Catholic bishops file lawsuit to protect the secrets of sex predators

A new state law requires priests to report confessions of abuse. Catholic leaders claim they're being persecuted.

This newsletter is free, but it’s only able to sustain itself due to the support I receive from a small percentage of regular readers. Would you please consider becoming one of those supporters? You can use the button below to subscribe to Substack or use my usual Patreon page!

---

The state of Washington recently passed a law requiring clergy members to report child abuse to law enforcement authorities even if they learn about it through the act of confession.

It’s a law that will protect children from sex predators and prevent lifelong trauma.

So naturally, Catholic bishops are now suing to overturn it.

A confessional booth (via Adobe Spark)

It comes weeks after the Republican-led Department of Justice said it would launch a “civil rights investigation” into the matter.

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

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

(That does not mean, however, that priests would be forced to testify in court about anything they heard. They merely have to report to law enforcement any knowledge of ongoing child sexual abuse.)

When this bill was being debated, Bishop Frank Schuster of the Archdiocese of Seattle argued it would be “impossible for a priest to comply with this bill” because “the penalty for breaking that seal [of confession] is excommunication.”

But that’s absurd. In no rational world is getting excommunicated more damning than letting a child continue to suffer sexual abuse. If you would rather protect priests than kids, then your organization should just admit the safety of children isn’t a top priority.

It’s that principle that Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson (who is Catholic) alluded to when he signed the bill.

Keeping the confessional in the bill did not give Ferguson pause.

“Not for me,” he said. As a Catholic, “I’m very familiar with it. Been to confession, myself. I felt this was important legislation for protecting kids.”

That’s really what it all came down to: What’s more important? Protecting a religious tradition or protecting children? Democrats, who 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 meant 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 ritual, then the priests could let the child abuse continue. It’s a horrible argument that doesn’t get any stronger when you invoke religion to defend it.

The Catholic Conference also claimed this violated their religious freedom… (to protect abusers).

With this law, the State of Washington is specifically targeting religious conduct by inserting the government into the Catholic tradition, namely, the highly defined ritual of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The state is now requiring priests to violate an essential element of the rite, the confidential communication between the priest and penitent in which the absolution of sin is offered.

…

Once the state asserts the right to dictate religious practices and coerce information obtained within this sacrament—privileged communication—where is the line drawn between Church and state? What else may the state now demand the right to know? Which other religious practices will it try to legislate? Why is this privileged communication between priest/penitent the only one singled out? Why not attorney/client? Doctor/patient? Spouses?

This new law singles out religion and is clearly both government overreach and a double standard. The line between Church and state has been crossed and needs to be walked back. People of every religion in the State of Washington and beyond should be alarmed by this overreach of our Legislature and Governor.

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. Canon Law is irrelevant. 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 argument was also specious for another reason: Suppose there was an explicit rule that said no one—including doctors and lawyers—could hide behind confidentiality when it came to abuse. Everyone was a mandated reporter. If that were the law, would Church leaders agree that the act of confession shouldn’t be exempted either? Of course not. That’s why their argument that certain professions are allowed to keep things confidential—and this law is unfairly targeting them—didn’t hold water. They’re disingenuous when they say they’re victims of religious discrimination because they’re always going to believe they’re above the law in this situation.

Every single argument against this law boiled down to certain people wanting to preserve an unethical religious tradition even at the expense of stopping child sexual abuse. That’s what you should be thinking every time a Catholic official speaks out against this law. They’re more interested in preserving a ritual than protecting children.

In early May, the Trump administration got involved. The Department of Justice announced that it would launch “a civil rights investigation into the development and passage of Washington State Senate Bill 5375… which appears on its face to violate the First Amendment.” Where that investigation goes is anyone’s guess. (It’s possible it goes nowhere and the only purpose of it was to generate headlines.)

But now, Catholic bishops in Washington have sued the state to regain their self-proclaimed right to protect sex predators.

The federal lawsuit says the state is violating the Church’s First Amendment rights, the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, and the state’s constitution:

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.

Again, they believe their options under this law are going to jail or being tortured for eternity.

The actual options are protecting children or letting the kids suffer even more. Don’t let their religious beliefs convince you it’s anything different.

The heart of the lawsuit argues priests are being treated worse than other professionals who are allowed to maintain confidentiality in certain situations—the bill “expressly takes aim at clergy,” it says—but that’s just a lie. Clergy members are not singled out. They were mentioned in the bill because they were exempt in the past; now they’re not. Other reporting professionals are not bound by confidentiality when it comes to ongoing child abuse.

For example, the lawsuit says Washington protects “spousal privilege,” suggesting someone wouldn’t have to testify against his or her partner even if that person confessed to abusing their child. But that’s not true. Washington law says the presumption of confidentiality “shall not apply” if a crime is committed “against any child of whom said spouse or domestic partner is the parent or guardian.”

In fact, if anything, priests still get off lightly relative to other professions.

Domestic violence advocates, therapists and unions — all groups with “privileged communications” under state law — already lose the privilege in child abuse cases and still must follow mandatory reporting laws. Doctors can also be called to testify during judicial proceedings of child abuse cases. Clergy, meanwhile, still don’t have to testify in court during such cases — the new law only applies to reporting information to authorities.

Even if that weren’t true, though, it’s wild that the Church’s argument is that no one should be obligated to report sex abuse in certain situations… instead of saying that everyone should be held to the same higher standard. By using this argument, the Catholic Church is actively pushing to keep the bar low.

The lawsuit also includes some batshit crazy defenses of the need to keep confessions secret. Like this section saying God told them they could keep secrets and that they would rather die than reveal secrets.

When Jesus Christ gave Saint Peter the keys to the kingdom of Heaven, they came with Christ’s power to “bind” and to “loose”—a power that includes adjudicating and forgiving sins. With that power came the obligation to keep secret confessed sins…

…

Priests are 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 isn’t some complicated moral dilemma. This is about as clear-cut as a moral question gets. It’s also not clear why secular courts should take their religious mythology seriously.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the bishops by the conservative legal groups Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and First Liberty Institute along with the more prestigious law firm WilmerHale. But even those firms aren’t helping with their public statements about the case:

"It's hard to imagine a more brazen attack on faith than state bureaucrats policing the sacrament of confession," Mark Rienzi, president and CEO of Becket, a religious liberty law firm in Washington,D.C., that is representing the bishops, said in a statement provided to OSV News.

"Washington's law isn't about protecting kids -- it's about jailing priests for following the Church's ancient faith practices," Rienzi said. "We're asking the court to step in and stop the state from turning a sanctuary for the soul into a tool of surveillance."

Again, when you remove the religious rhetoric from that comment, he’s saying priests should protect child sex predators because of “ancient faith practices.” The law is no more a “tool of surveillance” than the police responding to a tip they receive over the phone.

Gov. Ferguson issued a brief-yet-damning statement on Thursday in response to this lawsuit:

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

No notes. That’s exactly what the bishops are doing here. Instead of doing everything in their power to protect victims of abuse, they’re using their power and money to carve out an exemption they don’t deserve so they can throw those victims under the bus.

For what it’s worth, I’m not sure how effective this law would be even if implemented successfully, only because the number of people who confess to ongoing sexual abuse are likely very small. But in principle, the law is still the right thing to do because it eliminates a loophole in the state’s mandatory reporting rules. These religious leaders and their lawyers are hiding behind the cloak of religion to defend something that ought to be indefensible.

Defying this law would not be “good trouble.” These priests would not be martyrs by sacrificing children to preserve their made-up dogma. This is all a way to rationalize doing something unethical because common sense would tell you protecting children from abuse is more important than keeping an abuser’s secret.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

---