UNITED STATES
PolicyMIc
Medha Chandorkar
The role of the Catholic Church is to guide and protect its followers. Except, apparently, when it’s protecting its pedophile priests instead.
According to hundreds of documents that were released this week, the Milwaukee archdiocese has ignored eight decades worth of sex-abuse scandals. Instead of investigating sexual assault claims against its priests, the Milwaukee archdiocese, headed at the time by current New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, either disregarded the claims or simply reassigned priests to unsuspecting parishes. Not surprisingly, this response did not prevent further assaults because it did nothing to address the real problem: pedophile priests.
In fact, the only people that benefited from the arrangement were the sexual assaulters themselves. Records show that one priest molested the same minor close to 40 times in the span of five years, while another assaulted over 200 boys as headmaster at a school for deaf boys. Some were moved over 11 times in 34 years, while others were stayed with the church for close to a decade after the Vatican was notified of their sexual child abuse.
If that’s not disgusting enough for you, consider the fact that Dolan and the Vatican frequently corresponded on the costs of fighting sexual assault claims in court, and when certain sex scandals threatened to surface, Dolan asked permission to move $57 million of the church’s money into a trust fund to protect it from “any legal claim and liability.” In short, prevent it from falling into the hands of those abused and violated by the church’s priests.
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