Cummins Institute Speaker Thomas Plante Addresses Clergy Abuse Assumptions
News reports about clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have risen substantially since the Boston Globe cast a spotlight on the subject in 2002, exposing a longstanding and unaddressed crisis in the city’s archdiocese. Later that year, in response to public outcry and increasing media coverage of the painful issue, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops established the Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, a comprehensive set of procedures to address allegations of sexual abuse of minors by clergy. Even so, focus on the crisis continued.
More recently, a grand jury investigation revealed widespread sexual abuse of children in six Pennsylvania dioceses, prompting similar investigations across the nation. In February, the Vatican called for a summit on sex abuse. Additionally, in response to parishioner calls for transparency, dioceses around the country, including San Francisco’s and Oakland’s, released the names of priests and other vowed religious who have been credibly accused of the sexual abuse of minors. As a result of the crisis, according to a Gallup poll conducted early this year, only 31 percent of Catholics now rate the clergy’s honesty highly, which is down from a 49 percent rating two years ago.
In early April, the Bishop Cummins Institute invited the highly respected Thomas Plante, PhD, to Saint Mary’s for a discussion on the crisis and public perceptions of Catholic clergy. Plante, who is Santa Clara University’s Augustin Cardinal Bea, SJ University Professor of Psychology, and who Time Magazine notes as one of three leading Catholics in his field, offered an address that countered recent media reports, explored statistics and myths, and provided a perspective rarely articulated, but one supported by his academic research.
According to Plante, sexual abuse of minors is no more prevalent among Catholic priests than it is among other adults who use their positions to prey on youth, including teachers, coaches, or scout leaders. He also noted that the best available data reports that 4 percent of Catholic priests sexually violated a minor child during the last half of the 20th century, with the peak level of abuse being in the 1970s and dropping off dramatically by the early 1980s. Furthermore, during the half century leading up to 2002, he noted that just 129 perpetrators accounted for almost a third of all known victims.
In comparison, Plante said U.S. Department of Education research shows 5 to 7 percent of public school teachers engaged in similar behavior with students during a similar time frame. He also noted a smaller-scale study that found 4 percent of Anglican priests had violated minors in western Canada. “Many reports have mentioned that clerical abuse of minors is common with other religious leaders and clerics as well,” he added.
The bottom line, Plante said, is “Child sexual abuse is a lot more common than you think it is, and it’s not more common among Catholic clerics than others. He said the numbers show about 5 percent of the male population sexually victimized minor children in the half century prior to the early 1980s. (It was in the ’80s that public awareness led to better training for identifying, mandatory reporting, and responding to sexual assault on children.)
Plante, the author of 17 books, and who serves as the editor for Spirituality in Clinical Practice, said there’s also a myth that celibacy and pedophilia are somehow connected. “People want to blame celibacy. Why? Because they know that what makes Catholics different than other religious leaders…is that Catholics are celibate.”
In addition to noting statistics that show Catholic clerics are not at a higher risk of being sex offenders than other groups, Plante added, “we know that about 80 percent of sex offenders are not clerics or celibates. They’re fathers, stepfathers, grandfathers, the older brother, the cousin…these are not celibates.” Plante also pointed out that many people in the general population refrain from having sex. “Think about it,” he said. “If you couldn’t or didn’t have sex with a consenting partner, would children become the object of your desire? Of course not; if anything, it would be other consenting adults.”
The third myth, Plante said, is the idea that homosexual clerics are the cause of pedophilia in the Church. Studies show that an estimated 5 to 6 percent of the American male population is gay. In the Catholic Church, it’s higher—somewhere between 25 to 45 percent.
“But that doesn’t cause pedophilia,” said Plante. “The sex-offending clerics of the day were what we call situational generalists—people who would sexually violate whatever was easy and convenient. They didn’t necessarily see themselves as homosexual or heterosexual. They were going to violate whoever they had access to.”
Plante pointed out a fourth myth—that many people believe the Church has really done nothing about sex offending at all. “But they have. They’ve used best practices since 2002,” he said, noting statistics that show incidents of clerical abuse in recent years (since 2002) are down to a trickle. In addition, he said about half of the new cases involve international priests who haven’t gone through the extensive training and screening that American priests now do.
“The Dallas Charter and subsequent Church reforms have resulted in a number of industry standard and even groundbreaking policies and procedures to keep children safe in Church-related activities and keep abusing priests out of ministry.”
Plante, who also is an adjunct clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, has evaluated or treated over 900 clerics or clerical applicants and serves on a lay review board that reviews every case of reported clerical problem behavior in the San Jose Diocese. He said there is a zero-tolerance policy now that mandates that any credible accusation of abuse be reported to law enforcement. The offending party must also be pulled from ministry and evaluated, and if accusations are found to be credible, the offending party can never return to ministry again.
Brother Charles Hilken, FSC, director of the Cummins Institute and sponsor of Plante’s lecture, saw the overall message as reassuring but cautionary. “The encouragement was that Catholic clergy are no more likely to abuse children than anyone else and that the Catholic Church in America, since 2002, has put in place strict policies for the reporting and removal of clerical abusers.” But Brother Charles said that regardless of the low percentage of clerical abusers, their ministry makes the abuse more egregious. “There are still structural changes to be made in Church governance in order to make ministry to children even safer.” He echoed Plante’s own words: “Keep the faith…but change the Church.”
Plante’s lecture was the third Saint Mary’s community conversation about the crisis in the Church. Karin McClelland, director of SMC’s Mission and Ministry Center, who helped coordinate two earlier campus conversations in the fall, agreed with the assessment of Brother Charles. McClelland called for a new path to healing and reconciliation that reinstates faith in the Catholic Church. “I truly hope that we at SMC can combine our wisdom, faith, and love to provide a venue/model for a reconciliation experience that reinstates our faith and trust in Catholic leadership.”