1. Widespread Sexual Child Abuse by Christian Priests
   1. Internal Abuse of Priests - Abuse Leads to Abuse
   2. The Financial Cost to the Church
   3. The Long Shadow: Ancient Christian Sexual Abuse
   4. Around the World
      1. United States of America (USA)
      2. Ireland
      3. United Kingdom (UK)
      4. France
      5. Germany
      6. Austria
      7. Hong Kong
      8. Australia
   5. Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi's Response at the Human Rights Council 2009
   6. Aren't Satanists Supposed to be the Child Abusers?
2. Christian Teachings on Sexuality Cause Sexual Dysfunction
3. Medical Child Abuse
   1. Neglect and Murder Should Not Be Excused By Religion
   2. Four Children Who Died When Their Parents Employed Faith Healing Rather Than Medicine
4. Conclusions

1. Widespread Sexual Child Abuse by Christian Priests

Christian clergy have been under much scrutiny over the last two decades after a long series of scandals involving child abuse. The cases have been shocking, wild, numerous, public, and they keep coming. Recently, an Australian fundamentalist pastor was jailed for incest and child abuse after spending the 1990s sleeping with his own two children in order to 'educate' them. Many cases have been settled out of court, some priests have quit, and some have committed suicide. Police and Western authorities have despaired, because they thought that the Christian churches were good place for children (hence governmental support for faith schools, etc). The situation is so bad that the police have called for routine checks of all priests. No other employer or community has such massive problems with sexual immorality than do Christian organisations; and it seems the stricter they are in their beliefs, the worse their transgressions are - note the born-again paedophile priest who murdered two of his congregation.

• In 2010 the Pope met with German senior Catholics to discuss 170 child abuse cases by German priests, and German Bishop Robert Zollitsch apologised again to victims of the abuse.₁

   

• "Last year [in 2001] the Pope sent an apology by e-mail for a string of injustices committed by clergy in the Pacific nations, which included priests and missionaries forcing nuns to have sex and then abortions."

  "Pope denounces 'evil' sex priests" (BBC News 2002)₂

• "2% of the priest population can be classified as true pedophiles with a three to one preference for boys. This gender attraction is reversed in the general population. [...] 4% of the priest population become sexually involved with adolescents"₃.

   

• Father James Porter victimized 200 minors in the 12 years between 1960 and 1972 when he was active in the priestly ministry. Many of his victims report violent rape, cruel humiliation, and punishment that can only be described as sadistic. [...] One priest who "saw" Porter rape a child defended him, when confronted by a parishioner, with response, "Father is only human." [...] In 1993 he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 18 years in prison for a portion of his offenses. He is one of only a small fraction of priests who have been prosecuted by the law for abuse of minors.

   

• Many priests, even those sent for psychiatric treatment for child abuse, are kept in positions of authority in the Church₄. Maybe because the Church is lacking so many priests, and to expel them all would be too damaging to the structure of the Church.

   

• More than a dozen suicides by priests facing public exposure of their sexual activity were recorded between 1990 and 1993₅.

   

Christian Churches are often defensive about their views and effect on society, and they have often claimed that claims of sexual abuse (despite the evidence of abuse uncovered by police investigations) are actually attempts to discredit the church, rather than victims finally finding the courage to speak out. Many of the scandals have centered around the way that the Church shuffles accused priests around and hides allegations, even of priests that have been previously convicted in a court of law, often putting them back into supervisory contact with children. The Economist writes in 2002 after Catholic Cardinals and the Pope convened a meeting to discuss the issue, that "dismaying to Catholics is the fact that the hierarchy, in protecting such priests, plainly cared more for the institution of the church than for the souls of its children"₆.

The abuse has occurred in communities large and small, in private homes and in church. In 2008, the Pope was apologizing again, this time in person to President Bush, about the extent of the child sex abuse in the Catholic Church₇ in the USA, and the Canadian prime minister made an official apology to his indigenous population, because "between 1870 and 1996, an estimated 150,000 indigenous children were wrenched from their homes and sent to Christian boarding schools, where many were sexually and physically abused"₈. Not even schools have been safe from the secret violence. The worst frequency of abuse has been when Christians themselves live with other Christians, as we see in the next section:

1.1. Internal Abuse of Priests - Abuse Leads to Abuse

Much of the sexual abuse within Christian churches is internal, for example between priests and student priests, including seniors ignoring and reprimanding juniors when they complained of sexual abuse, and widespread admittance that the seniors themselves had such experiences as juniors. "After reviewing 473 priests or histories of priests who have [abused children] seventy to eighty percent of [them] have themselves been abused as children, some by priests. Furthermore, a high percentage of those who later abused youngsters - whether or not they themselves were abused as children - were in effect given permission for such activity by a priest or religious superior who himself crossed the sexual boundary with the priest abuser during the time he was studying for ordination. Ten percent of priests report that they were approached sexually by a priest during the time of their theological studies"₉. Many have theorized that Christianity's teachings result in a dysfunctional idea of sexuality.

1.2. The Financial Cost to the Church

The financial cost for Christians Churches has been great. Ongoing claims in Ireland continue to receive news coverage:

“

Faith-based welfare was the norm in Ireland up until only a few short years ago. The Catholic Church, in all its compassion, ran schools, orphanages, children's homes, hospitals - just about everything. The result? A catalogue of cruelty and abuse that has left the state with a compensation bill that could run into billions of euros - not to mention thousands of damaged and traumatised individuals who will never properly recover from the physical, mental and sexual torture they suffered at the hands of priests and nuns. In 2002, the Catholic Church agreed to pay over €128m in cash and property to the State as part of a deal to prevent bankruptcy - the actual total is more likely to be between €1bn and €1.3bn. [...]

To date, the average award has been €66,845. Some 23 victims received the maximum award of €300,000. More than 14,500 compensation applications for sexual, emotional or physical abuse were received by the board by the 2005 deadline.”

National Secular Society (2008)₁₀

And, earlier:

“In January, the Catholic Church in Ireland agreed to a $110m payment to children abused by the clergy over decades. More than 20 priests, brothers and nuns have been convicted of molesting children.

 

The US archdiocese of Boston has agreed to pay between $15m and $30m to scores of people to settle claims that a priest sexually abused them when they were children.”

"Pope denounces 'evil' sex priests" (BBC News 2002)₂

In the USA there have been massive costs resulting from legal cases. The USA LA Catholic Church has paid five hundred victims a total of $660m to settle cases dating from the 1940s. In 2008 alone, the Catholic Church in the USA paid $436 million in costs resulting from sexual abuse by clergy₁₁. In the USA at least, such massive criminal abuse has led to some Churches contemplating bankruptcy, as long ago as 1993:

“In 1993, two archdioceses, Chicago and Santa Fe, declared themselves in danger of bankruptcy due, at least in part, to compensation paid to victims of clergy abuse. Dioceses and religious orders have also paid for legal expenses involved in defending priests and themselves in civil and criminal suits in connection with child abuse, as well as treatment costs for the psychiatric care of priest perpetrators. Compensation, treatment, and legal costs are estimated to have passed the half-billion mark between 1984 and 1994 (Wojcik, 1994).”

"Sex, Priests and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis" by Richard Sipe (1995)₁₂

And la's Catholic Church in 2003:

“The accounts for the last fiscal year, which ended in June 2003, showed a deficit not of $4.3m, as had been predicted, but of $13.4m. Critics of the new cathedral, which cost $190m, were quick to place blame, but [...] about half of the deficit, $7.7m, was a one-off settlement of claims of sexual abuse by priests. [...] Some 300 claims of abuse in Los Angeles are under investigation. Ten priests already face charges.”

The Economist (2003)₁₃

1.3. The Long Shadow: Ancient Christian Sexual Abuse

Although the legal cases of the past few decades have raised public awareness about paedophile priests, the problem is ancient. The oldest existing commentary on the Christian gospels, the Didaché of the early second century, found it necessary to command that "thou shalt not seduce young boys". Richard Sipe continues by highlighting a trend that has been reflected in church texts since the second century:

“The earliest church council for which we have any records, that of Elvira in 309, has 81 Canons, of which 38 deal with sex. [...] Among those who are threatened with irrevocable exclusion - that is, they could not receive communion even at the time of death (nec in finem) are "bishops [...] committing a sexual sin" (Canon 18), "those who sexually abuse boys" (Canon 71).”

"Sex, Priests and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis" by Richard Sipe (1995)₁₄

The problems of the ancient church and its grasp of practical sexual morality mirrors shortcomings that Christian churches have today. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries it was noted that sexual offenders moved from one Christian province to another even after they had been excommunicated for their abuse₁₅. This was sometimes the cause of scandals; the same movement of abusive priests has caused outrage in the press in recent decades₁₆.

Breaking into the second millennium of Christianity, the same problems continue. One record I stumbled across in the accounts of the historian Will Durant concerned sex crime cases from 1499. "Clerical offenders numbered 23 per cent of the total, though the clergy were probably less than 2 per cent of the population"₁₇. Attempts at reform have been useless. The Council of Trent (1545-63) was held in order to curb abuses in the Church. Pope Julius III presided over this council for three years from 1550. The same pope entered a sexual liaison with a 15-year-old boy he had picked up on the streets of Parma₁₄. The omens were clearly not good for the success of that council. That such abuse has been endemic within Christian institutions for so long points to something fundamentally wrong with Christian teachings on sexuality.

Unfortunately, we should follow these historical abstractions with solid examples from our present time, in order to make it clear what types of behaviour we are talking about:

1.4. Around the World

1.4.1. United States of America (USA)

The Archdiocese of Boston in the USA became infamous for the scale of paedophile abuse (and other criminal behaviour) of its Christian clergy. There was an organized and determined extended cover-up over a long period of time involving many of the clergy, all of whom acted to protect each other rather than protect future and past victims. One of the factors that has caused most outrage is the standard procedure where paedophile priests were simply moved to a different location after victims came to light. The news articles linked on the right provide a seemingly endless stream of stubborn offence, re-offence and acts of looking-the-other-way. At the height of the revelations in the first half of 2002, the number of priests who left their post or were removed, numbered 200 out of a total of 46 000 priests in the USA₁₈. That's half a percent of all priests, in just half a year. Sipe, who wrote a book on the issue, found in 1995 that a full 2% of all priests are paedophiles₃, with the additional data uncovered in 2002, that looks more likely to be an astounding 3%.

“Over 800 complaints of sexual abuse had been lodged against priests in 2008. However, only 10 of those complaints involved recent activity; most of the complaints involved alleged offenses in the 1960s and 1970s, and nearly all of the priests accused are deceased, retired, or otherwise inactive. Several dioceses declined to participate fully in the audits and child-protection programs suggested by the staff of the bishops' conference. Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska, has consistently refused to allow audits.”

National Secular Society (2009)₁₁

Seven years earlier:

“Thousands of newly released personnel files show that the Archdiocese of Boston went to great lengths to hide priests accused of abuse, including clergy who allegedly snorted cocaine and had sex with girls aspiring to be nuns. The first round of the documents — roughly 3,000 pages on eight Roman Catholic priests — were made public Tuesday on a Superior Court order. They [...] included allegations that clergy sexually abused teenage girls and used cocaine and other drugs, and that one led a "double life" by carrying on an affair with a female parishioner.

 

Many of the priests whose files were released are not among the 400 clergy members targeted in the dozens of lawsuits against the archdiocese. But attorneys for plaintiffs hope the documents show the archdiocese had a habit of transferring priests to other parishes even after accusations of child abuse.”

"Archdiocese of Boston hid accused priests" (Fox News 2002)

Another seven years earlier:

“Several accounts already record the extent, history and struggles of the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the United States (Berry, 1992; Burkett & Bruni, 1993; Rossetti, 1990; Sipe, 1990a). [...] A quick review of the alleged priest abusers who have come to legal attention demonstrates the trend: 10 priests of a total of 97 in a Southwestern diocese; 9 of 110 in a Midwestern diocese; 7 of 91 in a Southern diocese; 15 of 220, and 40 in a diocese of 279 in the Eastern United States. [...] Sixty Catholic priests and brothers were in prison on sexual abuse charges as of September 1994.”

"Sex, Priests and Power: Anatomy of a Crisis" by Richard Sipe (1995)₃

One of the latest summaries is that of the famous liberal, Bishop John Selby Spong, in 2009, who admits that despite the horrific events that have been uncovered so far, there is more to come:

“There was a history of bishops and archbishops moving offending clergy to another jurisdiction rather than confronting the issue. [... If] the abuse and the cover-up were quite systemic, [...] it must have involved people in high places, including bishops, archbishops and cardinals. [...] I do not [...] believe that thus far there has been anything like a full disclosure, so the issue will not end yet.”

Retired Bishop John Selby Spong (2009)₁₉