To better protect God’s people When future historians write their histories of U.S. Catholicism, some may give Gilbert Gauthe a paragraph all to himself. Not for anything honorable that he did, but for something supremely dishonorable: He, as much as anyone, transformed sexual abuse of a minor by a Catholic priest from a personal disgrace into a national scandal. The story of this scandal is disturbing and complex. Even as the number of new cases has apparently dropped, bishops have found themselves struggling to cope with the consequences of earlier offenses that were covered up. Now even Pope Francis stands accused of not responding quickly enough, and Germany and Chile have joined the ranks of countries where the Church has abuse scandals on its hands. What follows is an overview of the history of this scandal in the United States, for the benefit of people trying to make sense of it all. It’s a perspective the bishops themselves will need as they gather in Baltimore the second full week of November for their fall general meeting. This issue is expected to dominate the agenda. Pope St. John Paul II speaks with Cardinal Bernard Law in 2002 in the pope’s private library at the Vatican. Cardinal Law had been one of the United States’ most powerful and respected bishops until his legacy was blemished by the devastating sexual abuse of minors by priests in his Archdiocese of Boston. CNS photo via L’Osservatore Romano A 1980s ‘aberration’ Start with Gilbert Gauthe. Although by no means the first abuser priest, he was the first to receive national attention as the specifics of his misdeeds and the bungling of his superiors became known. Gauthe. CNS In 1984 a grand jury indicted Gauthe — a priest of the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana — for a long list of sex crimes against children. He was tried, convicted and sent to jail, while the diocese paid out $20 million in settlements to his victims. Later he moved to Texas, where he did more jail time for abuse. Altogether, he is said to have molested some 100 children. Gauthe, it soon developed, was far from alone. Researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice have since concluded that, from 1950-2002, accusations of abusing minors were directed against 4,392 U.S. priests — 4 percent of the total number of priests during that time — with 10,667 people claiming victimization. 1990s response Few Catholics anticipated any of this when the Gauthe case was making headlines 30 years ago. Most supposed Gauthe and the handful of other priests then known to be abusers were an isolated phenomenon, not a widespread problem. But some people knew better. In 1985, abuse was on the bishops’ agenda at their spring general meeting. In that year, too, all diocesan bishops received a confidential report by three people: the director of a treatment facility for troubled priests and religious; a staff member at the Vatican’s embassy in Washington, D.C.; and the attorney who represented Gauthe. They told the bishops that the problem was serious and could be enormously costly to the Church. In the next few years some dioceses adopted new, stronger personnel policies and training programs with an eye to preventing abuse. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops (as it was then called) distributed suggested guidelines. Meanwhile, the number of complaints and lawsuits was rising, although allegations often concerned events in the past. After a daylong closed-door discussion at the bishops’ general meeting in June 1992, Conference president Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati issued a statement setting out five recommended steps for bishops. The five steps became the backbone of official Church response to the problem of clergy sexual abuse during the decade that followed. They were: Respond promptly to allegations of abuse; if evidence supports an allegation, remove the offender and provide him with appropriate treatment; report incidents as required by civil law and cooperate with the authorities; reach out to victims and their families; and be as transparent as possible about what happened. Some dioceses followed this advice. Some — disastrously, as events would show — did not. At their November 1992 meeting, the bishops resumed discussion of abuse. Several met with adult survivors of abuse, and the bishops’ Committee on Priestly Life and Ministry established a subcommittee on sex abuse, later succeeded by a full-fledged ad hoc committee. In 1993, a delegation of U.S. bishops met with Vatican officials to discuss the problem, and Pope St. John Paul II issued a letter condemning abuse. At their general meeting in November, the bishops petitioned the Vatican for changes in Church law to make it easier to laicize priests guilty of abusing minors. The pope responded with new regulations for the United States, which were to be good for five years. The regulations — later extended for 10 years and made applicable to the Church everywhere — loosened the statute of limitations for Church trials and increased the penalties for offending clergy. Jurisdiction in these cases was assigned to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In the next several years, dioceses continued tightening up their procedures. Then-Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington faces the press in the shadow of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican April 24, 2002. U.S cardinals met for a summit with Pope St. John Paul II at the Vatican on April 23-24, 2002, as the sex abuse crisis unfolded in the United States. The now-disgraced McCarrick was a key spokesman for the bishops during the summit. CNS photo via Paolo Cocco, Reuters Glaring ‘Spotlight’ And then came the watershed year, 2002. In January the Boston Globe began publishing investigative reports exposing serious mishandling and coverup of abuse by priests in the Boston archdiocese. The stories depicted an ecclesiastical establishment more concerned about shielding abusive clergy and protecting the good name of the Church than helping young victims and their families. As if to underline the point, mid-January brought the conviction for child abuse of a Boston priest named John Geoghan, who was said to have abused at least 130 minors. Convicted and given a sentence of 9-10 years, he was murdered less than a year later by a fellow inmate in a Massachusetts maximum security prison. This is the cover of the USCCB’s “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.” Established in 2002, the National Review Board is charged with addressing clerical sexual misconduct in the U.S. Catholic Church. CNS photo illustration via Rick Musacchio, Tennessee Register In April, the U.S. cardinals were summoned to Rome for a meeting with John Paul II. The pope declared that there is no place in priestly ministry or religious life for anyone who harms young people. The Vatican authorized the bishops to draw up new special legislation for dioceses. Meeting in Dallas in June of 2002, amid mounting furor, the bishops adopted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People and accompanying norms translating the charter’s principles into law that dioceses were required to follow. The chief feature of these norms — approved by Pope John Paul II the following year for the Church in the United States — is a policy of “zero tolerance” for clergy and religious who are found guilty of sexually abusing minors. But the new penal provisions did not cover offenses by bishops — an omission the bishops only now are moving to correct in the wake of the McCarrick scandal. Meanwhile, with the help of court orders that forced the release of Church records, other news media in other places had begun to publish their own exposés painting the same picture of clergy abuse and official coverup in dioceses all over the country. The Boston Globe won a Pulitzer Prize for its series. Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as archbishop of Boston and moved to Rome, where he was placed in charge of one of the major basilicas. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro speaks during an Aug. 14 news conference to release a grand jury report on a months-long investigation into abuse claims spanning a 70-year period in the dioceses of Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Scranton, Allentown, Greensburg and Erie. CNS photo via Reuters video Getting at the roots At the Dallas meeting in 2002, the bishops also established a National Review Board to oversee diocesan compliance with the new charter and norms. They also created an office for child and youth protection as part of the structure of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and commissioned studies on the scope and causes of abuse, as well as an independent annual audit of dioceses to assess their compliance with the Charter. The results of the first annual audit were released in January 2006, as have been the results of other audits since then. The studies were carried out by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. The findings were reported in two publications issued by the USCCB: “The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950-2002” (2004) and “The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010” (2011). Together, they provide the most comprehensive examination of this problem to be published to date. Karen Terry, principal investigator for the John Jay College report on the causes and context of clergy sexual abuse, speaks during a press conference at the headquarters of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., on May 18, 2011.