2 July 2010

Statement by Joelle Casteix [1-949-322-7434], Western Regional Director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, in response to NY Times article “Amid Church Abuse Scandal, an Office That Failed to Act”

The evidence is clear that Benedict is far from the ‘reformer’ some Vatican insiders claim. The Times reports that the church has a culture of “nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction” on abuse. For decades, Benedict has helped create and maintain, and now heads, that culture.

So it’s no surprise that that, in spite of continuing revelations and crimes and cover ups, so little is changing in the church.

We just don’t buy the “bishops were confused” claim. The single most crucial sentence in the Times piece is this one: “But most importantly, bishops always had the opportunity to contact law enforcement . . . following the moral and ethical law they promised to uphold: protecting children.” Few of them did this. Few of them do it now.

One critical fact is obscured by the article’s extensive focus on formal church policies: Every bishop has known for decades that it’s wrong to molest children and conceal crimes from police. Yet few bishops called police then and few call police now about child molesting clerics.

(No matter what a private company’s official internal policy is on physical assault, every employee knows it’s wrong to beat up others and hide beatings from police.)

The Times reports that "Bishops had a variety of disciplinary tools at their disposal  including the power to remove accused priests from contact with children and to suspend them from ministry altogether  that they could use without the Vatican’s direct approval."

But bishops had, and have, one other powerful tool (which is also a solemn duty) to tell the truth, expose the predators, warn the parishioners and protect the kids. Even now, very few bishops voluntarily do this. That’s the crux of the crisis.

As hundreds of thousands of boys and girls across the globe were being sexually assaulted by clerics, it’s especially troubling to read that:

-- Benedict was “busy pursuing other problems (including) examining supernatural phenomena, like apparitions of the Virgin Mary,” and "the diminishing image” of the priesthood.

-- Benedict “focused on reining in national bishops’ conferences, several of which, independent of Rome, had begun confronting the sexual abuse crisis and devising policies to address it.”

-- It took bishops from ten English-speaking nations to force Vatican staff, in 2000, to even discuss potential reforms.

If, as the Times says, “bishops who sought to penalize and dismiss abusive priests were daunted by a bewildering bureaucratic and canonical legal process,” that’s largely because the safety of kids has been trumped, in bishops’ minds and deeds, by the preservation of their own power and reputations.

Catholic officials are smart men with plenty of resources. A simple, speedy way to defrock criminals could be set up but still hasn’t been. That refusal speaks volumes about the callousness of the Catholic hierarchy.

What will be the impact of these disclosures? We believe they will likely be a severe blow to two long-standing, disingenuous church canards: that the Vatican doesn’t control or direct bishops on handing abuse cases, and that bishops “just didn’t understand” abuse until just a few years ago.

At least three times in 1996, 1998 and 2001 English-speaking bishops met to discuss clergy sex crimes and cover ups. So it’s deceitful for these men to have repeatedly claimed in 2002 “Geez, we just didn’t know how widespread or harmful abuse is” or “We had little experience in dealing with abuse.”  They knew. They just refused to act.

And who knows how many other secret meetings about clergy sex crimes and cover ups, large and small, have been held involving bishops across the planet and officials in Rome

These revelations will likely help the legal moves to hold the Pope and his staff responsible for the sexual violations of children by predatory priests, nuns, bishops, brothers and seminarians.

Finally, we take issue with:

-- the notion that bishops’ “approaches (to abuse) are remarkably uneven from country to country.” We find them remarkably similar, for the most part. Keeping the crimes of predator priests quiet is, across the board, bishops top priority, as best we can tell, across the globe.

-- the claim, by Nicholas P. Cafardi, that “When it came to handling child sexual abuse by priests, our legal system fell apart.”

-- the speculation that more recent US church abuse policies "seem to be having an impact." It's simply premature to make this claim, especially because, as the Times notes, "victims of child abuse rarely came forward until they were well into adulthood."

(SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. We’ve been around for 22 years and have more than 9,000 members. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Our website is SNAPnetwork.org)

Contact David Clohessy (314-566-9790 cell, SNAPclohessy@aol.com)

Barbara Blaine (312-399-4747 cell, SNAPblaine@gmail.com)

Barbara Dorris (314-862-7688 home, 314-503-0003 cell, SNAPdorris@gmail.com)

Peter Isely (414-429-7259, peterisely@yahoo.com)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/world/europe/02pope.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all