OGDEN (UT)
Standard-Examiner
August 22, 2018
By Mark Shields
I can testify from a lifetime of personal experience that practice does not really make perfect. Since the presidency of Harry Truman, during which I had the honor of being the youngest altar boy in St. Francis Xavier Parish to serve the standing-room-only midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, I have been a practicing and manifestly imperfect Catholic.
After the recent Pennsylvania grand jury report on sexual abuse, which tells of more than 1,000 victims enduring criminal cruelty at the hands of some 300 Catholic priests, I am consumed with anger toward my church. Of course, I am also sad, but I remain even more furious toward my church’s hierarchy and its rush not to console the anguish of and heal the wounds of the vulnerable victims but rather to lead a systematic cover-up of priests’ crimes against defenseless children to protect the institutional church from legal liability and deserved public outrage.
Mostly missing from the church’s reaction was human sympathy. Absent was any trace of Pope Francis’ call for the Roman Catholic Church to become a “field hospital after battle” to first take care of those suffering. The clerical leadership’s reaction was instead to turn the crimes and the crisis over to the lawyers and the public relations people, to retreat to a circle of silence. I am angry.
Such bad and indefensible decisions have repeatedly been made in secret rooms where the counsel and wisdom of parents, especially mothers, is neither sought nor welcome. By repeating this pattern of behavior first seen in the Boston Archdiocese in 2002, the hierarchy has provided persuasive ammunition to the church’s opponents and critics, neglected the hurting, and failed the faithful.
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