threat of excommunication.
“The letter was referred to in documents relating to a lawsuit filed earlier this year against a church in Texas and Ratzinger on behalf of two alleged abuse victims. By sending the letter, lawyers acting for the alleged victims claimed, the cardinal conspired to obstruct justice. Daniel Shea, the lawyer for the two alleged victims who discovered the letter, said: ‘It speaks for itself. It’s an obstruction of justice.’…
“Shea criticized the order that abuse allegations should be investigated only in secret tribunals. ‘They are imposing procedures and secrecy on these cases. If law enforcement agencies find out about the case, they can deal with it. But you can’t investigate a case if you never find out about it. If you can manage to keep it secret for 18 years plus 10 the priest will get away with it,’ Shea added.”
When Pope Benedict XVI made his first visit to the United States in April 2008, he told reporters on his plane on the way to Washington, DC, that the sexual abuse of children “is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the church in general and for me personally that this could happen.” He said, “As I read the histories of those victims, it is difficult for me to understand how it was possible that priests betrayed in this way. Their mission was to give healing, to give the love of God to these children. We are deeply ashamed and we will do what is possible that this cannot happen in the future.”
Drawing a distinction between priests with homosexual tendencies and those inclined to molest children, the pontiff said, “I would not speak at this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia, which is another thing. And we would absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry.”
Asserting that anyone guilty of pedophilia “cannot be a priest,” he said that church officials were going through the seminaries that train would-be priests to make sure that those candidates have no such tendencies. “We’ll do all that is possible to have a strong discernment, because it is more important to have good priests than to have many priests,” he said. “We hope that we can do, and we have done and will do in the future, all that is possible to heal this wound.”
The Vatican archives and the annals of Christianity going back almost two thousand years contain accounts of the struggle with sexual misdeeds. In the year A.D. 390, Emperor Valentinian II was strongly influenced by his Christian beliefs when he decreed that men committing sodomy “shall expiate a crime of this kind in avenging flames in the sight of the people.” In eighth-century England, a book that referred to sexual crimes committed by clerics against children, the Penitential Bede, advised that clerics who committed sodomy with children be given severe penalties, depending on their rank. In A.D. 1179, a Church council decreed that clerics who had committed “sins against nature” be confined to a monastery for life or be forced to leave the Church. In the sixteenth century, Pope Pius IV issued the first papal decree condemning solicitation of sex by priests. The next major statement of Church law, Sacramentum Poenitentiae, issued on June 1, 1741, by Pope Benedict XIV, decreed that all attempts by priests to lead congregants into sex be condemned. In 1917, a code was promulgated containing language condemning solicitation. Legislation on the subject of sexual solicitation was issued again in 1922.
At the time of the discovery of Pope John XXIII’s 1962 secrecy edict in 2003, The New York Times News Service reported, “The sex-abuse crisis that engulfed the Roman Catholic Church during the past twelve months has spread to nearly every American diocese and involves more than 1,200 priests, most of whose careers span a mix of church history and seminary training. These priests are known to have abused more than 4,000 minors over the past six decades, according to an extensive New York Times survey of documented cases of sexual abuse by priests through Dec. 31, 2002. The survey, the most complete compilation of data on the problem available, contains the names and histories of 1,205 accused priests. It counted 4,268 people who claimed publicly or in lawsuits to have been abused by priests, though experts say there are surely many more who have remained silent. But the data show that priests secretly violated vulnerable youth long before the first victims sued the church and went public in 1984 in Louisiana. Some offenses date from the 1930s.”
According to Los Angeles Police Department Complaint # BC307934, filed December 17, 2003, from 1955 through 2002 at least twenty-eight priests within the LA Archdiocese inner circle accused or convicted of sex abuse, “occupied the highest positions.” The complaint stated, “Well placed priests including Bishops Juan Arzube and G. Patrick Ziemann ‘used their prominence in the archdiocese administration to cover up for other priests. Priests involved in education such as Leland Boyer and Gerald Fessard utilized their positions of authority to gain access to victims and then to funnel the children they molested into seminaries and the priesthood. These twenty-six priests and likely many others occupied positions such as Auxiliary Bishops, Vicar for Clergy, Vicars General, deans, and teachers at local seminaries and as recruiters for seminaries. The elevation of child molesters to these positions helps explain why so many child-molesting priests were protected by the Defendant Doe Archdiocese, how so many child molesters became priests, and how so many seminarians and priests became child molesters.”
Jeffrey Anderson, a Minnesota attorney who specialized in sexual abuse civil suits, was aware of more than three hundred civil claims against Catholic priests in forty-three states through 1991, and had handled eighty cases himself. Catholic reporter Jason Berry had tracked at least one hundred civil settlements by the Catholic Church in the years 1984–90, totaling $100 million to $300 million. Roman Catholic canon attorney Father Thomas Doyle estimated that about 3,000 Roman Catholic priests had been pedophiliac abusers of children (an average of sixteen priestly sex abusers per diocese).
Baltimore psychotherapist and former priest A. W. Richard Sipe, author of A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy, made a comprehensive study of the sexual conduct of priests. He reported, “Estimated chances that a Catholic priest in the United States is sexually active: one in two.” Sipe studied 1,000 priests and 500 of their “‘lovers’ or victims.” He found that “20 percent of priests were involved in sexual relationships with women, 8 to 10 percent in ‘heterosexual exploration,’ 20 percent were homosexual with half of them active, 6 percent were pedophiles, almost 4 percent of them targeted boys.”
Offices of the national monthly Freethought Today in Madison, Wisconsin, reported receiving three to four newspaper clippings per week from readers detailing a new criminal or civil court accusation against a priest or Protestant minister. It had surveyed reported cases in North America during the years of 1988 and 1989 and found 250 reported cases of criminal charges involving child-molesting priests, ministers, or ministerial staff in the United States and Canada. Of the accused clergy, seventy were Catholic priests (39.5%) and 111 were Protestant ministers (58%).
Although priests made up only about 10 percent of North American clergy, they were 40 percent of the accused. With outcome unknown in about a fifth of the cases, the study found that “88 percent of all charged clergy were convicted (81 percent of priests were convicted)…. A majority of the cases did not go to trial…. Three quarters of all clergy who pleaded innocent were found guilty. About half of the Catholic priests pleading innocent were convicted.”
The study revealed that Catholic priests were acquitted or dismissed of child molestation charges at a higher rate than Protestant ministers. Similarly, Catholic priests received a higher rate of suspended sentences when convicted, and when sentenced, spent considerably less time in jail or prison.
Angela Bonavoglia, author of the book Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church, noted that many Catholic priests around the world—in Mexico, Latin America, Africa, and the United States—were involved in consensual relationships with women. Many other priests were involved in consensual relationships with adult men. “It is obvious that the crisis in the Church is much larger than pedophilia or the sexual abuse of minors,” she wrote. “It is about crimes and criminals, sex and power, yes. But fundamentally, it is about hypocrisy. By forbidding priests who choose to be sexual in mature ways that include commitment, responsibility and respect, and by protecting them from the costs of their sexual exploits, the Church has effectively condoned a clerical sexual free-for-all. That heterosexual and homosexual behavior may thrive in the Catholic priesthood does not reflect anything inherent about