UNITED STATES
Z Magazine
By Bill Berkowitz
Strategies used by the Church to cover up its worldwide sexual abuse scandal include: the Vatican’s refusal to cooperate with civil authorities; officially sanctioned priest shifting; the destruction of evidence; punishing whistleblowers and rewarding enablers; and blaming the victims.
At the end of February, the eyes of the world were on Pope Benedict XVI as he left the Vatican by helicopter to spend the final hours of what many would characterize as his scandal-dogged papacy at the papal summer retreat. According to the New York Times, “Onlookers in St. Peter’s Square cheered, church bells rang and Romans stood on rooftops to wave flags as he flew by.”
To the tens of thousands of survivors of the Roman Catholic Church’s worldwide sexual abuse scandals, there was little to cheer about.
A Philadelphia Grand Jury report put the long-lived scandal in unambiguous terms: by sexual abuse, “We mean rape. Boys who were raped… girls who were raped…. But even those victims whose physical abuse did not include actual rape—those who were subjected to fondling, to masturbation, to pornography—suffered psychological abuse that scarred their lives and sapped the faith in which they had been raised.”
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