Belgian probe of sex-abuse cover-up allegations
The Vatican is stepping up its condemnation of an extraordinary raid by Belgian law enforcement authorities to search for evidence that clergy sexual abuse was covered up. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said that the detention of bishops for questioning smacked of communist governments’ practices. The Belgian police were also faulted by church authortieis for searching the graves of two archbishops in the cathedral crypt, apparently on a tip that documents were hidden in the tombs. “It looks like police were searching for the Da Vinci code,” Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard reportedly said.
Thursday’s search created these scenes: police with dogs sealed off the archbishop’s palace; investigators confiscated the personal computer of Cardinal Godfried Danneels; bishops were detained and questioned; a mountain of documents was seized from a church commission investigating 450 cases of alleged sexual abuse. Authorities said that they also raided St. Rumbold’s Cathedral, seat of the Mechelen-Brussels archdiocese, acting on an informant’s tip that documents were hidden there. (Nothing was found.)
According to news reports from Belgium, the search was based on allegations from several witnesses that church officials deliberately withheld information on sexual abuse. The search signals that prosecutors evidently suspect that the church’s investigative commission is holding back evidence from them – they seized all of the panel’s records. The head of the church commission, child psychiatrist and Professor Peter Adriaenssens, responds that the confiscated records include information meant to be confidential.
Was there a long-standing cover-up? Even Archbishop Léonard said recently that the Belgian church would “turn over a leaf from a not-very-distant past when such matters would pass in silence or be concealed.”
I’ve followed this news with the current column from Brooklyn’s Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio in mind. He comments, referring to clergy sexual abuse in the United States, that it’s wrong to say that church authorities took part in a cover-up. He writes that “the term `cover-up’ is inappropriate to describe the phenomena because in most instances the abuse was unknown and never reported.” He adds:
The public perception by members of the Church is that somehow the bishops engaged in a cover-up of crimes in the past or even in the present and were unresponsive to the needs of victims. We must all work to change this perception since it is not accurate. This can be done by each individual priest, deacon, religious and lay person in the Diocese of Brooklyn and Queens. Knowing the facts will go a long way toward changing the perception inside and outside of the Church.
Grand juries from Philadephia, Suffolk County, N.Y., and elsewhere would certainly disagree with the claim that there was no cover-up. I would agree with one point the bishop makes: that “knowing the facts” is important. What must be done, short of desecrating graves, to confirm the facts so that bishops and lay people will share the same perception of what occurred?
It is proverbial in Washington that nothing is believed until it is officially denied. Toyota has succeeded in convincing most of its customers that there was no problem with their cars and that the guy who died in the Lexus SUV caused the crash and that it was not Toyoto’s fault. So Bishop DeMarzio is right up there with public relations liars and we will see some honest Catholics agreeing with him. People deny the Holocaust even in the face of startling photos. Hitler said: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”
I found Bishop DeMarzio’s comment astonishing. Astonishing not only in terms of all that’s happened including Grand Jry reports, but that he stresses knowing the fcats, when lawyers for the church continue to try to block discovery, depositions, publications thereof., etc.
In another thread, we talked about the US Bishops being inept – I submit here is another example.
How far has the public reputation of the Catholic Faith fallen? When I was young there were devout Catholics, nominal Catholics and fallen away Catholics. About 40% 40% and 20%. These numbers have now been eclipsed by Embarrassed Catholics.= 80 %. We now appear to the ‘other world’ to be just another dangerous cult being led by dictatorial leaders. The end is not in sight e.g. the Fed, Grand jury is still sitting in Los Angeles. These ongoing Federal raids like those in Belgium are making the Church look more and more like David Koresh’s Waco Tex,.. the dissident Mormon compounds raided for polygamy/child abuse and Sciencetology. The public’s reaction is ‘it’s about time’. The Church bunker mentality insures that… no leaders will stand up. .
“Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said that the detention of bishops for questioning smacked of communist governments’ practices.”
Well, at least he didn’t say that it “smacked of the Inquisition.”
There is no way to prove that you are not hiding something. Think about it. What the bishops need to do is restore trust. Church practice, in particular. the tendency to–shall we say nontranparency?–is not help.
Bob Nunz –
I too find Bishop DiMarzio’s statement astonishing. What can account for such blindness? I wonder if they are suffering from a form of anosognosia. According to a recent series in the NYT, anosognosics typically go into total denial when their bodies are severely impaired (e.g., paralyzed) or they are very sick. They generally function quite rationally otherwise, but they are mentally ill; Perhaps some of the bishops are suffering from a similar mental problem, one which allows them to reinforce each others’ delusions;
The series is in 5 parts. It begins at:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/
Of course most Catholics, including dotCommonwealers, are as certain that they “know the facts” as the bishop of Brooklyn is certain that he “knows the facts.”
The bishop believes that cover-up is the wrong construct to explain what happened over many decades with respect to the clerical sexual abuse of children. Whereas most/many Catholics believe there was a cover-up.
I remain agnostic about who, if anyone, really has the facts about the hierarchy’s response to this abuse–excepting perhaps the statistical data of the John Jay study and the self-disclosure of clergy and bishops who have admitted abusing children and have accepted punishment.
I no more believe that most bishops have the “facts,” than I think most of us have the “facts.”
+DiMarzio: “The public perception by members of the Church is that somehow the bishops engaged in a cover-up of crimes in the past or even in the present and were unresponsive to the needs of victims.”
For +DiMarzio, “the bishops” might name the class or category containing all bishops. Yet if we swap in “all bishops” for “the bishops” above, do we get an accurate claim about what public perception by members of the Church is? Even if it’s inaccurate, what if it’s DiMarzio’s own sincere view of what public perception of the members of the Church is? Conflicts sometimes set in motion conditions that trigger in the people involved systematic mutual misrecognitions. Misunderstandings pile up, get too big, and cannot be worked through. And then things get even worse.
Having read the Philadelphia Grand Jury Report from stem to stern twice and perused the Ferns report as well as the Murphy report, I can only conclude that Catholic bishops indeed covered up the sexual abuse of children by priests. Most certainly they did not experience what they were doing as a cover-up. They probably saw themselves as buying time. More than likely hoped it would all go away. Crossed their fingers and laicized the most egregious offenders. If the only outcome of this process was aggravation to the bishops, then maybe I could agree it wasn’t a cover up. But dear God, the outcome was giving child predators more access to children, and it was the harsh and profoundly disrespectful treatment of victims coming forward for justice. UNTIL the press got wind of it, researched and began to publish their findings. For the prelates in Belgium, this is what you can expect when there is a history of looking away. For the lifers in Rome—it is the first time the word “indignation” has come into play. And who are they indignant on behalf of? Not victims I assure you, but the bishops who were detained for 9 hours. Grow up everybody.
What many bishops did was worse than covering-u. They enabled abusers: they lied point blank to parents when asked if there was any problem with priests, they led to other bishops when a protest was transferred to another diocese, they did not inform pastors or parishes when an abusive priest was stationed at a parish, they sometimes, in response to a report that a priest was sexually interested in boys, made the priest a boy scout chaplain. All this looks more like being an accessory before the fact to a felony than simply covering-up.
Of course no one knows all the facts about clerical abuse of minors, since some of the facts are still unreported and may never be reported; and probably only a few people have really sorted through the the reports and pieces evidence that have become available–there must be a vast quantity of data. But surely enough material is on the public record to show that some bishops engaged in a course of action that justifies the use of the term “cover-up”.
Margaret, here’s a random quote from http://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2005_09_21_Philly_GrandJury/Philly_03.pdf . Sadly, there is much more in there if you care to look.
I think that the clergy determinedly refused to believe the implications of what they were seeing. They were incapable of facing reality. They believed in other priests’ goodness rather than draw the logical but unacceptable explanations of what was happening before their eyes. They were willfully naive.
The report raises other troubling questions: If priests are so good at convincing themselves of what they want to be true, in spite of damning evidence, then how can we trust anything they say about anything?
“Archdiocese leaders conducted non-investigations designed to avoid establishing priests’ guilt.
At first, Grand Jurors wondered whether Archdiocese officials, including Cardinal
Bevilacqua and his aides, were tragically incompetent at rooting out sexually abusive
priests and removing them from ministry. Secretary for Clergy William Lynn suggested,
for example, that accusations made against Fr. Stanley Gana in 1992 – of anal rape, oral
sodomy, and years of molestation of adolescent boys – “must have fallen through the
cracks,” since Fr. Gana remained a pastor three more years until another allegation
surfaced. Soon the Jurors came to realize that sexual abuse cases in the Philadelphia
Archdiocese did not fall “through the cracks” by accident or mistake.
The Secretary for Clergy, whom Cardinal Bevilacqua assigned to investigate
allegations of sexual abuse by priests, routinely failed to interview even named victims,
not to mention rectory staff and colleagues in a position to observe the accused priests.
The only “investigation” conducted after a victim reported being abused was to ask the
priest if he did what was alleged. If the accused priest, whose very crime is characterized
by deceit and secretiveness, denied the allegation, Archdiocese officials considered the
allegation unproven. Monsignor Lynn professed to the Grand Jury that he could not
determine the credibility of accusations – no matter how detailed the victims’
descriptions, or how many corroborating witnesses there might be, or how many similar
accusations had been made against a priest by victims who did not know each other, or
how incriminating a priest’s own explanation of the events.
The reason for Msgr. Lynn’s apparent lack of judgment, curiosity, or common
sense in refusing to acknowledge the truth of abuse allegations became evident when
Cardinal Bevilacqua testified. The Cardinal said that, when assigning and promoting
priests, he disregarded anonymous or third-party reports of sexual crimes against children
that were contained in many priests’ files. The Cardinal, like his Secretary for Clergy,
claimed to be unable to determine whether the reports were true. He told the Grand Jury
that he could not know without an investigation. And yet the staff, with his approval,
never truly investigated these reports – no matter how serious, how believable, or how
easily verified. This was the case even when victims were named and other priests had
witnessed and reported incidents. The Cardinal conceded under questioning that
allegations against a priest were generally not labeled “credible” unless the priest
happened to confess.
The Grand Jury is convinced that the Archdiocese could have identified scores of
child molesters in the priesthood simply by encouraging other clergy to report what they
witnessed – for example, incidents in which they saw fellow priests routinely take young
boys, alone, into their bedrooms. We heard from many victims that their abuse had been
witnessed by other priests. Fellow priests observed Frs. Nicholas Cudemo, Craig
Brugger, Richard McLoughlin, Albert Kostelnick, Francis Rogers, James Brzyski, and
John Schmeer as they were abusing young victims. None of these witnesses helped the
children or reported what they saw. Father Donald Walker confirmed what we came to
believe – that the Archdiocese had an unwritten rule discouraging “ratting on fellow
priests.” ”
So sad.
“Troubling questions” such as: if priests are so good at self-delusion, then what to make of everything they have taught us about our faith? There’s a big risk that all the people who have an unexamined faith leftover from childhood are now likely to walk out of the church because of this great scandal, and may lose their faith altogether.
Ms. Steinfels’ dismissal of the evidence/”facts” beyond that in the JJ study or admitted to by clergy and bishops is very disheartening.
Here is part of what bothers me about the JJ survey in the instructions sent to bishops in how to complete it:
“If the victim of abuse is biologically an adult, but mentally under the age of 18, should the allegation be included?
NOT unless the abuse started when the individual was under the age of 18.”….
Q2: Should seminarians be included? YES, but only those who are later ordained”
Openness, transparency, or even the full truth, are lacking.
Here is my list for what NH bishops said, versus what the NH attorney general found, in his own words:
http://votf.org/Survivor_Support/truth_list.html
Thank you, Molly, for reading through the Phila grand jury report twice.
A good way to see the opposing points of view Ms. Steinfels mentions, and determine for oneself where the truth rests, is to scan the grand jury report, or at least the intro and overview.
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/pa_philadelphia/Philly_GJ_report.htm
Then read the archdiocesan response, which looks impressive at first glance.
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2005_09_21_Philly_GrandJury/Response.pdf
Then read the DA’s rebuttal of that response, which IMHO demolishes any claim to integrity by bishops.
http://www.philadelphiadistrictattorney.com/images/DA_s_Response.pdf
See both sides, and determine who really has the “facts,” according to the evidence.
Leon Podles’ meticulously-researched book, Sacrilege, provides chapter, verse, and then some to back-up the charges in his comment above, and countless more crimes.
http://www.amazon.com/Sacrilege-Sexual-Abuse-Catholic-Church/dp/0979027993/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1277600279&sr=1-1
How much evidence does it take to draw conclusions of criminal conduct?
Hearty congratulations to Belgian authorities for being proactive, after encountering prior obstruction. Bishops have richly earned the scrutiny of law enforcement.
Well it’s a red letter day for VOTF and SNAP. I’ll only comment that I was disturbed to see how unthinkingly some Belgians associated the child molestation of pedophile and ephebophile priests with the child murderer Marc Doutroux.
No doubt many of you have seen this in the Sunday NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/world/europe/27vatican.html?ref=todayspaper
which is Rachel Donadio’s report on the loosening of certain Italian tongues hitherto restricted by a largely self-imposed secrecy.
In general it seems that the notion of omertà is by no means restricted to Sicily, or indeed Italy.
Carolyn Disco: “Hearty congratulations to Belgian authorities for being proactive, after encountering prior obstruction. Bishops have richly earned the scrutiny of law enforcement.”
Let me annoy some of you some more by saying that the actions of the Belgian prosecutors are outrageous. Opening tombs?? Holding officials for 12 hours? Breeching the confidentiality of a commission’s records? It is doubly outrageous considering that the same authorities probably turned away victims over the years who wanted to report a crime. “Covering up” former acts of collusion by a blitzkrieg could use some examination, therapeutic and judicial (the European Commission on Human Rights, perhaps).
I note in a couple of the postings to this thread the use of “the clergy” or “priests” without qualification as if all of them were guilty of naivete or chose not to believe the implications of what they were seeing, etc. Is it too much to ask that some qualifications be introduced, e.g., most priests, many priests, some priests, etc.?
I agree with Peggy Steinfels that the actions of the civil authorities in Belgium were outrageous.
Two coments:
If this thread is about the comment of the Bishop of Brooklyn about “cover up.” I am still astonished and think that any who say there has been no cover up offer little or no substatntiation for that view.
If the thread is about police actions in Belgium, I think judgemennts about how “outrageous” their actions were remain to be seen and those who feel strongly otherwise are speaking out of their own preconceptions.
The Belgian authorities are going to have a lot to answer for if they don’t find something big.
Ms. Steinfels – appreciate your clarification of what you had stated earlier. Not sure of the legal steps crossed by these civil authorities; why the internal abuse commission files were taken?; etc. It does appear to be a significant civil action – but, as you say, who really knows the facts that led to this civil decision? Also, the legal system in Belgium does not follow Anglo-Saxon rules.
From John Allen interview of a Belgium priest: http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/belgium-anti-pedophile-priest-rips-silence-and-omissions-bishops
Highlight of the La Stampa interview: “In the wake of the recent police raid on church offices and residences in Belgium, the Italian newspaper La Stampa interviewed Devillè, 65, on June 27. Devillè described the raids as a “good thing,” saying “it’s about time that the justice system seeks out the guilty.”
The following is an NCR translation of that interview.
“The Belgian church instituted its own commission to investigate charges of abuse, the Adriaenssens Commission. Is that not enough?
The problem was its connection with the Archdiocese, and the absence of either a lay component internally or a connection with the civil authorities. I always hoped that a truly independent commission would be formed, an organism whose objective was to help justice take its course. That must be the way. It’s not up to the church to decide who violated the law and who should be punished.”
Suggest waiting until all the facts are in. If we do borrow from Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, then, guilt must be “beyond a reasonable doubt.” At least in the US and some other countries, there is enough documented evidence that goes will beyond a reasonable doubt. Let me add some other examples – some recent:
a) listen or read the depositions by Cardinals Mahoney and George – guess we could quibble about whether their admitted failures were “cover-ups” but it feels a little like Bill Clinton saying: “it all depends upon how you define the word ‘is”….”
b) There is plenty of evidence that gives one pause about the John Jay studies of the US National Review Board – The USCCB established the National Review Board (NRB) as an lay-led audit body. One chairperson of that body resigned mentioning non-cooperation, and another, Judge Anne Burke, recently said:
“as interim chair of the body investigating the abuse of minors by the clergy in our nation-truthfulness was always the one virtue that was hardest to wring out of the institution during our investigation. Truthfulness, itself, was the victim everywhere we turned.”
=== very few conferences world wide have even established these internal lay review boards;
c) the current request from Rev. John Connell: http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?id=51325
d) there have been two very recent resignations of diocesan abuse coordinators – one in Australia and one in Ireland – in both cases, allegations and victiim reports were shared with the accused clerics which deviated from all agreed upon processes and victims’ confidentiality;
e) the continued saga of JPII and Maciel
f) the continued saga of the Austrian church esp. papal appointments and handling of Groer, etc.
Given this, can you share some more about the “outrageous” actions of these civil authorities? What exactly do you think the damage is? You cite the European Commission on Human Rights – well, the UN has found the Vatican in non-compliance beccaus of its non-handling of abuse.
Also, Fr. Joe makes a good point – will try to keep that in mind. So, if we make comments taking into account “priestly and individual qualifications”, can we do the same for the Belgium civil authorities?
Bob Nunz: It might help clarify things if you could explain what the “preconceptions” are that you think lie behind judgments about the Belgian situation.
It is a fallacy to believe that because crimes have been committed in church circles, anything goes in law enforcement. Belgium has a Napoleanic system, so doesn’t have some of the limits on police investigation that we have here. Yet restraint should be used, and apparently wasn’t. I’ve been particularly concerned about the confidentiality of the files of victims. They were seized with no commitment concerning who would see them. The business of a tip alleging records in a grave sounds so bizarre that, even not knowing the facts, it seems to me it ought to have been approached more cautiously than it was. The scene leaves the impression that beyond a genuine investigation, a point was being made by in effect degrading the objects of the investigation. Two wrongs don’t make a right. The clergy who abused degraded their victims. This in no way means it is salutary for a police force to degrade those suspected of abuse or of hiding abuse.
While Rita has a point, the actions there should be judged in the light of what is found, even if heavy handed.
I note today’s NYT artticle on Italy and ‘omerta” in the church.
We often talk about truth and justice, but part of what’s needed for that is for those under investigation to be forthcoming.
Bob: I think the Times article was also pointing out Italian “omerta” in the Mafia, in the culture, and in the Catholic Church. It’s a whole-culture issue and not just a Catholic Church issue.
Joe Komonchak, helpfully clarifies: the global claims of cover-up by bishops, by the church, etc. is not backed up by facts that have so far come to light. Some bishops covered up; having read the depositions in the Boston case, I would agree that there was a cover up in Boston by a number of bishops, perhaps including some of Law’s predecessors.
Some bishops took the best advice available at the time, they sent a priest for therapy; that wasn’t a cover-up (or do some of you consider that it was?). If a therapist tells the bishop the priest can go back to full-time ministry and the bishop did that, is that a cover-up?
Should we include in the cover-up the parents who refused to have the children exposed by testifying in court? Or the prosecutors who decided not to prosecute? Or the victims who have honestly decided they don’t want to go public and bring charges?
This subject of child sexual abuse, now become a scandal, has a history, probably longer than any of us know, and probably once regarded in a more benign way than any of us can now comprehend. Is this a long history of cover-up? In the Church? and everywhere else? A related tragedy–incest–also has a long history and though it is a criminal offense like pedophilia, would we conclude that whole communities and cultures are guilty of a cover-up because perpetrators didn’t go to jail–or in most cases were never charged.
Being agnostic about facts that are denied, suppressed, repressed, etc. (or perhaps don’t even exist), seems to me a realistic view of the matter, and one that history will verify. Actual facts of abuse, and collusion, should be prosecuted when the evidence and witnesses are there. And in that sense, the phrase “some bishops,” or even Bishop N (the particular), engaged in a criminal cover-up is the right one; I suspect that is far fewer than many Catholics believe.
I don’t know the Bishop of Brooklyn, but I am willing to consider that if he thinks cover-up is the wrong phrase to describe the scandal, it’s because he hasn’t engaged in any cover-ups and that he probably knows other bishops who haven’t either. But I think I’ll also remain agnostic on that conclusion.
I’ve been trying to imagine a situation in the USA that might be compared to what the Belgian authorities did, and the best I can come up with is this. Imagine that during the hysteria fanned bu Sen. McCarthy over Communists in the government in the early 1950′s. the FBI had conducted a similar raid on the offices of the American Civil Liberties Union and of the New York Times, holding officers and editors incommunicado for half a day, carting off whole file cabinets, etc. It never came to that in our country, but in his play “The Crucible” Arthur Miller was still able to use the Salem witch trials as a metaphor for what he feared was going on in the US at the time. Maybe the analogy is even more appropriate in a context where elementary concern for justice and rights, including the rights of the accused, appear once again to be considered by some a dispensable nicety. We are told to wait to see what will be found in Belgium; the end, after all, may justify the means.
The pope has directly criticized the Belgian raid:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/28/world/europe/28vatican.html?hp
I suspect the reaction to the very legitimate protests of the pope and the church in Belgium will perhaps be another consequence of the abuse crisis, in that many will note — as I admit I did — that top church authorities are much more outspoken and quick to act on behalf of their rights than they have been on behalf of children who were sexually exploited by church employees.
And if the authorities do find something explosive, or even semi-explosive, the reaction or anger toward the church will also overshadow qualms about the process. Perhaps akin to our country’s relative lack of concern for civil liberties in this past decade of the “War on Terror,” so-called.
“Perhaps akin to our country’s relative lack of concern for civil liberties in this past decade of the “War on Terror,” so-called.” Tell that to Scott Horton and many other lawyers who went to bat.
The Guardian’s more detailed account can be found at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/24/belgium-catholic-church-sex-claims
I believe such action is not unprecedented and is justified when widespread criminal conspiracies are suspected. Enron is one case in point. In any event, it’s not clear why the Church deserves to be exempt from civil authority when there is reason to believe laws have been broken.
Margaret
You say: This subject of child sexual abuse, now become a scandal, has a history, probably longer than any of us know, and probably once regarded in a more benign way than any of us can now comprehend.
Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that “child sexual abuse… [was] probably once regarded in a more benign way than any of us can now comprehend”. I’m actually mystified and this rarely happens to me.
Mr. Manetti: If you will examine the posts in this thread, you will not find one that asserts that “the Church deserves to be exempt from civil authority when there is reason to believe laws have been broken.”
You are right Father Komonchak. “Most priests”, not just “Priests”. But at the same time, the events in the grand jury report could not have gone on if even a single one among the witness priests had taken it upon himself to figure out the truth and act upon it until the offender was removed from causing harm. Just one determined exception would have sufficed, but there was none, among all those perfectly normal priests. That makes this part of the report very disturbing to me. Would I have also remained passive? Would you? Was there something special in the church culture, some “structure of evil”, perhaps, that made that possible? If it exists then I don’t believe that it has been fully recognized and reformed.
“[about incest:] would we conclude that whole communities and cultures are guilty of a cover-up because perpetrators didn’t go to jail” – great question. That’s precisely the point. Would you or I report a case of incest? Should we, and if we did not, wouldn’t that point to a grave flaw in our culture that would need to be recognized and reformed?
Claire: Is there a grand jury report that states or implies that “most priests” are guilty of not doing anythng about witnessed atrocities?
Rita is right, but I can’t get worked up about the misdeeds of the Belgian police (especially if they stayed within legal bounds, which remains to be confirmed). Being cynical, I expect the police to be rough as long as they can legally get away with it. On a world scale of police abuse or of religious persecution, that seems like a very minor incident. Let the Belgians deal with it, and let us not get distracted from what matters: figuring out what’s wrong with our church.
Father Komonchak, see in my lengthy quote above: “The Grand Jury is convinced that the Archdiocese could have identified scores of
child molesters in the priesthood simply by encouraging other clergy to report what they
witnessed – for example, incidents in which they saw fellow priests routinely take young
boys, alone, into their bedrooms. We heard from many victims that their abuse had been
witnessed by other priests. Fellow priests observed Frs. Nicholas Cudemo, Craig
Brugger, Richard McLoughlin, Albert Kostelnick, Francis Rogers, James Brzyski, and
John Schmeer as they were abusing young victims. None of these witnesses helped the
children or reported what they saw. “
It’s pretty shocking that Belgian authorities apparently opened two tombs in their search, but as for other methods used, I’m not as surprised as many others who have commented here. I once spent seven years as a reporter covering federal courts, which meant I wrote about many federal investigations. I don’t know anything about the Belgian system, but I don’t find it unusual that agents who have gotten a tip about a crime would sweep into the main office of a large organization, seize all the records and question people in an aggressive or accusatory way. I’m not a fan of this, but things can get a lot rougher.
In this case, it appears from news coverage that a Belgian priest who had tried for years to get the church to address the crime of sexual abuse of minors has given authorities information. He says he spoke to the cardinal personally about sex abuse, to no avail.
Is this true and did a crime occur under Belgian law? That’s the issue.
Regarding a cover-up in the United States: From the first stories in the Boston Globe in 2002, I’d always understood the scandal to be about how information about the crimes of certain priests was concealed by church authorities. They knew; we didn’t. In Ireland, the police also knew. That doesn’t seem to be the case in the U.S.
Was justice obstructed? I assume that this is the question a federal grand jury in Los Angeles has been investigating.
Claire: The grand jury report is clearly correct that if the priests who witnessed this behavior had done something about it, much abuse could have been prevented. This does not imply that most priests witnessed such behavior and did nothing about it.
Father Komonchak: Fellow priests observed Frs. [7 names inserted] as they were abusing young victims. None of these witnesses helped the children or reported what they saw. “
It seems to me that this does “imply that most priests witnessed such behavior and did nothing about it”.
Claire: No, it might imply that most priests who witnessed such behavior did nothing about it, but that does not mean that most priests witnessed such behavior and did nothing about it. There’s a big difference in the two accusations.
Ah, finally, I get your point. Do you think that the priests who witnessed such behavior are different from other priests? Based on the beginning of that paragraph my understanding is that the witnessed, not the actual abuse, but red flag incidents such as “fellow priests routinely taking young boys, alone, into their bedrooms”. I think of them as accidental witnesses, and as such, I see them as normal representatives of priests in general.
I don’t know what is meant in the report by “witnessing”. My only concern has been the assumption that all or most priests witnessed the kind of “red flag incidents” you describe. That because those who did witness such incidents did nothing about them should not be generalized into a statement about all or most priests, or should not be so generalized without some evidence.
Mr. Gannon – will make this comment in terms of your question to Ms. Steinfels. Here is a brief overview of US attempts to identify and get the bishops to focus on abuse by clerics since 1976: http://www.richardsipe.com/reports/1992-10-17-Sexual_Abuse_by_Priests.html
Here are documented reports about the efforts of Fr. FitzGerald dating back to the 1950′s: http://www.richardsipe.com/2009-09/Father.Gerald.Fitzgerald.pdf
Here is an indepth look at US clerical abuse from 1950 on – note the last chart in terms of the percent of abusers per ordination class. Assuming that much abuse happens 3-5 years after ordination, the 60′s and 70′s dominate and these would be clerics who were educated and ordained before and during Vatican II or a few years after.
Here is a list of recent reports by the church; civil authorities, etc. http://www.richardsipe.com/Doyle/2009/2009-05-20-REPORTS%20ON%20SEXUAL%20ABUSE%20BY%20CATHOLIC%20CLERGY.pdf
Finally, this is a reference to St. Peter Damian – obviously, the church has been confronting pederasty since the 11th century: http://www.richardsipe.com/Books_of_Note/anderson.html
Antonio is correct. This Belgian effort needs to be seen as an investigation of criminal conspiracy in which some influential bishops and cardinals colluded in a systematic effort to hide, disclose or transfer cases of abuse and molestation by some clergy.
It is difficult to prove a conspiracy. First you need to have sufficient evidence that one occurred. Then you need to find leverage and start leaning on some guilty ones, find places where items are being held, etc.
As for the Pope’s “outrage”, he should follow the example of Jesus. He should have a good idea of what that might be since he wrote a book about it with another one to follow.
Speaking of which, I think Jesus’ advice in Matthew is pretty good today.
The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ (Peter’s) seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them
Ms. Steinfels:
“Some bishops took the best advice available at the time, they sent a priest for therapy; that wasn’t a cover-up (or do some of you consider that it was?). If a therapist tells the bishop the priest can go back to full-time ministry and the bishop did that, is that a cover-up?”
In answer to your question, it could be a cover-up because of the way the bishops may have selected their “expert advisors” and then conveniently followed their advice. Under those circumstances, resorting to the claim that they followed the best available advice could be simply passing the buck.
The situation is I think more complicated than claiming that “we followed the best advice.” One has to know if indeed the bishops consulted psychiatrists and psychologist who would give them the best advice. What your observation does not account for is the competency of the “experts” used. Were they for example, Catholics, as opposed to non-Catholics? It would be interesting to see the statistics on this aspect of the question? I suspect, they were mostly Catholics, whom bishops would have believed to be familiar with the “particular demands of the priesthood”. Did they evaluate individuals objectively or were they influenced by the fact that the abuser was a priest, and they had some idea of what the bishop really wanted to hear?
Religious orders regularly use their own personnel to evaluate the psychological health of candidates. Were they influenced by the interests of the order?
When you factor in the culture, and the desire to retain a priest at all costs, it may be that the best evaluators were not actually consulted, and so those who were used may have been enablers as well. If bishops deliberately chose evaluators who were sympathetic to the Church and failed to advise well, this could constitute an aspect of a cover up. Another issue is whether these experts “donated” their services to the Church.
George D.: How about that other statement of Jesus; “Judge not lest ye be judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.”
I’m just back frim a big bridge outing I had to oversee.
I think if anyone here, Peg Steinfwels, Joe Komonchak, Bob Nunz, etc. were the subject of a major criminal probe and a judge issue a waarrant to the fBI to search their records, they’d appear and take off all your records, whether you’re a new dropped innocent lamb or not – and as far as I can see, you’d have no right to be “outraged” as this is what happens, not some special police awful practice.
It further strikes me that for Holy Mother, the days of wine and roses for special treatment are now past and we need to be mature enough to stiop yelling about rights and concentrate, as a Church, on doing the right thing – including being genuinely forthcoming.
“On a world scale of police abuse or of religious persecution, that seems like a very minor incident. Let the Belgians deal with it, and let us not get distracted from what matters: figuring out what’s wrong with our church.”
Claire, I agree.
Taking Mr. Mitchell’s comment another step … even if there had been a valid, competent psychiatric evaluation and a reasonable basis for church authorities to believe an offender could be cured, it doesn’t negate the law that makes it a crime to have sexual contact with a minor. It’s still on the books, and those who obstruct its enforcement could conceivably be prosecuted.
The statute of limitations so far has barred such a criminal case against a bishop in the U.S. … and I hope it doesn’t come to that. But, with a federal grand jury in LA conducting an investigation, it’s possible.
The question of whether bishops were acting on the best therapeutic advice available at the time – rather than simply trying to keep sexual abuse quiet to avoid bad publicity, cops or lawsuits – is an important one. But in a strictly legal sense, I think it’s a mistake to frame this as a matter of either therapy or criminal prosecution.
Bob Nunz: If you looked through the comments on this post critical of what the Belgian authorities did, you won’t find anyone criticizing them because they think Mother Church deserves “special treatment.” Your comment distracts from the point they make. It would appear, in fact, that “special treatment” is precisely what the Church in Belgium received–how often do tombs get searched?
Father Komonchak: thank you for engaging with me. I am beginning to understand your viewpoint. Yes, I did generalize from the behavior of the priests who happened to be around, who I assume are just regular normal priests, to the behavior of all or most priests. I am not sure why you would assume that there is something special about them that would make them behave differently from most other priests would. I thought of them as a random sample, hence representative. But I will think about it. At least now I see where you’re coming from.
Bill DeHaas
My focus was on “benign”. To regard some behavior in a benign way is to look kindly or benevolently on it, or so its seems to me. There is evidence of denial, of secretiveness at all costs, of indifference to and even blame of the victims, but where is the evidence that in the past any reasonably normal people took a kindly view of the sexual abuse of minors.
Mr. Manetti: If you will examine the posts in this thread, you will not find one that asserts that “the Church deserves to be exempt from civil authority when there is reason to believe laws have been broken.”
As far as we know, the Belgian police carried out a legitimately issued and executed search warrant. I get the impression from the outrage here that some think the Church deserves the kind of deference from the state in this matter that would not be extended to any other institution in similar circumstances.
In any event, according to the Guardian article,
Police sources told the Flemish newspaper De Standaard that the raids were carried out because of suspicions that church leaders were failing to hand over all the necessary materials to the commission of inquiry.
Mr. Manetti: I believe your “impression” is mistaken and not grounded in anything said in these posts. It is disappointing when posts are misinterpreted, and the misinterpretation is then responded to, while the original point is ignored.
Just back from an 80th birthday celebration (not mine!).
Joseph Gannon quoting me: “This subject of child sexual abuse, now become a scandal, has a history, probably longer than any of us know, and probably once regarded in a more benign way than any of us can now comprehend.”
His question: “Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that “child sexual abuse… [was] probably once regarded in a more benign way than any of us can now comprehend”. I’m actually mystified and this rarely happens to me.”
If we look at the treatment of children historically, in our own country and elsewhere, we find that practices of physical punishment, humiliation, derogation and neglect were often quite different than what we now accept as the minimum of decent child care and respect. Psychologically, sociologically, and legally children have a far higher status and level of protection from abusive parents, teachers, and relatives than they had even sixty or seventy years ago. Physical abuse of children is still tolerated in some quarters in our own country even though it is illegal. Sexual abuse is a piece of that.
I mentioned above incest, which is, of course, usually a form of child sexual abuse more often of girls than of boys. I was introduced to this subject in graduate school by having to do a paper on incest on the frontier.
What evidence did I find? Not droves. But there was sufficient secondary evidence that school teachers, “friendly visitors,” and eventually social workers suspected not all was well in some families, especially those isolated on farmsteads, etc. In more recent times, there is evidence of memoirs, court cases, etc. It was not always so. Father-daughter incest always raised the question of breaking up the family and throwing its primary bread winner in jail (when there was even thought of legal measures).
Sexual abuse of boys was perhaps more hidden especially in families. Boarding schools certainly represented one locale, but boys working in factories, mines, and on farms were another [if you read the recent post here on Maciel, you will have noted that his father sent him to hard labor, where one of his cohorts reported they were raped by men in the work detail. We don't know how common that was, nor how uncommon].
When I said more benign reaction, I meant that adults and officials in these sorts of circumstance often turned a blind eye because to do otherwise was to rent the social fabric in ways that societies in those times and places had no notion of how to do or to repair.
More modern times: there have been many reports in the media about the practice of the Afghan army having troops of boys who are sexually used by the soldiers. Is this an ancient practice that has persisted even into the West in modern times?
When the sex abuse crisis came to fuller light in the U.S., I heard some Catholic men recount stories of the abusive priest or brother in high school who everyone knew about, and in some cases was a figure of derision. Was this reported to parents or school authorities? Apparently not. Why? Dan Barry whose touching memoir, “Pull Me Up,” I have mentioned here before has a full account of such a scenario in his own high school. Did the boys tells their parents? Or school authorities. It seems to have been a thrilling danger and a joke. I don’t have the book at hand but I will give the full citation tomorrow.
This is not a new problem were talking about; we need to see that it is and was seen in different ways in different times and cultures. No surprise perhaps that some bishops didn’t catch on, but then neither did the boy scouts, public schools, and a vast array of other institutions.
We will probably have to wait and see what further information reveals about the whole response of the Belgian police. It certainly seems quite different from anything we have seen recently in other locales. Why should it be so? We might consider some background issues that could have shaped their response. According to Wikipedia, “In 2001, the Belgian police underwent a fundamental structural reform that created a completely new police system. A Belgian parliamentary report into a series of pedophile murders accused the police of negligence, amateurism and incompetence in investigating the cases. The loss of public confidence in the police was so great that the whole population deemed the reform indispensable.[2] The three former police forces, the municipal police, the national law enforcement service (Rijkswacht/Gendarmerie) and the judicial police (assigned to the offices of the public prosecutors) gave way to an integrated police service structured on two levels.”
The situation would perhaps be a bit different in Belgium from that in , say, Ireland, or Boston where police deference to the clergy might have still been a cultural given.] And we know how unfortunate that well-meant automatic deference turned out to be. At present I would be inclined to suspend judgment about the intrusiveness of the Belgian police effort till we know more about it. But the background info does suggest why the references to that recent and troubling pedophile murder case keeps turning up in the news reports.
I forgot to mention the work of Alice Miller. I don’t buy all of her theories, but the list of her books on Amazon reminds me that I have read some of her and that she understands how many forms of child abuse are and have been hidden.
On the history of sexual abuse.
It has been awhile and I would have to dig it up but initially Freud began to hear reports of female patients experiencing sexual abuse or incest and began to forward that as a causality of “neurosis”
His followers and colleagues simply could not believe that such a thing even existed and attributed it to either fantasies, delusions, or some other form of pathology.
The point is that, it has probably always existed in exactly the same frequency as now, but there has been a huge amount of denial concerning it. Even today.
And, we should also say that the vast majority of sexual abuse occurs in families. The highest risk are women who are going into second and third marriages and have daughters. Risk factors multiply.
While on one level, I can understand the whole issue of consulting therapists and a belief in redemption, etc. of abusive priests, on another it seems to me that the larger concern was the “good of the Church” interpreted as the reputation of the clergy. I know that these are vulnerable times for priests.
Still, I think most people understand that things like this are going to occur everywhere but the issue is the response of responsible leadership. And in the Church, there is the issue of modeling appropriate responses to these behaviours. I think European culture is behind the curve in this regard and this is having its effect in the European response (including the Vatican which is dominated by a more European mentality).
Fr K
On your analogy of raids of ACLU offices, etc. during McCarthy era. What would have been found would have been in fact evidence of Communist infiltration of these groups. No question about that. I am not a huge right wing person but I thing that Whitaker Chambers’ book Witness is an accurate picture of how the strategy worked including Yalta.
Lenin’s quip about “useful idiots” meaning well meaning people who will further the cause without being fully aware of the end game is true.
America is a fair minded country with rules of laws and I appreciate that. but I also appreciate full disclosure and the Belgian move will help with this.
Claire, it is not helpful or charitable to talk of most priests as colluders in child abuse. You might with equal justice or injustice say that most teachers, most boy scout leaders, most parents, or any category you like are colluders in child abuse. This is witchhunt thinking and witchhunt talking. And to desecrate graves is about as witchhunt-like as you can get.
The person who comes out of this ghastly incident with his dignity intact is Benedict XVI — he resolutely insists that crimes must be investigated and punished while at the same time denouncing the Belgian behavior as a “moment of madness.”
Wikipedia, quoted by Susan Gannon, uses the phrase “pedophile murders” — which exactly reflects the thinking in Belgium. The Marc Dutroux crimes created a deep trauma in Belgium and the fumblings of pedophiles (who do not murder children) became linked to them in the public imagination.
Possibly the greatest love poem in English in the 20th century is addressed to a 14 year old boy by a 26 year old man — it would probably get its author imprisoned today — in Belgium it would probably get him tarred as a child murderer. Surely we need a sense of proportion?
Some background on the experience of treatment centers in providing therapy to priests:
A doctor who treated 300 priests noted “that the church frequently ignored doctors’ advice when deciding whether to return abusive priests to work….I found that they rarely followed our recommendations,…They would put them back into work where they still had access to vulnerable populations.”
Another doctor’s deposition, unfortunately not available online, is full of instances where he was never told the full sexual histories of priests he was consulted about: “I saw none of it. That’s what I said. I saw none of those records.” Repeatedly, in two days of testimony, he told of allegation after allegation he was never informed about. He also learned during questioning from survivor attorneys of his numerous recommendations that were completely ignored.” His frustration jumped off the page.
“James Gill, a psychiatrist and Jesuit priest who helped start the Institute of Living’s program for clergy, said bishops **frequently** fail to share information about allegations, although he doesn’t believe it is an attempt to mislead. He said the church is simply a secretive organization that is unaccustomed to the full disclosure required in treatment centers. (Sorry, that excuse does not hold up under any reasonable scrutiny, and seriously compromises treatment recommendations.)
But, Gill acknowledged, there have been times when he believed a bishop was sending a priest for treatment with a specific outcome in mind – namely to get a green light to send him back to work. One of those times happened early in his own career, he said, when a cardinal personally appealed to him to pronounce a priest fit for duty.
“I thought this guy was going to need months of therapy,” Gill said. “But the cardinal showed up and told me he needed the guy back in his parish and he gave me a date he had to be back at work.”
Again, congratulations to Belgian authorities who I believe had probable cause in spades. Chancery officials are not trained investigators, and for them to keep information about crimes to themselves, on the idea that the authorities should t-r-u-s-t them to decide what to turn over, is unreasonable to me. I also consider it prudent to be concerned that documents could be transferred to the Vatican embassy where they would acquire diplomatic immunity, something a US canon lawyer recommended to dioceses here; also in light of the Vatican’s stellar record of not assisting government investigations.
My own research on what I term “lies” told to the authorities were exposed by our attorney general after he went to court to get the diocese’s secret archives. Bishops’ failure (plural, in general) to tell the truth was rampant. Twist this, omit that, and no wonder Justice Burke spoke as she did of the lack of truth in the church. I heard that same speech in person and found its conclusions solid. While she referred to “some” bishops who tried to deceive the National Review Board itself, she did not specify exact numbers of bishops culpable in the following, allowing generalizations like:
“As we sought the essential reasons for how this, the greatest of all scandals in the history of American Catholicism, came about, today I would have to say that what was most important was the discovery that truthfulness, itself, had been the first victim to fall. Without truthfulness, leadership did what it willed; dragging the church into the murky world of half-truths and cover-up…
Charity suffered; kindness was ignored; courage was discarded; and holiness disappeared. Character was traded for secrecy; honor was bartered for disguise; and moral excellence was silenced before it could utter a word.” I believe Burke’s experience was certainly across a broad spectrum.
Father O’Leary, if the culture of the church was conducive to most priests being passive colluders in child abuse, that needs to be understood. I will be very happy if this possibility is refuted, but in the meantime I cannot let charity get in the way of understanding.
The objections from Fr Komonchak and Margaret Steinfels to my assertion “most priests turned a blind eye” are, for one: “Too general. Most of the priests who witnessed signs of child abuse turned a blind eye, but we cannot generalize from that to most priests.” And for the other: “Too specific. Not just priests but the entire society turned a blind eye on signs of child abuse.”
I think that the topic is not closed.
To those who are willing to cut the bishops some slack for having sent abusive priests to therapy, etc.: you could stretch a point and say that perhaps they thought that the priest was “cured”. But only once. Most of the pedophile priests repeated their crimes again and again, and many were transferred again and again. No bishop could have failed to realize that the priest was not “cured” and was not stopping. It is the refusal to face the horrible facts after they have been demonstrated over and over that sickens me and many othe Catholics like me. There can be no excuse.
Perhaps an additional note would be appropriate: no one in my cathedral parish is talking about the continuing abuse and cover-up scandal. I did hear it addressed from the altar once recently; the priest said that we should be uncritical and trust our bishops. The diocesan newspaper is completely silent on the whole matter. Is this not part of the cover-up? If this is typical in other dioceses, I would have to say that an awful lot of priests and bishops are still in denial.
Is the silence of diocesan newspapers part of the cover-up? Surely that is an exaggeration. “Cover-up” is a loaded term, suggesting criminal intent.
“The priest said we should be uncritical and trust our bishops” — Did he really say, “My dear people I urge you to be uncritical” or is that your summary?
“Most of the pedophile priests were transferred again and again” — are you sure that this “most” is accurate?
I seem to remember the John Jay report saying that about half the priests were one time offenders — which seems very plausible to me. A person could slip into inappropriate behavior unreflectingly, and then quickly and definitively draw back.
There is a dogma now that pedophiles are compulsive and incorrigible. The people pursuing the Irish swimming coach Gibney in California presume he must be up to mischief even though he is happily married and has had no complaints against him since moving to the US. They say he had complaints against him in Ireland 20 years ago and “given the compulsive nature of his condition” we can be sure he is still up to evil behavior. In short, witch-hunt thinking.
If diocesan papers remain silent it is perhaps partly out of embarrassment, partly due to people’s desire not to have the unpleasantness thrust in their face, partly due to the fact that people feel they cannot speak freely in this area (unless they beat an orthodox drum). I noted that the Bologna diocesan paper had a lot of discussion of cases there. Also the Irish pastoral journal, The Furrow, has had a vast amount of discussion of the abuse crisis, from a variety of angles.
“Most priests were passive colluders in child abuse” — I see no evidence that this is the case. You could say with equal injustice that “most teachers are passive colluders in child abuse”.
I think people imagine that priests are transparent to one another in their personal lives. Nothing could be further from the truth. Invariably, when a priest gets into trouble about a pedophile offense or allegation, the reaction of the vast majority of his colleagues is genuine surprise.
Now if priest were more open to one another about their sexual desires and behavior that would not alter the case, since the one group who would not be open is those guilty of child molestation, for obvious reasons.
Also I query if the secretiveness of the church is any greater than that of any other community. No community can survive without turning a blind eye to or hushing up or remaining discreetly silent about its members’ sexual behavior. It is on this basic secretiveness that the more serious matter of failure to protect children from abuse has been parasitic. And given that to denounce someone as a child abuser is to throw them to the wolves (in present circumstances) most families would hesitate greatly before doing so and would seek any other method of healing the situation. There is still great fear, and not unfoundedly, of a rent in the social or communal fabric, and this runs right through society.
Clarie: Thank you for taking my point seriously. I do not mind that you or anyone else regard the priests who turned a blind eye to abuse as a ‘random sample” and thus believe you can generalize from it to statements about “most priests,” as long as it is recognized that this is hypothesis, in need of verification. It is when people make bald statements about what “priests” (all?) or “most priests” have or have not done, are or are not doing, that I get annoyed.
On the other hand, in your reply to Fr. O’Leary you wrote: “If the culture of the church was conducive to most priests being passive colluders in child abuse, that needs to be understood. I will be very happy if this possibility is refuted, but in the meantime I cannot let charity get in the way of understanding.” Please note that this possibility cannot be refuted; how can one refute a possibility? It’s not the possibility that is my concern, but whether in fact most priests were “passive colluders.” This places us priests in the unhappy condition of having to prove a negative–”I was not a passive colluder”–and could be taken to imply that we priests are guilty until proven innocent.
Just amazing how we forget history, especially when it is so recent. Doyle and Jason Berry warned the bishops at least in the early ages—twenty years before the Dallas conference. Doyle and Berry were not quiet about it either. The bishops not only rejected Doyle’s report which they commissioned. They ostracized and persecuted him. So give me a break with this Bishops and priests did not know stuff. Here are people so erudite and yet they were not aware.
http://www.catholicsexabuse.com/WHAT_THEY_KNEW_IN_1985
Bill: The question being discussed here is not whether all or most priests knew that there was a serious problem back in the 1980s, but whether they witnessed particular cases of abuse and did nothing about them. These are two different questions: one could have been aware of the problem, and yet not oneself have witnessed any specific cases.
Father Komonchak, I do not believe that most priests were passive colluders. I believe that the culture of the church was such that, if faced with suspicious behavior, most priests would have turned a blind eye, not because of their own character flaws but because of an unhealthy church culture. Thinking about my own behavior, I can see how in that context I would easily myself behave in that way unless my awareness had been specifically raised. I am not accusing most priests of being guilty, but accusing the culture of the church of being such that the deck was set up to make most priests passive colluders if placed in that situation.
You ask: how can you prove that, if you had witnessed suspicious incidents, you would have reacted properly? Impossible since it’s all hypothetical. It’s not a fair question, you say.
I think that your question is not framed quite right. My beef is not with priests but with the structure of sin that may be present in the church – the work of the devil, if you will.
Margaret Steinfels
Thanks for the very useful reply. Had you spoken of “turning a blind eye” in your original post rather than “regarding in a benign way” I would not have disagreed.
To Joseph S. O’Lear:. Yes, I quoted the priest correctly when he said that we should not criticize and should trust our bishosp to handle this matter privately. Your definition of “cover-up” is a legal one. Yes, I do believe that if the clergy and/or the diocesan paper refuses to talk about the escalating abuse charges, that is part of an overall cover-up. You say that it is a “recent dogma” that pedophiles are, for the most part, uncurable. This is in fact accepted by psychologists and law enforcement experts (I am related to one such and we have discussed it). It is one of the hardest things to stop, expecially when the perpetrator has been doing it for some time. And yes, it does appear as if “most pedophile priests” had their actions covered up for (at least) decades. When did anyone ever hear of one being turned in by the pastor or bishop before the Boston Globe broke the scandal in that city?
As an interesting aside to the US situation:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jI74rOCSoa7G_cWbYqFAcNiNGP-QD9GKAV400
The Supreme Court is allowing a suit against the Vatican to continue.
Claire: Thank you again. I’m content as long as people recognize the hypothetical character of their claims about what an alleged culture would have inclined priests to do, and do not move on to make unverified statements about what priests did or didn’t do.
For those expressing outrage, what do you think the execution of a search warrant against an institutional target looks like? The FBI or police come in, often with guns drawn, and start seizing documents and computers. Sometimes they hold people for questioning, especially if they think they might know where other documents are or might be able/willing to destroy evidence or implement obstructive activities. Sometimes they take things they don’t actually end up needing because it’s hard to figure that out in short order.
And as for seizing the internal investigative files of the Church — it continues to amaze me that countries like Belgium give the church any autonomy at all when it comes to investigating abuse.
It isn’t McCarthyism when you are responding to actual criminal allegations, unless you think Belgium would excuse similar allegations against someone else. I am really stunned at the continuing denial of the sheer scale of wrongoing exhibited by the Church in its response to clerical abuse.
The BBC reports that the head of the Belgian investigative committee has resigned: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/europe/10432827.stm
Barbara: I’m stunned that you’re stunned. The scale of wrongdoing is precisely what is at stake when people make unqualified claims about what bishops or priests (all of them? most of them? some of them?) have done or not done. When the statements are unqualified, bishops and priests are considered guilty until they can prove themselves innocent.
And please note that most of the comments here critical of the actions of the Belgian government don’t make any assumptions about what is the case with the Belgian hierarchy and do not rest on the view that the Church should be granted special treatment. This is a distraction from the main point.
I’d like to recommend an article entiled “The Fall of the Belgian Church,” by Alexandra Colen, a member of Belgium’s House of Representatives:
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4471
Promised footnote: Dan Barry, Pull Me Up, pp. 110-117; (Norton, 2004).
Fr Komonchak:
As you wrote earlier,
I’ve been trying to imagine a situation in the USA that might be compared to what the Belgian authorities did, and the best I can come up with is this. Imagine that during the hysteria fanned bu Sen. McCarthy over Communists in the government in the early 1950’s. the FBI had conducted a similar raid on the offices of the American Civil Liberties Union and of the New York Times, holding officers and editors incommunicado for half a day, carting off whole file cabinets, etc.
I interpreted this as an expression of outrage based on the belief that Belgian Church had been unjustly singled out for indignities and mistreatment. What did I misunderstand?
I was trying with this imagined case to describe an exercise of police power in the USA that might cause outrage similar to that many people feel over the actions of the Belgian authorities. That’s all. No comparisons were made with how other people or groups are treated. I would expect the same outrage, but perhaps not find it here, if it had been a Jewish community whose headquarters were treated in this fashion and the graves of whose rabbis had been invaded.
Is this the usual way Belgian police carry out a search? If so, the Church would seem to have no reason to complain. With the exception of the violation of Cardinals’ tombs, it doesn’t sound all that unusual. In fact, it sounds like the police were being careful not to use more force than they needed to; nobody got beat up, nothing valuable was damaged, nobody’s dog got shot. What’s the big deal?
Good news, indeed, from the U.S. Supreme Court!
I’m rootin’ for the good guys (and they ain’t the guys in Rome). The Vatican wants it both ways: It’s a church HQ when it’s convenient to be a church HQ, and it’s an independent city-state when it’s convenient to be an independent city-state! As my late father-in-law used to say years ago (he was a plumber), “Crap or get off the pot!” Ya’ can’t have it both ways and expect respect from your neighbors who have to put up with life as it is.
Barbara, thanks for noting the value/propriety of law enforcement raids. As for opening tombs, heck, they do it on CSI from time to time. Why should anybody be surprised by such a practice? Is the local bishop exempt from civil law? “Render unto Caesar…”
As others have reminded us, Tom Doyle (God bless him!) learned the consequences for bringing bad news to the hierarchs. Does anybody know if he was eventually able to retire from chaplaincy with the U.S. armed forces? Did not the military archdiocese yank his required ecclesiastical endorsement, thus requiring separation from active duty?
Doyle was not the first conscientious presbyter to alert the bishops to the powder keg on which they were sitting:
“Bishops were warned of abusive priests”, NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER, March 30, 2009:
— http://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/bishops-were-warned-abusive-priests
Pope Bennie with his expression of outrage over the Belgian police raid continues to amaze me. These guys ensconced in the Vatican have got to be living on a different planet!!!
I tip my proverbial hat to the Belgian law enforcement team in this instance.
God bless ‘em!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fr. Komonchak: By analogyizing to McCarthyism, you essentially implied that Belgium had singled out the church based on ideology or disagreement with its tents or some other unfair basis, rather than bona fide criminal suspicions. Sort of like young black males are singled out by police for “stop and frisk” searches. Whether this search was heavy handed or more intrusive than it absolutely needed to be, it seems unlikely that it was motivated by dislike of Roman Catholics.
The allegation that is the most potentially inflammatory is searching the tomb. But does that actually mean that there was any disinterment? I assume we are talking about mausoleums or other “monumental” tombs that contain more than dirt and a coffin.
I don’t know of any other party that is given the privilege of investigating its own potential crimes without interference once the authorities have probable cause to believe that crimes did in fact occur. For all those reasons, I really don’t see the basis for outrage.
Barbara – here from John Allen – provides historical context and current reasons for why this may have happened: http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/belgium-perfect-storm-sex-abuse-crisis
You may not agree with this comparison but remarks from Barbara Blaine of SNAP:
http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/outraged-over-police-raid-church-offices-wait-what-revealed
The only thing that still concerns me is that it appears there was some type of agreement and set up led by an esteemed child psychiatrist for an independent review and support for victims to come forward (est. 475 cases to date). Victims came forward with the impressions that this was confidential – now these cases are part of the police investigation.
Here is what a friend in Belgium writes me. Perhaps I should hasten to note that he is neither priest nor bishop.
After the Dutroux affair of the ’90′s, people in the northern part of the country became more aware of the possibility of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. As a result, at the beginning of the third milennium, a commission was installed whose task was to listen to victims of abuse that no longer could be brought to court. In cases that could still go to court, it was decided that the commission should immediately transfer the dossiers to the department of justice.
After the scandal about Mgr. Van Gheluwe, Bruges, about 475 people submitted their dossier to that commission. The overwhelming majority of these people are between 40 and 70. The only thing they asked was a listening ear. 400 of these people did not want to have an intervention from the officials. The commission was going carefully through these dossiers and sent those which still could be handled by courts to the officials involved.
Last Thursday, however, police went to the palace in Mechelen (in the presence of the international press, who clearly had been invited) and to the office of the commission in Leuven. They took all computers, dossiers, dvd’s, cd’s etc. with them. Perhaps because they had read “The Name of the Rose” and “The Da Vinci Code,” they thought that some dossiers might be hidden in the tomb of cardinal Mercier, who died in 1926.
That Thursday, the monthly meeting of the Belgian episcopal conference was taking place: all the bishops were present and kindly invited to sit together in a big room. Things began at 10.15 AM and the show was over at about 7.30PM.
The result, up to now, is that nothing of value or new information has been found. The commission and its president, believing that they were misused by the court, stepped down today. The person who gave or protected the intervention of the police is well known for his aversion to the catholic Church, and the rumor goes that the whole thing was arranged on a golf field.
In any case, in a country were separation of Church and state is held in high esteem, one very well understands that the police must do their duty. It is not the fact but the style that shocks people. People are also disappointed that many who had given witness about a tragedy in their youth and did so sub secreto, are, again, misused because of the ego of some policemen. At the same time, people here think that the Vatican is over reacting: Archbishop Leonard is more moderate than Benedict and Bertone.
My analogy with an FBI raid on the ACLU does not at all imply what you suggest: “that Belgium had singled out the church based on ideology or disagreement with its tenets or some other unfair basis, rather than bona fide criminal suspicions.” As I said above, I was looking for an example that would from our US experience that might prompt outrage similar to that which many feel. I have no idea whether the search was “motivated by dislike of Roman Catholics,” and I did not state or imply that. Once again, this is a distraction. From the beginning, my reaction had to do with a search that, to use your mild words, was “heavy handed or more intrusive than it absolutely needed to be.”
I guess in the end one is either outraged or not. I should think it difficult to argue someone into outrage.
“As for opening tombs, heck, they do it on CSI from time to time.”
——-
(On Miss Marple last week, Edward Fox opened the tomb of a servant in which he had hidden the big diamond years before.)
Frightening to read the denial and defensiveness and excuses here.
Thanks for that report from the front lines, Father K. It seems like a balanced take on the affair.
I am still uncertain what to think about the raid. Paul Moses made very good points above as regards a comparable raid on say, a savings and loan or a union HQ or a similar target. We wouldn’t flinch. But the Belgian hierarchy doesn’t seem to be an ongoing criminal enterprise, and the police will have to have some pretty juicy results from this if they are to justify the raid.
Much is not known, however, and the legal system seems much different. The Vatican’s exquisite sense of timing — calling Schonborn on the carpet on this of all days — does not help.
Were the tombs in graves (holes dug in the earth), or were they above ground in sarcophagi in marble chambers, as is customary for hierarchs, pope, royalty, et al.?
Is opening a sarcophagus desecration? (It’s often done, obviously.)
“I would expect the same outrage, but perhaps not find it here, if it had been a Jewish community whose headquarters were treated in this fashion and the graves of whose rabbis had been invaded.
You mean like the outrage that acompnied the FLDS compound search and siezure in Texas?
David
That’s the point isn’t it. It’s not a savings and loan or a union headquarters. It’s not a “similar target.”
I know the Church has done wrong, and has handled so much of this situation badly. But isn’t it time for Catholics, including those critical of the Church, to realize that much of this behavior by authorities isn’t about justice. It isn’t even about doing right by the victims, seeing that they cared nothing about the privacy concerns of most of them. It’s anti-Catholic bigotry.
Ask yourself this. Would a mosque or the home of a prominant immam get this treatment? Cameras rolling, at a point when you would most embarass and inconvenience the most people? What possible basis can they have to open a tomb sealed more than 80 years ago? This evidence had to be seized on the morning that the bishops could be rounded up like the usual suspects and held for hours?
It’s interesting to now see you asking these questions. When I ask why public schools and the child welfare system are treated like the Church even though there is ample evidence that child abuse is more prevalent in those institutions, I am deflecting. Why are church buildings suddenly just like a savings and loan?
Here’s another note from a Belgian academic, also not a cleric.
“Please remember that the real name of this country is Absurdistan, so those who live here are not by divine order any more informed than you are. From what I get, it is a combination of remaining anti-clericalism, some sentationalism, and an ongoing guerre des juges [war of judges] – with an arrogance that indeed is remarkable (by what law can these ‘police people’ request that the mobile phones of the bishops be confiscated? – of course, one can appeal and get vindicated 25 years down the line). The most factual consequence is that the investigating commission has resigned.”
Belgian churchmen would be well advised to emulate and even improve upon the techniques of the Pharaohs:
_________________
Security Measures, Warnings and Curses did not deter the Tomb Robbers
The were grave warnings which were carved into tomb hieroglyphics relating to the punishments in the afterlife which would be enacted by the gods and the occupants of the tombs on tomb robbers. Curses such as the curse of Osiris “Death comes on wings to he who enters the tomb of a pharaoh” did not deter the tomb robbers. Tombs were bolted and sealed. Tombs contained secret chambers, burial chambers containing treasures were difficult to access and hidden from sight. Entrance passages or shafts leading to the tombs were blocked with huge stone slabs and mounds of rubble. There were blind passages and trap doors. Hidden holes and wells. There were even wires designed to decapitate the tomb robbers. It was also believed that the Ancient Egyptians used poison in the coatings of tombs or in powders which were released into the air when stones were disturbed. And finally, tombs were guarded by necropolis guards. These security measures were all overcome by the the ancient tomb robbers.
http://www.king-tut.org.uk/egyptian-tombs/tomb-robbers.htm
Gerelyn: Enlighten us all: Where are “the denial and defensiveness and excuses here”?
I don’t think “all” need to be enlightened.
There is a sense that “we don’t have the facts” made by several posters. That’s defenseive and an excuse. So is blaming the Boy Scouts, the schools ect., etc., ad nauseum.
That’s true, we don’t have *all* the facts. We do have some facts, and those are damaging. I cannot recommend too highly to anyone who is interested to read the actual depositons of the bishops. Thses depositions do raise more questions that answers. Nevertheless, the answers provided in the depositions demostrate a coordinated effort to obstruct justice and conceal evidence. In short, “cover up” is the only reasonable term to describe the U.S. Catholic bishops’ behavior.
In other countries, it appears the cover up was also substantial. The Murphy Report and Ferns report are also damaging. Cardinal Schoborn’s statement that John Paul blocked efforts to investigate Maciel is a claim of a cover up made by a Cardinal of the Church. Schonnborm also stated, “The days of cover up are over.” That’s probably a wish on his part, not a statement of fact.
We don’t know all that has happened but what we do know can only be called a conspiracy.
Here is another view from Belgium, this from a Jesuit theologian:
I think the key event of the past days is not so much the fact that the premises of the archdiocese in Malines, some graves of former cardinals in the Cathedral, and the house of Cardinal Godfried Daneels have been searched for supposedly hidden files and documents that would indicate the complicity of the Belgian hierarchy in covering up sexual abuse cases by members of the clergy. The former bishop of Bruges’ admission that he has abused one of his nephews, as well as the accusations made by a priest, Rik Devilé, who has over the years collected files of individual abuse cases that he claims to have made known to Cardinal Daneels, have raised anger not only about the abuse cases themselves, but also about the supposed cover up of such cases by the church authorities and hierarchy. The recently appointed archbishop, Mgr. André-Joseph Leonard, has made it very clear that he wants to collaborate with judiciary authorities and there is a strict ecclesial policy of cases being brought to court. As a consequence of the search in Malines, the movements of the full episcopal conference, which was gathered in Malines, were restricted, a fact that has elicited strong reactions in Rome (strong reactions that have not always been stated wisely, as, for example, when Belgian judicial authorities were compared to the communist regime).
The real key event is the search at the premises of the so-called Commission-Adriaenssens in Leuven. This Commission has been installed by the bishops to allow people, who have suffered sexual abuse by clergy, to have a reference point where they can formulate what has happened to them. Peter Adriaenssens, a well respected professor in Leuven, specialised in family therapy and sexual abuse, is its second head, and the fact that the Commission is referred to by his name indicates also the respect in which he himself and the members of the commission are held by the public at large and by many of the victims of sexual abuse by clergy. The commission has reached agreements with the judiciary authorities on referring cases to courts and on insight in its files – and many people who contacted the commission (there are 475 files) trusted the commission and asked for discretion also with regard to judiciary authorities. Here, the tension between allowing victims to tell their suffering and punishing perpetrators enters into play, as well as the fact that the commission collected far more information and data than the courts have up to now. A Brussels investigation judge has seized all files and documents of the Commission-Adriaenssens, leaving the commission with no material to work on, but also creating a severe breach on the trust and confidentiality that had characterized the work of the commission. That is the double reason why first an angry Peter Adriaenssens and then the rest of the members of the commission will tend in their resignation to the bishops and why the work of the commission will be closed down. This leaves the victims with a new sense of insecurity, as they do not know what will happen with their painful narratives included in the commission’s files. There is no person they can address in their pain and some of them will not trust the representatives of the judiciary system, particularly after one of them said that the files would be transferred to the courts and answered the question about how the victims, who requested discretion, would feel about that: “Dat is dan spijtig voor hen” (Well, that’s bad luck for them). This response infuriates me personally, as it seems that the real losers of all these events are, once more, those people who have been the victims of sexual abuse.
Obviously, there is a lot of discussion about why the investigation judge (judge of instruction) has taken the very radical decision he took of “sequestring” for about 9 hours the episcopal conference, of breaching the graves of former archbishops, but most of all to seize all documents and files of the Commission. Here, stories abound and that is when one enters what Jan calls “Absurdistan”. I think the coming weeks will clarify what exactly has happened and why decisions were made as they were made. I think at this stage, we should be very concerned about the fate of traumatized people who, in a sphere of trust and hope, had started telling their stories and pain. I think we should also be very concerned about another issue that Peter Adriaenssens has raised: in what kind of society do we live and what is the relationship between the juridical and the care approaches. I am also worried about the fact that the Church has been ridiculed beyond what it should be – this is very clear in how some of our newspapers report these events.
I think we find ourselves in a very serious Church crisis (what kind of Church do we want for the future and should we fear a reclericalisation of the institution in an attempt to fend of the attacks on the Church?), in a societal crisis (how do we deal with traumatized people and victims? what is the role of law in our society?), and most of all: we are facing the question how to respectfully and discretely (with discretion and wisdom) address the stories of suffering people? Belgium is not really used to serious public debate and Church intellectuals may be hampered by the criminal acts of some of the members of the clergy as well as by the clerical power games of Church structures … This is where a creative imagination oriented towards life-giving future initiatives, risks to lose out against blinding phantasy – Jan’s Absurdistan. I hope these crises will make us a little bit more adult … we owe this to re-traumatized traumatized people.
I hope this helps, although I fear that I am not the best person to present a sharp analysis of what is going on right now.
There is no reason why police and public authorities cannot handle survivor dossiers with appropriate confidentiality. Obviously, I do not know Belgian law, but at least here in NH, victims’ names are not released by police, the attorney general, child protection agencies, etc.
In fact the one entity that threatened to release victim names in the state was the bishop and the diocese. It was a backhanded intimidation tactic by the diocese during civil lawsuits, according to survivors and their attorney, and some survivors settled early under that threat.
A plaintiff’s attorney asked the diocese not to divulge victim names, and in a clear passive-aggressive move the diocese (read McCormack) ignored the request “not to disseminate the names.”
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/NH-Manchester/JBMcCormack-2002-11.html (third news article from the bottom)
By contrast, when the AG’s office came into the possession of thousands of church secret archives through a court order, its investigators contacted victims in confidence, and submitted an authoritative report that respected their privacy.
That investigation was the basis of a planned indictment for criminal endangerment of children with perjury as one of the charges, but it was not prosecuted in exchange for public release of all documents – though McCormack had to admit the diocese’s guilt as part of the deal.
Victim/survivors were treated with utmost care and respect by state personnel, and the criminal conduct and multiple lies of bishops were exposed outright.
I hope a similar outcome pertains in Belgium. Anyone in church or state scaring survivors that their confidentiality will be violated is unconscionable.
I do not understand why any church commission in Belgium should be the arbiter of what gets turned over to the state for possible prosecution. A thorough state investigation of what Daneels may have covered up should be pursued, and an indictment returned if the statutes of limitation (SOL) allow.
If not, a report to the public of what evidence the state’s investigation found is warranted, just as our AG did. SOL was an issue here too, but the one-year clock started when the state got access to the secret archives.
People want the truth of what happened exposed, and survivors to have appropriate redress in justice for the crimes committed against them.
Thank God the church in Belgium cannot hide evidence by blocking access to documents. I am not aware of any bishop anywhere who turned over documents except under threat of legal action, court order, or government investigation. It’s a vicious page-by-page battle by bishops to keep crimes secret.
May prosecutors everywhere have the tools and the will to expose the truth. Too many of them have failed survivors and society by their deference. What wonderful news that at last, at last, Jeff Anderson and Marci Hamilton have started to penetrate the Vatican’s ability to prevent disclosure and accountability for its actions. (That $10,000 Jeff spent to translate documents into Latin in order to serve papers was well worth it; think it’s the same case.)
BTW, SNAP’s advice to survivors: the first call you make to report is 9-1-1. Let the professional investigators deal with the case, and with the church.
The posting immediately above again makes me recall Kinsey’s claims that hysterical witchhunts against pedophiles actually do more damage to children and victims than pedophilia itself.
The glee with which SNAP and VOTF greeted the behavior of the Belgian authorities also confirms my suspicion that they are more interested in getting pedophiles and bishops into the dock than in the welfare of children. Vindictiveness produces cruelty and blindness.
Oops, the “posting immediately above” refers to Fr Komonchak’s.
Carolyn Disco, in the Belgian case it seems that it was not the Church that insisted unlaterally on confidentiality of victims’ reports — they had reached an agreement with the judiciary authorities on this. It seems that the raid ignored this agreement.
Throwing pedophiles to the wolves overrides all other considerations, it seems.
Church Raid in Belgium Raises Dark Questions – NY Times June 28
(As the story unfolds)
“Interviews with church officials and dissident priests, along with accounts in the Flemish press, indicate that prosecutors acted after a trusted witness provided information that suggested that the church was hiding information from its own internal commission on sexual abuse…
The driving force behind the prosecutor’s investigation was a formal declaration from an unidentified witness who had warned the authorities that the church had held back documents from its own commission, which was first started in 2000….
Shortly after his announcement, Dr. Adriaenssens spent the afternoon with investigators, who for now are focused on investigating child abuse, but could expand to a novel new area to encompass people who knew children were in peril but failed to protect them…
We are working on a specific case about a specific declaration,” he said. “We are not starting an inquisition against the church. We are working on a file that has some statements, and we are verifying those statements.
In the Flemish press in Belgium, Godelieve Halsberghe — the former head of the commission and a retired magistrate who resigned amid complaints that church officials were uncooperative — suggested that she may have prompted the spectacular searches…
She declined to return a telephone call Monday, but in previous statements to the newspaper Het Nieuwsblad, she said she had kept copies of records during her tenure on the commission, from 1998 to 2008, that concerned victims and records of conversations with them and Bishop Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who retired in January and whose home was also searched and computer seized last week.
Ms. Halsberghe went to the prosecutor’s office, according to her interview with a local newspaper, after receiving a telephone call from a man who spoke to her in French and asked about the storage of the records before issuing a warning to beware — not only to guard the records, but to protect herself.
One element is clear from the pattern of the raids and the seizure of documents and computers. Over the next few weeks, investigators will be comparing the records that the commission had to those taken from the church to evaluate whether some cases had remained secret.
Norbert Bethune, a former hospital chaplain in Belgium who clashed with church authorities when he reported accusations that priests had sexually abused patients, said he also believed there were missing records, and he credits Ms. Halsberghe for pressing the authorities to act. “
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world/europe/29iht-belgium.html?pagewanted=1&ref=doreen_carvajal
Oh my, O’Leary again on the lesser harms of pedophilia.
Ms Disco, it could be that Jesus stands with the pedophiles that you throw to the wolves.
Pedophiles not to the wolves, but to the criminal justice system along with any bishops who covered for them.
“Jesus stands with the pedophiles that you throw to the wolves.”
There is a tiny kernel of truth in this statement. But your argument would gain a lot of force if you could find a way to specify “but not when they’re committing paedophilia“.
Exactly, Molly, with appropriate treatment and long-term support to deal with compulsions one neither seeks nor sees a way to control.
In what sense does Jesus “stand with” pedophiles? Certainly, Jesus stands in solidarity with those guilty of pedophilia (which refers only to pre-puberty minors, not to minors in general), pederasty, and any other sins in the sense that he is ready to forgive any sin, no matter how serious, in response to contrition. At the very same time, we can be assured–right?–that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity does not want us to minimize, or to appear to minimize, the gravity of pedophilia, pederasty, or any other moral evil. It was he who said: “And if anyone hurts the conscience of one of these little ones, that believe in me, he had better have been drowned in the depths of the sea, with a mill-stone hung about his neck” (*Mt* 18:6; Knox).
Well, I’ll let Father O’Leary answer. This is one of his doctrines.
Seeing now the source of the complaint, I am more sympathetic to the raid and patient in seeing if it does ultimately help to achieve the goals of law enforcement.
The Jesuit theologian whom JAK quotes above says this:
“The recently appointed archbishop, Mgr. André-Joseph Leonard, has made it very clear that he wants to collaborate with judiciary authorities and there is a strict ecclesial policy of cases being brought to court”
Forgive me if I say that in the face of this sort of assertion I await the event of seeing it carried out. We’ve seen a large procession of ecclesiastical authorities say the same thing, we’ve seen the Dallas charter, with teeth, paraded as the solution to future problems, we’ve seen any number of protestations of good will toward victims, then we’ve seen business-as-usual reassert itself. In short, the bishops have been losing credibility at such a rate that it’s hard not to take any such statement from an archbishop with a grain of salt.
Gerelyn asks: “Were the tombs in graves (holes dug in the earth), or were they above ground in sarcophagi in marble chambers, as is customary for hierarchs, pope, royalty, et al.? ”
I’m wondering this too. The formulation “desecrated graves” would not be consonant with absolute honesty if the tombs in question were really crypts. If there is a stone barrier between the Cardinals’ remains and the police, it’s not desecration. It is unusual to search tombs only because it’s unusual to keep a tomb in one’s basement. If the tomb is on the premises, the police would be negligent not to check it out.
The Church was not so squeamish when they opened John Wycliffe’s grave, exhumed the body and burned it for heresy.
There seems to be no details given by any source except the diocesan spokesman about this tomb-desecration. Has it been confirmed? Will it possibly go the way of “detained for hours without food and drink” which is now known to have been pure fabrication?
Hysterical self-pity is not exactly a rarity at the Vatican.
We’ve been down this road before, Fr. O’Leary. Cut the NAMBLA crap.
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/?p=8040&cpage=1#comment-71698
Hi, Felapton!
This morning the NYT says:
“The declaration to the police set off four raids in which the authorities seized hundreds of case files from the commission’s current leader, detained a group of bishops for more than nine hours and disturbed the tomb of a cardinal where construction work had recently been done. Investigators drilled into the tomb and lowered a camera, but found only the remains.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world/europe/29brussels.html?scp=1&sq=disturbed%20the%20tomb&st=cse
Fr. Komonchak, thank you for (as I assume) working your personal network to get us those very valuable first-hand observations of what is transpiring in Belgium.
I come late to this discussion —
Claire on June 26th, 2010 at 8:09 pm, said:
“There’s a big risk that all the people who have an unexamined faith leftover from childhood are now likely to walk out of the church because of this great scandal, and may lose their faith altogether.”
To call this “faith” is really stretching the point. Unexamined or blind belief is far from faith. As
Flannery O’Connor put it:
“I think that the reason such (mechanical-Jansenist) Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.”
JAK on June 27th, 2010 at 10:00 am said (echoing MOS):
“ — the actions of the civil authorities in Belgium were outrageous.” What is outrageous is the idea of church authorities anywhere that, because they are churches and church authorities, they are, ipso facto, deserving of treatment better than other alleged criminals would be.
There appears to have been good cause on the part of the civil authorities to implement the exhaustive search of church premises. As stated in The Guardian article cited herein (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jun/24/belgium-catholic-church-sex-claims): “”The police have a number of accusations connected with the sexual abuse of children within the church,” said Jean-Marc Meilleur, a Brussels police spokesman. “The searches are the result of the investigation we started recently. We are collecting evidence material.” “Police sources told the Flemish newspaper De Standaard that the raids were carried out because of suspicions that church leaders were failing to hand over all the necessary materials to the commission of inquiry.”
Let me turn around a statement by JAK on June 27th, 2010 at 2:58 pm:
“Is there a grand jury report (or any other evidence) that states or implies that “most priests” are NOT guilty of not doing anything about witnessed (or alleged) atrocities?” Is it not possible that the case of San Francisco’s Fr. John Conley (http://www.katu.com/news/93805259.html) is more the rule than the exception?
Claire on June 27th, 2010 at 3:21 pm provided this snippet of information that MIGHT be representative: ““The Grand Jury is convinced that the Archdiocese could have identified scores of child molesters in the priesthood simply by encouraging other clergy to report what they witnessed – for example, incidents in which they saw fellow priests routinely take young boys, alone, into their bedrooms. We heard from many victims that their abuse had been witnessed by other priests. Fellow priests observed Frs. Nicholas Cudemo, Craig Brugger, Richard McLoughlin, Albert Kostelnick, Francis Rogers, James Brzyski, and John Schmeer as they were abusing young victims. None of these witnesses helped the children or reported what they saw. “
I suspect Carolyn Disco will have a great detail of information that could help answer this question.
Amen to Jimmy Mac and Carolyn. And to Grant re the continuing minimzations of Fr. O”Leary.
A note on cover up”
Dan Rather on the Huiffington Post today talks about the hiding of assests and seeking of bankruotcy – dishonestly – in dealingwith victims. That’s another part of “cover up” which someone suggested – defensively I’d say – is a loaded term.
I guess Mr. Rather will be on the Catholic Leagues” anti-Catholic hater list.
There’s no cover up – the Belgian authorities acted terrib;ly -Cardinals shouldn’t criticize eacxh other over these kinds of issues – we only want truth and justice?????
And re Belgium, there is this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/world/europe/29brussels.html
Jimmy Mac: I was not outraged that the Belgian church did not receive special treatment, but that it did receive it. You join others either in claiming to know my motives or psychological difficulties (“denial”) or in making me say what I did not say and in ignoring what I did say.
You make my point about priests (all, most, many, some?): the presumption of innocence does not exist for them; they must prove their innocence of the charge that they either did not witness cases of abuse or that, if they did witness any, they did something about it.
When one adds to this that there seems to be no point either here in the US or in Rome where the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt applies in the case of accused priests, you might be able to understand why it is common to hear priests observe: “We are one phone call away from being on the street.”
If we could re-focus on the original post, here is a link to a very good summary that poses that Cardinal Daneels might be the actual target of this investigation: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2010/06/29/gunning-for-godfried-belgian-abuse-probe-asks-what-danneels-knew/
This provides a different context and slant than Fr. K’s friends summations. Unfortunately, we will again see these arguments and defenses again:
“……did not suspect the cardinal of abuse himself. But it seems the investigating magistrate behind the raid is convinced that Danneels hushed up cases during his long reign.” WHY?
“The change in tone about Danneels is striking and dates to the April resignation of Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe after admitting he had abused his own nephew. Danneels said at the time that he first learned of Vangheluwe’s transgressions only days before they became public, a fact that has been challenged by a Brussels priest, Rik Devillé.”
This article does not mention the prior special commission head (before Adriaenssens) who went to the judiciary with allegations that cases were being covered up, hidden, or delayed.
But the article does continue to explain:
“Only 30 cases had been registered with the commission in the previous 10 years and none or almost none with the police. This is a sea change. That so much information was flowing into the Church commission and so little of it getting out to the judicial authorities seems to have been the trigger for the investigating magistrate following abuse cases to take action. Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck accused the commission of dragging its feet.”
Again, if you follow this writer’s logic and the target is Cardinal Daneels – then, the judiciary felt that they could not wait for an internal church committee to meet with Daneels in July and then make some type of report in October and only then would case information reach the judiciary.
On another note, a report has been made public that one of the abuse victims in his 60′s has gone to the judiciary to begin proceedings to insure that his committee case/information remains confidential. Not sure of the legal ramifications or if every one of these 475 victims have to go through this process but we also can’t assume that confidentiality will be compromised by the judiciary. We will have to wait and see.
I was not outraged that the Belgian church did not receive special treatment, but that it did receive it.
In what specific ways did the Belgian Church receive ‘special treatment’ at the hands of the civil authorities? ie. Treatment that would not have been meted out to any other institution under similar circumstances.
Mr. Manetti: When did the Belgian authorities do anything similar?
A note: Of the Belgian authorites whose comments I quoted, only one could really be called a friend; another I met once; the third I have never met. All three are academics, and would be considered on the “progressive” side of the spectrum.
Again, trying to avoid the usual, the post ended with a quote from Bishop DiMarzio about using the term “cover-up”…….it appears that the Belgium judiciary is focused on Daneels and, one can guess, the recent Bishop who abused his nephew (there has also been another victim who alleges abuse by this same bishop).
Daneels’ story is that he did not know about this bishop until recently – but others dispute this story. Who is credible? Who knows? But, we will probably find out.
Unlike DiMarzio’s comments, Ms. Disco shared just some of the US examples and proof that some US bishops have covered-up and been caught. To date, none of these have led to any criminal charges. It is too early to say what will occur in Belgium but it could end with Daneels caught in a cover-up.
I use “again” numereous times above because we will then see the usual defensive protestations – this is how all clerical abusers were handled, etc.; he reacted with the knowledge of his day; etc..
Not sure in this case that this will hold up – for one, this case involves a bishop in his country and his conference; this case is recent compared to some US cases dating back to the 60′s, 70′s, even the 80′s; the Dotroux case will make it extremely difficult for any church leader to make excuses.
The question is this: WAS the Belgian church singled out for special treatment? What we don’t know is how the civil authorities in Belgium treat organizations about whom comparable suspicion about coverup and evidence hiding exists. To assume that what was done was “special treatment” is yet not a matter that has been established.
I personally find it hard to believe that the close fraternity of diocesan priests could be so ignorant of the extent of sexual abuse that existed. Closed fraternities thrive on gossip (as a gay man, I know of what I speak!). I still would like to hear from Carolyn Disco or anyone who has stats (if they exist) on attempts to suppress priests who tried to raise the issues but were slapped down. Or on the degree (this might be quite hard to find) to which the clerical fraternity bought into the need to “avoid scandal” and “protect the good name of the church.” We may never know this, but it appears to be an essential piece of this sad puzzle.
I think that settlement conditions that suppressed discussion by those abused, or their parents, had a great deal to do with the lack of information that we have today. But there were no settlement conditions within the priestly fraternity.
Lay people knew of which priests to be suspicious and away from whom to keep their kids. That seems to have been common knowledge in those parishes were abusers were posted. As such I remain skeptical about how this close-knit group of men could be so ignorant of what was going on or so willing to look the other way.
Hi Gerelyn!
OK, I guess I believe it if it’s being reported in the mainstream media.
But what is the significance of recent construction? Why did they mention that?
We’ll see how this all shakes out. In the mean time, though, here is what I rue:
It seems, from reports filed here, that the church in Belgium, whatever its faults in the past, was making a good-faith effort to reach out to victims, and at the same time engage with civil authorities in a cooperative way. That the commission had collected 475 files of victim testimony suggests that this effort was bearing good fruit.
In short, it seems as though the Belgian church had devised a process that, if reports here are accurate, *was working*. Had the process been allowed to continue, perhaps some wonderful things could have come about – healing, therapy, reconciliation, restitution for victims, punishment of abusers.
And now, that process has been smashed to pieces.
It seems – again, based on what has been reported here – that the smashing was accomplished by a triumvirate that we’ve become very familiar with in the US: victims-rights advocates, prosecutors and the media.
I don’t have high expectations for the media (Commonweal excepted, of course) nor prosecutors. But … I’d like to see some sign or semblance of self-reflection and self-examination on the part of victims’ advocates. It seems possible, in this case, that they’ve taken part in an event that will cause more harm than good for those for whose welfare they are supposed to be advocating. I haven’t heard that those 475 victims who testified are gleeful that bishops’ cell phones were confiscated and tombs were violated. All I’ve heard is that they’re afraid that their confidentiality will be breached. If victims have been helped at all by this raid, it isn’t clear how that will be.
We’ll watch the events unfold. But my sense, for now, is that a promising shoot has been trampled.
The NJ Star Ledger thinks the complaints against the Belgian civil authorities are off base:
http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2010/06/pope_benedicts_complaint_is_of.html
Jimmy Mac says: “What we don’t know is how the civil authorities in Belgium treat organizations about whom comparable suspicion about coverup and evidence hiding exists.”
Comparable suspicion? In most places this is what they do if they think you’re in possession of marijiuana. Not to mention if they think you’re in the country illegally. That’s what police do. They detain people, confiscate property, ask intrusive questions and search places. Sometimes they get it wrong and just end up inconveniencing everybody, damaging property and wasting time. In exchange for this inconvenience, we get to live in a relatively safe, peaceful, orderly country. People all over this planet envy us the opportunity to make that bargain.
I wish the Successors of the Apostles could stop all this unseemly whining. What must St. Laurence think, whom the Roman police roasted on a grill?
“But what is the significance of recent construction? Why did they mention that?”
————
I wondered that, too. Very cryptic.
If the recent construction made it appear that somebody might have been secreting documents in the tomb, then the police would have had to check.
Jim – would suggest that you do not have the facts straight and that you are re-writing events. Go up to Carolyn Disco’s post of June 28; 11:38 AM – read the description of the commision which has existed since 1998. She came forward about an estimated 30 cases that appeared to have been withheld by dioceses.
Read my post above of June 29th; 4:30 PM and the link….it provides a much more comprehensive picture and context of what is happening. Your comment: “In short, it seems as though the Belgian church had devised a process that, if reports here are accurate, *was working*. Had the process been allowed to continue, perhaps some wonderful things could have come about – healing, therapy, reconciliation, restitution for victims, punishment of abusers.” Other significant and key folks did not see this process as “working” and resulted in the investigation/raid. One might ask why it needed to come to that but we have no documented reports about what had happened between the judiciary and the Belgium church leading up these events.
One issue here is the role of an internal but independent church committee that handles abuse cases. The judiciary openly states that they felt that this committee was withholding case information that rightly belonged with the judiciary – is it only a matter of timing? The committee head planned on making a report in October. But, as these linked articles imply, the judiciary felt compelled to act now because of certain allegations (documented cases? we don’t know) that indicated information was being withheld (it is possible that the committee does not even know about this).
You also seem to completely ignore the role of these victims groups and the media in forcing the church to reveal abuse – there is more than enough examples that prove that the church would have never come forward. You conveniently skip over that part of the history.
Finally, there are inherent concerns with any internal committee appointed by bishops to oversee abuse. Again, go to some of Carolyn or my earlier posts about comments from the US National Review Board – pay particular attention to your own Illinois justice, Anne Burke, and her indictment of some bishops in terms of secrecy, putting the clerical culture first; obfuscating, delaying, and hiding information.
Not sure I would jump to your three comments.
“Lay people knew of which priests to be suspicious and away from whom to keep their kids. That seems to have been common knowledge in those parishes were abusers were posted.”
This is one of those generalizations that simplify things: I’ve seen and heard enough parents who have expressed shock and dismay that a priest they trusted had abused their children. Could we introduce some qualifications? Most lay people? many? some?
“As such I remain skeptical about how this close-knit group of men could be so ignorant of what was going on or so willing to look the other way.”
It seems that you really aren’t skeptical at all. You’ve made up your mind.
Fr. Komonchak: When did the Belgian authorities do anything similar?
You alleged the Belgian Church was receiving “special treatment” at the hands of the civil authorities. To me, special treatment implies treatment that would not be meted out to others under similar circumstances. Thus, I asked for the specifics on which that claim was based.
No, I’m skeptical and am ready to see data that disproves my skepticism.
I am unaware of any *stats* on priests who went to the police, but am a friend of a priest survivor who was removed from his pastor’s position for doing so. Sort of an East Coast version of John Conley in San Francisco, whom Jimmy Mac cited.
See http://www.boston.com/globe/spotlight/abuse/stories/032302_priests.htm The Globe article was written before my friend went public as a survivor. Another survivor friend tells of a priest seeing abuse and doing nothing. I have read any number of similar case reports, and believe the experience was not unusual.
Let’s turn the issue around, and ask how many reports are there of priests who 1) even reported to civil authorities and 2) did not experience backlash. I can think of none. Despite the numerous statements out of Rome how bishops were not prevented by Crimen and its successors from reporting to police, I find Tom Doyle’s rebuttal very persuasive where he quotes numerous statements from Vatican prelates how things should be kept in house – revising history Vatican style.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/examining-crisis/revising-history-vatican-style
A priest friend reported to his bishop about an abuser and nothing was done. He never did anything further, and in that environment it was absolutely unthinkable – not even on the radar – to go to the police. He was more familiar with diocesan efforts to spring any priest from the police, a somewhat common occurrence. I could ask Tom Doyle and any number of survivor attorneys, but believe it would be a waste of time. Eight years of reading documents, and I come up dry.
What is quite telling is the experience of many priests who have been received Priest of Integrity Awards from VOTF. In every case I can think of, they have been ostracized, disparaged, and treated shabbily, if not cruelly by their fellow priests for standing with survivors. Their heartrending experience of the pain inflicted by their bishops and colleagues is powerful and unforgettable.
The award is almost an embarrassment to their dioceses and fellow priests – no congratulations, or thank you’s – just silence. Any number are uncomfortable with the award, and initially turn it down, perhaps not to call nasty attention to themselves from their “brothers.” Such is the atmosphere. I recall Tom’s words about priests’ reactions over the decades – that he was a traitor to the priesthood.
So what does that say?
I am not sure what the tipping point or threshold is before one may speak in general about the conduct of bishops or priests: two-thirds, a numerical majority, or every single prelate named and proven culpable. How literal should the standard be?
The latest updates on abusers by extrapolation with figures from known dioceses since 2002 (thanks only to government investigators) is about 9% of priests, understanding 80% of abuse goes unreported, per Marci Hamilton. I need to track down her source. It’s certainly not everyone, but it’s certainly more than a few.
As for bishops though, didn’t we have a hard time here naming even two or three bishops who responded forthrightly and courageously? Dallas Morning News cited 2/3rd back in 02 who covered up in one form or another.
An image sticks in my mind of USCCB-Dallas 02 when survivors spoke to the bishops (meaning practically all of the bishops, I suspect). David Gibson wrote about the “constrained response, a courtesy carefully measured out,” and how the detachment of bishops “was unnerving.” Where was the bishops’ standing ovation for survivors’ courage to bare their souls to them? I watched on TV, disgusted.
Bishops no doubt have many good qualities, but my exposure, in person, in print, in deposition, in press conferences, has been negative. I find nary any evidence to the contrary in their forced responses to sexual abuse. Show me otherwise. Now when Donald Cozzens and his like are elevated (such fantasy), talk to me again.
Am I minimizing when I suggest that Jesus might be standing with the pedophiles in the dock? In the Gospel Jesus comes into connection with criminal prosecution of sexual behavior only once. He actually stops the law from taking its course on that occasion. “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone… Neither do I condemn you…”
Of course the SNAP people can argue that Jesus was wrong, and that Christian perdonismo (tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner) is the source of all the corruption. A stricter regime of crime and punishment must replace the iffy values of the Gospel.
Here is the Auden poem I referred to earlier (one of several addressed by Auden to a 14 year old boy):
Lay Your Sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy,
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost.
All the dreaded cards foretell.
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought.
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
I don’t approve of the moral implication of Auden’s “brief encounter” poem, but neither do I approve of countless other poems of illicit, anti-social, illegal or immoral love, such as those of Baudelaire. But knowing these poets does create a humane understanding that might allay the frenzied character of moral crusades.
Joseph, regarding the protection afforded by Jesus to a female adulterer — first, she wasn’t “forcing” or “coercing” another human being to have sexual activity. Chances are quite good that as with most prostitutes then and now, selling services was the result of economic compulsion. Second, it wasn’t just that those who would kill her were sinners but that they were, in fact, committing the very same kind of sin, maybe even with her, and somehow, in their moral universe, found it unproblematic to mete out harsh punishment only to the woman — the weaker participant — in a sin that perforce involved two parties. Indeed, maybe they were killing her only because otherwise it would have been difficult to keep their own sins hidden.
One of the problems with the Church’s response to clerical abuse, IMHO, is that it seems to have viewed sexual abuse of minors mostly through the lens of errant sexual activity, rather than as a form of aggravated assault and battery. Ergo, it reacted much like Jesus did to the prostitute, without examining some very important distinctions between types of criminal behavior.
Barbara, excellent points, only there is no mention in the story of the woman being a prostitute. The commentaries I’ve read on that passage suggest her husband may have trapped her, but there is no suggestion of sex for pay.
Fair enough. But the fact that it was plain vanilla adultery doesn’t really make it different. Women were second class citizens — whether she wanted to have sex or was coerced, the male half of the sinning duo was not being punished.
Would you call the Auden experience recounted about “assault and battery”? Certainly Auden could go to jail today, and certainly no one is going to approve morally of sleeping with 14yo boys, but I think we could adopt a more humane outlook than that of criminal law. I think most people are guilty of abusive or at least inappropriate sexual behavior that would have been criminal in some jurisdictions. Adultery was regarded as a serious crime in Israel, but Jesus, knowing that all have been adulterers in their heart, refused to approve of its criminal prosecution.
correction “recounted above”
The idea that he adulteress story is really about feminist concerns with equality is a modernizing emasculation of the story to bring it in line with punitive American puritanism.
You gave the experience, recounted from Auden’s perspective. Recounted from the perspective of the 14yo, once he has grown old enough to reflect on it, it would probably be a completely different story.
But Claire, as I have frequently pointed out, we have countless accounts from such boys, grown up, that go completely against the phenomenology imposed by the current orthodoxy. Do purchase John Bridcut’s account of Auden’s close friend Britten (Britten’s Chidren), to be supplemented by the more upfront work of Humphrey Carpenter (Benjamin Britten); in it you find 83 year old grandfathers recalling with deepest affection their passion for Britten when they were teenagers.
Kincaid quotes from the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin: “Children are not forced, compelled, or enticed into acts with threats of harm. They are, in many cases, willing, noncomplaining victims. Some children hae actually described the people who molest them as their ‘best friends’”. On the same page (Child-Loving, p. 387) he quotes one Larry L. Constantine: “A careful review of the literature on adult-child sexual encounters… indicates that immediate negative reactions are minor or completely absent in teh majority of cases that significant long-term psychological or social impairment is rare, truly remarkable findings considering that most studies have dealt with criminal or clinical samples.”
Moral principle should not need false psychology, false phenomenology, and demonization to prop it up.
Commenting on the McMartin Day Care Center case, Kincaid relates: “David Watchfogel, a former teacher in the area, says that the trial made it ‘very clear that people could not hug and touch kids. A lot of adults are very careful these days and they will be forever.’ Adults taking this sort of care take away from children forever more than one can say. As another Manhattan Beach resident says, ‘Every time I hug my nieces and nephews I think twice about it. Isn’t that weird?” … That children are so smothered with our own sick fears and suspicions that they can hardly help misinterpreting friendliness was noted with some anger decades ago by Kinsey” (p. 383).
It’s of course quite possible that Auden’s schoolboy might portray his relationship with him in retrospect in the darkest light, but then many adult relationships also often appear dark in retrospect in the same way, including many marriages.
Actually the schoolboy, whose name is unknown to the public, could still be alive, aged 85!
I don’t deny that Auden and even Britten were in a sense immature people, but I suggest that like many priests their errances — whose extent we do not know, but which might have got them in jail — were offset by much that was good. Love covers a multitude of sins. Of course it must also be recalled that as open homosexuals they lived in the shadow of criminal prosecution in any case (as would also be true in Ireland until 1993) so that a fling with a minor would have seemed less weighty).
Here is some of the case against Auden:
“In the 1940s and 1950s, Edmund Wilson became a staunch booster of Auden. He concluded his long tribute, “W. H. Auden in America” (1956), by describing him as “a great English poet who is also … one of the great English men of the world.” Nearly twenty years earlier, however, Wilson put his finger on another dimension of Auden’s sensibility: “W. H. Auden has presented the curious spectacle of a poet with an original language … whose development has seemed to be arrested at the mentality of an adolescent schoolboy.” There is no doubt that Auden’s poetry developed; the question is whether it can really be said to have matured. The quality that, in their different ways, Wilson, Jarrell, Larkin, and Ricks dilate on has to do with a precociousness that never outgrew itself. In later years, Auden took to referring to himself as “mother,” especially in relation to the monumentally irresponsible Chester Kallman. (Although they were lovers only briefly, Auden supported Kallman for the rest of his life and the two periodically lived together.) More telling and finally more appropriate was the nickname Auden acquired at Oxford: “The Child.” The coyness and prolixity that characterize Auden’s later poetry are emblematic of what happens when the desire for perpetual adolescence fails to outgrow itself: it becomes seedy. It is shocking, as one looks back over Auden’s poetic oeuvre, to note how early the seediness set in.”
That was from http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/auden-kimball-2859
This could be instructive: http://www.informaworld.com
Or this: http://marcellous.wordpress.com/2007/07/07/pedophile-monster-knee-jerk-reaction/
Oops, this is the one that refers to Auden: http://marcellous.wordpress.com/2007/05/27/miranda-is-still-banging-on-about-history-boys/
Oops again, this is it: http://marcellous.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/history-boys-and-miranda/
Alan Bennett, I discover, also has a play on Britten and Auden: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/nov/22/the-habit-of-art-bennett
Many boxes above I made reference to the reports of journalists in Afghanistan about the Afghan army’s practice of using boys for sex. Here from the NYTimes (June 30) is a reflection by Jessica Stern, a terrorism expert, on the psychological sources of those who become terrorists:
“To the list she would now add sexual humiliation, and in January she published an article in Foreign Affairs in which she pointed out that sexual abuse of boys in the Islamic religious schools known as madrasas is not uncommon, and neither is the rape of boys in Afghanistan, especially on Thursday, known as “man-loving day,” because Friday prayers are thought to absolve a sinner of all his guilt.”
I post this to suggest to the firmly convinced that the sexual abuse of children has been and is far more prevalent than we think. It would seem that whole cultures not only allow it but justify it. Is our own culture so far from those days? Can we speak of whole cultures averting eyes and/or covering up?
Stern herself was raped as an adolescent and she has some deeply felt reflections on that:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/books/30stern.html?_r=1&ref=charles_mcgrath
Here is the Foreign Affairs article noted above: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65896/jessica-stern/mind-over-martyr
In some oceanic cultures sodomizing of adolescents was part of their initiation ritual. Given the ceremonial context, would it be right to call such rituals abuse (and if so what of the painful circumcision of adolescents in other cultures?)
The ease with which pedophiles and ephebophiles are stereotyped as child rapists is a demonizing factor. Most pedophiles are into touching rather than penetration — an Irish priest got six years for “the offence of touching”. I suggest that this is an easy crime to slip into, and that it has made everyone worrying about touching a child in any way (since there is no infallibly marked boundary line between good touch and bad touch and even it there were no one can be sure that a good touch won’t be interpreted as a bad touch).
Another factor to bear in mind is that when penetration does occur between an adult and an adolescent, the adolescent is as likely to be the active as the passive partner (and to be sexually more potent than the adult).
The above remarks are not meant to excuse or minimize improper behavior, but merely to bring into focus the phenomenological truth that our stereotypical discourses occlude. My remarks may seem horribly graphic, but in reality they are far less detailed that would be required for a full phenomenology. Our present discourse is as inadequate as Victorian discourses about “the Angel of the House” or “fallen women” or “femmes fatales”, which were exploded when women began to speak up about the real texture of their experience. At present the only discourse that is permitted about adult-minor relationships is one in which the minor positions him or herself as victim and “survivor”; children are badgered into assuming that role in many prosecutions of pedophiles, even though they are initially reluctant to do so (which itself can constitute a form of child abuse). The law works with a typology of criminals and victims that may not match human reality very smoothly or completely.
“The above remarks are not meant to excuse or minimize improper behavior” One could hardly tell…
I contacted a national expert on sexual abuse who served on a church’s Commission to protect children, who responded about O’Leary’s post on the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin:
The expert notes the Bulletin goes way back, and that Larry Constantine (who was quoted) was a proponent of adult-boy sex who was discredited fairly early when the child sexual abuse field was just starting out. His argument was that clinicians were only seeing cases where children had disclosed the abuse. The many cases where no disclosure was made, in his opinion, constituted no harm. The term now used is compliant victim where the child or adolescent is unaware of being exploited and thinks they are “best friends”.
It’s exploitation, period. I heard an FBI expert myself a few years ago who wrote extensively on sexual abuse and if I can find my copy of his writings, I shall send him O’Leary’s many posts for comment.
“the Bulletin goes way back” — how does that refute the observation quoted by Kincaid in 1991? The presumption that we now are such well-informed experts that anything written more than 20 years ago cannot be taken seriously is a very questionable one.
Larry Constantine “was discredited fairly early when the child sexual abuse field was just starting out.” Discredited by having his arguments refuted?
” His argument was that clinicians were only seeing cases where children had disclosed the abuse. The many cases where no disclosure was made, in his opinion, constituted no harm.”
Well, he was wrong about that. But that was not the argument cited above.
” The term now used is compliant victim where the child or adolescent is unaware of being exploited and thinks they are “best friends”.”
This is true in many cases, but seems to be untenable in cases where the “compliant victim” is still talking the same way many years later, or in some cases becomes the adult’s lifelong partner when they are both adults.
There is a troubling vagueness about the whole notion of child abuse in that no one can give a clear mathematical definition of when sex between an adult and a minor becomes clearly, intrinsically abusive (as it is claimed to be). Instead the law is quoted, but the law varies hugely from place to place and from culture to culture.
The absolute refusal to countenance the abundant testimony from adults that they sought sexual contact with adults when they were minors, that they suffered no serious bad consequences, etc., is irrational. There are lots of gray areas here.
“the child sexual abuse field was just starting out”
That is astonishing. Literature in many languages and centuries is full of information on child sexual abuse, and of adult-adolescent sexual behavior, a rich store of material that the new experts generally ignore. They seem to think they have successfully constituted a new science in some 20 years, a science full of infallible propositions!
Seeking to verify that Larry Constantine had been discredited, I found lots of christianist rants against him, Kinsey and Judith Levine, but no engagement with his arguments. Some people are quoting him as a respectable authority: http://www.amazon.com/were-NOT-abused-David-Riegel/dp/0967699738/ref=pd_sxp_f_r/179-3503911-9379965
It is very easy to declare that a person is “discredited” and it can be abusive to do so.
Is Dr Karl Menninger, quoted in the same sense in the link I just gave, also “discredited”?
Fr. O’Leary: Enough. I have already warned you about this. I know you don’t like it. That’s unfortunate, but so it goes. That you have the gall to call discrediting Constantine “abusive” in a thread about the sexual-abuse scandal says everything about your skewed view.