The Broken Church PART II: bless me Father

SPOTLIGHT: 2002

‘They knew and they let it happen’: Uncovering child abuse in the Catholic Church

For all those times
You stripped away my layers
Made me taste forbidden fruit
Forced my hands to do your work
Penetrated beyond boundaries
Hands snaked around my neck ready to silence the sound

For all those times
I never said no.

For all those times
I endured unwanted shadows creeping inside
Felt cold metal of a barrelled gun pushed against my head
Suffered perversion of injustice
Paralysed my breath through restrained fear
Offered my services on a plate

For all those times
I never said no.

For all those times
I quickened my footsteps down a dim lit path
Criss-crossed patterns in the road to shake away the followers
Barricaded my sanctuary through blockades of furniture
Feigned sleep to hasten your desire
Gave you permission without speaking a word

For all those times
I never said no.

For all those times
I didn’t dare scream
Kept quiet
Stayed silent
Never fought back
Ever told

For all those times
I never said no.

For all those times
I felt special
Chosen by you
Thought you loved me
Wanted your attention
Asked for more

For all those times
I never said no.

For all those times
I trusted you
Loved you
Despised you
Feared you
Missed you

For all those times
I never said no.

For all those times
I trembled to speak
Felt ashamed
Pushed the knife deeper in
Faded into darkness
Shattered into broken pieces

For all those times
I never said no

For all those times
I am haunted daily
I speak out
Fear will no longer silence me
My voice shall be heard
Truth will resonate

For all those times
I never said no.

For all those times
I wasn’t asked
I give myself permission
My choice
My body
My right

For all those times
I never said no.

For all those times
I longed to say stop
Stop.
I am the adult
With ownership
Of my freedom

For all those times
I never said no.

For all those times
You think you won
Of lives destroyed
We will stand strong
United in power
Together as one

For all these times
We will say no.

…unnamed victim

The Spotlight Team revealed the church’s secret protection of pedophile priests in a series with global repercussions. Few investigations have made a bigger impact in the history of contemporary American journalism than the above mentioned Spotlight series in The Boston Globe in 2002. This project opened the door to highlight clergy sexual abuse, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. This was when my awareness of its magnitude shook me to the core. Not that it was unknown. Certainly I was aware of clergy misdeeds. However, it was the extent, familiarity and gross malpractice of transparency by The Catholic Church that I find unacceptable and catastrophic.

The ‘Fixers’, they are called. And a former monk described his job while employed by the Catholic Church as one which was to cover up and displace child molesting priests. He says the communities which housed many priests were purposefully selected in states that have laws favorable to the Church, such as Missouri. Let’s focus a bit on these ‘fixers’. The who and how are unspeakable. But it is the why I find the lowest…the most inconceivable, as it bespeaks the sinful hypocrisy of an institution so many venerate and worship.

According to Wikipedia, there have been an outstanding number of ‘reported’ cases of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, nuns and members of various religious orders. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the cases have involved abounding allegations, inquiries, trials, convictions, affirmations and apologies by The Church as well as manifestations about decades of abuse and endeavors by the Church to conceal them. ‘The abused include mostly boys but also girls, some as young as three years old, with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14.’

Dioceses and religious orders so far have shared the names of more than 5,100 clergy members, with more than three-quarters of the names released just in the last two years. The AP researched nearly 2,000 who are still alive to determine where they have lived and worked. This was the largest review to date of what happened to priests named as ‘possible sexual abusers’. This review found hundreds of priests who continued holding roles of trust and many with direct access to children. More than 160 continued working or volunteering in churches, including dozens in Catholic dioceses overseas. Nearly 190 received professional licenses to work in education, medicine, social work and counseling, with over 76 who still had proper credentials in such fields.

When the clergy abuse scandal first hit Roman Catholic dioceses in the early 2000s, U.S. bishops created the ‘Dallas Charter’. This was considered to be a ‘baseline’ to report sexual abuse, as well as a training to prevent child abuse. A handful of canon lawyers at the time said every diocese should be ‘transparent’, name priests that had been accused of abuse and, in many cases, ‘get rid of them’.

Most dioceses decided against naming priests, however. And with the dioceses that did release lists in the next few years — some freely and others due to lawsuit settlements or bankruptcy proceedings — these abuse survivors complained about underreporting of priests, along with the exclusion of religious brothers they believed should be on those lists. The ‘Dallas Charter’ was supposed to fix everything. It supposedly made the abuse scandal HISTORY. HOWEVER… ‘this did not happen’, said the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer who had tried to warn the bishops that abuse was widespread and that they should ‘clean house’. If priests choose to leave their dioceses or religious orders, OR if the church decides to lastingly defrock priests in a process known as ‘laicization’, leaders say the church no longer has the authority to monitor where they go or what they do.

After the ‘Dallas Charter’ came a hustle to laicize, which resulted in more than 220 of the priests researched by the AP being laicized between 2004 and 2010. Roughly 40% of all the living credibly accused clergy members had either been laicized or had voluntarily left the church. These laicized priests were also noted as becoming increasingly YOUNGER- giving them increasing years to lead unsupervised lives, according to Deacon Bernie Nojadera, the executive director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection. “We have 197 different ways that the Dallas Charter is being implemented. It’s a road map, a bare minimum,” he said. “We do talk about situations where these men are being laicized and what happens to them. And our canon lawyers are quick to say there is no purview to monitor them.”

Gemma Hoskins, one of the stars of the documentary series “The Keepers” about abuse in a Baltimore Catholic school, also is taking up the cause. Hoskins and a handful of volunteers have started a homegrown database using spreadsheets of clergy members created by a nonprofit called BishopAccountability.org to locate priests accused of abuse and post their approximate addresses. “We’re careful. If their address is 123 Main Street, we’ll say the 100 block of Main Street like the police do,” she said. “We don’t want any of our volunteers to get in trouble, but it’s something all of us feel is necessary. If the priests are laicized, it’s even scarier … because it means the church isn’t tracking where they are living. They’re out there in the world as unregistered sex offenders.”

Vatican Report – Cardinal McCarrick. …it hits home

REPORT ON THE HOLY SEE’S INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND DECISION-MAKING RELATED TO FORMER CARDINAL
THEODORE EDGAR MCCARRICK
(1930 TO 2017)
Prepared by the Secretariat of State of the Holy See Vatican City State
10 November 2020

Below are excerpts from said report:

On 6 August 2012, Priest 3 wrote a three-page letter to Nuncio Viganò. In the letter, Priest 3 stated, “Early in my time in North America I was sexually assaulted by the Cardinal Theodore McCarrick (at the time he was an Archbishop). I mention this now, as I believeth [it] is at the root of my recent problems with the Diocese of Metuchen.”1170 Priest 3 stated that he felt that he had been falsely accused of financial mismanagement and that his transfer away from the Portuguese and Brazilian communities, where he had worked for over twenty years, was wrongful. Priest 3 wrote, “the Diocese had only one goal in mind and that was to sweep me under the Church’s rug and to make my life so miserable I would not speak out against the sexual misconduct amongst priests and in particular, Cardinal McCarrick and Bishop Bootkoski”. Priest 3 continued:
“What does it really mean to be a priest in America? Evidently to serve God and the Church takes on different meanings. As a liason (sic) between the Vatican and the Churches here in America, you need to be consciously aware of the behavior amongst priests and the impact it has on the people they serve and guide. For a priest to be punished and admonished based on false allegations and speaking the truth about inappropriate behavior of sexual misconduct amongst priests is unacceptable under any standards. Cardinal McCarrick was a sexual predator. As one of his victims, I saw firsthand what it was to be a priest in America”.
Priest 3 stated that his civil case was “still pending…”.

The foregoing account has detailed the Holy See’s knowledge and decision- making regarding McCarrick from his first episcopal appointment through 2017. The Report concludes the Secretariat of State’s factual examination ordered by Pope Francis in late 2018. As the Holy Father has stated:
“If one member suffers, all suffer together with it” (1 Cor 12:26). These words of Saint Paul forcefully echo in my heart as I acknowledge once more the suffering endured by many minors due to sexual abuse, the abuse of power and the abuse of conscience perpetrated by a significant number of clerics and consecrated persons. Crimes that inflict deep wounds of pain and powerlessness, primarily among the victims, but also in their family members and in the larger community of believers and nonbelievers alike. Looking back to the past, no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient. Looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated. The pain of the victims and their families is also our pain, and so it is urgent that we once more reaffirm our commitment to ensure the protection of minors and of vulnerable adults.

Well. Just one story. Of many. This was MY Diocese, however. This was too familiar. Too close. TOO reprehensible. Is this enough? Much talk. Much apologetic banter. I do not know…

However, this IS what I know and what I want. My main aspiration is that not only is it time for church leaders to the to WALK THE TALK of PUTTING THE NEEDS OF THE VULNERABLE AND WOUNDED VICTIMS FIRST! And, it is time to alter the TONE of the talk. The church must move towards a victim-focused language and corresponding practices of accountability dedicated to acknowledging and transforming a church culture of denialism, complicity, conformity and protectionism. The church is now the ‘third person’. It is now about ‘us’. The truth in language of the lay person. No more sanitizing sexual abuse. It is an oxymoron.

Utilizing ‘lay’ persons – church members who aren’t clergy – to work with the clergy cooperatively towards a safer and more accountable Catholic community, I think, may also be incredibly empowering and effective in ensuring transparency and remediation. Lay-led organizations such as Voice of the Faithful and The Catholic Whistleblowers draw on their Catholic faith and teachings to seek to empower lay Catholics. Greater public accountability from the Catholic Church clearly is connected to the necessity to CHANGE internal church norms, patterns, behaviors and relationships. Awareness MUST be raised for GREATER PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY and LIABILITY from the Church to instill our quest and need for justice, healing and forgiveness.

As of now, there is no formal mechanism in place for punishing or removing any of the thousands of Catholic bishops across the world when he is accused of wrongdoing, short of the intervention of the pope. And this remains to me the strongest impediment towards change and reparation. Problems with ‘accountability’ are as rooted in the structure of the Church itself as self-deception. Dioceses, or local areas of governance, are like feudal estates! Each one is organized in a slightly different manner with minimal centralized oversight above the level of the bishops or archbishop assigned to that region. Therefore, many dioceses are also full of quasi autonomous groups. As an example, the members of religious orders report not to bishops but to the heads of their own organizations. This is random and complicated. Confusing.

This internal ‘format’ can only exacerbate apprehension and confusion concerning clergy sexual abuse, because different dioceses and orders have all chosen to handle allegations in different ways. Some, such as the Archdiocese of Boston, have agreed to engage and potentially settle with any alleged victim, even if the legal statute of limitations on the abuse has long passed. Others, such as the Archdiocese of New York, spent years aggressively lobbying state legislation to extend the statute of limitations on child-sexual-abuse.

In closing… a prominent sexual abuse victim turned advocate once said: “When someone shares a story of being abused, it takes ahold of your heart in a way that has a real claim on you…I can see these people in front of me—their faces, they’re so beautiful, and they’re so hidden, in a way. They have experienced so much shame, and so much that’s impacted them far into their adult lives.” This is true. And this is sad. And, it is time for some real change.