Editor’s Note: The recently released movie Spotlight focuses on the Boston Globe “Spotlight” team that uncovered in 2002 the priest abuse scandal in the Church and the cover-up by some bishops that exacerbated the problem.
There is no way to deny the scandal; it was a shameful episode in the life of the Church in Boston and elsewhere, but it is over and there is no place in the world today where children are less likely to be sexually abused than the Catholic Church. In other words, children in Catholic schools and parishes are safer today than in any other religious or educational institutions.
Yet there is an ongoing effort to convince people that the sex abuse scandal is continuing in the Church. To help you to rebut this canard, here are some facts about the original scandal, and the myth of a continuing scandal, that are taken from Bill Donohue’s article in the December 2015 issue of Catalyst, the monthly publication of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (www.catholicleague.org).
First, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice began an investigation in 2002 of priestly sexual abuse covering the period from 1950 to 2002. It found that 4,392 priests — about four percent of all Catholic priests — had been accused of molesting minors. Of that number, 1,881 allegations were not substantiated, meaning that roughly two percent of Catholic priests had credible allegations made against them.
Second, the scandal was not about pedophile priests, i.e., those who abused prepubescent children, but rather about homosexual priests who abused older children. According to the John Jay researchers, less than five percent of the molesting priests were pedophiles. They reported that 81 percent of the victims were male and postpubescent, and the perpetrators were homosexuals.
Even Kevin Cullen, a member of the Globe “Spotlight” team, admitted this in a column he wrote for the paper on February 28, 2004. He quoted the following from attorney Robert S. Bennett, a member of the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ National Review Board:
“There are no doubt many outstanding priests of a homosexual orientation who live chaste, celibate lives, but any evaluation of the causes and context of the current crisis must be cognizant of the fact that more than 80 percent of the abuse at issue was of a homosexual nature.” A colleague of his, Dr. Paul McHugh, former chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University, said that “this behavior was homosexual predation on American Catholic youth, yet it is not being discussed.”
It was still being covered up on November 1, 2015, when a staff reporter for the Globe said that the Spotlight movie was about “the pedophile priest crisis.” This demonstrates, said Bill Donohue in Catalyst, that “the evidence . . . doesn’t count. Politics counts. The mere suggestion that homosexual priests accounted for the lion’s share of the problem was met with cries of homophobia.”
Third, attempts to blame the crisis on priestly celibacy are absurd. Most of the sexual abuse in families, churches, synagogues, schools, etc., is committed by married men, not by celibate men. In a 2011 report, John Jay researchers said that “celibacy has been constant in the Catholic Church since the eleventh century [actually since the first century] and could not account for the rise and subsequent decline in abuse cases from the 1960s through the 1980s.”
They said that the root of the problem was the prevalence of sexually immature men who were allowed to enter the seminaries in the 1970s, as well as the effects of the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s.
Fourth, Donohue refuted the myth that the problem of sexual abuse in the Church is ongoing. He said that “in the last ten years, from 2005 to 2014, an average of 8.4 credible accusations were made against priests for molestation that occurred in any one of those years. . . . Considering that roughly 40,000 priests could have had a credible accusation made against them, this means that almost 100 percent of priests had no such accusation made against them!
“Sadly, I cannot name a single media outlet, including Catholic ones, that even mentioned this, much less emphasized it. The Catholic News Service, paid for by the bishops, should have touted this, but it didn’t. This delinquency is what helps to feed the misperception that the Church has not even begun to deal with this problem.”
Fifth, Bill Donohue explained the continuing attack on the Church by saying that “the Catholic Church has long been the bastion of traditional morality in American society, and if there is anything that the big media outlets and the Hollywood studios loathe it is being told that they need to put a brake on their libido. So when the scandal came to light, the urge to pounce proved irresistible. The goal was, and still is, to attenuate the moral authority of the Catholic Church. It certainly wasn’t outrage over the sexual abuse of minors that stirred their interest: If that were the case, then many other institutions would have been put under the microscope. But none were.”
He said that “there is plenty of evidence that Hollywood has long been a haven for sexual predators, both straight and gay. The same is true of many religious and secular institutions throughout society. But there is little interest in the media and in Tinseltown to profile them. They have identified the enemy and are quite content to keep pounding away.”
That is why, said Donohue on page three of the same issue of Catalyst, that the media and Hollywood executives are trying to block distribution of a new movie, An Open Secret, which is “a devastating look at the way Hollywood predators manipulated, intimidated, and raped aspiring child actors.”
Q. During Mass last week, I witnessed something I have never seen before. I saw a eucharistic minister open the tabernacle to put in the consecrated Body of Christ not consumed during Communion. I was wondering if there are rules for who can approach and open the tabernacle. — B.K., Maryland.
A. According to the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (n. 163), “When the distribution of Communion is over, the priest himself immediately and completely consumes at the altar any consecrated Wine that happens to remain; as for any consecrated Hosts that are left, he either consumes them at the altar or carries them to the place designated for the reservation of the Eucharist.”
Barring any other liturgical directive with which we are not familiar, we would say that only the priest is to put the consecrated Body of Christ into the tabernacle after the distribution of Communion. Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, who are bringing Communion to the sick when there is no Mass being celebrated, may open the tabernacle to obtain consecrated Hosts for those confined to home, hospital, or nursing facility.
Q. When I was a very young person, Friday night boxing was the rage on TV. The concept is to injure the opponent. What is the current Catholic moral thinking in this area? — R.B.K., Virginia.
A. We are not aware of any official statement by the Church on boxing. Some Catholic moralists, however, have questioned the morality of a “sport” whose goal is to hurt an opponent and ultimately to knock him senseless. And we’re not even talking about the savagery of kick-boxing.
In answering this question, one needs to consider how this violent activity squares with Christ’s command to love our neighbor, which means respecting his bodily health. Some would make a distinction between amateur boxing, where skill and finesse are the rule, and professional boxing, where violence is the norm, and perhaps that distinction has some merit.
Another factor to be considered is the bloodthirsty behavior that professional boxing brings forth from spectators, who clamor for more brutality and viciousness as a fight progresses. Is it a good thing to stir up the primitive violence that is never very far below the surface in the supposedly civilized men and women of today? Perhaps the time has come for the Church to take an official position on the morality of boxing.
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