Closure of Encompass
The closure of the Catholic Church’s in-house treatment programme for sexually abusive clergy, Encompass, has brought out some interesting figures. Firstly, Professor Timothy O’Hearn, a former board member, said that a review found that maintaining the programme would cost $750,000 a year, and the cost can’t be justified.
Can someone tell me, then, how the Catholic Church can spend 20 times that on World Youth Day, and not see the equivalent 20 years of treating abusive clergy being worth the money?
Secondly, a Sydney Morning Herald article says this:
“Opened in 1997 by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and the Australian Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes, Encompass treated more than 1100 people, 250 of them in an intensive six-month residential psychosexual program, according to its final newsletter.”
So that’s an average of 100 clergy treated per year for 11 years, of which 23 or so each year were considered serious enough problems to be doing the intensive residential programme. Those weren’t all Catholic, by the way – other denominations referred problem clergy to Encompass too. But given that there are around 12,000 clergy in Australia at any given time, having to treat 1100 of them gives some idea of how big this problem is.
So given a) the scope of the problem clearly set out in their own newsletter, and b) how much the church is prepared to spend on other things, how can they not find justification for maintaining the Encompass programme?
The money’s not really an issue (even if their priorities are).
The number of clergy to treat isn’t an issue (the less to treat, the less it will cost, after all).
About the only answer I can logically conclude is left is that the treatment has been found to be unsuccessful.