Coming Home

WARNING: GRAPHIC AND EXPLICIT SEXUAL CONTENT AND LANGUAGE!!!

I have earned the right to say what I am about to say. I spent seven years of my life in my twenties working with homeless teens at Covenant House in New York City’s Times Square. Five of those years were spent working with unwed mothers, and the last two working on what was at the time the only residential treatment facility in the US for adolescents with HIV/AIDS. Many of the children with whom I worked had worked on the streets as prostitutes, male and female.

In the quiet moments at night, when my family are all asleep and I am alone with my thoughts, my mind periodically drifts back to those seven long years in a job where most people lasted no more than 2-3 years. As a husband and a father of three small children, one boy and two girls, I cannot but help to reevaluate those experiences through the prism of my fatherhood.

Memories of abused children become unbearable now. I simply cannot fathom such evil. It’s all around us. The hyper-sexualization of society is a demonic force from the pit of hell itself. The sexual revolution has been a war aimed at us, humanity. It has torn apart our dignity, reducing us to an animal level.

I recall one day at Covenant House when I was filling in for someone on a unit for males 17-20 years old, a young man came up to another resident outside of my office and spoke of a young girl whom he met in the dining room and went with to an unused platform at the Port Authority Bus Terminal to have sex. His exact words have never left me:

“Yo B. I doged that bitch brother! I doged that bitch!!”

{Emphasis his. He invented a new verb: To Dog}

Not a shred of human reference or dignity in either that statement, or the location where he paid his canine courtesies.

What have we become?

Against this nuclear meltdown of Western Civilization has come the revelation that a minority of Catholic Clergy, mostly homosexuals, have committed unspeakable atrocity against prepubescent children. According to the John Jay study, 4% of Catholic clergy have been accused over the past 50 years. You can read the report here.

Here is the victim tally from the study, from an accounting of every diocese’s Priest personnel file for the past 50 years:

GENDER OF ALLEGED VICTIM
Gender Count % of Total
Male 8,499 80.9%
Female 2,004 19.1%
Transsexual 2 .0%
Total 10,505 100.0%

Each and every one of these cases represents a life destroyed, a family destroyed. Not one should ever be minimized. Not one.

I’ve seen firsthand the terrible destruction wrought by predators. Now as a father, it’s simply more than I can stand to have to recall as I contemplate my children’s innocence. The thought of perverting that innocence stirs outrage, and we have been right to register that outrage during these many years since the first revelations emerged in the mid-’80’s.

Cleaning Up

To her credit, the Church has cleared out the backlog of cases and begun a painful and often bankrupting process of accountability toward the victims and their families. Catholics of good will pray that this helps to facilitate healing and wholeness. The Church has also instituted appropriate oversight and reporting practices for moving into the future.

When Pope John Paul II’s health all but incapacitated him in the final years of his life it was Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, who began to streamline the process of adjudicating cases of Priests who stood accused and laicizing the guilty. Pope Benedict XVI has apologized repeatedly to victims in private audiences and cried with them. He continues the program of accountability. The first thing Benedict did when he became Pope was to do a visitation of the American Seminaries and restructure the screening process for seminarians.

Perversely, that’s problematic for some.

Piling On

For some, this is not enough. Some want the resignation of this Pope, of Bishops. Many speak of “power sharing” with the laity, a Congregationalist model of ecclesiology. It says something when liberal Jews such as Alan Dershowitz and former NYC Mayor Ed Koch come out swinging in defense of the Pope, accusing the chorus of being unfair and having ulterior and base motive.

Many of those piling on the Pope and accusing him of baseless allegations speak of holding the Church to her own high moral standard.

Really?! Who would have guessed that the New York Times cared so much for Rome maintaining its moral integrity?

For the Times, this might have been about children’s safety at some point, but that point is long since past. The same for the many dissident Catholic groups and individuals who spout the left’s party line. This now has nothing to do with children’s safety. This now is all about tearing apart the Bishops, the Popes, the Curia. This is about demolishing the credibility of the Church to advance the Culture of Death without the major opponent: Rome.

What this is certainly not about is the safety of children. If it were, then these same people who are pounding on Benedict would harness their outrage at Rome to the problems faced by children throughout society.

By The Numbers

Consider the following assessment of child sexual abuse in the U.S. vs. U.K. from a well-footnoted article at Nation Master:

United States and Europe
Child sexual abuse occurs frequently in Western society.[88] Prevalence estimates range between 10% in the UK[89] and up to 62% for females and 16% for males in the United States.[90][91] The US Department of Health and Human Services reported 83,600 substantiated reports of sexually abused children in 2005.[92][93] The total number of incidents that were not reported is even larger.[94]

Get the rest of the article and references here.

Another site posts these numbers from the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect:

Incidence: In 2003, there were 78,188 victims of sexual abuse in the U.S. (USDHHS, 2005). This is a rate of 1.2 per 1,000 American children (Douglas & Finklehor, 2005).

In 2003 10% of all confirmed child abuse cases in the U.S. were sexual abuse cases. (USDHHS, 2005).

Between 1992 and 2000 the annual number of substantiated sexual abuse cases dropped from 149,800 to 89,355, a 40% decline. Researchers believe a real decline, as opposed to changes in reporting trends or data collection, is responsible for this drop (Finklehor & Jones, 2004).

Victims: Girls are sexually abused three times more often than boys (Sedlak & Broadhurst, 1996).

Perpetrators: More than 90% are men (Douglas & Finklehor, 2005). But, sexual abuse by women may be underreported. About 50% of abusers are acquaintances or friends. About 25% – 33% of child sex abusers are family members and from 7% to 25% are strangers (Douglas & Finklehor, 2005).

The Protestant Churches, as detailed here and here have a problem at least as bad as Rome’s.

If these same people who are pounding on Benedict truly cared for children, they would be outraged at a US Department of Education study by Dr. Charol Shakeshaft, which shows that 9.6% of public school children will be victims of inappropriate sexual conduct sometime during their 12 years of schooling. {*Shakeshaft, C, “Educator Sexual Misconduct: A Synthesis of the Literature”, U.S. Department of Education, 2004}

Of the ~50 million children in school today, that means 4,500,000 of these children will be victimized from behavior ranging from sexually abusive language to rape. That’s 375,000 children per year! Even if Dr. Shakeshaft’s detailed analysis of the literature led to a 10x overestimation of the problem, that would still leave 37,500 victims per year, or 450,000 over a twelve year period compared to the John Jay study that showed 11,000 credible allegations against Catholic clergy over half a century.

Worse still, the study tells of the common practice of silently moving pedophile teachers around in the same manner the Bishops moved pedophile Priests.

Moreover, the number of cases involving Catholic clergy have slowed dramatically since the 1980’s. Thus has the problem within the clergy been resolving, thanks entirely to the publicity it has received, since the first wave of revelations became public twenty-five years ago.

Too Much Of A Good Thing

The publicity has been a genuine good. But too much of a good thing can be counter-productive, depending on one’s motive.

The argument here is not for less vigilance within the Church. Nor is the argument here an attempted deflection of blame by saying, “What about the other guys who are doing it?”. Those are absurd allegations being made by those who wish to cow common-sense folks into silence in order to keep an exclusive focus on Rome for reasons that have nothing to do with the safety of children.

The argument here is why the outrage is so very selective, so very targeted over a quarter of a century, if ALL children’s safety is truly our concern. By all the objective data it is evident that the Catholic clergy’s contribution to the sexual abuse of minors is far below 1% of the victim count.

Thus, as a body, Catholic Priests are shown by the data to be the LEAST problematic group of any in consideration. Remarkable!

The numbers simply do not add up. Where is the outrage on behalf of the remaining 99% of the victims?! Don’t they matter?

I suspect, after 25 years, that the welfare of all children is NOT at issue with Rome’s most vociferous detractors {the victim’s groups being a strong exception}. Given the numbers presented here, if the scandal in the Church has of itself provoked such outrage, one cannot comprehend what a proportional outrage would look like were the magnitude of the problem in other quarters ever addressed.

Evil always overplays its hand, as it has done here. Most of those who have published wild allegations against the Pope and his predecessor in recent weeks have seen their stories evaporate under scrutiny. But truth has long since taken flight. Tell a lie often enough and people begin to believe it.

As I said at the outset, I’ve earned the right to demand answers to the questions posed here. I mopped up the mess left behind by thousands of adults who sexually savaged the children I cared for at Covenant House. Not one of those children ever named a Priest as a molester, which squares with all of the data mentioned here.

The truth is that the John Jay study shows Catholic clergy, at the worst, to have had no more than 4% of its members involved in this atrocity. That means that 96% of our clergy have NOT been involved.

Can we married people boast the same numbers for our vocation? With 50% of marriages ending in divorce, 40% of child sexual abuse occurring in the home, 9% of school children abused by teachers and staff, we should blush at the thought that we are somehow occupying the moral high ground with respect to the Catholic clergy.

The pedophiles have been exposed and cleared out. The Priests who remain are the men who live their vows with heroic fidelity and are entitled to our gratitude and respect for living lives of selfless service to the rest of us. They certainly have mine.

If we are serious at hunting down pedophiles and keeping children safe, then the data suggest that one not look to the pulpit, but the pews.