Good Morning.
Note: My email service was down from Friday until this morning. The subject matter of this blog, unfortunately, seems to always be timely.
Another report about the abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests has just come out, this time from Pennsylvania.
Two weeks ago it was Cardinal McCarrick who actually resigned
amidst the charges against him, and now it's Cardinal Wuerl, McCarrick's successor in Washington, D.C. but formerly of Pittsburgh where he was apparently complicit in the horror that was going on in that diocese. When the pope visited the nation's capital, Wuerl was right there in the popemobile, riding along to the cheers and applause. Francis is a master at public relations but he surely knows about Cardinal Wuerl and he knows about all the others. He canonized John Paul II who ignored the criminal behavior in the priesthood for decades and rewarded the notorious Cardinal Law of Boston with a cushy job at the Vatican. Covering up the criminal behavior in the church and coddling a well-known protector of abusive priests does not rise to the level of sainthood, not in my mind.
When I lived in a small, Midwestern city during the 1970s, a priest arrived from Boston to shepherd the local Catholic church. I didn't like him for some reason, but it never occurred to me that he was pedophile. One Saturday afternoon, an altar boy whose family I knew finally told his parents that the priest had been molesting him right there in the sacristy. His father immediately went to the church, beat the priest within an inch of his life, and in a matter of minutes, a giant diocesan machine was turned on to shove the whole thing under the rug. The priest, we later learned, was whisked out of town in a private car instead of being taken to the hospital, and the cops weren't called, of course, because the main thing was to keep the abuse quiet.
By morning another priest had driven through the dark of winter night to say the Sunday Masses. With the organ hushed for his sermon, the supply priest stood in the pulpit and told the parishioners that their regular pastor had slipped on the ice and sustained a head injury. I was sitting toward the front of the church and heard the chorus of gasps behind me, and after Mass, as the chain smokers lit their cigarettes within seconds of exiting the church and the devout clutched their weekly bulletins with fingertips freshly dipped in holy water, the comments were universally sympathetic to the priest who was the apparent victim of the harsh winter climate.
Except the kid and his parents didn't keep their mouths shut, and within days, scores of people connected to the church knew what had really happened - the parish secretary, the rectory housekeeper, the choir director, the women who served the funeral lunches, and plenty of other church members who had heard the lies from the pulpit and were trying to process the truth. Nobody did a thing. Nobody was willing to face the fact that a member of the Catholic clergy had been committing a crime as unconscionable as any on earth. Nobody was worried about the boy and his family whose agony was discarded like a pile of old rags.
I also did nothing. I'd been told from the time I could walk that I was to bow and scrape to the clergy no matter what, and you can start right there with the abuse in the Catholic church - the deliberate attempts to scare the daylights out of innocent young kids with constant threats and graphic descriptions of hell. The religious instruction of my childhood was not about instilling a love for God and his created beings; it was about fostering a blind allegiance to a pyramid of church authority, and those not inclined to be cooperative were spirited off to a particularly unpleasant parish priest who effected with a length of rubber hose the required submissiveness. I somehow managed to escape such a fate, but I certainly heard about it in some detail from two or three less fortunate classmates.
My assumption that the pedophile priest would henceforth be confined to a monastery in the middle of nowhere turned out to be horrifyingly incorrect. Ten years later, when I'd moved to a much larger city, I attended Mass one weekend at a church across the street from a Catholic grade school, and as I watched the priest walk down the center aisle in the company of two altar boys, I was sickened to the point that I got up and left, but still I did nothing. At that point in time, nobody would have paid attention to anyone's complaints about the priest's proximity to those boys or to the school that housed plenty of others, but it doesn't give me a drop of comfort. The priest was later assigned as a hospital chaplain, and one can only hope that the
pediatric ward was placed on alert, but I'll bet the hospital had no idea what was wandering the halls because the church didn't want it to know.
I have a profound faith in God, but I've absolutely had it with these men who have a long history of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, and it's not just a handful of disordered priests; it's an arrogant, systemic corruption that has gone on for centuries, and it's not going to change, not until they clean house and allow a married clergy of both men and women. Decent men with families wouldn't countenance the abuse of anyone, let alone precious young children, and women would scream at the top of their lungs about such appalling wretchedness. Meanwhile, the cops, the courts, and the press should land on the church like a ton of bricks just like they did in Pennsylvania. No more games, no more excuses, and no more statements from the pope about how sorry he is every time another terrible report sees the light of day . Enough is enough.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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