After settlement, Catholic priests in Washington can keep sex predators' confessions secret

Years of effort to safeguard children were undone by religious leaders who worship secrecy more than justice

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After Catholic bishops and the federal government argued that it was more important to protect sexual predators than their victims, the state of Washington has agreed to a settlement saying they won’t go after priests who refuse to rat out child sexual abusers who confess during a religious ritual.

It’s a depressing ending to a law that took years to pass and that could have protected survivors of sexual abuse. All to appease religious zealots.

You may recall that Democrats in Washington passed a law in May requiring clergy members to report child abuse to law enforcement authorities even if they learned about it solely through the act of confession.

A confessional booth (via Adobe Spark)

Almost immediately, Catholic leaders balked at the possibility that their religious ritual was supposedly under attack. A trio of bishops sued to block the law and the Republican-led Justice Department soon filed its own lawsuit.

A quick reminder about this law: It merely added “member of the clergy” to the list of mandated reporters in the state. What made it unique was that it specifically said clergy members would not be protected by an older law which allowed certain private communications to remain private. In other words, now, even if you learned about abuse through confession, you couldn’t just hide behind that shield. You still had to report the abuse to authorities.

Under the new law, all mandated reporters (including priests) would have been required to “report suspicions of abuse within 48 hours.” If they didn’t, the subsequent misdemeanor charge could have landed them a year-long prison sentence on top of a $5,000 fine.

Ultimately, this came down to a question of what was more important: protecting a religious tradition or protecting children? Democrats, who at least in this situation have higher ethical standards than the Catholic Church, said protecting children was the priority.

After the bill was signed, the Washington State Catholic Conference insisted that they totally care about kids… but not if it means shedding their dogma:

While we remain committed to protecting minors and all vulnerable people from abuse, priests cannot comply with this law if the knowledge of abuse is obtained during the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

In plain English, Church leaders were saying if someone confessed to abuse in a particular part of the church during a particular act, then the priests could let the child abuse continue. It was a horrible argument that didn’t get any stronger when they invoked religion to defend it.

The Catholic Church insisted their religious beliefs—which the rest of us are under no obligation to follow—should override the communal need to protect children. But Canon Law isn’t our law. Just because your church created a loophole for child abusers to confess their sins without penalty doesn’t mean the rest of the world has to simply accept that. They had it backwards. Washington wasn’t targeting “religious conduct”; lawmakers merely said religious conduct could no longer be an excuse to shield predators.

Or to put it another way, if the state can’t interfere with a religion’s beliefs, then the state also shouldn’t be allowed to hand out exemptions to people on account of their religion.

The bishops’ lawsuit was absurd in another way: They argued that they had a self-proclaimed right to protect sex predators—and that the government was making it so that their only options in that situation were going to jail or being tortured for eternity:

Putting clergy to the choice between temporal criminal punishment and eternal damnation, interfering with the internal governance and discipline of the Catholic Church, and targeting religion for the abrogation of all privileges, is a patent violation of both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and a violation of Article I, Section 11 of the Washington Constitution.

The actual options were protecting children or letting those kids suffer even more.

They also argued that priests were “obligated to defend the sacramental seal, if necessary, usque ad sanguinis effusionem—i.e., through the shedding of blood.” If my religion told me it was more important to die than rat out a child sex predator, I would ditch that religion. This wasn’t some complicated moral dilemma. This was about as clear-cut as a moral question gets.

Washington’s Governor Bob Ferguson had the right reaction:

“I’m disappointed my Church is filing a federal lawsuit to protect individuals who abuse kids,” he said.

In July, just before the law was scheduled to go into effect, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing that from happening. U.S. District Judge David G. Estudillo concluded that the Catholic bishops “are likely to succeed on the merits of their Free Exercise Clause challenge and otherwise meet the requirements for the issuance of a preliminary injunction.” The legal battle could continue, but the law was put on hold.

Now, it seems, Washington officials have concluded that this won’t end in their favor and they need to salvage whatever they can.

So yesterday, they agreed to carve out an exemption for clergy to cover up sex abuse they learn about through confession—basically sacrificing the heart of the law—in order to protect the rest of it that makes priests mandated reporters outside of confession.

Clergy in Washington will remain mandatory reporters under stipulations filed today by the state Attorney General’s Office and the plaintiffs in lawsuits against the state over Senate Bill 5375. Under the stipulations, however, the state and county prosecutors have agreed—as the court ordered—not to enforce reporting requirements for information clergy learn solely through confession or its equivalent in other faiths. The stipulation now awaits approval by the court.

“Today’s agreement respects the court’s decision in this case and maintains important protections for children,” said Attorney General Nick Brown. “It keeps crucial portions of Washington’s mandatory reporting law in place, while also preserving the Legislature’s authority to address issues with the law identified by the court.”

It’s disappointing but it’s also the conclusion many church/state separation advocates expected. The settlement means the lawsuits go away. No money exchanges hands. And a few more kids may continue to suffer sexual abuse, but the Catholic Church has decided that’s a worthy sacrifice since it allows them to cling to their ritual of protecting predators in the confession booth.

I found it telling that in the celebratory press release from Alliance Defending Freedom—they represented some Orthodox churches and priests—they said very little about why this law was passed. They framed the entire thing as “religious discrimination,” as if the law was passed just to punish clergy members and believers for practicing their faith, rather than as an attempt to protect victims of abuse.

Orthodox Churches teach that priests have a strict religious duty to maintain the absolute confidentiality of what is disclosed in the sacrament of confession. This confidentiality protects the penitent and fosters a sense of safety and trust, allowing the individual to approach God for forgiveness without fear. Violating this mandatory religious obligation is a canonical crime and a grave sin, with severe consequences for the offending priest, including removal from the priesthood. Washington’s law would also harm members of Orthodox Churches. By piercing the sacramental confidentiality, the law deters believers from confessing certain sins—or even from going to confession at all—and so prevents them from mending their relationship with God.

The only way this law would have harmed priests or members of their churches is if a predator confessed to sexual abuse and the priest kept it quiet. It wouldn’t interfere with anything else.

But congratulations to conservatives, I guess. They got what they wanted. Predators’ secrets can forever remain a secret.

Democratic Sen. Noel Frame is the lawmaker who fought for versions of this bill to pass over the past several years, and she’s the person who shepherded this one over the finish line. In response to the settlement, she offered a statement to the Washington State Standard that I found rather depressing (but I don’t blame her), trying to focus on the bright side:

Sen. Noel Frame, D-Seattle, wrote the new law, which represents years of effort to add clergy to the state’s list of mandatory reporters.

“My goal all along with this bill has just been to protect children, and I hope that closing the book on this lawsuit allows for that to happen,” she said in an email.

“Children need to know that when they go to a trusted adult in their life to ask for help, like a member of the clergy, they get help,” Frame said. “That’s how we break the cycle of abuse and do better by our next generation.”

Unlike the clergy members who fought this law, she did everything she could to protect children. She can sleep soundly knowing she’s not part of a religion that doesn’t mind if abuse continues even when priests have the power to stop it.

The irony of all this is that the act of confession is meant to be redemptive. It’s supposed to be a place where you can feel whole again. But church leaders moved mountains so that they could also use the confessional booth to shield monsters from justice. There’s nothing sacred about complicity, and no God worth worshiping would demand that.

Every argument conservative lawyers and church leaders made in defense of the confession ritual was a confession in itself—that their faith stands for cowardice, corruption, and moral decay.

The heroes of this story are the lawmakers like Sen. Frame and Gov. Ferguson who fought to pass this bill knowing what they would be up against. They dared to argue that no faith, no tradition, no ancient rule should ever come before the safety of a child. It stands in stark contrast to the moral bankruptcy of those who fought against them, all because they believe divine authority allows them to look the other way even when faced with evil.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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