KANSAS CITY (MO)
The Kansas City Star
By BILL TAMMEUS
The Kansas City Star
When Tom Fox became editor of theAbuse Tracker in 1980, he never imagined what he now sees in the Catholic Church.
Back then Pope John Paul II was relatively new at the Vatican. Fox says he thought “that this was a great time when I could … really look at issues of the world — where Christianity is really practiced. We'd be focused outside on all the major faith issues, the major social justice issues, the mercy issues, the preaching issues. What I had not anticipated was that we were just entering into a kind of retrenchment” within the church.
But the church was “just beginning to turn inward,” says Fox, who will leave the Kansas City-based independent publication Jan. 1 after spending eight years as publisher.
Under this pope, he says, the church began to see the world “as evil, as basically flawed. The counterpoint to that is that the church is impeccable. What that led to very quickly was an inability of the church to be self-reflective.”
As that happened, Fox says, he began to get calls and letters from people in the church in pain, people who thought their voices were being stilled, scholars the Vatican was forbidding to teach in Catholic settings, even people who alleged sexual abuse by priests.
So Fox changed his original NCR agenda to let the publication focus on those stories. The independent weekly was writing about abusive priests as early as 1985 — more than 15 years before it became a national scandal noticed by the secular press.
“In 1986,” Fox says, “we wrote a front-page editorial saying there is now clearly a dual pattern, not only of the abuse but of the cover-up, and it was happening all over the place.
Posted by kshaw at December 25, 2004 08:56 AM