Essay:A critique of the Catholic Church's response to its pedophile priest problem

[WIP]

Preface

First things first: this is partially a defense of the Roman Catholic Church's actions in dealing with its priests who were molesting children, but not a claim that it was justified. Child sexual abuse is harmful and repugnant and ought to be dealt with thoroughly whenever it occurs. This is really more of an explanation for why the Church acted as it did and what it could and could not have done differently.

The core of this argument is that the Catholic Church was facing a moral and existential dilemma, and the course of action that it chose is consistent with its moral code and basic self-preservation. Later in this argument, I will point out alternative courses of action that the Catholic Church could have taken that would have served the purpose of self-preservation while also being possibly more morally proper than what it ended up doing. My aim here is to point out that the morally optimal response to the problem that led to the scandal — the problem being multiple priests sexually abusing children, and the morally optimal solution being to turn all of the pedophiles over to the secular authorities to be charged, tried, registered, and imprisoned — would not have been feasible.

Basic Facts about Institutions

To understand the dilemma that the Church faced, one must first understand some basic facts about social collectives — groups of people. Here are those basic truths:

1. In order to exist, a social collective needs people to be part of it. Depending on how organized and hierarchical the collective is, a collective may simply need members — people who align themselves with the group — or a mixture of members and staff — with members being those who claim fealty to the group but are not tasked with carrying out its functions, and staff being those who are formally employed by the organization and charged with doing the things the collective needs to do to follow its purpose and continue existing.
2. Many collectives need a purpose — a service that it fulfills for its members and humanity at large, and a goal it strives to meet.
3. A collective needs a moral code of conduct — a set of rules that its members are expected to follow, both to avoid endangering the members' interests as humans and to avoid endangering the collective's existence. The threat of members behaving immorally — that is, pursuing narrow and petty self-interest regardless of the harm it does to other people — is multifaceted. Immoral behavior against fellow members of the group can kill them or drive them to leave — either situation reducing the number of members of the collective, impairing the function of the group and bringing it closer to nonexistence. Immoral behavior against outsiders risks angering them and driving them to attack and possibly attempt to outright destroy the group in order to protect themselves and seek justice and/or retribution.
4. In order for a code of conduct to be meaningful, a collective must enforce it. This can range from admonishment of rule-breakers to fines and sanctions, all the way up to expulsion or execution.
5. Expulsion/execution, the most extreme punishment a collective can impose on rule-breakers, is damaging to the collective by virtue of the loss of membership or staff. The members/staff who were removed will need to be replaced, and the replacements will need to be trained into the role they are expected to fill. This means that any institution will face a difficult dilemma if a significant proportion of its members are engaging in expulsion-worthy misbehavior, especially when said misbehavior is harmful. If the institution takes the full, heavy reaction of expelling most or all of the rule-breakers, it may stop the misbehavior that would make people aim to destroy it, but the act of expelling the rule-breakers will make the institution lose a significant number of members/staff — enough of a loss to impair its continued functionality or even endanger its continued existence — and it will need to go to the trouble of replacing all of the lost members and training the replacements in order to recover. It may also need to acknowledge the fact that the large-scale misbehavior happened, especially if a lot of people were hurt, which may damage the institution's reputation. If the institution ignores the problem or takes a lighter reaction of imposing lesser punishments and/or expelling a small fraction of the rule-breakers, it avoids the immediate loss of members, and covering up the problem may protect the institution's reputation for some time; however, a soft or nonexistence response risks the rule-breaking continuing, causing innocent members to potentially be killed and/or driven away and risking injury to members and outsiders that could enrage them and drive them to attack the institution. This may even culminate in outsiders and injured/angered (ex-)members becoming enraged at the institution for the damage done by its rule-breakers and its failure to stop said damage, which is quite likely to drive them to attack it.

A broad overview of the moral guidelines of the Catholic Church

One of the main things that Jesus Christ prescribed in his preachings was forgiving people, even when they are not entirely deserving of it. The Church acknowledges that people will occasionally engage in antisocial behavior, and it tries not to hold it against them; it asks them to repent and strive to rise above their misdeeds. This tolerance towards wrongdoing is both one of Christianity's greatest strengths and one of its greatest weaknesses. On the positive side, the expectation of forgiveness for screw-ups means that people can rest easy knowing that they won't completely forfeit their right to life or their worth as human beings by making mistakes — even harmful mistakes. On the negative side, it allows malicious actors to abuse the system by engaging in wanton antisocial behavior without much fear of punishment.

When the Church ordains priests, it believes that it is conferring the grace of God onto them, and it therefore expects them to follow the ideals of YWHW the Father and Christ the Son, including the moral code that they prescribed. The Church expects priests to serve the communities where they are stationed — to provide them with guidance, comfort, instruction, and other such things. None of this requires molesting children. In fact, molesting children is a violation of this purpose, due to the physical, emotional, and mental harm it inflicts upon said children (and, by extension, the emotional harm to their families). The pedophilic priests were not only abusing the trust of the children they abused — they were abusing the trust of the Church itself.

Problems with how the Catholic Church handled its problem

One of the biggest ways the Catholic Church mishandled the situation was its heavy-handed attempts to silence and censor the victims to keep the issue under wraps. While the Church deserves some credit for attempting to solve the problem itself, its solution of scolding offending priests and moving them to different locations was the equivalent of putting an ordinary Band-aid on a large wound — only mildly effective at best in the immediate-to-short-term and somewhere between completely ineffective to flat-out counterproductive in the medium-to-long-term. Even worse, by threatening repercussions up to and including excommunication to the victims if they sought actual justice against their abusers by speaking out about their experiences or informing secular authorities, the Church exacerbated, extended, and added further damage to the trauma of the abuse they had already endured. This response is exactly the sort of narrow-minded self-interest that a rational person or institution would not pursue in recognition of said harm being done and the high possibility of endangering oneself by fostering resentment and a desire for revenge and retribution in the people being harmed.

So, if the Church couldn't expel all of the pedophiles, what could it have done instead?

There is strong evidence that the Church kept records of its admonishments to the pedophiles, meaning that it kept track of all incidents that it became aware of and knew the relative degrees of guilt of each of the rulebreakers. While handing all of the pedophiles over to the police would have crippled it, and its belief in forgiving wrongdoers would mean that it would not be interested in punishing low-level offenders, it still could have instituted a strikes policy where repeated and/or egregious offenses would be harshly dealt with (for instance, by handing them over to the secular authorities). While publicly acknowledging the wrongdoers' misdeeds would most likely have done some damage to the Church's reputation and authority, it would almost certainly have been nowhere near as bad as the damage that ultimately happened once covering up the problem inevitably failed.