NEW YORK (NY)
The Wall Street Journal
August 16, 2018
By C.C. Pecknold
A new grand-jury report on sex abuse shows the episcopate behaving like Judas.
A Pennsylvania grand jury this week published a 900-page report detailing sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by some 300 Roman Catholic priests over 70 years. The grand jury had spent two years gathering subpoenaed archives from Pennsylvania’s six dioceses. It sought not only to share the victims’ stories but to document an entrenched culture of coverup reaching the highest levels of the U.S. church.
Forensic accounts of priests raping the sons and daughters of Christ reminded me of Judas. On the way back from Mass on Wednesday, with the report on my mind, I asked my 14-year-old son what differentiated Judas’s single betrayal of Jesus and Peter’s threefold denial of Christ. Well-catechized, he simply replied “repentance.” His answer helped us have a frank discussion about sin in the Catholic Church, the human need for penitential disciplines and devotions, and God’s way of helping man triumph over the wickedness of the Devil.
Not even Dante in his “Inferno” imagined crimes as sacrilegiously perverse as those the report documents. In some cases priests used sacramental objects as props for their diabolical predations. While the majority of cases involve adolescent males, children as young as 7 were sexually abused by men trusted to represent Christ. Since most of the crimes occurred in the 1970s and ’80s, the accused are now dead or the statutes of limitations have run out. But the report notes: “The bishops weren’t just aware of what was going on; they were immersed in it. And they went to great lengths to keep it secret.” They must be held to account.
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