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  Church Sex Abuse Scandal Scars Europe

By Carol Marin
Chicago Sun-Times
March 17, 2010

http://www.suntimes.com/news/marin/2106513,CST-EDT-Carol17.article

UNITED STATES -- St. Patrick must be weeping. As we mark this day that bears his name, the sex abuse scandal that scarred the U.S. Catholic Church is shaking Ireland to the core.

Growing worse across Europe by the day, it reaches now into Pope Benedict XVI's former archdiocese in Germany.

As a result, devoted priests and devout Catholics -- who exemplify what is right with the church -- are weighed down once more by the burden and shame of what has gone wrong.

Recently, at a large funeral mass for a dear friend in Chicago, I counted eight priests on the altar. I know most of them. And I know the fine and faithful work they do in parishes, with the poor and disabled and in the classroom.

They are not the problem.

It is the secrecy, arrogance and lack of transparency of the hierarchy that have been toxic for the reputation of the church and its moral authority.

The parallels between the 2002 Boston sex abuse scandal and the one that now comes out of Dublin are striking. They are the subject of a superb piece in the current issue of Commonweal magazine by Nicholas P. Cafardi.

Cafardi is a civil and canon lawyer, one of the original members of the National Review Board appointed in the wake of the U.S. sex abuse crisis, and a respected, conservative Catholic.

"It is clear that for more than two decades, simultaneous tragedies of episcopal malfeasance played out in both the U.S. and Irish churches," he writes, "as bishops in both countries systematically mishandled allegations of child sexual abuse committed by priests."

Cafardi compares the Murphy Report issued in the wake of the Irish crisis to the one that came out of the Attorney General's Office in Boston in 2003.

"The two reports reveal all too clearly that both the American and the Irish bishops valued their clergy over their people -- they gave the interests of the ordained priority over the needs of the baptized."

Cafardi continued, "Both used the mask of treatment to enable priestly offenders to be reassigned."

In fairness to the bishops, there was until 1992 a belief that treatment could rehabilitate and repatriate sex abusers.

However, when a priest was sent off for treatment, it has been proven that often the church did not fully apprise treatment centers of the full scope of the offender's problems.

Both reports decry the bishops' devotion to secrecy in order to avoid scandal and protect the reputation, not to mention the assets, of the church.

If there is any good news in this sorry, shame-filled saga, it may be that the Irish have learned a lesson from the Americans.

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin swiftly did what we did not.

He announced that if "bishops found culpable . . . did not resign, he would petition the Holy See to remove them."

It's called "fraternal correction." And, Cafardi notes, it takes real courage, a kind of courage that "was by and large lacking in the United States."

In Ireland, four bishops already have resigned.

In the Boston debacle, in contrast, five bishops kept their jobs, and only one resigned. And the one who did, Cardinal Bernard Law, isn't exactly a testament to penitence.

Law, as this column has reported before, still flies first class. He commands a huge and beautiful basilica in Rome, lives opulently, dines well and remains a bishop in good standing.

Maybe he suffers inside.

But for those whose childhoods were ruined and whose belief in the loving arms of the church has been betrayed, symbol and substance are one and the same.

Our bishops have said they are deeply sorry.

But Cardinal Law is living proof that the American Church -- and Rome -- are still not sorry enough.

 
 

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