UNITED STATES
Philadelphia Inquirer
By John Grogan
Inquirer Columnist
I was having lunch recently with an area priest with whom I am friendly. When the topic of the clergy child-abuse scandal came up, the pain on his face was palpable.
The embarrassment, the anger, the shame and sense of betrayal.
It was as though, just by mentioning it, I had sucker-punched him.
This priest is a good and decent man. He's reverent, not self-righteous. He toils quietly at his vocation in the hopes of leading the Catholics he reaches toward a happier, holier life.
He is a man of fairly intimidating build, and my clear sense as we sat over brats and beer talking about abusive priests and the hierarchy that for so many decades enabled them was that he wanted to... kick somebody's butt. I mean that literally.
And it wasn't the media's backside he wanted to kick for publicizing the long-hushed scandal. Or lay Catholics for asking hard questions. Or even the comedians for their cruel jokes.
It was his fellow priests he wanted to clock for sinning so horribly, so criminally, so repugnantly. And his Church leaders who failed to take decisive action when they could have and should have.
The Catholic Church, here in Philadelphia and across the nation, failed miserably toward that end. Every institution has its misfits. There are corrupt cops and lecherous coaches and pedophile scout leaders and, yes, unethical journalists. But the measure of a great institution is not the behavior of its aberrant members but how it deals with that behavior.
Posted by kshaw at June 28, 2005 06:40 AM