The Jay Report on priestly abuse

It’s probably unfair to comment too much on this new report based solely on a newspaper account of what it contains, but lacking an actual copy, take the following with that caveat.

1. The report, “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010,’’ was done by researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, paid for mostly by the Catholic Church itself and initially to be released to the US bishops. Some will probably find that suspicious, but let’s move on.
2. The report suggests the primary factor was societal: “the documented rise in cases of abuse in the 1960s and 1970s is similar to the rise in other types of ‘deviant’ behavior in society, and coincides with social change during this time period.”  Assuming it’s not a matter of changes in reporting levels (e.g., a change in societal mores, including reduced respect/deferral to authority, increased the number of abuse cases reported, not the number happening), this seems to be a modern way of saying “The Devil made me do it.”  Don’t blame the individuals involved, for heaven’s sake, blame the society in which they are living. That seems an odd theology. Plus, that one expects more from those taking holy orders, and, in fact, would expect a devotion to God to make priests less vulnerable to these sorts of temptations of the flesh, doesn’t seem to register.
3. The church policies on priestly celebacy are, according to the report, not to blame.
4. Nor would better screening at seminaries have helped, since there was no common profile. Nope, no responsibility on the church’s part there, either.
5. The report doesn’t seem to address any issues of the church hiding, shuffling around, or otherwise protecting the priests it knew were abusers (or, perhaps more properly, protecting  its reputation).  It does note that until the early 2000s, when all of this really broke open, the church seemed more interested in working with the abusers than with the victims.
6. More significantly, though, it blames (or tries to enlist pity for) the abusive priests themselves: “The report also states that poor training of priests, combined with social isolation, job stress, and few support mechanisms likely contributed to the abuse problem.” One would think those were all factors that were, in fact, under the church’s control, as demonstrated in the following sentence, “The decline of sexual abuse in the mid-1980s coincided with better training for seminarians in human sexuality and relationships.”
7. Disturbingly, the report downplays the child abuse aspect of the scandal, claiming that only 5% of cases involved pedophila.  It does this, though, by redefining the term.  Though most psychiatric associations consider pedophilia to involved youths age 13 or younger, the report uses 10 and younger as the classification.  Quoting the report, “The majority of victims were pubescent or postpubescent. Thus, it is inaccurate to refer to abusers as pedophile priests.” As the father of a daughter about to turn 11, I’d still consider any adult abusing an 11-year-old to be a pervert, especially if they were doing so under the cover of some sort of sacred authority.
8. Interestingly enough (and the part that will doubtless be least quoted by folks like Bill Donohue, the report “concluded that homosexual priests were no more likely to abuse than heterosexual priests.”

No other great conclusions here, except it doesn’t seem the report does much more than try to enlist sympathy for the priests involved, swept up unprepared in a great societal upsurge of “deviancy,” isolated and untrained too handle such things, and, at the very least, mostly abusing only tweens, not actual children.

I feel much better, don’t you?