PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
Orlando R. Barone is a writer in Doylestown
The verdict on Msgr. William J. Lynn has been rendered; it is very big news, and yet that verdict is not the one that occupies me this day.
I was 11 as I looked out the window of my front porch toward the near-blackness of early morning. Mom stood at my side, and I held my cassock and surplice in hand. At 5 a.m. I kissed my mother and ran outside as Father’s car stopped to pick me up on the other side of Main Street. It was my week to serve as altar boy at the 5:30 Mass in the lovely little chapel at Fitzgerald Mercy Hospital just two blocks away. I can still see Mom’s trusting smile as I ventured into the wintry darkness and into Father’s waiting car.
Much has been lost by my church since the child-abuse horror broke into public consciousness a decade ago. None of these losses, except those occasioned by the beastly acts themselves, can match the loss of that trusting smile on the faces of Catholic mothers everywhere. The mothers of today’s 11-year-old sons and daughters have issued their own verdict, and it is ominous. They are far less apt to release their children from their safe embrace to enter the car of a parish priest.
Rocco Palmo, Philadelphia-based author of the Whispers in the Loggia website, the place to go for what’s happening in worldwide Catholicism, has said that “a very different church is going to emerge from this” latest turn in the sex-abuse scandal. He is speaking of the hierarchical American church of bishops and cardinals, chanceries and palaces — the mansion in Philadelphia is up for sale, a sure sign of some kind of change.
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