Public Choice and the Abuse Scandal

Obviously, the investigation is ongoing, but this doesn't look good:

A widening child sexual abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict XVI, as a senior church official acknowledged Friday that a German archdiocese made “serious mistakes” in handling an abuse case while the pope served as its archbishop.  The archdiocese said that a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted. Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest’s transfer for therapy. A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement.

What's sort of surprising to me is that, even assuming the worst is true, anyone would be particularly surprised by this.  Although the Church leadership is fond of saying that all sorts of other institutions have experienced child sexual abuse, I cannot think of any organization that has had the same history of both (1) covering it up and (2) repeatedly sending the wolves back out to tend the sheep.  But that pattern seems to me to follow very naturally from the status of lay people within the Church's bureaucracy.

Conservative legal scholars are constantly harping on what public choice theory teaches us about political structures and the perverse incentives they can create for public actors.  But conservative Catholic legal scholars -- who are often very skeptical of government bureaucracies -- seem extremely reluctant to apply those same insights to the Church's hierarchy.  Given the nearly total lack of meaningful input into Church governance by lay people (short of the largely unutilized power to conditionally withhold donations), is it any real shock that the celibate clergy made decisions in the abuse scandal that largely track the interests of the celibate clergy.  And that the abuses were worse when the children involved had no families to look after them and were therefore particularly vulnerable?  For anyone who thinks that public choice theory offers even a modicum of insight (and, to be clear, I am skeptical of its reach), it would be surprising if it were any other way.

Why would the Church be exempt from the consequences of the perverse incentives created by a bureaucracy with almost no mechanism for democratic feedback?  The popes and bishops are, after all, human beings.  I suppose the argument is that the Holy Spirit is somehow looking out in a special way for the Church such that the normal tendencies of human motivation don't apply.  The thing about providential arguments like that is that you can never tell where things are going to go next.  Perhaps the growing scandal rocking the Church is itself the work of providence and will put enough pressure on the institution to take a second or third look at its autocratic governance system.  If so, THAT will be the work of the Holy Spirit as well. 

Comments

[Eduardo Penalver]

Kensy -- your theory strikes me as totally unfalsifiable. You deem the fact that the media haven't found evidence of similar scales of abuse and cover-ups as evidence that they're not looking hard enough. The fact that you hear news reports about teachers seducing (note, the difference between seduction and pedophilia), however, suggests that the media is in fact scrutinizing the behavior of other institutions. My guess is that if you were to find other institutions with the same degree of cover up and reassignment that we see in the Church, you'd be looking at an institution with a similarly authoritarian bureaucratic structure. I would imagine that some school districts might fit that bill, as would some other faith communities. My point is not that the Church is totally unique in facing this problem, but that its defense does not really own up to the nature of the problem, which is itself a function of the Church's governance structure. Imagine what would happen to a school superintendent in a functional democracy who took an abusive teacher (or a number of such teachers) and merely reassigned him to a different group of kids. In short order, I suspect, s/he'd be voted out of office. What happened to bishops when they did the same? (1) It mostly went undetected for decades and (2) even when it came out, they did not tend to be disciplined in any significant way. The constituency for a bishop is primarily up the hieararchy and only secondarily down in the pews.

[Kensy Joseph]

"Although the Church leadership is fond of saying that all sorts of other institutions have experienced child sexual abuse, I cannot think of any organization that has had the same history of both (1) covering it up and (2) repeatedly sending the wolves back out to tend the sheep."

How many other organisations have been pursued with the same diligence and persistence by the mainstream media? Remember, there are over 400,000 Catholic priests working worldwide. What would the statistics be if reporters decided to follow a comparable organisation? In Britain, for instance, hardly a week passes by without a news report of a high school teacher seducing or having sexual relations with a student (in around half the cases, the perpetrators are women) - yet there is no comparable clamour for a review of the public schooling system. In many cases, there is evidence of cover-up as well.

What do you say?