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Allegations
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Sexual abuse by
Catholic priests seems to be the new white collar crime and, as SARAH STUART
reports, genuine clergy are having to pay for the sins of a few.
Through the roar of
lunchtime screams, Father Pat's laugh sang out like the icecream-van song in
summer, drawing kids from every direction, registered before it was heard.
Running from the playground benches we'd dive for his hand, or, those that
knew him best, for the deep pockets in his regulation black trousers. There
lay our earthly reward--a handful of paper-wrapped sweets for those game
enough to grab. In 1979, Father Pat's
pockets were nothing more than a schoolyard game, an innocent distraction
from a well-loved cleric. Twenty-five years later they're enough to make a
young Catholic priest gasp in horror. "Just giving a
child lollies intimates something these days, let alone kids reaching into
his pockets," says Father Craig Dunford, 34, a man who avoids being
alone with children and touching or even hugging them in public. We are
sitting in the lounge of his church office, our chairs several metres apart,
the curtains drawn wide. He's chosen this room for the reasons he always
chooses it; its large, open space, the myriad of windows looking in from the
street and courtyard and because anyone can walk through its doors at any
time. Since he entered the
seminary almost a decade ago, Dunford has lived with the consequences of
sexual abuse by fellow priests. He avoids being alone with women or young
people, is nervous showing affection for children except for those of his
very close friends. In his light blue shirt and white Roman collar, with a
parish in the centre of Auckland city, Dunford is for many the public face of
clerical abuse. It's a mantle he wears with sadness and unease, one that
affects not only his work but his everyday life. "I remember
walking down to Queen St one day, it must have been just after the St John of
God (abuse revelations),'' he says of 2002's accusations that priests abused
up to 70 children at a Christchurch residential school, Marylands. "And
I walked past a newspaper poster that said something like "another
clergy up on abuse charges'. I was in my collar and all I could think was
everyone's looking at me thinking I'm a paedophile," he says. "It's
like you've got a big sign on your head, or at least that's what you
perceive." It's a a tough time to
be a Catholic priest. Falling numbers of clergy, an increasingly secular
community and the stigma of being a church leader at a time when sexual abuse
revelations seem an almost weekly bad news story, must make this the least
attractive time to have "the calling". Auckland university
psychologist Dr Niki Harre likens the stigma priests may feel to to those of
any minority, marginalised group. "But what's different about this
group," she says, "is they have more recently fallen from
respect." In just a few decades,
priests have gone from being revered community figures to a group small in
number and, for much of the population, in stature. "The group may not
have the strength to withstand these changes that they might have had in the
past, when the general population was committed to a Christian
ideology," says Harre. There are 440 Catholic
priests working in New Zealand but no official figures have been kept on the
number who have faced abuse allegations. Catholic Communications director
Lindsay Freer says the church acknowledges "38 substantiated" cases
of abuse in the past 50 years."That is men against whom we believe abuse
has been proven," she says. These include former priest Alan Woodcock,
who was last month convicted of sexual assault on at least 11 boys in his
care over a 20-year period, and Magnus William Murray, who was convicted in
2003 of 10 charges of indecent assault, doing indecent acts and inducing
indecent acts on four boys in Dunedin and Mosgiel between 1958 and 1972. Abuse revelations have
been much more prominent in the US, but a New York Times survey found just
1.8% of all priests ordained since 1950 had been accused. But the other 98%
have also carried the can. Most of the abuse cases took place during the
1950s-1980s; Father Tim Duckworth, deputy head of Woodcock's Marist order,
the Society of Mary, says Woodcock would be one of New Zealand's most recent
clerical abusers and that he doubted there would be many after him. "The
world has changed," he said. Dunford, a worldly
Westie who travelled through Africa and was a supermarket manager and a
Rothmans salesman before he joined the Diocesan order, says at least a week
of each term in his years in the seminary training for priesthood was spent
dealing with celibacy, sexuality and intimacy issues. He says experts from
outside and within the church spoke on ways to avoid potentially
inappropriate situations. In the large house he
shares with another Catholic priest at St Patrick's Cathedral, the living
quarters are out of bounds and visitors are invited only into the formal
lounges. Though he likes a Friday night drink at the local Shakespeare hotel,
Dunford's life is almost always lived in public, and without the physical
affection most take for granted. "We're all tactile
people, you can't deny that," he says, acknowledging there have to be
new rules. "It makes me sad really. Sad for the kids too, because they
miss out." On school visits
Dunford has panicked when children have jumped up next to him, or all over
him, on a couch. "All that was going through my head was `Where's the
teacher? Where's the teacher?'. I spoke to her later and she said a lot of
those kids come from separated families and don't have a male role model or
men around. When they see male teachers or priests or whatever, they
gravitate towards them." There have been many
theories for the abuse allegations which have rocked the Catholic Church over
the past two decades; some believe paedophiles were attracted to the
priesthood because of the position of trust it placed them in with children.
Other academics have blamed the celibate culture for the abuse. Celibacy does
not cause paedophilia, the theory goes, but it contributed to a secretive
culture in the Church where any form of sexual behaviour must be hidden. But priests spoken to
by the Sunday Star-Times did not see compulsory celibacy as contributing in
any way to the cases of clerical abuse which have been uncovered. "If you looked at
the rate of sexual abuse among the general male population compared with (the
priesthood), you'd see that celibacy makes no difference at all," says
Father Michael Gielen, an ebullient Hamilton-based parish priest. "Celibacy is seen
as such a foreign thing in our society that people think there's got to be
something going on there. I can tell you that for at least 98% of priests,
there isn't." Gielen, 33, is another
of the younger generation of Catholic priests living with the aftermath of
his brothers' crimes. But he says the boundaries that must be set - never
being alone with young people, even when they are altar-servers, making sure
the parish secretary is present when women come for counselling or on church
matters - are no different to any professional. "My brother is a
school principal and we often talk about it and our ways of dealing with it
are very similar," he says. "It's professional standards. If you
spoke to grandfathers these days and asked them how they felt, it's no
different to us. I think there's been a change in attitude towards males in
general." Over the past two
years, the number of priests in New Zealand has fallen by more than 150, a
drop Freer attributes to elderly clergy dying and fewer entering the
priesthood. She was unable to say how many priests had simply left the Church
over the past decade. One former priest, who
left the Church "mainly" for personal reasons five years ago, says
there are many pressures on priests today - the stigma of the sexual abuse
allegations may be one, but overwork and the slow rate of change in the
Catholic hierarchy are often more frustrating for the dwindling numbers of
clergy. Duckworth agrees that
since the abuse revelations began in the 1980s, the Catholic Church has
received "a certain amount of flak" for its stand on celibacy. (THIS IS A PULLQUOTE I
THINK....) "It's the only lifestyle now that's totally and utterly
different. You can be anybody you want to be sexually these days; the only
thing people seem to be down on is celibacy." Gielen agrees. In his
six-and-a-half years as a priest, only one person has said to him in a social
situation "anything accusatory" about the Catholic Church's sexual
abuse record. "More people just
want to talk about celibacy," he says. "I find it far more
difficult wearing my collar and worrying about speeding or littering (than
the stigma of abuse)," he says. "I once accidentally cut someone
off in traffic and they gave me the fingers. Two weeks later I was doing a
baptism for her child." But Duckworth, who has
worked with victims of priests from his order, says seminaries must be
careful not to ordain men who end up "acting like a brick wall or a
misogynist". "We all need
affection and support and family and compassion and love, and you have to
discover how to appropriately meet those needs," he says. "It's
important to realise priests are human beings - you don't get given a
capacity to be superhuman." For Duckworth,
appropriate relationships meant making many friends during his years at
university and becoming a part of their families. "I've taught their
children to drive, I go to their birthdays. In some ways I'm probably seen
like an uncle," he says. In public, Duckworth
believes priests cannot be paranoid about their public role, though he
recalls meeting a government minister at the airport recently, and when asked
what he did, he was unsure what her response would be. "She said, `Oh,
that's great' but sometimes you wonder . . ." he says. "People will
always judge me by who I am and how they meet me." Duckworth believes Alan
Woodcock, a teacher who was moved from school to school even after the
Catholic hierarchy found out about his abuse, would not make it through the
seminary these days. He points to a "battery" of psychological
screening tests run "by shrinks" before men enter the priesthood
and says if a candidate was not seen to form normal male and female
relationships during training, questions would be asked. "You'd say to
yourself, what's going on here?" Gielen, who has coached
school first XI cricket teams and played representative cricket for Poverty
Bay in recent years, says those relationships outside the Church are vital
for a parish priest's wellbeing. "When I entered
the seminary in 1992, (sexual abuse issues) weren't as prominent but very
quickly they became so during my training," he says. "I know they
looked carefully at your social ability, at how you fit in." Gielen sees
his role as being a "doctor of the soul" for his congregations and
says numbers have not changed in his three parishes (Hamilton west, Raglan,
Te Mata) over the past few years, despite publicity around Woodcock and other
abusive priests. "It's amazing how
forgiving people have to be. Obviously they are appalled by what's happened
but they haven't stopped coming to mass." As Harre points out,
prejudice is often a superficial bias which is dissolved by personal contact.
"My son now goes
to scouts," she says. "And I don't look at (scoutmasters)
dubiously, because I know them personally." For priests, that may
mean a few uncomfortable moments wearing a Roman collar out on New Zealand's
public streets, but in their church halls and on school playgrounds, their
actions are likely to be received still in good faith. "We deserve what's
come our way," says Gielen. "You have to take it on the chin and we
may have to apologise for the rest of history. It's just absolutely
disgusting what has happened. If it means we have to pay a penalty for
however long, then that's what it takes." -------------------- CAPTION: Father Craig
Dunford avoids being alone with women and young people: "Just giving a
child lollies intimates something these days." Photo: David White A crucifix at St
Patrick's Cathedral, where thr priests' living quarters are out of bounds to
the public. |
