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Over 4,800 children sexually abused in Portugal’s Catholic churches since 1950: ‘Tip of the Iceberg’

By Samantha Kamman

Priests and others within the Portuguese Catholic Church sexually abused more than 4,000 children over the past 70 years, and more than 100 priests suspected of child sexual abuse are still active in church roles, investigators estimate.

An investigation report published this month by the Independent Commission for the Study of Child Sexual Abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church found that priests and others have likely sexually abused 4,812 children within the church since 1950.

Through an online survey, investigators validated 512 victim witness statements and “estimate that the 512 victims knew of or were in contact with close to 4,300 other victims.”

“[T]he vast majority of cases took place on more than one occasion against the same child, to many thousands of instances of abuse,” the report states.

In a statement, Bishop Josè Ornelas apologized for the church’s failure to grasp the extent of the problem, promising more transparency in the future.

“We have heard things that we cannot ignore. It is a dramatic situation that we are living,” he said, adding that child sex abuse is a “heinous crime.”

The commission, founded by child psychiatrist Pedro Strecht, began its investigation in January 2022 after Ornelas, president of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, invited Strecht to form the commission.

“There is an approximate (number of accused priests) and it will clearly be more than 100,” Strecht told SIC television, according to Reuters.

In 96.9% of cases, the abuser was male. The abuser was a priest in 77% of cases.

In 46.7% of cases, the abuser and the victim were acquainted with one another, with the average age of abuse victims being 11.2 years, according to the report.

The investigation found that boys were more likely to be victims than girls, with the former accounting for 57.2% of cases and the latter accounting for 42.2%. In 65.8% of cases, the commission reported no actions were taken to stop the abuser. However, over three-fourths (77%) of the victims never complained to people within the church or organizations. Only 4.3% of victims took their cases to court.

“The data on the incidence of sexual abuse uncovered in the ecclesiastical archives must be seen as the ‘tip of the iceberg,'” the report states. “It was thoroughly demonstrated that an indeterminate number of victims did not report the abuse to the Catholic Church.”

The report found instances of abuse in 129 districts across the country. The highest abuse rates were reported in Lisbon, Porto, Braga, Santarém and Aveiro.

While some incidents of abuse happened outside of the church (such as boy scout meetings), 23% of the incidents happened at a seminary. Other instances occurred at unspecified locations (18.8%), and 14.3% occurred at a confessional. Another 12.9% of abuse cases happened at a rectory, and 6.9% occurred at a religious school.

The type of abuse the victims endured varied, but most of the abuse consisted of “manipulation of the sexual organs, masturbation, oral and anal sex as well as full copulation.”

“In most cases, victims stressed that after the abuse had occurred they were expressly asked or ordered to ‘keep it secret,’ abusers commonly resorting to various forms of blackmail, often by threatening to reveal the child’s behavior to family members or friends,” the report reads. “Contempt and humiliation, making the child feel ridiculous in its always vulnerable relationship with adults, increase victims’ feelings of loneliness and abandonment.”

The commission said victims’ testimonies “bear witness to an emotional atmosphere of terror and to abusers’ regarding their crimes as mere instances of ‘the banality of evil.'”

Many victims said that they and their families considered themselves religious. Because the abuse they experienced was at the hands of church members, the victims reported that they developed a “basic mistrust” that persists to this day. That mistrust has also inspired feelings of protectiveness of their children and grandchildren, according to the report.

“The larger group among these revealed that they cut contact with the Church and partly or entirely ceased to be practicing, although they remain Catholic and express their faith by other means,” the report reads.

“The study shows that the Church lost faithfulness groups as a direct result of child sexual abuse perpetrated by its members. This effect extends to others who, while not having been abused themselves, are in sympathy with the suffering of the victims.”

A second group of victims, the report explains, who said they were able to make a distinction between abusers and the institution itself who remained practicing Catholics. A third group of victims was categorized as those who “cut off all faith and belief and became agnostic or atheist.”

The commission made recommendations, including ongoing training and supervision of church members, ceasing religious practices in closed locations, and providing psychological help for the victims.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests welcomed the report but found it “disturbing” that it didn’t name a single abuser.

“[W]e do believe there is a public interest in the identities of the alleged abusers and the places the abuses allegedly happened,” a statement from SNAP reads.

“The panel is to send to bishops by the end of the month a list of alleged abusers who are still active in the church. This is a good step in theory, but church officials clearly do the bare minimum when it comes to protecting children.”

The commission admits there is fear that abusers still active in the church may “continue to commit the same crimes.”

“[A] list was prepared on the basis of the data collected. Names were submitted to the Public Prosecutor as the work progressed, and a complete list of the names was provided to it on completion,” the report states.

The report comes as previous investigation reports have highlighted sexual abuse problems within Catholic churches in other countries.

In October 2021, an independent commission launched in 2018 found as many as 3,200 pedophiles had worked in the French Catholic Church since the 1950s.

A grand jury report released in 2018 detailed how 301 priests abused more than 1,000 children over the past several decadesinsix dioceses across Pennsylvania.

Pope Francis issued an apostolic letter in 2019 requiring clergy to report abuse, changing an earlier standard that allowed church officials their own discretion on the matter.

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The Pope’s African pilgrimage

— Does the continent represent the future of Catholicism?

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As milestones go, the recent sight of three leading men of God together in Africa was quite something — a rare chance for Christian leaders to spread the word and challenge rivals for hearts and minds.

Pope Francis and the Vatican media machine might have led the way, but alongside him went Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshields. They shared the Papal plane on the way home with the kind of bonhomie and mutual understanding that highlights the importance of Africa in the contest to be the world’s leading faith.

There they were, the three of them, in the war zone of South Sudan, the Christian stronghold that broke away from the Muslim north amid terrible conflict. Today that newest of countries represents a small but symbolically important piece of the continent’s religious jigsaw that will see Christianity grow by more than 40 per cent, the hierarchy believes, by 2050, and so ensure their faith will continue to stay just ahead of Islam in global per centages.

Some walked for days just to see and hear him

Ahead of that historic appearance of a Christian triumvirate, Pope Francis had spent days in Congo, sub-Saharan Africa’s largest country, home to more than 100 million, half of them Catholic, and the crucible of a conflict that has claimed more than five million lives, displacing millions more. It was a grim sign of the continuing murder and mayhem that the Pope had to cancel a trip to Eastern Congo, the epicentre of the war, because of fighting near the regional capital of Goma.

At his main mass in the capital, Kinshasa, more than a million Catholics joined him, some having walked for days just to see and hear him. Everywhere he went, thousands lined the streets and overpasses to glimpse the man many Congolese call simply “Our Father.” Francis, deeply moved, found the voice that has eluded him in recent times.

“This country, so immense and full of life, this diaphragm of Africa, struck by such violence like a blow to the stomach, has seemed for some time to be gasping for breath,” he told followers, clearly energised by the sight of so many worshippers. “But you are a diamond, believe in yourselves, and your future.”

The numbers do tell. According to the Vatican’s news agency, Africa accounts for 265 million members of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics — 20 per cent, and growing fast. The Anglican church is smaller but with significant followers in those countries with a footprint of the British empire: Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa (think the late Desmond Tutu)

“Africa offers Christianity such opportunity, born out of tragedy and suffering maybe, but such potential,” to quote one of the Pope’s advisers, noting that the Pontiff insisted on making the trip despite poor health of late and being now wheelchair-bound. “Francis, better than anyone, knows where we have lost ground, and where we need to work.”

It is ironic to consider it but, yes, the Argentinian Pope does indeed know where Catholicism has seen the faithful flee elsewhere. In Latin America, once the vanguard of his own Jesuit mission and home to the largest Catholic country on the planet, Brazil, Church leaders acknowledge that tens of millions have been lost to rivals, especially the Evangelical and Pentecostal faiths.

Even in the Pope’s beloved Argentina, you can see the exodus and not just in the major cities, Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Rosario. In the foothills of the Andes, in conservative, rural Mendoza, the Catholic church is often half-empty. In contrast the Evangelical arena, often a large, multi-purpose room on the main street, or a schoolroom not used on the weekends, can be packed to overflowing — with the devout outside in sizable numbers.

“Ours is Christianity that speaks to people’s needs, and people’s lives,” says Evangelical minister Jose Hernandez in Mendoza, pinpointing how Rome’s hard line on “social issues” (code for contraception, abortion, and the role of women in the Church) especially during the long years of the Polish Pope, John Paul the Second, opened the floodgates. “Ordinary people have flocked to us.”

The religious battle for Africa has been joined

Fascinatingly, the attempts of Pope Francis to soften the conservative line of his predecessors — taking for example such a relaxed view of homosexuality (“who am I to judge?” he says, “they are children of God too”) — has produced blowback, the likes of which Christianity may not have seen before. Such appeasement seems to have come too late for his Church in Latin America — and in Africa, his open voice on gay life is the seed of clear dispute between his Vatican and some fiercely traditional Bishops, let alone communities, on the ground in the likes of Congo and South Sudan.

“The Pope can have his view on homosexuality, and we have ours,” said one Catholic Bishop in attendance as the Pope celebrated that mega-mass in Kinshasa. “It is a sin.” Justin Welby and the Anglican church heard likewise in South Sudan from their flock. “Better to have two wives than to be gay or lesbian,” according to one Protestant Archbishop there.

The religious battle for Africa has been joined, and Christianity, losing out elsewhere in the Global South, sees the continent as the go-to arena tomorrow. So much so that inside the Vatican — where I was once a young correspondent back in the day when they dared to elect a Pole as Pope — they say the next Pontiff could well be an African.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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More than 100 priests suspected of abuse remain active in Portugal’s Catholic Church

People walk by a church on the day Portugal’s commission investigating allegations of historical child sexual abuse by members of the Portuguese Catholic church will unveil its report, in Lisbon, Portugal, February 13, 2023.

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More than 100 priests suspected of child sexual abuse remain active in church roles in Portugal, according to the head of a commission investigating the issue.

The commission, which started its work in January 2022, said in its final report published on Monday that at least 4,815 children were sexually abused by members of the Roman Catholic Church in Portugal – mostly priests – over 70 years.

It added that the findings were the “tip of the iceberg”, describing the 4,815 cases as the “absolute minimum” number of victims.

“There is an approximate (number of accused priests) and it will clearly be more than 100,” child psychiatrist Pedro Strecht, who headed the commission, told SIC television.

The commission said it was preparing a list of accused priests still working to send to the Church and to the public prosecutors’ office.

Strecht said those on the list should be removed from their roles or at least should be banned from interacting with children and teenagers during the investigation.

Jose Ornelas, head of the Bishops’ Conference, said the institution was yet to receive the list.

“What Pope (Francis) says (is)… abusers of minors cannot hold positions within the ministry as long as it is proven that the person is an abuser,” Ornelas said, adding the Church would not conduct a “witch hunt” against its members.

Strecht said the Church had the “moral and ethical duty to collaborate with judicial authorities” on the matter.

Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said the revelations “shocked society as a whole”, adding that government officials, including the justice minister, would meet with commission members.

President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who came under fire in October for saying 400 cases of alleged sexual abuse by clergy members did not seem to be “particularly high”, said the Church must be held accountable.

Portuguese bishops will meet on March 3 to consider implementing “more efficient and appropriate mechanisms” to prevent future abuses, Ornelas said.

In a statement, U.S.-based support group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) called on Portuguese church officials to “prominently publish the name, photo, place of residence, and work history of abusive clergy”.

“Immediate action is needed, and it includes the dismissal of any bishop, chancellor, vicar general, or other church hierarchs who is complicit in what has happened,” SNAP said. “Without change at the top, nothing will change.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Irish delegates call for radical change at European assembly of Catholic churches

— Representatives push for women to be admitted to priesthood after island-wide consultations

The assembly in Prague has been attended in person by four Irish delegates with 10 attending online.

By Patsy McGarry

An assembly of the Catholic Church in Europe has been told that members in Ireland want women to be admitted to the diaconate and priesthood. In island-wide consultations “many women communicated their pain at being denied their agency in the life of the church and spoke of feelings of exclusion and discrimination. Women play a critical role in the life of the church but so many men and women have spoken of the church ‘excluding’ the fullness of the gifts of women,” representatives of the Irish church said.

In Ireland there was “a deep longing for a more inclusive and welcoming church. People wish for this enlarged tent to be experienced in liturgy, language, structures, practices and decision-making. The co-responsibility of all the baptised must therefore be recognised and practised, to overcome clericalism and to ensure full and equal participation of women in all aspects of church life and ministry and decision-making,” they said.

The European assembly in Prague, which is ongoing, has been attended in person by four Irish delegates with a further 10 attending online. Those in Prague include Catholic Primate Archbishop Eamon Martin, Dr Nicola Brady, Julieann Moran and Fr Eamonn Fitzgibbon. The 10 online delegates involve six woman, including Ursula Halligan of the We Are Church Ireland group. Representatives of 39 Catholic churches across Europe are in attendance.

Speaking to the assembly on behalf of the Irish church, Ms Moran and Fr Fitzgibbon said that in the consultations with practicing Catholics around Ireland “those who are in loving relationships that don’t accord with church teaching, including people identifying as LGBTQI+, and those in second unions, also spoke of their hurt, particularly around harmful and offensive language used in church circles and documents”.

There was also “a call for greater inclusion of migrants and refugees; of people living with disabilities; of young people; of single parents. Some of those who love the pre-Vatican II liturgy also spoke of their sense of exclusion.”

Overwhelmingly, however, they spoke of the destruction caused to the Catholic Church in Ireland by clerical child sexual abuse. It had “a profound effect on the church in Ireland”, they said. Having listened to abuse survivors during the consultation process “we recognise that abuse is an open wound and will remain a barrier to communion, participation and mission until it is comprehensively addressed”, they said.

There was “an anger, a sadness, a sense of loss, including in some cases a loss of faith, which is felt most acutely by those who were abused, but it is also felt by the lay faithful, by priests, bishops, religious men and women, by those who have remained, and by those who left because they no longer hear the good news in a church that failed so many”, they said.

“Carefully chosen words spoken with humility and sincerity help, but they are not enough. We need to continue our efforts to provide times and spaces for lamentation, to grieve this shared pain and loss.”

They also spoke of how “across both political jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, the last number of decades have seen divisive conflict including suspicion and sectarianism within the Christian family, together with a radical demographic, economic and social transformation”.

This European assembly is one of seven continental assemblies taking place across five continents in the latest stage of an ongoing “synodal process” in the Catholic Church worldwide, leading to two planned Synods of Bishops in Rome, one next October and a second in October 2024.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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New Catholic clergy sexual abuse report from Fordham charts a path forward

— ‘To me, placing survivors’ stories first is about cultural transformation,’ said The Rev. Gerard McGlone.

David Lorenz, Maryland director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, speaks at a sidewalk news conference outside the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops gathering in Baltimore on Nov. 16, 2022.

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In 2018, the Catholic world was reeling from the one-two punch of abuse allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the scathing Pennsylvania grand jury report exposing Catholic clergy sexual abuse of over 1,000 children over the previous 70 years. That reckoning prompted a group of researchers from 10 Jesuit institutions to mobilize to look for ways to stem a crisis of clergy sexual abuse that is now reaching its fourth decade.

At Georgetown University, a priest began studying the healing effect of abuse survivors’ stories; an ethicist at New York’s Fordham University began investigating how Black survivors had been erased from the clergy abuse crisis; in Milwaukee, an interdisciplinary team at Marquette University started a workshop for Catholic teens on abusive power dynamics.

These projects are three of the 18 funded by an unnamed foundation and whose findings are published in Taking Responsibility, a 68-page report from Fordham University released in January.

The report includes case studies of abuse cover-up in Baltimore, Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska; research on topics such as moral injury; and guides for whistleblowing and for communicating about abuse. Though the report concludes with recommendations for Jesuit leaders, the findings, according to project director Bradford Hinze, a professor of theology at Fordham, can be applied broadly.

Several of the projects fault clericalism, or the Catholic hierarchy, with fostering clergy’s sense of superiority, isolation and ultimately abuse. As part of the remedy, the report calls for priests and their institutions to confront survivors’ stories, both past and present, head-on.

The Rev. Gerard “Jerry” McGlone, S.J. Photo courtesy Georgetown University
The Rev. Gerard McGlone.

The Rev. Gerard McGlone, senior research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University and a Jesuit priest, sees abuse survivors’ stories as sacred. “To me, placing survivors’ stories first is about cultural transformation,” he told Religion News Service. “It’s about having a community that believes those who have been harmed, rather than those in power.”

McGlone used his part of the grant to launch a study of more than 150 participants who engaged with survivors’ stories in video, written and  listening formats. They also took pre- and post- surveys.

Preliminary findings, which McGlone called “staggering,” suggest that listening to survivors’ stories increases a person’s levels of spirituality and decreases their loss of meaning and sense of institutional betrayal.

“What was stunning in the research is that initially, the rates of moral injury of several different components that have been known in the field were lowered when the person heard and saw a survivor’s story,” McGlone said.

Most participants — many reached through advertisements in America magazine and National Catholic Reporter — were practicing Catholics. Yet engaging with the stories didn’t diminish their church attendance or beliefs. McGlone, who hopes the findings can be replicated in future studies, said they could have sweeping impacts.

“How might survivor stories become part of a new catechesis?” he asked. “How might it be integrated into the fabric of who we are as Catholic believers?”

For his project, the Rev. Bryan Massingale, a priest in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and a theological ethicist at Fordham, grappled with the link between white supremacy and the church’s failed response to clergy abuse of Black people. “In many ways this report is really the only one in existence yet to take the experience of African Americans and make it central,” he told RNS.

The Rev. Bryan Massingale. Photo by Patrick Verel/Fordham University
The Rev. Bryan Massingale.

Massingale analyzed the limited data available on Black Catholic survivors and discovered several barriers to knowing the full extent of their trauma. Most Catholic dioceses don’t collect data on survivors’ race and ethnicity. Race-specific barriers also prevent Black folks from reporting abuse in the first place, as they may not trust law enforcement. They may fear that they won’t be believed by authorities or by a jury, particularly if the abuse was perpetrated by a white priest in good standing.

The church can help more Black survivors, Massingale said, by collecting survivors’ demographic data and creating forums designed explicitly for Black survivors and other victims of color to process their trauma. Many Black victims, he said, “find it very difficult to tell their story without talking about how race impacted their experience.”

In addition, Massingale said those who present education materials on clergy sexual abuse need to rethink the images they include — “Do we allow victims/survivors/copers of color to see themselves as part of this narrative?” he asked. The church may also need to reevaluate what terms are used to describe those who’ve been abused.  Black communities who’ve long had to cope with white supremacy, for instance, might prefer the term “coper” over such words as “victim” or “survivor.”

While Massingale and McGlone focused on survivors’ stories, the Marquette team studied how to best equip teens to identify abusive power dynamics. The team found 161 different educational materials for children across 196 dioceses that were often inconsistent, outdated and without theological grounding. One group used a video from 1998 in which a yellow dinosaur teaches kids about “tricky people.”

“There was very little reference to power dynamics, and that was why we decided to focus our workshop on power. Particularly, who has power, and how they have power based on their social context,” said Karen Ross, professor of theology and ethics at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

Mark Levand, education practicum coordinator at Widener University’s Center for Human Sexuality Studies, added that none of the materials discussed comprehensive sexuality education, despite research showing it reduces rates of sexual abuse and increases reporting.

Cathy Melesky Dante, from left, Karen Ross and Mark Levand pose together during a workshop for teens about healthy relationships, held in the Diocese of Milwaukee. Courtesy photo
Cathy Melesky Dante, from left, Karen Ross and Mark Levand pose together during a workshop for teens about healthy relationships, held in the Diocese of Milwaukee.

To fill the void, Ross, Levand and Cathy Melesky Dante, a spiritual director and Ph.D. candidate studying solidarity with abuse survivors at Marquette, held workshops for teens — one for younger teens, one for older teens — in the Diocese of Milwaukee. Using icebreakers, discussions and case studies, they walked teens through what healthy relationships look like and gave them tools to identify emotional abuse, sexual coercion, intimidation and isolation. In surveys, participants reported learning about their own autonomy and power in relationships.

Melesky Dante told RNS the workshop used Jesus’ resurrection as an example of wielding power for good. “This is our God using power to raise people from the dead. How does this inform how we think about power?” The workshops also incorporated the Examen of St. Ignatius of Loyola, a prayer technique that allows participants to reflect on when they felt close to or far from God during the session. (Their teaching guide is available on Fordham’s website.)

“In a Catholic framework, having more dialogue around standards and what we can do as a church to help integrate sexuality into a broader curriculum is really important,” said Levand. “I hope it starts a dialogue about the importance of power dynamics in relationships and also most specifically in Catholic spaces.”

If its lessons are taken seriously, the authors of the Fordham report say, it could be a critical step toward justice and abuse prevention. But ending the clergy abuse crisis continues to be an uphill battle. In November, a probe uncovered more than 600 abuse victims of Catholic clergy over 80 years in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. A month earlier, the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo submitted to government oversight after a lawsuit accusing former bishops of sexual abuse coverup.

“We know that in dioceses across the country, it’s often the case that lawyers have in the past told bishops, you don’t want to get involved. You don’t want to talk to victims. … You don’t want to speak out publicly, for fear that this might have an adverse effect on your institution,” said Hinze. “My great hope and desire is that there will be much more open discussion and collaboration with people around these issues as we move forward.”

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