In a meeting today with Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith, Pope Francis urged him to “act decisively” against sexual abuse, “continuing along the lines set by Benedict XVI,” according to a Vatican news release. How?

First of all by promoting measures for the protection of minors, as well as in offering assistance to those who have suffered abuse, carrying out due proceedings against the guilty, and in the commitment of bishops’ conferences to formulate and implement the necessary directives in this area that is so important for the Church’s witness and credibility.

Presumably that would include verifying that the world’s bishops conferences had turned in to the CDF guidelines for responding to abuse allegations, as they were instructed to do in May 2011.

More from Catholic News Service here.

Last Friday, Mollie did a superb job cataloging Bill Donohue’s shortcomings both as a crusader against anti-Catholicism (which obviously includes using the occasion of World AIDS Day to call people with HIV promiscuous) and as a surrogate for the conservative movement (giving Dick Morris a run for his money). Her conclusion was pointed: “Seriously, your excellencies and eminences: what will it take to make you rethink the wisdom of encouraging Bill Donohue to act as your public interpreter?” Wish I knew. Donohue has said lots of offensive things on a variety of topics, but his record on one subject in particular ought to give Catholic bishops considerable pause before lending him support: the sexual-abuse scandal.

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that the clergy of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph are divided on the question of whether their bishop should resign after being found guilty of one count of failing to report suspected child abuse. (A diocesan school principal warned the diocese about about Fr. Shawn Ratigan’s “inappropriate behavior with children” in May 2010; seven months later disturbing photos of little girls were found on Ratigan’s laptop; Finn didn’t restrict Ratigan until February 2011; and the police weren’t notified until May 2011.) The Times story is ugly: One priest goes on the record recommending the bishop step down. Another says his liberal colleagues are using Finn’s travails to push for a new, less conservative bishop. More than one hundred thousand people have signed an online petition urging Finn to step aside. The diocese has spent $1.4 million on legal fees. And the Times spoke with two priests who say that at a recent meeting of diocesan clergy Finn denied any wrongdoing. Yet he agreed to a set of stipulated facts that led a judge to render a guilty verdict. “I truly regret and am sorry for the hurt these events caused,” Finn told the judge at the time. And now he’s privately telling priests that he did nothing wrong?

Of course, none of that troubles Donohue. When it comes to defending Bishop Finn, Dr. D. is all in.

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This morning, Thomas Reese, SJ, delivered a keynote address at the conference Clergy Abuse: Ten Years Later, sponsored by Santa Clara University. In his talk, Reese described the “unfinished work in responding to the sexual-abuse crisis.” Some highlights (you can read the whole talk at the bottom of this post):

First, I think the church—and by church I mean both the clergy and the people of God—needs to re-envision its attitude toward the survivors of sexual abuse. In Latin America, liberation theologians developed the concept of the preferential option for the poor. The American Catholic Church needs to embrace a preferential option for the survivors of sexual abuse.

[...]

Second, we need a better system for investigating accusations of sexual abuse. Obviously, all accusations must be reported to the police, but if the statute of limitations precludes prosecution, the police will not investigate. Or the prosecutor may judge there is insufficient evidence to prosecute. Under these circumstances, the church still has an obligation to investigate and determine whether a priest is guilty or innocent, whether he must be permanently removed from ministry or returned to ministry. The charter calls for an investigation of the allegations, but there is no standard operating procedure.

That became painfully clear in February 2011, when a Philadelphia grand jury found “substantial evidence” that thirty-seven priests — all in active ministry at the time — had abused. As the chair of the archdiocesan review board wrote in Commonweal:

The board had reviewed just ten cases involving the thirty-seven priests. None of the evidence we saw concerning the ten led us to conclude they had sexually abused minors. But until the grand-jury report came out, the board was under the impression that we were reviewing every abuse allegation received by the archdiocese. Instead, we had been advised only about allegations previously determined by archdiocesan officials to have involved the sexual abuse of a minor—a determination we had been under the impression was ours to make.

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Editorializing on the criminal charges of  clergy sexual abuse and its alleged cover-up  in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, The New York Times observes, “The haunting question is how many other Philadelphias may be out there.”

Another dismal question to consider in such investigations is the role of a bishop whose actions are under scrutiny by a grand jury. If his own conduct as an administrator is at issue, should he be in charge of diocesan decisions on any plea deal that would result in avoiding criminal charges for himself, key administrators or the diocese?  Should he resign? Now that the grand jury in Philadelphia has indicted one diocesan official and threatened in its report to indict a former archbishop, this needs to be considered further.

A 2004 report by the National Review Board said that “to the extent that a bishop avoids consequences for himself by agreeing to provisions that impose onerous financial or operational restrictions on the diocese, the Board has grave concerns about the apparent conflict of interest.” The report explains:  “Many dioceses are structured as a `corporation sole,’ whereby the bishop owns and is responsible for all of the diocesan assets. This structure may increase the risk of a conflict of interest between the bishop and his diocese.”

If there are indeed “other Philadelphias” – and, as the 2004 report documented, there were other dioceses  similarly hostile to law enforcement probes  – then this issue the Review Board raised about the bishop’s role should get close attention.

We’ve all read the accounts of the latest wave of the sex abuse crisis. They are discouragingly familiar.  This account, however, raised a new question with me.  Does holiness give insight into another’s character?

Apparently, Donald McGuire was Mother Teresa’s spiritual director.  Spiritual Director! No wonder she had a dark night of the soul. Moreover, she placed him in charge of the retreat direction of members of her order worldwide!

It also appears that  Pope John Paul II–now on the path to sainthood–was completely taken in–duped–by Father Maciel; in my view, an evil man if there ever was one.

Does closeness to God give one any special insight into the character of others?  Or not?

Or am I looking at the problem in the wrong way?  I’ve heard it said (on TV so it must be right!) that psychopaths such as serial killers are able to short-circuit the built-in warning systems that people have about danger from others.  Is that the problem here?

Late yesterday afternoon, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops put out a statement on the sexual-abuse scandal from its president, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York. (You may have seen him on 60 Minutes this week, where he also discussed the continuing scandal.) The purpose of the statement, the archbishop writes, is “to offer reassurances that this painful issue continues to receive our careful attention, that the protection of our children and young people is of highest priority, and that the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People that we adopted in 2002 remains strongly in place.” Without noting any of the concerns about zero tolerance he shared with John Allen last month, Archbishop Dolan reaffirms the policy “to remove permanently from public ministry any priest who committed such an intolerable offense.” He also says that the charter is up for review by the bishops at their June meeting. Which is good, because, as the Catholics of yet another scandalized diocese know all too well, something isn’t working properly. Conspicuously absent from the archbishop’s statement is the name of that city.

Just posted to the homepage: Nicholas P. Cafardi’s article on scandal in Philadelphia. (Also check out our editorial on unrest in the Middle East, and Dionne’s latest column on Wisconsin.)

Yesterday, at his indispensable blog Spiritual Politics, Mark Silk pointed out that Justice League President Bill Donohue, PhD, managed to be not wrong about something important. Last week victims attorney Jeff Anderson released a 2003 letter from Archbishop Timothy Dolan (now of New York, then of Milwaukee) to then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger asking that a pedophile priest be laicized. “The public display that will now take place in the criminal trial in California, to say nothing of the civil suits that could arise there, makes the potential for true scandal very real,” Dolan wrote. Anderson called that document a “smoking gun” proving “Dolan’s desire in concert with the Vatican to think about one thing: secrecy and preservation of their own reputation.” Donohue pointed out that in Catholic parlance “scandal”

is defined as “a word or action evil in itself, which occasions another spiritual ruin.” In other words, once the public finds out more about Becker, his misconduct will give scandal to the Church by causing the faithful to question their faith. For that reason, and for his past record, Dolan said he wanted him out of the priesthood.

Mark gave Donohue props for pointing out Anderson’s distortion, and, in a coda to his post, wrote:

If anything has become clear over the past quarter-century, it is that the doctrine of scandal has been the occasion of greater scandal in the Catholic Church than the sexual abuse itself. Nothing has done more to drag the Church into disrepute–and to alienate the laity–than the revelations of cover-up. It’s time for the doctrine to go.

I winced when I read that. Apparently Donohue did too. After claiming Mark lacks “ethical standing” (whatever that is) as a Jew (classic Dr. D.) , Donohue issued a press release titled “The Scandal of Church Critics.” (See what he’s doing there?)

Imagine a Catholic professor telling observant Jews that they need to change one or more of their doctrines. If such a character could be found, I would be the first to tell him to mind his own business.

As Mark correctly notes, the Catholic notion of scandal is a medieval teaching, not a matter of revelation. (Although you’ll find the term in 1 Corinthians and the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John.) Meaning there’s nothing wrong with non-Catholics using common human reason to evaluate it. You might even say it’s natural. So the good doctor is wrong to claim that Mark has no business opining on this particular Catholic teaching. What Donohue doesn’t point out, however, is that Mark doesn’t have it quite right.

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Everybody relax. As widely expected, Rome is about to issue new rules for handling priests who sexually abuse minors, including those who view child pornography and abuse adults with mental disabilities, classifying such acts as grave canonical crimes. Oh, and the new document will include those who try to ordain women and women who try to get ordained.

Over to you, John Thavis:

The revisions were expected to extend the church law’s statute of limitations on accusations of sexual abuse, from 10 years after the alleged victim’s 18th birthday to 20 years. For several years, Vatican officials have been routinely granting exceptions to the 10-year statute of limitations.

The revisions also make it clear that use of child pornography would fall under the category of clerical sexual abuse of minors. In 2009, the Vatican determined that any instance of a priest downloading child pornography from the Internet would be a form of serious abuse that a bishop must report to the doctrinal congregation, which oversees cases of sexual abuse.

In addition, the revisions will make clear that abuse of mentally disabled adults will be considered equivalent to abuse of minors. In the law on the sexual abuse of minors, the term “minors” will include “persons of who suffer from permanent mental disability,” sources said.

And about those already self-excommunicated attempted ordainers of women and women who try to be ordained:

Pope John Paul’s 2001 document [adding sexual abuse to the list of delicta gravoria and giving the CDF jurisdiction over such crimes] distinguished between two types of “most grave crimes,” those committed in the celebration of the sacraments and those committed against morals. Among the sacramental crimes were such things as desecration of the Eucharist and violation of the seal of confession.

Under the new revisions, the “attempted ordination of women” will be listed among those crimes, as a serious violation of the sacrament of holy orders, informed sources said.

It will be interesting to see how the new norms and their accompanying documentation handle the issue of women’s ordination. Footnote? Bullet point? Boldfaced and highlighted? Whatever the case, why now? To fuel the suspicion that in the 1980s and ’90s the CDF was more interested in disciplining “liberal” doctrinal abusers than it was abuser priests?

(More from David Gibson here.)

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna surprised many of us when he called for an “unflinching examination” of mandatory clerical celibacy as a response to the sexual-abuse scandals. He stunned even more people when he went after former Vatican Secretary of State Angelo Cardinal Sodano for having “deeply wronged the victims” of sexual abuse by apparently dismissing news reports of the scandal as “petty gossip.” Making matters more heated, Schoenborn then accused Sodano of blocking an investigation of allegations against Austrian Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, who resigned in 1995 after he was accused abusing seminarians (he never admitted guilt). The cardinal who wanted to investigate Groer? Joseph Ratzinger–one-time professor of Christoph Schoenborn.

How interesting, I thought at the time, that Schoenborn was going out on those limbs. He is, after all, supposedly close to the pope–and played a major role in Ratzinger’s election. Had he consulted with anyone in Rome before publicly airing his concerns about celibacy, about Sodano’s bad behavior? Apparently not.

Today, the Vatican press office released an unusually detailed statement (Italian only) describing a meeting between Schoenborn and the pope, who were eventually joined by Sodano and the current secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone. Usually by this time Monday, the Vatican issues its English press release via e-mail. That hasn’t happened yet, so for the time being we’ll have to rely on Rocco Palmo’s translation (feel free to offer your own in the comboxes):

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So says Catholic jabberer-in-chief Bill Donohue, explaining how he travels to his frequent TV appearances. Who could doubt it? The man can talk. Donohue shared that tidbit in his fiesty reply to NCR editor Joe Feuerherd’s takedown. In a follow-up post, Michael Sean Winters did most of the heavy lifting required to rebut Donohue’s rebuttal, but I’d like to say a bit more about one of Donohue’s favorite topics.

Like a Tourette’s patient, Donohue won’t stop insisting that the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal is really a gay problem. We’ve been down this road before. As made clear by the scholars conducting the USCCB-commissioned study of the causes of the crisis, homosexuality is not a predictor of sexual abuse. Yet Donohue thinks that because 81 percent of the victims were male the real cause was homosexuality. And if that isn’t enough to convince you, Donohue asserts that three-quarters of the victims were postpubescent, noting that the American Pediatric Association says boys start puberty at age ten. In other words, the more postpubescent male victims we find, the more likely it is that we’re looking at a gay problem. Obvious, isn’t it?

Not quite. First, John Jay researchers did not measure the pubescence of victims. They collected two sets of data about victims. One, the “Cleric Survey,” recorded the victims in the following age groups: 1-7, 8-10, 11-14, and 15-17. Researchers presumed that victims aged 11 to 14 were postpubescent; according to the Cleric Survey, 50.9 percent of victims were aged 11 to 14. That’s why on page 56 of the “Nature and Scope” study the researchers claim that “the majority of alleged victims were postpubescent.” It’s not clear to me why John Jay would make that claim, given that researchers didn’t collect data on victims’ pubescence and that the DSM-IV defines a pedophile as someone with recurrent sexual desires for prepubescent children “generally aged 13 or younger.” The American Pediatric Society actually says that for males the onset of puberty–not its conclusion–usually occurs between the ages of 10 and 14. So why would John Jay presume that victims between 11 and 14 years of age were postpubescent? What’s more, according to the Cleric Survey, nearly 73 percent of victims were 14 or younger.

John Jay also collected individual surveys for every victim about whom there was data. The “Victim Survey” has a different age breakdown. Table 4.3.2 of the “Nature and Scope” study shows that 60 percent of victims were 13 or under. Granted, the Victim Survey data set isn’t as large as that of the Cleric Survey, but it is broken down more carefully. Again, it remains mysterious why a bullet point in the Nature and Scope study summarized only one set of data about victims as: “The majority of alleged victims were postpubescent, with only a small percentage of priests receiving allegations of abusing young children” (4.2 Summary). As far as I can tell, that conclusion doesn’t follow from any data collected by John Jay.

Permit me one last repetition. Again and again, Bill Donohue, PhD, and his ilk chant the mantra: 81 percent of victims were male, therefore the crisis is caused by homosexuality–as if the data speak for themselves. They do not. Like the phenomena from which they’re drawn, the data are complicated. Just 3.4 percent of the total number of credibly accused priests were responsible for more than one-quarter of all allegations. What conclusions can be drawn from that kind of data? One set of data groups victims across the ages of pubescence, making it difficult to tell which were the targets of true pedophiles and which were not. Another set of data simply lists victims by age. On at least one point, however, both sets of data on victims agree: about 73 percent of victims were 14 or younger.

None of this is to say that homosexuality did not play a role in the crisis. The fact that, according to the Victims Survey, about 25 percent of victims were 15 or older is troubling and deserves investigation. That’s what the “Causes and Context” study is doing. You know, the one whose lead researchers have already reported that homosexuality is not a predictor of abuse. Even a limousine conservative should be able to see that.

Michael Sean Winters continues to call down shame on the secular press for its coverage of the latest phase of the sexual-abuse crisis. Winters doesn’t see why anyone should be too troubled by how the CDF handled the case of Stephen Kiesle: “This, we are led to believe, is the smoking gun. Raztinger signed the letter in 1985. That is HIS signature. Case closed.”

In 1978 Kiesle was convicted of molesting two boys and was sentenced to three years’ probation. (Later he was convicted of molesting a girl.) As Winters points out, the priest sought to be released from celibacy and returned to the lay state. The bishop of Oakland and others who knew Kiesle sent letters to Rome–along with Kiesle’s file–in support of the request. (Read the documents here.) Winters writes:

The first document posted at the Times is a 1981 letter from a parish priest who worked with Kiesle. It says that Kiesle lacked “maturity and responsibility and spirituality” and says he only became a priest to please his over-bearing mother.

That’s not all it says. Read it for yourself: Fr. Dabovich writes that Kiesle worked mostly with teenagers and children in the parish CCD program. “They liked him and cooperated with him. Yet he acted as one of them: played ball with them; took them to outings and shows and spent time in their homes.” He continues: “I was somewhat concerned, but never received any unfavorable comments. Only some years after he left this parish did I learn of some improprieties that were going on while he was here.” An experienced Vatican official would know how to read between those lines.

Winters:

The second document, also from 1981 and also from a priest who worked with Kiesle, says that Kiesle’s family was opposed to his becoming a priest and claims that Kiesle was irresponsible and had trouble relating to adults. The letter refers to “the eventual difficulty that Father Kiesle had with the law because of his relationship to young children” but there are no details.

So what? The letter writer, Fr. George Crespin, then chancellor of the diocese, may have felt squeamish about detailing Kiesle’s crimes. He may have wanted to stick to the protocol of understatement when communicating with Rome. Note, too, that before euphemistically mentioning that Kiesle ran into trouble with the law because of his “relationship to young children,” Crespin also notes that Kiesle showed interest in “ministering” to no one else but young people. Does Winters expect us to believe that CDF officials couldn’t connect those dots?

What’s more, in the same letter Crespin says that “a sufficient description of the nature of the difficulties” was included in the Acta, which had already been sent to Rome. Later in the post Winters–still ignoring the unpublished Acta we know was sent to the CDF–repeats the claim that Ratzinger was never informed of the full extent of Kiesle’s crimes. That assumption is unsupported by the record.

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Today the Boston Globe published a curious op-ed by the head of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ National Review Board, Judge Michael Merz. The occasion for the piece is the release of the film Doubt, adapted from John Patrick Shanley’s Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning 2004 play about an accused priest, set in 1964 (I reviewed it here).

The movie’s plot is largely fictional. Sadly, too many stories that surfaced since 2002 were not fictional. The clergy sexual abuse crisis is the greatest crisis in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States, something that caused the downfall of one of the most powerful bishops in this country, Bernard Cardinal Law; moved hundreds of abuse victims to step forward; and resulted in the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements by various dioceses, prompted apologies from the highest levels in the church, and led to an extraordinary meeting between Pope Benedict XVI and abuse victims from Boston just last April.

Merz is right. The abuse crisis is the greatest scandal in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. But note the strange construction of the last sentence in that paragraph. The scandal, Merz writes, “caused” Cardinal Law’s “downfall.” It also “caused” victims to come forward. It “resulted in” financial settlements for victims ($1 billion and counting, not “hundreds of millions of dollars”). It “prompted apologies from the highest levels in the church.” And it “led to” an unprecedented meeting between Pope Benedict and victims from Boston. When you put it that way, the sexual-abuse crisis almost sounds like a positive thing.

Of course, that is absurd. Merz has it entirely backward. The scandal did not cause Law’s downfall. Law was responsible for a large part of the scandal. That is why he resigned (twice, apparently–the first time John Paul II refused). Likewise, it is bizarre to speak of the scandal as having caused financial settlements for victims. According to the John Jay report, about 4 percent of U.S. Catholic priests (4,392) were credibly accused of molesting more then ten thousand minors. Presumably Merz would acknowledge that the courage of victims may have had something to do with “causing” the settlements. And what really “prompted” apologies from bishops? The media’s unsparing reports? The staggering costs? Sheer embarrassment? Finally, yes, Pope Benedict’s meeting with victims was  impressive. It’s too bad his predecessor had not done the same.

Merz writes to reassure Catholics and the wider public of “the intention of the nation’s bishops to address this problem forcefully.”

These intentions have been translated into strong actions by the bishops. For example, any priest or member of a religious order against whom a credible accusation has ever been made is no longer working with children; many have been removed from the priesthood.

Merz helpfully details the significant progress made by the bishops’ conference: nearly 2 million clergy and laypeople trained in safe-environment programs; nearly 6 million trained to recognize predators; backround checks on more than 1.5 million church voluneers, workers, educators, clergy, and seminarians. Such achievements should not be minimized.

But neither must the failures of bishops–even “the bishops.” The way Merz uses the term reminded me of the many times I’ve seen it in articles submitted to Commonweal. Editors have to be mindful of nuance; the term “the bishops” can be accurately used in some instances. And many defenders of “the bishops” rushed to point that out as the Globe and other news outlets churned out story after story on priest-abusers and their enablers. They had a point. One shouldn’t judge the entirety of the bishops’ conference by the actions of an individual bishop, even Cardinal Law.

Yet Catholics have good reasons to remain vigilant. Last year the Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to a $660 million settlement, yet the public is still waiting for the clergy records the archdiocese promised it would release as part of that settlement. In April, during the pope’s visit to the United States, the cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith seemed to minimize the actions of bishops who failed to protect children from abusers. Then in August, a deposition of Cardinal Francis George of Chicago revealed his serious failures and confusions with respect to the case of a priest-abuser who molested children as recently as 2005. The cardinal is now president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Merz acknowledges that “many Catholics expect more,” and that they wonder why more bishops haven’t resigned. Not Merz, apparently. “I, on the other hand, believe it is better for bishops to take responsibility for fixing the problem. This may not satisfy everyone.” In his op-ed, Merz offers no explanation for why he arrived at that conclusion. More troubling is that this way of thinking echoes Cardinal Law’s own response to calls for his resignation in early 2002. Obviously Catholics expect their bishops to take responsibility for their tragic failures. They know that sometimes accepting responsibility means going away.

There can be no doubt that the institutional church has made major progress in dealing with clergy abuse–those successes can’t be ignored. By the same token, no one should have any illusions about the nature, extent, and present status of the scandal. Least of all the chairman of the National Review Board.