Another Thing You Can't Blame on Woodstock

By Charles P. Pierce
The Esquire
June 21, 2013

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/catholic-church-abuse-audit-finds-it-longtime-problem-061913

Filippo Monteforte

When the scandal in the Roman Catholic Church broke, and it was discovered that Holy Mother Church had been d/b/a an international conspiracy to obstruct justice in thousands of cases of criminal sexual abuse of the children in its charge, the defenders of the institutional church, and not a few members of the Clan Of The Red Beanie, decided that the whole thing started when The Sixties happened. The good holy celibates saw all the unauthorized fking going on around them and, swooning over the Strawberry Alarm Clock, they took to abusing children because that's what the Sexual Revolution was all about. Also, too -- birth control!

Except, of course, no.

The auditors' report, released on Tuesday, found that sexual abuse by friars in the St. Joseph Province of the Capuchin Order was discussed at meetings as far back as 1932, the first year for which minutes of meetings were available. After more than a dozen students at the province's St. Lawrence Seminary in Wisconsin accused nine friars of abuse in 1992, it cost the province's insurer nearly a million dollars - but 89 percent of that went to lawyers to defend the Capuchins and only 11 percent to victims for settlements and therapy, the report said.

The auditors said that the files often contained "coded language" and euphemisms to refer to sexual abusers. Friars were said to suffer from "immorality" or "evil actions and speech," and some documents record friars sent for treatment for alcoholism when sexual abuse was clearly the issue. Peter J. Isely, who was abused by a Capuchin friar at St. Lawrence Seminary in 1970s, praised the province for commissioning the report, but said he suspected that the order had either destroyed documents or withheld them from the auditors. Mr. Isely, the Midwest director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said that he had provided court documents to the auditors that were not in the province's files. Asked about this discrepancy, Father Celichowski acknowledged that "file management was historically a significant problem."