Bishops’ abuse official sees long road ahead

Kathleen McChesney is no stranger to positions of authority or to Chicago. The former No. 3 official at the FBI also spent 1999 to 2001 here as Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau’s fourth-largest field office. McChesney, a Catholic, left a nearly 25-year career with the FBI in December to take charge of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Office of Child and Youth Protection. She spoke with staff writer Michelle Martin when she visited Chicago to accept the 2003 Woman for the World Award from the St. Scholastica Academy Alumnae Board.

 

The Catholic New World: Why did you decide to accept the job from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops?

Kathleen McChesney: I was eligible to retire (from the FBI) anyway. This was an incredible challenge in an organization that has an impact on society, not just on American society, but around the world. This was an organization, the church, that had a problem, that they believed I could help with. Not fix, but help with. It seemed like the right thing to do.

 

TCNW: Why did the bishops look to you to start this office?

KM: I think they were looking for someone who had experience in developing offices, who understood about auditing and compliance, who understood about victims—I’ve been dealing with victims for 30-some years—who understood about working collaboratively with various groups. You have the church groups, you have the victims’ groups, you have the law enforcement entities.

 

TCNW: What’s been most challenging and surprising?

KM: Communicating is probably the greatest challenge, communicating to people what the office is and how it can help. It’s challenging to try and do all the things that are called for in the charter with limited resources. Really, the implementation of the charter is not through our office as much as it is in every diocese in the country. It’s challenging to try to find some consistency as they implement the charter, while keeping in mind the various differences in dioceses relative to their cultures and the people who are part of their parish communities.

 

TCNW: Two of the main points of the charter call for an audit to make sure dioceses comply, and a study of past clergy sexual abuse cases. Did you get the level of cooperation you wanted with those?

KM: The cooperation has been phenomenal. Notwithstanding the bishops’ pledge to cooperate in the charter, social scientists will tell you in studies of this nature that if they even get 40 percent, that’s a tremendous number. In this study, we’re approaching 100 percent participation. I hope it will be 100 percent. That increases the reliability of the data. It will show the public that the church is taking a leadership role in trying to learn about abuse, starting with abuse in its own house. That may or may not be the impetus for other organizations to study abuse that might exist within their organizations. Very few organizations that work with youth have studied it. It would be good for society and just as a health and safety issue in this country to know what the extent of abuse is in institutions.

 

TCNW: When the surveys come out, we’ll know the extent of it within the church, but we won’t know the extent anywhere else.

KM: John Jay College will put it in context insofar as the information is available from all the states. They’ve asked all the states to provide all the data that they had going back for the same period of time. That will be included in the report, so people can see what percentage of all abuse that went on in that 52-year period was committed by clergy.

 

TCNW: What do you think is the most important function of your office?

KM: What’s probably most important is what’s not listed in the charter. It’s how the office has evolved into a place where victims, survivors and their families can come and get guidance as to where they need to go to get help within the church if they’re unsure about where to go. Where this comes into play sometimes is if the alleged abuse is a member of a religious order. We try to help people know where it is that they need to go relative to an order, or who the victims’ assistance coordinator is in a particular diocese. The other one is safe environment. This is really all about victims, survivors and preventing future ones from developing, and a lot of people really don’t understand about this.

 

TCNW: Do people see you as on the side of the bishops, on the side of laity? Where do you feel that you are?

KM: I’m not on any one side. I’m there to support everyone—to help the bishops implement the charter, but also to audit their implementation of the charter and to inform the public, to assist the victims, to communicate with the laity. There isn’t a single constituency. There are lots of them.

 

TCNW: That’s a lot of people to work with, a lot of people to please. How do you do that?

KM: First you recognize that you aren’t going to make everyone happy all the time with the things that you do. But that doesn’t mean that isn’t your goal. Your goal is to find ways to assist the bishops. To hold them accountable through an auditing process doesn’t mean you’re not helping them. That’s the way we tried to craft the process, to make certain instructions and recommendations are framed with suggestions, as opposed to just going in and saying, you’re not doing this, you’re not doing this and you’re not doing this, and walking away. That’s not effective.

 

TCNW: What’s your impression of how the Archdiocese of Chicago has handled it?

KM: Chicago has had an abuse policy in place for some time, which is very commendable. Both Cardinal Bernardin and Cardinal George have put resources in the right place to assist victims. Now, does that mean every victim is totally satisfied with what’s gone on? No. But they started years ago, before it was mandated in Dallas, and that’s an important thing. Another thing that the Archdiocese of Chicago has done is that they’ve had a Victims Assistance Ministry program for some time, and they have learned a lot from it, and they have shared. For the past five years or so, they have had an annual conference in Mundelein and invited victims’ assistance personnel from dioceses around the country to participate. That’s a model that we’re going to try to build on.

 

TCNW: How long do you see yourself doing this?

KM: I don’t know how long I’ll be involved with this office, but I do expect this office and the responsibilities within it will carry on for sometime to come. There is so much more that needs to be done, whether it’s me or others that do it. The crisis itself took many, many years to develop, and we’ve got to be able to continue to ensure that there’s no future cases, or as few future cases as possible.

 

TCNW: No future cases might be an unrealistic goal.

KM: We tell people that. In any society in the world, there is nothing anyone has found that can prevent abuse of others, adults or children. There’s no magic potion, there’s no educational program, there’s no specific therapy and there’s no drug that will do that. You just have to do as much as you can.