“…Suffer the Little Children…” Reflections on the Child Abuse Scandal in the Church
"…Suffer the Little Children…" Reflections on the Child Abuse Scandal in the Church
The Warrior, Journal of The Trial Lawyers College
April 5, 2002
"And they brought little children to Jesus that He might bless them, but the disciples turned them away and when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, saying: ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these. Verily I say unto you, he who does not receive the Kingdom of Heaven as a little child will never enter therein’…"
Gospel of St. Mark, Ch. 10, v. 13-15.
As I thought this last week about the dozen men and the two women I have represented who, as children were abused, sodomized or raped by priests they loved from a Church they trusted, as I have thought about their stories in light of the wave of media coverage over the past three months concerning pedophilia in the Church, I considered what I might say to you this morning that would not be simply a series of tragic images and stories that would really do nothing but leave us all feeling helpless and numb, or else would be simply a dry lecture on the law and the cases and the statistics that might inform, but would not especially enlighten us. It seemed to me that the most honest thing I could do this morning is to offer you the questions that have baffled me since I first began to do this kind of work almost a decade ago, and to share with you the beginnings of answers I have stumbled upon.
There are three questions, and they are simple. There are more than three answers, and they are not simple. The questions are:
Now, before we explore these questions, I need to make a disclaimer: I am not someone who enjoys suing the Catholic Church. I am not a church-basher. I have great respect for the Catholic Church: historically, as a guardian of values that I care about, and theologically as the Church founded by the words of Christ and on the shoulders of Peter. Most of my historical, theological, and literary heros are Catholics. Many of my best friends are Catholics. I am getting ready to marry a devout Catholic. I have twice begun instruction to join the Church.
So, suing this Church is no fun for me. But, once upon a time, someone referred to me a young man who had been abused by his priest. I began to look into the allegations, they made sense, I believed him. I took his case because it seemed right to do so. That was nearly ten years ago. I have since believed other men and women, and I have seen the wreckage left by the abuse. I worked on these cases for seven years before I ever won the right to go to a jury. I believe in this work. It is worth doing. But I do not take any joy from it.
I.
So, with that disclaimer out of the way, then, Question 1 is: why do pedophile priests do what they do?
Of course, "what they do" is to abuse kids: it ranges from molestation and fondling to more severe forms of abuse, sodomy and rape. These men, who to everyone else seem genuinely kind and charitable, will literally lie, steal, intimidate and threaten in order to set-up their abuse and in order to cover up their abuse.
Why do they do this? Well, the easy answer is "because they are perverted and evil men, and therefore they do perverted and evil things." But, after taking the depositions of many of these priests, reading the depositions of dozens of others, and reviewing more psychological material and literature than I care to remember, I will tell you that that is a simplistic answer.
The truth is, most of these men went into the priesthood for the right reasons. Most of them started out with a genuine affection and concern for kids. Most of them did not simply wake up one day and decide to spend the next 30 years destroying the lives of boys.
No, what happens is pedophilia: a progressive, profound, addictive illness that warps the mind, the soul, and the body and turns men who would serve God into men who, wittingly or unwittingly, destroy lives and souls-- and the last time I checked that was the work of the devil.
Pedophilia mixes feelings of love with abuses of trust; turns a desire for intimacy to a craving for lust; and takes the love of a father for a son and possesses it with all of the insanity and cruelty of a dope-fiend who will kill for his next high.
I have read poetry of a priest to his adolescent victim, where, side by side with a lovely and reverent poem full of Christian spirituality, is a poem of sexual innuendo and explicit images that could be right out of the pages of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. I have watched priests break down in depositions as they answer questions about their conduct, and I have read the stories of priests who, once in treatment and regaining sanity, took their own lives because they could not bear to contemplate the animals they had become or the damage they had done.
So, what happens is pedophilia; that is the best explanation I have as to why they do what they do.
But, let me clear up two misconceptions:
Celibacy does not cause pedophilia-- there are plenty of celibate priests who perform their sacred call honorably and responsibly. Homosexuality does not cause pedophilia-- anymore than heterosexuality causes a man to molest a young girl. No, pedophilia, not celibacy or homosexuality, causes child abuse. Pedophilia causes pedophilia.
II.
The Second Question is this: Why do the victims do what they do? Now, what the "victims do" is this: first, they "allow" the abuse to happen and they tell no one about it at the time; second, often they do not tell anyone for two, three, four, or even five decades. Why do they do this?
The answer is easy when a child is 8 or 10 years old, especially if the abuse was in the 50’s, 60’s, or 70’s. In those days, if you were a Catholic boy, you did what the priest said. The trust was absolute. In one case of mine, after confession, the priest took a nine year old boy into a separate room where he told the boy that the Pope had appointed one priest in every parish to keep young boys pure. The priest told the boy that any impure thoughts he had --such as the ones he had just confessed-- he should show to the priest and do with the priest. If with the priest, and only with the priest, then it was not sinful. "This is ok with me but it would not be ok if you did it with a girl," the man remembers the priest saying. This M.O. was repeated on over a dozen occasions over the next several years as the young boy came into his own sexuality. You can imagine what kind of conduct was acted out under that construct. We have since learned from three other victims of this same priest that this was his standard operating procedure. One boy even remembers the priest wearing a stole at the time the sexual abuse was happening. The trust was absolute.
It is a harder question to answer when the boy is 12 or 14 or 16 and, at least physically anyway, could resist. Of course, even then, the trust is absolute. And, significantly, with boys that age the priests tended to gravitate towards boys who were less confident, less self-assured, less likely to reject or question the priests: the boys who were getting no attention at home, the boys from alcoholic homes, the boys without any self esteem. The priests would spend a year or two befriending these boys and building a friendship that was very important to the boys, so that, at the critical time, the boy could not imagine rejecting his friend and possibly losing the friendship. This is called "grooming". I did not make up this term. Psychologists made it up and use it all the time. This concept was used extensively by the FBI Report on child pornography and child abuse issued in the 1980’s. That report concluded that pedophiles seduce their victims in every sense of the word. We sometimes refer to it as "the Pied Piper Phenomenon," which is why, so often, adult offenders of children have so many victims: they are incredibly popular with kids and trusted by the families.
All this leads to the second part of the question though, which is, why children do not tell anyone, either then or later.
Well, sometimes there are threats: no one will believe you, or something far more menacing.
But always, threats or not, the victim blames himself for the abuse, at least until he begins to see clearly. So, guilt is the reason they do the second thing they do. They go quiet and for decades stay quiet about what happened to them.
Psychologists tell us that a healthy "guilt" tells me that "I have made a mistake." This is also called conscience. It is a good thing. An unhealthy guilt, sometimes called shame, tells me that "I am a mistake." It is an all covering embarrassment and sense of unworthiness. In the case of child abuse victims, it drives them to silence. The testimony of one boy who was abused at age 15 was that, immediately after the first incident of abuse, he told himself: "I am going to hell: I had sex with a priest. It was my fault, I should have said no." In the stereotypical victim, which all too often is precisely a true picture, within months or years of the onset of this guilt and shame, victims are abusing alcohol, drugs, sex, or themselves in an effort to find some mood altering substance or experience.
Interestingly, what triggers these men to come forward as adults really falls into two categories: First, they see their own children coming of age and realize that, at that age, no child is responsible for sexual involvement with an older, trusted adult. Or, the second thing that causes them to come forward is to be confronted in a tangible and vivid way with what happened to them. One man I represented took a job in an office building right across the street from the church were he had been abused weekly for 3 years. Everyday in his office he looked at that church, everyday at noon he heard those church bells ring, until he finally could stand it no longer, and he came to see me.
Likewise, when adults read in the newspapers or hear in the media about others who have come forward, usually with legal cases, and they read the profiles of these people, they recognize their own story, and they come forward. Now, often, it is not money that brings these people forward. In fact, I have had just about as many people come talk to me who did not want to make a claim or did not want monetary compensation as those who did. Just this week, I had a man call me, a very sophisticated lawyer from the San Francisco Bay area, simply to tell me that "your client is telling the truth." In other words, he wanted me to know that, in another case, the story my client was telling was identical to the story that he had experienced at the hands of this priest. He simply wanted me to know that and offered himself as a witness, if it would be helpful.
On the other hand, I make no apologies for those who come forward to make claims for money. As long as our civil justice system equates money with justice, child abuse victims are entitled to money: I can think of no one more entitled to justice in our civil system than child abuse survivors.
III. The third question is: why does the Church do what it does. Actually, I should have said "why did the Church do what it did," because I believe things are changing in the Church. I will talk about that later.
But why did a Church, led mostly by men who mostly wanted to do good things--led mostly by men who mostly wanted to good things, and in earthly society that is about as good as it gets-- why did such a Church tolerate it? Accept it? Cover it up?
The answers fall into several categories. I think that for awhile-- decades or centuries-- there was a subculture in pockets of church institutions where abusive and exploitative sex was frequent. I have read depositions and heard stories of seminaries where bishops preyed upon young priests, young priests preyed upon seminarians, and seminarians preyed upon each other. In fact, I am involved in a case involving St. Anthony’s Franciscan Seminary in Santa Barbara, California. The Seminary itself did a report in 1996 that concluded that in the decades previous, over 25% of the priests or brothers on staff at that seminary had abused boys, and the victims numbered in the dozens. There was simply a culture of sex abuse.
I am afraid that such pockets and such sub-cultures were more frequent than we can admit. Then, of course, the subculture spreads out to parishes and missions and the exploitation continues and the victims get younger.
But this raises the question of why such a culture and such conduct was "accepted" and "tolerated" by other priests, nuns, sometimes even by Bishops.
Well, the answers run the gamut of human nature and culpability: from denial to sin.
First, there was denial. Ask any parent or spouse of an alcoholic or drug addict. You do not want to believe that your loved one is engaged in this kind of behavior. Priests, Nuns, and the Church faithful simply did not want to believe that Father might be doing such things.
Then there was incredible naivete. Pastors and Bishops believed that when "Father confessed" and promised he would not do anything like this again, that the problem was solved. They treated it as if pedophilia were a one time, voluntary sexual affair, an "Oops." They thought it could be cured with good intentions.
Next up the scale of culpability is grievous irresponsibility. Bishops, rather than deal with "Father’s Problem", simply transferred him to another Parish or Diocese in an attempt to let someone else deal with the problem.
Finally, there were outright deliberate and immoral "coverups". We have known for at least 15 years now that Bishops sometimes transferred abusive priests, and sometimes threatened victims with defamation, alienation, or worse, or offered them money to be quiet.
But it is this latter ring of the circle-- this cover-up-- that has blown the lid off the issue in the last three months in the national media and has created actual scandal. Before January, 2002, the general public knew that sometimes a priest would molest a kid. The general public knew that sometimes a foolish Bishop would transfer a priest. But the general population , and certainly rank and file Catholics, did not know or believe that the Church hierarchy, at least portions of it, was engaged in a deliberate institutional cover up. This is what gotten the attention of the national consciousness recently. This is the "crisis." This is what is new.
So, let me ask: what is going to happen? How is this drama going to end? Well, there are some hopeful signs: for at least a decade or two, the Church has been engaged in much more aggressive screening and supervision of new and potential priests. And, the Church, I think it is fair to say, now has in place a zero tolerance policy for child abuse. The Church has come to offer counseling, apologies, and even occasionally to offer early financial settlements, all as a way to simply "do the right thing" by the victim.
Now, granted, some of this is because, for the last 10 or 15 years, the Church has been getting drubbed in the courtroom: a jury in Dallas awarded $125 million dollars in punitive damages against the Archdiocese; in Oregon, my estimate is that the Archdiocese of Portland and its insurers have paid out between $10-20 million for the sins of Father Maurice Grammond, and I am aware of another $5-7 million dollars that the Church in Oregon has paid out on other cases. The same is true around the country. To that extent, the Church and its insurers have begun to learn their financial lesson.
So things may be getting better.
Still, the former secrecy will not forever be a thing of the past unless good rank and file Catholic women and men take a stand. They must say to their priests and their bishops and their cardinals and their Church: "It must stop." Now, I realize that the Church is not a democracy, but I believe, as I think Catholics believe, that the Holy Spirit speaks through the faithful. So, I hope that rank and file Catholics say to their Church: "This is the Holy Spirit speaking. Get it right. Keep changing." I hope they remind the Church that the same Master who said "suffer the little children" also said "it would better for a man to have a millstone about his neck and be cast into the sea than to cause one of these little ones to stumble." For the sake of these victims, for the sake of the faithful, and for the sake of the Church itself, I hope the Church is listening.
