SPRINGFIELD (IL)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
[Springfield police department report – The Smoking Gun]
Tim Townsend
After all three Masses last weekend, parishioners of St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Springfield, Ill., were handed a statement written by the diocese’s leader, Bishop Thomas Paprocki.
The bishop explained that St. Aloysius’s pastor, the Rev. Thomas Donovan, “is suffering from a psychological condition that manifests itself in self-bondage as a response to stress.”
The statement was a response to a 911 call in November by Donovan from the parish rectory. In it, the priest tells dispatchers he had placed himself in handcuffs and asks police to help free him.
After the recording of Donovan’s 911 call rocketed across the Internet, Paprocki was in a unique situation. His priest had not done anything illegal, and yet he’d been found doing something most people would consider bizarre.
In Paprocki’s 1,038-word response to parishioners, he took the unusual step of delving deep into Donovan’s psychological problem. With the priest’s consent, the statement includes a description of what Donovan’s own clinical therapist had diagnosed as “non-sexual self-bondage.”
For the last decade, in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis that rocked the Catholic church, bishops have been hammered by critics for breaking repeated promises for transparency in documentation of past abuses and investigations of present-day accusations of sexually abusive priests.
But there are signs that a younger generation of church leaders have learned lessons from the last decade and are attempting to be as open as possible when a crisis comes to their diocese.
Yet in the case of St. Aloysius, that desire for transparency may have produced a response that caused more harm than good.
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