NEW YORK (NY)
New York Times
March 8, 2019
By Rick Rojas
When the Archdiocese of Hartford released a list this year identifying 48 priests accused of sexual abuse, five of them had served at the same church: St. George’s, in the small coastal town of Guilford. One had been a pastor there for more than a decade, baptizing children and hearing confessions.
Some in the large congregation were deeply hurt. Some fumed, saying they held onto Catholic teachings, but saw their faith in the men leading the church disintegrating amid a cascade of allegations.
And so The Most Rev. Leonard P. Blair, the archbishop of Hartford, responded to the crisis with an extraordinary gesture: He held a special Mass of Reparations. He said that he came before the congregation “on my knees as a bishop” in search of forgiveness.
“I ask forgiveness of God, of the wider community and our own Catholic community,” Archbishop Blair said, standing before the packed church in flowing vestments and the red-rose skull cap worn by bishops. “I ask it especially of all the victims of sexual abuse and their families. I ask it for all the church leadership has done or failed to do.”
Bishops across the country are reeling over accusations that they are implicated in a decades-long cover-up to protect priests who had sexually abused children. They are on a campaign of apologizing, often in personal terms, as the Catholic Church wrestles with the fallout of a scandal that has drawn the scrutiny of law enforcement officials and stirred a crisis of confidence among followers.
Some, like Archbishop Blair, have held somber reparations Masses or led worshipers in special rosary prayers. They have offered conciliatory messages in homilies and in letters, like the one from Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, who expressed his “genuine sorrow and regret to the victims who put their trust in a member of the church only to have that trust so profoundly betrayed.”
And last month, Pope Francis decried an “evil that strikes at the very heart of our mission,” as he gathered bishops at the Vatican for a landmark gathering on sexual abuse.
It is a recognition of how the scandal engulfing the church has evolved and spread. “It’s not a clergy abuse scandal anymore,” said David Gibson, the director for the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University. “It’s a bishop accountability scandal now.”
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