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	Pedophiles Not Welcome Student Printz April 9, 2009 http://media.www.studentprintz.com/media/storage/paper974/news/2009/04/07/Opinion/Pedophiles.Not.Welcome-3700760.shtml The New York Times recently published a story about the founder of a Roman Catholic religious order who wrote countless letters to American bishops, warning that pedophile priests should be removed from the priesthood because curing them is impossible. Rev. Gerald M.C. Fitzgerald founded the Servants of the Paraclete, which took part in the spiritual healing of "troubled" priests. His letters date as far back as the 1950s (Fitzgerald died in 1969). However, hardly anybody in the church listened to Fitzgerald; the chairman of the U.S. Bishops Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People said that Fitzgerald's views "by and large, were considered bizarre with regard to not treating people medically, but only spiritually, and also segregating a whole population with sexual problems on a deserted island." In fact, Fitzgerald even made a $5000 down payment on an island in the Caribbean to which he could relocate sexually predatory priests. At first it seems like the issue uncovered by Fitzgerald's letters is the disagreement between him and, well, everyone else, about whether or not pedophile priests can be "cured." If they can, then the disagreement continues: can they be cured only through spiritual treatment, only through medical treatment, or through a combination of both? No matter what your thoughts are on how best to go about treating pedophilia in the priesthood, the bigger issue surrounds the fact that despite their sexually abusive histories, an unconscionable number of priests have simply been reassigned to other parishes and schools where they have abused new victims. In a letter to a bishop in 1957, Fitzgerald wrote, "We are amazed to find how often a man who would be behind bars if he were not a priest is entrusted with the [care of souls]." That's one thing Father Fitzgerald and I agree on. I have no idea how to go about treating "troubled priests" or anything of the sort. What I do know is that I went to Catholic school my whole life until I came to USM. If someone were to tell me that a parish down the road sent one of their priests, who they were aware had a history of sexual abuse, over to my school, I would be furious (just as any reasonable person would). It's unacceptable to have the mentality that it's perfectly okay to reason, "Father So-and-so is making too much of a ruckus here at our church with all these sexual abuse accusations… let's send him across town to that other parish to quiet the matter." It wasn't until 2002 that the American bishops officially required bishops to remove priests with legitimate accusations against them. They waited until just seven years ago to do this? And the Catholic church has been around how long? Obviously, the way this situation in the church has been handled in the past has been grossly unfair to the abuse victims. That's sort of a given. However, I do have to feel sorry for the plethora of good priests (and brothers and nuns) out there. I knew plenty of them growing up, and I hate to see their good works overshadowed. I was about to make a conclusion that I felt sorry for the church itself, but then I backtracked. I don't feel sorry for its leadership as a whole, because I know from personal experience the Church can be (and often is) better than that. Maybe I wouldn't have to feel sorry for anybody at all if everyone in the holy hierarchy had woken up to the fact that sexual predators should be removed from the priesthood sometime before 2002.
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