There are reasons... and implications...

Thursday December 7, 2006

This is a difficult article to read at this time of the year or at any time of the year but you must read it in order to understand the continuing morass in the aftermath of sexual abuse by clergy. Those who have had their fill of the issue need not read further but then they should not criticize victims and victim advocates for their pursuit of justice.

Those who read on should keep in mind that the underlying issue is the abuse of authority and power as well as the absence of transparency and accountability in the Church particularly by the hierarchy and many members of the clergy.

I spoke many years ago to Brooks Egerton of the Dallas Morning News. He is a thoroughgoing and an astute investigative reporter in the league with others such as Jason Berry, author of several books on the same topic. He is known and respected most for his undying efforts in the pursuit of justice on behalf of the victims of ‘Maciel,’ founder of the Legionaries for Christ who was recently suspended by Benedict XVI.

I post his commentary only because it is symptomatic of a phenomenon that has continued across the Roman Catholic Church globally.

This article will be followed by another insightful article on the status of vocations, seminaries and seminarians published in COMMONWEAL Magazine, a lay Catholic publication. It’s a logical connect to Egerton’s commentary.

____________

Covering up for priests took precedence over helping abuse victims

12:00 AM CST on Sunday, December 3, 2006

By BROOKS EGERTON / The Dallas Morning News

For 18 years, Richard Sipe belonged to the brotherhood of Catholic priests. For the last 14, he has been helping their victims across America seek redress from men like Fort Worth Bishop Joseph Delaney – men who, as last week’s unsealing of court records showed, have deceived their flocks and protected predators.

Time and again, people ask Mr. Sipe why moral leaders would do these things. The San Diego-area researcher explains with a little story, about a priest who challenged a bishop for denying knowledge of a sexual abuse case.

“Look, Father,” the bishop responded, “I only lie when I have to.”

He “has to,” Mr. Sipe says, if he thinks it will protect the church’s good name. And many shepherds equate “church” with themselves, not their sheep.

“Clerical narcissism,” Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea calls it.

“They call each other ‘your excellency’ and ‘your eminence,’ and they’re serious about it,” says the Charlotte, N.C., psychologist, who treats sex-crime victims and has researched the Catholic hierarchy extensively. “They really are royalty. Truth is what they say it is.”

These and other students of the Catholic Church’s ongoing clergy abuse crisis see much familiar in the revelations about the Fort Worth Catholic Diocese, which resulted from a 19-month legal battle waged by The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The material documents complaints of depravity against seven priests who served for years under the late Bishop Delaney: enticing little girls with candy and older boys with booze; fondling kids as they prepared for first communion; masturbating them behind the altar; abusing them with enemas; attempting rape; raping. The bishop and his aides excused much of it away, helping molesters stay in ministry and hiding it all from police.

The records build on findings that date to 1998, when The News reported that Bishop Delaney had hired two priests with histories of questionable conduct with boys in other states. He retained them after they were convicted of crimes there – the first for contributing to a minor’s delinquency, the second for stealing from a parish and using some proceeds on tropical vacations with boys.

Bishop Delaney told a judge that the first priest would not work again with boys, but he did. The Rev. Thomas Teczar became a target in a Texas investigation of sexual abuse and left the state with the knowledge of the bishop, who died in 2005. Bishop Delaney gave The News conflicting accounts of the matter. Authorities said he wouldn’t aid their investigation.

Father Teczar faces a criminal trial in Eastland County in February. The Fort Worth Diocese paid two of his victims a settlement totaling $4.15 million last year.

Managing the fallout

None of this happened on new Bishop Kevin Vann’s watch, yet he has been struggling to manage the fallout from the court records’ unsealing.

He apologized at a midweek news conference for what the abusers did but not for the cover-ups that Bishop Delaney and his aides orchestrated. “Not being here at the time those decisions were made, I can’t say they should have done this or that,” he said.

But Bishop Vann was doing exactly that by week’s end, having come under fierce criticism from victims.

“I can’t defend the indefensible,” he told the Star-Telegram. He said he planned to talk to, but not discipline, four priests who have been accused of enabling abusers or mistreating victims.

The News asked him repeatedly to talk about the general mindset of diocesan managers over the last quarter-century, when he was working his way up the ladder in Springfield, Ill. What, he was asked, would explain putting a priest’s career above children’s safety?

Bishop Vann, who was a top bishop’s aide in Illinois, would not answer.

There’s no good way to have that conversation without addressing the church’s broader web of sexual secrecy, said Mr. Sipe, the former priest who consults on civil and criminal clergy-abuse cases. He is the co-author, with the Rev. Thomas Doyle and former priest Patrick Wall, of the recently published Sex, Priests and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church’s 2000-Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse.

Most priests and bishops don’t abuse children, Mr. Sipe said. But many, he said, violate their vows of celibacy with adults and end up afraid to challenge more serious misconduct.

“Celibacy is a myth,” Mr. Sipe said. “And getting into this exposes a corrupt system.”

Bishop Vann was surrounded by this culture in Springfield. An August 2006 report commissioned by the diocese there and conducted by a former federal prosecutor found that:

• Previous Bishop Daniel Ryan “engaged in sexual misconduct with adults and used his authority to conceal this misconduct … the investigation found a culture of secrecy fostered under Bishop Ryan’s leadership which discouraged faithful priests from coming forward with information about misconduct.” • A top aide to Bishop Ryan and the current bishop “was involved in sexual misconduct” before two teens attacked him in a city park and nearly killed him. He has been removed from ministry. • Two other high-ranking veteran priests “are now on leave because of allegations of personal and ministerial misconduct.”

The report did not name four other priests who were implicated in financial misconduct or using computers to access inappropriate Web sites, according to the Springfield State Journal-Register. They reportedly admitted wrongdoing and agreed to undergo rehabilitation.

Bishop Vann was not mentioned in the report.

“I have to be responsible now for making the right and just decisions now,” he said at last week’s news conference. “That’s been the principle of all of my life. I’ve always tried to make the right decision wherever I’ve been.”

There are other issues to consider when trying to understand cover-ups like the ones in Fort Worth, said Robert Scamardo, a lawyer who formerly worked for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston.

First, he said, is that bishops do not consider priests employees.

“The analogy is that of a parent to a child,” said Mr. Scamardo, who spent years in seminary but decided not to become a clergyman. “There is no group more important to a bishop than his priests.”

Shortage of priests

The church’s increasingly dire shortage of priests reinforces that bond, he said. And even if a bishop finally concludes that a man should be removed from the priesthood, the Vatican’s expulsion process is long and cumbersome.

Charles Curran, who teaches moral theology at Southern Methodist University and formerly worked as a priest, sees another issue: Bishops tend to have more experience identifying with victimizers than victims.

Bishops’ “primary experience of people doing wrong is the sacrament of penance,” or confession, he said. In many cases, the bishops dispense forgiveness and “there is no consideration” of victims.

“This is the mindset.”

And why don’t victims speak up more often and go to the police themselves? Because they are typically devout people steeped in church traditions of secrecy and shame, said Mr. Scamardo, who was abused by a priest and a lay minister as a boy.

Instead of seeking justice via civil authorities, he said, these victims hope for better from the very people who have betrayed them: “It’s this childlike belief that the church is going to do the right thing. You’ve got to give that up.”

Four years ago, at a landmark meeting of U.S. bishops in Dallas, Dr. Frawley-O’Dea told Bishop Delaney and his brothers from around the country that secrecy was the “cornerstone of sexual abuse.” They must all do penance – make “genuine confessions of failings and remorse,” she said at the time.

She was the only mental health professional invited to address the bishops’ gathering, which produced “zero tolerance” reforms and vows of increased transparency.

The bishops were in free-fall at the time. The Boston Globe had gotten court records unsealed that showed a pattern of violation and concealment much like that now emerging in Fort Worth. The News showed that at least two-thirds of U.S. bishops had left priests on the job after accusations of sexual misconduct.

The Rev. Wilton Gregory, who was president of the bishops’ conference, praised Dr. Frawley-O’Dea at the time and pledged a new day of “openness, forthrightness and courage.”

It hasn’t happened, she said, citing the recent events in Fort Worth as but one example: After the Dallas promises, the diocese fought to keep the priests’ files sealed, then fumbled in the aftermath.

“The transparency promise was bull,” said Dr. Frawley-O’Dea, author of the forthcoming book Perversion of Power: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church. Even now, “whenever they come to a crossroads, they take the wrong turn.”

E-mail begerton@dallasnews.com

From COMMONWEAL Magazine

December 1, 2006 / Volume CXXXIII, Number 21 CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION

More on the Seminaries

LET’S BE CANDID ABOUT THE CANDIDATES

Paul Stanosz

To shed some light on the crisis in seminary formation today (see “Tomorrow’s Priests,” November 3), let me describe a priest I know, a man I will refer to as Fr. Bo. Ordained after barely scraping by in the seminary academically, Fr. Bo identifies strongly with John Paul II. The first in his class to own a cassock, he has a strong devotion to Mary, never misses a papal youth rally, and prides himself on his theological orthodoxy.

He also recently began cruising gay bars.

Bo did not realize he was sexually attracted to males until his mid-thirties. Not sufficiently challenged to face this issue in the seminary, he has remained in many respects an adolescent. He was once a strong proponent of mandatory celibacy and continues to oppose the ordination of women, but he now supports optional celibacy-because “priests need fun too.” Besides the sense of spirituality that drew him to the priesthood, Bo found the role appealing because it meant he would never have to look for another job, worry about money, clean house, or otherwise fend for himself. And because he was compliant and did little to draw attention to himself, he managed to be ordained.

Intellectually unformed, personally immature, Fr. Bo is by no means a rare exception at seminaries today. Indeed, his is a personality one encounters often among the newly ordained. And that’s the problem.

Few organizations take the training of their personnel as seriously as the Roman Catholic Church. Since the Council of Trent, the formation of priests in the Catholic Church has included lengthy periods of seminary training attending to nearly every detail of a candidate’s life. The duration and scope of this formation process have traditionally aimed at assessing the candidate’s ability and developing his commitment to the church’s mission. Yet despite this rigorous process-and increased Vatican scrutiny following the clergy sexual-abuse scandal-my recent doctoral research in several East Coast and Midwest seminaries has made me seriously question our ability to produce mature, intelligent leaders for tomorrow’s church. I reluctantly concluded that we are seeing a decline in the quality of applicants, which, when combined with other dilemmas facing the church, may forecast long-range and deleterious effects on the U.S. Catholic Church.

To be sure, many fine candidates continue to enter seminaries, and not a few seem certain to become holy, caring priests who will serve with devotion and even distinction. Still, growing numbers of seminary faculty are frustrated and alarmed by the declining intellectual ability of the applicant pool. (This is something they would say to me only behind closed doors.) Statistics support their concern. In Educating Leaders for Ministry (The Liturgical Press, 2005), Victor J. Klimoski, Kevin J. O’Neil, and Katerina M. Schuth reported that only 10 percent of today’s seminarians are highly qualified, while 50 percent are adequately qualified, and the remaining 40 percent are impeded in their ability to do successful academic work. Catholicism is not alone in its struggle to attract top candidates to the ministry; unlike Protestant and Jewish denominations, however, it has not benefited from the inclusion of women candidates, who substantially outperform their male counterparts on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). And so, as average GRE scores for all U.S. test takers rose during the 1980s, the scores of prospective seminary students fell, and today, are significantly lower than the national average on the verbal portion of the test. In recent years, some seminaries have been forced to institute pre-theology programs to address the significant shortcomings of their entrants’ theological background.

Seminaries, moreover, are called not only to help students master theology, but to help them grow in maturity. John Paul II’s influential 1993 exhortation, I Will Give Them Shepherds, wisely added human formation to the seminary’s traditional concerns about spiritual, academic, and pastoral development. Indeed, formation on the personal level was to serve as the foundation for all other areas of priestly training. John Paul II noted that a priest’s personality had to act as a bridge, rather than an obstacle, if others were to encounter Christ through his ministry. And so, psychosexual development and affective maturity came to be seen as central to effective seminary formation.

How well are our seminaries succeeding in promoting this maturity? The example of Fr. Bo does not augur well. Though he was ordained in the 1980s, Fr. Bo is representative of what I found in seminaries today. Many of the men in my study entered the seminary in their thirties and forties, yet-like many younger candidates-they frequently seemed to lack well-developed social and relational skills. Many had been away from the church for years before having a conversion experience, and some reported being moved to seek priesthood by the charisma of Pope John Paul II. Faculty members I interviewed noted that today’s seminarians are frequently drawn to theologies that exalt the status and distinctiveness of the clerical role, and are more interested in consulting the Catechism of the Catholic Church for clear answers than in exploring the wide breadth of Catholicism’s theological heritage. My sense from my research visits is that a significant number of seminarians are looking for a religiously saturated environment that will bestow a special sense of sacred identity. Their rooms often have the appearance of shrines, and their days are spent in study and prayer among peers who share their worldview.

My hope is that Fr. Bo resolves the issues related to his arrested development before he gets himself into other kinds of trouble. I am not sure this is likely. While he complains that it is the media’s fault that the clergy sexual-abuse scandal has created the “depressing picture” of the church for people, Fr. Bo seems unaware of the extent of the problems and of his own inconsistencies. What I find depressing is the church’s own lack of candor. Desperately needed are priests who are forthright, not only in terms of their own sexuality, but of their personal integrity.

Are today’s seminaries fostering such an ethos? I have my doubts. Many of the seminarians I conversed with seemed like impressionable, religiously disposed men who were seeking regimentation, self-abnegation, and an institutionally prescribed identity. Such authority-dependent men are likely to frustrate bishops and vicars-not because they will sexually abuse minors or fail to honor their vows, but because they will take little initiative on their own. Followers rather than leaders, they are not likely to show the creativity required for effective parish work. In the past, they might have gotten by serving as associates at larger parishes, but now they will be called on to pastor parishes after only a few years of experience as associate pastors.

The well-being of any organization relies on its ability to attract the best and brightest to its leadership ranks. This clearly isn’t happening in the U.S. Catholic Church. The admission of women into the clergy by other denominations has raised the overall aptitude of their seminarians, but Rome has ruled out this possibility for Catholics. While one wonders what effect optional celibacy would have on the number and quality of men entering the Catholic priesthood, Rome has been intransigent on that option too. The Vatican appears to prefer modestly gifted celibate men over brighter, more capable women or men who want to marry.

While Catholics know that the number of newly ordained priests is down, not enough has been said about the characteristics and abilities of those who are entering the seminary. With fewer well-prepared, gifted, mature men seeking ordination, why aren’t seminary administrators and faculty members publicly calling for a discussion of the quality of applicants to their schools? What will become of a church that settles for mediocre leaders and excludes many who feel called to priesthood simply because of their gender, sexual preference, or desire to marry?

Choruses of bishops, vocation directors, and Serra Clubs calling for priests and laity to promote vocations have not addressed the quality of seminary applicants. Given how acute the priest shortage is and the unwillingness of the Vatican to discuss solutions to the problem, the U.S. Catholic Church is likely to face a continuing crisis of ordained leadership, long after the sexual-abuse crisis abates.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Rev. Paul Stanosz is a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and the author of The Struggle for Celibacy (Herder and Herder/Crossroad).

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