Religious Leaders Back New Law Requiring Child Abuse Reports

A new state law requiring clergy to report child abuse--except when they learn about it through confidential confessions--is being welcomed by religious leaders as an overdue obligation that also strikes a blow at church cover-ups of sexual molestation.

The law, which went into effect Jan. 1, adds priests, ministers, rabbis and other clergy to a long list of professionals--from teachers and doctors to animal control officers--already required to alert a child protective agency if they have a reasonable suspicion of child abuse.

“We have a moral obligation with or without this law,” said Rabbi Aaron Kriegel, co-founder of the San Fernando Valley Interfaith Clergy Council. Officials of the Southern California Board of Rabbis “absolutely applauded it” at a recent meeting, he said.

Some concern remains about how to distinguish between confidential confessions and other conversations with congregants.

“That’s still going to have to be sorted out,” said Scott Anderson, executive director of the California Council of Churches, which supported the legislation.

Catholic Church representatives in Sacramento also supported the bill (AB 3354) after Assemblywoman Valerie Brown (D-Kenwood), the principal author, accepted their suggestion to expand protected confidential communications.

“We were in a tough spot,” said Msgr. E. James Petersen, executive director of the California Catholic Conference. “If we opposed the bill, it would look like the same old story of the church trying to cover up.”

Petersen was referring to a rash of incidents in recent years in which priests were quietly transferred by higher-ups after they abused young boys.

Former Assemblywoman Paula Boland (R-Northridge) said she coauthored the bill because of such problems in the Catholic Church, of which she is a member.

“I was dismayed when I heard about clergy sexually abusing children, and the church, instead of dealing with it, took [the priests] out of that situation and moved them to another church,” Boland said. “Unfortunately, the church mishandled this for so many years.”

California Catholic leaders saw the amended bill as “an opportunity for healing,” Petersen said. “The day I went over to the Legislature to testify at a committee hearing, some of the victims who were there went out of their way to tell me how much they appreciated my being there.”

A seminary president who helped write the bill said he wanted to educate California clergy about their obligations to protect children.

“We’re moving away from the ol’ boy network in the church where issues of sexual harassment and child molestation were often covered up,” said the Rev. Robert Edgar, president of the Claremont School of Theology.

More than a year ago, Edgar was named by his United Methodist Church to preside over trial-like proceedings against a fellow minister who allegedly molested several children years ago. One of those who brought complaints to the Methodists, Melissa Knight-Fine, also was a key proponent of the bill as coordinator of the Sacramento-based Legislative Coalition to Prevent Child Abuse.

“We have found that clergy often don’t know that abuse is a pattern of behavior,” she said. “It is not stopped by praying with the perpetrator.”

In addition to addressing the issue of clergy molesting minors, backers said the law fills two important gaps in handling child abuse:

* Clergy are in a good position to hear about abuse in family settings, where the great majority of physical harm and molestation occurs.

* Clergy previously could be sued for reporting suspected child abuse, but the new law provides them with a legal shield against such lawsuits.

The law, signed in September by Gov. Pete Wilson, made California the 28th state to require clergy to report suspected child abuse. But 15 of those states do not have an exemption written into the law for “penitential communication,” proponents said.

Because the definition of “penitential communications”--the legal language for confessional situations--varies from one religion to another, the California Council of Churches has explained the law in letters to denominational executives and plans to offer workshops on it in the spring.

“There are going to be some tough scenarios,” said Father Petersen, the Catholic representative in Sacramento. “If someone comes into a church and blurts it out, that’s not confession, for instance.

“But if it comes up in confession, which we now call the rite of reconciliation, then the priest has to use his powers of persuasion to get him to seek help and tell someone else his problem.”

Rabbi Bernie King, president of the Orange County Board of Rabbis, said he “always assumed that when someone comes to me for a counseling problem in my office . . . that I’m bound not to reveal that in any way.

“But the law has changed the situation to the degree that we now have more of a responsibility to report the suspected child abuse,” he said.

The Rev. Louise Fairweathre-Baxter, a United Methodist minister in Fullerton and one of the law’s strongest proponents, said she has “already announced to my congregation that I’m a mandated reporter.”

As the tradition of silence is broken, she said, perpetrators and victims will feel freer to speak. She recalled the case of an 85-year-old woman who approached her after a sermon and confided that she had been molested as a child--but never told a soul.

Speaking before an interfaith gathering last week, Fairweathre-Baxter also said the bill should help end an era when religious institutions could serve as employment havens for pedophiles unable to gain such close access to youths in the secular world.

“We can no longer just move them to the next congregation or the next parish,” she said.