St Mary's

Andrew Hamilton Eureka Street.

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=26679

The recently published John Jay Report on sexual abuse in the United States Catholic Church received only passing attention in Australia. But it is important both because of its attention to sociological evidence, and because of the larger questions that it raises.

The report shows that the number of reported cases of sexual abuse by clergy in the United States rose sharply in the 1960s and 1970s, peaked in the 1980s, and subsequently declined equally sharply. It explores this phenomenon by setting it against other reported cases of abuse, against sociological studies of Catholic priests, and against academic and popular attitudes to sexual abuse of children over the period.

It dismisses many explanations offered for child abuse, including celibacy, because it was demanded before, during, and after the crisis, and homosexuality. Victims were often chosen because they were most readily available. To explain the spike it focuses on the formation of the clergy, the lack of public awareness of the problem, and the lack of boundaries surrounding contact of clergy with children and adolescents. It also explores the slowness of church leaders to respond to the crisis. It makes clear that the courage of victims speaking of their experience and the publicity given to them was a necessary condition of the sharp decline in cases of abuse reported of the 1990s.

Critics of the report rightly point out that the statistics represent only cases provided by the church chanceries. It is likely that many cases reported to the church authorities were not recorded and that many other cases were not reported at all.

The figures are especially likely to understate the extent of sexual abuse during the 1940s and 1950s. Victims at that time rarely reported the abuse themselves, and those who survived until the 1990s when abuse in the Catholic Church became notorious may not have wanted to publicise it. So the low base line may be misleading.

The Report raises larger questions when it implies that the roots of the increase in sexual abuse are to be sought in the Catholic Church of the 1940s and 1950s, not in the post-conciliar church. It argues that priests who underwent treatment after becoming known offenders passed many years between ordination and their first offenses. So priests who offended in the sixties and seventies were mostly trained in the 1940s and 1950s. The report suggests that they were not prepared for the changes in society that occurred in the 1960s.

Why was this so? This question takes us beyond the disciplines of the report to larger question of culture, and in this case to the distinctive ways in which celibacy, popular theology, the exercise of power and human frailty are intertwined at different times in the Catholic Church.

The decades after the Second World War saw great growth in the Western churches: in the number of priests and religious, of parishes, of schools and other institutions. Seminaries attracted many candidates, and forming them for ministry was a challenge. Generally speaking the emphasis was on control through insistence on obedience to rules with often severe penalties for infringing them. The heads of seminaries were typically remote. Little attention was given to emotional growth and literacy, much to compliance and loyalty.

This echoed the more general Catholic culture in which the unique claims of the Catholic Church and the authority of the Pope in the universal church, of the Bishop in his diocese and of the parish priest in his parish were insisted on. They were God’s representatives in their different spheres.

Control was also exercised internally. It depended on a clear understanding of which actions were sinful, and of the difference between grave and less serious sin. Serious sins had ordinarily to be confessed to a priest for forgiveness. God underwrote and sanctioned the definition given by the Catholic Church to sins and of the requirements for forgiveness.

In retrospect this emphasis on authority and compliance was brittle. It unravelled in the 1960s. In the wider society authorities were no longer given instinctive credence. Respect needed to be earned. In the Catholic Church, the image of a God who simply sanctioned the laws of the church was called into question. It became unbelievable that God should condemn to hell people for one action defined as a mortal sin, like deliberately missing Mass on Sunday. It was seen as incompatible with God’s love.

Catholics, including clergy, had to arrive at a personal moral framework less dependent on authority and based in respect for human dignity within relationships relationships. Most did. But it is understandable that the loss of external controls combined with the exclusive focus on the individual’s relationship with God should have led some priests to act abusively. What they did was between them and God. The claims of the human dignity of their victims were not salient.

This dynamic is reflected in the justifications and excuses given by priests for their abuse. Many saw their abuse as an expression of weakness. Others that it was a sin that had been confessed and forgiven, and so not to be judged by others.

It is arguable that the roots of the sexual abuse crisis did not lie in the 1960s but in the shallow Catholic culture of the earlier decades. The 1960s exposed its inadequacies. It is not a model for the Catholic Church of the future.

Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.