UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
NCR Editorial Staff | Jul. 10, 2015
30 years later
EDITORIAL
It is inconceivable that any bishop would stand before a congregation and give them the following instructions:
If you commit a serious sin against the community, your first obligation is to conceal it.
If an accuser comes forward, deny the offense and condemn the accuser as someone who simply wants to besmirch your name.
If that doesn’t quiet the accuser, offer payment for the person’s silence.
If that fails, hire the best lawyers in town.
And if, finally, you have no escape, go to settlement and apologize to anyone who may have been hurt by your “mistakes.”
The scenario is unthinkable, but it is also descriptive of the very behavior that Catholics have witnessed among their leaders, with slight variations, for the past 30 years.
Those of us who have reported on the scandal for the past three decades, who have read through endless pages of horrific accounts and unfathomably slippery depositions, understand the descriptive exhaustion that Dominican Fr. Tom Doyle displays in his essay. There are no words left to adequately describe the level of deceit and corruption that existed in bishops’ residences and chancery offices across this land as thousands of priests, hidden and protected by bishops, abused tens of thousands of our children.
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