Catholic Church and Pedophilia (Part III)

Cases

In the late 1940s, the American priest Gerald Fitzgerald founded the Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete, a religious order that treats Roman Catholic priests who struggle with personal difficulties such as substance abuse and sexual misconduct. In a series of letters and reports to high-ranking Catholic leaders starting in the 1950s, Fitzgerald warned of substantial problems with abusive priests. He wrote, for example, "[sexual abuse] offenders were unlikely to change and should not be returned to ministry." He discussed the problem with Pope Paul VI (1963 – 1978) and "in correspondence with several bishops".

In 2001, the Vatican first required that sex abuse cases be reported to the Vatican hierarchy; before that, it left management of the cases to local dioceses.  After the 2002 revelation by the Boston Globe that cases of abuse were widespread in the Church in Massachusetts and elsewhere, The Dallas Morning News did a year-long investigation.   It reported in 2004 that even after these revelations and public outcry, the institutional church had moved allegedly abusive priests out of the countries where they had been accused but assigned them again to "settings that bring them into contact with children, despite church claims to the contrary". 

 Among the investigation's findings was that nearly half of 200 cases "involved clergy who tried to elude law enforcement."

The cases received significant media and public attention in the United States, Ireland (where abuse was reported as widespread), and Canada, and throughout the world.  In response to the attention, members of the church hierarchy have argued that media coverage has been excessive and disproportionate.   According to a Pew Research Center study, media coverage was generated mostly in the United States, beginning in 2002, with a Boston Globe series that published hundreds of news reports. By contrast, in 2010 much of the reporting focused on child abuse in Europe.

Non-disclosure

Church authorities are often accused of covering up cases of sex abuse. In many cases, as discussed in the sections on different countries, clergy discovered by Church authorities to be criminally offending are not reported to civil authorities such as the police. They are often merely moved from one diocese to another, usually without any warning to the authorities or the congregations at the destination. While offending clergy could be subject to action such as laicization, this is rare; the intention of the Church until recent times has been to avoid publicity and scandal at all costs.

In some cases offenders may confess their wrongdoing to a priest under the Sacrament of Penance. Church canon law unconditionally prohibits a priest hearing such a confession from making any disclosure about the existence or content of the confession to anybody, including Church and civil authorities—the "Seal of the Confessional". This obligation is taken very seriously throughout the Catholic Church; for example all serving archbishops in Australia told the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that they would not report to police a colleague who admitted in the confessional to child rape.  This is not always in contradiction with civil law; the law in many, but not all, countries confers confessional privilege, a rule of evidence that forbids judicial inquiry into certain communications between clergy and members of their congregation.