UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
WillIam D. Lindsey
In a comment a moment ago here, Mary writes,
How sick is it that so many well-meaning, practicing Catholics are able to be desensitized to to the horrible reality of clergy sex abuse, all so their sacramental experience of weekly mass isn’t tarnished. I was once one of them.
The word “desensitized” hits me between the eyes. I hear myself in that word: I hear the word as an accurate description of how I’m in danger of becoming, as I read yet another story about abuse of children by Catholic clergy, and the longstanding cover-up of that abuse.
Mary’s comment flashed into my email inbox just as I happened to be reading several articles about the action that the Eastern District of the Missouri Court of Appeals took a number of days ago. The court ruled that the archdiocese of St. Louis does not have to release the names of priests accused of sexual abuse in a lawsuit now before the courts. This was a ruling in response to another court ruling ordering the release of these names.
The lawsuit was filed by a woman who was 19 when she filed suit in 2011, and who claims that her parish priest began to abuse her at St. Cronan’s parish in St. Louis when she was 5 years old. The priest in question, Father Joseph Ross, was later defrocked. He had previously been convicted of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old boy at a parish in University City, Missouri, decades prior to the period in which the woman who has now filed suit claims her abuse took place.
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