January 23, 2003 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Last month’s resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law, America’s senior Roman Catholic prelate, and the settlement in New Hampshire of what would have been the first-ever criminal case brought against a diocese, ought to frame a broader debate about crime in the clergy.
For a full year now, the spotlight has fallen on the more than 100 priests who have been removed from active ministry — some of whom have been convicted — following allegations that they sexually abused children, as well as on bishops like Cardinal Law who are accused by parishioners of covering up those crimes. But in the past couple of months, a prominent Presbyterian minister has stepped down amid similar sex-abuse allegations, although the statute of limitations bars prosecution in his case. A rabbi has been convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment for hiring two men to kill his wife so he could carry on an affair with a woman he met while ministering to her terminally ill husband. And the imam of a Paris mosque has been arrested for allegedly aiding the man who tried to detonate explosives packed inside his sneakers on a flight to Miami.
Clerical malfeasance has not received this much attention since the 1980s, when Jim Bakker, the Pentecostal minister, was led away in handcuffs. Mr. Bakker’s crime involved defrauding his flock. Ironically, the focus on sex crimes has obscured the financial crimes in which religious leaders also have been implicated in recent years.
For example, 18,000 investors were bilked out of $448-million in a Ponzi scheme orchestrated by, among others, an evangelical minister and four church elders, who were convicted in Florida of fraud and money laundering. During the fall, a priest in New York pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $100,000 in parish funds, which he spent on vacations and other personal expenses. Several rabbis have been convicted of defrauding the federal government in connection with their religious institutions, and, in one case, of laundering Colombian drug money. Muslim religious leaders are accused of deceiving donors by funneling charitable contributions to supporters of terrorism. And, of course, Buddhist nuns and monks were used as conduits for illegal campaign contributions in a case that dogged Al Gore’s presidential campaign.
In response to clerical misdeeds, congregants increasingly have begun to insist that authority and accountability must go together. They are not just counting on law-enforcement agencies to take action, but are taking steps on their own, from strengthening lay oversight to withholding donations, to foster greater accountability. Even so, more attention should be focused on the legal impediments to ferreting out clerical criminality.
One legal change to help prevent serial sex crimes against children would be to add clergy to the list of professionals, like teachers, doctors, and coroners, who may be held criminally liable for failing to report suspected child sexual abuse.
Clerics have been exempted in many states, ostensibly to protect the confidential communications encompassed by the “clergy-penitent privilege.” In the context of the current scandal, however, the clergy-penitent privilege is a red herring. Prelates, for example, received most sex-abuse complaints outside the confessional, and from the victims of abuse rather than the wrongdoers. Clerical reluctance to turn in their colleagues must yield to the imperative of protecting children.
Equally important in preventing financial abuse by clergy is the need for financial transparency. In 1996, Congress, concerned in part about televangelists who were using their tax-exempt organizations to siphon money to themselves, permitted the Internal Revenue Service to levy fines on charity officials who were receiving exorbitant salaries or benefits. Nevertheless, the IRS continues to require less financial disclosure from churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples than from other nonprofit entities. Certain state laws have even broader financial-disclosure exemptions, and others limit investigatory and enforcement jurisdiction when a religious organization is involved. Such favoritism is unwarranted and simply invites financial abuse.
More generally, any effort to confront crime in the clergy must also rethink questionable interpretations of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. Unfortunately, Americans tend to perceive this separation as justification for adopting a hands-off attitude toward the clergy. Until last year, a Texas law permitted religious child-care providers to skip state licensing requirements and receive their accreditation by a board of pastors. The law was allowed to lapse only after staff members at a home for troubled youths run by People’s Baptist Church were arrested for allegedly mistreating their charges. Some courts have also dismissed lawsuits involving sexual abuse by clergy, or permitted documents in such lawsuits to be kept secret, on First Amendment grounds. These decisions run the risk of converting a precious constitutional safeguard into a cynical shield against legitimate scrutiny.
Reports of crime in the clergy historically have been rare partly because such accusations often were ignored or not believed. But the events of late are a reminder that religious leaders are capable of doing bad things just like everybody else.
And the effects of those events are beginning to appear. A recent Gallup poll shows that one in five active Catholics has stopped donating to his or her local diocese. Since the religiously inspired September 11 terrorist attacks, the FBI has changed its guidelines that had severely restricted the bureau’s monitoring of religious institutions, and prosecutors are now less timid about investigating crime in the clergy.
The law, and those who enforce it, should treat clerics no differently from others who commit crimes. In this way, the trust that so many in the clergy have earned, but that a small minority has eroded, will be restored.
Gordon Mehler, a lawyer in New York City and a former federal prosecutor, was a deputy assistant U.S. attorney general in the Clinton Administration.
