Rome Shifts the Blame Again
A recent research study concludes that the cause of the abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church was not such factors as homosexuality or priestly celibacy but the social and sexual revolution of the Woodstock era in the 1960s and early 1970s. The study, The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010, was commissioned by the US Conference of [Roman] Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. It was funded mostly by the USCCB, the Knights of St Columba and several other Roman Catholic bodies.
The spokesman of an abuse victim aid organisation, Road to Recovery, said, “This report does not get to the heart of the issue, and the heart of the issue is deceit, cover-up, [and] silence. . . . They tend to look outside of themselves for the answers. . . . These were crimes committed by paedophile priests and those who covered them up.” Bishop Accountability, an organisation that investigates the abuse crisis, said the study minimises the gravity of their crimes, and gives short shrift to another crime, that of enabling, concealing, and fostering abuse by the US bishops and the Vatican bureaucracy.
Karen Terry, the principal investigator for the study, confidently claims, “The abuse crisis is over”. But a spokesman for Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, doubts that this is so: “Every single time there’s an independent look at clergy sex crimes, the percentage of accused child-molesting clerics jumps dramatically”. Neither will the latest Vatican guidelines for dealing with the problem remedy the situation. This new document, published in May, states the obvious – that sexual abuse of children is a crime – but does not require bishops to report these crimes to police. Indeed, it reinforces the bishops’ exclusive authority by stating that no secular bodies overseeing child protection can take the place of the “judgement and power” of the bishops. The Survivors Network of Those
Abused by Priests rightly says of the Vatican guidelines: “There’s no enforcement here . . . . Until that happens . . . church officials will continue to hide and enable abuse.”
It is obvious that both the USCCB-commissioned research study and the latest Vatican guidelines do no more than deceive some into thinking that Rome is making headway in dealing with the problem. But nothing will really terminate the dreadful abuse scandal but the demolition of the whole corrupt system. “Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down, and shall be found no more at all” (Rev 17:21). At the very least we are to pray for the downfall of Satan’s kingdom (Ps 68:1), including specifically the Papal region of it, and that many trapped in it would be brought into the kingdom of grace (see The Shorter Catechism, 102). NMR