Sexual crimes

Fr. John Coughlin’s excellent review (“Scandal and Canon Law,” June/July 2008) of Nicholas Cafardi’s equally excellent book Before Dallas: The U.S. Bishops’ Response to Clergy Sexual Abuse of Children is marred by approval of setting aside “prescription,” the statute of limitations for the prosecution of a delict in canon law. Coughlin asserted that prescription rendered canon law ineffective for the prosecution of accused clerics because “victims of child abuse sometimes do not bring accusations to the attention of church authorities until many decades after the abuse has occurred.” This is a mantra chanted often in the media by self-serving contingency lawyers and victim groups, but the claim lacks both context and proof.

The prison where I have lived for the last fourteen years houses some 2,500 prisoners, 40 percent of whom are convicted of sexual crimes—most against children. That translates into a population of some one thousand sexual offenders in this single prison, with another six thousand in the state’s parole system. Two of these are Catholic priests, one accused three months after a series of claimed assaults and the other accused of an assault from twenty-seven years ago.

The other 6,998 are accused parents, grandparents, step-parents, uncles, teachers, ministers, scout leaders, and so on, and for them the typical time lapse between alleged abuse and a victim coming forward to report it was measured in weeks or months, or years—certainly not decades. There is simply no evidence to support Coughlin’s contention that sexual-abuse victims typically require decades to come forward.

So what sets the accusers of priests apart from other victims? The John Jay Report revealed that a full 70 percent of the claimants against Catholic priests came forward not in the 1960s to 1980s, when the abuse was claimed to have occurred, but in 2002, when Church institutions were forced into “blanket settlements.”

Before the Church abandons the rule of law in favor of the cascade of media bias, much more study of the relation between settlements and claims is needed. Financial settlement appears to be the sole common denominator that sets claims against priests apart from most other claims. As Archbishop Charles Chaput has asserted elsewhere in the pages of First Things, “statutes of limitations exist in legal systems to promote justice, not hinder it.”

Rev. Gordon MacRae
Hampton, New Hampshir