SPRINGFIELD (VA)
St. Raymond of Penafort Roman Catholic Church
In the midst of all this media flurry over the failure of the Catholic Church’s officials in the past to quickly “defrock” priests who were guilty of the heinous sin of sexual abuse of children, one question never seems to be actually addressed – “how does a decree laicizing such a priest in any way protect children?” The reason the question is never asked surely cannot be that the question is unimportant. One reason it is never asked is that the underlying but never stated assumption has to be, at least for the lawyers and reporters, “yes it does.” But I can immediately think of at least two other reasons why the question is never asked and more than one argument why the real answer is more likely “no, this process does not really safeguard children.” It safeguards only the Church.
Another reason this question is ignored today may be that the people who are feeding this firestorm are not at all interested in that question simply because their immediate purpose is to discredit the Catholic Church and hold it up to ridicule. It’s most interesting that this onslaught on the Catholic hierarchy, now including the Pope, is happening after the Catholic Bishops in this country, – with the assistance of the Vatican that has streamlined its ancient procedures precisely to laicize such clergy – have moved to safeguard children in concrete ways that have dramatically reduced the incidence of this terrible crime by Church employees of any kind and have made our schools and other activities the safest environments in the country for children. Each year the public school system alone has thousands of such cases, while in the Catholic Church, there are now only a few credible incidences each year. No institution can guarantee that the crime will never happen under its auspices, but the Catholic Church has come close to that promise.
However, the people feeding this firestorm are not interested in this effort of the Church because their real motives go beyond protecting children. The media like AP and The New York Times have their own agenda, i.e., discrediting a whole Church that they find an recalcitrant obstacle to the transformation of the morals of modern society, and of course the media today feeds on any story that has traction with a lot of people who hate the Catholic Church, the last respectable bigotry even among the intelligentsia.
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