A Catholic whitewashes the whitewash

May 26, 2011 • 6:05 am

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the new report by The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which tried to unravel the causes of pervasive sexual abuse by Catholic clergy.  As Miranda Hale noted in her analysis, the report was a tissue of evasions and circumlocutions, pinning the blame not on evil child rapists in collars, but on the permissive sexual climate of the Sixties and Seventies.

Predictably, Catholics and their sympathizers are rushing to defend this egregious report.  One of them, Thomas G. Plante, a professor of psychology and director of the “institute of spirituality and health” at Santa Clara University (a Jesuit college in California),  defends the report in a PuffHo piece he has the temerity to call “Clergy sex abuse report: Let’s rely on science, not hysteria.”  Why temerity? Because the report, much of which I’ve now read, is hardly a piece of “science.” (What it’s a piece of I’ll leave to your imagination.)

It may not be irrelevant that Plante not only teaches at a Jesuit school, but was one of the consultants in the USCCB study.  Basically, he says the report is a scientific analysis and we should simply accept its findings.  If you believe that, I can sell you Manhattan for $24.  Download the report at this page and see for yourself (warning: it’s 143 pages long).

I just want to highlight two of Plante’s claims.  The first is this: “Other organizations did it too!”

Another false claim being made is that other organizations — the Boy Scouts, public schools, Protestant and other faith congregations — don’t have this problem because they deal with it when it happens. Again, data shows that the level and type of abuse in the Catholic Church is consistent with other large organizations with men who had unlimited access to children during this time frame.

That’s just wrong: there are no statistics comparing the levels of child rape by Catholic clergy with those from these other organizations, which also include other faiths.  And how could there be, given that much of the abuse by Catholic clergy (and by some of these other organizations as well) was either not reported or covered up? Indeed, the report admits this (p. 17):

As such, it is impossible to accurately compare the rate of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church to rates of abuse in other organizations. Nonetheless, it is useful to review what is known about the various organizations to provide context for the incidence of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

In the end, the addition of other organizations like the Boy Scouts is simply an attempt to exculpate the clergy by showing that they were not that unusual in their immorality.  And do note that on p. 17 of the USCCB report, the authors mention one earlier comparison of religious versus secular abuse—but quickly defuse it:

Sullivan and Beech also found that abuse by religious leaders was more common than that committed by teachers or child care professionals.  However,  the authors observed considerable crossover in roles; many religious professionals worked in a teaching capacity while teachers worked in residential or religious settings.

WTF?

Now there may have been a point to discussing these other groups if their inclusion helped pinpoint the causes of that abuse or, more important, identify ways to prevent it. But that stuff isn’t in the report.  These other groups are included for one reason alone—to make the Church seem less evil. But given the scale of the Catholic Church’s abuse, and its coverup at the highest levels (something not matched by other groups they discuss, like Big Brothers Big Sisters, public schools, or the Episcopal Church), this is simply displacement activity:  Other folks did it too!

But this is the part of Plante’s piece I find most offensive:

Let’s also be very clear that the report found that the vast majority of clergy sex offenders are not pedophiles, but rather situational generalists violating whomever they had access to and not seeking out young pre-pubescent children of either gender. They violated whoever was available to them at the time.

As Miranda pointed out in her piece, the USCCB piece reduces the incidence of “pedophilia” among clergy simply by arbitrarily redefining it—lowering the age of victims from 13 (as defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) to 1o.  That lowers the incidence of “pedophiles” from 73% to 22%!  And do note the replacement of the word “pedophiles” (which, as a commenter pointed out, really should be “child rapists”), with “situational generalists,” a neutral word lacking negative connotations.  What is a situational generalist? Somebody who has abused at least one victim 12 or younger and one 15 or older!  Well that certainly changes things!  Nobody can be a pedophile if he’s raped at least one older child.  Plante’s euphemistic redefinition is an offense to any decent person, much less to science.

So much for “science.”  Susan Jacoby, at The Washington Post, has a take more accurate than Plante’s:

This “study” boils down to an official conclusion that a lot of those priests molesting children who trusted them were, well, just driven a little crazy by all those pictures of their contemporaries enjoying themselves in the Summer of Love. If only young men and women unconstrained by the church or vows of celibacy didn’t seem to be having so much fun, why those priests would have had the self-control to keep their hands off altar boys!

The current pope just loves the old Latin liturgy. Too bad the hierarchy, which paid for this responsibility-shifting report, doesn’t like saying, Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault. Oh, wait, it’s really the fault of the Pill and miniskirts and pot-smoking hippies and Stonewall. The culture made made me do it.

Horace Freeland Judson, R.I.P.

May 26, 2011 • 4:50 am

As the Guardian reports, Horace Freeland Judson (b. 1931), an American writer on the history of science, has died at the age of eighty.  Among his books was a classic, The Eighth Day of Creation (1979), a history of molecular genetics. It is simply spellbinding: the best popular book on molecular biology I’ve ever read, and one of the best of all books on modern biology.  It begins with the classic work of Avery, MacLeod and McCarty at the Rockefeller Institute on the “transforming principle” in bacteria, showing that DNA was almost certainly the genetic material, and then proceeds through the work of Hershey and Chase, Lederberg and Lederberg, Meselson and Stahl (whose proof of the semiconservative replication of DNA I consider, along with others, as the most beautiful experiment in all biology), Watson and Crick’s elucidation of DNA structure, the discovery and unraveling of the triplet code, the operon, and so on.  It’s a lively, extremely well-written book, full of colorful characters, that anybody with an interest in biology should read.

Buy it or take it out of the library, but read it now.  You won’t regret it. The Guardian says:

A part of The Eighth Day of Creation was originally published by the New Yorker in 1978, and the full, 600-page text is still in print. It was immediately recognised as a classic, in part because it was the first complete record of a giant intellectual achievement. The physicist Jeremy Bernstein wrote in the New York Times Book Review: “I finished the book with a great sense of elation and a deepened admiration for what the human family, at its best, can accomplish.”

His other books, while creditable, never achieved the standard of Eighth Day, but that is enough for a lifetime.

One cultural note from Judson’s life:

For seven years, during the height of the counterculture, he [Judson] travelled around Europe, seeing plays and attending exhibitions. He interviewed John Lennon, Samuel Beckett and others, among them Bob Dylan, during the singer’s 1965 tour of Britain. He endured a tirade from Dylan against Time (and squareness in general) that has remained a part of pop culture because it was memorably captured in DA Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back (1967). Horace always dismissed the speech as “contrived”.

Judson is survived by his four children, one of whom, Olivia, is a biologist who until recently wrote a column on evolution for The New York Times.

The Guardian‘s obituary ends:

He was an atheist, and once, at the conclusion of a long dinner, told me that while life (and, by extension, death) was full of surprises, he suspected that, at death, “the machine just stops”. Horace may have stopped, but his great book and its influence go on. In science writing, we are all Judsonians now.

And in skepticism as well.

Child abuse

May 25, 2011 • 2:37 pm

This is how parents are told to teach their kids “sophisticated” theology using the new theory of the “Wow Factor.”

This video is from the Kidspace YouTube channel; note that the video is aimed not at children, but at their parents, telling them how to indoctrinate their offspring by confusing the nature of evidence.

“Faith can be a fluffy subject, because we are trying to put our trust in things that we haven’t seen.  Yet God knew very well that with the creation he’s made for us, we can trust him because of what we’ve seen, we KNOW there’s a creator; we KNOW that he exists, and we can get excited about that!”

This reminds me of the old Jewish joke: Q: How does a Jew say “Screw you”?  A: “Trust me!”

h/t: Scott

Wednesday canid: Foxes of London, Ahooo!

May 25, 2011 • 11:21 am

We don’t usually feature canids on this website, but this is an exception, for reader Dominic has spotted a mother fox and three kits in central London:

 Usually my ‘wildlife’ in central London is confined to herring gulls, lesser black backed gulls, cormorants on the canal at Kings Cross, and some other small birds. However, today I can trump your bonking squirrels (which we have as well!).  Just as I was about to leave work at about 4.30 p.m. I spotted a family of three fox cubs and their mother in the enclosed old garden at the back of the library right in the middle of the Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital, only a few hundred yards from Kings Cross! Luckily I had my camera with me (I have learnt from Amy saying that she missed a great photo opportunity recently), and I attach one of the pictures. I managed to get some video on the camera as well. There was a pair of magpies there as well, and one cub was playing with them. The magpies were quite happy with the foxes who made no serious attempt to catch them. I thought you might enjoy the picture!’

Click to enlarge:

And their fur was perfect.

Surprise! Catholic Church whitewashes priest pedophilia

May 25, 2011 • 5:48 am

Miranda Hale’s been on a break from posting, but has come back with a doozy, an analysis—”A worthless and dangerous report“— of the 143-page report by The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (link to the report is on her post).  You might have heard that this report is something of a whitewash, for it pins the pervasive sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests not on the priests themselves, but on the permissiveness and “deviant” behaviors of the Sixties and Seventies.  But it’s even worse than you thought.  Miranda has a thorough (but not overly long) analysis, so go read it.

The three things that horrified me the most (and there are many things to criticize) were these:

1.  The report seems to have been almost entirely financed by the Church itself or by Catholic organizations.  Half the funding came from the conference itself, and much of the rest from groups like the Knights of Columbus.  Now this does not necessarily discredit the report, for I doubt that any other organizations were willing to do the study, but it’s always a bit worrisome when an organization—particularly one with a history of suppressing information and whitewashing its actions—investigates itself.  And, sure enough, the findings largely exculpate the Church, blaming sexual abuse on the social and sexual climate obtaining several decades ago.  What’s equally worrisome is that much of the data are based on self-reporting by the Church itself: things like its interviews with offending priests and summaries thereof conducted not by outside investigators, but by the Church itself.

2.  If the priests weren’t to blame, what was? As I said, the report implicates the wild and wooly Sixties and Seventies.  Miranda notes that the report

attempt[s] to connect this supposed “peak” in sexual abuse cases (again, remember that all of this data comes from the “censuses” they sent to the dioceses) to the concurrent shift in cultural norms/”social indicators” (36) and rise in “deviant behaviors” (46), primarily “divorce, use of illegal drugs, and crime” (36), arguing that: “[t]he documented rise in cases of abuse in the 1960s and 1970s is similar to the rise in other types of “deviant” behavior in society, and coincides with social change during this time period” (46).

As she points out, this is correlation, not causation (and when was “divorce” a “deviant behavior” equivalent to sexual abuse of a child?).  One might as well also note the rise of moustaches on men during the same era; maybe that had something to do with the abuse, too!  The report further claims that seminaries simply failed to prepare priests-in-training for the social changes of this era.  Well, I was a young man in the sixties and seventies, and I don’t remember that society licensed the sexual abuse of children back then.  Further, I distinctly remember that child pornography, which of course is connected to child sexual abuse, was also seen as a serious crime in those days.

3.  To minimize its malfeasance, the report simply redefines pedophilia as sexual abuse of a child 10 years old or younger.  But the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the “DSM,” which is a handbook used by mental-health professionals to diagnose problems—sets the cutoff age at 13.  Granted, any such age is somewhat arbitrary for diagnosing a disorder, but what’s rankling is that the Bishop’s report otherwise relies on the DSM for recognizing the symptoms of pedophilia!

By arbitrarily lowering from 13 to 10 the age at which child abuse is considered pedophilia, the report manages to lower the percentage of “pedophilic” acts from nearly 73% of total abuse to only 22%.  That’s nothing other than a blatant manipulation of data to make the Church seem less culpable.  It’s disgusting.

The more I learn about the Catholic Church, the more I see that, as an institution, it’s so nefarious as to border on evil.  I don’t know how more liberal or open-minded Catholics can, in good conscience, remain in the Church.  Let us see if a sizable number of Catholic laypeople raise a hue and cry about this report.  I doubt it.

And we’re supposed to pat this Church on the back because its official doctrine is friendly to biological evolution?

Kitteh contest: George

May 25, 2011 • 3:47 am

Reader Witchylana has entered her gray tabby George, and a handsome specimen he is, too:

KITTY LITTER!

In 2009, my husband and I separated temporarily. His new place was too quiet, so he got George for company.  George was tiny when he was brought home – he was supposed to be eight weeks, but was probably only 5 weeks old – and so, he thinks Husband is his Mummy.

When Husband moved back home, George came with him. My older cat, Connery, was Not Impressed (it’s been 18 months, and Connery has only recently started to remain in any room that contains George).

George is the most affectionate kitty I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. He “talks” constantly, and won’t eat unless someone hangs out with him. He loves having his belly rubbed, and lets my child treat him like a stuffed animal. His preferred method of locomotion is to be carried, cradled like a baby, belly-up. He throws “tantrums” when Husband leaves the house, and sticks to him like velcro when he gets back.

And he managed to completely wreck that wastepaper basket.

2011’s top ten new species

May 24, 2011 • 10:23 am

Each year the Arizona Institute for Species Exploration issues its list of the “top ten new species of the year.”  The mission of the AISE, at Arizona State University, is to promote taxonomy and the exploration of the Earth’s biodiversity.

Their list for 2011, which includes only species first described scientifically in 2010, has now been published, and there are some amazing species on it.   They include two fungi (a bioluminescent mushroom and the world’s only mushroom known to fruit underwater), a spider that builds the largest orb-style web ever described, a new halophilic bacterium found eating rust off the Titanic, a cricket that pollinates an orchid on Reunion Island (the only cricket known to pollinate a flowering plant), a two-meter-long monitor lizard from the Phillipines (it was already known to the locals), a jumping cockroach that looks like a grasshopper, and, perhaps most amazingly, a brand-new species of duiker (antelope), found in a bushmeat market in Africa (it’s hard to believe an antelope has gone undescribed!).

The descriptions on the AISE pages also give the journal references where the species were described.  A few of them:

Darwin’s bark spider (Caerostris darwini) from Madagascar.  Look at the size of that web, spun by a single individual! (Images © Matjaž Kuntner):

A new leech (Tyrannobdella rex) found feeding in the nostrils of two children in South America.  (The PLos One article describes one as being nearly three inches long).  T. rex is unique because it’s the only known leech with a “single armed jaw with such large teeth.”

The first known underwater mushroom, Psathyrella aquatica, from Oregon! (Photos copyright by Robert Coffan). You can see a short video of it at this link:

A jumping cockroach, Saltoblattella montistabularis, from South Africa (photo courtesy of Mike Picker).  Resembling a grasshopper, it’s a remarkable example of convergent evolution between insects from two different orders. The website says this:

This new species of cockroach exhibits unusual morphology.  It has legs that are highly modified for jumping. Prior to its discovery jumping cockroaches were only known from the Late Jurassic. This extant cockroach has jumping ability that is on par with grasshoppers. In addition to the leg modifications, it has hemispherical shaped eyes that protrude from the sides of the head instead of kidney shaped and the antennae have an additional fixation point to help stabilize them during jumping.

And my favorite, the Louisiana Pancake Batfish (Halieutichthys intermedius; photo by Prosanta Chakrabarty).  It was discovered right before the BP oil spill, and in the same area. Let’s hope it’s still around:

Think of all the weird and wonderful stuff that’s still out there and undescribed!  Much of it never will be, either, if we keep despoiling our planet.