“The tragedy of abuse is bringing about a poorer and humbler church.” The Catholic hierarchy has transformed its response to abuse scandals, which have left the church poorer and less influential.
ROME—From when the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse crisis erupted in 2002 until his death more than three years later, St. John Paul II never met with a victim of clerical sexual abuse.
In 2002, after the Boston Globe newspaper began publishing reports about local clerical abuse and its coverup, prominent Vatican officials and cardinals from several countries made highly defensive public statements. They minimized the number of predatory priests and blamed the scandals on plaintiffs’ lawyers and hostile media.
Ms. Barrett Doyle said the church has made substantive changes in its response to the scandals, but not enough. It is still only in the U.S. that church law mandates “zero tolerance”: the automatic removal from ministry of a cleric who has been found guilty of one act of abusing a minor. “The tragedy of abuse is bringing about a poorer and humbler church,” Bishop Franz-Josef Overbeck of Essen, Germany, said last month. “We have lost credibility. People have lost confidence in the Church, in priests, in bishops.”According to church statistics, 9.1% of Catholics in Germany regularly attended Sunday Mass in 2019, down from 12.6% in 2010, when the German church was hit by a series of abuse scandals.
In 2019, 27% of U.S. Catholics surveyed said they had reduced their Mass attendance in response to the abuse crisis, according to the Pew Research Center. The crisis has had a heavy impact on church finances. From 2004 to 2020, Catholic dioceses and religious orders in the U.S. spent $4.3 billion on costs related to abuse allegations, mostly in payments to victims and attorneys’ fees, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
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