PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Huffington Post
Jonathan Wolfman
My hometown, Philadelphia, became known over the past decade for its criminally accused and criminally liable priests, 37 of them. One of them, Monsignor William Lynn, the first member of the U.S. Catholic Church hierarchy to suffer a conviction in the scandal, is serving a serious prison term not for rape but for helping to bury the pedophilia scandal by shredding internal Church documents. Copies were subsequently found (by, my guess, some heroic female office lay worker in the Archdiocese).
The Archdiocese is also now known for the fact that, in Philadelphia, the Church has not lived up to its no-tolerance pledge. Like many mammoth institutions, the Church has found advancing molesters onward and, at times, upward, far simpler than confrontation. In some cases, the Church simply removed these men from the priesthood.
I am not in favor of the Church simply ridding itself of these priests. If that’s zero tolerance, it’s flawed. The Church should be held accountable to its faithful and to the rest of us — including those who have taught distraught teens after their horrified parents have pulled them from diocesan schools — by taking full responsibility for these men. The Church recruited, groomed, educated, trained and ordained them and provided them, worldwide and for generations, extraordinary access to tens of millions of children.
Cashiering these men would force secular society to wholly assume a responsibility that is not wholly ours. There’s no reason to think that pedophilic priests, defrocked and loosed onto the streets, would be less dangerous than they were, say, at Saint Paul’s or Saint Bart’s. In fact, defrocked and on the loose, they would be harder to identify within the thousands of communities their presence would make vulnerable.
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