Can the Church Be Saved?

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For years most cases that made it to trial were civil complaints, but they were financially devastating, sometimes costing millions. So some dioceses adopted hardball legal tactics that abused victims all over again. A group of 39 plaintiffs have been battling the diocese of Providence, R.I., for as long as 10 years to get recompense for alleged abuse at the hands of 11 priests. Church lawyers attack the victims' credibility and besmirch their families. They bombard victims with as many as 500 written questions, demand 30 years' worth of tax returns, require names and dates for every doctor visited back to age 12. They cross-examine mothers about their children's sex lives. "It's intimidation," says Lee White, 45, one of the plaintiffs. "I feel like I am being reabused."

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

First, the institutional church has to acknowledge the magnitude of the damage. The Pope's cryptic paragraphs at the end of his Holy Thursday letter to priests hardly constituted a ringing mea culpa. At a stiff press conference afterward, Dario Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, a contender for the next pontificate, short-circuited the avalanche of questions with a sample of Vatican stonewalling, sternly defending current policy. Citing the "serious and severe" internal rules the church has applied to pedophile priests, the Cardinal looked up from his text and asked what other institutions had such guidelines. "I would like to know one!" he demanded, waving a finger.

The Vatican has long dismissed all the fuss as "an American problem," as if it plagued no other countries. In the corridors of Rome, prelates disparage the "litigious" nature of U.S. society and blame abusive priests on lax American sexual mores. Complains a Vatican official: "In America there is too much reliance on modern psychology in place of the church's traditional wisdom." Officials say the Pope is greatly pained by the crisis in the U.S. church. But that doesn't mean he is ready or able to confront such an explosive issue. The papacy hates to bend to outside pressure. St. Paul, Minn., attorney Jeff Anderson, who has been suing the church regularly for abuse victims, says, "They're not going to change until a bishop goes to jail and every bishop hears the door clang behind him and that sound resonates to the Vatican."

But it wouldn't take a Vatican II-style revolution to start improving the church's handling of sex abuse. Atlanta's Archbishop John Donoghue ticked off a few lessons in a recent pastoral statement: Report accusations immediately to the law. Cooperate in investigations. Move the accused away from kids. If he's found guilty, bar him from the ministry.

Scott Appleby, director of Notre Dame's Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, says the Conference of Catholic Bishops should immediately hammer out an enforceable uniform code of binding policies that enshrine those principles. "The problem in the past," he says, "has been the autonomy of each bishop, free to adopt or ignore conference policies." Many have suggested that each diocese name a board of independent lay advisers--lawyers, psychologists--to oversee every abuse case. More rigorous screening and modernized seminary training for sexually immature priests would help too.