Despite Reforms, Scars Remain from Clergy Abuse

Despite Reforms, Scars Remain from Clergy Abuse

All Things Considered, January 12, 2007 · On a recent Thursday evening, John and Maryellen Rogers arrive at St.Francis Cabrini Catholic Church in Situate, Mass. They walk into asmall makeshift bedroom off the sanctuary. The room is furnished withan air mattress and a couple of pillows.

Thisis where the couple has slept every Thursday night for the past twoyears. There's a sign-up sheet in the lobby. Dozens of other peoplevolunteer for different times, but someone is always at the church,keeping vigil. On this night, a small group of faithful has gathered topray in the lobby of the church.

Theseparishioners have been occupying the church since 2004, when the BostonArchdiocese decided to shut it down, along with dozens of others, aspart of a restructuring plan.

ButJohn Rogers is convinced his church is a casualty of the sex-abusecrisis that has cost the Catholic church hundreds of millions ofdollars.

"They need the hard assets," Rogers says. "They need the cash flow to solve the problems and the sins of their past, not ours."

Sex Scandal and Parish Bankruptcies, Closures

It'snot clear to what extent the sex-abuse crisis can be blamed for parishclosures in Massachusetts or elsewhere. Many of the closures arerelated to changing demographics and a chronic shortage of priests,factors that were in play before 2002.

Butthere is no question the church has hemorrhaged hundreds of millions ofdollars in the past five years. And the situation is infuriating toparishioners such as Jim Clifford, who says he wants his parish to cutties with the archdiocese altogether for how it treated victims ofclergy sex abuse.

"When the childrenwere abused, they hid, and concealed," Clifford says. "And when it wasfinally forced upon them, they threw money at the kids instead of goingout and loving them and holding them."

Fourdioceses have filed for bankruptcy: Portland, Ore.; Tucson, Ariz.;Davenport, Iowa; and Spokane, Wash. The Spokane Archdiocese just lastweek agreed to pay more than $48 million to settle claims. InCalifornia alone, settlement costs have exceeded $200 million. Theseare the hard costs; the long-term emotional damage is harder toquantify.

Aftershocks Still Reverberating in Community

St. Patrick's Church in Stoneham, Mass., was home to seven abusive priests. Parishioners there are still coming to terms with how the crisis has affected them and their church.

ChuckDeCost is a father of five, and he's been a parishioner at St.Patrick's since 1996. He is a devoted, lifelong Catholic. When thescandal broke in 2002, he and many in the congregation felt disbeliefone day, overwhelming sadness the next.

"It's almost like peeling an onion," DeCost says. "And every time you start to peel some more, you start to cry some more."

Atfirst, DeCost downplayed the situation, refusing to believe thevictims' claims. But soon, several of his friends left St. Patrick's inanger and sadness. Dozens more followed, and DeCost says eventually theevidence was too much.

"It was smackin our face, so I just couldn't deny it anymore," he says. "I had todeal with it. So I had conversations with my wife and with friends, andI chose to pray on it and I chose to make my faith my own."

Forhim, that has meant separating the sins of the perpetrators from hispersonal faith, accepting that the abuse and cover-up happened, andthen moving on. Others here still question the scope of the abuse andsay victims and the media have overblown the crisis.

Either way, the aftershocks of the sex-abuse scandal are still reverberating through this faith community.

"Youthink that everything is done and then suddenly it re-emerges forsomeone else," says Sister Mary Lou Cassidy, a senior staff member atSt. Patrick's. "I'm not saying a new allegation; I'm saying suddenly itstrikes Joan in a way that Bill dealt with this years ago."

Cassidyhas spent much of the past five years trying to win back parishionersin the wake of the scandal. Cassidy tears up when she describes howthat work has distracted her from her own grief over what's happened inher church.

When asked if she has nowbeen able to more fully address how the whole thing has affected herpersonally, she fights back tears.

"No, not until this very moment," Cassidy responds.

For Cassidy and others, it has taken years for them to tap into this grief, and it is just taking hold now, today.

BarbaraThorpe is the victims' assistance coordinator for the Archdiocese ofBoston. Her office was set up in early 2002 to counsel victims ofclergy sexual abuse.

"Even though we're five years into this, there are days when we still feel like we're in the heart of the crisis," Thorpe says.

Toput victims at ease, there are no crosses or religious symbols in heroffice. In the past year alone, her office provided counseling servicesto more than 300 people.

"This was adeep and shattering wound of the soul. Faith-shattering," she says."The work to rebuild trust … will engage us, I suspect, for as long asI'm alive."

The Ongoing Healing Process

Inthe summer of 2002, the American bishops met in Dallas and passed a setof guidelines, known as the Dallas Charter. Among various reforms, nowevery diocese is required to set up a counseling office, like the onein Boston. They help victims deal with many issues, but Thorpe says themost difficult challenge is trying to heal people's faith.

"That'sthe task of the church," Thorpe says, "to stand in the breach right nowand not to walk away, not to see all of the aftermath of the horror ofwhat happened; there has to be this intense level of presence."

Healing will require presence ' and accountability,an idea central to the Dallas Charter. Article 3 of the documentforbids secret settlement deals that prevent victims from speaking out.Article 4 stipulates that dioceses must report any allegation of sexualabuse to legal authorities. There are deeper background checks forclergy and an annual audit process to make sure these reforms arecarried out. But ultimately, it is up to each bishop to decide whetherto implement any of these reforms.

BishopGregory Aymond is the head of the Diocese of Austin, Texas, and chairsthe U.S. Bishops' Committee on the Protection of Children and YoungPeople.

"There were times in thepast, as we all know, where when someone was involved in pedophilia orsexual abuse of a minor, where we said, well, it's a moral issue,"Aymond says. "We get them spiritual direction and they go to confessionand everything will be OK." In retrospect, he says, that wasn't theright approach.

To this day, CardinalBernard Law of Boston is the only top-ranking church official to losehis job for covering up abuse, even though hundreds of other bishopswere named in suits around the country, and many were found negligent.

But Aymond says he and other bishops have repeatedly expressed regret for how the church handled or mishandled the crisis.

"Iapologize for the mistakes that we made as bishops of the church, maybeby not acting quickly enough," he says. "By thinking that treatmentwould help someone, and it didn't, by unknowingly putting other peoplein harm's way. I feel that as bishops, we collectively and individuallyneed to apologize for that."

'Apologies Are Not Enough'

Butmany who have studied the crisis in the church say the apologies arenot nearly enough. Richard Sipe is a psychologist and a former monk whohas spent the last 40 years studying sexuality and the priesthood.

"Youcannot have secrecy and accountability at the same time," Sipe says."Is sexual secrecy part of the core of this power and part of the coreof the operation of this organization? The answer is yes. That is whatholds it together."

The churchcommissioned the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York toresearch the abuse scandal. That study found that between 1950 and2002, 4 percent of priests were accused of sexually abusing a minor,and that abuse affected 95 percent of all American dioceses.

Sipesays the number of predators in the priesthood is actually much higher.He says the church has tried to downplay the extent of the abuse and topresent it as a problem solved.

"It'slike somebody who has a sore on their arm and it's a horrible-lookingsore and you treat it with ointments and so on," he says. "And the soregets healed over. There's maybe a scar there. But the blood within thesystem that is causing the harm, it's still there."

Local Priests Feel Effects of Crisis

Parishpriests on the ground ' who are living the effects of the crisis everyday ' are doing much of the work to heal the church and wash away thestains of the abuse.

At St. Patrick'sChurch, Father David Goodrow says that the crisis has had anirrevocable effect on his life as a priest. Goodrow actually requesteda transfer to this church.

"This wasmy first choice," he says. "Because this is what the church is about.This is about the church living through difficult times."

Hehas been here for a year and a half and has spent much of that timeministering to people still struggling with the abuse and cover-up. Butfor him, the saddest part of the scandal is how it has changed hisrelationship with parishioners, especially children.

"Sometimesparents come up and say, 'Give Father David a hug.' and I'll give thema hug, but I'll never take the initiative," he says. "I never approacha child that way. And it is sad, it's a shame really because we don'thave our own children, they are our families."

What Lies Ahead for the Catholic Church

And that's a concern not just for priests doing the work now, but for the future generation of Catholic clergy.

Thea cappella group at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore practicesregularly in the cavernous entryway of the campus chapel. CarloStebbings, 27, leads the group in a Latin chant. He is a formerspecial-education teacher with a passionate interest in theater andmusic and a devotion to the Catholic Church.

But when Stebbings started thinking about entering the priesthood a few years ago, he had serious reservations.

"When I expressed it to friends of mine, they sort of laughed at me," Stebbings says.

His friends said the priesthood was "just a bunch of child molesters," which angered Stebbings.

"I'mlike no, that's not the case," he recalls. "And it forced me to thinkabout how does a priest live? Do I have the right conception of what apriest is?"

This kind of soulsearching is more important than ever, says Father Jerry Francik, whoheads up the admissions program at St. Mary's. And the seminary isasking more questions, too. A candidate's psychological evaluation usedto take a couple hours; now it takes a full day.

Francik says the best defense against sexual abuse is to make sure predators never enter the priesthood in the first place.

"Youwould expect that when people come forward for something like servicein the church that these would be holy people, righteous people, goodpeople," Francik says. "And I think what we've learned is that you haveto be very wise and use a lot of common sense and not take anything forgranted. Uncover every stone, ask every question and then be preparedto deal with the answers."

Francik says the crisis has been incredibly painful, but he says it also provides an opportunity.

"Wecan either shrink away and we will die," he says. "Or we can say, 'No,this is not who we are,' and we step forward and we show whatseminarians are like, what priests are like, and then invite people …to come join us."

Sexual abuse byCatholic priests has broken lives, put dioceses into bankruptcy,shattered people's faith, and shrouded the church in a cloak of publicdistrust. Those who have been affected by this crisis may continue todisagree about how it happened and who is to blame for this tragicchapter in the church's history. But everyone agrees that if the churchis to recover ' and even if it's not ' it is a chapter that can't berepeated.

Scandal in the Church: Five Years On

Browse our coverage on the five-year anniversary of the Boston clergy sex-abuse scandal:

• Part 1: Abuse Scandal Still Echoes Through Catholic Church
• Part 2: Victims of Clergy Abuse Still Wrestle with Faith, Past
• Part 3: Despite Reforms, Scars Remain from Clergy Abuse