NEW YORK (NY)
Staten Island Advance
March 20, 2019
By Anthony J. Raiola and Michelle Simpson Tuegel
For decades, the Catholic Church has turned a blind eye to the child predators in its ranks and refused to be held accountable for the thousands of lives it ruined.
Yet it took less than two days for the Brooklyn Diocese to respond to a joke on Saturday Night Live that compared the Catholic Church to R. Kelly.
There is no greater evidence that the Church refuses to take its child abuse problem seriously. It is clear the priorities lie in feigning outrage, not actually changing the culture of secrecy and abuse that has become the tenet of the modern Catholic Church.
Take, for example, the recent Vatican conference on sexual abuse of minors that was portrayed by many as a positive step forward by the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, the conference failed to establish any real solutions or tangible outcomes for survivors of clergy abuse. The Church has knowingly allowed abuse against minors to go on for decades, working hard to keep the abuse quiet and rotating sexual predators around different communities. Despite a contrite tone, Pope Francis proposed no concrete solutions to deal with the scourge of clergy abuse and failed to promise a zero-tolerance approach from the Church.
Survivors of clergy abuse in New York and beyond deserve more. It is time for Catholic bishops in New York state to make real reforms rather than empty promises, and do what the participants of the Vatican conference refused to do — focus on the survivors and enact concrete changes so that this abuse never happens again.
For example, New York bishops must convene a statewide summit and actually listen to the voices of survivors, not the clergy and institution that allowed this corruption to happen. By failing to prioritize the needs of survivors, the Church is once again choosing its leadership over the people it has failed to protect for decades.
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