I read an article in the New York Times about how the rate of clergy sexual abuse of children in the Philippines is part of a broader systemic issue that persists. If you are a Catholic, my views may offend you — consider yourself warned.

I took an interest in the subject because I am interested in systems and I obsess how people make decisions. I found a study by Julie Hanlon Rubio and Paul J. Schutz called “Beyond ‘Bad Apples’: Understanding Clergy Perpetrated Sexual Abuse as a Structural Problem & Cultivating Strategies for Change.”

The researchers claim that clericalism — a structure of power that isolates clergy and gives them excessive authority while reducing agency of the lay, toxic masculinity (among other personal factors), and a culture of silence and repression that inhibits victim or institutional whistleblowers from coming forward.

To support their claims, the authors surveyed religious, lay, and clergy. I don’t put a ton of weight on anecdotes (anecdotes aren’t data), but the authors did their best to methodically categorize and tag data for analysis. Their conclusions are that the system is to blame and not the person.

I asked myself, how many different systems are at play here? And what enables these systems to persist? I identified two from the research, and there are probably more.

Church as a social institution.

• The norm is the belief that the church is nearly infallible. We tell ourselves stories that reinforce that belief — “listen to the priest”, “respect the priest”, “don’t make us that family that makes noise, keep your head down and your mouth shut.”

• There are feedback loops that make it possible for clergy to offend with impunity — “I’m a priest, I can leverage God to enforce compliance or silence.” Or at an system-administrator level, “If we expose our offending priests, we may lose credibility with congregants.”

Social stratification as a system

• Norms that enforce power dynamics such as patriarchy and/or female submissiveness.

• Norms that enforce power, such as clericalism, reinforce the belief that a priest’s association with the divine inherently positions the lay beneath them.

I then thought, how do we change systems?

Let’s go to physics — The church as an institution has mass and is in motion. Over time, its mass grows, making it more resistant to change. Newton’s principles tell us that to alter its trajectory, an external force must be greater than the force keeping it in motion.

Let’s go to systems — systems dynamics tells us that the most powerful way to intervene in a system is to change the relationship between nodes. To change the relationship between clergy and lay or between the institution and itself is much easier to write than to implement. It would require fundamentally changing how we see ourselves and how we see an institution — an ancient belief reinforced through generations!

Let’s go to behavioral economics — oversimplified, humans prefer to make change when they have high degrees of certainty and they believe the gain is greater than the loss. To change the nature of relationship between a person and a deep-set institution and belief system requires the person to believe with high certainty that what they gain from giving up a prior belief is greater than giving up a belief they may have held since childhood. How does that happen easily?

My final thought on this paper

Physics, sociology, systems, and economics tells us that to change the system may require us to change the nature of our relationship with the system. And, if you’ve ever tried to change the nature of your relationship with anything you deeply love you know the challenge. Perhaps a solution to system-wide change is to start small — through nudges.

System administrators—any person or group accountable for a system’s goals, behaviors, and outputs—can introduce nudges that gradually weaken deep-set beliefs and slowly reveal something new. The tradeoff is that if the negative side effects of the system are allowed to persist, the thing that you’re most trying to protect may erode away sooner than its natural death.

For those who engage with the system as participants or end users, find ways to communicate and transparently report push back and feedback to system administrators. Consider a vote with the wallet — stop financially supporting the system. Consider financially supporting or publicly advocating for a competing cause. At the level of the person these changes don’t seem meaningful, but at scale, they can be powerful voice-of-user feedback.

Three principles then for thinking about changing your relationship with anything large:

1. If you want to make a big change, change your relationship with the thing you want to change.

2. Make that large change sooner than later. Have systems in place to support you as you make that change.

3. Accept that nothing changes overnight, the only way to eat a gigantic steak is one bite at a time, and you’re only human.

Consider applying it to something you could give up — examples include ice cream, pizza, (for singers) the need to back phrase, or BTS.