{"id":262,"date":"2011-04-06T12:13:40","date_gmt":"2011-04-06T16:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=262"},"modified":"2011-04-06T13:27:16","modified_gmt":"2011-04-06T17:27:16","slug":"diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html","title":{"rendered":"Diarmuid Martin gets it right"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone who wants to know how Catholic prelates should be addressing the abuse crisis should read the remarks<\/a> that Dublin archbishop Diarmuid Martin delivered a couple of days ago at the Marquette University International Dialogue on the Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal. Martin has walked the walk to deal with the crisis in his own diocese; no one has confronted these realities more honestly and straightforwardly. But in what he had to say, he frames the issue in ways that the rest of the hierarchy seems incapable of understanding, much less conveying. It was itself an exercise in the restorative justice he sees as necessary for the church to heal.<\/p>\n

Consider, for example, how Martin addresses the issue of reckoning with the extent of the scandal.<\/p>\n

\n
Statistics can be used in different ways. If I take a Father Z, I can categorise him statistically in various ways. He can be statistically registered as one priest; it can be determined however that he abused perhaps one hundred known victims; there can be valid indications that he had probably abused hundreds more other children; the number of family members affected will then easily reach into the thousands. And that is just for one priest. And in Dublin you must multiply Father Z by about ten real serial abusers. More dramatically still there are no accurate statistics about those who took their own lives.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n
But even those numbers, though shocking, have not got the right focus. Statistics are too often offender-focussed. We have to set out from the standpoint that the person who was at the epicentre of abuse was not the priest, but the victim, a child. A restorative justice approach would have to re-orient the way we draw up not just our statistics but our pastoral care. One victim constantly reminds me that the stern words of Jesus in Saint Matthew\u2019s Gospel (Mt 18:6) about the \u201cgreat millstone\u201d to be fastened around the neck of anyone who becomes a stumbling block for the \u201clittle ones\u201d, are quickly followed (Mt 18:12) by the teaching on the Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to find the one who has been lost.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Now compare this with New York archbishop Timothy Dolan’s recent account<\/a> of his response to a fellow airplane passenger, who asserted that the Catholic Church was “the only group that knew it was going on, did nothing about it, and kept transferring the perverts around.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cYou obviously never heard the stats on public school teachers,\u201d I observed. \u201cIn my home town of New York City alone, experts say the rate of sexual abuse among public school teachers is ten times higher than that of priests, and these abusers just get transferred around.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

That’s a striking statistical rebuttal, but let’s just say that it doesn’t bear up well under scrutiny. According to the archdiocese<\/a>, it’s based on a report that found 78 substantiated abuse cases by New York teachers in 2009, and 73 such cases last year. Did Dolan mean that there have been only seven or eight substantiated abuse cases by priests over the past couple of years? <\/p>\n

There are almost 50 times as many public school teachers in New York City<\/a> as there are priests in the New York archdiocese<\/a>. If “cases” refers to abusers, then on a pro rata basis 75 public school cases would be the equivalent of 1.5 priest abuse cases; one-tenth the rate would be .15 per year–i.e. almost none. Is Dolan saying that there have been no substantiated cases of priest abuse over the past two years? If there were seven or eight per year, that would in fact be five times the rate of sexual abuse among school teachers.<\/p>\n

But the real point is this: Diarmuid Martin would not have given the same response had he been in Tim Dolan’s seat.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who wants to know how Catholic prelates should be addressing the abuse crisis should read the remarks that Dublin archbishop Diarmuid Martin delivered a couple of days ago at the Marquette University International Dialogue on the Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal. Martin has walked the walk to deal with the crisis in his own diocese;…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-diarmuid-martin-timothy-dolan"],"yoast_head":"\nDiarmuid Martin gets it right - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Diarmuid Martin gets it right - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Anyone who wants to know how Catholic prelates should be addressing the abuse crisis should read the remarks that Dublin archbishop Diarmuid Martin delivered a couple of days ago at the Marquette University International Dialogue on the Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal. Martin has walked the walk to deal with the crisis in his own diocese;…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-04-06T16:13:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2011-04-06T17:27:16+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Diarmuid Martin gets it right - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Diarmuid Martin gets it right - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"Anyone who wants to know how Catholic prelates should be addressing the abuse crisis should read the remarks that Dublin archbishop Diarmuid Martin delivered a couple of days ago at the Marquette University International Dialogue on the Clergy Sexual Abuse Scandal. Martin has walked the walk to deal with the crisis in his own diocese;…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html","og_site_name":"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","article_published_time":"2011-04-06T16:13:40+00:00","article_modified_time":"2011-04-06T17:27:16+00:00","author":"Mark Silk","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html","name":"Diarmuid Martin gets it right - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#website"},"datePublished":"2011-04-06T16:13:40+00:00","dateModified":"2011-04-06T17:27:16+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/927f8b0a579506efe527e8e0967f519d"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/diarmuid-martin-gets-it-right.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Diarmuid Martin gets it right"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/","name":"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","description":"Beliefnet Voices","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/927f8b0a579506efe527e8e0967f519d","name":"Mark Silk","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/c82\/c82eec82562775fad85f4a47e1a5fc4ax96.jpg","caption":"Mark Silk"},"description":"Mark Silk graduated from Harvard College in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in medieval history from Harvard University in 1982. After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}