PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
Jim Remsen
is Inquirer Faith Life editor
A respected Catholic priest is exposed as a child molester. A venerable pastor is shown to have once been a church administrator who failed to blow the whistle on abuse.
The church teaches forgiveness, but can a molester ever really be forgiven, let alone restored to public good graces? And has the administrator forfeited his right to be a parish pastor, or to receive public honors for his other, good works?
What is fair?
To Jim Post, it's "an exquisite moral dilemma."
As a founder of the activist group Voice of the Faithful, Post has watched as Catholics across the country absorb the shock of local priest abuse - then struggle with how to regard their once-trusted clerics, and the officials who minimized or enabled the problem.