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	Joe Soucheray: Judgment Day - for the Catholic Church By Joe Soucheray Pioneer Press May 21, 2011 http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_18109008?nclick_check=1 Maybe today is a safe day to open a can of worms and weigh in on a topic that I suspect is above my pay grade, but so be it. By today, I mean that we might not even be here anyway because of the end of the world that was predicted for Saturday by some carnival barker named Harold Camping, an 89-year-old Christian radio broadcaster. This Camping fellow certainly got his 15 minutes of fame, traveling around the country preaching hellfire and damnation. I gave a fleeting thought to wondering if I would have a Lucky Strike, my first since 1987, as the clock neared 6 p.m. Saturday, but I decided against it on the grounds that the world probably wasn't going to end and I didn't want to go through the whole withdrawal process again. In any event, also in the news last week was the report of a study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice concerning the sexual abuse of youth by Catholic clergy. It was a four-year study. It cost $2 million, funded generously by the Catholic Church. It purported to study "The Causes and Contexts of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United Sates, 1950-2010." The study found, in part - I guess this is the context referred to in the study - that the abuse was the result of the permissiveness of the 1960s that saw an increase in divorce, marijuana experimentation and robbery. Huh? Now, I am one of those antiquated types who is still a Catholic. Of my generation particularly it has become quite fashionable, in order to demonstrate enlightenment, to say "I used to be a Catholic," or "I was raised a Catholic." But I have hung in there and I am not at all uncomfortable saying, "Well, I am still a Catholic." No, I have no idea what sacrifice I am making eating scallops on Fridays during Lent, but that's neither here nor there when it comes to the sexual abuse of minors by priests. I'm not buying this study, and I find it embarrassing that I am expected to believe that if a kid was treated poorly, or worse, criminally, by a priest in, say, 1966, the church gets to blame it on Jefferson Airplane lyrics or all the dope that was getting smoked around Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. In other words, during a decade of cultural turbulence and upheaval, it is apparently not unreasonable, for the authors of the study, to suggest that priests got confused by all that wild living that was taking place, even including robbery, which I don't know how to place in the context of the behavior of anybody, much less a priest. Better that they had robbed. I have had an exclusively Catholic education. Maybe I got it all backward, but if I had to distill what I learned, I would say that I am to make an effort to be a decent human being and that I am responsible for my actions. Period. That's it. I find it terribly uncomplicated. It's on my tab when I foul up. I not only don't get to blame outside agencies when I foul up, I am not supposed to. Is the church going to deny teaching me that? So here comes this study that, again, only in part, essentially makes the ridiculous argument that poor behavior is the result of external influences. That sure lets a lot of bad behavior off the hook. I guess a heroin junkie who shoots somebody for money can put the crime in the context of Hollywood having made too many films that glamorize drug addiction. That there even is a study suggests that the wounds of criminal sexual behavior by clergy have not healed. I can't imagine that this study is of much consolation to a victim of abuse. The church needs to man up, quite literally, and quit looking for excuses. I don't want to join the crowd that says, "I used to be a Catholic." I'm trying to make it to the finish line. Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5474. Soucheray is heard from 3 to 6 p.m. weekdays on KSTP-AM 1500.
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