Priests and nuns are risking discrimination to speak out against cases of ongoing sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church. It’s a massive international scandal dating back at least 50 years, and one that has rocked the leadership of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics as victims came forward one by one to tell their stories of abuse at the hands of church leaders.
More than 3,000 civil lawsuits have already been filed and adjudicated against the church in the U.S., resulting in $3 billion in settlements. Roughly 525 members of clergy have been arrested and virtually all have been convicted and sentenced to prison. Although the church implemented a zero-tolerance policy in 2002, the policy hasn’t been strictly adhered to as victims continue to come forward every year claiming that they were molested.
In response to the ongoing problem, a new group of church leaders has stepped forward to publicly acknowledge the problem while calling upon the pope to take a hardline stance against sexual abuse. Calling themselves the Catholic Whistleblowers, the group consists of priests and nuns who say the Roman Catholic Church is still protecting sexual predators.
The New York Times reports that the whistleblowers currently have a steering group of 12, including three canon lawyers who handled previous abuse cases and four individuals who say they were victims of church leaders’ sexual abuse.
“We’ve dedicated our lives to the church,” Rev. John Bambrick, a priest in the Diocese of Trenton, said at a meeting of the group last week in New York. “Having sex offenders in ministry is damaging to our ministry.”
Despite facing potential discrimination from their peers, the whistleblowers sent a letter to Pope Francis at the end of April, urging the new leader of the Holy See to take a hardline approach to excising abusive clergy from the ranks of the church.
“During the past decades this previously embraced level of trust has been severely damaged, although not irreversibly so, by the crisis of clergy sexual abuse of children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults,” they write. “This damage has grown into a full-blown scandal because of a self-righteous spirit of injustice, and the commitment to secrecy that many bishops and other church leaders have demonstrated. This behavior has adversely influenced the religious practice of many persons, a scandal that hinders the mission of the church.”
The new group has received support from BishopAccountability.org, a website dedicated to recording allegations of sex abuse and building support for whistleblowers within the church’s leadership. Thus far the group has recorded 50 reverends, nuns and bishops who have spoken out against sex abuse.