Survey: Catholic Church Removed 218 Priests
Sun Jun 9, 8:38 AM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Roman Catholic Church has removed 218 priests from their positions this year because of child sexual abuse allegations, but at least 34 known offenders remain in church jobs, a Washington Post survey reported Sunday.
The Post survey also found at least 850 U.S. priests have been accused of sexual misconduct with minors since the early 1960s, and more than 350 of them were removed from the ministry before this year.
The Post said the numbers were considerably higher than previously disclosed and showed the scope of the sex abuse scandal that has hit the Catholic Church. They also underscored the shortage of reliable statistics on the church's sex abuse problem, it said.
The newspaper said it conducted the survey by contacting each of the nation's 178 Roman Catholic dioceses. It said 96 responded and 82 did not, but supplementary data was gathered from newspapers, church newsletters and diocesan Web sites.
As the nearly 300 active U.S. bishops head for Dallas this week to debate and vote on a national policy on priests accused of sexual misconduct, they don't know the extent of the problem and have made no real effort to find out, the newspaper said.
On Wednesday, a committee of bishops from across the country recommended defrocking any priest who sexually abuses children in the future, but left open the possibility that some past offenders could remain in the clergy.
In Dallas, the bishops will vote on those standards, which some church leaders have said do not go far enough.
The proposals are aimed at stemming a scandal that erupted in January and has grown into what is widely viewed as the greatest crisis to have faced the church in modern times.
David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, an 11-year-old support group, speculated the lack of information may reflect a deliberate strategy to shield the church from liability.
"It's ludicrous that you can't get very, very basic data such as the number of priests who've been defrocked or the number of criminal or civil abuse cases filed against priests," he told the newspaper.
"I think any prudent person would assume the church has more data than it's sharing. But I also think that the church is smart enough not to have collected data, which could be discoverable" by plaintiff's lawyers in lawsuits.
The Post said the U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops does not keep any nationwide statistics on sexual abuse cases and individual dioceses vary greatly in their openness. |
