Joining a traditionalist community offers no assurance of protection from predator priests either, as last week’s news of a second arrest of James Jackson – a priest of the Fraternal Society of Saint Peter (FSSP) – on charges of possession and distribution of child abuse images attests. As many have noted, nearly 70% of the priests charged with sexual abuse were ordained prior to 1970 (and who knows how many cases there were before the Church started keeping records).
The crisis of credibility set off by the sexual abuse scandal can hardly be blamed on the Second Vatican Council. Looked at from a different angle, however, we might note that it’s interesting, even impressive, that such Catholics nevertheless continue to be drawn to the Church at all. These critics typically argue that such statistics show a need for better catechesis, a stronger emphasis on doctrine and moral teachings, or even a return to the Latin Mass.
According to oft-cited survey results frequently brought up by critics of the Second Vatican Council, adherence to many fundamental Catholic doctrines is inconsistent, even among regular Mass-goers. Mass attendance doesn’t tell the entire story, of course. The sexual abuse crisis has had a palatable effect on the US Church as well, and corresponds to freefalls in Mass attendance in places that were once Catholic strongholds like Philadelphia and Boston. Mass attendance there has continued to hover in that range ever since, but baptisms and ordinations to the priesthood continue to drop. The sexual abuse crisis delivered crippling blows to the Catholic Church in overwhelmingly Catholic countries like Ireland, which boasted Mass attendance rates well over 80% in the late 1980s, but dropped to 30% by 2011. No scandal or event has caused greater damage to the credibility and reputation of the Catholic Church in centuries than the revelations of the horrifying and widespread sexual abuse of children by priests, which was often enabled by bishops who committed the further crime of covering it up. Furthermore, his portrayals of the Council, its implementation, and the current state of the Church are shallow caricatures that reflect common tropes but are not consistent with reality. There are many things wrong with Ross Douthat’s recent New York Times op-ed, “How Catholics Became Prisoners of Vatican II,” but the most glaring is his failure to mention the impact of the sexual abuse crisis anywhere in his 1400-word assessment of the past 60 years of Church history.
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