Thank God the Conference of US Catholic Bishops was able to clear up the priest abuse issue. It was the fault of Woodstock and poor training. I guess the thousands of predator priests were out sick at the Seminary on the day they taught them to not stick their dicks into the mouths of 10 year old boys. Below is a link to the latest Catholic Heirarchy coverup. They can keep writing reports to rationalize and try to explain the indefensible. Until Bishops and Cardinals are taken away in handcuffs, I will not believe a word these corrupt evil men spew out to the public.
http://www.usccb.org/mr/causes-and-context.shtml
It takes a comedian to make this issue as clear as can be. The Catholic Church is in denial and is still in coverup mode. I hope they are losing billions in contributions. They deserve to pay dearly for their evil acts.
“Do: Give sermons, counsel your flock, preach the good word. Don’t: Molest anyone… ever!” –Stephen Colbert
Flawed analysis in priest report
The idea that individuals are responsible before God for their sins and before the law for their crimes is nearly universal.
But a report released last week that explores the context and causes of child sexual abuse by priests in this country at times seems to downplay personal responsibility and lays the blame on the permissive society of the 1960s and 1970s. That’s a shame, and it calls for a firm and quick response from the church itself.
The report, commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, was undercut by one of its main conclusions: namely, that the hippies of the ’60s and the libertines of the ’70s were in some ways responsible for some priests’ reprehensible actions.
Any attempt to deflect responsibility away from those who actually perpetrated the abuse (and those in the church hierarchy who aided and abetted it) is absolutely antithetical to the principle of individual responsibility, enshrined in both American jurisprudence and Christian theology.
Elsewhere in the report, the authors use the word “vulnerability” in describing priests who committed the crimes.
The use of that word is bitterly ironic as applied to these priests. It was they who found and abused their young, truly vulnerable victims. And priests are called to rise above sin, not descend to its most disturbing fringe.
The report also makes a distinction between those priests who preyed on teenagers and those who abused prepubescent children. While that may matter to the psychiatrists who diagnosed and treated them, it is of no comfort to a 14-year-old abuse victim that his attacker was not, technically, a pedophile, but some other classification of deviant.
In explaining the downward trend of such incidents since the mid-1980s, the report points to the victims’ advocates groups calling for justice and tougher responses to abuse by bishops.
But for far too long, Catholic leaders looked the other way. Many people, male and female, gay and straight, came of age in the decades marked by changing mores. However, very few of them ever decided, even at their most promiscuous, to sexually abuse a minor. Too many priests did. And they got away with it for far too long.
The value of this study is in its painstaking and quantitive analysis of the scandal. Unfortunately, some of its conclusions are lacking the rigor of its statistical models.
What is called for now is a response from the Catholic Church that recognizes the role of personal responsibility — for priests and for members of the church hierarchy who allowed these acts to go on for decades.
Church Report Cites Social Tumult in Priest Scandals
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: May 17, 2011
A five-year study commissioned by the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops to provide a definitive answer to what caused the church’s sexual abuse crisis has concluded that neither the all-male celibate priesthood nor homosexuality were to blame.
Instead, the report says, the abuse occurred because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s.
Known occurrences of sexual abuse of minors by priests rose sharply during those decades, the report found, and the problem grew worse when the church’s hierarchy responded by showing more care for the perpetrators than the victims.
The “blame Woodstock” explanation has been floated by bishops since the church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002 and by Pope Benedict XVI after it erupted in Europe in 2010.
But this study is likely to be regarded as the most authoritative analysis of the scandal in the Catholic Church in America. The study, initiated in 2006, was conducted by a team of researchers at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City at a cost of $1.8 million. About half was provided by the bishops, with additional money contributed by Catholic organizations and foundations. The National Institute of Justice, the research agency of the United States Department of Justice, supplied about $280,000.
The report was released Wednesday by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, but the Religion News Service published an account of the report on its Web site on Tuesday. A copy of the report was also obtained by The New York Times. The bishops have said they hope the report will advance the understanding and prevention of child sexual abuse in society at large.
The researchers concluded that it was not possible for the church, or for anyone, to identify abusive priests in advance. Priests who abused minors have no particular “psychological characteristics,” “developmental histories” or mood disorders that distinguished them from priests who had not abused, the researchers found.
Since the scandal broke, conservatives in the church have blamed gay priests for perpetrating the abuse, while liberals have argued that the all-male, celibate culture of the priesthood was the cause. This report will satisfy neither flank.
The report notes that homosexual men began entering the seminaries “in noticeable numbers” from the late 1970s through the 1980s. By the time this cohort entered the priesthood, in the mid-1980s, the reports of sexual abuse of minors by priests began to drop and then to level off. If anything, the report says, the abuse decreased as more gay priests began serving the church.
Many more boys than girls were victimized, the report says, not because the perpetrators were gay, but simply because the priests had more access to boys than to girls, in parishes, schools and extracurricular activities.
In one of the most counterintuitive findings, the report says that fewer than 5 percent of the abusive priests exhibited behavior consistent with pedophilia, which it defines as a “psychiatric disorder that is characterized by recurrent fantasies, urges and behaviors about prepubescent children.
“Thus, it is inaccurate to refer to abusers as ‘pedophile priests,’ ” the report says.
That finding is likely to prove controversial, in part because the report employs a definition of “prepubescent” children as those age 10 and under. Using this cutoff, the report found that only 22 percent of the priests’ victims were prepubescent.
The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifies a prepubescent child as generally age 13 or younger. If the John Jay researchers had used that cutoff, a vast majority of the abusers’ victims would have been considered prepubescent.
The report, “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2002,” is the second produced by researchers at John Jay College. The first, on the “nature and scope” of the problem, was released in 2004.
Even before seeing it, victims advocates attacked the report as suspect because it relies on data provided by the church’s dioceses and religious orders.
Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a Web site that compiles reports on abuse cases, said, “There aren’t many dioceses where prosecutors have gotten involved, but in every single instance there’s a vast gap — a multiplier of two, three or four times — between the numbers of perpetrators that the prosecutors find and what the bishops released.”
David Clohessy, national director of the Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said that while the report contained no surprises, it had nonetheless been a disappointment because it did not include recommendations for far-reaching reforms, including limiting the power of bishops. Mr. Clohessy said this was critical because bishops had covered up many instances of sexual abuse by priests in the past.
“Predictably and conveniently, the bishops have funded a report that says what they’ve said all along, and what they wanted to hear back,” he said. “Fundamentally, they’ve found that they needn’t even consider any substantive changes.”
Robert M. Hoatson, a priest and a founder of Road to Recovery, which offers counseling and referrals to victims, said the idea that the sexual and social upheavals of past decades were to blame for the abuse of children was an attempt to shift responsibility from church leaders. Mr. Hoatson said he had been among those who had been abused.“It deflects responsibility from the bishops and puts it on to a sociological problem,” he said. “This is a people problem. It wasn’t because of the ’70s, and it wasn’t the ’60s, and it wasn’t because of the 1450s. This was something individuals did.”
Kristine Ward, the chairwoman of the National Survivor Advocates Coalition, said the cultural explanation did not appear to explain why abuse cases within the Catholic church have shaken places from Australia and Ireland to South America. “Does the culture of the U.S. in the 1960s explain that? It’s hard to believe,” she said.
William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, a conservative Catholic group, however said he believes permissiveness in the church in the 1960s and 1970s – particularly at seminaries – had been a significant reason for the rise in sexual abuse. Mr. Donohue said that while he generally supported the report’s findings, he believed that the study seemed to have purposefully avoided linking abuse cases with the increase in the number of gay men who became priests during the 1960s and 1970s. “The authors go through all sorts of contortions to deny the obvious – that obviously, homosexuality was at work,” Mr. Donohue said.
In Philadelphia, where a grand jury in February found that as many as 37 priests suspected of behavior ranging from sexual abuse to inappropriate actions were still serving in ministry. The archdiocese initially rejected the grand jury’s findings, but soon suspended 26 priests from ministry.
An essay in the Catholic magazine Commonweal last week by Ana Maria Catanzaro, who heads the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s sexual-abuse review board, which is supposed to advise the archdiocese on how to handle abuse cases, said that the board was shocked to learn about the dozens of cases uncovered by the grand jury. Her essay raised questions about whether bishops provide accurate data even to their own, in-house review boards.
Still, the John Jay report says that when it comes to analyzing the incidence and causes of sexual abuse, “No organization has undertaken a study of itself in the manner of the Catholic Church.”
Because there are no comparable studies conducted by other institutions, religious or secular, the report says, “It is impossible to accurately compare the rate of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church to rates of abuse in other organizations.”
