Crisis spans nearly all dioceses: Sex abuse scandal includes more than 1,200 Catholic priests
In proving that denial and obfuscation are never effective ways to deal with a problem, the Catholic Church now has enough sex offenders to qualify as an alternative lifestyle. Whoda thunkit? Priests have the same problems that the civilian world does. Of course, the civilian world doesn't try to hide their despicable acts behind the moral authority of a clerical collar.
NEW YORK -- The sexual abuse crisis that engulfed the Roman Catholic Church in the past 12 months has now spread to nearly every American diocese and involves more than 1,200 priests, most of whose careers straddle a sharp divide in church history and seminary training.
These priests are known to have abused more than 4,000 minors over the past six decades, according to an extensive New York Times survey of documented cases of sexual abuse by priests through Dec. 31, 2002.
The survey, the most complete compilation available of data on the problem, contains the names and histories of 1,205 accused priests. It counted 4,268 people who have claimed publicly or in lawsuits to have been abused by priests, though experts say there are surely many more who have remained silent.
The survey provides a statistical framework for viewing the sexual abuse crisis against the modern history of the American Catholic Church. It found, for example, that most priests accused of abuse were ordained between the mid-1950s and the 1970s, a period of upheaval in the church, when men trained in the traditional authoritarian seminary system were sent out to serve in a rapidly changing church and social culture.
Most of the abuse occurred in the 1970s and 1980s, the survey found. The number of priests accused of abuse declined sharply by the 1990s.
But the data show that priests secretly violated vulnerable youth long before the first victims sued the church and went public in 1984 in Louisiana. Some incidents date from the 1930s and 1940s.
"This has been going on for decades, probably centuries," said Richard O'Connor, a former Dominican priest who says he was one of 10 boys sexually assaulted by three priests in a South Bronx, N.Y., parish in 1940, when he was 10. "It's just that all of a sudden, they got caught."
Every region was seriously affected, with 206 accused priests in the West, 246 in the South, 335 in the Midwest and 434 in the Northeast. (Some priests were counted more than once if they abused in more than one region.) The crisis reached not only big cities such as Boston and Los Angeles but smaller ones such as Louisville, Ky., with 27 accused priests, and St. Cloud, Minn., with nine.
The Catholic Church has turned a blind eye to this abuse for going on 70 years now. All I want to know is when people will begin to be held accountable for this sorry state of affairs. When will priests and the bishops who coddled them do jail time? When will dioceses be forced to pay multi-million-dollar settlements to those who were abused and then neglected by the Church? When will those who created and fostered this suffering be made to suffer themselves?
With apologies to the ardent Catholics among my readers, perhaps it's time we tore down the Catholic Church and replaced it with an institution that cares for and tends to it's parishioners. What we have now is an institution that cares more about position and property than people. Somewhere along the line, the Catholic Church lost sight of the reason for it's existence. Perhaps it's time to start over.
