BOSTON (MA)
Boston Globe
August 13, 2018
By Michael Rezendes
When the Globe Spotlight team began its investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Richard Sipe was our guide, our teacher, our chief cheerleader.
A gentle man with an easy laugh, he was also a former monk and priest, a psychotherapist, a scholar, and ideally suited to explain that the horrors we were discovering in Boston were not unusual — and quite probably part of a pattern throughout the church.
Sipe, who was 85, died Wednesday in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego.
His groundbreaking work began in 1990 with the publication of “A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy.” Based on interviews with 1,500 priests and others with firsthand knowledge of celibacy violations, Sipe estimated that 6 percent of all priests were having sex with children and young people — at the time a shocking claim that he famously repeated in the movie, “Spotlight.”
My first encounter with Sipe’s work came in the summer of 2001, when I read his expert testimony in the case of the Rev. Rudy Kos, a Dallas priest convicted of sex crimes in the late 1990s.
This was a 75-page document so complete in its understanding of clergy sexual abuse that I immediately called the author, A.W. Richard Sipe, eager to learn more.
Days passed without a reply until my cellphone rang on a warm September afternoon as I was racing down the Mass Pike, trying to get to a Red Sox game after covering a court hearing.
For more than an hour, Sipe patiently explained that, as hard as it was to believe, the appalling sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests was a systemic problem within the church fostered by the culture of celibacy, the promise that every priest makes to live without sex or marriage.
Even though the sun was shining, I had the sensation that all the lights were coming on. I told Sipe that the Globe was going to fly him and his wife from their home in California to Boston so the entire Spotlight Team could hear what they had to say.
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