Authors defend report on clergy abuse

But she also cautioned that the causes of abuse are complex and can’t be linked to a single factor. It wasn’t simply that social mores were changing in that era, she said, but that priests had not received instruction in human sexuality and emotional relationships. And episodes of abuse, Terry said, often happened among priests who felt isolated and under stress.

“What’s important is this convergence of factors,’’ Terry said in an interview yesterday at the Washington headquarters of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which commissioned the study.

Critics said yesterday that the report minimized the sexual abuse epidemic in the church and downplayed the institutional church’s responsibility for creating conditions where abuse flourished, relieving church leaders of an obligation to make fundamental changes. They also complained that the report trivialized the crisis by describing it as a relatively contained historical phenomenon, with a huge spike in abuse cases over a 20-year period and a decrease in the rate of abuse since the mid-1980s, according to the study.

“Predictably and conveniently, the bishops have funded a report that tells them precisely what they want to hear: It was all unforeseeable, long ago, wasn’t that bad, and wasn’t their fault,’’ David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests said in a statement.

And some questioned the report’s emphasis on the sociocultural dynamics surrounding the spike in abuse at the expense of other factors, particularly the role of the church hierarchy.

David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said the social dynamics in the 1960s and 1970s may have figured into the abuse crisis, but the study’s authors were not sufficiently specific about how.

“For example, the big rise in homicide and robbery we saw during that period was due to an increase in the illegal drug markets,’’ he said. “The increase in the divorce [rate] was due to the fact that women were seeing themselves in different roles. That doesn’t explain’’ why priests abused children.