Lifting the Lid

Lifting the Lid

Future Church

Kudos to the Australians, again, for their unrelenting drive to pierce the pious fabrications that have covered over the terror so many children, their families, and communities have faced as those entrusted to pastor them perpetrated crimes instead.

A new 379 page University report by researchers at the Centre for Global Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University takes a deep and wide plunge into systemic ills that have been at the root of clergy sex abuse and the cover up. Here are some of the RMIT findings:

• Popes and bishops created a culture of secrecy, leading to a series of gross failures in transparency, accountability, openness and trust as they endeavoured to protect the Church’s reputation as an all-holy institution above all else, even at the expense of children’s safety.

• Priest and religious predators have benefited from easy access to children in parishes and schools, particularly those living in one-priest presbyteries and with access to a car. The risk was especially high in countries like Australia and Ireland which historically had a large number of orphanages and residential schools.

• The risk of predation is highest in residential settings. That risk continues today, particularly in India and Italy, which have a significant proportion of the Church’s remaining 9,500 orphanages.

• Pope Pius X’s 1910 decision to lower the age at which children make their first confession to seven years indirectly contributed to putting more children at risk.

• Young and vulnerable Catholic children, especially boys, were and remain at risk from psychosexually immature, sexually deprived and deeply frustrated priests and religious brothers lacking intimacy, particularly those who have not resolved their own sexual identity and whose thinking is deeply distorted and mutated towards children.

• While not the direct cause, mandatory celibacy has been and remains the major precipitating risk factor for child sexual abuse. The best studies across the world show that about one in 15 priests offended, though rates differed across dioceses and among religious congregations.

• Young and vulnerable Catholic children, especially boys, were and remain at risk from psychosexually immature, sexually deprived and deeply frustrated priests and religious brothers lacking intimacy, particularly those who have not resolved their own sexual identity and whose thinking is deeply distorted and mutated towards children.

• Though homosexuality is not a direct cause of abuse, the deeply homophobic environment within the Church and its seminaries, based on the teaching that homosexuality is an intrinsically disordered state and that all gays must lead a celibate life, contributes to psychosexual immaturity.

• While there are other factors, the risk of offending has been much higher among religious brothers with little contact with women – educated at male-only schools and trained for religious life in male-only institutions before being appointed to male-only schools and living in all-male communities. The lack of the feminine and the denigration of women within Church structures is one key, underlying risk factor in the abuse.

Writing for National Catholic Reporter, Kieran Tapsell surfaces a few other important findings in the report:

• The church from its earliest times regarded child sexual abuse as a sin, punishable in the next life, but by the Fourth century it was also seen as a crime punishable by imprisonment, as a minimum. That tradition was turned on its head when the 1917 Code of Canon Law abrogated seven papal and church council decrees that required clerics who abused children to be handed over to the civil authorities. Five years later, in 1922, Pope Pius XI (1922-39) issued his instruction, Crimen Sollicitationis requiring all information about child sexual abuse to be subject to the strictest secrecy. 

• The incidence of abuse in Australia has dropped significantly over the last 30 years, but then many of the systemic features that provided opportunities for abuse have declined or disappeared: the fall in the number of priests and religious; Catholic schools now staffed almost exclusively by lay people; the collapse of the altar boy system; and the church's withdrawal from boarding schools and orphanages. That is not the case overseas.

• Since the early Middle Ages, the church has had a problem with priests soliciting sex in the confessional. Papal and council decrees in 1227, 1622 and 1741 condemned the practice. The Inquisition dealt with many cases of solicitation, most of them with women, sometimes men, but rarely young children because confession was only available to Catholics after the age of 12-14. Pius X (1903-14) lowered the age to 7, thus providing pedophiles with new opportunities.

• The Australian Royal Commission finds 7 percent of diocesan priests are abusers. The authors cast doubt on the 4.3 percent in the United States as revealed by the John Jay report given that they were derived from responses from the American bishops rather than from the production of documents on which the Dutch, Irish and Australian inquiries relied.

Often we talk about the saints of the past, but today, I find myself deeply grateful for those who are fighting criminality within the church. We are getting closer to the justice and transparency we seek because of the likes of Barbara Blaine, Marie Collins, and the researchers at RMIT. Thank you and all those who have rallied for victims/survivors in the church. May your work continue to produce greater transparency and hope for all God's people. 

Deborah Rose-Milavec

Executive Director