Last month the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
published its report
on the latest round of diocesan audits conducted by the National Review
Board for the Protection of Children and Young People. The results are
encouraging.
Accusations of sexual abuse by clergy have fallen dramatically over
the past decade. While it goes without saying that a single instance of
child sexual abuse is one too many, just thirty-four minors made
allegations of abuse in 2012. Of those thirty-four allegations, six were
considered credible, twelve not, and the rest are still being
investigated. These are the fewest allegations we’ve seen since the
audits began in 2004—audits made possible by reforms the bishops
conference adopted in Dallas in 2002. While it’s true that most dioceses
self-report their data, and that many refuse to allow auditors into
parishes and schools, no one can deny that the Catholic Church made
significant progress on this issue. Yet some bishops still act as if the
sexual-abuse scandal never happened.
I was at the National Press Club in February 2004, when Archbishop
Wilton Gregory, then president of the USCCB, announced that the
sexual-abuse crisis was “history.” He was roundly criticized for that
comment, but I’m sure he was being sincere. At that point, two years
after the bishops adopted the
Dallas Charter and Essential Norms
governing their response to abuse accusations, the new rules seemed to
be working. Predominantly lay review boards in every diocese were
assessing abuse allegations in order to advise bishops whether accused
priests should be removed from ministry. And, according to the new
rules, no priest with a credible allegation of child sexual abuse
against him would be allowed to remain in ministry.
When the spotlight of the national press was on them, it appeared
that the bishops had acted responsibly. But, as an inaugural member of
the bishops’ National Review Board for the Protection of Children and
Youth, I had a different perspective. When the board went looking for
national data about the phenomenon of sexual abuse by clergy, the
California bishops, led by Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles (now
retired),
strongly resisted the audits .
First Mahony objected to the institution we chose to conduct the
investigation, the highly regarded John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
He had never heard of it. Why couldn’t a Catholic school handle it?
Apparently it didn’t occur to him that avoiding the appearance of bias
would be essential in establishing the credibility of the study. But
Mahony went further, suggesting that John Jay’s audit instrument was
“designed, on purpose, by people who have a vested interest in confusing
the many intricate issues and maximizing the statistical number of
perpetrators, as well as attaching the greatest possible numbers of
perpetrators to diocesan reports.”
As a lawyer, I understood the cardinal’s fears. Any information they
turned over to us could be subpoenaed by plaintiff’s lawyers. Whether
they’d actually get their hands on it—or understand what they were
seeing—was another matter: John Jay coded the data to make it extremely
difficult to match accusation to accused. But what was there to fear
from the truth? Civil-law discovery could have uncovered the same
reports whether or not the National Review Board had asked for them. As
it turns out, Mahony’s attempts to head off the investigation failed.
Eventually the Archdiocese of Los Angeles would pay nearly
three-quarters of a billion dollars in legal settlements. Perhaps it’s
not surprising that Mahony was so committed to blocking the audits. Last
year
we learned that during the late 1980s , he elected to keep accused priests out of state in order to shield them from law enforcement.
But Mahony was not alone in his skepticism. Cardinal Francis George
of Chicago said that even though he thought the archdiocese’s
process—which had allowed some abusive priests to return to ministry
after treatment—was working well, he would follow the national policy
and remove them. He obviously had second thoughts about that, because in
2005, against the advice of his own review board, he kept an accused
priest in ministry who went on to molest more young children. Daniel
McCormack ended up going to prison. George apologized. In 2007, his
fellow bishops
elected him president of the USCCB , knowing he had flouted their own rules on keeping abusive priests in ministry.
Six years later, a Philadelphia grand jury found that thirty-seven
accused priests were still in ministry. Why were those men still in
ministry? What happened to the archdiocesan review board, which was
supposed to examine allegations of child sexual abuse by priests and
make recommendations to the archbishop? As the chair of the Philadelphia
review board
explained in Commonweal two years ago ,
“The review board did not see two-thirds of those cases because,
according to the archdiocese, allegations against most of those priests
involved only inappropriate behaviors that were not related to the
sexual abuse of minors. And, citing privacy laws, the archdiocese had
not provided the priests' psychological evaluations and other health
records in cases the board reviewed. Board members don’t know for sure
whether the archdiocese gave us all relevant information.”
The USCCB’s 2002 reforms called for the creation of archdiocesan
review boards whose function would be to evaluate charges of sexual
abuse against priests and advise the bishop on how to proceed. A review
board can’t do its job unless it’s receiving all allegations against
priests.
When bishops ignore their review boards they put children at risk.
That’s partly why Bishop Robert W. Finn, of Kansas City-St. Joseph,
Missouri, was found
guilty of child endangerment
last year. In December 2010, Finn learned that one of his priests, Fr.
Shawn Ratigan, had hundreds of pornographic photos of children on his
computer. The bishop did not notify the police, in accordance with civil
and canon law. Nor did he inform the diocesan review board. Instead,
Finn reassigned him as chaplain to the Franciscan Sisters of the Holy
Eucharist in Independence, Missouri. The sisters later said they had not
been informed of the real reason Ratigan was there. Finn placed minimal
restrictions on Ratigan—for example, he was allowed to say Mass for
youth groups. So for the next five months, apparently without local
supervision, Ratigan concelebrated a confirmation, interacted with
children on Facebook, hosted an Easter egg hunt—and even attended a
sixth-grader’s birthday party. After he was invited by parishioners to
dine at their home, he was caught taking photos up their daughter’s
skirt, according to a federal indictment. Eventually Ratigan admitted to
charges of possessing and creating child pornography. He’s in jail.
How can Finn face his people, priests, and fellow bishops? He has let
them all down. How can he attend national bishops conference meetings
and hold his head up? Perhaps it’s easier when the USCCB fails to
schedule a discussion of the problem of bishops who break their own
rules.
And now the archbishop of Newark, John Myers, has been criticized for
failing to suspend a priest who admitted to two incidents of sexually
groping a thirteen-year-old boy. You can read Fr. Michael Fugee’s
confession here .
It seems straightforward, not the words of a man who was forced by
police to confess to acts he didn’t commit. Yet Fugee recanted his
confession and denied the charges at trial, claiming he lied to police
because he wanted to go home. The judge ruled the confession “totally
voluntary.” Members of the jury were not convinced, and they convicted
him of aggravated criminal sexual contact. The judge sentenced him to
probation for five years and to five hundred hours of community service.
Fugee also had to register as a sex offender and undergo psychological
counseling.
But Fugee’s conviction was overturned on appeal because of a
technicality. The trial judge’s instructions to the jury did not give
adequate guidance “on the issue of defendant’s supervisory authority.”
Rather than retry Fugee, the Newark prosecutor entered into a legally
binding “memorandum of understanding” with the priest and the
archdiocese that permanently restricted Fugee from any ministry
involving children. Fugee also agreed to “undergo sex-offender specific
counseling/therapy.”
Imagine the surprise of the Catholic parents in Newark when they
discovered that, despite the archdiocese’s agreement with the
prosecutor, Fugee had been involved in youth activities, including
retreats and weekend trips. He was even hearing young people’s
confessions—in private, as all confessions must be heard.
Archbishop Myers’s response was less than forthcoming. In a letter to
Newark priests, Myers claimed that Fugee had been acquitted. That was
false. Fugee had been convicted, the conviction was overturned, and
rather than face retrial, he and the archdiocese agreed to a plea
bargain that restricted his future ministry, specifically excluding any
contact with minors. The agreement is essentially—if not legally—an
admission of guilt.
The archbishop also claimed that his review board had concluded that
Fugee had not committed an act of sexual abuse. The review board
evidently accepted Fugee’s disavowal of his prior confession, finding
that, while he had engaged in ill-advised activity with a minor, it did
not rise to the level of abuse. Apparently the review board was strongly
influenced by the prosecutor’s acceptance of Fugee’s return to limited
ministry—a ministry that could not involve children in any way. In fact,
the memorandum of understanding says that the archdiocese will not
allow Fugee “to supervise or minister to any child/minor under the age
of eighteen or work in any position in which children are involved. This
includes, but is not limited to presiding over a parish, involvement
with a youth group, religious education/parochial school, CCD,
confessions of children, youth choir, youth retreats and day care.” If
limited ministry was good enough for the prosecutor, it was good enough
for the review board, and that was their recommendation to Archbishop
Myers.
Serving on a diocesan review board, with the fate of the children of
your diocese at stake and the ministry of the accused in your hands is
not an easy task. I know because I’ve been there. I don’t know what the
Newark review board’s thinking was. But reading Fugee’s original
confession disturbs me. Even discounting for the stress of being
interviewed at a police station, Fugee does not come off as well
balanced. If the Newark review board was going to rely so heavily on the
part of the agreement that allowed Fugee to return to limited ministry,
what about the part calling for him to undergo sex-offender therapy?
That seems a rather clear declaration that he has a sexual problem with
children. If you are going to pass the buck to the prosecutor, you have
to look at everything that the agreement required.
The idea of “limited ministry” does not appear in the Dallas Norms.
It is a half-measure that has been deployed in several dioceses when a
review board cannot confirm an instance of true sexual abuse but has
enough information to recommend a priest’s ministry be restricted. The
trouble with this is that a priest in limited ministry still gets to
wear his Roman collar, still gets to present himself as a priest in good
standing. That collar is a badge of trust signifying authority. It can
allow priests to spend time alone with children—Fugee is proof of this.
Limited assignments may be considered safer than nothing, but for
priests who are sexually attracted to children, no assignment is without
significant risk.
Evidently the archbishop of Newark has his own questions about how
Fugee was handled. He recently announced that the archdiocese had
“uncovered certain operational vulnerabilities in our own systems. We
found that the strong protocols presently in place were not always
observed.” He also sacked his vicar general, Msgr. John E. Doran, whose
job it had been to make sure Fugee had been keeping the terms of the
memorandum of understanding. Doran’s signature is on that document.
Myers has yet to take any personal responsibility for the failures of
his own archdiocese, but according canon law, vicars general are
supposed to “report to the diocesan bishop concerning the more important
affairs which are to be handled or have been handled, and they are
never to act contrary to the intention and mind of the diocesan bishop.”
Myers is a canon lawyer. Are we supposed to believe
he never asked Doran
for a report on Fugee? If Myers failed to ask for such updates, he is
grossly negligent. If he did and knew about Fugee’s violations of the
agreement, then he is complicit. Neither is of any comfort to Newark
parents.
When review boards were established in Dallas in 2002, what happened
in Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City, and Newark was not exactly what
we had in mind. They were meant to reinforce the idea of episcopal
accountability. In many dioceses, perhaps most, they are fulfilling that
function. But not everywhere. My own experience with diocesan review
boards is that their performance varies. Some bishops have appointed
board members who will not challenge their decisions. Others permit (or
even require) chancery officials to sit in on a board’s deliberations,
allowing the “What does Father think?” mentality to influence the
board’s judgment. Perhaps the biggest problem is that there are no
national standards for review boards, which means their effectiveness
varies from diocese to diocese. Without a certain uniformity in how
these boards function, there will always remain the possibility that
they will be ignored, deceived, or manipulated. If we can’t rely on
review boards, then we have no assurance that abusive priests will not
remain in ministry—beyond our bishops’ words. Of course, we had those
words before Dallas, and now we know they weren’t true.
The bishops relied on majority-lay review boards to recover their own
credibility. They were our safeguard against bishops who tried to
revert to their old ways and move predator-priests around. The bishops’
promise to let the laity have a say in evaluating charges against
priests was the central point of the Dallas reforms. Most bishops are
keeping that promise. Some obviously, disastrously, are not. Every time a
bishop flouts the Dallas reforms by placing his own judgment above the
collective wisdom of the bishops conference and the advice of laypeople,
he undermines the church. The only way out of this continuing crisis is
by holding such men accountable. As the original National Review Board
put it in our February 2004 report, “The exercise of authority without
accountability is not servant-leadership; it is tyranny.”
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