Sexual abuse of children by the Catholic priests in the US: from a ‘charismatic bureaucracy’ to a governance regime

Abstract

The article focuses on the sexual harassment of children by the Catholic clergy in the US up until the early 2000s. The goal is to show how the emotional regime determining the relations between the clergy and the faithful changed as a result of successive revelations about clerical sexual abuse and the intransigence of the church on this issue. Both deprived it of much of its protective charisma and thus untouchability. Faced with mounting contestations and financial pressures, the upper echelons of the church hierarchy were forced to switch from unilateral bureaucratic to multilateral decision-making forms. The text highlights the contribution of the women’s and victims’ movements, popular culture (Oprah Winfrey!), insurance rules, and courageous journalists and lawyers to this process.

Keywords:

• charismatic bureaucracy
• emotional regime
• power
• RC Church
• sexual abuse

Acknowledgements

My deepest gratitude goes to Tom Burns, ca. 2011. Mark Jacobs offered words of encouragement and two well-taken points – unpacking the oxymoron turned out to be crucial! Two anonymous reviewers knew exactly where and one even in what ways major thinkers on power would improve the text. Mark Haugaard, the editor of the JOPP, made the entire process joyous. Felipe Rubio corrected English in add-ons. Eitan Wilf kindly sent me the article highlighting Oprah Winfrey’s email exchange with viewers. Lisa Schank helped with references, not just this time around. Jochen Kleres did thumbs up, also 2011. I am grateful to the copyeditor and Mark Haugaard for English correction. I would like to thank them all very, very much.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It was estimated that in 2002 there were 178 Cardinals, 4420 Bishops, 404,208 Priests and 58,210 Religious Brothers worldwide. In the US, there were 13 Cardinals, 373 Bishops, 46,041 Priests and 5565 Religious Brothers (The Official Catholic Directory from 2002 cited in Doyle and Rubino 2003–2004, p. 553 note 26).

2. In the early 1990s Blaine left the Catholic worker community, became a lawyer, and a prosecutor in cases of abused kids. She served as an honorary president of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) from 1989 to early in 2003. In 2002 after the explosion of the clergy scandals, SNAP’s membership increased to 5000 persons. In 2003, Blaine became one among the first four precarious employees of SNAP. At about that time SNAP also became more of an activist organization. In January 2011 its home page said that it had 7000 members and was the oldest organization of its kind (http://www.snapnetwork.org). While its online archives going back to 2002–2003 feature commentaries and reports on suits or court cases dealing with clerical sexual abuse and church intransigence, its most recent archives relate some victories, inform about newest laws and signal interest in clerical sexual abuse abroad. Blaine still serves as SNAP’s president.

3. He went with the story of 20 cases to the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Nation, Mother Jones which were not interested. Only a local newspaper editor was interested, but asked for more material and longer coverage time.

4. On the 5th November of 2010 – about half a year before she ended the show – Winfrey had 200 men from every walk of life and of every possible skin colour in her studio. In life in the studio and in filmed interviews they told of their own sexual abuse. At some point Winfrey cited national statistics according to which every fourth girl and every sixth boy in the US becomes a victim of sexual abuse. Using the tele-therapeutic lingo, she kept repeating the message to the victims that they should overcome their shame to speak up in order to start the healing process and support others. Tears and applause for those who narrated that they did punctuated the televised ritual of victims coming out and coming together for mutual celebration and support. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNvK2WHBQpw [Accessed 23 January 2015].

5. Little agreement exists as to whether to treat mid-1980s or 1992 or even 2002 as the watershed events. Doyle and Rubino (2003–2004, pp. 550–551) see the Lafayette-case as crucial because it galvanized other victims and their families to action. Whereas the criminal justice system in their estimate sentenced perhaps 250–300 Catholic clerics before the mid-1980s, afterwards it dealt with about 3000 civil cases of clerical sex abuse and 12 high profile trials. In contrast Burkett and Bruni (1993, p. 34) see 1992 as a crucial event since while in 1985 thirty cases were still pending against the Church on behalf of 100 victims, and the courts as well as the news media handled them with discretion, in 1992 the media focused on what seemed like a flood of cases. Across the US the number of arrests of Catholic priests skyrocketed. Another author (Berry 1992, p. ix) has 1983–1987 and 1982–1992 as two issue-peak phases. The Boston scandal in 2002 caused yet another wave of intense media coverage of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests (Terry 2008). It started with a court case against a priest in the Boston Archdiocese, John Goeghan, who was accused of having abused 130 children over three decades. He was defrocked, sentenced to prison and murdered by an inmate.

6. The bishops demonstrated a very ambivalent attitude to scientific evidence on several occasions. Between 1965 and the early 2000s they requested several sociological and psychiatric studies concerning priests – their recruitment, work conditions, exits, pathologies – only to ignore the reports (Doyle and Rubino 2003–2004, pp. 573, 565–574). In the mid-1990s, a group of psychotherapists treating clerical sex offenders in different hospitals tried, but could not win the US Catholic Bishops’ approval for a shared project into the causes, patterns and after-care issues of sexual abuse. Research into clerical sexual abuse was generally speaking very limited: only about 10 social science studies of clerical sexual abuse were conducted from 1990 on (Terry 2008, p. 550).

7. The document (accessed online on March 22, 2011 as a PDF-file listed under the title of the article by Barnett in The Observer put online by Guardian and cited in the main text) spells out the procedures to be followed to ensure that no false accusations are taken at face value. It grants priests extensive rights of defence. It also instructs bishops (i) to admonish – ‘paternally, seriously or most seriously’, adding, if necessary, the explicit threat of a trial process, should some other new accusation be laid upon the accused (see Chapter II, 42:c’) – the priest who has been accused on one or more occasions (perhaps correctly but with insufficient proof or as a result of faulty procedures), (ii) to inform their peers or subordinates about the reasons for transfer of a priest proven guilty to a new parish or diocese, and (iii) it clarifies under what conditions – during the investigation but also during the trial, should it arise – the accused priest can rightfully be denied the faculty of exercising some or all of his ecclesiastical ministries (have his possibly fear-inspiring contact with parishioners curtailed) (see, Chapter III, 51 and Penalties, 61–64), of giving, or even worse, receiving some or all sacraments, and (iv) should the crime be notorious and accompanied by false teaching or false mysticism and (v) the accused so immersed in malice in the abuse of his sacred ministry as to cause a grave scandal harmful to the faithful and their souls and be beyond any human hope of amendment, he could be reduced to a lay-brother. All of this, apparently, the US bishops failed to do.

8. The Pope and members of the Papal Curia responded to the scandal by classifying it as an American phenomenon resulting from the sexual revolution of the 1960s, gay activism, the women’s movement and poor standards in Catholic seminaries (Scheper-Hughes and Devine 2003, p. 18). The Pope was too busy, his representative told the international press, to be concerned with the ‘American’ problem. This remark outraged North American Catholics.

9. Christian morality started its slow merger with psychology back in the 1970s, when American bishops relied on psychological screening of seminarians, many priests and nuns went into therapy, and Catholic social services included therapies and therapists, only some of whom were clergy or religious (Berry 1992, p. 192), but here the focus is on the shift in frames adopted to view the issue of sexual abuse.

10. Until about 20 years ago in the US high school boys, some as young as 12, were admitted into the Catholic seminaries (Sobczyk 2003–2004, p. 7).