UNITED STATES
Compliance Week
Bill Coffin | October 12, 2016
When I was a child, my brothers and I served as altar boys at our local Catholic church. We were some of the longest-running altar boys in the church’s history in fact and, at one point, we had become such an institution that our pastor asked my brother and I if we were interested in pursuing theology, seeing as most kids our age quit serving years before.
One of the interesting aspects of serving the church was being behind the scenes of mass. We spent a lot of time, over the years, with various priests in the sacristy—a side room where the priest and we altar servers would prepare for mass—and it occurs to me now that we were very, very vulnerable there. Away from any other adults, the priests with whom we worked could have easily taken vile liberties with myself or my brothers. None ever did. The priests we worked with—like the overwhelming majority of clerical workers, I imagine—were good, decent people who would never think of hurting a child.
And yet, we have seen that it happens within the Church. We have seen it quite a lot, in fact, usually after extensive efforts to cover it up or to pretend that it never happened. In the United States, there have already been various high-profile cases of widespread sexual abuse by priests, and these cases have cost the Church dearly in terms of money and in terms of reputation and, most of all, in terms of trust. Trust, we all know, takes many years to build, and only one wrong moment to destroy.
Sadly, we have seen this happen yet again, this time in Germany, where the Catholic Church has agreed to pay settlements to some 422 individuals who have alleged having been sexually and physically abused while they were pupils at a choir school in Regensburg. The alleged abuses took place between 1953 and the 1990s, and the Church is offering to pay each of these victims between €5,000 and €20,000. All of the perpetrators, save one, are dead. Pope Benedict’s brother, Georg Ratzinger, ran the choir from 1964 to 1994, when most of the abuses were supposed to have occurred, yet Ratzinger says he knew nothing of any abuse.
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