Unbearable Ugliness Catholic Reactions to Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church
Content warning: This work contains death imagery and discussion about sexual assault. No graphic depiction of sexual assault is present on this web page, but indicated links do contain graphic detail.
We, the members of this grand jury, need you to hear this. We know some of you have heard some of it before. There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale. For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere.
On Tuesday, August 14th, 2018, a Grand Jury investigative report was released in Pennsylvania. At the time, this report was the most comprehensive publicly-available detailing of a pattern of sexual abuse within any Catholic community, and the steps taken by Church leadership to hide it. It was not the first, and it was not the last. But, for many Catholics, the contents of the report forced them to finally confront this crisis now being uncovered in seemingly every corner of the Church.
With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.
I was 17 years old in August 2018. I had been attending Catholic schools since preschool (and would continue through high school), and every Sunday, my family attended Mass. After listening to hundreds of homilies, I remember few of them, but I do remember the one I heard on August 19th of that year. The priest told us of his shock, horror, and heartbreak at the contents of the Grand Jury report, the hopelessness he and many of his fellow priests felt for the future of the Catholic Church, and these sentiments were echoed thousands of times over in the hearts, minds, and words of many devout Catholics. Before the report was released, it was general knowledge that there was a problem of sexual abuse by priests, but this felt like a breaking point. To me, the prevailing emotion was a bone-deep anger and bitterness. My whole life I was told that the Church was safe, that priests were trustworthy and kind, incarnations of Jesus' love. But those very priests were rapists and pedophiles, or they were brothers and friends of rapists and pedophiles, or they helped hide rapists and pedophiles from justice. All of this while they continued to preach about sinfulness and the importance of Catholic morality! What hurt the most however, was seeing the teachers and family members I loved and respected attempting to excuse the actions of Church leadership: that at the time pedophilia was seen as a mental illness to treat rather than criminalize, that any other institution where adults have access to children have these problems and do not face as much criticism, that these cases are all far in the past. Those defenses are insufficient. The Church, if it wants to uphold itself as a bastion of morality, is thus responsible for actually practicing its morality, or at the very least, facing the evil that has been able to proliferate within head on.
It is to come face to face with monstrous, grotesque ugliness. It is to see the Catholic Church as a repulsive institution, or at least one permeated by repulsive human beings who reward one another for repulsive acts, all the while deigning to lecture the world about its sin.
The purpose of this project is to capture the reactions of many devout Catholics to the data presented by Report 1 of the 40th Pennsylvania Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, 2018. Through this, I hope to bring greater awareness to the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and to remind viewers to be critical of all organizations. The resulting artifact is displayed in the video below.
The artifact mimics a tabernacle, which is usually located front and center in a Catholic church, just behind the altar. Whenever Catholics enter a church, they genuflect to the tabernacle before sitting in a pew or when crossing the middle aisle, except when a Mass is actively being held, during which they bow instead. This version of a tabernacle is golden with a dome and cross on top. It is engraved on its side panels, and on the front door there is a "stained glass" illustration of a cross and a dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, lit from within with "candles." Real-life tabernacles are usually made of only gold and silver with elaborate embellishments of holy symbols, but stained glass is a staple decoration in Catholic churches. The main function of a tabernacle is to hold the consecrated Body of Christ, often within a golden chalice, when it is not in use, as as such, is treated with extreme reverence. This tabernacle's chalice, however, holds tiny skulls.
How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to Christ! How much pride, how much self-complacency!
The 2018 Pennsylvania Grand Jury report covered sexual abuse cases in six of the state's eight dioceses over 70 years. These dioceses were Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Scranton. 301 priests were named as abusers, with a total of more than 1000 victims. In its 1300 pages, the report spared few details, it seems, in over 650 specific cases. It also named Church leaders who participated in the cover-up of those cases. When this data was combined with the 51 priests named in a 2016 Grand Jury report on the Altoona-Johnstown diocese and the 63 from a 2003 report on the Philadelphia diocese, 8% of the 5000 priests who served in Pennsylvania over the 70-year-period were accused of sexual abuse.
As wolves disguised as the shepherds themselves - these men stole the innocence of children by sexually preying upon the most innocent and vulnerable members of our society and of the Catholic faith.
The data below was extracted from three Grand Jury reports, in total covering all eight dioceses of Pennsylvania. The 2018 report of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury investigated the dioceses of Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Scranton. The Altoona-Johnstown diocese was the subject of a 2016 report by the 37th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury, and the Philadelphia diocese was the subject of a 2003 County Investigating Grand Jury.
The 129 pieces of "stained glass" in this tabernacle were chosen to correlate with this data, each color representing a different diocese. The 127 pieces of the cross-and-bird design are shown below with a color key per each diocese. Like a pie chart, the percentage of pieces of a specific color out of the total 119 pieces of the main design correlate to the percentage of priests of the total accused from each diocese. The eight circles for "Church leadership" collectively represent the leaders of each of the eight dioceses, including the bishops and clerics over the seventy years. The two pieces embedded on the crosses atop the tabernacle are representative of the Vatican leadership.
A "stained glass" representation of the priests on the front of the tabernacle was chosen because of its beauty disguising the ugliness of what is inside, though upon closer inspection, one can in fact see through it. The number of skulls inside the tabernacle represent the countless victims of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church; as such, the skulls are uncounted.
What we found were not acts of God, but of men who acted in His name and defiled it.
The 2018 grand jury proposed four specific reform measures: (1) eliminate the criminal statute of limitations for future sexual abuse cases of children, (2) allow civil suits from victims against the dioceses past the civil statute of limitations, (3) clarify and elevate penalties for failure to report child abuse, and (4) exclude communications with law enforcement from civil confidentiality agreements. In 2019, new legislation was signed by the Pennsylvania governor that acted on all four recommendations along with creating a fund to pay for abuse-related therapy for the victims.
If one member suffers, all suffer together with it.
How was child abuse allowed to proliferate among the priesthood? According to the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest, there were five primary reasons. First, a clerical culture extending even to the Vatican encouraged priests to protect each other, similar to that of police officers. Second, lawyers and insurance companies discouraged bishops from meeting with victims and their families. Third, until 1992, bishops listened to psychologists that priests treated for pedophilia were safe to return to their ministry. Fourth, bishops did not want to drive away lay members of the Church nor to expose their assets to lawsuits. Finally, for most of this time period, untrained priests were responsible for investigating and responding to cases of abuse. In January of 2002, the Boston Globe published a scathing expose of rampant sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. After victims began coming forward in droves, Church policies began to change; most notably, the adoption of a no tolerance policy means that even one act of abuse now leads to immediate dismissal from ministry.
It is difficult to say that the Church would have taken these measures if their missteps had not come to light. Before the sexual abuse crisis was exposed to the public in 2002, every procedure in place had had the ultimate goal of keeping cases secret and dealing with it internally. Lay people, and the general public, were blinded by the intentional facade of moral examples. Holding the Church accountable, then, depends on transparency enforced by journalists and public data collections. The Database of Accused in the United States, maintained by BishopAccountability.org since 2004, is the largest public archives compiling the history all kinds of abuse perpetrated by the Catholic Church. Their digital library includes 63,630 pages of church files, over 121,000 news articles, more than 100,000 pages of investigative reports and studies, and over 1880 lists of accused clergy from 150 dioceses and 25 religious institutes. Their brick-and-mortar archive includes 243,770 pages of publicly released church files and over a million pages of other church files. According to them, true "bishop accountability" relies on a record of the bishops' responsibility for the crisis as individuals and as an institute and on bishops facing consequences both in secular government and papal government. Their hope is that their information can empower victims to come forward and for the laity and clergy to take action against the complicit.
As such, recent years have seen a significant decline in abuse cases, though the Church still struggles with the reckoning of past cover-ups. Despite continued verbal commitments to addressing the accusations of victims, Church leadership has been slow to respond with appropriate force to exposed sexual abuse cases around the world. This crisis is a lesson in hypocrisy and the breaking of trust: any organization, especially those that are seen as safe spaces (like churches, libraries, and schools), has a responsibility to its constituents to be true to the values it espouses and to protect those it says to protect.
The church tells people that confession is good for the soul. It needs to practice what it preaches. if it wants forgiveness, it must confess its sins, have deep sorrow for these sins, do penance, and Amend its ways.
Complete references and further reading are located at the bottom of this page. The quotes embedded within this section come from the following sources, in order of appearance:
- 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. (2018). Report I of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. PA Office of Attorney General. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/PA_40th_GJ/2019_12_16_Final_Redacted_PA_GJ_Report_and_Responses_008307.pdf [CONTENT WARNING: graphic descriptions of sexual assault.]
- Bergoglio, J. M. (AKA Pope Francis) (2018, August 20). Letter of His Holiness to the People of God. Vatican News; Holy See Press Office. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2018/documents/papa-francesco_20180820_lettera-popolo-didio.html
- Linker, D. (2018, August 29). The unbearable ugliness of the Catholic Church. The Week; Future US LLC. https://theweek.com/articles/792775/unbearable-ugliness-catholic-church
- Ratzinger, J. (AKA former Pope Benedict XVI) (2005). Jesus falls for the third time. Www.vatican.va. https://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/2005/via_crucis/en/station_09.html
- 37th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. (2016). A Report of the Thirty-Seventh Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. PA Office of Attorney General. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2016_03_01_Pennsylvania_Grand_Jury_Report_on_Diocese_of_Altoona_Johnstown.pdf [CONTENT WARNING: graphic descriptions of sexual assault.]
- County Investigating Grand Jury of September 17, 2003. (2003). Grand Jury Report in RE: Misc. No. 03-00-239. First Judicial District of Pennsylvania, Criminal Trial Division. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2005_09_21_Philly_GrandJury/Grand_Jury_Report.pdf [CONTENT WARNING: graphic descriptions of sexual assault.]
- Bergoglio, J. M. (AKA Pope Francis) (2018, August 20). Letter of His Holiness to the People of God. Vatican News; Holy See Press Office. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2018/documents/papa-francesco_20180820_lettera-popolo-didio.html
- Reese, T. (2018, August 15). Pennsylvania grand jury report is a new low for Catholic Church. Religion News Service. https://religionnews.com/2018/08/15/pennsylvania-grand-jury-report-is-a-new-low-for-catholic-church/
The Making of the Tabernacle
Through this project, I wanted people to experience the awe of its exterior only to open it to find horror in its interior, just as Catholics who believed the Church to be good and beautiful only to confront a rotten core in August 2018. I chose to recreate a tabernacle because it is the centerpiece of any Catholic Church and because it is supposed to hold the most Blessed Sacrament.
I began the design of this tabernacle by sketching out the whole idea and cataloguing the materials I would use. I used 0.11" thick maple plywood sourced from Dr. Maggie Melo to build the walls of the box and the cross on top. The transparent colored acrylic I used for the "stained glass" were leftover scraps from a previous project by Dr. Glenn Walters.
Next, I 3D modeled its basic shape and laser joints in OnShape. The 3D printable file for both the dome and the pedestal for the chalice inside was extracted from this file, and the 3D model for the skull prints were found in Thingiverse. All 3D prints were done on the Ultimakers with CPE filament at the BeAM Makerspaces. The paths of the box faces were imported into Adobe Illustrator, where I completed the designs for laser cutting the box and cross on top.
The two side panels of the tabernacle are engraved with five of the quotes embedded in the first section of this page, arranged in a draped cross pattern. The stained glass pattern on the front was extensively modified from this picture. The calculations how many of the 119 pieces in the cross-and-bird should be allocated to each diocese were done with the percentages from the table in the previous section. I then recolored the design in the master template accordingly. After laser cutting the wooden pieces out on a Universal Laser Systems laser cutter at BeAM, I painted the inside surfaces black and the outsides surfaces golden.
I wanted the stained glass to be transparent, so I could not use a backing piece to hold the acrylic in place. I also did not want to use glue as it does not dry clear on the acrylic. Therefore, I calculated the kerf of the laser cutter, and then compensated for it in the cut outs in the wood and in the acrylic cuts. As such, I only needed to use a mallet to push embed each piece in its corresponding slot for it to hold in place. The tiny pieces of acrylic were at risk of falling through the bed of the laser cutter (a "beehive"), so I placed very thick acrylic piece underneath it while laser cutting, along with a piece of masking tape in between to prevent melting to each other. After full assembly of the stained glass, the acrylic was cleaned with soap and water.
After my 3D prints were finished, I painted the skulls white and the dome gold. I had to print the dome in four parts because it was too large to fit on one 3D printer. The cross on top of the dome was also painted, then glued onto the dome.
Finally, I assembled the tabernacle completely. I attached hinges and a latch to the door, attached the dome to the top, then fit the panels together. The hinges are actually attached backward because the length of the nails and thickness of the wood meant that the nails protrude out the other side. Before adding the front panel, I arranged the skulls to surround the chalice, which was also filled with skulls. All skulls were glued into place, but the chalice is removable due to concerns about weight. A short LED strip with a battery pack and remote (leftover from a previous project) coils around the skull configuration, but it is also removable to allow changing of batteries and because of the battery pack's weight.
Finally, after more than 30 hours of designing and building, it was finished!
References and Further Reading
- 37th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. (2016). A Report of the Thirty-Seventh Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. PA Office of Attorney General. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports /2016_03_01_Pennsylvania_Grand_Jury_Report_on_Diocese_of_Altoona_Johnstown.pdf [CONTENT WARNING: graphic descriptions of sexual assault.]
- 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. (2018). Report I of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. PA Office of Attorney General. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/PA_40th_GJ/2019_12_16_Final_Redacted_PA_GJ_Report_and_Responses_008307.pdf [CONTENT WARNING: graphic descriptions of sexual assault.]
- Associated Press. (2019, November 26). Pennsylvania governor approves law giving victims of child sexual abuse more time to sue. USA TODAY. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/11/26/pennsylvania-law-giving-child-sex-abuse-victims-more-time-sue/4307256002/
- Bergoglio, J. M. (2018, August 20). Letter of His Holiness to the People of God. Vatican News; Holy See Press Office. https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2018/documents/papa-francesco_20180820_lettera-popolo-didio.html
- BishopAccountability.org, Inc. (2021, March 19). Home - BishopAccountability.org. Bishop Accountability; BishopAccountability.org, Inc. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/
- County Investigating Grand Jury of September 17, 2003. (2003). Grand Jury Report in RE: Misc. No. 03-00-239. First Judicial District of Pennsylvania, Criminal Trial Division. https://www.bishop-accountability.org/reports/2005_09_21_Philly_GrandJury/Grand_Jury_Report.pdf [CONTENT WARNING: graphic descriptions of sexual assault.]
- Dodd, S. (2018, August 14). Pennsylvania Grand Jury Says Church Had a “Playbook for Concealing the Truth.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/us/pennsylvania-child-abuse-catholic-church.html
- Goodstein, L., & Otterman, S. (2018, August 14). Catholic Priests Abused 1,000 Children in Pennsylvania, Report Says. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/us/catholic-church-sex-abuse-pennsylvania.html
- Jeff Anderson and Associates. (2020). Pennsylvania Grand Jury Reports on Clergy Sexual Abuse. Jeff Anderson and Associates; Jeff Anderson & Associates. https://www.andersonadvocates.com/abused-in-pennsylvania/pennsylvania-grand-jury-reports/
- Linker, D. (2018, August 29). The unbearable ugliness of the Catholic Church. The Week; Future US LLC. https://theweek.com/articles/792775/unbearable-ugliness-catholic-church
- Ratzinger, J. (2005). Jesus falls for the third time. www.vatican.va. https://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/2005/via_crucis/en/station_09.html
- Reese, T. (2018, August 15). Pennsylvania grand jury report is a new low for Catholic Church. Religion News Service. https://religionnews.com/2018/08/15/pennsylvania-grand-jury-report-is-a-new-low-for-catholic-church/
- Responses to Report I of the 40th Statewide Investigating Grand Jury. (2018). PA Office of Attorney General. https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/40th-SWIGJ-Report-1-Responses-8-12-18_Redacted.pdf
- Roewe, B. (2016, March 2). Grand jury report reveals decades of clergy sex abuse in Altoona-Johnstown diocese. National Catholic Reporter; The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company. https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/grand-jury-report-reveals-decades-clergy-sex-abuse-altoona-johnstown-diocese
- Schiavo, C., Opilo, E., Yates, R., & Hall, P. (2018, August 14). Scathing Pennsylvania grand jury report accuses hundreds of priests of sexually abusing more than 1,000 children. The Morning Call. https://www.mcall.com/news/breaking/mc-nws-grand-jury-report-catholic-dioceses-20180612-story.html
- Shapiro, J. (2020, April 16). Major victory for abuse survivors. Trib Total Media. https://triblive.com/opinion/josh-shapiro-major-victory-for-abuse-survivors/
- Steinfels, P. (2019, January 25). The PA Grand-Jury Report: Not What It Seems. Commonwel Magazine. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems