UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Does anyone but me ever have the sense that Catholic pastoral authorities have played and continue playing an ugly game with the rest of us about the abuse situation in the Catholic church? (I’m being facetious, of course: we all know that they’ve long been playing games with us about this.)
That nagging question is in my mind yet again today as I read Brian Roewe’s report in National Catholic Reporter about St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota, the largest Benedictine monastery in the Western hemisphere. Roewe notes that, under pressure, St. John’s has just released documents regarding 18 monks who “likely offended” sexually against minors, with allegations dating back to the 1960s. Further information about this release of documents is to be found at the website of the Minnesota Transparency Initiative, to which Roewe’s report links.
Here’s a powerful, thought-provoking statement by a reader of Roewe’s report, mokantx, that in my view perfectly summarizes the problem we have as we try to deal with the continuous game-playing of the pastoral leaders of the Catholic church re: the abuse situation: mokantx writes,
This Abbey’s problems capture perfectly, the problem with the scandal in the church. Think about this sequence, from the article:
1: June 1985: The Abbey hosted the U.S. bishops for a conference devoted to the issue of sexual abuse of children by priests.
2: In 1992, the abbey received an allegation against one of their own from a former college student. The Abbey recalled the priest from his assignment in Japan and sent him to the St. Luke’s Institute in Maryland. There, he admitted as many as 15 “sexual contacts” with college students, leading an evaluation report to conclude the priest represented “a very serious moral, legal and financial risk to the Benedictine Order and to St. John’s University.” Still, the trips abroad continued as other allegations came in. Lawsuits as of 1992 accused five monks of sexual abuse.
3: In 1993, it held another conference, titled “Sexual Trauma and the Church,” which brought together leading Catholic experts on the abuse issue, along with ministers from other faiths, victims’ advocates, abuse victims and clergy abusers in recovery. In the invitation to this conference Benedictine Abbot Timothy Kelly “insisted he wanted the truth; we were to resist any temptation to mere image repair or litigation control.” He and his community wanted to understand the scope, causes and nature of sexual abuse by clergy, which has resulted in such trauma to the church.”And he wanted action,” Sipe wrote.
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