Our lead commentary today is the text of a talk given by Richard Sipe to a group of guests invited by www.bishop-accountability.org in the Boston Public Library on May 20, 2010. It is a powerful and provocative commentary setting out the case why the gravity of the present crisis facing the Church calls for Benedict XVI to be the 10th Roman Pontiff in history to resign.

Introduction:

Coming to Boston is a home-coming for anyone who has been concerned with the clergy sex abuse crisis in the United States. We all know now that some Catholic clergy for decades (and centuries) were abusing boys and girls while bishops covered up the crimes, but it took the "guts of The Boston Globe", The Spotlight Team, to ferret out the documents and deliver the news, really to the world, beginning on January 6, 2002.

Boston provided the flashpoint of the Catholic clergy sex abuse crisis in the United States. Lawyers fought for victims: prominent among them Eric Mac Leish, Mitchell Garabedian and Carman Durso.

The combination of press exposure, victims' pressure, legal support and public outrage propelled the bishops into action; within six months they instituted a "zero tolerance" policy toward priest abusers (but not against abusing bishops). They established a National Review Board under lay direction and employed the John Jay School of Criminal Justice to conduct a survey of the U.S. diocesan files. Both unveiled their reports on February 27, 2004. Meanwhile the pope called the American cardinals to Rome and accepted the resignation of the archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law.

Boston lay forces mobilized: Terry McKiernan and Anne Barrett-Doyle founded and operate www.bishops-accountability.org the single most valuable repository of documented information about the sex abuse of bishops and priests.

The Voice Of The Faithful organized "to support the sexually abused; to support priests and bishops of integrity; and to help shape the structural integrity of the Church." VOTF spread from Boston across the country.

Secular authorities neither in Boston nor across the country were mollified; in 12 jurisdictions from Massachusetts to Los Angeles civil officials instituted Grand Jury investigations to evaluate the pattern and practice of the Roman Catholic Church in dealing with sex abuse of minors by its clergy. Every one found the bishops negligent or complicit in a problem they "could not manage".

Despite all of the evidence to the contrary the voice of the hierarchy remained defiant and clear: the head of the U.S. bishops, Wilton Gregory, proclaimed the crisis, "history" and Pope John Paul II pronounced the crisis, "an American problem". Even in 2010 a researcher for the U.S. bishops declared sex abuse of minors by American priests essentially a fluke of history and a temporary deviation from a celibate norm.

The revelations of abuse in Europe and its cover up by church authority belie the assumption that sexual abuse by priests and bishops is geographically limited or a temporary phenomenon.

Now is the time to be direct and honest about where we are: the pope has a sex problem! Its dimensions cannot be solved or even contained without serious and fundamental reconsideration of the origins and dynamics of the phenomena.

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Secret sex in the celibate system

by A.W. Richard Sipe on Apr. 28, 2010

• Examining the crisis

• Viewpoint

  Sexual behavior has a long and well-documented history. Even the current problem of sexual abuse of minors is neither new nor limited to clerics. It is a practice that crosses ethnic, cultural, religious and economic strata and custom. Incest (familial contact) is the most common. However, the sexual abuse of minors by declared celibate clerics poses special issues. There are three factors that draw special attention to the sexual practices of Roman Catholic clerics today.

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