Motive of Credibility: Holiness

Four thousand, three hundred and ninety-two. That’s how many Catholic priests and deacons in the United States were credibly accused of abusing 10,667 minors between 1950 and 2002, according to a 2004 report by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. In Ireland, a 2018 list reported more than 1,300 clergy accused of committing sexual abuse over a similar timeline. Today, we know that such trends have occurred across the world — from Mexico, where Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, sexually abused 60 minors and fathered six children, to East Timor, where Fr. Richard Daschbach was convicted of and imprisoned for sexually abusing orphans. The NOR has (rightly) invested no little energy exposing sexual predators in the priesthood and censuring the activities of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who for decades sexually abused boys and seminarians from his perch of seemingly unassailable ecclesial power in the United States.

Obviously, this is a black mark on the history of the post-war Catholic Church. Religious orders and many dioceses — including those in Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Louisville, Boston, Dallas, and Baltimore — either paid out major settlements or filed for bankruptcy in response to sex-abuse lawsuits. Who knows how many millions of Catholics stopped going to Mass or repudiated their Catholic faith because of the sex-abuse scandal. The crisis was arguably the worst thing to have happened to the Church since the French Revolution.

Many defenders of the Church, myself included, have noted that studies have found that the percentage of clergy alleged to have engaged in sexual abuse during this time — typically estimated to be about four percent — is approximate to estimates of sexual abuse committed by the general adult male population. Medicine, education, the military — these and other professional spheres have been just as swamped with allegations of sexual misconduct as has the Catholic priesthood, as any perusal of the daily news demonstrates. To single out the Church as somehow uniquely or pre-eminently guilty of sexual misconduct — as many of her detractors do, often adding that priestly celibacy is to blame — is contrary to simple fact.

Yet that’s not much of a comfort given what we are talking about. The Catholic Church claims to stand for virtue and righteousness in a way that no other institution does. As it is written in Lumen Gentium, “The one mediator, Christ, established and ever sustains here on earth his holy Church, the community of faith, hope, and charity, as a visible organization through which he communicates truth and grace to all men” (no. 8§1). The Church unequivocally defends the rights of the unborn, the dying, the impoverished, and the vulnerable. Her mission, manifested in schools, hospitals, and manifold charitable organizations and religious orders, is to care for people’s bodies and souls in a way that is supposed to be different from what the secular world offers. That she allowed — through negligence, self-preservation, or worse — such wretched behavior for so many decades is a betrayal of the highest order. Though efforts to more diligently vet Church personnel and quickly address alleged offenders have placed the crisis in the “rearview mirror,” so to speak, according to those within the Church and in the court of public opinion, the damage has been done and will be felt for years to come.