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The Roman Catholic Church has had to deal with many accusations of sexual abuse by their clergy in dioceses all around the world. The following is a brief overview of some notable cases.
In 2005, the Diocese of St. George in Newfoundland almost sold off all of its property after agreeing to pay $13 million to 40 victims of Reverend Kevin Bennett, who was convicted in 1990 of hundreds of sexual assaults dating back to 1961.
Another major Canadian scandal happened in Cornwall, Ontario, involving allegations that a ring of pedophiles had operated there since the late 1950s. In 1992, a former altar boy came forward to say he had been sexually abused by two Roman Catholic priests in the late 1960s.
Police followed up on the complaint, and in 2001, Ontario Provincial Police charged 15 people with 100 charges including gross indecency and sexual assault. Only one person was ever convicted in the scandal, but in 2005 Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty announced he was establishing the Cornwall Public Inquiry. It began on February 16, 2006, and continues today.
His trial helped shine light on a systemic crisis of clergy sexual abuse and an institutional pattern of shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish instead of turning them over to police. Cardinal Bernard Law, who had been the Archbishop of Boston for almost 20 years, was forced to resign over his handling of the abuse allegations.
Even before 2002, however, American dioceses were discovering the widespread problem of clergy sexual abuse. Allegations that cropped up in Lafayette, Louisiana in 1985 are considered to be have provoked a wave of revelations about clergy sexual abuse that swept through dioceses in Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.
In 2004, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned a wide-ranging study into the nature and scope of the problem of sexual abuse of minors by clergy. That 120-page study identified 4,392 priests accused of sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002, and estimated that American dioceses had paid out more than $420 million to compensate alleged victims.
Though the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales had established a fledgling
sexual policy in 1994, it proved ineffective, and in 2000, Archbishop
Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, invited British
judge Lord Nolan to help examine and review arrangements made for child
protection and the prevention of abuse within the Church, and to make
recommendations. Those recommendations came out in 2001 and were reviewed
last year.
There were 132 allegations of sexual abuse clergy in 2002, but according
to the Catholic Office for the Protection
of Children and Young Adults,
that number has declined steadily ever since. In 2004, for example, 111
alleged victims came forward; 56 came forward in 2005.
Ultimately, sex scandals would force all but one seminary to close and force one bishop to resign amidst criticism of his handling of abuse by clergy in his diocese.
In 2005, the Irish Bishops' Conference published Our
Children, Our Church, a set of policies and procedures for protecting children and young
people within the church that is to be put into effect in every diocese.
