The Catholic Church Ignores This Child Sexual Abuse Law
One of the most damning findings from the recent grand jury investigation into widespread child sex abuse in Pennsylvania Catholic Church dioceses is how leaders covered up the misconduct. “It’s like a playbook for concealing the truth,” wrote the grand jury in its report, outlining seven tactics that church officials followed, such as using euphemisms for rape, shuffling predatory priests among dioceses and conducting bogus internal investigations.
Experts told HuffPost that sexual abuse continues in large part because the church ignores laws enacted to protect kids from harm. In particular, they said clergy regularly violate mandatory reporting laws, which require certain groups to inform child protective services or the police about suspected child abuse. But changing the church’s deeply rooted culture of silence and trust into one that holds itself accountable to law enforcement is a big task.
Sherryll Kraizer, the founder and director of the Coalition for Children, said the Catholic Church protects “pedophile priests” instead of children. “It’s a culture that they are struggling with giving up,” she said. “The law is clear, and the criminality is clear, and the sin is clear.”
She said the Catholic Church is so good at fostering trust among its followers that members have not questioned whether priests should have the authority to handle child abuse claims. “The church did what it wanted because it could get away with it,” she said. “We have been socialized to look at people in the clergy almost as if they are gods ... That’s how these children were groomed.”
Sometimes it’s good to hear what others are trying to say rather than the RCC itself, which has a long history and a vested interest in child rape apologia.
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Who told the higher-ranking clerics that the kid was being abused?
Very often, nobody. Until the kid was older. The parents didn't know. The higher-ranking folk didn't know. There was nobody to protect the kid except the victim and the victimizer. So who's at fault here? Those who didn't know, the scared victim, or the victimizer? There's a time gap that seems to be erased in much reporting. So we assume that the abuse, the reporting, and the reaction by higher-ranking priests was somehow in a short time frame, not over the 20 years between when the 8-year-old was abused and when the abuse was reported.
It's difficult to keep all the facts straight. They often are tricky, annoying, and when there are a lot of cases difficult to keep straight. Esp. when we're pissed. And want to be pissed.
Often later when the priest was still around kids, or when the truth came to light and the abuse was still going on, the Church did "best practice" and sent the priest for counseling and rehabilitation; that was the going thing. In the courts, as well, pedophiles would be sentenced for a few years to prison, rehabilitated, and set free--no claim that "once a pedophile, always a pedophile." The shrinks got that wrong. Post-rehab, the priest was reassigned. But very often the priest was reassigned where there were no kids. "Reassigned" is interpreted to mean "reassigned to be around kids," but some went to senior centers or other positions with no minors. How that went depended on the jurisidiction--broad-brushing here won't work. There's often a gap in what "reassigned" can mean and what we perceive it "must mean."
At the time there was no usually law that they violated by not informing. Now there is. Another time gap.
Then there are some really, really egregious cases. But when you check, you find that some happened 50 years ago and the offending priest died 20 years ago. Whatever the witness says, I don't believe them. Why? Because memories that old are often corrupted. They *can* be crystal clear and tend to be accurate, but using the words "can" and "tend" already asserts the alternative "might not".
And then there are the cases that deserve no more attention. In some cases where the grand jury in PA reported evidence, it only reported some evidence, how horrible the priest was to this kid and no criminal case pursued. The rest of the evidence sometimes said that the priests reported it to the cops, the cops investigated, they could prove nothing or the victim's family wanted to avoid any public scrutiny, the priest was put in a "safe" place or defrocked. In other words, "nothing was done" isn't true; what could be done was done. This also varied by parish.
The devil's in the details for lots of these cases. Because of the biases in reporting, it's hard to know even what "lots" means. Even the ones widely discussed tend to leave out timelines, but that's crucial to serving as judge and jury. When did the events happen? When were they first reported to the church? To the police? What did any investigation show? What were "best practices" at the time? If the priest was reassigned, when did that happen--and if he was, what was his new charge? Was he defrocked? Was the abuse reported before or after the law was changed to make priests obligatory (or even "recommended"
reporters?