(The Pillar. ED. CONDON).
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops released on Tuesday its annual independent statistical report on abuse allegations in the Church in the U.S. As with previous years, the headline statistics make for grim reading — some 1,300 new allegations came to light from July 2022 to June 2023. But also as with previous years, the report charts some remarkable progress. The number of new allegations in 2022-23 was less than half the previous year’s tally, and barely more than a quarter of the tally for 2019 — the high water mark for allegations coming to light in the wake of the McCarrick scandal and Pennsylvania Grand Jury report. And, as has been the case for some time now, the overwhelming majority of the new cases reported were of decades-old instances of abuse, more than two-thirds of which concern the 1960s through 1980s. The report, compiled by the National Review Board for the Protection of Children and Young People, has become a bittersweet annual health check for the Church in the United States, marking real year-on-year declines in the number of allegations coming to light, both recent and historical. While no report could ever capture the human cost of decades of sexual abuse, facilitated by negligent and sometimes maliciously culpable administration, the USCCB findings do lay bare the ever mounting financial price of failure — more than $260 million in compensation to survivors in the last year.