Three quotes about clerical sexual abuse and its causes:
In the sold mass of so-called “regrettable individual lapses,” in the over-tolerant attitude of clerical superiors, and in the lying propaganda of this international body under the guidance of Roman or Vatican laws, we perceive symptoms of a disease leading to the complete internal decay of an institution
All who today bear the name of Christian share responsibility for all those ecclesiastical sins of past days whose expiation the Lord of righteousness is now completing.
We must not blame the agents of these deeds so much as the system. It is a system which has brought untold misery on mankind… Perhaps Saints can manage to love according to the rules of these Orders; certainly ordinary, natural man will only achieve sham sanctity.
These quotes seem apropos of what the Catholic Church is going through now. Unfortunately, they were all made in 1936-1937 – in Germany – by Nazis.
Hitler had long railed against the corruption of the monasteries. He had been in a Benedictine school for a year – there is some suspicion that something happened there, but only vague and circumstantial evidence.
In 1936 the Nazis began the Sittlichkeitsprozesse, the Immorality Trials, Eventually about 250 priests, religious, and employees of Catholic institutions were found guilty. The German bishops admitted the truth of these cases, but said they had handled them when they know about them. Apparently the bishops had usually dismissed the offenders, but they had not reported the offenses to the police. The bishops also objected to the way the press was portraying what happened. Sound familiar?
The Nazis had a field day attacking the Church. The failure of the Church allowed the Nazis to seize the high moral ground (!), and they enjoyed lecturing the bishops about morality. The Nazis also lied, distorted, fabricated evidence, suborned perjury, and otherwise behaved like Nazis, claiming that 7.000 abusers had been convicted.
How widespread was corruption in the German Church? Were the Nazis right (gag) in the substance of their charges? History has many ironies, but this one…!
(The quotes are from a 1940 book The Persecution of the Church in the Third Reich by Walther Mariaux, a German Jesuit in the Curia who worked with materials smuggled out of Germany).
There is no question that all the western churches, Catholic, Protestant, and Reformed failed in the their response to the growth of National Socialism. The Concordat of 1933 was a deal with the Devil, and devils break their promises and bare false witness. This became obvious to Pope Pius XI by March 1937. Unfortunately it was too late. The opportunity to take a strong stand and challenge the consciences of people in the pews had not been taken. Very few Christians leaders and thinkers in Germany saw that one could not be a practicing Christian and a Nazi supporter at the same time.
Even the colonels and generals of the Wehrmacht, who finally turned against Hitler, did not organize a resistance until they could see that there was no possibility that Germany could win the war. ( Due to the failure on the eastern front.) These leaders were all some sort of believers in God. Some were practicing Christians.
I cannot think of any reason to believe that the rate of abuse of children was any different before World War II than it was after. This would have been yet another hammer to keep the churches in fear of being prosecuted out of existence.
It is worth noting that German and Austrian children were singing hymns to Hitler in school. I wonder if Christian schools allowed this.
In this country the prosecutions are underway and keep going up the chain of command. Msgr. Lynn in Philadelphia will have to face the penalties for child endangerment if he is found guilty. Citizens of functioning democracies have the power to reform anything.
It is frightening to think that Hitler was democratically elected and afterward seized dictatorial power in what turned out to be a massive personality cult. I hope that cannot happen here.
I would like to challenge Janice Fox or anyone else to produce the data that indicate Catholic clergy in the US or Europe sexually molesting kids in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s.
Such data do not exist.
They do not exist because the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy was NOT A SYSTEMIC PROBLEM before 1960.
I am not sure what you mean by “systemic,” but the German bishops in 1936-1937 admitted that hundreds of priests and religious were abusers,
Some of the worst cases in the US date to the 1950s, such as ring of abusers in El Paso. Maciel’s abuse dates from the 1950s. We know of several rings of abusers in the US in the 1950s. How they ever formed, how they recognized one another, is difficult to discern. 19th anticlericals claimed that seminaries were breeding grounds for homosexuals – perhaps they were right.
After the Jesuits were suppressed in Germany in the 18th C, their secret archives contained scores of cases of abuse.
And of course St. Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah strongly suggests that abuse was “systemic” in Europe in the eleventh century.
Sexual abuse is a chronic problem in the church; whether it increases and decreases a over the centuries is very difficult to say. Only a few popes have ever made any real effort to root it out (Pius V, Horrendum) and Benedict XVI.
Early councils of the Church mention abuse of minors and St. Basil recommended rather strict guidelines in handling it. I’m not sure what “systemic”is supposed to mean but ours is not the first era in the Church’s history that has been plagued with this problem, as Mr. Podles indicates. It might be a fruitful exercise to see if there are charecteristics common to periods during which abuse of the young by sizeable numbers of clergy occured.
Leon, the first of the three paragraphs you cite is absolutely applicable to the current situation and, sadly, is correct. The clerical sex-abuse crisis that came to light within the past decade is not merely a collection of individual failures but a systemic failure of monumental proportions…on the level of Greek tragedy, even. It’s a systemic failure because the Church has a medieval governing structure that embraces monarchistic pretensions, institutional arrogance and isolation, a kind of class structure (with laity at the bottom and the bishops at the top), blind deference to authority and a permanent sense of entitlement. Taken together, those factors create the perfect breeding ground for corruption.
The other two paragraphs, well…..
Blaming the entire Church for the misdeeds of its priests and prelates is no different than Mark Shea saying, “we get the bishops we deserve.” It’s blaming the victim. Besides, Christ received God’s expiation for all sin on the cross.
Finally, even if the system is corrupt (which it is) and even if sham holiness is prevalent (and that’s not solely a Catholic problem), it’s not the system that creates holiness. It’s God. Of course, the Nazis would never mention that.
admin: “the German bishops in 1936-1937 admitted that hundreds of priests and religious were abusers” So “250 priests, religious, and employees” were convicted by Nazi courts. What can we make of this? How many were priests and religious, vs how many employees? Was it 230 employess and 20 priests? How many priests were there in Germany at the time? These numbers need to be nailed down. These priest were DISMISSED, they were not recirculated. The German bishops didn’t report them to the police who were under the thumb of the Nazis. Why is this a scandal? If you lived in a totalitarean regime that sought your extermination, would you turn one of your brothers into the police for a sex crime. Your post provides absolutely no comparison to the situation with the US Bishops in the 1960s and 70s were priests were NOT dismissed and were recirculated, and where half the cops in the big cities were Irish Catholics and provided COVER for the Church.
Systemic: my definition is “affecting the entire system” The only authoritative findings on clerical sex abuse across the country as a whole, or if you will the entire system, can be found in the John Jay data–which is the largest and most thorough descriptive study of its kind, certainly in North American, if not the world. The JJ data CLEARLY indicate that the sex abuse rate in the US was extremely low in the 1950s, amounting to a handful of priests across the entire country. Yes, there may have been some rings of abusers. No, there’s no evidence that these rings existed within a large number of dioceses. There was no systemic abuse during the 1950s. By the mid 1970s the data CLEARLY show that the abuse had become systemic–the abuse rate by US priests had reached as high as 10% of all priests ordained in the 1960s. Most of these priests were NOT dismissed, and they were recirculated.
admin: One more point. You say “Sexual abuse is a chronic problem in the church; whether it increases and decreases a over the centuries is very difficult to say. ” You are mistaken. You have NO data to support the claim that “sexual abuse is a chronic problem”. At best, we have evidence that shows that it is a sporadic problem throughout the history of the Church, and that it became systemic in the US from around 1960 – 1985.
Many clergy genuinely love the church as an institution. Not so much God, and not so much people. But they love the church. Therefore they protect it, God and humanity being irrelevant to their emotional loyalties. They are “churchmen.”
As of November 1937, 45 priests, 176 brothers and nuns, and 21 employees were convicted of morals offenses; 187 were acquitted; 955 still in court. I have ordered a 1971 book from Germany that should give final figures.
Many offenses occurred before the Nazi takeover. Because the bishop did not report them to the police before 1933, they allowed cases to accumulate and the Nazis to prosecute them all at once, giving a distorted picture of the situation. Something similar happened in the United States in 2002. All the cases that had been kept secret for decades suddenly started becoming public, giving a distorted view of the situation (which was still very bad).
We simply do not know whether clerical sexual abuse is more or less constant in the Church and is exposed only at certain times, or whether there are bad episodes of abuse caused by local and temporary conditions.
One major factor contributing to abuse is the failure to punish it. The French Church has had far fewer allegations than Germany or Holland. One French newspaper speculated it was because of the anticlerical laws passed by the Freemasonic government at the beginning of the 20th century. French priests knew that they would not and could not be protected from the full force of the criminal law. Fear of punishment is a deterrent to crime.
admin: Thanks for the clarification on the stats. It would be useful to know what constituted “moral offenses.” That is, how many of these offenses were legitimately found to have involved the sexual abuse of minors, over how many years, and what percentage of the clergy population. Granted these may be hard to come by, but they would put a finer point on the nature and extent of the problem in Germany. The German scenario may share some features with the US problem, but you suggest that at least one central feature was not shared, and that was that the German abusers were dismissed from their offices. Not so with the Americans, largely. This is a big difference that I think reflects a significant difference in perspective. The US bishops saw this primarily as a clinical problem, and secondarily a legal problem. Since 2002, the bishops have been forced to put the legal factor at the top of their considerations. But in my thinking, this still misses the core SPIRITUAL issue, both in the priest perps and in the bishops.
“Fear of punishment is a deterrent to crime.” No doubt. But such fear is an EXTRINSIC deterrent. It is extremely important to remind ourselves of the INTRINSIC motivations for sex crimes by the priest, and the INTRINSIC motivation for bishops viewing a sex crime as fundamentally a clinical problem. These motives are FUNDAMENTALLY SPIRITUAL. What intrinsic deterents did the abusers overcome to begin their sordid behaviors? What spiritual blindness did the bishop have to see this a clinical problem? These are the core questions. They are both spiritual. Enforcement both internal and external to the Church are certainly factors, but essentially they are not intrinsic. What happens to a man spiritually that would incline him to take advantage of minors to satisfy his own lusts? If we can answer this we have the most important (but not the only) solution to the problem of clerical sex abuse.
There is a perspective on the problem of (heterosexual) abuse that I think Catholics avoid — for obvious reasons.
When a man gives a woman spiritual counsel, it is an intrinsically intimate thing and the possibility of sexual entanglement is very real. The husband is the head of the home and of his wife. When a priest gives “spiritual direction” to a married woman, he is usurping the husband’s place and creating sexual tension.
No man, priest or not, has any business giving spiritual counsel to any woman who is not his wife. And no woman has any business giving spiritual counsel to a man.