A new report detailing the dramatic decline in credible clergy sex abuse cases in 2023 has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.According to the Catholic News Agency, the new report issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) found 1,300 clerical abuse allegations in 2023, down from 2,704 in the prior year. The 2023 total represents a sharp decline in the number of cases from 2019 when 4,434 allegations were brought of which 229 were found credible. In 2023, only 17 of the allegations were credible with just three of those charges being substantiated.
“These numbers are not just numbers," said Archbishop Timothy Broglio, president of the USCCB in the report’s introduction. “The statistics are the many stories and accounts of the betrayal of trust and the lifelong journey towards recovery.”
While even one case is too many, this dramatic drop in the number of abuse cases is described by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue as an “almost complete eradication of clergy sexual abuse.”
As he states, “During this period, there were 47,987 members of the clergy. This means that 0.006 percent of them had a substantiated case of sexual abuse made against him by a minor.”
The fact that only four of the allegations were made by males and 11 by females also points to the fact that the Church’s crackdown on homosexuality in the priesthood appears to be working. This is significant because most cases of clergy sexual abuse involved homosexuality with only a tiny percentage involving pedophilia.
One would think that this tide of good news would be making headlines across the country, yet Donohue found not one secular media outlet in the United States that ran a story on the latest report.
“If there had been a sharp uptick in the number of cases, it would be all over the news,” Donohue writes. “Such a story would have been picked up by the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC—and every left-wing internet and social media site. But because this problem has all been wiped out, practically no one knows anything about it.”
While congratulating the bishops for making such dramatic progress in implementing reforms, Donohue says “shame on journalists and the talking heads for the total media blackout!”
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