Bishop Bruskewitz has said his diocese won’t participate in a study of sex abuse due out next month. The bishop said his diocese will be the only in the US that won’t be part of the survey commissioned by the US bishops’ conference and run by John Jay College of Criminal Justice to tally all case clergy sex abuse over the past 50 years.
Bishop Bruskewitz, asserting his canonical sovereignty over his diocese, said the study appeared more to exist to “satisfy curiousity” than to help victims. He also questioned the inclusion of unproven allegations against the dead and said that since each diocese is self-reporting, the study could be unreliable.
Several Eastern-rite eparchies aren’t participating. In some of those cases, it’s because the congregations of those eparchies are so small and spread out over such a large area, in some cases covering the whole US. And despite a claim that the data collected would be anonymous, they have so few allegations that the priests and victims would be readily identified.
What is the study supposed to accomplish? that question has never been answered to my satisfaction.
Actually, I think the study’s real goal is to quiet the critics by somehow proving that the Dallas policy has fixed the problem. By studying the past, they can say “All this happened before” and then contrast that with the recent audit, saying “Now look where we are now.”
But as Bruskewitz points out, it’s all voluntary self-reporting. How do we know whether they’re holding back or hiding anything since there’s nothing to compel them to release all the information?