Tear down statute of limitations on cases of sexual abuse of children

Markey aims to extend limitations on reporting sex abuse cases

Margaret Markey is a New York State Assemblywoman from Queens who represents heavily Irish Catholic neighborhoods such as Woodside, Maspeth and Sunnyside.

Elected in 1998, Markey, a past president of the New York State American Irish Legislators Society, has stepped into the fray over the recent spate of sex abuse horror stories and offered up a solution that seems eminently sensible.

Markey has introduced a bill that would change the current statute of limitations when it comes to criminal and civil cases.  Currently, when the victim turns 18, they have five years to come forth. 
Markey’s bill would not start the clock until the victims turn 23.

“I’m going to do what I can to get Governor Cuomo and the Senate on board,” Markey was quoted in the Daily News as saying. “I think we have a fair chance with the governor.”

It’s not hard to understand why Markey would call for the passage of this bill now.  We have read about a terrible litany of sex abuse crimes against kids in recent weeks. 

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There have been allegations coming out at a dizzying pace -- from Penn State University, from Syracuse University and from Poly Prep High school in Brooklyn, just to name a few.

And, of course, it is impossible to discuss a story such as this without acknowledging the broader history of abuse in the Catholic Church, in the U.S., Ireland and elsewhere.

And therein lies some of the trouble.

The Catholic Church has lobbied to prevent the passage of Markey’s bill.  She made note of this fact when commenting about it earlier this week.

“This bill is not about the Catholic Church,” said Markey. “It is about pedophiles. But some of my colleagues are intimidated by the Catholic Church.”

And lest anyone suggest Markey is merely jumping on a hot issue to get some headlines, she has been fighting for a bill such as this for most of the past decade.

As the Daily News noted, “Markey first introduced the bill seven years ago and it cleared the Assembly several times but has faced stiff opposition from the Republican-controlled Senate and the Catholic Church.”

Irish Americans such as David Clohessy, executive director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests, have long supported legislation extending the statute of limitations in such cases.

Clohessy and others had hoped the ongoing horror of abuse revelations might persuade lawmakers in New York, as well as Arizona and Wisconsin, to pass Markey’s law.

This past summer, however, after intense lobbying efforts by the New York State Catholic Conference, a similar bill was defeated in the New York State Senate.

“You cannot ask institutions to take responsibility for the failures of a few individuals whose actions took place 40 and 50 years ago,” said Dennis Poust, the communications director of the New York State Catholic Conference.

There is no point in making this a story about the evil, secretive Catholic Church. 

First of all, the Catholic Church is not the only religious organization opposed to these reforms. 

Numerous Jewish groups also see the law as a way to decimate their finances, images or both.  (And further proving this is not merely a Catholic problem, Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes is currently prosecuting “an astounding 85 accused Orthodox child molesters,” according to the New York Post.)

More broadly, it should go without saying that sex abuse cases that originated years, even decades earlier, must be treated with a certain amount of sensitivity.  There is research that suggests childhood memories about such traumatic events can be unreliable. 

On the other hand, it is also clear that victims often bury their pain away in deep, dark places.  There are a thousand and one reason to do this, one of them being that a 12-year-old has positively no idea what to do with such pain. 

Adulthood finally brings with it a sense that something can be done about such a horrendous crime.
That a statute of limitations might possibly protect a criminal who, it’s quite clear, has a pattern of abusive behavior, is yet another insult to the victims who have suffered so long.

(Contact “Sidewalks” at tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)

Was Catholicism worse than Communism?

John Banville

If you are looking for a good anti-Catholic rant, you can listen to certain Evangelical Protestants or rigid atheists.

But why bother? Many Catholics these days are as reliably anti-Catholic as the Vatican’s oldest enemies.

This is understandable, given the revelations of the last decade or so.

Living as a devout Catholic requires a tremendous amount of dedication and sacrifice. That was especially true in a largely Protestant nation such as America, where Irish Catholics were a distinct minority for the century or so following the Famine.

But these days, it seems as if Catholics are the ones who want to throw stones at the stained glass windows.

This was made crystal clear by two recent developments in the ongoing tension between the Irish and Rome.

First came the announcement that members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) have filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, outlining how Vatican officials tolerated and enabled “the systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes,” as Irish American SNAP leader David Clohessy has written.

Clohessy added, “After many years of effort in the United States and around the world, the (abuse) problem became too big to ignore. … We finally began to feel heard. And now we want these crimes investigated and prosecuted.”

Clohessy knows this move may not be popular.

“Some may be shocked that we are accusing the world leader of a church, a man considered by many people of faith to be a holy leader. But one cannot be the head of an institution and escape accountability for that institution’s continuing criminal cover-ups,” he writes.

Clohessy then quoted Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Enda Kenny, who said, “The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution — its power, its standing and its reputation.”

Most observers feel that SNAP’s ploy is not likely to be successful -- unless, of course, by successful they mean drawing more attention to an urgent problem.

Still, whatever the technical outcome, trying to haul the Vatican before a human rights tribunal means that at least some people want to equate priestly crimes with systematic atrocities committed under brutal dictatorships in places such as Haiti and China and Chile. Or, for that matter, old Communist regimes.

Which is why I was taken aback when I heard a recent interview with acclaimed Irish writer John Banville, a widely admired writer who has won the Booker Prize (for his novel The Sea) and is now gaining a larger following for his mystery novels, written under the pen name Benjamin Black.

Banville told the editor of The New York Times Book Review that Ireland in the fifties “was a time of great secrecy. We were in the clutch of the Catholic Church. The church for us was what the Communist party was for Eastern Europe.

“We only discovered this when we got older, how unfree we were. And everything was hidden, as we have discovered, to our horror, in the past five or 10 years.”

Are SNAP and Banville right? Do the church’s transgressions rise to the level of the 20th century’s worst dictatorial regimes?

We probably do need to make distinctions between Ireland and America, though Catholicism did pervade big-city parishes in the U.S. nearly as thoroughly as it did elsewhere.

Indeed, Banville’s comparison is particularly jolting for Irish Americans. They often flaunted their anti-Communism to prove to native WASPs just how patriotic they could be.

And now it is being said they themselves were no better off than the victims of Communism?

I’d say SNAP may be on to something, but I will respectfully disagree with Banville.

Moreso in Ireland, but also in America, parish institutions pervaded every aspect of life. To say they were as negatively pervasive as Communism’s rigged elections and secret police is simply too strong a case to make.

The saddest thing, of course, is that the case can actually be made at all.

(Contact tomdeignan@earthlink.net or facebook.com/tomdeignan)