A church coming to terms with abusers in its midst

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
July 2, 2013

Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki warned Catholic parishioners to "prepare to be shocked" by revelations in a trove of documents released Monday related to the church's sex abuse scandal.

He was right. The details in thousands of pages of depositions, personnel files and letters are profoundly disturbing.

Equally disturbing is something else the documents reveal: a pattern of willful neglect stretching across decades within church hierarchy.

Church officials moved accused priests from one parish to another, often accompanied by cordial letters; they failed time after time to notify authorities; they maintained what even bishops describe in depositions as a culture of silence; they paid priests to leave the priesthood; and they moved money, apparently, to protect it from the claims of victims.

Even now, we wonder if the hierarchy really gets it: In his letter last week, Listecki wrote that "the arc of understanding sexual abuse of a minor" had evolved over the years. Really? Does he mean that church officials once did not consider abuse of a child to be criminal activity that needed to be dealt with directly and firmly? That sounds like an excuse, though Listecki probably did not mean for it to be.

In an interview with The New York Times, the Rev. James Connell, a priest in Sheboygan who formed the group Catholic Whistleblowers, challenged such thinking.

"I was in high school in the 1950s," he told The Times, "and I learned about statutory rape in high school. An adult having sexual activity with a minor is a crime. We knew about it then, so you can't claim that social thought changed."

The documents paint a picture of former Milwaukee Archbishops Rembert Weakland and Timothy Dolan, as well as former Auxiliary Bishop Richard Sklba, as men scrambling to protect priests, the church and its financial assets. And when they did try to remove priests — Dolan especially worked hard to do this several times — they were stymied by an unresponsive Vatican bureaucracy.

That bureaucracy was nimble enough, however, when Dolan asked permission — four years before the archdiocese filed bankruptcy — to move nearly $57 million in cemetery funds off the archdiocese's books and into a trust to help protect them "from any legal claim or liability," the documents show.

In a statement, Dolan, now cardinal of New York, denied that it was his intent to keep funds from victims seeking recompense; he called it an "old and discredited attack." But given the need of a bishop to balance the competing interests of church, parishioners, victims and clergy, it's hard to see his transfer of the funds as anything else. Even if Dolan was right to do what he did, and he might have been, the victims have a right to challenge that decision.

The bankruptcy court must take care to provide just compensation for those grievously harmed by clergy members without undermining parishes or the good work of the church and its institutions. Victims are entitled to compensation and substantial help to heal; in this system, that's how justice is apportioned — and victims have been denied justice far too long. However, they are not entitled to blank checks.

The documents provide validation for victims — as many of them said Monday — and reveal a church hierarchy that seemed far more interested in protecting the institution — and themselves in some cases — than in serving victims. It's a textbook case of what to do wrong at almost every step. The church and other institutions that deal with children (schools, athletic teams, recreational programs and counseling programs) need to use that textbook to build a better, safer environment for kids.

Church officials say they already have. And it's true that they have taken steps to protect children and to ensure a scandal of these proportions won't happen again. The Milwaukee Archdiocese maintains that there are no priests with substantiated allegations of sexual abuse currently in ministry.

It's also true that this is not just a problem confined to the Catholic Church. Other churches and other institutions have abusers among them. And often, those institutions have reacted in the same way that past Catholic leaders did. And it has to be noted that the abuse was perpetrated by a small minority of clergy.

Let us hope that the church — and every other institution that deals with children — has learned a painful lesson.

"I can tell you that under any legal or moral standard, the molestation of a child is wrong. Children must be protected at all costs (I think Jesus made that point)," former state Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske wrote in an online chat with the Journal Sentinel on Monday.

Indeed, he did.