Is the Roman Catholic Church finally getting its act together when it comes to protecting children from sexual abuse by clergy?
Good lord, I want to believe so. Yet after watching two press conferences on Tuesday, I have a notebook full of questions.
The first press conference was in Washington, where report cards were handed out on virtually every Roman Catholic diocese in the nation, 191 of them. Ratings were given as to how each diocese has performed in the protection of children since a sex-abuse scandal of epic proportions began in Boston in early 2002 and ended up reaching dioceses in every corner of the country.
In response to thundering public outrage, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops approved the appointment of a lay review board, which in turn hired one of the FBI’s most respected deputy directors, Kathleen McChesney. Her job was to organize an audit of every diocese in the country. On her instruction, 54 former law-enforcement agents, most of them FBI trained, fanned out to assess just how well the Catholic Church was doing in setting up now-mandated policies and procedures to prevent the molestation of children and young people by clergy or others attached to the church.
The good news is that 90 percent of all dioceses, including Chicago, are judged to be in compliance with the new rules and the other 10 percent, according to McChesney, are working on problems identified by auditors.
Surprisingly, some questions were not well answered at the Washington new conference.
How many priests have been removed because of abuse since the new rules were put into place? William A. Gavin, whose Boston-based company conducted the audit, said he didn’t know. Nor, he said, were personnel files reviewed “due to the sensitivity to laws and privacy.”
Let’s be clear. No audit can do everything and while this is an important first step it is also absolutely clear how many more steps have yet to be taken, including figuring out how to better find and reach out to victims.
One of the most important recommendations of this audit urges bishops to keep better track of offending priests who have been removed from service. Is this something the bishops will willingly adopt?
Here, Bishop Wilton Gregory, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, seemed to have trouble giving a direct answer. There’s a good reason for that. There is and has been genuine, sometimes strong, disagreement among bishops about how far the reforms should go and how much a board of lay people gets to tell them what to do.
One critical question was not asked at the Washington press conference. It has to do with religious orders. This is something that confuses Catholics and non-Catholics alike. There are two kinds of priests: diocesan and religious. The former work mostly in parishes and answer to bishops. The latter, such as Jesuits or Carmelites, work as missionaries or teachers and answer, not to the bishops, but to the superiors of their orders.
Amazingly, though diocesan priests were part of the current audit, religious priests were not, even though they make up a third of all Roman Catholic priests in America. How come? Good question.
The answer is that diocesan and religious priests are actually independent of each other. As it turns out, the religious orders have decided to do their own study. It is not underway but in the planning stages.
Why is that important?
Let’s go to that second news conference.
Jimmy Lago, the archdiocesan chancellor, took reporters questions here in Chicago and along the way offered this promising fact: that there have been no contemporary accusations against diocesan priests in Chicago spanning the last 10 years. All the current cases stem from alleged abuse decades ago.
But wait a minute.
WMAQ-TV Ch. 5 reporter Mary Ann Ahern had her hand in the air. Weren’t there two priests removed based on recent charges in the last few years?
Well, yes, said Lago. But there were not Chicago diocesan priests.
One of those priests, he said, was a “religious,” the other an “extern,” which is to say a priest from another diocese other than Chicago.
The lesson here is pretty simple. Every word and number in this audit, every word and number in two more reports scheduled for release next month, will be scrutinized by a skeptical laity and a questioning press corps.
The Roman Catholic Church and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Chicago Archdiocese, for that matter, have taken extraordinary steps over the years to address horrific wrongs. But this audit is just one more example about how numbers only mean something if all of the numbers are counted, if all of the data is gathered.
To most of us, a priest is a priest. Not a religious. And not a diocesan. Those are distinctions with no difference to the people in the pews.
If there is now zero tolerance for priests who abuse, there is close to zero tolerance for bishops and archdioceses when it comes to delivering all the details, no matter how hard they will be to hear.
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