How Can I Join a Church that Abuses Children and Covers It Up?

Recent revelations about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s scandalous behavior have brought the emotionally sensitive subject of the priest abuse scandal back into the limelight.

This scandal, as those revealed over the last couple of decades was not due only to the fact that children were abused, but that Catholic clergy who knew about the improprieties failed to report the cases to the police.

Combining other obstacles people have about the hypocrisy of believers, Christian teachings on sexual morality, and a suspicion of hierarchical religion, this one is indeed a mountain. And it is impossible to get around or over it. The only way is to drill a hole right through.

One Strategy: Explain the truth about the numbers of the abuse.

One strategy seeks to put the scope of the issue into perspective. The media coverage led many to think the numbers were far greater than they were.

In 2004, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York to conduct a study analyzing allegations of sexual abuse in Catholic dioceses in United States.  The study covered the time period from 1950 to 2002.

The final report identified 6,700 unique accusations against 4,392 clergy, or four percent of the 109,694 clergy active during the period. Of those accused, only 252 were convicted, which is less than six percent of those accused and less than one-tenth of a percent of the total clergy.

To be sure, even these numbers are too many. But they do show that the scope of the scandal, despite the coverage it received, was very small—surely too small to be a basis for rejecting the Church completely.

It’s also important to point out that this kind of problem is not confined to the Catholic Church. It is found among Protestant clergy as well. In his book Pedophiles and Priests, Philip Jenkins, a Protestant who is an expert in the study of pedophilia, writes,

“The most-quoted survey of sexual problems among Protestant clergy states that some ten percent are involved in sexual misconduct of some kind, and that ‘about two or three percent’ are pedophiles, a rate equal or higher than that suggested for Catholic priests. These figures should be viewed skeptically; the methodology on which they are based is not clear, and they seem to rely disproportionately on individuals already in therapy. However, it is striking to find such a relatively high number suggested for both celibate and non-celibate clergy.”

Sexual abuse is not only found within the boundaries of Christianity. It is a problem in virtually all settings where adults have care of minors. Consider, for example, the 2014 scandal concerning USA swimming coaches, ninety of whom were banned for sexual misconduct. In January of 2018 Larry Nassar, former doctor for USA women’s gymnastics team doctor and sports medicine physician at Michigan State University, was sentenced to 175 years in prison for sexually abusing over 150 women over the past two decades of his practice.

The sexual abuse of children is a horrible crime and it needs to stop. There is no other person that a child should feel safer with than a person who represents Jesus Christ. But to think this is solely or conspicuously a Catholic problem, which is the narrative the media created, is simply not true.