Facing a Dazzling, Earth-Shattering Darkness
Reporting Alleged Sexual Abuse Perpetrators by Name in Local Catholic Dioceses
Author’s Disclaimers and Related Warnings:
* Roman Catholicism is one of my former denominational pews.
* I know at least two potential survivors of Confessional impropriety.
* Although I’ve tried to keep this piece to just the facts with no visual details, it might be triggering for some. Please proceed with caution.
I’ve written in the past about the sexual scandals plaguing our Roman Catholic siblings in Christ. My first piece was back in 2016 on my other blog Kittie Phoenix Living Romans 08; it was Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh… Stayin’ the Same!. I’ve tried to not call too much attention to the situation, as I feel the news media tends to go overboard.
I moved here to Medium shortly after the publication of that piece. I shut down my WordPress “career,” and I’ve been slowly rebooting here. All around me the world continues… as it was… back in 2016.
Yet another local diocese has announced sexual scandal. However, I do have to applaud Bishop Gainer for his stance. He chose to begin judgment within the church; he listed the names of alleged abusers.
For my Protestant siblings, this is quite in alignment with the truth of God’s Word. 1 Peter 4:17–18 (ICV) makes it very clear that we have to start with judging ourselves:
It is time for judgment to begin, and it will begin with God’s family. If that judging begins with us, what will happen to those people who do not obey the Good News of God?
“It is very hard for a good person to be saved. Then the wicked person and
the sinner will surely be lost!”
What can be more wicked than a shepherd turned hired hand molesting and assaulting the lambs? Bishop Gainer has taken his crosier and started culling the worst out. The problem is, this is like beating a dead man, or maybe it is beating a dead man… or many dead men.
As I reviewed the list of 71 names (reviewed a second time in an article on The Morning Call as I was preparing this post), I thought that the majority were dead. But then I realized something — the list was categorized in ways that made it look like a non-issue and most were dead.
So I copied and pasted the entries into a spreadsheet and began to swizzle and swerve the details. Of the total number, 46 are living, and 22 are dead, roughly a 2:1 ratio. Most interesting is that the diocese seems to have lost track of 2 priests; it is unknown whether they are living or dead.
For the deceased priests, there is no discussion of whether the allegations are founded or unfounded. The same is true of those that the diocese doesn’t know whether they are alive or dead.
Of the 46 living, everything is so oddly worded. It included words like allegation and accused. Only 2 cases involved convictions.
There was one case that was unique: the priest himself admitted that he might have landed on a site that contained porn. After two investigations (one by the FBI and one by a district attorney), he was found to have had nothing on his machine. I’m not even sure why he was listed so publicly since he was acquitted.
That leaves 43 unsubstantiated allegations. The problem with most of the reports was that the purported actions leave no physical marks. Even if the victims could have convinced their parents that something had happened (because let’s be honest — a wolf in shepherd’s clothing turning on the sheep, especially lambs, is too horrific to consider for most people), there would have been no semen and no bruises to prove anything.
We’re back to the old “he said/she said.” Maybe in this case it’s the “authority says/child with no voice” says. We as a culture don’t want victims to suffer, but we also don’t want to destroy seemingly decent human beings serving the Lord in the midst of a wicked and cruel world over hearsay or falsehood.
Victims don’t want to come forward to participate in a reversed David-and-Goliath case against an authority figure. Especially, they don’t want someone (or the media) snooping up their asses and finding every misdeed in an attempt to discredit them while vindicating the authority figure (because most misdeeds result from an inability to handle the effects of abuse).
This is probably why the numbers of reports against the living are low.
That said, I wonder how widespread the problem really is. I did some digging with the help of the awesome staff at childwelfare.gov. With their assistance, I found the Child Maltreatment 2016 report by the Children’s Bureau (Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Administration for Children and Families) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. You’ll want to review Chapter 5 as that is where I got the vast majority of my numbers (and yes, your eyes will glaze over too).
In 2016, in Bishop Gainer’s state, there were 4,653 perpetrators of some kind of child abuse. The vast majority of perpetrators were aged 25–44 (2,688, or 57.8% of the total number of perpetrators). Someone calculated this to be about 2 out of 1000 adults; the national rate is a bit higher at 8 or 9 adults per 1000 (yes, I rounded because in real life you can’t have part of an adult).
Men are 64.9% of the perpetrators of child abuse in Bishop Gainer’s state. Of the 4,653 identified perpetrators, 486 fell into the other category, which includes clergy as well as household staff, another foster child in the home, and nonrelatives. This is about 10.4%.
The estimated population for 2017 for Bishop Gainer’s state was 12,805,537 (according to Wikipedia’s “List of US states and territories by population”). That would make the percentage of perpetrators less than 1% for the entire population.
This is the end of my data saavy. Unfortunately, I had a hard time finding statistics for the number of Catholics in Bishop Gainer’s state and the number of religious in Bishop Gainer’s state. I suspect those numbers would be needed to ensure a classic apples to oranges comparison. Perhaps too the problem is that the report uses current numbers for just a few previous years and the paper listed reports over time going back to the 1940s with no dates to allow true data analysis.
So it begs the question: If we could obtain all these numbers and then do the analysis, would we find these ratios for the general population are maintained within the pews of the leadership of our Roman Catholic siblings?
Also, would we find that the ratio is maintained among the leadership of Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims? That is, it’s reported in the media against Roman Catholic leadership because it’s sensational and they live their lives according to different rules. Therefore, they are different and weird and immediately suspect. Although, the irony in light of the Inquisition is positively delicious in an evil, eye-for-an-eye kind of way.
By no means am I diminishing the experiences of the victims. I truly believe they have gone through an awfully horrific situation compounded by the position of trust and authority their abusers have.
As I’ve argued in other pieces, we need to flip our social model. We should help the victims become survivors by giving them the tools they need to put their lives back together. Take the focus off the perpetraitors through the legal system, and refocus on binding the wounds of victims and survivors through counseling and other tangible supports. This is especially true for victims and survivors who found the power to stop the abuse before it left physical evidence like semen, measurable bruises, torn tissue, or diseases transmitted through bodily fluids.
We need to work on preventing a witch hunt. If abuse can be proven, then by all means even spiritual giants need to fall and face the prosecutor’s music. If abuse can’t proven, the alleged perpetrator should have to be evaluated and observed to determine whether there are any danger signs. An additional consideration is how to prevent the unstable or the aggrieved from harming an accused before innocence or guilt is proven.
Finally, Protestants should be praying for Roman Catholic siblings, priests and lay people alike.
- Priests, because, well, you’ve read the documents. The good ones are going to have a harder job; there will be more responsibility among fewer hands, and the faithful might be a bit angrier and harder to reason with.
- The lay people, because they’ve been taught all their lives to respect the authority of the collar, and some collars were or are actually nooses. Laity now have to teach their youngsters to be streetwise even in church on sacred, hallowed ground that should be the safest place to be spiritually, emotionally, physically, and sexually.
