who are not priests. But in any case, the fight over this issue has to do with the betrayal of trust by people who are, theoretically, our most sacred leaders and its cover up. It’s the tension between how priests portray themselves—as holier than the rest of us, people who tell us what to do and what not to do—and the reality of widespread sexual abuse that makes this particularly awful.
That, and the decades of cover-ups, of course.
5/23/2011 10:10 am
It’s an opinion piece; no surprise that the people who write them have opinions and quote others who have opinions (actually, the author of some Dept of Education report is quoted too). Nor am I surprised that the author does not identify herself as a former worker for Dan Quayle (are you seriously suggesting she should have done that? She is a regular columnist.)
I have no brief for any of these people, and none for the Roman church. I was simply curious about the facts they state, the assertion, for example, that protestant clergy engage in as much child abuse as Catholic clergy. Do you know Glendon, for example, to have fabricated such statistics in the past? Or are you saying it doesn’t matter, because the cover-up was something the RC church did? (The Protestants would surely have been too disorganized to have achieved it!)
5/23/2011 10:20 am
I don’t think the author needed to disclose her background, but it does affect my sense of her credibility to know that she was a Bush civil rights appointee. (Hello, torture!) I do think that the other sources are presented as non-partisan experts on law and ethics when they are clearly defenders of the Church. I would have found the piece much more convincing and far less irritating if the writer had, indeed, produced some statistics to that effect. The fact that she didn’t suggests to me that they don’t exist. (If they had, surely this trumped-up report would have included them.)
There are a few relevant differences between the Protestant and Catholic Churches here. One, Protestant priests can have sex…with adults! Two, no confessional. Three, less secretive and hierarchical and dogmatic.
I would be very, very surprised if the rate of sexual abuse among Protestant priests is even close to that of Catholic priests. Wouldn’t we have heard a bit more about it?
5/23/2011 11:39 am
I can’t believe I seem to have gotten myself into the position of defending the Catholic church. I am not. I am simply asking if you are confident that the one-look-and-I-know-it’s-wrong dismissal of the report, the product of a reputable academic institution, is fair, knowing what I know about what Richard Blumenthal and his AG brethren did with a few Dateline-type stories about Internet-mediated child molestation. Their version of events was refuted by a serious academic literature review, and before the ink was dry on it they had dismissed the report as obviously wrong.
The John Jay College report, available here, is in fact full of statistics. I don’t have the time to read it. Here is the opening para about Protestants:
The Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies estimates that 224,000 churches could be classified as Protestant. Only limited data are available from these churches because of the autonomous organizational structures and varied reporting systems among different denominations, which makes estimating the extent of child sexual abuse within all Protestant churches very difficult. Nevertheless, in 1996, Jenkins published a book entitled Pedophiles and Priests, in which he reported that 10 percent of Protestant clergy have been involved in sexual misconduct, of whom about 2 or 3 percent are child sexual abusers. More recent statistics have been reported in the news media from three insurance companies that provide liability coverage to approximately 165,000 Protestant churches in the United States. The insurers estimate that Protestant churches receive upwards of 260 reports annually of sexual abuse by clergy, church staff, volunteers, or congregation members from persons eighteen years of age or younger.
There is much much more. I don’t have time to read it right now.
5/23/2011 11:44 am
I will try to read the report, Harry. But I am skeptical from the start because it was commissioned by the Catholic Church and, like all consulting firms, this one seems to have produced a report delivering exactly the message that its clients wanted.