Examining the crisis

What does it mean? What happens next? When will this end? What can we do? We hear these questions and more from many readers trying to make sense of the exploding sex abuse scandal, now involving the Vatican. To help readers examine these questions more deeply, NCR is opening "Examining the Crisis," a new blog on NCRonline.org. We will post commentaries, opinion pieces, and yes even a homily or two, about the issues we, as church, must confront. We offer these pieces as a way to begin to move beyond the current phase of reporting of the crisis.
Dec. 09, 2011

Both Pennsylvania and New York will have an uphill battle to get any legislation dealing with the sexual abuse of children discussed, let alone signed into law, regardless of what has been happening lately at Penn State, Syracuse or any other educational, religious, public or private institution.

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Nov. 10, 2011

The British High Court ruled Tuesday that the Roman Catholic Church can be held responsible for the wrongdoings of its priests, according to BBC News.

"The Church had claimed it could not be held vicariously responsible because there was no formal employment relationship with its priests," the site reported.

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Oct. 31, 2011

It has been almost 10 years since the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States mandated accountability and transparency in regard to the sexual abuse of children, but how that accountability and transparency was defined was ultimately left up to individual bishops, as was their application.

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Jul. 21, 2011

Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach, or prime minister, of Ireland, addressed the Irish Parliament about a judicial report released last week on how the Cloyne diocese responded to the clergy sex abuse crisis. That report found that the church's own guidelines were "not fully or consistently implemented" in the diocese as recently as 2008. It also accused the Vatican of being "entirely unhelpful" in the crisis, charging in fact that the Vatican "effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore [those] procedures."

Kenny told the Parliament "the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism … the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day."

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Jul. 21, 2011

ANALYSIS

The publication of the most recent John Jay study of sexual abuse in the church has been met by predictably impassioned binary responses. Church leaders seem to idealize the results, feeling vindicated in at least some of their responses to sexual abuse. Victims and advocates, on the other hand, lambaste the research as a dismissive invalidation of their pain. It is always difficult to speak dispassionately about sexual abuse; the crimes at issue involve passion, denial by perpetrators is standard fare, and brittle experiences of new betrayal are at the ready for victims expecting their suffering to be minimized. It is worth trying, however, to put passion aside temporarily to make room for reason. I hope to do a little of that here.

Before unpacking specific aspects of the John Jay study, it is important to put the entire project into a research and scholarly context.

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May. 21, 2011

In the last few days I have carefully read the entire 143-page John Jay report on the causes of clergy sex abuse in the United States and have again reviewed the executive summaries and conclusions of 17 of the 27 reports on clergy sexual abuse that have been published between 1989 and 2011.

Most of these are from official sources such as the U.S. grand juries, the three Irish reports (Ferns, Ryan, Murphy) or the two Canadian reports that resulted from the Mt. Cashel debacle of the eighties. Others are from Church sources such as the National Review Board Report of 2004, The Bernardin Report of 1992 or Church sponsored reports such as the Defenbaugh Report (Chicago, 2006) or the first John Jay Report from 2004. Most of the reports contained a section on causality.

None of the reports said anything about the effect of the culture of the sixties or seventies as a factor of causality but every one of them pointed to the various kinds and levels of failure by the bishops as the essential cause of the phenomenon of sexual abuse of children and minors by clerics.

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May. 16, 2011

In a circular letter to the world's bishops released today, the Vatican's Congregation for Doctrine of the Faith has asked every bishops' conference in the world to prepare "guidelines" for dealing with cases of sexual abuse of minors by clergy. (See Vatican guidelines seek consistency on sex abuse.)

I believe that the guidelines will change very little in how the Catholic church handles these cases. Here are 10 reasons why I think that:

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Mar. 16, 2011

Across the Middle East and in North Africa, courageous citizens are calling to account dictators. In Philadelphia, the second grand jury in 6 years issued a second scathing report highlighting the moral corruption we have come to expect from the Catholic hierarchy. Once again, a prince of the church stood at a bank of microphones apologizing for harboring alleged sexual predators. Is there anyone left who believes this hackneyed and heartbreaking theater of hypocrisy?

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Jan. 10, 2011

COLUMN

In a Jan. 4 letter to the members of the Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Archbishop Jerome E. Listecki explained why he felt forced to file for bankruptcy, explaining “priest-perpetrators sexually abused minors, going against everything the church and the priesthood represents.”

This is true as far as it goes, but it is hardly enough to address what many experts have described as the most significant crisis in the Roman Catholic Church’s over-2,000 year history, possibly even eclipsing the Reformation.

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Dec. 21, 2010

Every time Pope Benedict XVI says something about the never-ending sex abuse nightmare, he inches closer and closer to the dark reality that has been like a black cloud over the church for more than two decades. And although he is slowly moving forward, he always stops short of the most important and no doubt for him, the most painful issue: the complicity of the world's cardinals and bishops.

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Oct. 01, 2010

Henry Nouwen (Taken from the cover of Jurjen J Beumer's book Henri Nouwen: A Restless Seeking for God.)Henry Nouwen (Taken from the cover of Jurjen J Beumer's book Henri Nouwen: A Restless Seeking for God.)Recently I was in the process of cleaning out some files and ran across a July 1991 letter from Henri Nouwen. He and I had spent a year together during the mid 1960s in Topeka, Kansas at the Menninger Foundation’s training programs for clergy counselors. We had kept in casual contact afterward. He moved on to professorships at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard and traveled the troubled world while I settled into clinical practice, married life, and part time work at a Catholic seminary, college, and medical school in Baltimore.

By the time Henri wrote this letter he had already become a huge spiritual resource through his writings, retreats, lectures, teaching, and personal contacts. Most of his 40 books had been published. In contrast I had just recently (in 1990) published my first book, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy.

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Aug. 04, 2010

Examining the Crisis

When Belgium authorities moved in on the offices of the Roman Catholic church to obtain documents did they do the correct thing? The world press recorded the operation on June 26: In an unprecedented move, Belgian police authorities raided the offices, private residences, and the graves of Belgian Catholic church officials who may be linked to the ongoing sexual abuse scandal.

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Jul. 28, 2010

Examining the Crisis

About 5,000 priests and religious brothers have been identified as credibly accused of sexually violating minors. Most of these men were unavailable to criminal prosecution due to statutes of limitation; some within the statutes are in prison. The rest are dead, have voluntarily left the priesthood, were laicized, are residing in religious communities with more or -- usually -- less appropriate supervision, or wait in limbo for the church to adjudicate their cases.

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Jul. 22, 2010

Many people, including bishops, date and label the "Crisis in the Catholic Church" to Jan. 6, 2002 when The Boston Globe began publishing its series about sexual abuse of minors by priests and revealing the conspiracy of bishops in covering up crimes. That was the flash point of a worldwide scandal. The crisis it epitomizes is more profound.

Read the full report here: Beneath the child abuse scandal

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Jul. 09, 2010

Examining the Crisis

Ron Westrum, professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University, suggests that organizations react in a series of stages to “anomalous reports.” They are: 1) suppression, 2) encapsulation, 3) public relations, 4) local fix, 5) global fix, and 6) investigation of root causes. He came to his formulation through the study of the battered child syndrome that many people, even professionals, found hard to admit was a widespread phenomenon.

It is not difficult to match the trajectory of church response to allegations of hidden clergy sex abuse against Westrum’s model. It’s a good fit.

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Jun. 17, 2010

If the church is to emerge from the crisis of the clergy sex abuse scandal and cover up and enter a new day, rather than being permanently degraded and diminished by it, a vital project of renewal is needed. It would involve all Catholics -- laity, nuns and priests, including the hierarchy -- in an energetic search for creative and vital means of replacing patterns of domination and control with more cooperative ways of interacting.

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Jun. 08, 2010

Like all Catholics, I gratefully depend on the faithful ministry of the many good priests who serve the church. Yet I offer a broad critique of something central to their lives and identities -- the rule of celibacy. Many priests will recognize the truth of what I describe.

I write from inside the question, having lived as a celibate seminarian and priest for more than a decade when I was young. In the Bing Crosby glory days, celibacy was essential to the mystique that set priests apart from other clergy, the Roman collar an “Open sesame!” to respect and status.

From a secular perspective, the celibate man or, in the case of nuns, woman made an impression simply by sexual unavailability. But from a religious perspective, the impact came from celibacy’s character as an all-or-nothing bet on the existence of God. The Catholic clergy lived in absolutism, which carried a magnetic pull.

Read Carroll's full commentary here: Mandatory celibacy at the heart of what's wrong

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Jun. 01, 2010

Theologian Yves Congar once said, “In the Catholic Church it has often seemed that the sin of the flesh was the only sin, and obedience the only virtue.” This dynamic dichotomy forms the linchpin to the structure of the entire clergy sexual abuse crisis currently embroiling the Catholic Church.

But the sexual abuse of minors by clerics vowed to celibacy is only the symptom of a system desperately in need of fundamental reconsideration.

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May. 26, 2010

Let me take you into a situation that illustrates the church institution's instinctive reaction to cover-up scandal. It was a workshop in 2000 for new Jesuit superiors. The presenter, a former provincial, was discussing the circumstances when a superior could break the bond of confidentiality between himself and the men he was in charge of. He said something could be shared with the provincial "If it was a matter of danger for the individual or to others."

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May. 20, 2010

Examining the Crisis

The Roman Curia is the Vatican bureaucracy. Most people know little about the men who run the curia. But press coverage of the clergy abuse crisis is closing in on cardinals whose blunders in the clergy abuse crisis have begun to draw criticism from other Princes of the Church.

As words fire back and forth in the press, the wall of secrecy that traditionally surrounds the curia is showing cracks.

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