Righting America

by William Trollinger

I have been at the University of Dayton (UD) for 30 years. And one of my proudest moments in those 30 years came in 2004-2005, when this Catholic university hosted “The Wounded Body of Christ: Sexual Abuse in the Church,” a three-semester lecture series sponsored by the president’s office, the Religious Studies Department, and Campus Ministry. Presentations included:

• A clinical psychologist (Anna Salter) whose expertise is on sexual abusers and their victims.
• A victim who was abused at the age of 11 by his priest. 
• A former FBI official (Kathleen McChesney) who headed the U.S. bishops’ Office of Child and Youth Protection.
• A historian (R. Scott Appleby) who spoke on the Church’s response to and responsibility for the sexual abuse crisis.
• A scholar (Sidney Callahan) who discussed Catholic teaching on sexual abuse.
• A law professor (Patrick Schlitz) who talked about how financial settlements for clergy sexual abuse threatened the survival of several dioceses. 
• A theologian (Robert Schreiter) who talked about whether reconciliation was possible when it came to clergy sexual abuse.
• A number of presentations by UD faculty, including then-Religious Studies chair Sandra Yocum on the virtue of hope.

The dramatic high point of the lecture series came on March 10, 2004, when Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk spoke on the topic, “What Were Bishops Thinking?” A few months earlier Pilarczyk had pled no contest on behalf of the archdiocese to the failure to report the crime of clerical sexual abuse on the part of 49 priests over the past 53 years. The Kennedy Union ballroom was absolutely jammed with 400 attendees – most of whom were Catholic, and many of whom were very angry – and quite a few print and TV journalists, as well as an alert contingent of  campus security personnel (as there had been a threat of violence). 

I was the moderator for the event, or, as one friend put it, I was the “bouncer,” as it was very clear that perhaps my primary task (along with reminding one extremely presumptuous TV reporter that he was not running the Q and A) was to stand between angry attendees and Pilarczyk. The archbishop was both succinct and contrite in his remarks; as reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer article, “Archbishop faces faithful at public forum,” Pilarczyk expressed remorse, saying that he was “sorry about what happened in this archdiocese,” and that he “will carry that sorrow to my grave.” Still, as moderator, I found his comments lacking in the kind of genuine empathy and heart-felt regret that could have helped defuse the hurt and anger in the room. As the leader of the Cincinnati chapter of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) put it, “he basically read off a piece of paper that sounded like it was written by his attorney.” 

That said, he was there. He made himself available. He was part of the approximately thirteen months of public presentations devoted to the Catholic clerical abuse scandal. 

Why am I telling this story now? Because whether or not they want to acknowledge it, Protestant evangelicals are enmeshed in their own clerical abuse scandal. Almost every day in the remarkable Roys Report – thank you, Julie Roys – one reads of yet another evangelical pastor or missionary or Christian college administrator who has engaged in some sort of sexual abuse or who has turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse in their own institution. In just the past three weeks we have learned that:

• A South Carolina worship minister – who worked in Baptist and Methodist churches, and who produced an album of worship music – is facing 50 years in prison for producing child sexual abuse material over the past two decades.
• An Indiana Assemblies of God pastor – who had also been involved in rescuing individuals from sex trafficking – has been accused of sending erotic text messages to sex workers; while the denomination has revoked his ministerial credentials, the local church refuses to take action against him, and is instead seeking to “remove Assemblies of God from its official name.”     
• A former Youth for Christ worker and nondenominational missionary in Haiti – who has been there for three decades – has been arrested for a history of sexually abusing young boys, while a Baptist missionary with a large TikTok following has also been arrested for molesting young boys. 
• A megachurch pastor in New York has been sentenced to eight years in prison for raping two children under the age of 15.
• A Calvary Chapel pastor in Colorado has been charged with sexual assault and child abuse.
• The founding pastor of two community churches in Michigan has been removed from his post for using his “spiritual authority” to groom women for unwanted sexual encounters.
• A pastor of a Baptist church in suburban Kansas City resigned in response to allegations that he sexually abused multiple women, some of whom were underage, over a span of two decades (with some alleged victims critical of the church’s failure to respond).
• The youth pastor of a Pentecostal church in Oklahoma has been arrested on charges of raping teenage girls, one of whom was in his foster care, while the lead pastor – who happens to be his father-in-law – failed to act on complaints about the youth pastor’s abusive behavior.

And again, this is just from the past three weeks.

It is long past time for a Protestant institution to step up and host an evangelical version of the University of Dayton’s Wounded Body of Christ series.  There are so many colleges and universities and seminaries, so many megachurches and parachurch ministries, that could host a year of events and lectures devoted to unpacking and confronting and analyzing the evangelical clerical abuse crisis. 

But for an evangelical institution to do this would take the willingness to own the fact that this abuse is rampant in evangelical institutions, and to address the question as to why this is the case, and what needs to change. That is to say, to do this would take real courage.

A daunting task, to be sure. Are there any volunteers?