THE CURRENT CLERGY ABUSE CRISIS

The History

In 306 AD at the Council of Elvira, held in what is now known as Granada, Spain, a church law was adopted against clerics having sex with boys, decreeing that an offender was to punished by being deprived of receiving communion, even on his death bed, with the cleric becoming separated or excommunicated from the religion. There are three notable, interesting things about this.

First, in that era the church only adopted laws and issued edicts on matters of extreme importance, thus it is apparent the pattern of clerics sexually abusing children was extensive at that time.

Second, the Council of Elvira took place seven years before Emperor Constantine officially recognized Christianity as the official religion of the Empire, giving birth to what was thereafter known as The Holy Roman Catholic Church – widespread clergy sex abuse of children was a serious issue in the religion even before Christianity became known as the catholic or universal church.

Finally, this codified prohibition against clerical child sex abuse was issued seventeen years prior to the Council of Nicea that announced the divinity of Christ and the existence of the Trinity. Clergy child sex abuse has been part of the fabric of the religion, as dark as the black cloth of priestly garb worn today, since the earliest days of the religion, pre-dating the official formation of the church as well at its claim of Christ’s divinity and the existence of a divine trinity.

Vatican documents prove that in every century since the beginning of the fourth century to the present there exists evidence of what is now termed clergy child sex abuse. Many popes, with the exception of those pontiffs who themselves engaged in child sex abuse, popes who sodomized young boys and raped young girls, have issued edicts and other proclamations decrying the perverted practice of priests sexually abusing children. Sexual perversion in the priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church was an issue in the Protestant Reformation five hundred years ago as allies of Martin Luther promulgated writings on the subject.

As the evidence that great crises and immense scandals involving clergy child sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church have existed for centuries is overwhelming, substantiated by Vatican documents, it is apparent there has been a great failing of worldwide media for over three decades as they have uniformly and consistently referred to the current clergy child sex abuse crisis as something that is new, something of the modern era that first arose in the United States at the beginning of this century, in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2002, when the current crisis clearly began in the state of Louisiana in 1984, with a case that was carefully monitored at the highest levels of the church. This historical human rights abuse crisis and scandal should always be referred to by media as the “current” clergy sex abuse crisis for the issue has always existed and been prevalent among priests, dating back at least to 306 AD.

The worst failing of media was being deferential to the church and being compliant with the church in a great deception relating to a core issue of the crisis. From the first day of the current sex abuse scandal, the focus should have been on the bishops and hierarchy of the church all the way to the Vatican. For decades the church hierarchy has successfully engaged in a perverse chess match with parishioners, press, prosecutors and the public at large as the hierarchy sacrificed pawns, sex abusing priests, to protect bishops who empowered and enabled the criminal priests and covered-up their crimes. Those bishops who are guilty of having covered-up sex crimes committed by clergy belong in prison cells alongside the convicted criminal priests.

The Numbers

The numbers are now well known, a matter of public record. In July, 2014, Pope Francis stated that two percent of Catholic priests are pedophiles, priests who sexually abuse pre-pubescent children. The church has always minimized every number associated with the scandal, often outright lying about the extent of the crisis, thus it is certain this percentage is higher than two percent, and added to that would be the percentage of priests who sexually abuse adolescents, post-pubescent children (the church freely admits far more priests sexually abuse post-pubescent adolescents than pre-pubescent children).

Secular studies put the percentage of priests who sexually abuse children and minors closer to five percent. Given that there are over 400,000 Catholic priests in the world, this means there are at least 20,000 priests who have or are committing heinous sex crimes against children.

It is well established in clinical data that a child sex abuser in a position of trust as a priest will leave a trail of many victims in their wake. The priest involved in the first case in the current crisis and scandal admitted that he had hundreds of victims, saying, “I had sex with a boy every day I was a priest.”

The numbers raise an obvious question. Could any other institution or organization remain in business for a single day after admitting that thousands of its executive officers whose moral fitness had been certified through ordination, priests, had committed millions of heinous, felony sex crimes against hundreds of thousands of innocent children that were covered up by its CEOs, bishops, and Board of Directors, the curia in the Rome, costing the institution or organization billions of dollars? This kind of admission would have destroyed any other organization overnight.

That great damage has been done to the church is beyond question; the current crisis and scandal led to the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the defection of millions of the faithful from the church, and the creation of a massive cash flow crisis, as well as causing a drastic decline in vocations, the number of students studying for the priesthood, and causing financial losses in excess of four billion dollars. The real cost is far greater.

Victims – The True Cost

A person who is sexually abused as a child will die a thousand deaths in their lifetime. When the person who sexually abuses the child is a priest, one in a position of absolute trust, God’s representative on earth in the eyes of the child whose life is being destroyed, a man accorded the highest respect by the family of the child and the community surrounding the child, the damage done to the child is inestimable, incalculable, unimaginable to all but those who suffer a lifetime of pain as a result of having God’s greatest gift that only resides in children, innocence, rippled from their hearts.

These atrocities do not rise to the level of the mass killing of millions during the holocaust at the hands of Nazis, or the slaughter in the killing fields of Cambodia, the millions of deaths in tribal wars in the Congo and other instances of genocide on a scale so great that it assaults the sensitivity of man to the point that most look away just as many look away from this current clergy child sex abuse crisis as it is literally too incomprehensible to contemplate for most people. What kind of religious institution could inflict such pain on innocents for centuries?

It’s a religious institution whose stated mission is healing. When the church inflicts the greatest damage imaginable, destroying the lives of children, the church fails the children, fails mankind, and fails God and Jesus Christ from whom they claim their moral authority, while the church hypocritically attempts to heal itself by secreting its sins and presenting a false image to the world, rationalizing that the suffering of the innocents is inconsequential compared to protecting its image and avoiding scandal to Holy Mother Church, believing the church is a law unto itself and above all laws that apply to every person in secular society.

The collateral damage done by clergy child sex abuse extends not only to the families of the victims but also to Catholics who have received the sacraments from the hands of criminal priests and from the hands of criminal bishops who have covered-up the crimes of the priests. Receiving knowledge through public revelations that the family priest who baptized, married and buried family members, the one always thought of as being better than those he allegedly served, is in fact a demented, despicable criminal is soul shattering to those who have to accept this reality.

There are victims of clergy sex abuse who survive and it is documented that there are many who have not survived but who have died by suicide. Government and church commissions in Belgium, Australia, Ireland and other countries have documented many suicides of child victims, and court cases and media reports in the United States have also documented cases of victims taking their own lives.

It is also documented that people who have been caught up in the current clergy sex abuse crisis have been murdered by priests. In one well-known case in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, a beauty queen who had confessed her sins during Holy Week was raped and murdered by her confessor, a crime covered-up by the bishop spiriting the killer from the legal jurisdiction. An award-winning documentary film chronicles the murder of a young, idealistic nun in Baltimore, Maryland who was on the verge of exposing her killer for the crimes he’d committed in sexually violating young girls. In the Netherlands, dozens of young orphans were found dead in their beds over a short period of time by nuns who later described the priest in charge of the orphanage as having been a sadistic monster. These Dutch children lost their lives, but the horrors visited on Dutch children also included horrors for some boys who lived as it was revealed that in some cases when young orphan boys complained of being sexually abused by priests, they were admitted to Catholic hospitals and castrated as punishment. There are criminal cold murder cases in many jurisdictions, murders committed in an era when no one would suspect a priest was capable of killing a child, the best evidence is that the child-murder victim was last seen alive in the company of a priest.

It is important to note that priestly sex abuse also extends to targeted, vulnerable adults, primarily women, and the church has done all in its power to suppress information regarding these crimes. However, Pope Francis admitted that his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI had to disband an order of priests in France when it was discovered that these priests were holding nuns in sexual slavery.

The full list of horrors committed by Catholic priests throughout history is so long that it would fill volumes that would take up the shelving of a large library room. These crimes and sins have been known by every prelate who has ever served as a bishop, archbishop, cardinal, member of Rome’s curia, or been elevated to the papacy. The immense guilt rests like a heavy stone on every Catholic altar in the world all the way to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Pathology to The Millstone

Today it is well understood that the sexually abusive proclivities of those priests who rape children and adolescents is rooted in deep, dark pathology. They are among the sickest people on this planet, a scourge on society, men driven by a compulsive, destructive disorder that defies the understanding of ordinary men and women who are capable of rational thought, one of the worst illnesses known to mankind where the lives of children are superfluous, mean nothing as the lives of those innocents stand between the afflicted men and the gratification of their sordid, compulsive, sexual desires.

The conduct of bishops who have knowingly and willingly been complicit in the cover-up of these sickening clerical crimes is conduct that is also rooted in deep, dark pathology, for these bishops are as sick or sicker than the demented priests. These men who adorn their chests with pectoral crucifixes rationalize their despicable conduct as affirming the duty of their office that is to first do all in their power to avoid scandal to the church even if it means sacrificing the suffering of innocents whose souls are damaged beyond repair.

For centuries the trappings of the church, the robes worn by the prelates, and the clothes of its priests gave the ministry and the institution cover to protect the large culture of sex abusing clerics in this institution, a cover that was finally blown away in the current crisis in jurisdictions where a ten-year-old child is equal to a bishop in a court of law. But man’s law has not been sufficient grant justice to all victims or imprison all priests deserving of criminal punishment as well as bishops who have remained above the law, untouched by the criminal justice system, meaning one has to turn to God’s law.

The Bible addresses this in plain language. At Luke 17:2 it is written, “If he were thrown into the sea with a millstone tied to his neck, he would be far better off than facing the punishment in store for those who harm these little children’s souls.”

Though the failures of the judicial system have resulted in only a few of the many thousands of sex abusing priests being imprisoned for their crimes and only one monsignor serving a short time in prison for covering-up priestly crimes, it is clear what ultimate punishment is in store of sex abusing priests, and the bishops, archbishops, cardinals, curia and popes who cover-up their crimes. God’s law is clear; eternal damnation.