SAND POINT (ID)
Bonnor County Daily Bee
December 18, 2018
Here’s an idea. Gonzaga University could invite professional conservative martyr Ben Shapiro to reprise the topic of one of his recent Daily Wire podcasts: Has Catholic Church Sex Abuse Been Exaggerated?
Shapiro could conduct an interview much like that one – which he had Sunday with Bishop Robert Barron of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles – in which the bishop said, essentially, yes. The abuse and the widespread cover-ups were bad, the bishop said, they were awful and horrible and inexcusable and the church should pay. But, the bishop said, there’s some truth that the media, as Shapiro phrased it, “are basically picking on the Catholic Church” for a problem that is universal to all organizations and societies.
So, Shapiro could come to Gonzaga, put on that show, and afterward someone could walk him across campus and tell him the story of Cardinal Bea House.
Because – as shown in a great piece of reporting by Emily Schwing of the Northwest News Network – the story of the Bea House and its use as a final stop for at least 20 priests accused of sexual assault and abuse is another example of the ways in which the church’s sex abuse scandal was not at all like the sex abuse scandals of other organizations, but which flourished in the particular culture of Catholic clergy and which was forgiven and ignored and covered up by church leaders in such a way that the tendrils of the thing are still woven into the institutions.
Schwing’s reporting shows the Bea House, right in the middle of the campus, was used specifically, though not solely, as a place where abuser priests – even priests believed to be certain to reoffend – could be kept and monitored in secrecy.
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