Gustav Niebuhr
"The Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church"
March 18, 2003

The New York Times, where I worked for about eight years, ran a story about the appointment of a new bishop to a Roman Catholic diocese in eastern Connecticut--not a place that one often thinks of as being the center of the catholic world, but I'm sure an important diocese to those who live there. Not long ago, that transition from one bishop to another in a place like eastern Connecticut would have been a rather unremarkable event. But at this time in the life of the Catholic Church in the United States, nothing it seems can really be described as being unremarkable. There was actually a story on this transfer of power that noted that the new bishop, Michael Cody, would be taking over a diocese that had just settled a claim of sexual abuse against one of its priests for about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. The diocese' annual fundraising appeal had come up fifteen percent short of its goal. And, the previous bishop--the one who was retiring--was forced to curtail, for financial reasons, some of the diocese ministries--cutting back on social action work, ministry to prisoners and the offices in charge of worship and ecumenical activities.

This is just a single aspect of this enormous crisis over the sexual abuse of minors by a relatively small number of priests that has engulfed the largest single religious institution in the United States in a mere fifteen months. News organizations, particularly the Boston Globe, have covered the particulars of the story very extensively. What I would like to do today, though, is to take a step back and try to frame this crisis in a wider perspective because there are consequences here not only for the Church, but for society at large. In some respects, this is an American crisis not just confined to the Catholic Church in terms of its consequences.

Now, specifically--and if we are just dealing with the specifics alone, which is, of course, where many news organizations have focused--it is a story about astonishing negligence on the part of many American bishops in dealing with a limited number of predatory individuals among their clergy. The negligence suggests a certain disconnection that has existed between the highest level of authority in the American Church, that is certain leading bishops, and the lay people. Accused priests in many cases were given the benefit of the doubt, in some cases, repeatedly, which certainly occurred in Boston. As a result there has been a certain backlash of outrage among lay people in this crisis, which has gathered force over the past year and which has lead to a perceived weakening of authority among the bishops.

There is a lesson here and that is that any authority--particularly authority that lacks coercive means--is delegated authority, such that it cannot afford to lose its mandate. Colonel Bernard Law, the former archbishop of Boston, is an important case in point in that he was forced to resign in December after he was perceived to have lost control of the arch diocese of Boston.

In a larger sense, though, the crisis is also about the Catholic Church's importance to, and its influence upon, t he larger American society of which it is part. For non-Catholics, I think this crisis is important because of its current negative effect on the single largest religious institution in the United States. Saying that, let me pause a bit to describe some points about the Catholic Church within American society.

As I say it is the biggest single institution. There are approximately sixty-five million baptized Catholics in the United States and it has a truly national reach. There are not many religious institutions in the United States that have a truly national reach into all fifty states. You certainly can when it comes to the Roman Catholic Church. Its membership alone makes the church more than four times the size of its nearest protestant competitor, if we can use the word competitor and in this specific case we can because the largest protestant entity is the Southern Baptist Convention, which counts about sixteen million members now. And although in one way or another can be found in all fifty states, the Southern Baptist Convention is still strongest in the southeast and in Texas, its historic area.

In national surveys, about one quarter of Americans identify themselves as Roman Catholics, which is truly astonishing. The American society does divide themselves into quarters. One quarter Roman Catholic, one quarter evangelical protestant, one quarter mainline protestant, and one quarter a vast variety of different groups.

Historically, the Roman Catholic Church's roots go very deep in this country. There were Catholics in the southwest, and Catholics in Florida before there were puritans in Massachusetts and Anglicans here in Virginia. In the English colonies, Catholics began to arrive as early as the 1640's to settle in Maryland, which was an early and very interesting experiment in religious pluralism, that is Catholics and protestants attempting to exist side by side. Catholics distinguished themselves in the American Revolution to the degree that their service was publicly praised by George Washington and also by James Madison. By independents, however, Catholics were still a tiny minority among the three or four million people living in the former British colonies. They comprised about one percent of the population. But, that changed very rapidly in the nineteenth century with the growing influx of immigrants, particularly from Ireland, such that by 1850 Roman Catholics were the largest single religious group, already, in the United States. And, of course, the Catholic population continued to grow with waves of newcomers from Ireland, Italy, Germany, Poland, France and Mexico.

It is only by the mid twentieth century, though, that Catholics begin to feel and are seen as being fully part of the American social and political mainstream, no longer consigned to this second class status. The watersheds are, of course, symbolic watersheds--John Kennedy's election as president in 1960, which coincides with the second point--the start of the Second Vatican Council, whose singular importance for non-Catholics is that it calls for the Church to be engaged with non-Catholics in dialogue and discussion and also places the Church explicitly on the side of democratic pluralism, which meant a tremendous amount throughout the world. The paradox, though, is that at this very moment of seeming triumph, of transition in the 1960's and integration into American society, the Church begins to see the breakdown of one of its most vital systems--the recruitment of young men into the priesthood.

Beginning in the mid to late 1960's the number of young men entering the seminary begins to drop, a trend that also coincides with the resignation of many young priests from active service. By the year 2000, the church is graduating only about one seminarian for every two openings within the priesthood. And, at the same time, the number of priests actively serving has declined significantly from the 1960's and the average age of priests, therefore, has risen dramatically to near sixty years old.

Further complicating problems and certainly adding pressure on those priests that are serving is the fact that the Catholic population continues to grow rapidly. What is more, the growth is highly diverse. It comes largely from new immigrant populations whose members come from all over the globe--Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, Africa, the Caribbean, and most especially Latin America. These people add an exciting, but complicated new component to an existing population, many of whose members comprise the best educated and most affluent sector of religious society in the United States. To figure out how to form a new Catholic identity in the United States among this highly diverse population--socially, economically and linguistically, takes enormous energy and creativity. The problem is that, just as this is being demanded, the pedophilia crisis really hits.

In saying that, the really extraordinary situation that has engulfed the Church with the pedophilia crisis since January 2002, I should say, to put it in recent historical context, is actually the third wave of a pedophilia crisis that has hit and it is by far the worst.

In 1985, and again in 1992, the bishops were forced to confront the fact that within clerical ranks there were some men who abused children and adolescents. I should say that each one of these waves that has broken has been distinguished by initial revelations around a particular priest who was accused of being a serial molester. The first time around, the focus was on an issue triggered by the case of a man named Gilber Gothey, who was a priest in the diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, west of New Orleans, accused of molesting about a hundred boys and adolescents. The important point was that this incident was not treated as isolated, but was regarded as a matter that needed to be dealt with by the bishops as a whole, and as a result the bishops met on this, discussed it, and did appoint a committee to look into the matter. The committee came back with a report that was really a sharp warning about the need to study this much more closely and to develop safeguards. It was a warning, too, that the Church's financial exposure in terms of litigation could amount to a billion dollars.

The report, at least some of its authors thought, really did not go as far in terms of being dealt with as it should have been. It left at least one author somewhat bitter in terms of what happened. He became a priest who was widely quoted, feeling as if in some ways he was the Cassandra in this--crying out about a matter that would break out again. And, indeed it did.

In the early 1990's again there was another instance in which a priest, this time a former priest named James Porter, and his activities became extraordinary news coverage and, once again, the bishops convened and drew up a set of voluntary guidelines by which each diocese should really investigate these matters. It was a voluntary procedure put into place about dealing with allegations of pedophilia and the reactions a bishop should take regarding specific individuals who are accused. In other words they were to get them out of ministry immediately and into treatment while dealing as compassionately as one could with the people making the complaints.

The Pope himself spoke out at that time very forcefully condemning sexual abuse and urging that seminarians receive more educational training in issues related to human sexuality and celibacy. What we know now, though, is regrettably the guidelines were not enforced as rigorously in some places and certainly not uniformly. The issue thereafter did not recede into the background this time as it did after the Gothey case but was kept alive, to a degree in the public eye, by some of the lawsuits that continued to be pursued particularly one in Texas that resulted in an extraordinary verdict of more than one hundred million dollars, later reduced on appeal against the diocese of Dallas. A resignation shortly thereafter came of a bishop in Florida had been accused of sexual abuse himself as a priest.

This brings us up to 2003, and as I said earlier, this time the problem is truly national in that sense its impact has been close to devastating, I think, for a variety of reasons that I will go into. When the New York Times did a statistical survey of publicly disclosed sexual abuse accusations against priests, it found that the accusations had been made in more than ninety percent of the nation's one hundred and seventy-seven diocese. More than forty-two hundred people had made claims against a total of twelve hundred priests. Most of the claims concerned incidents that had allegedly occurred in the 1970's and the 1980's, although there were some before and some after. The Times further reported that nearly two percent of all men ordained as priests since 1950 had been accused of abuse, which is an extraordinary total.

The crisis, I think, has had some particularly harrowing moments. One came a month ago when a grand jury and panel in Suffolk County, New York, returned a report accusing Catholic authorities in diocese of Rockville Center, which incorporates much of suburban Long Island, of willfully deceiving parishioners who claimed to have been victims of sexual abuse by priests there. The grand jury's language, as it was reported, effectively described a conspiracy to sidetrack abuse claims, keep them quiet, and to protect fifty-eight priests accused of abuse. The storm's center, of course, has been in Boston where investigative reporting by the Boston Globe into the case of one particular priest--it is always one instance that always seems to trigger this and break it all open--a man named John Gagen. The reporting revealed that Cardinal Law had appeared to deal with accusations of abuse by simply transferring accused priests to another parish and that it had gone on, even at times, beyond the voluntary guidelines adopted by the bishops in 1933. That in itself was enough to trigger a response in the arch diocese of Boston that really went beyond anything before, in that some lay Catholics got together and formed a lay group independent of the arch diocese, but within the arch diocese. It was, of course, in Boston that the crisis reached such a crescendo that the arch bishop, who had until recently been considered the single most powerful prelate in the United States, was forced to resign, which really is an extraordinary development if one thinks about Cardinal Law and the moment of enormous tragedy in the Church.

Law is a multi-dimensional figure and represents many different things within the Catholic Church in America. One thing that I mentioned was that he was singularly powerful. It is often from a New York perspective that one expects the cardinal arch bishop of New York to be the most powerful individual within the Catholic Church, but there are many arguments that Law was especially powerful in his relations with the Vatican and also his effect in being able to place bishops within other diocese in the United States, something which of course his hand resulted in a greater fallout in terms of issues in this crisis specific to Boston have been felt elsewhere because some of the men who served under Law have since gone on to other diocese and have been drawn in to have to answer some of the things that went on in Boston.

Part of the great tragedy of this is that Law embodied some of the best of Catholic social teaching and its action in the United States. He was an outspoken figure in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's and has also been credited in bringing Vietnamese Catholic leaders to the United States when South Vietnam fell in 1975. I think that the fact that, essentially, this loss of a mandate among his people in Boston, and that forcing the Vatican to accept his resignation, is a really singular event in the history of the Catholic Church within the United States. It is really one that has yet to be fully felt or understood. It is a testimony to how power works in this world--that even in institutions that are not structured to be democratic, people do count and they cannot be disregarded.

What does this mean if we step back? What lessons can we draw from it at this stage? We are really only fifteen months into the crisis at this stage. It is still evolving. I have four points, maybe four and a half points that I would like to make here, which I think range from the obvious to the more subtle. First, and perhaps most obviously, the crisis comes at a terrible time for the Catholic Church in terms of recruiting men to the priesthood. The overwhelming majority of priests, of course, are good and dedicated men who have sacrificed much to follow their colleague. What happens now? It has been said that the best way to recruit men to the priesthood, and if you want to speak in a religious sense--to help awaken young men and older men to an awareness of their call--it is to show them priests who are happy, purposeful and have high morale in their calling.

What happens if priests are not that--if morale is down and priests feel they have to be reserved in their interaction with parishioners, especially children. What happens if they feel that they are under suspicion? After the first crisis broke, I remember talking to a Jesuit, who was a friend, who asked me "what can I do now? Can I pat a child a kid on the head or does that engender suspicion? Can I council somebody in private or do I always have to have the door open?" As he was talking, he mentioned with a sort of sadness about hearing a joke from a parishioner who said something to the extent of "don’t hug me too closely." It was a joke, but a wounding joke unfortunately.

Secondly, the crisis comes at a particularly challenging time. Part of the challenge is that it is widely assumed that the Church is ending or is nearing the end of a particular pontifical reign. Physically, Pope John Paul II is not the rigorous man that he once was. After all, he was shot and nearly killed and he suffers from Parkinson's Disease. He will be eighty three in two months. He is, right now, either the fifth or sixth longest reigning Pope among the two hundred and eighty-three since Peter. It has been pointed out that there is a great difference between the Vatican and the Church in the United States. The relations have not always been easy. Many of the Vatican, I think that it is fair to say, do not understand the United States or its culture. They have rather negative views of the culture. It has been said that on his trips here, the Pope has always been pleasantly surprised by the obvious devotion of American Catholics and their commitment to the church. They have hardly been portrayed so positively by some people within the Vatican itself. Here you have to think, too, that the things we prize so much in this society--democracy, individualism, consumerism, which translate that to self-reliance and choice, things that we really prize--are not universally valued and may be perceived in less positive ways abroad.

In addition, for months some Vatican officials downplayed the crisis developing here, preferring to blame it on the news media, always a likely target, saying it was really an artificial creation and that the best response was to wait it out. This is, I guess, my half-point. One result of that thinking is to perceive what has happened as a manifestation of anti-Catholicism. Certainly it has not been that long since Roman Catholics here felt they emerged out of that perceived ghetto of intolerance and being consigned to second class status. I know that there are Catholics here in the U.S. who really worry about that, too. That, is this in some ways being used by some and perhaps some in the media as a way of getting at Catholicism in general.

Two more points and I think that they should be of particular concern to Americans as a whole. One is, and this is getting into a less tangible area here, that this crisis and its financial implications complicate the great challenge that the church faces in bringing together its ethnic complexity at this time. Inevitably, people in the front line of this particular effort are priests and nuns who find their image now tarnished by the terrible actions of a few among them. That gets back to that news story that I cited earlier about the cutbacks in eastern Connecticut. They came in areas of social justice, prison ministry and ecumenical affairs--three areas in which one can argue that the church really ought to be present. Not least because we live in a time which social justice issues are really not considered a priority and in which prison populations has been growing by leaps and bounds, and in which are emergent religious pluralism makes good relations among religious groups a necessity, I would think, for helping maintain a certain level of civic harmony. Here a word on my own specialty, that the Catholic Church has to be appreciated for the extraordinary lead that it has taken in inter-religious dialogue over the last forty years. It really has been the leader in this country and, I think, abroad as well in fostering reconciliation which is, historically for Christianity, of crucial importance.

Finally, and I think truly unfortunately, the crisis has effectively silenced the bishops as a public voice, which in itself is great loss for public dialogue in the United States. The bishops do continue to speak out, but my perception is that they are largely unheard by the news media these days and by others. It is largely because of the situation that prevailed in the 1980's and 1990's has changed so radically that the crisis over pedophilia has sucked the air out of the room.

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