Recent Doyle Article
Thomas Doyle was the source for a recent article titled “Priest says clerical sex abuse issue not over” (and mirrored here) that appeared in the The Irish Times authored by the journalist Patsy McGarry. The article is indicative of a pattern of journalistic credulity shown by elements of the media when it comes to Reverend Doyle’s claims. I do not have the means to examine whether this response is typical but it is common enough to make it quite easy to find a significant number of media pieces that display this effect (for example, here, here, here and here).
The second line of the article ambiguously claims “in 1985 he [Doyle] helped draft a report on clerical child sex abuse for America’s Catholic bishops.” This could be interpreted to mean that he produced a report upon the request of the American Roman Catholic bishops. In reality the report was produced upon the authors’ own initiatives. As Doyle previously claimed: “The Manual was not commissioned by nor assigned by anyone in any position, official or otherwise.”
“It [clerical child sex abuse] may not be front-page news, but the nightmare is still going on. We are only starting to see the extent of clergy abuse in non-English speaking countries. “We’ll continue to see victims come forward because the sickness is far deeper and wider than anyone can imagine.”
There is no evidence provided, nor any apparently requested, to substantiate this claim. In fact the most comprehensive study on the matter, produced by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, suggests that the abuse peaked in the 1970’s and 1980’s and has rapidly decreased ever since. Although it is possible that there is much abuse to be uncovered in the these “non-English speaking countries”, in the absence of evidence (and if such evidence were available it would no longer be necessary to ‘uncover’ it) such claims are no more than speculative.
Speaking in an interview with Realitymagazine, he said “the hierarchy have never faced it head on and done something effective to find out why clergy sexual abuse has been so much a part of clerical culture. It’s been hidden and denied, but it’s there and has been for centuries.”
The claim that child abuse has been a “part of clerical culture” “for centuries” is one that would arguably take reputable scholars many years to accumulate sufficient evidence to substantiate. I am not aware of any reputable works that have attempted to, let alone convincingly established, this. Doyle likely relies upon his own work, “Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes: The Catholic Church’s 2,000-Year Paper Trail of Sexual Abuse“, co-authored with Patrick J. Wall and Richard Sipe. Given that none has a reputation for scholarship and all have strong anti-hierarchical views I am skeptical of the authors’ claims.
He said the Catholic Church’s monarchial structure compounded the problem
“There are no checks and balances. Bishops all report to the pope. As one cynical old monsignor once said to me: ‘They’re all playing to an audience of one!’ That’s not an effective management and in reality each bishop is basically the lord of his own kingdom and acts that way, being held accountable by no one.”
Checks and balances and accountability. Everyone agrees with them in the abstract but many differ on how they are to be achieved. The Catholic bishops claim to possess apostolic authority that they derive not from the consent of their congregations but from their immediate predecessors (and ultimately back to Jesus whom they regard as God). If one disagrees with such a conception of authority then one can leave the organisation and join a Protestant church. What Doyle advocates as ‘reform’ could be reasonably interpreted as the complete destruction of the Roman Catholic church.
He claimed that clerical child sex abuse was a bigger problem for the Catholic Church than other churches or institutions.
“Some experts have estimated the percentage [of priests who abuse] is about 4.5 per cent. Right now the average percentage is about 9 per cent. That’s devastating. Can you imagine the public response if the same kind of information came out about medical schools, teachers, lawyers or even carpenters?”
The John Jay Report provides evidence that about 4.3% of all priests that served in the United States between 1950-2002 were alleged to have engaged in sexual abuse of minors. This excludes single victim abusers whose victims did not come forward (and therefore were not there to allege wrongdoing) but will include priests subject to false allegations. It is not clear where Doyle got the 9% figure from nor if that figure is of those priest judged guilty by a jury of their peers and to a criminal standard. It is incumbent upon a professional journalist to properly ground such claims in reputable data.
The article ends with Doyle repeating what amounts to a recital of the liberal agenda for reform couched in emotive rhetoric.
I do not blame Doyle for the content of the article, or any article, in which he is quoted as a source. He has made his choices and appear hell-bent on viewing the abuse issue through his particular ideological lens. I do believe, though, that many journalists are failing in their ethical duties by uncritically accepting or poorly scrutinizing Doyle’s claims before reporting them.
Related Posts
- Reverend Thomas Patrick Doyle
- Deliver Us From Evil Review
- Crimen sollicitationis and the Media
- Crimen sollicitationis
- Hypocrisy and the Clergy Abuse Scandal
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