Sin vs. Crime, Redemption vs. Recidivism: Criminally Offending Priests, Bishops, and Misprison of Felony

• NCJ Number: 209324
• Journal: Sex Offender Law Report Volume: 6 Issue: 1 Dated: December/January 2005 Pages: 1,10,14
• Author(s): Nathaniel J. Pallone
• Date Published: January 2005
• Length: 6 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article analyzes the controversy surrounding the child sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church.

Abstract

Most particularly, this article focuses on the lack of criminal charges brought against senior clerics who covered up the child sexual abuse perpetrated by their priests. The argument is put forth that the persistent inability of a substantial number of senior clerics to distinguish crime from sin is the main reason that charges of misprision of felony were not brought. Indeed, it is contended that this lack of distinction between crime and sin protected the clerics whose mission it was, they would have argued, to save souls. Thus the protective behavior exhibited during the child sexual abuse scandal could have been argued as a soul-saving mission well within the religious purview of the clerics, thus illustrating a lack of mens rea and, therefore, a lack of a criminal activity. The article goes on to add that any sexual activity by a cleric is de facto sinful even though according to societal laws, all sexual behavior is not criminal. Within church convention the important point is that the vow of chastity is broken; how it was broken, for example through the seduction of an under-aged alter boy or through an adult consensual encounter, matters little. Indeed, little worry was displayed over whether the act violated societal laws that carried criminal sanctions. Senior Church clerics reacted to the child sexual abuse scandal as a sin and set about designating spiritual remedies that would result ultimately in redemption and resumption of normal clerical duties. The article also analyzed the way in which the Church back-pedaled away from its 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, promulgated by the Nation’s bishops, which prescribed summary suspension from ministerial functions upon a judgment of “credibility” in an accusation of sexual sin.