What did the church do about abuse?

In 2002 the United States bishops set up a lay National Review Board, which commissioned researchers at John Jay College to survey the dioceses and religious communities. Dioceses representing 99 per cent of diocesan priests responded, and religious communities representing 83 per cent of religious priests.

The result: 4,392 priests, about four per cent of those serving between 1950 and 2002, had allegations against them, and 10,667 victims had come forward by the time the surveys closed. Legal and treatment costs and compensation had reached 572.5 million dollars at that point and more than 1.3 billion by 2008, when a summary of the study was published.

These figures count allegations reported by dioceses and religious communities, which is a floor rather than an estimate of the total.

Ireland's commission of investigation into the Dublin archdiocese said it without hedging. The archdiocese's preoccupations in dealing with child sexual abuse, at least until the mid 1990s, were "the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets", and it "did its best to avoid any application of the law of the State". What communication there was with the Gardaí before 1995 the commission called "largely inappropriate".

Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and an independent commission set up at the request of the French bishops and religious orders found the same sequence: complaints made, offenders moved to other posts, records kept internally, civil authorities not told. The French commission, summarising documents the French church gave it, says the church deplores its own conduct before 2000, including "excessive concern for confidentiality" and "the practice of transferring accused priests to other dioceses".

That commission, reporting in October 2021, went further than case files and commissioned a population survey. It estimated 216,000 children abused by clergy or members of religious orders in France between 1950 and 2020, and 330,000 once lay people working for the church are included.

Three inquiries, three countries, and the American survey before them. One pattern. That is what distinguishes this from a claim about individuals.

In 2019 a papal decree, Vos estis lux mundi, required clergy and religious to report allegations promptly to the local Ordinary, established procedures for investigating bishops, and set out reporting obligations within the church's own structures. It was approved for three years as an experiment, and was reissued in revised form in 2023.

On civil law it says the norms apply "without prejudice to the rights and obligations established in each place by state laws, particularly those concerning any reporting obligations to the competent civil authorities". That sentence is identical in both versions. What it does not do is create an obligation to report to civil authorities where local law does not require one. Writing about abuse disclosed in confession, the French commission says the article "further adds to the uncertainty of what the Church actually requires its clergy to do".

Comparable rates for other institutions with access to children, schools, sports bodies, other churches, are mostly not available. Australia's Royal Commission, which could compel witnesses and documents, received more allegations about institutions run by religious organisations than about any other kind, and more about the Catholic Church than any other religious body. It said its figures could not measure prevalence, because it could not count the children each organisation served.

France is the exception, because the survey there asked about every setting and not only the church. It estimated 141,000 children abused at school over the same seventy years, and 103,000 each in sport and at holiday centres, against 216,000 by clergy and members of religious orders. As a share of the children exposed to each, the commission reported the prevalence in the church higher than in any other sphere of socialisation apart from family and friendship circles.

Where comparable numbers are missing, their absence supports no conclusion in either direction. The known quantity is that this institution's rate has been measured and most others have not.

Reporting systems are required now rather than optional: every diocese was given a year to set up a public and accessible way to receive reports. Whether that is changing the outcome is the harder question.

Whether the church is safer now, and by how much, is not settled, and one survey that does not depend on who came forward gives a mixed answer. The French estimate of children abused by clergy fell from 121,000 in the twenty years after 1950 to 48,000 in the twenty after that, then held at about 47,500 for the thirty years to 2020. Set against the falling number of clergy, the rate appears to rise over those last thirty years rather than fall, which the commission declined to call certain because the confidence intervals overlap.

The commission that produced those figures also judged the measures taken since 2000 "globally inadequate given the scale of the trauma". Disclosure often comes long after the acts, which makes recent years the hardest to assess and makes confident claims about them premature in either direction.

Every count is a count of people who came forward. Survey-based estimates are much larger, and rest on extrapolation from samples. The French commission found 4,832 victims named in the archives of the church and of the justice system, and its survey estimated a number more than forty times that.

There is no method that produces the true number, and any figure presented without saying which of those two it is should be read with that in mind.