Happy New Year: abuse is back in the news

On Sunday morning, as on every morning of the year, I trekked outside to the foot of my driveway, picked up my local suburban newspaper, brought it into the house, removed the waterproof plastic wrapper, and unfolded it to see the front page.  What confronted me yesterday was this headline:

Hundreds of accused clergy left off church's sex abuse lists

The story, by Claudia Lauer and Meghan Hoyer of the Associated Press, is national in scope:

An AP analysis found more than 900 clergy members accused of child sexual abuse who were missing from lists released by the dioceses and religious orders where they served.

The AP reached that number by matching those public diocesan lists against a database of accused priests tracked by the group BishopAccountability.org and then scouring bankruptcy documents, lawsuits, settlement information, grand jury reports and media accounts.

Lauer and Hoyer spend a good deal of the remainder of the story endeavoring to explain how it is that there are nearly 1,000 gaps in published church records.  I'd encourage anyone interested in this topic to read through the article.

At the risk of tooting our collective horn here at NewGathering, we covered much of this ground earlier in 2019, when we looked at a list of alleged Illinois clergy offenders published by victims' advocates Jeff Anderson and Marc Pearlman, and then did a deeper dive on the specific question of dioceses reporting (or not reporting) religious-order offenders who work in the diocese.  I'd like to quote from that latter post to try to illustrate one aspect of the difficulty in compiling a single, comprehensive list of offenders:

We've seen that at least some dioceses are publicly reporting only those instances of abuse allegedly perpetrated by diocesan clergy.  To be sure, some religious orders also are making public the names of their members with substantiated allegations against them.  But the orders are doing this on their own, without coordinating the communication closely with dioceses.   This means that reporters and members of the faithful who wish to get a comprehensive picture of abuse in a particular diocese can't count on the diocesan website to be a "one-stop shop".  Unless a diocese includes both diocesan and religious order offenders on its website, a person seeking the information in question needs to know where else to look, because the diocesan website will provide only a partial picture.
A consumer of this information would need to know which religious orders operate (and/or formerly had operated) in a diocese to know which websites to check.  Religious orders, by and large, aren't bound by geographic territory, so an order or province of an order (or abbey, or ... each order has its own organizational structure) that publishes the details of its offender members may not organize its listing in a way that makes it clear which diocese offenders worked in.
For example: I checked the website of St. Meinrad Archabbey, a Benedictine abbey in Indiana that has supplied parish priests to a parish in Chicago.  The site lists the names of St. Meinrad priests with allegations against them, but doesn't state where the abuse took place.  A viewer would have no way of knowing, based on the information supplied at that site, whether or not any of the abuse happened in a Chicago parish or school setting.

To their credit, the team of AP reporters seem to have done substantial work to try to assemble and vet a single, comprehensive national list that incorporates clergy from dioceses and religious orders.  Their article highlights some of the major reporting gaps they encountered along the way.  Lauer and Hoyer point to one egregious example:

Richard J. McCormick, a Salesian priest who worked at parishes, schools and religious camps in dioceses in Florida, New York, Massachusetts, Indiana and Louisiana, has been accused of molesting or having inappropriate contact with children from three states. In 2009, his order settled the first three civil claims against him. Yet he does not appear on any list of credibly accused clergy members.

[...] 

The Salesians, based in New Rochelle, New York, have never posted a list of credibly accused priests.
“Our men who have been credibly accused and have had accusations have been listed in the various dioceses that we serve,” said Father Steve Ryan, vice provincial of the order.
Ryan said he was certain McCormick’s name appeared on several lists, including Boston’s.
But when Boston posted its list in 2011, Archbishop Sean Patrick O’Malley wrote that he was not including priests from religious orders or visiting clerics because the diocese “does not determine the outcome in such cases; that is the responsibility of the priest’s order or diocese.”

The article quotes victims' advocates and victims' attorneys who are highly critical of the church for this lack of coordinated information.  As we discussed earlier this year, some of this criticism undoubtedly springs from self-interest: having a single, unified source of data would make it easier for victims' advocates to pursue their work.

Likewise, it would seem to be in the institutional entities' self-interest not to be too helpful to groups that are seeking to sue them and to induce state governments to suspend statutes of limitations so that even more lawsuits can be filed.

But that attitude of self-interest by stonewalling and concealment has been pursued by virtually every institutional entity for the last 30 years, and the results have been disastrous for the Catholic church.  It's long past time for these entities to try the paths of cooperation, collaboration, transparency, and begging for forgiveness from victims.

I do believe that the sheer complexity of institutional church governing structure is a genuine barrier to the institution proactively assembling and publishing a list that would be similar to the AP's.  I am sure all of us agree (and perhaps many bishops would, too) that the Salesians should be publishing a list of priests from their order who are credibly accused.  But neither we nor the bishop can force the Salesian leadership to do so.  For that matter, the Salesian leadership may not be American and may not yet have learned the hard lesson that American church leaders have learned: when it comes to the abuse scandals, the only thing worse than transparency is opacity.

It seems likely enough that we'll need to continue to rely on reporters, lawyers and victims' advocates to learn the truth of historical abuse in the Catholic church.  And that's a shame.