Really, the stories are hitting all over--mostly good ones, for the people and children.
First there was this in The New York Times Sunday from op/ed columnist Frank Bruni:
The Church's Errant Shepherds
Mr. Bruni rightly points out that yet more extremely damaging but sadly predictable documents are coming out from the Catholic Church on their sex scandals, this time, from Milwaukee:
BOSTON, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. The archdioceses change but the overarching story line doesn’t, and last week Milwaukee had a turn in the spotlight, with the release of roughly 6,000 pages of records detailing decades of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests there, a sweeping, searing encyclopedia of crime and insufficient punishment.
The one thing that has to be kept in mind foremost at all times are the children and their families that are hurt and affected, just as SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, always insists.
Behind that, however, are the many millions of dollars spent on covering up the Catholic Church's transgressions because, in the first place, the sexual abuse of their students occurs and then the Church compounds the gravity of the situation by covering it up, time and again, and trying to protect the priests that commit these acts, instead of protecting those same children, both the ones already abused and the ones who might be, in the future.
The article goes on:
"...over the last few decades we’ve watched an organization that claims a special moral authority in the world pursue many of the same legal and public-relations strategies — shuttling around money, looking for loopholes, tarring accusers, massaging the truth — that are employed by organizations devoted to nothing more than the bottom line.
In San Diego, diocesan leaders who filed for bankruptcy were rebuked by a judge for misrepresenting the local church’s financial situation to parishioners being asked to help pay for sex-abuse settlements.
In St. Louis church leaders claimed not to be liable for an abusive priest because while he had gotten to know a victim on church property, the abuse itself happened elsewhere."
And here, ladies and gentlemen, is where it gets REALLY good, at least for Kansas Citians and what we've been exposed to and seen in the last few decades:
In Kansas City, Mo., Rebecca Randles, a lawyer who has represented abuse victims, says that the church floods the courtroom with attorneys who in turn drown her in paperwork. In one case, she recently told me, “the motion-to-dismiss pile is higher than my head — I’m 5-foot-4.”
And, for me, the clincher, since Bishop Finn still holds his office, even though he was found guilty in a court of law:
And, for me, the clincher, since Bishop Finn still holds his office, even though he was found guilty in a court of law:
Also in Kansas City, Bishop Robert Finn still inhabits his post as the head of the diocese despite his conviction last September for failing to report a priest suspected of child sexual abuse to the police. This is how the church is in fact unlike a corporation. It coddles its own at the expense of its image.
Can you say "Travesty of justice"?
It's beyond disgusting, besides being deeply, deeply immoral and out and out ugly and wrong, in so many ways.
Yet these are the people who are supposed to be "Godly" and moral.
And they still don't "get it."
Finally, at least today, there's the breaking news this week you may already have seen:
And of course, this is both good and bad news. There wouldn't be anything good about it at all but the Church is being held accountable yet one more time, if only financially, for transgressions of their male hierarch (read: priests).
Once again, we all have to ask--Catholic, non-Catholic, all of us--when does this end? When do these people learn? When will there stop being if not any physical or sexual abuse acts and reports of Catholic children and students, at least far less? And then, when will they begin truly not covering up for the abusive priests and transferring them to other parts of the country or world?
Five decades ago would have been too soon.
The excuses by them and for them, by others, have to stop.
The abuse must end.
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