Stopping the Collateral Damage
by Fr. Roger Landry - September 23, 2011
Last week we focused on the Solomonic balance the Church needs to find between caring for those who have suffered child sexual abuse by ministers of the Church, defending other children from the same evil, and protecting Church ministers from false accusations of having committed this evil. While reforms in the Church in the last decade have been justly praised for all that they have done to protect children and to hold priest abusers canonically accountable, many have noted that, in practice, the new policies — or, more accurately, the way they are being implemented — have left priests, deacons and lay men and women who work for the Church vulnerable to becoming victims of character assassination through false allegations. Two wrongs never make a right and the just response to a failure adequately to protect and help sexual abuse victims in the past is not to allow innocent clerics, teachers and other Church personnel to become another class of victims through false accusations. What is needed is to defend the full rights both of accusers as well as accused, to protect both children and Church workers from injustice and crime, to remove those would harm the young while simultaneously preventing those who would have faithfully dedicated their lives to the Gospel from being removed through perhaps the worst of all calumnies.
One area in which this Solomonic balance comes up is with respect to the releasing names of those accused of having committed the sexual abuse of minors. On August 25, Cardinal Sean O'Malley released the names of 159 priests from the Archdiocese of Boston who were found guilty by Church or state of sexually abusing a child, laicized before or after having been accused, publicly accused of sexually abusing a child (while Church proceedings still need to be completed) or deceased after having been publicly accused of sexually abusing minors but against whom criminal or canonical proceedings were not completed. Cardinal O'Malley intentionally did not release the names of living or deceased clergy against whom allegations have not been made public, a move that has brought intense criticism from some victims' groups.
Cardinal O'Malley confessed that sharing information about clergy accused of sexually abusing minors is "a complex issue involving several competing considerations" and therefore a proper prudential balance is required. "On the one hand, there is the critically important need to assure the protection of children and also important considerations related to transparency and healing; on the other, there are interests related to the due process rights and reputations of those accused clergy whose cases have not been fully adjudicated, including deceased priests who were not alive to respond to the allegations." How to determine what to do when these two goals seem to work against each other is not an exact science. He shared his rationale for not releasing the names of priests against whom public accusations have never been known. "Not only must the Archdiocese honor its commitment to protect children, it must also be mindful of the due process concerns of those whose guilt has not been established. In the present environment, a priest who is accused of sexually abusing a minor may never be able to fully restore his reputation, even if cleared after civil or canonical proceedings. Reputational concerns also become acute in cases concerning deceased priests, who are often accused years after their death with no opportunity to address the accusations against them. [With] deceased priests, there is, by definition, no consideration relating to child protection, and the countervailing considerations related to due process and protecting reputations become more substantial. In the vast majority of these cases, the priest was accused after he had already passed away and accordingly had no chance to address the allegations being brought against him. In a very large percentage of these particular cases, there has been a single allegation of abuse; that is not said by way of minimizing the allegations of misconduct, but rather to point out that there is little evidence on which to base a decision of guilt or innocence. It is extremely difficult to determine the credibility of these accusations, given that they involve matters that typically occurred decades ago."
Those who have long pressured the Archdiocese of Boston and other dioceses to release the names of all priests accused of the sexual abuse of minors were critical of Cardinal O'Malley's decision. Clergy sex abuse victims, they say, often carry with them the guilt of what they suffered; seeing the names of those who abused them made public brings enormous validation of their most painful experiences. Indisputably, there's clearly a benefit for victims to have their abusers named, and this is something that the Church should want to do out of pastoral concern and reparation for those who have suffered in this manner. But that solace cannot come at any cost. The good end of bringing comfort to those who have suffered from clergy sexual abuse can never be morally achieved through the immoral means of abetting calumnious allegations.
Some in the Church today — including some victims' rights groups — seem to have become desensitized to the harm of false accusations against Church leaders in an analogous way to how many were once insensitive to the evil and harm of the sexual abuse of minors. False accusations, some victims' advocates say, are relatively rare; in the United States, historically less than ten percent of accusations have been demonstrated to be false. When someone is accused, they imply, there's a 90% chance that he or she is guilty, and therefore the good obtained by releasing all names outweighs the evil that might come to a few. Such proportionalistic reasoning, however, fails to consider adequately the harm done to the ten percent or more who are falsely accused of something as hideous as child abuse. No one would ever want to see the reputation of a living or deceased father, mother, beloved teacher, coach, athlete, actor, president or other public official destroyed by the actual or posthumous reporting of an untrue allegation of sexually abusing kids. A good reputation earned by a lifetime of virtue should never be able to be annihilated simply by the bringing of an accusation, because the accusation may be false or frivolous; with people we care about, we would justly demand that before such an allegation be publicized it would need to be substantiated. The same principle of fairness must reign within the Church. This isn't a lack of sensitivity or concern for victims of sexual abuse, but a just principle to prevent making another class of victims.
Some in our society have begun to awaken to the reality of false accusations of the sexual abuse of minors and the often irreparable harm that comes through them. In a powerful June 15 Boston Globe article entitled "Collateral Damage," columnist Brian McGrory wrote about the case of Boston priest Fr. Charles Murphy, who was falsely accused not once but twice of sexual abuse. Both accusations were brought by attorney Mitchell Garabedian, the first in 2006 involving a woman from 25 years ago, the second in 2010 involving a man from 40 years ago. On both occasions Fr. Murphy had to vacate his rectory, to suffer the ignominy of others' thinking he had molested youth he had been ordained to serve and love, and to undergo the painfully slow process of the Church's preliminary investigation, which shamefully occurred after, not prior, to Fr. Murphy's suffering all of these tangible harms. McGrory described how, after the second accusation, many of the priest's friends and parishioners hired a private investigator, "who discovered that the alleged victim was mired in financial problems, had a long list of liens placed against him, and faced massive credibility issues even within his own family." These are all items that should have been discovered before Fr. Murphy's reputation was damaged again. "It took nearly six months — about five months longer than it should have — before an archdiocesan review board cleared Murphy of the allegations in September and Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley restored him as a senior priest." But the suffering had taken its toll and Murphy died soon thereafter, of "a broken 77-year-old heart that refused to mend." McGrory called Garabedian's bringing these false accusations without adequately investigating his client's motives and accusations "a disgrace." He wrote, "Garabedian told me this week his Milton client was 'credible.' He wasn't. He lashed out at what he described as a 'kangaroo court,' the respected, independent archdiocesan panel that cleared Murphy. He didn't utter the only words worth hearing: I made a mistake."
Regardless of whether mendacious accusations are intentionally made or "mistakes" happen, it's clear that there need to be policies that prevent the injustice that happened to Fr. Murphy from happening to other priests and Church workers, whether alive or dead. As tough as it was for Fr. Murphy to suffer these accusations and see them publicized before they were demonstrated to be more than suspicious, at least he was still alive for his friends and parishioners to hear him emphatically deny them and be led to help him restore his reputation. Such a partial rehabilitation would have been much more difficult if he had been deceased when they arose. That's why it's obviously prudent and just for the Church not to publish names of those — whether living or dead — who have been accused of the sexual abuse of minors until, minimally, an investigation demonstrates that they're plausible, or, even better, until guilt is admitted or proven. Injustices aren't remedied by committing other injustices.
As the Church prepares in 2012 to mark the tenth anniversary of public part of the sexual abuse crisis and the Church's response to it in Dallas, it is time for Church faithful and leaders to begin to achieve a yet unrealized Solomonic balance between the rights of accusers and accused. This will ensure that in the Church's understandable zeal to bring healing to those who have suffered sexual abuse and prevent children from suffering similar harm in the future, we not lump the good in with the bad by treating all accusations, both true and calumnious, as worthy of publication until at least a minimal standard of veracity and substantiation has been established.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
