Advocates against priest sex abuse are calling on Quincy Mayor Thomas Koch to apologize for comments he recently made on a radio talk show that seemed to minimize the scope and severity of the Catholic Church scandal.
Koch sent GBH News a statement after this article’s publication Thursday, saying that he had apologized directly to the local schools and LGBTQ+ community at a schools committee meeting Wednesday night. He said his comments were “ill-thought remarks” and he was caught off guard by the issue.
During a discussion of Quincy’s controversial plan to install the statues of two Catholic saints at the front of its public safety building, Dan Rea, the host of WBZ’s “Nightside with Dan Rea,” shared his perplexity at what he called the antipathy of some people toward religion.
He added that he remains shocked by the clergy sex-abuse scandal, which Rea described as the “priest pedophile crisis.”
At that point Koch interjected, saying, “That was mostly homosexual issues, not pedophilia.” When Rea pushed back, saying there were lots of children and early teenagers who were impacted by abuse, Koch replied, “There were? Well, pedophilia’s a younger age than to me a teenager. But that’s another issue for another day. I [unintelligible] either at all, believe me.”
According to a 2004 report by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the average age of alleged victims of clergy abuse in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century was 12.6 years old.
Koch went on to assert that sexual abuse is more frequently perpetrated by coaches and teachers than priests, but doesn’t receive the same amount of attention because, as he put it, the Catholic Church is “not very popular with the secular media, so they took a beating.”
“You don’t read about it every day when it happens around the country in other circumstances,” Koch added. “It’s bad and evil in any circumstance, but I don’t believe the media treats it equally in the various situations where it happens.”
Sarah Pearson, a spokesperson for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, told GBH News by email the group “is appalled by Koch’s recent comments ... dismissing the clergy abuse crisis as ‘mostly homosexual issues’ rather than recognizing the catastrophe for what it is: the widespread and systemic rape and sexual assault of children and vulnerable people facilitated and concealed by Catholic bishops around the world.”
“The conflation of homosexuality and pedophilia has been repeatedly refuted by medical and scientific experts,” Pearson added. “Mayor Koch’s comments serve to scapegoat gay men, imply that middle-school and high-school boys are not actually victims of abuse, and completely dismiss every girl or woman who has been assaulted in the Catholic Church…
“For Mayor Koch to deny that reality while the children of Quincy go to schools and parishes run by the Archdiocese of Boston is a disservice to his community and an insult to every survivor of clergy sexual abuse in Quincy and beyond,” Pearson continued. “For this, he should apologize.”
Koch did not reply to an inquiry from GBH News about his remarks Wednesday. He responded with a statement on Thursday.
“I publicly apologized at last night’s school committee meeting directly to our gay community and our schools community for my ill-thought remarks on a radio program earlier in the week,” Koch wrote. “I was caught off-guard by the question and tried to make a larger point about sexual abuse across all segments of society — regardless of sexuality or any particular institution. But that’s beside the point — I know better and will do better. I am proud of my faith, and the essence of that faith is to love one another and not judge — my words failed that standard here.”
Koch’s comments were also criticized by the lay Catholic group Voice of the Faithful, which was formed in Massachusetts in 2002 in response to the abuse crisis.
“The idea that there’s a correlation between homosexuality and sexual predator kinds of behaviors is just clearly incorrect,” Voice of the Faithful vice president Margaret Roylance told GBH News. ”Having a same-sex attraction doesn’t mean anything about an attraction to children or teenagers.”
The John Jay report found that 81% of alleged victims in the church abuse scandal were male.
However, Roylance said, “In general, one in five females are victims of sexual abuse and one in 10 males. If there’s a different situation as a result of accessibility within the church organization, that could explain some difference.”
Roylance also said that, despite Koch’s assertions about coaches and teachers, the rates of abuse of children remain “pretty much the same” in different sectors of society. But she called abuse inside the Catholic Church especially heinous because, as she put it, “It’s a betrayal of trust and faith.”
“The numbers don’t really matter as much as the egregious nature of the offense,” Roylance said.
