BishopAccountability.org
	The Pedophilia Scandals: the Punishing News Never Stops By Gustav Niebuhr Washington Post December 3, 2010 http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/undergod/2010/12/the_pedophilia_scandals_the_punishing_news_never_stops.html Other than the election of Pope Benedict XVI five years ago, news stories about the Roman Catholic Church tend to cluster around a single, terrible subject--the sexual abuse of children and adolescents by individual priests (in the 1960s, '70s, '80s and even '90s) and the failure of those priests' bishops to stop it. December began with a report from Delaware that a jury in that state had awarded $30 million in compensatory damages to a man who asserted he had been molested more than 100 times as a youth by a priest. The jury has yet to get around to deciding what it will award in punitive damages. One can only imagine. Yes, the overall issue has been thoroughly well-studied by now, and many explanations offered about the ecclesiastical culture in which these abuses took place. But it still remains confounding why the higher-ups in the hierarchy didn't yank these criminals out of ministry at the first report of their despicable transgressions. The negligence of certain bishops, poisonous seeds sowed over the decades, has reaped a lushly appalling crop, whose terrible thorns do much to obscure the church's moral witness. By the latter, I mean the courageous and the committed who have labored (and continue still) to bring to society Christian ideals of aiding the poor, oppressed and persecuted. I was reminded of those people very recently, on a visit to Argentina, a nation still coping with the legacy of seven years of state-imposed terror, the so-called "Dirty War," waged against civilians by a military government in the 1970s and early 1980s. One need not go far in Buenos Aires to be reminded of that exceptionally dark period, as trials of the terror's perpetrators still continue. Nor does one have to read very deeply to come across the names of some of the period's better-known victims, among them two French nuns who came to the aid of the families of "the disappeared," only to be kidnapped themselves, tortured and eventually murdered. The pair were among many who paid deeply for opposing injustice--a religiously and professionally diverse group that included many other Catholics, as well as Jews, intellectuals, journalists, attorneys and pretty much anyone considered "subversive" by a regime run with an outlaw brutality. At some point, when the church (and the civil courts) have finished dealing with the criminals it long allowed in its midst, then its leaders can get back to lifting up the memories of loyal Catholics who gave their lives for its greatest ideals. If nothing else, a recounting of their stories would make fine telling during some future Advent. Niebuhr is an associate professor of religion and the media at Syracuse University and directs Religion & Society Program, an interdisciplinary undergraduate major.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.