KANSAS CITY (MO)
The Kansas City Star
BY MARY SANCHEZ
THE KANSAS CITY STAR
09/30/2014
The culture of silence continues. It’s hovering in a courtroom in Independence this week like a blanket threatening to smother.
Attorneys for the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph invoke it with every objection, every debate about whether a particular witness should testify in the case of a former altar boy, Jon David Couzens, who alleges abuse by the late Monsignor Thomas J. O’Brien.
This trial is so important because it could tie together decades of allegations and emotions about what the diocese knew, when it knew it and what various clergy did or didn’t do with information. But what the jury is allowed to hear is a compressed and sanitized version. That’s often for good reasons: ensuring a fair trial to the accused.
But sexual abuse of children generally isn’t revealed in succinct ways that are always chronicled and documented, easily recounted in testimony years later.
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