It would be comforting to be able to report that last week's announcement of new measures to deal with priests' sexual abuse of children in the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Chicago was motivated entirely by the church's outrage and its compassion for the victims.
The policy adopted by Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin goes beyond legal requirements, setting up an independent board to investigate accusations of child molesting among the clergy. It establishes a 24-hour toll-free hot line to receive complaints and stipulates that allegations must be reported to a state agency handling child-abuse cases.
In its comprehensiveness, the Chicago policy is a laudable model for other dioceses, including Baltimore's -- but it has been a long time in coming.
One cannot avoid the conclusion that, without the civil suits filed by aggrieved parents, the financial pressure of mounting damage awards and out-of-court settlements and the zealous probing by the press, this scandal would have remained hidden under the rock of official church secrecy.
Just how big a scandal is it?
Jason Berry, a New Orleans-based journalist (and practicing Roman Catholic) who devoted much of the last eight years to uncovering layers of clerical obfuscation across the United States, has just published a book on his findings that should be required reading for laity and clergy alike -- especially the bishops.
In "Lead Us Not Into Temptation -- Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children," Mr. Berry provides as authoritative an account as now exists of the extent of the problem.
"Between 1983 and 1987," he writes, "more than two hundred priests or religious brothers were reported to the Vatican Embassy [in Washington] for sexually abusing youngsters, in most cases teen-age boys -- an average of nearly one accusation week in those four years alone.
"In the decade of 1982 to 1992, approximately four hundred priests were reported to church or civil authorities for molesting youths. The vast majority of these men had multiple victims."
Sad and shocking as such revelations are, there is another fact that raises the issue to the level of a crisis that can't be ignored by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops or by the Vatican. "By 1992," Mr. Berry reports, "the church's financial losses -- in victims' settlements, legal expenses, and medical treatment of clergy -- had reached an estimated $400 million."
