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INTRODUCTION

If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.

(MARK 9:42)

And yet, despite these words, thousands of priests and religious brothers worldwide have sexually abused minors, causing massive and lifelong harm.

When they first entered the seminary or novitiate, most of them were idealists, filled with enthusiasm for the message of Jesus and a desire to make the world a better place. Instead they have ended up violating every precept of Jesus, every teaching of the Church they profess to love, and every criterion of the most basic human decency.

There is an ancient saying: corruptio optimi pessima or, ‘the corruption of the best is the worst’. If those who start out with the highest ideals fall, there is no limit to the depths they can fall to.

When so many people act this badly, we can no longer limit our blame to the individuals, but must also look for factors within the very culture of the Church that have contributed. And when so many authorities in the Church have attempted to conceal the abuse, or treated victims of abuse as though they were an enemy of the Church, we must again look for systemic factors behind such behaviour, factors that are part of the very culture of the Church.

Recently, a group of experts in advertising and public relations was asked what steps it might suggest to present the religion of Islam in the best light. Among the ideas suggested were: encouraging the bulk of moderate Muslims to speak up and dissociate themselves from the terrorists and fundamentalists, using women wherever possible as spokespersons, and identifying the one or two central ethical values at the heart of Islam and showing how ordinary Muslims live these values in their lives.

They were then asked to do the same for the Catholic Church. They discussed this for some time, but eventually said that, as long as the massive weight of the sexual abuse scandal was tied around the neck of that Church, there was really nothing they could suggest. Any talk of a ‘new evangelisation’ would be a waste of time. Indeed, any attempt to get back to ‘business as usual’ while the abuse scandal remained would be positively counterproductive.

Millions of good Catholics have been deeply disillusioned, both by the revelations of widespread abuse, and even more by what they have perceived as the defensive, uncaring and unchristian response on the part of those who have authority in the Church and claim to speak in God’s name. The effects on the Church have already been massive and the poison will continue to eat away at the very foundations of the Church for as long as the issue remains.

On the other hand, if the Church really did confront the entire issue of sexual abuse with total honestly, ruthlessly uprooting anything and everything that may have contributed to either abuse or the poor response to abuse, this would in fact be the best possible evangelisation it could carry out, and would have far more effect than any more conventional form of evangelisation.

All the evidence available says that the number of offences in this field has fallen greatly, and some might be tempted to think that the problem has, therefore, gone away and no longer needs to be thought about. The sad fact, however, is that the major reason for the fall in the number of offences has been naked fear—fear of being arrested and sent to prison, fear of the walk of shame in handcuffs before the television cameras, fear of the total and permanent destruction of one’s good name before all the people one has ever known.

It is obviously good that the number of offences has fallen, irrespective of the motive. And yet an improvement based largely on fear is surely not good enough as a total answer to the matter. Surely we need to look more deeply at any contributing factors within the Church, and eliminate them.

There are three major tasks to be performed in eradicating sexual abuse from the Church:

• identifying and removing all offenders

• reaching out to and assisting all victims/survivors

• identifying and overcoming the causes of both abuse and the poor response to abuse.

I have been involved in the first two fields for the last eighteen years and, in my position as a retired bishop not looked upon with favour by those in authority, I don’t know that there is much more I can do. So I am here turning to the third element of identifying and overcoming the causes of both abuse and the poor response to abuse. We must have priorities in the work to be done, and for me the first priority will always be that of preventing abuse. Once abuse has occurred, anything we do will always be inadequate, so the only real solution is to prevent abuse happening in the first place.

I believe that it is in this field of preventing abuse that the greatest failure of the Church is to be found. The work of identifying and eradicating all the factors that may have contributed to abuse—and to the poor response—has not been done and, indeed, there has not even been a public call from the Pope for it to be done. There is a crying need that it should be done now and with a sense of great urgency. All levels of the Church must cease to simply ‘manage’ the problem and instead seek to confront it head-on, identifying and changing anything and everything that needs to be changed. Only then will the Church regain some measure of credibility.

Since the subject is vast, there are a number of further comments that I need to make to specify and limit the purpose and scope of this book.

I speak of factors that ‘may have contributed’ to either abuse or the poor response to abuse. I freely admit that I do not have scientific proof that each of the factors I shall mention has contributed and I cannot have an exact knowledge of the extent to which each has contributed. If we were to demand such proofs, however, I believe we would merely be looking for an excuse to do nothing, and that cannot be good enough. If an element in the Church can be shown to be unhealthy, we should remove it anyway, especially if we can see a clear connection between that factor and the whole phenomenon of abuse.

There are some causal factors that are common to all offenders and others that are particular to each individual offender. In between these two, there are unhealthy factors within particular societies or organisations that can foster a culture in which abuse will more easily occur, or can compound the problem by contributing to a poor response. It is this culture within the Catholic Church that will be the particular focus of this book.

Needless to say, the Church must also look at broader factors in modern society that may have contributed to abuse. It might be argued, for example, that the more open portrayal of sex and the more liberal attitudes towards sex in modern Western society have led some priests to think that they too should benefit from these easier sexual attitudes. Any study of factors external to the Church, however, must never be to the exclusion of factors internal to the Church. Indeed, because the Church can change the latter in a way it cannot change the former, it must give particular attention to the internal factors, and it is these factors internal to the Church that I shall look at in this book.

Abuse is most likely to occur when the three elements of unhealthy psychology, unhealthy ideas and unhealthy living environment come together.¹ Many studies have been done concerning unhealthy psychological elements and I do not have the competence to add anything to what the specialists have said on this topic.² On the other hand, much remains to be done concerning unhealthy ideas and unhealthy living environments, and I hope that in these fields I may have more to offer.

I suggest that the major reason why the Church has not yet seriously looked at causes of abuse is that it fears that any serious and objective study of the causes of abuse would lead to a demand for change in a number of practices, attitudes, laws and even teachings within the Church, and it is quite unwilling to do this. In studying abuse, we must be free to follow the argument wherever it leads, and we must not impose in advance the limitation that our study cannot demand change in any teaching or law. We must admit that there might be elements deep within the ‘Catholic culture’ that have contributed either to abuse or to the poor response to abuse.

Most of the cases of abuse that have come to light occurred a number of years ago and most of the offenders received their upbringing and training decades before that. The factors that led them to abuse may not exist in quite the same way or to the same extent today. Despite this, I shall study these factors, for it would be extremely dangerous to assume that any such factors had disappeared and no longer applied.

Priests and religious have many things in common, but they also have their differences. To be accurate concerning both groups in every statement I make would not be possible, and I feel that I would run the serious danger of making false statements about religious. Because of my personal experience, I shall here limit myself to speaking about priests, allowing religious to adapt my thoughts to their own situations.

This book is a continuation of the book that I published in 2007: Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church, Reclaiming the Spirit of Jesus. I have repeated a certain amount of material from that book, but this book goes well beyond that one in the specific field of identifying causes of abuse.

I have been supported by many people in the writing of this book. I express special thanks to Sr. Evelyn Woodward RSJ and to Tony and Gerardine Robinson for their helpful and constructive comments. I thank Fr. Michael Whelan SM and all the members of Catalyst for Renewal for their encouragement. I thank Gary Eastman, Tony Biviano and all the staff at Garratt Publishing for their assistance over many years and their enthusiasm for this book. I thank all those many people who have been calling out for a more radical response to sexual abuse.

Above all, I thank all the victims of abuse who had the courage to come forward and tell their stories. If serious change ever occurs within the Church, the credit must go overwhelmingly to them.

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¹ David Ranson, ‘The Climate of Sexual Abuse’, The Furrow, 53 (July/August 2002), pp. 387–397.

² For a summary of the point psychology has reached, and for nineteen pages of bibliography on the subject, see ‘Child Abuse: A Review of the Literature’, The John Jay College Research Team, Karen J Terry, principal investigator and Jennifer Tallon, primary researcher. See also ‘The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States’, a Research Study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Both documents may be found on the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops at http:/www.usccb.org/ocyp/webstudy.shtml