A new study reveals 10% of Catholic seminarians in the United States experienced or may have been subject to sexual misconduct, while almost 90% have not.
The study, conducted by Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life and Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, investigated the prevalence of sexual abuse at seminaries, or institutes where priests are educated, across the U.S. Those who reported experiencing or possibly experiencing misconduct identified a range of behaviors constituting harassment or abuse that they encountered.
A slight majority of those who reported misconduct said someone had “posed a troubling physical presence toward [them], such as uncomfortably followed, watched, spied on [them], or inappropriately stared at [them].” Forty-three percent reported someone who “talked to [them] or tried to get [them] to talk about sexually suggestive or indecent matters.” Almost 40% said someone had “tried to or actually touched, kissed, or fondled” them, while 20% said someone had asked them “to engage in any kind of sexual relations with them or someone else.”
About three-quarters said instances of sexual misconduct directed at them occurred more than once, with a plurality of 31% saying they occurred three to five times. In most cases, the perpetrator was a fellow seminarian, but sometimes it was a seminary authority or a church authority not affiliated with the seminary.
Fifty-one percent of those who experienced harassment or abuse did not report it, but of those who did, just over 40% said their report was completely or mostly taken seriously and acted upon.
The study, which was conducted in the spring, included responses from 1,544 seminarians. It comes in the wake of last year’s scandal involving disgraced ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., who was accused of abusing seminarians at a beach house.
