#411: Cover-Up

Ever Since Watergate, Americans have believed that “The cover up is worse than the crime.” Has the U.S. Catholic hierarchy STILL not figured that out?

Two events this week remind us that not only is the Church’s sex abuse crisis still with us; it is also still cause for worry.  For there is fresh evidence that, even now, some members of the hierarchy just don’t get it.  In particular, this week’s events--one in Chicago and one in Geneva--show a hierarchy still torn, among its own members, between apology and denial. 

The denial came to the fore when Bishop Francis Kane, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Chicago, held a news conference concerning Wednesday’s court-ordered release of documents relating to cases against 30 priests accused of child abuse.

Bishop Kane began by apologizing for the abuse itself, and admitted that the archdiocese had been wrong not to act more forcefully, but then denied any cover-up by Chicago bishops:

It was just they didn't realize that it was such a terrible thing, and so I think they did relocate people, but it was not intended as a way of covering up things.

But Marc Pearlman, a lawyer representing 200 of the victims, took exception to the Bishops claim:

The issue is not when the abuse happened; the issue is what they did once it was reported….I think that the files will show a systemic plan over decades in this diocese, along with many other dioceses, to conceal sexual abuse, to conceal who the predators were, and to put the interests of the predators and the institution above the interests of innocent young children…Until there is public disclosure and transparency ... there is no way people can learn about it and make sure it does not happen again,"

Bishop Kane also said, “It's humiliating as a priest to know there were other priests who did something like that."

In both of his remarks, Bishop Kane speaks for many bishops (past and perhaps even present) who find it “humiliating” to acknowledge that priests abused children but impossible to acknowledge that bishops and others covered it up.  Of course, it was precisely this “humiliation” that induced bishops to keep such matters quiet—they were too embarrassed to admit the truth.

What they still don’t get is that, for the vast majority of Catholics who were not touched by the abuse itself, the cover-up is a much greater scandal, and denying it continues to damage the Church’s credibility.

So the question arises: how could Bishop Kane say there was no cover-up?  Perhaps it is a matter of definition. Perhaps he and others think that, if previous bishops underestimate the problem, the result was they did nothing about it—and that was not, at least intentionally, a cover-up. To me, such a view is disingenuous at best.

To clarify, it may help to use a concrete example, so let me tell a story.  A true story.

This happened more than 60 years ago in a small town in the Archdiocese of Boston.  One fine day the pastor of the local parish took a group of altar boys on a field trip.  At some point during the day he sexually accosted one of the boys.  The boy broke away, and had the presence of mind to hitchhike home, where he told his father what had happened.

On his return with the rest of the group, the pastor found the boy’s father waiting for him at the rectory--with a shotgun.  No violence resulted, but the diocese was contacted.  That night, a limo arrived at the rectory carrying the archbishop’s minions, who removed the pastor to the limo, thence to Logan Airport, and finally onto a night flight to exile in Ireland, where he arrived the very next morning.

A team of three priests was assigned to the parish, with instructions to calm the family involved and “avoid any scandal” over the event--that is, keep things quiet (one of those priests told me this story years later).  So the parish never knew what had happened or why their pastor had disappeared literally overnight.

Three years later, he returned from Ireland and became pastor of a parish in another part of the diocese.  No one there ever learned the story either.

Now this story, while dramatic, is not at all unusual.  In fact, it reflects a pattern that was remarkably consistent from diocese to diocese in the U.S. throughout the 20^th century.  In case after case where abuse was charged, the Church’s managers--the bishops--dealt with accusations by taking the following steps:

1. They removed the priest, usually on short notice, with either no public explanation or a phony one.

2. They bargained or bribed to prevent victims and their families from exposing the priest, often in the name of “avoiding scandal.” In many cases, families were promised the priest would never deal with parishes or children began.

3. The priest was sometimes sent away for “penance” and/or for “treatment,” often to a facility operated for that purpose.

4. The priests who remained or who replaced the abuser did not inform the parish about anything that had transpired.  In some cases, they themselves were not informed.

5. The accused priest was generally recycled to another parish or even diocese, either immediately or on his return from exile.  The new parish was told nothing of his record.  If he was assigned under a pastor, even the pastor himself was often not informed of the man’s history.

6. Of course, in a large percentage of cases the recycled priest repeated his offense, abusing more children in his new setting.

One is tempted to say: if this is not “cover-up,” what is?

Let’s grant that bishops honestly failed to recognize that a crime have been committed, so civil authorities were not notified.  Let’s even grant that bishops failed to understand the deep damage done to the children and their families.  The fact remains that no attempts were made to protect future victims, for that would have required notifying others--other parents, other families, other priests, as well as pastors (and sometimes other bishops) under which the recycled abuser was assigned.  Instead of taking steps to prevent further abuse, bishops acted to end each incident quietly and then keep the problem itself quiet.

In a 2010 novel that Robert B. Parker wrote as part of his celebrated “Spenser” series, private eye Spenser interviews a university police officer about the way the university handled the case of a professor named Prince, who had been seducing his students.  Spenser says, “So the university decided to do nothing about Prince.”--and the campus police chief replies: “No, they decided to keep it quiet…That’s doing something.”

Indeed, keeping abuse quiet is doing something--something called covering up.

Bishop Kane seems unable to acknowledge that, whether they “intended” a cover-up or not, bishops managed to cover up the problem so effectively, in diocese after diocese, that the history of abuse was kept quiet for decades (and probably generations) before it finally exploded into public view.  Over the years, dozens of bishops knew the facts and kept them secret.

One of the released Chicago documents, for example, includes former archbishop John Cody telling a priest not to worry about one girl’s 1970 accusation of prior abuse: “The whole matter has been forgotten,’’ he told the priest. “No good can come of trying to prove or disprove the allegations.’’

Sorry, Bishop Kane.  “Cover-up” is the right label for such behavior.

Meanwhile, Vatican officials were appearing before the U.N. Commission on the Rights of the Child in Geneva, where they had been summoned to explain their compliance with the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (which the Holy See signed in 1990).

While attempting to persuade the U.N. panel of their resolve to fix things, the Vatican’s envoy nonetheless refused to accept a “buck stops here” responsibility.  Instead, he passed the buck for responsibility back onto the local bishops, insisting:

Priests are not functionaries of the Vatican…Priests are citizens of their own states, and they fall under the jurisdiction of their own country.

Yet a U.N. Committee investigator pointed to cases where priests were transferred from one diocese to another, with Vatican approval.  And Vatican guidelines only require notifying local authorities if local laws require it.  Many bishops in the United States led efforts to prevent such reporting laws, including a 10-year legislative campaign to prevent clergy from being designated as “mandated reporters” under the Massachusetts law--a campaign which failed only after the Boston scandal broke in 2002.

The Vatican denials of responsibility ring hollow for one simple reason: while not responsible for the management or discipline of individual priests, the Vatican is responsible for the performance of local bishops.  And since the practice of recycling accused abuses was so widespread, we might ask: by failing to remove or even discipline bishops who covered up, did not the Vatican become complicit in enabling abusers?

In short, both local bishops and Vatican officials fell prey to the same failure: because they did not act to be part of the solution, they made themselves part of the problem.

As the U.N. Committee chairperson said:

The view of committee is that the best way to prevent abuses is to reveal old ones--openness instead of sweeping offences under the carpet…It seems to date your procedures are not very transparent.

Transparency, accountability--these are the hallmarks of a solution.  The failure to employ them is the failure of those who remained part of the problem, not by abusing children but by covering up the abuse by others--and in doing so, enabling abusers to abuse again.

It is high time to stop denying that cover-up happened and enabled abusers.  It is time to begin the long process of rehabilitating the crippled credibility of the U.S. hierarchy.

The last thing we need now is a cover-up of the cover-up.

  © Bernard  F. Swain PhD 2014