That 1985-2002 clergy-abuse gap (revisited)

June 15, 2012 By

As a rule, your GetReligionistas think that veteran religion-beat specialists do a consistently better job of getting the basic facts right, especially when their work is compared with general-assignment reporters who are shipped off to cover complicated stories that often have years, decades or centuries of past history.

At the top of the list of scribes whose work we frequently admire is Tim Townsend of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The man is a pro.

All of which makes we wonder if an editor or two monkeyed around with the top of the following story about the early work at the latest meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops. Pay close attention and think “history.”

ATLANTA – The U.S. Catholic bishops who gathered here for their annual spring meeting spent Wednesday morning grappling with the sins of the past, marking the 10th anniversary of the clergy sex abuse crisis that crippled the church. …

In June 2002, the bishops met in Dallas as the abuse scandal, which first erupted in Boston, was raging across the country.

The crisis began in 2002? That will be a shock to religion-beat veterans who have been covering the crisis since the mid-1980s, complete with magazine cover stories, a major book or two and even a made for television movie about one spectacular case that gripped the nation.

This brings us to Father Gilbert Gauthe and the following 1985 quotation from Time magazine (which I have quoted before):

Father Gilbert Gauthe, a Roman Catholic priest, delivered spellbinding funeral sermons, won local respect by rescuing a man who was trapped under an overturned tractor, and impressed many older women with his charm in Louisiana’s Vermilion Parish. But most of all, he was a Pied Piper for the children. He would take them on wilderness trips, play games and invite favored boys to spend the weekend in the rectory.

You know where that story is going to go.

Here’s the key: The Gauthe case was not the first. It was the case that lept into the national headlines, the first of many in the era between 1985 and 2002.

In other words, the public crisis began back then. The Boston furor in 2002 led to increased legal actions and more episcopal action on this issue IN PUBLIC, as opposed to behind closed doors. However, regional and even national press coverage of this hellish issue has roared to life several times since 1985.

In short, if the crisis is primarily about lawyers, it’s possible to say that it kicked into a higher gear in 2002.

If the crisis is primarily about children, about victims, then the crisis began in the 1980s and earlier.

Later in this story, readers are told the following about the board that the bishops finally created to work on this issue:

In a progress report released to the bishops … the National Review Board said that a decade after the crisis, “there has been striking improvement in the Church’s response to and treatment of victims.” But it also acknowledged that “much work still needs to be done.”

The board said in its report that in the past 10 years more than 15,000 victims of clergy sexual abuse had come forward. More told their stories each year. The incidences of abuse, it said, began to rise in the 1960s, peaked in the 1970s and declined sharply in the 1980s.

I guess one needs to ask: What is the nature of the crisis? The headlines began nearly three decades ago. The actual abuse raged for years before that.

To understand this story, readers need to know that public debate and news coverage about this crisis began in 1985. Period. That’s the date that reporters should use to start this timeline. That’s the size of this crisis.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Godbeat, People, Sex
About TMatt

Terry Mattingly directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. He writes a weekly column for the Scripps Howard News Service.

  • http://!)! Passing By

    People smarter than me have noted that two factors led to the explosion in 2002. First, location – Boston is not south Louisiana: think The Boston Globe, close relative to The New York Times. The second factor is the internet. Even in the mid-90s, the Rudy Kos scandal in Dallas didn’t kick off the national tremors of Boston. Part of that is simply the growth of communications.

    tmatt, this story is manifestly not “about kids”. For Catholics, it’s about the failure of our bishops to be good fathers and shepherds rather than CEOs protecting their corporation. The percentage of priests who did wrong is low; the percentage of bishops who did wrong is high.

    For those who hate us, it’s an opportunity. If it were about kids, victims, they would be looking at the larger context rather than scapegoating one entity. Fr. Conger’s post on the AP story illustrates that really well.

    And as always, it’s useful to read Phillip Jenkins’ Pedophiles and Priests, an analysis of social panic reaching back to the 30s and running through the Rudy Kos scandal in Dallas. I read it after the Boston scandals broke, and was fascinated to note that only the names changed. Reporting of the two scandals followed almost-identical scripts.

  • Julia

    The Diocese of Belleville IL lost nearly 10% of its priests in a sex abuse scandal which Wilton Gregory was sent to deal with in the early 1990s. This is how he came to head the USCCB and lead it’s official tries at dealing with the problem on a bigger stage.

  • Thomas A. Szyszkiewicz

    … The sex abuse crisis did not start under Blessed John Paul II. The records show that it started in the 1960′s and peaked around 1985, just about when it started receiving news coverage.

    I still remember the four or five-day series that the Minneapolis Star Tribune did on Father Thomas Adamson, a notorious pedophile with connections to Fall River, Mass., the Twin Cities and southern Minnesota, back in the late 80′s. Everyday at work, a copy of the paper would be on the breakroom table with a story starting on page 1 and the jump continuing on for another one to two full, dense pages of type (people still used to read back then). For all of the stir it caused around here, nothing much came of it on a national scale that I could tell.

    But anyone who knows anything about the Church knows that sin has never taken a vacation and that clergy have been abusing kids and adults throughout her history. It’s just one of the gazillion sins of which the Church’s members are guilty. So tmatt, the size of the crisis is actually much larger than that.

    Yet one thing which journalists will never be able to understand or convey without being accused of being partisan for the Church, is that, thanks be to God, God is infinitely larger than our sin.

  • Julia

    I guess nothing counts unless it’s in a major media center.

  • Carl

    Great catch. It makes more sense when compared to the story today that says in one reporters paraphrase: “The church, the thinking goes, needs to take control of its message, rather than allowing the press to dictate it.”

    The important word here … control. As if the church has not been out of control of its members or, in control of its message.

    Control is and has been the problem from time immemorial. Whether they fault media remessaging, or loose times of the 70s, or Vatican II there has never been a time when anyone imagined the Vatican was not in control.

  • http://www.tmatt.net tmatt

    Passing By, etc.

    The scandal outbreak in 1985 received MAJOR media attention — national. Television networks, magazines.

    There have been three or four major waves in the scandal, depending on how one wants to judge this.

    Thus, the 2002 “crisis begins” motif has to ignore a number of important facts. It’s simply wrong.

  • Carolyn Disco

    “To understand this story, readers need to know that public debate and news coverage about this crisis began in 1985. Period. That’s the date that reporters should use to start this timeline. That’s the size of this crisis.”

    I believe there is a real distinction between the pre-2002 coverage and what began on Jan. 6, 2002 in Boston. Just ask Jason Berry, the premier reporter who worked on the Gauthe case in 1985, and found a very lonely, highly frustrating effort to get anyone to pay sustained attention in the interim.

    Prior cases were far more isolated, and never reached anywhere near the more recent barrage of coverage. That was thanks to people like Marty Baron at the Globe who had the courage to proceed where deference to bishops and cardinals had deterred others.

    The real impetus for full-scale exposure came because of two women judges who ordered the release of secret documents in Boston: Constance Sweeney with the Geoghan files and Leila Kern with the Shanley files.

    Never before had such damning primary sources been available, according to Walter Robinson, head of the Globe’s investigation team. The paper spent $1 million in legal fees to achieve that end.

    The documents made it all possible. It was the courage of survivors in filing lawsuits against great odds that led to the judge’s rulings.

    Sexual abuse existed long before 2002 of course, but except for isolated sensational cases in the media, the breadth and depth of criminal activity and its cover-up was not made public until 2002 and beyond. After all, only 2% of priests were ever criminally convicted.

    Survivors celebrate Jan. 6 as the beginning of unprecedented attention finally being paid to what they endured. Over 700 priests were removed from ministry as a result. Investigations of dioceses by attorneys general, grand juries, and district attorneys never occurred before with such vigor. There should have been far more of them.

  • Passing By

    Tmatt,

    Of course there was publicity in 1985. What didn’t happen was the widespread reaction as described by Carolyn Disco. I agree with you that the media issue didn’t begin in 2002, but it did go into overdrive.

  • http://!)! Passing By

    I guess nothing counts unless it’s in a major media center.

    Sorry for multiple posts, this is so true.

    Think about the Episcopal parishes on the east coast that have gone Catholic, the coverage, and even the GetReligion analysis of that coverage. Compare that to the lack of coverage, even in backwater Fort Worth’s own newspaper, of this event, or even a sextuple diaconal ordination. Those six guys will be ordained priests June 30 at 9am. I’m waiting to see if that gets coverage.

  • Jimmy Mac

    Passing by: in 9 above you are talking about intramural activities with limited interest to the general reading public. I’s sure the local diocesan “newspaper” will cover this event as if it was the Second Coming.

    The ongoing horror that continues to unveil about the sexual abuse scandalS and the coverupS deserves wider dissemination, if, for not other reason than to alert people to what has happened and how to be on the look for signs of debilitating effects even today.

  • Passing By

    Jimmy Mac,

    I was comparing coverage of similar events in an east coast market like Baltimore and a market like Fort Worth.

  • http://pastoralresponse.org Sr. Katherine M. Donnelly

    As a member of a multidisciplinary team of highly skilled
    professionals in the field of child abuse, who have donated
    countless thousands of hours since 1992 to address the needs of all the members of the church family affected by the abuse by members of the clergy, I am amazed that the myth that the sexual abuse crisis began in the(promiscuous)1960′s still
    continues to surface.

    On a personal level, I have listened to the stories of countless elderly people grateful to find non-judgmental listeners with whom they feel they can share their stories.
    For many our presentations are the first time they have ever heard that “it is never the child’s fault” and they can begin to forgive themselves for not telling someone so
    that the other children of their perpetrator could have been spared the pain they have dealt with for decades.

    In the life of Saint Anthony of Padua published by the Daughters of Saint Paul for his 800th anniversary, there is reference to one of the early superiors of Anthony being a pedophile and Anthony was known for his compassion for victims.

    Abuse, of women and children particularly, has been with us since the beginning of recorded history. It is encouraging that the openness to discuss all forms of abuse has developed so significantly in recent years.