The Church’s Sins Are Ours

Edd Doerr (arlinc.org) thinks that Frank Bruni op ed ( Nov 4 NY Times) “The Church’s Sins Are Ours,” re sex abuse scandals" is right on target.

"It’s fashionable among some conservatives to rail that there’s insufficient respect for religion in America and that religious people are marginalized, even vilified.

That’s bunk. In more places and instances than not, they get special accommodation and the benefit of the doubt. Because they talk of God, they’re assumed to be good. There’s a reluctance to besmirch them, an unwillingness to cross them.

The new movie “Spotlight,” based on real events, illuminates this brilliantly.....

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” says a character in “Spotlight.” Indeed it does: a village too cowed, and a village too credulous."

There were 414 comments on this OpEd including:

"American history is replete with examples of religious institutions and ministers betraying their spiritual mission through the pursuit of political influence. Catholic authorities who valued the church's power and influence over the welfare of the faithful violated, in the most egregious manner, the commission they believed they had received from Christ. The Protestant evangelist, Billy Graham, while innocent of any criminal behavior, also betrayed his spiritual calling when he used his pulpit to claim that God wanted Christians to vote for Richard Nixon...."

Below it the comment Edd posted in the Times on-line is a good column.


Bruni's point is reinforced by the 2014 book, Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse, by church-law trained lawyer Kieran Tapsell.


Also note a report this week in the National Catholic Reporter by Jack Ruhl titled "NCR Research: Costs of sex abuse to US church underestimated."


Ruhl's research shows that the sex abuse scandal has cost the Catholic Church in the US $4 Billion in the past 65 years. Ruhl adds that "separate research recently published calculates that other scandal-related consequences such as lost membership and diverted giving has cost the church more than $2.3 Billion annually for the past 30 years." That adds up to a total of $69 Billion! No wonder church officials have been seeking public funds through vouchers and tax credits for their shrinking system of private schools.

Clerical Sexual Abuse

a review by Edd Doerr

 Clerical Sexual Abuse: How the Crisis Changed US Catholic Church-State Relations, by Jo Renee Formicola. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 279 pp, $105.

No Longer on Pedestals, by Carol A. Kuhnert. iUniverse, 2014, 385 pp, $23.

By now the clergy sexual abuse scandals, worldwide and of long duration, are out in the open. In the current issues of Free Inquiry and the ARL journal, Voice of Reason, I reviewed Kieran Tapsell’s book, Potiphar’s Wife: The Vatican’s Secret and Child Sexual Abuse. The two reviewed here are just the latest in a long stream on the subject, many of them by Catholic authors, such as Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea’s Perversion of Power: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (2007); Leon Podles’s Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church 2008); Lucinda Almond’s Child Abuse (2006,  to which I contributed a chapter);  and two in Spanish by Spanish psychologist Pepe Rodriguez, Pederasty in the Catholic Church: Sex Crimes by the Clergy against Minors: A Drama Silenced and Covered Up by the Bishops (2005) and The Sex Life of the Clergy (2002).

Jo Renee Formicola, a professor of political science at Seton Hall University, a Catholic institution, starts off on page 1 noting that the abuse scandals in the US alone have so far cost the Catholic Church over three billion dollars to settle lawsuits. She makes clear that internal progress to deal with the abuse mess has been agonizingly slow, a matter of “too little and too late,” with church officials in the US and the Vatican far more concerned about protecting their image and covering up the abuse than about the vast numbers of minors who have been victims of clergy sexual abuse. She also touches on the scandals in Belgium and in Ireland, which, with only one percent of the US population, the 2006 Ryan Report showed that over a period of 70 years there were over “over 14,000 sexual abuse victims of priests and nuns.” She notes that the 2004 John Jay College of Criminal Justice study, “The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002,” found that “4,392 clergymen were accused of abusing 10,667 people between 1960 to 1984 at a financial cost of $573 million,” that “most of the victims were males between the ages of 11-14.”

Formicola’s well documented book details the legal and canon (church) law complications involved in dealing with the problem and concludes that church officials have consistently sought to shield the scandals from public scrutiny and civil law enforcement.

Carol Kuhnert is a devout Catholic woman in the St Louis area whose older brother was a priest who abused numerous minors. Her book is a courageous, detailed, well documented account of one abuser and the author’s years long though fruitless efforts to get her church to clean up the mess. She makes clear that the cover-ups and indifference toward the abuse were/are every bit as bad as the abuse itself.

Both books mention Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who was a bishop in St Louis who seemingly was of no help there, who was then archbishop of Milwaukee where he tried to move church assets around to avoid their being used in compensate victims, and who now as archbishop of New York had been campaigning to have the New York legislature divert public funds to his church’s private schools through vouchers, which would of course be contrary to the state constitution’s Article XI, Section 3.

Both of these books merit five stars. Too bad the list price of the Formicola book is so unreasonably high.