“The rise in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s” was due to the “social and sexual turmoil” in “society in general” according to a new report commissioned by the US Catholic Bishops scheduled to be released today.
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice report on the “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse by Minors by Catholic Priests 1950-2010” is a follow-up to the report they released in 2004 which provided just statistics about what has been repeatedly and correctly referred to as the greatest crisis in the Catholic Church since the Reformation. Obviously, the biggest problem with both studies is that they relied entirely on information provided by the bishops themselves – kind of like asking Republicans to provide data and an accurate assessment on the “causes and context” of our economic problems.
However, there is no reason to doubt that the number of children brutalized by the Catholic clergy didn’t spike during those two decades because, in fact, there were more priests and more chidren in parochial schools and involved in parish activities during that time.
The number of priests in the US more than doubled between 1930 and 1965 and reached a peak in 1975. (Since then the number of priests has fallen by almost a third.) Similarly, due to the post-WWII Baby Boom, “by 1965 roughly half of all Catholic children in America attended Catholic elementary schools.” (The number of Catholic elementary school pupils has fallen by more than 40% since 1975. The number of Catholic high schoolers has dropped 30%.)
A support group for clerical sex abuse victims, the National Survivor Advocates Coalition, also made the valid point in their press release issued this morning that it takes decades, if ever, for children who have been raped and sodomized to come to terms with their horrific past, typically not until their 30s and 40s although for many it’s even longer. “That puts anyone abused in the 1980s at just the brink of their ‘going public’ time frame.”
For those who are familiar with my blogs, I hope you will indulge me for including the information that the $1.8 million study was paid for by the “bishops, Catholic foundations, individual donors and a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice,” as reported by theAP. Additionally, I will remind the readers that their tax dollars have paid not only for all the law enforcement and judicial personnel necessary to apprehend and try these criminals, but also much of the unemployment, disability and medical expenses of the tens of thousands of victims whose lives were ruined by the Catholic Church.
There will be much, much more reporting and discussion on this latest John Jay Report. The rightwing will tout that the report refutes that celibacy is a cause of sexual abuse, even though the progressive argument has been that celibacy is one of the root causes of the clerical culture which causes, not sexual perversity, but the “system” which aided and abetted the perpetrators. Liberals can applaud that the report confirms that the reason there were more boy than girl victims was because priests had more proximity and opportunity to attack boys, not because the criminals were homosexual.
*But now you know enough not to “blame Woodstock,” a brilliant phrase written by Laurie Goodstein in today’s New York Times.