It started in the spring, and it just got hotter as we got into the summer: the bishops have been the subject of relentless attacks, much of it having to do with the issue of sexuality. The John Jay report on clergy abuse, along with a new wave of lawsuits and gay rights legislation—gave way to vicious condemnations, ranging from columnists to commentators.

In some cases, individual bishops were singled out for denunciation, and in this regard no one was the butt of more unfair remarks than Archbishop Timothy Dolan. He is an easy target: he is the head of the New York Archdiocese and the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. He is also outspoken, much to the chagrin of those who would like to silence him.

Some of the most vocal critics are the so-called victims’ groups. Nothing the bishops will ever do will please them, so out-of-control is their anger. Even though sexual molestation has long since ceased to be an issue among the clergy, these groups, assisted by lawyers on the hunt for new victims—it does not matter how long ago the alleged incident occurred—are doing everything in their power to keep this issue alive.

Besides the bishops, priests have been the object of many suspect lawsuits. For example, a man who claims he was abused in 1984 has sued the Fort Worth Diocese and the entire Pallottine religious order. The accuser, who has been in prison for over a decade, says he cannot remember the priest’s name. If this isn’t bizarre enough, the accuser is in the slammer for sexual abuse. Unfortunately, there are too many suspect cases like this to think it’s all coincidental.

When the John Jay study came out, the narrative was quickly set by the New York Times: it was miffed that the social scientists who did the report didn’t attack the bishops. The Church’s critics were doubly incensed when the report mentioned the social and cultural context of the 1960s and 1970s, the decades where most of the damage was done.

Left-wing Catholics gave cover to those with an anti-Catholic agenda. In June, they assembled in Detroit, though even the organizers admitted that few young people, or non-whites, were drawn to the event. That they are stuck in a time warp—they can’t spring away from the 1960s—is an understatement.

Bill Donohue’s 24-page analysis of the John Jay study (an excerpt is on pp. 8-9) was sent to hundreds of bishops, lawyers, activist groups and members of the media. We are pleased to note its warm welcome in many circles.

On June 11, Lady Gaga performed at the Euro Pride concert in Rome. The big news wasn’t her appearance, it was how she wound up there: it was all due to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

A few weeks after the concert, Clinton admitted that the State Department was “instrumental in sealing the deal” for Lady Gaga to be there. She explained that “Lady Gaga is Italian-American and a strong supporter of LGBT rights.”

Bill Donohue responded by saying, “The Obama administration has U.S. troops fighting in four wars—Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Yemen—and yet the Secretary of State has time to lobby Lady Gaga to attend a homosexual extravaganza in Rome. The fact that the Queen Monster performed near the Vatican was clearly not a problem for Secretary Clinton.”

Donohue also pointed out that Lady Gaga is known in Catholic circles for strutting like a tramp while dressed as a nun, swallowing rosaries, taking liberties with the Cross, and parading around in glossy-red habits. None of this, obviously, is seen as problematic by the Secretary of State. However, one would think that a feminist might object to a video that features a simulated rape of Lady Gaga by her S&M boyfriends.

Lady Gaga did not disappoint the homosexuals in Rome. She stepped on stage with a flowing patterned skirt while singing, “Born This Way.”

The fact that Lady Gaga is being courted by the White House provides a window into the mindset of this administration

FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK 
William Donohue

Despite the multi-media universe we live in, the New York Timescontinues to shape the contemporary narrative on major stories. Indeed, many in the mainstream media (msm) are content to simply parrot their line. This happened recently again when the John Jay study was released: everywhere, it seemed, it was being reported that the study “blamed Woodstock” for the abuse scandal.

Laurie Goodstein’s news article of May 18 on the John Jay study got the ball rolling. “The ‘blame Woodstock’ explanation has been floated by bishops since the church was engulfed by scandal in the United States in 2002,” she wrote, “and by Pope Benedict XVI after it erupted in Europe in 2010.” But, of course, the bishops never invoked this terminology. Neither did the authors of the study. The jazzy term was invented by Goodstein. Then she had the audacity to attribute its origins to the bishops.

Why this appellation? To be sure, the 1969 Woodstock rock festival in upstate New York symbolized the worst of our society at the time—free sex and drugs. Therefore, by dropping the term “blame Woodstock” to describe how the scandal erupted, it suggests that miscreant priests were merely a product of the times. Indeed, in an editorial on this subject, theTimes said the study cited “the sexual and social turmoil of the 1960s as a possible factor in priests’ crimes.” Then it got angry by claiming that “this is a rather bizarre stab at sociological rationalization.”

In the 1960s, one American city after another went up in flames. Never once could the New York Times find it within itself to blame the rioters, and that is because those who took to the streets were black. What it said instead is that we must understand the “root causes” of the riots. In other words, not only did the Times seek to exculpate the rioters by citing social and cultural forces, it sought to shift responsibility to those who allegedly created the “root causes.” Which means they blamed whites.

However, when it comes to understanding the social milieu in which the abuse problem peaked, the same newspaper has nothing but contempt for “root cause” analysis: it wants everyone to know that the Catholic Church is alone responsible for the problem.

No social problem emerges in a vacuum, so it makes good sociological sense to discuss the cultural currents that were extant at the time. Those who seek to exonerate wrongdoers will, of course, allow explanations to facilitate justifications, but this is not true of those who simply seek to clarify the source of the problem. The John Jay study did not seek to exonerate anyone by citing the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s, so the “blame Woodstock” accusation is a canard.

There is more going on here than just an attempt to negate the social and cultural environment in which the abuse problem took hold. What also bothers the Times, and by extension the msm, is the rap on the sexual revolution. They still think it was a glorious chapter in American history, so to cast aspersions on it is to invite a liberal backlash.

The champions of the sexual revolution cite the liberation of women and homosexuals as its greatest achievement. How sad. Yes, it is true that women and gays were liberated from traditional sexual mores, but what exactly did they win? The birth control pill came on the market in 1960, and it was supposed to decrease abortions and illegitimacy. Both have since skyrocketed. And who are the net losers? Not men. Women have suffered the most.

No one ever heard of AIDS until 1981. If the sexual revolution liberated gays, why did they die in record numbers, and in excruciating pain? Let’s face it—before they were liberated, they were relatively healthy. What kind of liberation is it that leaves an unprecedented number of its beneficiaries dead?

The liberal bastions of the academy and the media will have none of it. So what if illegitimacy has spiked? So what if 70 percent of all African-American births are out-of-wedlock? So what if herpes now infects a record number of young people, including half of all young black women? So what if depression among young women, white and black, is most acute among those who like to “hook up” with various guys? So what if a new wave of promiscuity among gays is leading to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases?

For those who share the vision of liberation as understood by the New York Times, all of these problems are regrettable, but none can discount, or in any way eviscerate, the good that has come from being emancipated. But was not liberation meant to be enjoyed, not endured?

No one in the Catholic Church is floating the “blame Woodstock” rationale for priestly misconduct. On the other hand, no one who understands anything about sociology fails to note how the onset of this problem coincides with the timeline of the sexual revolution. And no one whose head is not stuck in the time-warp of the 1960s fails to see how the sexual revolution savaged our society, coarsened our culture, and left many for dead.

The  following is an excerpt from Donohue’s “John Jay Study on Sexual Abuse: A Critical  Analysis.” The longer version was sent to all the bishops and is available online at catholicleague.org.

In the aftermath of the media blitz in 2002 exposing sexual abuse by Catholic priests, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) commissioned researchers from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to study what happened. In 2004, the first studied the nature and scope of the problem, covering the years 1950-2002. Its latest study addresses the causes and context of abuse. Despite many strengths, what seriously mars the new report is its ideological reluctance to deal forthrightly with the role of homosexuality.

Both studies report that the crisis extended from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, peaking in the 1970s. This was a time of increased levels of deviant behavior in society, and the authors properly cite the role played by the sexual revolution in shaping the environment. This is not a justification—it is an explanation. It should be clear by now that the cultural winds of promiscuity that hit the larger society in the 1960s and 1970s came smashing through the windows of the Catholic Church; it is not an insular institution.

Celibacy as a cause is quickly dismissed, and pedophilia is similarly rejected as an explanatory variable. The report astutely notes that “Celibacy has been constant in the Catholic Church since the eleventh century and could not account for the rise and subsequent decline in abuse cases from the 1960s through the 1980s.” The logic is sound.

Importantly, pedophilia is discounted: less than 5 percent of the abusive priests fit the diagnosis of pedophilia, thus, “it is inaccurate to refer to abusers as ‘pedophile priests.’”

The bishops have commonly been criticized for not sufficiently responding to the problem of abusive priests. As it turns out, the report does much to question the validity of this charge. It provides plenty of evidence that when this issue became well known in the mid-1980s, several initiatives were forthcoming.

Unfortunately, much of what the bishops tried to do, we now know, was in vain. To be exact, they were being briefed in the late 1980s and the early 1990s about the wrong problem, and were similarly misled about the right remedy. It must be stressed that this is not the conclusion of the authors—it is mine. But it is reached by reliance on the data contained in the report.

The report says the bishops were offered several presentations by clinical psychologists about pedophilia at their meetings. But we now know that pedophilia was never the problem. So why didn’t the authors flag this? It is not hard to surmise that to do so would be to raise questions about the role which homosexuality played. As we shall see, the authors did everything they could to downplay this issue.

The report also makes it plain that therapy was being sold to the bishops as the right remedy. “Prior to 1984,” it says, “the common assumption of those who the bishops consulted was that clergy sexual misbehavior was both psychologically curable and could be spiritually remedied by recourse to prayer.” It also says that after 1985, “prompt psychological treatment for the priest was seen as the best course of action and became the primary intervention.”

Well, it is painfully obvious by now that the psychologists oversold their competence. It is not hard to surmise that the reason why the authors do not flag this matter—they don’t even include treatment in their concluding recommendations—has something to do with their reluctance to indict their own profession.

Regrettably, the authors allowed political considerations to color their conclusions on the role homosexuality played in driving the scandal. Let it be said at the outset that it is not my position that homosexuality causes predatory behavior. Indeed, this argument is absurd. As I have said many times, while it is true that most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay. Nothing in the report changes my mind, and indeed there is much in it that fortifies my position.

“Interestingly,” the report says, “an increase in the number of male victims occurred during the peak years of the abuse crisis.” From my perspective, it would have made more sense to say, “Unsurprisingly” than “Interestingly.” Here’s why.

Four related events emerged at the peak of the crisis that account for what happened:

• there was an exodus of heterosexual priests after Vatican II, a large percentage of whom got married

• the effect of this exodus was to leave behind a greater proportion of homosexual priests

• a tolerance for sexual expression in the seminaries was evident at this time, leading many previously celibate homosexual priests to act out

• there was a surge of homosexuals into the seminaries. It was the interaction of these four factors, I would argue, that accounts for the increase in male victims at the height of the sexual abuse crisis.

The authors insist that homosexuality played no role in the abuse crisis, but their own data undermine this conclusion. For example, they plainly admit that “81 percent of the victims [between 1950 and 2002] were male,” and that 78 percent were postpubescent. So if the abusers weren’t pedophiles, and the victims were mostly adolescent males, wouldn’t that make the victimizers homosexuals? What else could we possibly be talking about if not homosexuality?

“What is not well understood,” we learn, “is that it is possible for a person to participate in a same-sex act without assuming or recognizing an identity as a homosexual.” Yes, it is entirely possible for a homosexual not to recognize that he is a homosexual. So what? Isn’t it behavior, not self-perception, that objectively defines one’s sexual orientation?

Here is a good example of the flawed thinking on homosexuality that colors the study. “More than three-quarters of the acts of sexual abuse of youths by Catholic priests, as shown in the Nature and Scope study, were same-sex acts (priests abusing male victims). It is therefore possible that, although the victims of priests were most often male, thus defining theacts as homosexual, the priest did not at any time recognize his identityas homosexual.” It is a false segue to say, “It is therefore possible…” Such twisted logic suggests a failure to confront the obvious.

Let us grant that it is possible for gay priests to think they are not homosexuals. However, this changes nothing. If someone eats nothing but vegetables and does not consider himself to be a vegetarian, this is surely an interesting psychological issue, but it does not change reality. Subjectively, the vegetarian may think of himself as carnivorous, but his behavior belies his self-perception. Homosexuals, like vegetarians, are defined by what they do, not by who they think they are.

In the endnotes section, the study says, “it is possible for a man to identify himself as ‘heterosexual’ because he is sexually attracted to adult women; however, he may commit an act of sexual abuse against a male youth.” Let us concede the point. Yes, this may happen. But social science analysis, the authors well know, is informed by what is generally true, and is not driven by anomalies. In this vein, it would hardly change the status of a vegetarian if he were to experiment with hot dogs at a ballpark: he would not always be a practicing vegetarian, but it would not affect his master status.

The authors gathered clinical data from treatment centers, places where troubled priests were assigned. What they found was that “three quarters of the priests whom we have data had sexual relations with an adult and/or minor after ordination.” Given that the minors were mostly male, and beyond puberty, is this not clearly an issue of homosexuality?

Here’s another example of skewed logic. They say, “after considering pre-seminary and in-seminary sexual behavior separately, only in-seminary (not pre-seminary) same-sex sexual behavior was significantly related to the increased likelihood of a male child victim.” In other words, those studying for the priesthood who had sex with other seminarians—that would make them homosexuals—were more likely to abuse a child (male, of course) than gays who were active before they entered the seminary and then stayed celibate.

The problem of focusing on the sexual identity of the priest, as opposed to his behavior, is evident in the finding that “Those who identified themselves as bisexual or confused were significantly more likely to have minor victims than priests who identified as either homosexual or heterosexual.” But if these “bisexual and confused” priests chose to abuse mostly males—and they must have since 81 percent of the victims were male (and nearly 80 percent were postpubescent)—wouldn’t that mean that these abusive priests were practicing homosexuality? Again, the emphasis on self-identity gets in the way of reality. Indeed, the attempt to skirt the obvious is not only disingenuous, it is bad social science.

The authors try to say that much of the abuse was situational, a function of opportunity. For example, they note that after girl altar servers were approved by the Catholic Church, there was a “substantial increase in the percentage of female victims in the late 1990s and 2000s, when priests had more access to them in the church.”

However, if having access only to boys accounts for the high number of male victims at the peak of the crisis, then this should have been a problem before things got out of control. But the report emphatically shows this was not the case. “A review of the narratives of men who were seminarians in the 1950s, and of published histories of the seminaries themselves does not reveal any record of noticeable or widespread sexual activity by seminarians.” The reason it wasn’t a problem is because most priests put a lid on their libido in the 1940s and 1950s. When the lid came off in the 1960s, the crisis began.

There is also something unseemly about the opportunity-based argument. It suggests that if men don’t have access to females, they will start hitting on men. This is patently sexist and flatly absurd. Men don’t have much access to females in boarding schools and in the armed services, but virtually no one, save for homosexuals, finds himself tempted to choose other men to satisfy his sexual urges. Comparisons with the prison population are also flawed: the men housed there typically suffer from a host of deviant qualities.

There is too much evidence to plausibly conclude that there is no relationship between the overrepresentation of active homosexuals in the priesthood, and their overrepresentation in the sexual abuse scandal.

As the bishops assembled in Seattle for their spring meeting, they once again had to grapple with the issue of clergy abuse. While some recent allegations are worthy of pursuit, others don’t pass the smell test. The following cases were reported in the news during the first two weeks of June:

 • A Tennessee man claimed he was abused in the 1970s, though he and his lawyers admitted that his memories were returning “a little at a time”

• A Louisiana man claimed he was abused in the 1970s, though he admitted that he “suppressed” his memories until recently

• A Texas man claimed he was abused by a priest in the 1980s but couldn’t remember the accused priest’s name

• A convicted murderer from Pennsylvania claimed he was abused in the 1960s, though two of his own brothers don’t believe him

• A Kansas man who initially accused a priest of wrestling with him back in 1970s, now claims he was groped

• The Seattle archdiocese was sued by a woman who claimed she was fondled in the early 1960s at a church picnic by a man who was not a priest

• After a New York man read about the death of a priest whom he knew, he claimed he was abused by him in the 1960s

• A Tennessee man claims he was abused in the 1970s, though the suit never named the priest, who died in 2002

• A California priest who lives in a retirement home and has never been charged with anything, was accused of abuse in the 1960s

• After one Ohio woman came forward claiming she was groped in the 1960s, four other women in the area also claimed victim status

• A man from Pennsylvania said he was touched inappropriately in the 1970s, and even though he never contacted the police, the accused priest was permanently removed from ministry and had his job terminated at the diocese

We hope the bishops took note of these suspect cases. While it is important that the guilty pay, all accused priests are entitled to a presumption of innocence.

We recently addressed the three most prominent so-called victims’ rights groups and their opposition to the rights of priests. BishopAccountability, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and the National Survivors Advocates Coalition (NSAC) are so consumed with their agenda that they are ready to throw the constitutional rights of accused priests overboard.

At the bishops’ meeting in Seattle, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz expressed his concerns that unscrupulous lawyers may try to plunder the bishops’ conference for making commitments on how best to handle accused priests. For merely raising this concern, SNAP urged Catholics in his diocese to stop making contributions. In May, when a case against the Louisville diocese was thrown out, SNAP lashed out at the judge for dismissing it on the basis of a technicality. The technicality? The First Amendment.

BishopAccountability recently said that priests should be removed from ministry before the accusation is investigated. Similarly, SNAP said, “We strongly and repeatedly beg people to call authorities—police and prosecutors—with any information or suspicions no matter how small or seemingly insufficient.”

Here’s a good one: after typing “rights of priests” in the search engine of NSAC’s website, the first article to appear calls for the suspension of rights for accused priests. When an innocent Jesuit priest was recently nominated to be the House Chaplain, both SNAP and NSAC opposed him simply because some accused priests belong to his religious order.

BishopAccountability openly admits that it does not verify allegations made against priests before listing information on its website. That includes Father Charles Murphy, who recently died after being victimized by two bogus lawsuits against him that went nowhere. Worse, after NSAC ripped a columnist who pointed out what a travesty the Murphy case was, it concluded, “Perhaps Rev. Murphy was an innocent man, poorly treated.” It doesn’t get much lower than this.

In a recent New York Times article, Laurie Goodstein erred by saying that in the 37 cases of priests indicted by a grand jury in Philadelphia, none was brought to the attention of the review board.

Ana Maria Catanzaro, a member of the Philadelphia review board, previously said that her panel reviewed ten of the cases. Moreover, subsequent to the grand jury report, all 37 cases were reviewed by a former Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney, Gina Maisto Smith, with the aid of her team, and a forensic psychiatrist. Furthermore, not all of these allegations involved sexual abuse (which Goodstein acknowledged); many involve “boundary issues.”

We issued a press release on the morning the article appeared and asked the New York Times to make the appropriate corrections. We are happy to note that two days after our request, the Times made the corrections

Following the release of the John Jay study on the “Causes and Context” of clergy abuse, the media jumped all over the report. We followed up by issuing a statement addressing what they were saying.

The report says that fewer than 5 percent of abusive priests were pedophiles. The New York Times took issue with the report for defining prepubescent children as those age 10 or younger, mentioning that the American Psychiatric Association uses the age of 13. However, the American Academy of Pediatrics says puberty begins at the age of 10. This is important because the lower the age when puberty begins, the more it implies that heterosexuality or homosexuality was at work, and nobody wanted to squarely address the obvious.

The report says homosexuality was not a factor because a) not all homosexuals define themselves as such b) sexual relations with adolescents is ephebophilia c) the degree of abuse declined after gays entered the priesthood in large numbers in the late 1970s and 1980s, and d) they did not have access to altar girls when the abuse peaked.

A homosexual is defined by his actions, not his identity. Ephebophilia has no clinical definition and is nothing more than a description of adult men who have sex with adolescent males. The surge of gays in the seminaries began in the 1960s—not in the late 1970s. Finally, there are so few incidents of abuse these days (an average of 8.3 per year since 2005), that it makes no sense to compare the percentage of male victims at the peak of the scandal to what has happened since altar girls were allowed. The latest study on abuse notes that 83 percent of the allegations made in 2010 were by males, and the bulk of incidents took place in the early 1970s. Besides, priests had nothing but access to male altar servers before the 1960s, and the report notes that sexual abuse was not a problem then.

Finally, the report says that 81 percent of the victims were male and 78 percent were postpubescent. Since 100 percent of the abusers were male, that’s called homosexuality.

The left-wing attack on the John Jay study proves once again that art critic Harold Rosenberg was exactly right to say that liberals represent a “herd of independent minds.” Ever since the New York Times criticized the study as the “blame Woodstock” report, the herd swung into high gear.

• Tony Auth labeled his cartoon “It Was The Sixties, Man”

• A Boston Globe writer titled her piece, “Blame it on the ‘60s, Man”

• Jon Carroll branded his article, “The ‘60s Made Them Do It”

• A Canadian writer said, “Church Study Blames Swinging Sixties”

• ReligionDispatches indicted the Church for “Blame the Sixties” rationale

• Veteran Church-basher Marci Hamilton said the Church was guilty of “blaming the Sixties”

• Rabbi Shmuley Boteach said the Church blames “the 1960s”

• Mark Silk said the Church invokes the “Woodstock” excuse

• Sally Quinn’s brother, Wilson, slammed the Church for “Blame the Hippies” excuse

• A Cincinnati writer said the Church blames “dirty hippies”

• A New Haven writer said the Church blames “hippies”

• A Minnesota writer said the Church blames Jefferson Airplane

• A Florida writer argued the Church blames Janis Joplin

However, top honors go to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune for falsely claiming, “In page after page, the report also accuses the news media of misrepresenting the crisis.” This is utter nonsense. Mary Sanchez of theKansas City Star showed her brilliance by criticizing the study for not finding a “single cause.” She needs to take Sociology 101.

None of these critics is a social scientist, and few, if any, give evidence of actually having read the report. But that’s what we would expect from a “herd of independent minds.”

Recently, two victims’ watchdog groups, Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and BishopAccountability.org, responded to reports on sexual abuse. Once again they proved that they are not to be trusted.

The day before the Vatican issued its guidelines on how to address sex abuse, SNAP condemned them. The day prior to the  release of the John Jay report on the “Causes and Context” of abuse, BishopAccountability condemned the study.

Their credibility was shot long ago—both are relentless critics of the Church and neither is open to reason. Regrettably, not everyone has figured them out, and this includes many in the media. Either that, or the enemies of the Church are just given a pass.

Their actions should have been a wake-up call to fair-minded journalists. If any critics are to be deemed credible, they must first pass the test of rationality. But to these two groups, evidence doesn’t matter. They’ve made up their minds, and nothing the Church does can change it.

Those in the media who continue to give voice to these irrational sources cast doubt on their own integrity.