UNITED STATES
Let’s Think This Out
Bruce R. Nelson
Posted on April 8, 2017
I am told there is a special perch in hell for anyone who speaks ill of the country’s largest Christian denomination on the eve of Holy Week. It’s a risk I am willing to take, because I’ve really had it with corporate Catholicism and its relentless and unforgiving campaign against the victims of pedophile priests. This is a tragedy of gigantic proportions that keeps finding new ways of inflicting pain on those whose suffering is beyond comprehension.
In the beginning, there was the cover up. The Catholic hierarchy was well aware that many of its priests were molesting and raping children. For years, the Church did everything possible to keep the sexual attacks quiet, moving its collared pedophiles from parish to parish when things got hot, letting them start from scratch with a new crop of unsuspecting altar boys.
That routine began to slowly fail in the 1980s when, one by one, victims of the Church’s atrocity stepped out of the shadows with stories the bishops could no longer silence. According to informed estimates, 17,651 American children were sodomized by their parish priest, a number that keeps growing as people now in their 50s and 60s finally come to grips with the pain they’ve silently carried for decades.
Until a few days ago, I figured this story had ended, except for the healing. I hadn’t thought much about it since I saw “Spotlight”, the 2015 film based on the Boston Globe’s stellar coverage of this nightmarish scandal. Then I came across a local news item about the Maryland Legislature finally passing a bill to extend the statute of limitations on filing child molestation suits. It was an intriguing piece. A legislator had tried unsuccessfully for years to change the law so that adults had more time to sue over childhood sexual assaults. The old law banned such litigation after the victim’s 25th birthday. The rationale for the change seemed solid: abused children bury the pain and trauma for decades. By the time they are ready to deal with it, the filing deadline has passed. The bill’s sponsor should know. C.T. Wilson, a Democrat from Charles, MD, was repeatedly raped by his adoptive father between the ages of 8 and 16.
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