UNITED STATES
The Kansas City Star
July 4
BY MARY SANCHEZ
The Kansas City Star
No servant can serve two masters.
Those are the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. And yet how imperfectly have his followers taken them to heart. Throughout the history of Christianity, some of the most painful moments have been when church leaders cocked their ear toward Mammon when godliness would have dictated otherwise.
Other, more recent painful moments, especially for Catholic Christians, came when church authorities put institutional prestige ahead of justice and consideration for victims of sexual abuse by clergy members.
The damage done by the clerical abuse scandals to the Catholic Church, and to countless millions of its faithful, has been profound and worldwide. Although Catholic bishops and the Vatican have sought to atone and to reform the institutional practices that enabled the abuse, those efforts have often been admixed with less upright impulses.
Consider the case of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who once served as its prelate. Some of the most notorious cases of abuse took place there — well before Dolan was archbishop — and, as a consequence of legal settlements with victims, the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in 2011, after Dolan had left to become archbishop of New York.
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