The Catholic Church’s clerical sex abuse crisis may be said to have entered public consciousness with the Boston Globe’s revelations, which began in January 2002, and it has yet to go away. The standard explanation of it is that bishops and other superiors covered up abuse in order to protect the reputation of the Church, but this is almost the opposite of the truth. The reality is that sexual abuse was covered up as part of a strategy of calculated risk-taking, not for the benefit of the institution, but for the benefit of the superior.
I spent many years in Roman Catholic institutions populated by abusers and, while never a victim myself, I got to know some of the perpetrators and some of those who protected them. My argument, however, is based on well-established patterns of behaviour which can be found beyond the confines of the Roman Church. These patterns extend back in time at least as far as the 1960s, and they continue to persist.
Evolving explanations
One kind of analysis of the clerical abuse phenomenon is based on the Freudian hypothesis that sexual perversion is the result of sexual repression. In the hands of Theodor Adorno and his collaborators, it became the theory of the “authoritarian personality.” This sought to explain the Nazi phenomenon in terms of psychological “rigidity,” the lamentable result (according to Adorno and his colleagues) of being brought up amid a stable family to believe in traditional sexual norms.
Long after Adorno ceased to be fashionable in academic circles the stereotype he popularised has persisted. It is no coincidence that the first high-profile scalp of the crisis was the theologically conservative Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston in the U.S.A., and not his fellow American, the arch-liberal Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee, whose actions were already emerging into the public domain in 2002. Unlike Law, Weakland was personally guilty of some of the misdemeanours he so assiduously covered up on behalf of his subordinates.
Finally, though, the media narrative of repressed conservatives being at the bottom of every scandal succumbed to overwhelming contrary evidence. One part of this was the spread of the crisis from the Christian Churches to institutions such as the UK’s revered public broadcaster, the BBC, that have no particular association with traditional sexual morality. Moreover, too many theological liberals have been implicated: the American Cardinal McCarrick, the Argentinian Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, and the Slovenian Jesuit artist Marco Rupnik, being among the more recent examples. This is not to exonerate conservatives as a group, but rather to observe that the crisis is clearly not driven by conservatism per se, even when this is analysed as a psychological neurosis. Something else is needed to explain the crisis.
As the focus has shifted from perpetrators to those who protected them, another narrative has taken hold, which can be found in official reports into abuse, such as that of the UK’s recent Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. This new narrative tells us that “the protection of personal and institutional reputations above the protection of children was a frequent institutional reaction.” Indeed, this idea is repeated no fewer than seven times in the Summary Report.
This explanation, however, like Adorno’s theory, does not fit the facts.
Cover-ups and risk-taking
Consider the classic clerical abuse scenario, played out in Cardinal Law’s Boston, and in so many other dioceses. A priest-abuser generates complaints in a parish; eventually there are threats to go to the police or the press. The bishop responds by moving the priest to a new parish, where he continues the abuse and generates more complaints. Not only does this sequence of events get repeated an indefinite number of times with the same priest, but the bishop is simultaneously following the same procedure with other priests who are involved in similar abusive behaviours, and concurrently dealing with the consequences of this policy’s implementation by his predecessor. In this context, it is impossible to claim that bishops in these cases had not realised that the abuse would be repeated. And yet, instead of keeping a lid on the scandal by quietly putting the priest in a situation that minimises the chance of abuse—retirement, a desk job, academic studies, or whatever—these bishops moved abusers around parishes and similar posts until a scandal ended up in the papers or in court, with calamitous but wholly predictable consequences.
Sometimes, bishops’ behaviour goes even further. The journalist J.D. Flynn gives the example of Fr David Szatkowski of Allentown, one of the dioceses featured in the 2018 Pennsylvania Grand Jury report into clerical abuse. Flynn notes that Szatkowski had been charged with the sexual assault of a minor in 2011. The incident had taken place in the street and there were witnesses, but the victim did not press charges. Szatkowski’s Bishop, Thomas Welsh, knowing about this incident, subsequently appointed him to the diocese’s ‘formation team,’ to work with young men aspiring to the priesthood, and then as the defending canon lawyer of another priest accused of abuse. This is not the behaviour of a bishop whose overriding concern is the preservation of his or the Church’s reputation.
Similar examples could be multiplied indefinitely. What is going on? Let me approach the question through an anecdote.
A priest, whom I shall call Bernard, once complained to me about another member of his religious community, a notorious bully; let’s call him Leo. (Both of the priests concerned are now deceased.) Leo had long held an important position, which had enabled him to dominate a large number of subordinates, and on retirement was given another role, where, as things were working out at the time of my conversation with Bernard, Leo was able to continue his bullying behaviour, albeit on a smaller scale. Bernard remarked to me that it was as if their superior had decided to make available to this man an opportunity to continue his abuse, offering him a new set of potential victims as he put it, “like a great plate of meat.”
This expression has stayed with me particularly because Bernard was himself an abuser. Bernard’s preferred form of abuse was sexual, directed at boys and young men. The two priests hated each other, but they were in the same situation: they were both predatory and abusive, albeit in different ways. And having come to the end of the possibilities of abuse in one institutional context, they were provided with another: an opportunity neither neglected.
The bishops and superiors involved in such decisions were not sacrificing the interests of abuse victims because they were frightened of exposure. On the contrary, they were risking exposure in order to provide abusers with fresh opportunities to abuse: “like a great plate of meat.”
The idea that superiors and their equivalents in the secular arena fear that flushing out abusers will harm the prestige of their institution does not stand up to scrutiny. Prosecuting them might, indeed, be embarrassing, but nothing is simpler or more risk-free than for a superior, like a secular employer, to brandish a thick file of accusations at an abuser to get him to go quietly into retirement, or at least to take his problems somewhere else: indeed, this latter happens all too often. In the cases I am considering, however, that is not what superiors did. Instead, they prolonged the abuse by shutting down investigations, fobbing off whistle-blowers, and providing abusers with fresh victims. It is perfectly obvious that over time, this policy raises the risk of exposure by the press or the courts to higher and higher levels until, at last, in many cases, it finally becomes public.
Naturally, bishops and superiors who were doing this would not describe their policy in terms of facilitating abuse. They would say that they wanted to find a role for their priests, towards whom they felt an obligation, where their talents would be employed, and which would make them happy. However, this meant giving them opportunities for further abuse, and such bishops and superiors knew this perfectly well. What we see in these cases is not naivety. Nor is it paralysis, caused by fear of bad publicity. Nor, again, is it a failure to combat the problem with sufficient vigour. What we see is an abusive institution, an abusive network, whose objective is to find and exploit opportunities for abuse to satisfy its members.
The abusive institution
It remains to explain why. What is the motivation for bishops and superiors or anyone in authority to take such hideous risks?
It would be easier to understand if the bishop were himself an abuser, like Weakland or McCarrick. In such a case, he might be locked into a relationship of mutual protection with abusive subordinates. In many cases, however, this does not seem to be the case, and the same is true when we consider other abusive institutions. The BBC provided the paedophile television celebrity Jimmy Saville with fresh victims over decades, while concerns and complaints were brushed aside. I don’t believe for a moment that all the managers who took part in this were themselves paedophiles. They were risking a scandal, and they had their reasons for doing so.
Again and again, we see cover-up and protection of abusers, even when the abuser is not a celebrity, even when he or she has not much in common with decision-makers. True, abusers are sometimes popular, or have influential friends; they might even on occasion have the means to blackmail their superiors. But having met abusers, I can say that, equally, many of them are pathetic specimens: fragile, miserable, isolated, and broken by accusations. And yet they got protected all the same.
The answer, in fact, is a simple one. In any institution the loyalty and obedience of subordinates is maintained by some kind of reward given by superiors. In commercial enterprises this is money, but money can be supplemented or replaced by many other things, including opportunities for abuse or protection against complaints. If BBC executives or Catholic bishops want to shore up their position within their organisation, protecting abusers will ensure that at least an important section of their subordinates are loyal and uncomplaining. Once a culture of abuse is established, more and more people who can be motivated in this way will be drawn into the institution, while the people not wanting to play along will be marginalised, rendered powerless, and leave.
Superiors tolerate and facilitate abuse because it increases their power within the institution. It does not matter what form the abuse takes: emotional, sexual, spiritual, or even financial. Within the institutional Catholic Church, the toleration of all these kinds of abuse can be found.
Two historical triggers would have made this kind of loyalty-creating particularly attractive to bishops in the 1960s, the time when, according to most accounts, the pattern of abuse and cover-up became firmly entrenched.
One was the rejection, at least by the bien pensant, of traditional sexual morality. Educated people could tell themselves that the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults was a mere peccadillo. This view cannot be found in any official documents of the Catholic Church, but it was often the openly if quietly stated position of seminary formators.
The other was the crisis of priestly identity, when enormous numbers of priests sought laicisation, and vocations collapsed. Something extra needed to be found to motivate clergy, with the disappearance of the traditional understanding of the unique value of priestly ministry.
Accepting the facts
To conclude, the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults, and the spiritual and emotional abuse also found in the Church, are the products of an organisation that has itself become abusive, where the facilitation of abuse became a major factor in its day-to-day management. This is something the Church, and other institutions similarly affected, will not easily recover from, any more than will the victims.
As a committed Catholic, I take no pleasure in exposing yet again the suppurating wounds inflicted on the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, above all by those of her members entrusted with her highest offices. It is only by probing them, alas, that we can hope they may be healed.
