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Catholic World News News Feature

Study shows scope of US sex-abuse scandal February 27, 2004

Over 4,000 American Catholic priests have been charges with the sexual abuse of children in the past 50 years, according to a report to be released today by US bishops' conference.

At a Friday press conference in Washington, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops will formally release two studies on the sex-abuse scandal: a statistic analysis prepared by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and an analysis of those findings by the National Review Board commissioned by the US bishops.

As he presented the findings of the National Review Board, at the February 27 press conference, Washington attorney Robert Bennett said that there was "absolutely no excuse" for the failure of bishops to control priests who molested children. He argued that the scandal must be seen not as a personnel issue, but as an "age-old question fo right and wrong, good and evil."

In his own remarks, Bishop Wilton Gregory, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that the bishops are "doing everything possinle to see that it does not happen again."

The American bishops have already spent $572 million in legal damages and attorneys' fees to settle lawsuits brought by sex-abuse victims, the reports noted. That figure is artificially low, however, because it does not include some major settlement that occurred after the data were collected (such as the $85 million paid by the Boston archdiocese), and many lawsuits are still pending.

The report found that 80 percent of the abuse involved male victims. That percentage climbed steadily from the 1950s through the 1980s, while the number of incidents also increased. Sex-abuse charges were most commonly brought against priests ordained in the 1960s and 1970s, and among the priests ordained in 1970, one out of ten has been accused of molesting children.

More than half (56 percent) of the priests accused of sexual abuse were only cited for one alleged incident. A relatively small percentage of the accused molesters accounted for a huged number of victims; 149 priests who were multiple offenders were charged with 2,960 counts of sexual abuse.

The John Jay study showed that only 14 percent of the incidents of sexual abuse reported to bishops were brought to the attention of local law-enforcement authorities, and 95 percent of the perpetrators avoided criminal charges. Of those who did face charges, 64 percent were convicted.

In its analysis of the issue, the National Review Board noted that it could find no expressions of outrage in any of the correspondence between bishops and priests who had been accused of sexual abuse.

[CWN will provide fuller analysis of the reports as the information becomes available.]