The Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis

On 6 January 2002 the Boston Globe reported that the archdiocese of Boston had moved a priest, John Geoghan, from parish to parish while aware of his record of abusing children, and that Cardinal Bernard Law had approved one such transfer in 1984 (Boston Globe, 6 January 2002). The attorney general of Massachusetts began an investigation that month (Massachusetts Attorney General, Report on the Archdiocese of Boston (2003) covering letter, p. 1). His report of July 2003 counted, in the archdiocese’s own records, at least 789 victims who had complained to it of abuse going back to 1940, and, from those and other documents, allegations against at least 237 priests and thirteen other archdiocesan workers (Massachusetts Attorney General, Report on the Archdiocese of Boston (2003) pp. 11–13). It found no basis for criminal charges against the archdiocese or its senior managers (Massachusetts Attorney General, Report on the Archdiocese of Boston (2003) p. 22), and attributed the abuse to “an institutional acceptance of abuse” and a failure of leadership (Massachusetts Attorney General, Report on the Archdiocese of Boston (2003) covering letter, p. 2, and Finding No. 3, p. 25). Law resigned in December 2002 (Massachusetts Attorney General, Report on the Archdiocese of Boston (2003) p. 30).

The bishops of the United States, through a lay review board, commissioned a national study from John Jay College (John Jay Report (2004) Executive Summary, pp. 3–4). From church records it counted allegations, for the years 1950 to 2002, against 4,392 priests, about 4 per cent of those in ministry, made by 10,667 people (John Jay Report (2004) Executive Summary, pp. 3–4).

An Irish state commission on residential institutions run by religious congregations concluded in 2009 that sexual abuse was “endemic in boys’ institutions”, that cases were managed so as to limit public disclosure, and that offenders were transferred to other places where, in many instances, they were free to abuse again (Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, Report (2009) vol. IV, ch. 6, paras 6.18–6.22). By the end of May 2017 an Australian royal commission had heard 6,875 survivors in private sessions, of whom 4,029 spoke of abuse in religious institutions (Australian Royal Commission, Final Report (2017), vol. 16 summary, ‘Private sessions information’): 2,489 in Catholic institutions (Australian Royal Commission, Final Report (2017), vol. 16 summary, ‘Catholic Church’) and 594 in Anglican ones (Australian Royal Commission, Final Report (2017), vol. 16 summary, ‘Anglican Church’). It calculated that, allowing for length of ministry, 7 per cent of the Catholic priests it surveyed who ministered between 1950 and 2010 were alleged perpetrators (Australian Royal Commission, Final Report (2017), vol. 16 summary, ‘Catholic Church’). A Pennsylvania grand jury in 2018 found credible allegations against over three hundred priests in six dioceses and more than a thousand identifiable victims, and described a common practice of concealment (Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report (2018) pp. 1–3).

In April 2001 John Paul II had reserved cases of clerics abusing minors to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, whose prefect was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger; as Benedict XVI he approved revised norms in 2010 (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Historical Introduction to the Norms (2010)). That year he wrote to Irish victims that he was “truly sorry” (Benedict XVI, Letter to the Catholics of Ireland 6), and told the Irish bishops that some of them and their predecessors had failed, at times grievously, to apply canon law to the crime of child abuse (Benedict XVI, Letter to the Catholics of Ireland 11). Francis wrote in 2018 that the church “did not act in a timely manner” (Francis, Letter to the People of God (2018) 1). In 2019 he obliged clerics and religious to report abuse to church authorities, and set a procedure for investigating bishops, including for acts or omissions intended to obstruct investigations (Francis, Vos estis lux mundi arts. 1 §1, 3 §1, 6).

Outside the Catholic Church, an independent report of 2022 found that, for almost two decades, people who reported abuse to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee met resistance from some within it, and that a few senior leaders were focused on avoiding liability (Guidepost Solutions, Report on the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee (2022) Executive Summary, pp. 3–4).