Viewing the priest shortage another way, the average parish priest ministers to about 2000 Catholics.  To put that in perspective, America has about 800,000 lawyers to serve 280 million people, which computes to 350 people per lawyer.  Per capita, we've got about five times as many lawyers as priests.  The American Catholic Church has had an acute priest-personnel shortage for decades.  So if priestly standards have slipped a bit, the shortage of what the Church calls vocations may be a partial explanation [1].

Since the early 1960's, about 600 Catholic priests have been fired or suspended (as of June 2002) due to charges of sexual abuse.  So around one or two percent of priests turned out to be the last sort of people one would want in that kind of work [2].

That does not seem like a large percentage considering the problems the Church has long had recruiting enough priests.  A secular profession that's similar to church ministry, in terms of its practitioners' helping role, is that of psychology.  Depending on whose numbers you accept, somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of mental health professionals have preyed sexually on vulnerable patients or students [3].

So the fact that one or two percent of priests may be deviant is not remarkable.  The thing that's remarkable is the fact that their bishops have been protecting them from exposure and punishment, and have even placed them in positions where they had access to new potential victims.  You can be sure that tort lawyers and courts will make them pay for it . . . with someone else's money.  Estimates of damages already paid by Catholic dioceses across the country range from $350 million to $1 billion.  Future hits could easily reach 5 or 10 billion dollars.  That's a lot of money to take out of the collection plate.  Of course money can't measure the damage to the Church's mission and the faith of its members [4].
 

POWER WITHOUT ACCOUNTABILITY

Few doubt the truth of a statement by Lord Acton that is frequently quoted: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Unaccountable power is not exactly absolute, but it's pretty close.  It appears that the Church heirarchy is not accountable to anybody.  Catholics don't get to elect their bishops, the Pope in Rome appoints them.  Catholics don't get to elect the Pope either; a Pope serves for life, and when he dies his successor is elected by the "College of Cardinals," a relatively small group of elite bishops.  The term "princes of the Church" still has real meaning.

The Catholic Church has suffered and will continue to suffer catastrophic damage partly because its "princes" lack earthly accountability.  However, our legal "aristocracy" is the wrong instution to hold the Church's feet to the fire.  Its "princes" have caused so much sexual predation they make the "princes of the Church" look like a bunch of choir boys [5].

Many of the 600 defrocked priests had several victims, a few had dozens.  So the total number of victims would be in the thousands.  One could argue that the bishops who assigned known offenders to new parishes were responsible for many of those people being victimized; that is, the bishops enabled the rape or seduction of thousands of people, many children.  In exercising their unaccountable power, the "princes" on our Supreme Court enabled the forcible rape of millions of women and children.

On April 16, 2002, our "Secular Papacy" declared unconstitutional a six-year-old law prohibiting the distribution and possession of (computer simulated) pornography which appeared to depict sexual depravity involving real children.  Six of the nine princes on the Supreme Court said the law violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech.  This preposterous claim follows a half-century of radical Supreme Court inventions which degraded our culture, created our multi-billion-dollar pornography industry, and inspired legions of rapists and child abusers [6].

According to FBI crime statistics, the United States had about 17,200 forcible rapes in 1960.  About that time, the Supreme Court started inventing new "constitutional" mandates which tended to encourage rapists and obstruct police efforts to arrest, convict, and punish them.  The "constitutional" basis of those mandates was at best speculative and at worst fraudulent.  Consequently, the mandates were not "constitutional" at all, they were nothing but judicial policy innovations [7].

The number of rapes each year then proceeded to surge to ever higher levels; 38,000 in 1970, 83,000 in 1980, and 102,600 in 1990.  Between 1960 and 2001, roughly the same time frame in which 600 predatory priests allegedly raped or seduced several thousand victims, about 2.75 million forcible rapes were reported to the FBI.  Had the annual incidence of those crimes continued at the 1960 level (17,200), that 2.75 million number would be only 705,000.  So about 2 million reported rapes during those four decades represent growth which proceeded in step with the Court's policy innovations.  Since two-thirds of rapes are never reported to police, it appears that a total of six million extra rapes followed the Court's innovations [7].

Now it's not reasonable to blame the judicial policy innovations for all six million extra rapes.  During the 40 years in question, the U. S. population grew by about 60 percent with a disproportionate increase in the number of young males.  You will not be surprised to learn that young males commit most of the rapes.  However, Supreme Court policies created our graphic pornography industry, which stimulates rapists, and also made it much harder, in some cases impossible, for the states to enforce their laws against rape.

In 1960, before the Court's innovations, an arrest was made for 80 percent of all rapes reported; by 1995 that arrest rate had declined to 51 percent.  A rapist in 1990 in America had only a 15 percent chance of going to prison; our criminal justice system failed rape victims 85 percent of the time.  That pathetic performance was due mainly to obstacles the Supreme Court placed in the way of the system's efficient operation.  So, all things considered, it's probably reasonable to blame the Court's policy innovations for about one-half of the six million extra rapes [8].

Let's cut to the bottom line.  It will probably cost American Catholics several billion dollars (somewhere around $1 million per victim) for their bishops' misfeasance.  It's only fair that somebody should also pay a million dollars, or so, to each of the 3 million people who were raped because of U. S. Supreme Court misfeasance.  That total bill is about 3 trillion dollars; your family's share is around $30,000 [9].
 

NOTES AND CITATIONS

1.  Most of the numbers in these two paragraphs can be found at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops web site, http://www.nccbuscc.org/vocations/statistics.htm.  See also "Bishops lenient for past sex abuse," by Julia Duin, The Washington Times, June 5, 2002.

2.  See "Hundreds Of Priests Removed Since '60s," by Alan Cooperman and Lena H. Sun, Washington Post, June 9, 2002.

3.  See, for example, "Therapist-Patient Sexual Intimacy Involving Children and Adolescents," by Theresa Rose Bajt and Kenneth S. Pope, American Psychologist, Vol. 44. , No. 2, p. 455.  At this writing, the article could be found on the Internet at http://kspope.com/research7.shtml.  See also the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) web site at http://www.cchr.org/spiraling/eng/page00.htm.

4.  See "Catholics Urged to Tithe," by Larry Witham, The Washington Times, April 13, 2002.  Incidently, about a third of the money will go to lawyers.

5.  As early as the 1830's, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that America was ruled by an "aristocracy" of lawyers.  Ed Lazarus, a former Supreme Court clerk, in his 1998 book Closed Chambers, described the Court as "seven princes and two princesses sharing a single castle."  See also The Temple of Karnak, Chapter 3.

6.  The April 2002 ruling came in Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition.  The link between graphic pornography and child abuse is fairly well documented in the book by Catherine Mackinnon (Check the Bibliography).  See also the online essays and "Edicts of the Secular Papacy" and Our Secular Papacy and Sacred Porn.

7.  FBI crime statistics were taken from the National Disaster Center web site.  The four-decade rape total of 2.75 million was obtained by simply summing annual numbers given therein.  According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), only about one-third of rapes are reported to the police.  See also Judicial Activism Causes Crime.

8.  Arrest and incarceration rates are from a National Center for Policy Analysis Paper, "Crime and Punishment in America: 1997 Update," by Morgon O. Reynolds.

9.  The U. S. has somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million families.

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