Catholic Sensibility

Check out John Allen's The Word From Rome, linked at the sidebar, too. Fr Tom Doyle, who pioneered awareness on clergy sex abuse, takes on Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione, who claims the Scandal is “a last consequence of the invasion of the ideology of sexual permissiveness in the 1960s and 1970s.” Doyle does a thorough takedown. Worth reading in full. “Buttiglione’s views reflect those of many ‘moral conservatives,’ yet they are almost totally inaccurate." Doyle reports his own experience with victims abused in the 50's and 60's. I know a few myself. The limits of the Jay Study, in its focus on living victims of living priests, gives no information on the extent of sex abuse in prior decades or centuries. While it's possible clergy sex abuse sprang full-blown from 1950's Catholicism--the surveys can't deny it absolutely--it's far more likely that people in power took advantage of the weak as more or less of a continuous extra-curricular ... pretty much since the beginning of time. Doyle skewers the conservative view, and their "convenient scapegoat, though, especially for those whose level of denial renders them incapable of accepting the most criminal and immoral dimension of the scandal, namely the blanket of lies and cover-up as well as the constant shifting of perpetrators by the hierarchy." Exactly. We knew about sex abuse ten, twenty, thirty years ago. What has changed is that the bishops have conspired and covered up to avoid costly litigation. Was that also a product of the so-called Sexual Revolution? Lying and obstructing justice? "The hierarchy, encouraged and enabled no doubt by Vatican officials, have staunchly resisted any and all efforts at a serious and honest self-examination into the reason the civil cases take place and the grand juries investigate.......and this reason is not the sex abuse but the mismanagement and cover-up by the leadership." Nails it again. Why were people ticked off in 2002? Bishops. People who are ordained to pastor large numbers of Catholics and oversee substantial material and spiritual resources. The predators we knew about. What most people weren't aware of was the extent to which religious leadership went to hide perps, protect bank accounts, and pass the buck. Do you think the recent trend of Fidelity cubed (TM) bishops is going to be the solution? I wouldn't bet on it. New York's Cardinal Egan tried to insulate his old diocese from its financial responsibilities by finagling parishes as "independent" entities. In St Louis, when that independence rankles, the solution is "Show me the money, or I'll show you an interdict." "Whatever it takes" is supposed to be a motto for preaching the gospel, not avoiding justice.