Hamill: Pope Francis Must Crack down on Pedophile Priests to Restore Church's Relevance, Moral Standing

By Denis Hamill
New York Daily News
March 22, 2013

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/hamill-catholic-church-crack-pedophiles-article-1.1288073

Argentina's Jorge Bergoglio, elected Pope Francis I, must lead a church that has seen followers leave in the wake of its inability to manage an international child sexual abuse scandal. The church must penalize and ostracize violators and those who help shield them from justice.

Let that puff of white smoke that rose from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday be the last smoke blowing from the Vatican under Pope Francis in his lifetime.

No more smoke. No more “DaVinci Code” mirrors. No more coverups.

For the new Pope to have a prayer in saving the church from irrelevancy in this new century, he has to open wide the creaky old doors and let the sunshine of 2013, Year of Our Lord, shine in and let the winds of change start at St. Peter’s Square.

I long ago gave up for Lent giving up anything for Lent. But I have followed the matters of the church with an old altar boy’s eye. I respect the beliefs of people like my devout Roman Catholic mother, who found solace from bigotry in Northern Ireland and immigrant poverty in this life with her belief that her next eternal life would be a better one.

The smoke of doubt never clouded her eyes.

But the behavior of the Catholic Church in the sex scandals of the past two decades has itself been scandalous. The first inclination of the pedophilia revelations was to cover them up. Compound the unpardonable with more sacrileges by transferring known child predator priests from one parish to another — usually to poor parishes.

The church leaders in the Vatican blew smoke. Dark smoke. Poisonous, toxic, lethal smoke.

Soon they were looking out at empty churches across Europe, even in strongholds like Ireland. Great American cities with dense Catholic populations like Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Milwaukee and New York exploded with church pedophile headlines and multimillion-dollar lawsuits.

The church I knew as an altar boy began to crumble. The church where I served Mass is now a Coptic church. My Catholic grammar school is defunct. The school for which I played CYO baseball closed a decade ago.

More schools and churches shutter every year because the stubborn church has refused to change. Intractable on modern issues like contraception, gay marriage, women priests, celibacy.

The one part of the planet that seemed to keep hope alive for the traditional church was South America, where the flock remained loyal and strong. And here in New York City, some parishes survived because of an influx of new Latin immigrants. One of those churches is St. Athanasius, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, once an Italian stronghold.

“The new Spanish-speaking masses helped save our church,” says Msgr. David Cassato, whom Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz calls “The Pope of Bensonhurst.”

Msgr. Cassato watched the white smoke rise and the new Pope appear on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica on Wednesday from his rectory of St. Athanasius.

The new Pope is 76, a traditionalist, too old and set in his ways to budge from those crucial issues of celibacy, gay marriage, contraception, women priests.

The one saving grace even a traditionalist can adopt is a fierce zero-tolerance doctrine on pedophile priests who have been dismantling the very foundation of the Roman Catholic Church one ancient stone at a time.

If Pope Francis excommunicates every member of the “dirty clergy” — no matter the color of their vestments and how good they are as “earners” — he will pave the way for a new century of priests and parishioners knowing that this is a Pope that doesn’t blow smoke.

If not, many Catholics I know will keep drifting further away.

Contact: dhamill@nydailynews.com