PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Daily Times
By Christine Flowers, Delaware County Daily Times
POSTED: 01/02/16
Tenacity is a good thing. If you believe in something strongly enough, it’s a sign of character to keep fighting for your version of justice.
Maureen Faulkner is an example of admirable tenacity, investing decades of her life, all of her youth and much of her middle age to making her husband’s murderer accountable for his death. Mumia Abu-Jamal is still alive, and has brainwashed some addled activists into believing that he’s a victim of a racist system. But the fact that he is still behind bars and reviled as subhuman by most of those who have a soul is in large part attributable to that small and mighty woman’s crusade.
But there are those crusades that pass for a form of justice and are, instead, vindictive witch hunts carried out for a variety of reasons. There is the desire for revenge. There is the desire for publicity. There is the desire for something to tamp down the guilty nausea that roils in the gut of those who did nothing to prevent a crime, and who therefore grasp at any opportunity to say, “here, I’m making amends! Please forgive me!”
The prosecution of Monsignor William Lynn is a fascinating, and tragic, combination of all those things. It is an attempt to get that pound of flesh from a Catholic church that is hated and vilified by ex-Catholics, non-Catholics and troubled Catholics. It is a way of strutting one’s professional cred in front of an admiring audience, one that will cheer any attempt to slay the evil abusers (even imaginary ones, like the owners of the McMartin Pre-School.) It is an effective method for those who looked the other way while abuse was occurring on their watch to pay a penance beyond five Hail Marys and a command to “go and sin no more.”
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