UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
Another extremely important essay by Harvard-trained former Wall Street lawyer Jerry Slevin. Jerry argues that “it is the right time for President Obama to act” to protect children from childhood sexual abuse, as the Catholic hierarchy clearly remains intent on stonewalling, diverting, and covering up. What follows is Jerry’s essay:
This year, 2012, has been crucial in the horrible history of organized child sex abuse in the USA, especially in the Catholic Church. After over more than a quarter century of mainly Vatican diversions, distractions and/or deceptions, experts at a public Vatican abuse symposium in February estimated here that so far there have been over 100,000 young victims of priest child sex abuse in the USA alone, with no end in sight.
These abuse survivors and their families usually bear the painful psychological and other adverse effects of these sexual assaults for the remainder of their lives, often at great costs to society at large. Outrageously, most priest sexual predators and almost all predator-protecting bishops in the USA have so far escaped any accountability for their crimes, mainly as a result of the Catholic hierarchy’s political and media clout, as well as the lack of fortitude of most US political leaders and media executives and reporters.
This pressing and worsening problem is a national one and cannot be resolved adequately at the local state, county or city level only, since the bishops’ political clout has generally been very effective at controlling local lawmakers and prosecutors, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, most recently in Philadelphia, as noted here. While private lawyers for abuse survivors have caused some US bishops and their dioceses significant financial pain, the bishops often appear to settle the lawsuits before all of the stark details of the bishops’ cover-up misconduct reach the public record.
Private civil lawyers’ main objective in abuse cases generally is to get maximum payments for their abused clients, and not full disclosure for citizens of bishops’ misconduct.
With only rare exceptions, most US media organizations lack the staff, budgets and “appetite” for covering priest child sexual abuse cases consistently and in the detail often required. Unfortunately, there does not yet exist any national organization of lay Catholics that comes even remotely close to presenting a credible challenge to the US bishops’ political, financial and media clout.
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