The more we dig into the issue of
The investigation is an ongoing process, and it is happening worldwide. According to the grand jury report in 2018, 300 priests in Pennsylvania were discovered to have sexually abused more than 1,000 identifiable victims since 1940, while the Catholic leadership took part in cover-ups. In fact, in the U.S. alone, more than 17,000 people have been reported being molested by priests and others associated with the Catholic Church since 1950. Pay settlements have totaled more than $3 billion, bankrupting nearly 20 U.S.-based religious orders and dioceses.
In Germany, 3,677 people have reported to have been molested by clergy between 1946 and 2014. In Mexico, at least 152 priests have been suspended for sexual abuse in the past nine years. And the list continues: Scotland, Norway, Ireland, India, the Netherlands, England and many more.
This is horribly shocking. The Catholic Church is one of the oldest institutions in human history, which we assign it to be as the defender of positive moral values. Whether or not we uphold the church’s religious traditions, all of us are nevertheless disappointed and infuriated.
What should the Catholic Church do now?
Pope Francis recognizes this issue as “an urgent challenge of our time”. It is certainly an urgent challenge, but it should have been the urgent challenge generations ago. One of the biggest failure of the Catholic leadership is its complete failure to self-diagnose and eliminate the systematic sexual abuse long before it became this ugly and big. The more they covered up, the more shameful the outcome became.
This week, the Vatican plans to hold a special summit which will examine systematic sex abuse. But can bishops attending the summit solve such huge structural problems and ultimately restore public trust? Aren’t they the ones who have been deeply involved in church politics and, more importantly, closely associated with those who took part in systematic cover-ups that we are trying to eliminate? Without disintegrating the structure of power that allows systemization of sexual abuse and cover-ups, it is unlikely that the Vatican will be able to restore our trust. One suggestion is to allow a radical kind of oversight by non-Catholics, stepping away from in-house oversight by bishops. If the true enemy, so to speak, lives inside the church, then the most reasonable solution could be to utilize external oversight consists of members detached from church politics and hierarchy.
The process of uncovering deep-rooted systematic corruptions will certainly be painful for the Vatican. It will further damage the legitimacy of Catholicism as an institution based on religious morals. But the pain that the Vatican will experience will still be nowhere near the amount of pain that it caused to its victims.
Jaywon Choi
