MIAMI (FL)
Miami Herald
February 22, 2019
By Carl Hiaasen
In a meeting that should have been held decades ago, Pope Francis last week convened Roman Catholic leaders at the Vatican and called for “concrete and effective measures” to curb the “scourge” of sexual abuse by priests.
Strong words from the Holy Father. So it’s finally time to get tough, is it?
The summit is being hailed as “historic” only because the disgraceful history of the church was to suppress the claims of young parishioners, while shielding the clerics who raped them.
No victims were invited to speak at the opening Vatican assembly, but recordings from five unnamed persons were played. One recounted what happened when he complained to church leaders about being forced to have sex:
“The first thing they did was to treat me as a liar, turn their backs and tell me that I, and others, were enemies of the church.”
Another spoke of being impregnated three times by the same priest, who forced her to get abortions. “Every time I refused to have sex with him,” she said, “he would beat me.”
If only such accounts were freakish aberrations, and not part of a sordid institutional pattern. For generations, sex abuse by priests has been widespread and well-known to the Catholic hierarchy, which operated more like what prosecutors might call a continuing criminal enterprise.
The scandal broke open after a Boston Globe series 17 years ago, and since then numerous predator priests have been prosecuted. Their crimes typically were no secret to their superiors, who routinely moved serial offenders from one diocese to another, without warning parishioners.
God forbid that an archbishop might actually grab a phone and call the cops, which is what most decent humans would do if they knew a child was being sexually molested.
A study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, commissioned by Catholic bishops, reported that complaints about sexual abuse of minors were made against 4,392 Catholic priests between 1950 and 2002 in the United States alone.
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