Talk:Catholic Church sex abuse cases in the United States

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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Frommetr.

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Differences between the Canadian and American versions of the scandal

The article should maybe consider writing about how the abuse scandal was met with different types of reactions in the United States and Canada. The Canadian version of the events occured much earlier, during the 1990s in Newfoundland, and as such most of the Canadian public had already become familiar with allegations of abuse by clergy by the time they were widely publicized by media in the United States. Of course, one could argue that both scandals are not entirely healed and that significant wounds remain anyway, but there is definitely a different type of media exposure to the events, given that the earliest instances of abuse were exposed by Radio-Canada in the 1960s during the Duplessis Orphans affair. ADM (talk) 17:55, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Copyright problems, additional review may be necessary

Material was placed in this article in this edit that duplicated [1]. Other material was added here which duplicated in some parts and too closely paraphrased in others content from [2]. Much of the material has been marked for easier viewing by User:Kasaalan in this series of edits, but the material does go a bit further down than I had originally detected. In accordance with the prohibition against extensive quotation at WP:NFC, the material must be largely rewritten, with brief quotations utilized as necessary in accordance with that guideline.

The article may need additional evaluation to be sure that copyrighted content has not been added without proper handling in accordance with copyright policy and policy and guideline on non-free content. For instance, in this edit, the sentence "The meeting's participants drew up a final statement, which called for a set of national standards for dealing with sexual abuse of minors by priests and new procedures for dismissing from the clerical state those found guilty of that crime." seems to have been copied from this document, which permits reproduction with attribution but does not mention modification, making it incompatible with our license requirements and so must be treated like all non-free content. --Moonriddengirl ^(talk) 14:41, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

http://www.americancatholic.org/About/copyright.asp copyright statement of site. Kasaalan (talk) 16:43, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

I will be looking into sources where citations are needed as well as evaluating the scope of the problem. I will be adding details and different perspectives to this article in order to illustrate a fuller, more comprehensive situation that the Catholic Church is seeing. I also intend to focus on the Boston Globe and what they contributed to the uproar. I think the emphasis on the publications from the globe will tell us how and why people started talking about these sexual abuse cases. Frommetr (talk) 20:44, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

BishopAccountability.org

While this may contain useful information for attackers, I question its bias. It seems, essentially anti-Catholic. Quoting what is simply opinion from that site seems like quoting a blog. I question its general WP:RELY on non-factual material (i.e. opinion). Student7 (talk) 17:56, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

We can also question avvenire and every publication that is directly or indirectly controlled by the catholic church. Richiez (talk) 13:28, 22 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that catholic publications respond in a bloggish fashion. Material has been reviewed by somebody. Attackers don't always follow the same careful approach that defenders are forced to follow. We have the bishops, for example, as saying that only 1% of the priests were involved when actually it was more like 4%. This is from years ago, and valid for this article. But there is no attempt to make bishopaccountability.org accountable for anything it got wrong from 8 years back. Nor is it remembered. Nor does anyone care. The reason is, that it isn't regarded as a WP:RELY source for direct reporting. NCCB is and is therefore criticized when it is wrong. Student7 (talk) 19:55, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Scandal scope

Essentially the "scandal" was abuse from about 1950 through about 2002, when zero tolerance was adopted. The "scandal" become a media phenomenon as the abuse unfolded from about 2001 until 2008 or so when it essentially disappeared from the front pages due to settlement by the dioceses and zero tolerance (no new cases and dismissal when they were uncovered). This probably ought to be here someplace if someone stumbles over a reference declaring and end to this sort of news in the US. Student7 (talk) 20:40, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

More to the point, the dioceses were already pursuing this long before the Globe story. The pope's letter came out the year before. The dioceses adopted zero tolerance in 2001, I think.

The Globe story forced cardinals and bishops into the limelight, forced them to resign, and triggered lawsuits throughout the country. But the basic problem had already been addressed. Some of the facts are presented out of sequence to make it appear that the Globe article triggered "everything." It didn't. Just the dismissal of bishops and additional lawsuits for abuse that had largely been addressed/stopped. Student7 (talk) 19:07, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

I will be making some edits based on this. The sequence of events should be clearer. Frommetr (talk) 00:54, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

I'd like to add that the scope of the involvement of The Boston Globe with the "uncovering" of this issue should be developed in greater detail. I think that creating a clearer sequence of events to showcase what happened, when, and what resulted from it would be helpful in this case. No, the Boston Globe did not trigger everything, but they contributed to many dismissals and corrections within the Church. Getting more information about the Globe in this article may help clear things up a bit. Frommetr (talk) 21:01, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Also - It is important that the entirety of the situation is addressed. How did victims react? Did Catholics retaliate? I never learned about these sex abuse scandals in school and I went to Catholic school for 14 years of my life. In my opinion, expanding the scope of the scandal ALSO means including an objective perspective to tell us more about what was going on within the church. While avoiding bias, I would like to include numbers, facts, statistics, etc, about what happened AFTER this scandal was uncovered, how the public handled it, etc. No bias, just concrete history.

Frommetr (talk) 21:09, 23 October 2018 (UTC)

Koziol

I rm this statement which I assume is true: "In 2002 Rev. Stanley N. Koziol of St. Mark Parish in Stratford, Connecticut was forced to step down upon admitting sexual misconduct with a minor in the early 1960s. (ref) http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/22/nyregion/scandal-in-the-church-connecticut-bishop-names-five-accused-of-misconduct.html (end ref)"

Koziol should be covered by WP:PERP. That is, the perpetrator must be important enough in his own right to be reported. This is true of bishops, but not ordinary priests. Or there must have been certain notoriety, such as with Geoghan and Shanley. Basically, WP is not a police blotter. Or at least that is what I was told when I tried to construct articles containing similar offenses by teachers! Student7 (talk) 19:21, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Tablular reporting of settlements

Two small problems with this table:

1) It has a $100k settlement attributed to "Jesuits" under "Sacramento." But the Jesuits are not, strictly speaking, normally under diocesan control unless they were doing parish work. Anyway, it was Jesuits who paid, not the diocese.

2) Both that and one other settlement were $100k which seems more like paying lawyers to go away rather than anything substantive. I would think the table should be for significant awards. Student7 (talk) 19:38, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

Tabular vs text

The table nicely but tersely reports settlements/bankruptcies. It is easy to read. Below it, is an extended version which gives details not easily presented in a chart. I don't think there should be both. It is confusing to the reader. Right now they don't appear to duplicate. My suggestion is to go with text but admit the table is easier to read and "catchy." Student7 (talk) 19:42, 24 February 2011 (UTC)

bishop-accountability.org

I've posted at thread at Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard#bishop-accountability.org regarding a website that's used extensively for citations on this and related pages. My concern is that it hosts copies of newspaper articles without permission from the copyright holders. If anyone has input, please comment there.   Will Beback  talk  07:57, 25 February 2011 (UTC)

Regional Histories

This article is a bit muddied because it's such a widespread story and incidents and events in this scandal have popped up in almost every USA state and territory. It would be helpful if the scandal were broken down by regions of the USA where the incidents are being reported and what has occurred there.

This article is also missing the 2011 shocking recall of over 30 priests in the Philadelphia diocese and the closure of many Catholic institutions in the Philadelphia area, home to the largest group of Catholics in the Mid-Atlantic region. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.104.110.146 (talk) 19:30, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

The Catholic hierarchy functions by diocese. None of the dioceses are related to any of the others, except very loosely. For example, a it would be unusual for a priest born and trained in Pennsylvania to become bishop in either diocese. Selections aren't made that way. For that matter, parishes are independent and do not relate to the others except through the diocese. So if something happened in Philadelphia, and also happened in Pittsburgh, it would be more of a coincidence than anything. I don't see any benefit to these proposed subsections or articles. Student7 (talk) 18:11, 30 March 2011 (UTC)

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False statement at the top

Reported incidences since that time have dropped substantially[citation needed] and, when they occurred, been reported by the church itself.[citation needed]

We see just a tip of the iceberg--178.222.134.221 (talk) 06:15, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

In addition, from the CNN article, related to the Vatican utter silence about the Pennsylvania new report detailing horrific abuse by priests we read

"I don't think they understand in Rome that this is not just a continuation of the sexual abuse crisis in the United States," Faggioli said. "This is a whole different chapter. There should be people in Rome telling the Pope this information, but they are not, and that is one of the biggest problems in this pontificate -- and it's getting worse."--178.222.134.221 (talk) 14:23, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Opinion columns cited as facts

The "Failure to report alleged criminal acts to police" section contains two sentences that make straight-up moral/legal judgements ("the church acted as a criminal syndicate", "the church is guilty of a grave moral failure") but gives only opinion articles as citations for these statements.

Including these views in the article is probably important, but per NPoV standards should probably not be phrased as objective truth. 2600:1700:F5A1:5850:24E9:EB22:E526:2A0D (talk) 08:29, 2 September 2018 (UTC)

Response of the Vatican expansion

I think this needs area to be addressed. There needs to be more details on the specific actions taken by each Pope. For example, Pope Francis' installment of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. This action is included in the article, but no action from Pope John Paul II was included except a simple statement. I think this section could be more developed in terms of detail and some extra research needs to be done for each Pope. How effective has Pope Francis' program been? Are there any results? How is the problem currently being addressed? I would like to see more information that addresses these questions. These are questions that the readers quite possibly have, and they are not getting answered by reading this Wiki article. - Frommetr (talk) 20:44, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

I think this information should be easier for our readers to find, but I don't see why it should be in an article entitled "Catholic Church sex abuse cases in the United States". It should be in a more generally named article -- and indeed, it might already exist. This article should include a link to that general article to help our readers find this information. — Lawrence King ^(talk) 22:29, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

John Jay Study

The way the data is reported in this section is very confusing to follow. I will reword in order to get a clearer picture of what the statistics are illustrating. Frommetr (talk) 01:18, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Contested deletion

This page should not be speedily deleted because no analysis of evidence has been given that the current version of the article contains any copyvios, only that it was (allegedly) created by a "copyright violator, all versions tainted". Oh really, you have checked every single version of this article and discovered that they are all "tainted", have you? --Smeat75 (talk) 19:36, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

Diocese of Raleigh

I've added a subsection in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh's article on sexual abuse, but was wondering if I should include information about it in this article as well? -- Willthacheerleader18 (talk) 17:35, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Settlements first?

Why is "Settlements" the first section? It is a result, not a cause, correct? Shouldn't it be below some action that caused the settlements? Isn't having it first prejudical? Thank you. Sammy D III (talk) 18:50, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

John Jay study

Does it make sense to have it elaborated here? It's awfully outdated, false and meaningless. Read this article

In six months, abuse allegations against over 2,600 priests and church workers have been revealed BY ALEX SUNDBY UPDATED ON: FEBRUARY 21, 2019 / 11:45 AM / CBS NEWS — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.92.174.38 (talk) 17:58, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

Resignations

I removed the paragraph asserting that some bishops had resigned over sexual abuse case handling. There needs to be reliable secondary sources saying so. For example, the most recent one that happened a few weeks ago: there was an investigation by the Holy See but there was no trial, no censure, no penalty, and no forced removal, so it is difficult to see from Rome's perspective that the bishop in question resigned because of sexual abuse only. I don't doubt or deny that that was a factor, but Wikipedia uses secondary sources, and this assertion is a contentious fact about living people, and WP:BLPREMOVE demands its removal until it is properly sourced. Thanks. Elizium23 (talk) 01:27, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Sounds right to me. --PluniaZ (talk) 01:36, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

First sentence should be recast

The title of this article is a nine-word descriptive phrase, which doesn't lend itself well to inclusion in the lead sentence of the article. I propose we reword this by inverting it and combining it with the second sentence, to avoid this problem (note lack of boldface) as follows:

Cases of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the United States first came to light^{[citation needed]} in 1985, when a Louisiana priest pleaded guilty to eleven counts of molestation. This led to a series of lawsuits, criminal prosecutions, and scandals, as well as to awareness of the problem in many countries around the world.

Show first two sentences in current version of the article.
The first two sentences currently read: Catholic sex abuse cases in the United States are a series of lawsuits, criminal prosecutions, and scandals over sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy. The issue of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests was first publicized[citation needed] in 1985 when a Louisiana priest pleaded guilty to 11 counts of molestation of boys.

Besides being a near tautology, the first sentence in the current version violates the style guide in MOS:LEADSENTENCE, especially bullet 1. Here is an excerpt:

The first sentence should tell the nonspecialist reader what, or who, the subject is. . . . If possible, the page title should be the subject of the first sentence. However, if the article title is merely descriptive—such as Electrical characteristics of dynamic loudspeakers—the title does not need to appear verbatim in the main text.

The way the article is now is a textbook case of one of the "common mistakes" listed in MOS:LEAD at MOS:AVOIDBOLD, namely the "Mississippi River floods" example where they try to awkwardly cram the title into the first sentence. The fix in such a case is to recast the first sentence in a more natural way, like the green-checked version of the "Mississippi" example. This can be easily achieved in this article, as shown at the top. The part beginning "as well as" is a summary of material later in the lead, with the goal of pointing out how the U.S. was not unique in this, but was in the vanguard in reporting what eventually turned out to be a worldwide issue.

I thought I'd lay this out here for comment, before making a change, in case there's any objection. (The identical problem exists at Catholic Church sexual abuse cases, and any resolution here should probably be implemented at that article as well.) Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 01:12, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

The article is awfully outdated, inaccurate and biased

John Jay report, Church response then Vatican response? To all these nonsenses more than 2/3 article content is is dedicated to. Public opinions, voices of victims, truly independent analyses hardly have proper place in the article. Unfavorable opinions, sharp criticism and condemnations are labelled as anti-catholic.--109.92.166.176 (talk) 18:06, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Prosecution by civil authorities section is muddled

The section Prosecution by civil authorities has a lot of content that belongs in a different section (Lawsuits??). Prosecution is a criminal matter, leading in case of guilt to criminal penalties (which may include fines). Lawsuits leading to financial settlements (not fines) are different; the lawsuits need moving out of the Prosecution section. Best wishes, Pol098 (talk) 12:38, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

Maybe the title of the section should be Criminal prosecutions? I don't plan on making these changes, if you think they're appropriate, go ahead. Pol098 (talk) 14:13, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

"Public opinion" is just the Church's opinion

The "Public opinion" section is really lacking in sources, and doesn't really take into account anything other than "the Churches believes the accusation against the Chuches are exaggerated". There is nothing about the actual public's opinion, or the several ways these scandals have been referred to in popular culture, for example. Florence and the Codeine (talk) 02:15, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

"Catholic Church transfers credibly accused clergy from United States of America to other countries" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Catholic Church transfers credibly accused clergy from United States of America to other countries has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 June 17 § Catholic Church transfers credibly accused clergy from United States of America to other countries until a consensus is reached. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:32, 17 June 2023 (UTC)