CINCINNATI (OH)
New Oxford Review
By Michael S. Rose
Cincinnati’s west-side is considered one of the most staunchly Catholic, family-oriented, and prolife neighborhoods of any urban area in the country — such as it is. Ironically, the slowly unfolding drama of priestly sex abuse scandals has tested the mettle of the faithful here like in few other places. Just a few years ago, Elder High School, arguably the primary icon of cultural Catholicism in this part of the city, was identified as a bastion of macho conservatism. For example, the all-boys Catholic high school, named after Cincinnati’s 19th-century Archbishop William Henry Elder, consistently fields one of the most formidable football teams in Ohio, having recently won back-to-back state championships, and has produced professional athletes such as the New England Patriot’s Dan Stricker. The parishes that feed into the school are home to blue-collar families who still consider the Church an integral part of their existence.
Since 2002, however, Elder’s reputation has been tarnished by the revelation that five priests who formerly taught at the Cincinnati high school, including two former principals, have been suspended for substantiated allegations of sex abuse. One of them has since gone to jail, and a sixth abuser has since left the priesthood. Allegations from angry west-side Catholics charging that Elder High School was a “dumping ground” for abusive priests were met with a forceful rebuttal from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Dan Andriacco, spokesman for the Archdiocese, is himself an Elder alumnus. He suggested that the reason so many priests from his alma mater have turned out to be homosexual abusers stems from the fact that so many diocesan priests, at one time or another, have served at the school, a point that singularly failed to reassure the faithful.
Of course, by now, tales of the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests, and of bishops who look the other way, are commonplace. But in the majority of instances the scandal has been ill-defined as one of pedophilia, the sexual abuse of pre-pubescent boys and girls. It is no coincidence that the U.S. bishops and their consultants, many of whom are well-known advocates of advancing a homosexualist agenda in the Church, have made a concerted effort to package the sex abuse crisis as a “pedophile scandal” rather than what it truly is: a product of predatory homosexuality.