UNITED STATES
Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk |Jun 7, 2012
Bill Donohue has finally mounted a defense of his BFF Cardinal Dolan, the burden of which is that it is phony to attack the guy for “inducing suspected miscreant priests to exit the priesthood while he was the Archbishop of Milwaukee” because his critics aren’t really interested in how to handle sex abusers. If they were, quoth Donohue, they would also be criticizing all those examples of child-abusing government employees who are receiving their pensions.
Problem is, Dolan himself has repeatedly and vociferously denied that he did any such inducing, contrary to official admissions out of the Milwaukee archdiocese plus newly available documentary evidence. Which prompts the Church Lady in me to wonder who’s inducing His Eminence to issue such denials. Could it be…Satan?
Whoever, there is a good case to be made that laicizing child-abusing priests is a bad idea that mostly serves the interest of an institutional church that doesn’t want to be responsible for them anymore, i.e. subject to lawsuits for acts they commit after being defrocked. Better to keep them within the fold so as to be able to insure that they are assigned to places where they can be kept under control. Of course, there’s also a case to be made that it’s important for a church to be seen to be ridding itself of such bad actors, whose very continued existence as priests could be a cause of scandal.
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