Kevin McParland's story is not atypical in today's Catholic Church. Sexual abuse by clergy has been a significant and tragic reality for centuries but has only been forced out of hiding by courageous people like Kevin in recent decades. Kevin was sexually abused by a priest who took advantage of him. Though Kevin was legally an adult, he was still in a seriously disproportional situation. Father Steve Jeselnick is a priest and the power differential between a priest and a Catholic lay person is an essential issue in this case. The age factor is not a mitigating factor in any way though the diocese appears to think so.

If one looks past the dioceses' persuasive words one quickly sees that Kevin was not responded to by compassionate pastoral concern but by an administrative bureaucracy that first tried to silence him with hush money and then tried to make him feel guilty by calling to mind the payments for counseling that had been provided. It seems that Kevin's years of anguish and the years of betrayal and suffering of his family have been lost in the Church's self-serving spin.

I have worked closely with victims of clergy sexual abuse for 24 years. I have seen the Church's consistent pattern of inability to respond to a human problem with human compassion. What is both outrageous and typical in this case is that the accused priest is still in active ministry....and only because of the technicality that since his victim was not a minor, his offense was "OK" with the Church's administrative response to a deep-seated problem of sexual immaturity and dysfunction rampant in its clergy.

I'm sure some people will be angry with Kevin for making public another of the Church's destructive secrets. This is not unusual but in no way justified. What is wrong with our legacy of Catholic education when it puts the impersonal institutional structure above the human beings who are the real church. Perhaps the anger is grounded more in the fact that in seeing the clergy sexual abuse nightmare close up we are forced to accept the reality of a church that has given us a false sense of spiritual security. The institutional Church is no more divine than Enron was divine and the harm it has condoned and covered up by its enabling of sexual abusers is far worse than the financial devastation caused by the greed of the Enron hierarchy.