UNITED STATES
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI
In today’s column I wrote about Rick Santorum and American Catholicism and the church’s child sexual abuse crisis, and I wanted to circle back to that last item in this post, which is also a postscript.
I mentioned a support group for victims that’s under fire from church lawyers. That group is run by a man named David Clohessy, and if you want to understand just how much pain the crisis has caused Catholics, along with some of the ways it has tested families and challenged Catholics’ faith, his story is an instructive, heartbreaking one.
I told it in some detail in The Times’s Sunday magazine a decade ago, and provide the link here. I still vividly remember sitting with him and interviewing him, just as I still vividly remember sitting with and interviewing many people with recollections of sexual abuse by priests. Sexual abuse by any trusted adult is a shattering thing; sexual abuse by a priest or minister or other religious cleric upends a child’s every assumption about who’s safe and who’s not; where moral leadership can be found; what it means for a person to wear a badge of authority or the vestments of holiness. It says that nothing and no one is really safe.
One of the reasons the Catholic church’s child sexual abuse crisis has received so much attention over so many years isn’t, as some Catholic leaders have contended, primarily because there’s an anti-Catholic and anti-religious bias in secular society, and that nonreligious journalists are thrilling to the opportunity to humiliate the church. (Journalists thrill to malfeasance in all walks and corners of life.) It’s because of the magnitude of the violation of trust at work here. Before parents realized they should be as skeptical of a priest’s attention to their child as to anyone else’s, priests had special access to children. And priests certainly had special sway over them.
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