When will the Pope the Secretary of Education apologize to victims of abuse?

I know this is hard to read on a Monday morning, or any morning. Sorry, but it's important.

Compare this...

From the New York Times:

Photos Led to Arrest in Abuse of Pupils

By IAN LOVETT and ADAM NAGOURNEY

Published: January 31, 2012

LOS ANGELES — A former elementary school teacher who taught in a South Los Angeles school for 30 years was arrested Monday on charges of inflicting bizarre abuse rituals on at least 23 young girls and boys, including blindfolding them, binding their mouths with masking tape, and placing cockroaches on their faces and mouths before photographing them.

A student at Miramonte Elementary, where Mark Berndt used to teach. He is accused of covering children's mouths with tape.

The man, Mark Berndt, 61, was arrested in his home in Torrance, Calif., by members of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office, and charged with 23 counts of committing lewd acts upon a child. Bail was set at $2.3 million, but the authorities said they would seek to raise it to $23 million, or $1 million for each count.

The children were between the ages of 7 and 10 when the incidents took place between 2008 and 2010, the authorities said. Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, said potential victims were being urged to come forward in an attempt to establish whether such behavior had been going on earlier in the teacher’s career. He said five other people had come forward.

The sheriff’s office said the investigation began about a year ago when a film processor, complying with California law, turned over 40 photographs of children in a classroom, their mouths and eyes covered with tape. Some of the pictures showed Mr. Berndt with his arms around the children, or covering their mouths with his hands. Others showed Madagascar hissing cockroaches crawling on their faces, the authorities said.

Mr. Berndt was removed from the classroom on Jan. 7, 2011, after school authorities were notified of the evidence, said John Deasy, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. He was terminated by the Los Angeles Board of Education in February.

Mr. Deasy said that crisis counselors had been provided to victims and parents.

One student at the school said Mr. Berndt had collected bugs and larvae. School officials said there was nothing in Mr. Berndt’s 30-year personnel record to suggest this kind of behavior.

“This makes me afraid because the most important thing is to make sure my children are safe at school,” said Erendira Reyes, 38, who came to Miramonte Elementary School, where Mr. Berndt taught, upon hearing of the arrest. “When a person like that is at school and the administrators don’t know about it, I think that is a very serious problem.”

Jesse Lizzaraga, 30, also turned up to find out if this was the same man who was his second-grade teacher. It was. “He was actually kind of cool when I first met him,” Mr. Lizzaraga said. “I was shocked.”

Mr. Whitmore said that police closely monitored Mr. Berndt, who is unmarried and lives alone in a four-apartment complex in Torrance, to make certain that he had no contact with children. He said the length of time between the discovery of the photos and the filing of charges was a result of the complexity of the case, including efforts to identify the children in the pictures.

He said the final piece of evidence was finding a blue plastic spoon and a container in a wastebasket in Mr. Berndt’s classroom that contains traces of semen, which DNA testing established to be from Mr. Berndt. Some of the photographs depicted a similar spoon being held under the nose of blindfolded young girls.

The police searched Mr. Berndt’s home and uncovered an additional 100 photographs, and 250 more photographs were found at the film processing establishment. A total of 26 children have been identified in the photographs; 10 have not been identified.

...with this...

From the New York Times:

Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

Multimedia

Interactive Feature

Timeline: The Predator Priest Who Got Away

The Document Trail: Lawrence C. Murphy

The Takeaway With Laurie Goodstein

Abuse Scandal’s Ripples Spread Across Europe (March 25, 2010)

Room for Debate: Changing the Vatican's Response to Abuse(March 17, 2010)

Jeffrey Phelps for The New York Times

Arthur Budzinski, at a cemetery behind St. John's School for the Deaf, says he was first molested in 1960 when he went to Father Murphy for confession.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.

The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.

In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.

But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.

“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.

The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.

Father Murphy not only was never tried or disciplined by the church’s own justice system, but also got a pass from the police and prosecutors who ignored reports from his victims, according to the documents and interviews with victims. Three successive archbishops in Wisconsin were told that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children, the documents show, but never reported it to criminal or civil authorities.

Instead of being disciplined, Father Murphy was quietly moved by Archbishop William E. Cousins of Milwaukee to the Diocese of Superior in northern Wisconsin in 1974, where he spent his last 24 years working freely with children in parishes, schools and, as one lawsuit charges, a juvenile detention center. He died in 1998, still a priest.

Even as the pope himself in a recent letter to Irish Catholics has emphasized the need to cooperate with civil justice in abuse cases, the correspondence seems to indicate that the Vatican’s insistence on secrecy has often impeded such cooperation. At the same time, the officials’ reluctance to defrock a sex abuser shows that on a doctrinal level, the Vatican has tended to view the matter in terms of sin and repentance more than crime and punishment.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, was shown the documents and was asked to respond to questions about the case. He provided a statement saying that Father Murphy had certainly violated “particularly vulnerable” children and the law, and that it was a “tragic case.” But he pointed out that the Vatican was not forwarded the case until 1996, years after civil authorities had investigated the case and dropped it.

Father Lombardi emphasized that neither the Code of Canon Law nor the Vatican norms issued in 1962, which instruct bishops to conduct canonical investigations and trials in secret, prohibited church officials from reporting child abuse to civil authorities. He did not address why that had never happened in this case.

As to why Father Murphy was never defrocked, he said that “the Code of Canon Law does not envision automatic penalties.” He said that Father Murphy’s poor health and the lack of more recent accusations against him were factors in the decision.

The Vatican’s inaction is not unusual. Only 20 percent of the 3,000 accused priests whose cases went to the church’s doctrinal office between 2001 and 2010 were given full church trials, and only some of those were defrocked, according to a recent interview in an Italian newspaper with Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the chief internal prosecutor at that office. An additional 10 percent were defrocked immediately. Ten percent left voluntarily. But a majority — 60 percent — faced other “administrative and disciplinary provisions,” Monsignor Scicluna said, like being prohibited from celebrating Mass.To many, Father Murphy appeared to be a saint: a hearing man gifted at communicating in American Sign Language and an effective fund-raiser for deaf causes. A priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he started as a teacher at St. John’s School for the Deaf, in St. Francis, in 1950. He was promoted to run the school in 1963 even though students had disclosed to church officials in the 1950s that he was a predator.

Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy’s pulling down their pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother’s country house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips and in their dormitory beds at night. Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Father Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960.

“If he was a real mean guy, I would have stayed away,” said Mr. Budzinski, now 61, who worked for years as a journeyman printer. “But he was so friendly, and so nice and understanding. I knew he was wrong, but I couldn’t really believe it.”

Mr. Budzinski and a group of other deaf former students spent more than 30 years trying to raise the alarm, including passing out leaflets outside the Milwaukee cathedral. Mr. Budzinski’s friend Gary Smith said in an interview that Father Murphy molested him 50 or 60 times, starting at age 12. By the time he graduated from high school at St. John’s, Mr. Smith said, “I was a very, very angry man.”

In 1993, with complaints about Father Murphy landing on his desk, Archbishop Weakland hired a social worker specializing in treating sexual offenders to evaluate him. After four days of interviews, the social worker said that Father Murphy had admitted his acts, had probably molested about 200 boys and felt no remorse.

However, it was not until 1996 that Archbishop Weakland tried to have Father Murphy defrocked. The reason, he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, was to defuse the anger among the deaf and restore their trust in the church. He wrote that since he had become aware that “solicitation in the confessional might be part of the situation,” the case belonged at the doctrinal office.

With no response from Cardinal Ratzinger, Archbishop Weakland wrote a different Vatican office in March 1997 saying the matter was urgent because a lawyer was preparing to sue, the case could become public and “true scandal in the future seems very possible.”

Recently some bishops have argued that the 1962 norms dictating secret disciplinary procedures have long fallen out of use. But it is clear from these documents that in 1997, they were still in force.

But the effort to dismiss Father Murphy came to a sudden halt after the priest appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency.

In an interview, Archbishop Weakland said that he recalled a final meeting at the Vatican in May 1998 in which he failed to persuade Cardinal Bertone and other doctrinal officials to grant a canonical trial to defrock Father Murphy. (In 2002, Archbishop Weakland resigned after it became public that he had an affair with a man and used church money to pay him a settlement.)

Archbishop Weakland said this week in an interview, “The evidence was so complete, and so extensive that I thought he should be reduced to the lay state, and also that that would bring a certain amount of peace in the deaf community.”

Father Murphy died four months later at age 72 and was buried in his priestly vestments. Archbishop Weakland wrote a last letter to Cardinal Bertone explaining his regret that Father Murphy’s family had disobeyed the archbishop’s instructions that the funeral be small and private, and the coffin kept closed.

“In spite of these difficulties,” Archbishop Weakland wrote, “we are still hoping we can avoid undue publicity that would be negative toward the church.”

Notice the difference in the two stories.

The alleged molestation by the teacher is presented in isolation-- no discussion of the negligence or complicity of school authorities, despite the fact that the children appear to have been molested in the classroom, tied up with tape, covered with cockroaches, and fed semen on a spoon. It actually turns out that there were suspicions and even at least one allegation about this teacher going back to the 1990's.

Yet the school authorities are barely mentioned. The molestation is depicted as a la carte-- without context in the school system.

The alleged molestation by the priest is presented as an expose of the Catholic Church. The molestation is presented as crimes covered-up and even condoned at the highest levels of the Church. The article is focused on allegations of negligence and complicity by officials of the Catholic Church. The whole article is about context-- about the Catholic church.

The photo of the teacher (at the link) shows him isolated in a mug shot. The photo of the priest (at the link) shows him in a church conducting mass.

This double standard is evident in all mainstream press coverage of child abuse in schools and in the Church. When a teacher commits abuse, the abuse is generally reported in isolation (when it is reported at all). When a priest commits abuse, the abuse is almost always reported as a pattern of criminality sheltered and even condoned by the Catholic Church.

"Oh but", you say "teacher child molestation isn't covered up by schools like it is by the Church".

You'd be wrong, of course.

Hofstra Professor Carol Shakeshaft  has observed that educator sexual abuse is at least 100 times more common than sexual abuse by clergy. She has noted that schools rarely report suspicions of abuse to the police. Sexual abuse in public schools is an epidemic, and protection of accused abusers by schools has been the rule, not the exception. Ten percent of public schools students are victims of sexual misconduct by educators or staff at some point in their school years. There are approximately 30,000 children abused annually in schools in the United States by educators or staff. In New York City alone, one child is sexually abused by an educator or staff each day.

Here is an excerpt from Shakeshaft's report prepared for the U.S. Department of Education:

Consequences for abusers. In an early study of 225 cases of educator sexual abuse in New York, all of the accused had admitted to sexual abuse of a student  but none of the abusers was reported to authorities and only 1 percent lost their license to teach (Shakeshaft and Cohan, 1994). All of the accused had admitted to physical sexual abuse of a student but only 35 percent received a negative consequence for their actions: 15 percent were terminated or, if not tenured, they were not rehired; and 20 percent received a formal reprimand or suspension. Another 25 percent received no consequence or were reprimanded informally and off-the-record. Nearly 39 percent chose to leave the district, most with positive recommendations or even retirement packages intact. 

 Of those who left, superintendents reported that 16 percent were teaching in other schools and that they had no idea what the other 84 percent were doing. A recent report on sexual abuse in New York City indicates that 60 percent of employees who were accused of sexual abuse were transferred to desk jobs at offices inside schools and 40 percent of these teachers were repeat offenders (Campanile and Montero, 2001). In many instances, agreements are made to avoid legal battles with the alleged abuser (Shakeshaft and Cohan, 1994). . 

Several investigative reports have publicized individual cases and the response by districts to allegations of educator sexual misconduct. For instance, O’Hagen and Willmsen report that of 159 Washington state coaches “who were reprimanded, warned, or let go in the past decade because of sexual misconduct . . . at least 98 of them continued coaching or teaching afterward.” (Dec. 15, 2003) Many school districts make confidential agreements with abusers, trading a positive recommendation for a resignation.

In the midst of this epidemic of sexual molestation by educators and staff in public schools, very few cases of child sexual abuse in schools are reported to police by school officials.

By comparison, the Catholic Church has radically reformed its practices regarding prevention of abuse-- the Church in the U.S. is now one of the the safest places for children, much safer than schools, the streets, and the home. In 2009, there were six credible cases of allegations of clerical child abuse in the entire United States. That's fewer than the number of credible allegations of educator/staff abuse in New York City public schools each week.

When the Pope travels, the news media incessantly reports sundry demands that he apologize to victims of abuse. Where are the calls for apologies from top school officials, who oversee organizations in which abuse is orders of magnitude more common than it is in the Church and who generally have much more direct responsibility-- statutory responsibility-- for organizational oversight than the Pope has?

Why aren't school superintendents and state education officials scrutinized and vilified in the press with the same ferocity with which bishops are scrutinized?

Why hasn't the Pope the Secretary of Education apologized to abuse victims?

Here's another taste of the double standard:

The federal report [Shakeshaft] said 422,000 California public-school students would be victims before graduation — a number that dwarfs the state’s entire Catholic-school enrollment of 143,000.

Yet, during the first half of 2002, the 61 largest newspapers in California ran nearly 2,000 stories about sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, mostly concerning past allegations. During the same period, those newspapers ran four stories about the federal government's discovery of the much larger — and ongoing — abuse scandal in public schools.

Please note that my argument here is not that most educators are child-molesters or that public schools are in some way intrinsically evil. That would be grossly unfair to the vast majority of public school educators and administrators who are decent people and who work very hard to do the right thing. It would be as unfair just as the widespread media coverage of priests and of the Catholic Church on this issue has been unfair.

My argument is much more simple. I assert that people in the media and elsewhere who focus on abuse in the Catholic Church, but neglect the much larger epidemic of abuse in public schools, are bigots.

Imagine if every crime committed by a black person was reported in the media as an example of the propensity of blacks to commit crimes and the complicity of black communities in such crimes, but when crimes were committed by whites, no mention of race was made. Imagine if every financial crime committed by a Jew was reported in the media as an example of the propensity of Jews to steal and defraud and the complicity of Jewish organizations in such crimes, but when financial crimes were committed by non-Jews, no mention of religion was made.

The double standard of the media coverage of child sexual abuse by priests and of the media coverage of child sexual abuse by educators and by people in other walks of life is disgusting. It is pure anti-Catholic bigotry-- a modern analogue to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, directed against the Catholic Church.

It has a long history.