As a board member of BishopAccountability.org, I agree with Chaput, the new archbishop of Philadelphia. John Allen interviewed him:

What about the issue of the accountability of bishops inside the church itself? Critics often argue that recovery from the crisis can’t happen until bishops who covered up the abuse are punished as severely as the priests who committed it.

I understand that, and I think it’s a legitimate concern. We should have accountability for our actions in the church, and bishops should be as accountable as priests and laity. I’m sympathetic to the idea that there should be real consequences, with teeth, to acting contrary to the law of the land, the discipline of the church, or the moral law of God.

Do you think there are sufficient accountability provisions for bishops right now?

I’ll say something that many people in the church aren’t saying, which is that we ought to study this question and reflect on it very seriously. We should take up the issue of accountability, including accountability for bishops, in a formal, clear, and decisive kind of way.

Any sense of what that might look like?

No, because we haven’t done the study yet. In terms of the disciplining of bishops, that’s traditionally under the responsibility of the Holy Father. Since the question has been raised, I think the details of how someone can be held accountable ought to be developed and the Holy Father ought to give his approval when the appropriate time comes. I think it would be useful to him, and to all of us in the church, if there were clear principles and procedures.

I will assume that Chaput is sincere in these statements; buy how widely his view is shared by bishops and Vatican officials is uncertain; all indications are that being a bishop means never having to say you’re sorry, much less having to suffer any consequences for your actions and inactions.

No one knows with any certainty the percentages of homosexually-inclined or abusive men in the various churches. On the surface it would seem that celibacy would be a cover for someone who does not want to admit his homosexual inclinations to himself or to others. But the Anglicans have had big problem with homosexual molestation of teenage boys, often by married clergy. 

The clergy, in addition to attracting people with good or at least not harmful motivations, would tend to attract narcissists who love the attention and who enjoy manipulating people. Even worse, some of the rhetoric that has been used to exalt the Catholic clergy could attract megalomaniacs like Maciel and Karadima. 

Of course politicians are narcissistic and megalomaniac, and molesters occur in all occupations. But priests are carefully observed for years. Occasionally a psychopath might slip through, but why so many? And once they are in the clergy, they have access to vulnerable people who have been taught that priests are super-Christians, because they are so close to the sacraments. 

Also, if the sacraments help to sanctify a person’s life, why do priests at least not show a reasonable attainment of virtue? They have the closest association to the sacraments; why do the sacraments fail to lead to ordinary human virtue in almost all priests?

In case it slipped by you. According to Donohue:

Penn State professor Philip Jenkins has studied this problem for years. After looking at the John Jay data, which studied priestly sexual abuse from 1950-2002, he found that “of the 4,392 accused priests, almost 56 percent faced only one misconduct allegation, and at least some of these would certainly vanish under detailed scrutiny.” Moreover, Jenkins wrote that “Out of 100,000 priests active in the U.S. in this half-century, a cadre of just 149 individuals—one priest out of every 750—accounted for over a quarter of all allegations of clergy abuse.” In other words, almost all priests have never had anything to do with sexual molestation. 

What Jenkins is saying is that a very small number of priests – 149 – were accused of abusing almost all the victims. That is, these 149 priests had a large number of victims, and that 56% of accused priests had only one accusation.

However, the bishops reported that over 4.5% of priests had been accused, so it is NOT true, as Donohue claims, that “almost all priests”  – implying 749 out of 750 – have nothing to do with sexual molestation. One of twenty were accused, nineteen out of twenty were not accused.

From my conversations with victims, many of them are satisfied once their abuser has been publicly accused. If there is no possibility of civil or criminal action, they see no point in coming forward and suffering the embarrassment of admitting that they had been abused.

There seem to be some cases in which a priest had a large number of victims but no one has gone public yet. Criminologists and psychologists have studied abusers to try to determine the average number of victims per abuser, and it is far greater than one; perhaps 15-20 for abusers of older children, perhaps scores or even hundreds for abusers of small children.

Another weasly statistic which Vatican officials occasionally quote is a fraction of1% figure of priests as pedophiles. This is misleading. Pedophilia strictly defined is sexual abuse of pre-pubescent children. The proportion of this type in abuse by priests has been small and has even declined in absolute numbers over the decades. But most of the abuse has been of pubescent and adolescent boys, technically not pedophilia, but pederasty or ephebophilia.

That of course raises the question of homosexuality, and I think Donohue is correct that there has been blindness about that.

For a long time, both those who disapproved and those who approved of homosexuality conflated it with pederasty. Church documents refer to homosexuality when they mean sex with boys. Homosexual activists for many years accepted pederasts into their ranks. NAMBLA – the North American Man-Boy Love Association – marched in gay pride parades. Gradually homosexuals decided to dissociate themselves from these pederastic groups. I leave it to the psychologists to decide whether there is a real or only a political distinction between pederasty and homosexuality.

I simply do not know what has happened in the Church, and I don’t know how we ever know.

About 5 % of priests in the U.S. have been sexually involved with minors; that is certain.

But what about other countries and times?

The German bishops have not released the number of accused priests, but there have been thousands of accusations.

However in the 1930s the Nazis searched diligently for evidence to discredit the Church. Apart from two exceptional orders of lay brothers, they could only make charges against 50 priests, and most of those were acquitted. Did the Nazis miss massive abuse among the clergy? They tended to be thorough and none too gentle in their questioning.

Pepe Rodriguez estimates about 7% of Spanish priests have been sexually involved with minors. That is in line with American data. But Spanish anticlericalism has a long and bizarre history. Rodriguez is a sociologist, but he has also written a book “exposing” the pagan source of Christmas customs, another book “exposing” the Bible, and a third book praising Freemasonry. His judgment may be skewed.

But St. Peter Damian gave a scathing account of the clergy in the middle ages.

So what to make of all this? Has abuse risen and fallen, or have the cover-ups been more or less successful?

If abuse varies from diocese to diocese (from 0% to over 10% of priests in the U.S. dioceses), Why?

If abuse varies from decade to decade, and century to century, Why?

These are important questions, and I see no effort by the hierarchy to try to resolve them.

My dear friend Bill Donohue has found the money to take out a full page ad in the New York Times in an attempt to minimize the charges of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

Donohue summarizes Philip Jenkin’s analysis:

Penn State professor Philip Jenkins has studied this problem for years. After looking at the John Jay data, which studied priestly sexual abuse from 1950-2002, he found that “of the 4,392 accused priests, almost 56 percent faced only one misconduct allegation, and at least some of these would certainly vanish under detailed scrutiny.” Moreover, Jenkins wrote that “Out of 100,000 priests active in the U.S. in this half-century, a cadre of just 149 individuals—one priest out of every 750—accounted for over a quarter of all allegations of clergy abuse.” In other words, almost all priests have never had anything to do with sexual molestation.

But that is not what Jenkins is saying. The bishops admit that almost one out of 20 diocesan priests have been credibly accused (John Jay Report), and in the dioceses that have been most thoroughly investigated, one of ten have been credibly accused.

Donohue criticizes BishopAccountability, of which I am a board member because we post all public accusations.

BishopAccountabilty.org is accessed by reporters and lawyers for information on priestly sexual abuse, though the standards it uses cannot pass the smell test. It admits that the database “is based solely on allegations reported publicly” and that it “does not confirm the veracity of any actual allegation.” Swell. Furthermore, it says that “If an individual is ‘cleared’ or ‘exonerated’ by an internal church investigation and/or a diocesan review board decision, the individual remains in the database.” Ditto for cases where a priest faces an allegation for an act which occurred after he left the Catholic Church; even lawsuits against the dead are listed. There is no other group in the U.S. which is subjected to such gross unfairness. No wonder wildly exaggerated claims have been made based off of such collected “evidence.”  

We emphasize that these are only accusations, some of which (such as the one against Cardinal Mahoney) were made by a person who said she was subject to delusions; others have resulted in criminal conviction. However we have neither the authority nor the resources to sort out the validity of each accusation, so we simply summarize them and link to the newspaper reports or public documents.

Donohue also critics us for continuing to list priests who have been exonerated. But we say that they have been exonerated and link to the source that exonerates them. If a priest has been publicly accused, rumors will continue to circulate about him for years. It is helpful to him that a non-Church source indicates publicly that he has been exonerated. Anyone can go online, check his name, and see that the accusations were found to be baseless –and not have to take the priest’s word for it.

Donohue is correct that some of the criticism is motivated by anticlericalism or even antiCatholicism, but the failures of the Church have given its enemies much ammunition. Nor is sexual abused confined to the Catholic Church; but it is impossible to compare church with church, because statistics are lacking. And no other major Church, much less the public school system, claims that leaving it will lead to damnation. If the Church is going to preach that apostasy is damnable, it had better not give create conditions that lead people to apostatize. That is why Augustine insisted that discipline be maintained among the clergy and that offenders be removed immediately.