Sir, - The sentencing of the Dublin priest for the sexual abuse of minors, together with the threatened civil actions against the Catholic Archdiocese, and the toll of 31 priests and religious brothers convicted in Ireland (June 24th), may serve to recall the glacial speed of the US bishops in dealing with this problem.
According to Jason Berry's award-winning Lead Us Not Into Temptation (1992), the pioneering study of the subject, the widespread problem of clerical paedophilia in the US had been foretold in a 1985 92-page report by a trial lawyer, a canon lawyer at the Vatican Nunciature in Washington, and a priest-psychiatrist, who termed it "the single most serious and far-reaching problem facing our church today." They warned that, by 1995, church losses would total $1 billion. There was no public response from the bishops.
In late 1987, an investigative reporter for a national newspaper chain, Carl M. Cannon, called the bishops' reluctance to address the problem a "time bomb waiting to detonate within American Catholicism."
The bishops did not speak out publicly, though, until February 1988 when, through a spokesman, and in language described by the psychologist Eugene Kennedy as "crafted to limit liability," they said that they were not unaware of the problem, as they had discussed it in closed sessions in 1985, 1986 and 1987.
In the 1980s, a general secretary of the bishops said that "paedophilia was not a problem." A bishop, blaming the messenger, invoked "God's power on the media". Another bishop pronounced that the "paedophilia annoyance" would eventually "abate."
But it did not, of course, and the bishops did go on to form a committee in 1992 to develop guidelines for dioceses to respond to what the New York Times has called the "scourge" of clerical sexual abuse.
However disastrous the financial losses for individual dioceses may be, though, whether in the US, Austria, Ireland, or elsewhere, they are as nothing compared with the magnitude of the loss of the church's credibility. - Yours, etc., E. Leo McManus,
Florida,
USA.