Policy doesn’t deal with priests who abuse adults

The Diocese of Amarillo has kept a priest on duty after paying to settle a claim that he seduced a woman during a prayer session and pressured her to have an abortion when she thought she was pregnant. Catholic officials in Dallas, meanwhile, in recent months have handled two similar matters in different ways: They suspended a priest who was accused of raping a nun, but took no action against another priest accused of grabbing a man’s genitals during a blessing.

The cases point to an issue that is surfacing in dioceses around the country and is not answered by the sexual abuse policy that U.S. bishops adopted this summer in Dallas: What should happen when priests are accused of abusing adults?

Victims’ advocates say the problem is widespread and that most perpetrators have gone undisciplined, even as bishops have removed hundreds of priests accused of molesting minors.

“They are reacting to the fires that are the hottest,” said Susan Archibald, president of a national victims’ advocacy group called The Linkup.

Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, declined to be interviewed for this story and has not accepted Ms. Archibald’s request for a meeting on the subject.

Bishop Gregory has been praised for taking a “zero tolerance” approach to abuse of children in his Diocese of Belleville, Ill., that resulted in removal of several priests in the 1990s. He long left one priest on duty, however, after separate allegations of sexual misconduct with a middle-aged woman, a young man and boys. Bishop Gregory suspended the priest in September after The Dallas Morning News asked about his handling of the matter.

Dallas Coadjutor Bishop Joseph Galante, a spokesman for the bishops conference, said he expects his colleagues to broaden their abuse policy eventually. He cautioned that adult-abuse allegations can be more difficult to assess than those involving children.

A.W. Richard Sipe, a former priest who has studied hundreds of cases of clergy abuse, said that far more priests target adults than children — and some target both. The victims are primarily women, he said, though he has also compiled dozens of reports of powerful older priests pressuring younger ones, and priest candidates, for sex.

Calls from women

Ms. Archibald said that since the bishops met in Dallas, she has been getting calls frequently from women who report being seduced by priests from whom they had sought counseling or spiritual aid. Some states have criminalized such conduct; Texas law, for example, says a clergyman commits sexual assault if he has intercourse with someone by exploiting that person’s emotional dependency. Other reports she has received, Ms. Archibald said, range from sexual harassment to rape.

Since the mid-1990s, senior members of several women’s religious orders have told high-ranking Catholic officials about priests demanding sex from nuns and sometimes raping them. Sisters who protest or get pregnant often have faced retaliation, according to these reports, while the priests involved have largely gone unpunished.

The Vatican issued a news release last year saying that it was trying to deal with the problem, which is considered particularly severe in AIDS-ravaged areas of Africa. Many men there seek out sexual partners who are perceived as unlikely to be infected with HIV, according to two nuns’ written reports that were cited in National Catholic Reporter.

Ms. Archibald said bishops tend to minimize adults’ reports of abuse as “just affairs” and “blame the woman for causing the priest to violate celibacy.” They overlook the power imbalance that exists even in situations that don’t involve physical violence, she said.

Sadly, Ms. Archibald said, parishioners often seem almost relieved to hear that their priest has been accused of misconduct with a woman. One common reaction, she said, is “At least it’s not a kid.”

Sometimes, though, it’s both — many priests who have molested adolescents have also been sexually active with adults, usually picking one gender or the other. David Clohessy, a leader of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, said priests who abuse their power with adults should be considered potential threats to younger people, too.

That issue is being debated in a lawsuit against the Diocese of Dallas and one of its two imprisoned priests, the Rev. Emeh “Anthony” Nwaogu.

Lawyers for the adolescent girl he was convicted of molesting allege that church leaders had failed to act on an adult parishioner’s written allegation that Father Nwaogu was sexually harassing her. The woman has testified that a diocesan representative responded to her letter by saying that other parishioners had made similar complaints and that she “should pray about it.”

The diocese said it had no record that the woman complained, and even if she had, it wouldn’t have constituted a warning that the priest might harm a minor.
Sensitivity

Mr. Sipe said that bishops — sensitive about sexual activity in their own ranks and desperately short of priests — want to confine debate about abusers to those who prey on youth. Looking at the full problem, he said, “certainly will cast a wider net, both within the priesthood and the hierarchy of bishops.” At least 15 U.S. bishops have been publicly accused over the last decade of personal sexual misconduct, and most of have since resigned. About a third of the allegations came from people who said they were mistreated as adults.

In academic treatises, Mr. Sipe argues that most Catholic clerics violate their vows of celibacy at some point and that many do so regularly. Concern about having their own secrets revealed, he says, makes almost everyone afraid to blow the whistle on the minority of priests who abuse.

Clergy abuse certainly isn’t confined to the Catholic Church. And the Rev. Marie Fortune, a United Church of Christ expert on the subject, said Protestant leaders may be as reluctant as priests to expose colleagues’ wrongdoing.

One thing that distinguishes Catholic cases, she said, is that many adults presume priests are celibate and therefore not a sexual threat. “It’s a false expectation, but it’s one that makes some people more vulnerable,” said Ms. Fortune, who founded the Seattle-based Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence.

Staff writer Steve McGonigle contributed to this report.

E-mail begerton@dallasnews.com