The president of U.S. Roman Catholic bishops said Monday an upcoming study of the sexual abuse of children by clergy in America in the past 50 years would likely produce "startling" numbers.
But in an interview with Reuters, Bishop Wilton Gregory cautioned that no other comparable study had been done. He called for surveys in other sectors to put the results into perspective because pedophilia was not just a Catholic problem.
"The bishops really want to be honest with our people and say 'this is the data we want to share with you'," Gregory said.
"The numbers are going to be startling because they are going to be aggregate, over 50 years, and they will be startling because there is no context.
"We don't have a similar study for the school system, for athletic coaches, for scouting programs, for doctors, for therapists," he said, adding that it would be impossible to say if the numbers were high or low compared to others.
Boston was the epicenter of a scandal that swept the United States last year after it was discovered that several dioceses had transferred priests known to have abused children from parish to parish without alerting the public.
Last December the Vatican approved revised U.S. rules to try to protect children and punish clergy guilty of sexual abuse.
The National Review board of the Catholic Bishops Conference commissioned the study -- which will include information from all 195 American dioceses -- to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
Its purpose was to "re-establish a level of credibility and trust with our people" and to make sure children are protected, Gregory said.
The anonymous study does not include names of victims or offenders but is a compilation of information about offenders, victims, incidents of abuse, cost of therapy and legal fees.
"INSPIRE, URGE OR INVITE"
Gregory said he hoped the Catholic study would "inspire, urge or invite" other institutions to do the same in order to make children safe in all environments.
"I would hope that they would have the courage (to carry out their own studies) and decide that this is too important an issue...and if institutions are not forthcoming I would hope that other public entities would put the same pressure on them that we have been through," he said.
A number of U.S. Catholic officials and Vatican officials have said they felt the U.S. Church had been singled out for scrutiny for a problem that exists in other sectors of American society, including other religions.
"Certainly we as a Catholic Church have a primary responsibility because of the situation that we faced. There is no desire on our part to deny that, but we would also hope that fair-minded people would say 'this is a larger issue and let us review it in a larger context'," he said.
The archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law, resigned last December after dozens of his own priests publicly called on him to step down, but the effects of the scandal still linger.
Last month the Archdiocese of Boston agreed to pay up to $85 million to settle lawsuits filed by hundreds of people who say they were sexually abused by clergy.