UNITED STATES
Huffington Post
Cathy Cash Spellman
I was raised an Irish Catholic. Six a.m. Mass most mornings, Novenas every Tuesday, First Fridays every month and as many rosaries as could be squeezed in between. I was taught by the long-suffering nuns and was usually the debater they sent to Archdiocesan Religion Contests to compete on matters of faith.
Then I grew up. I studied other peoples’ theologies and evolved my own connection to God. I’ve written about Him/Her from a Tibetan, Catholic, Mystic, Native American, Hindu, Jain and Kabbalist point of view in my books. I’ve penned a book of Uncommon Prayer.
So much for my bona fides.
I’m now an outsider who was once an insider, but I’m troubled enough by the ongoing and seemingly endless litany of scandals and coverups within the Church, to want to raise a few issues:
It’s now well documented that the Church spent 25 years and more than a billion dollars to protect pedophile priests by covering up their crimes and moving them from parish to parish, allowing them back into the company of children, and denying their guilt until forced by law and the sheer number of victims, to admit it. Did you know there’s now an insurance company that underwrites a policy for clergy that covers “any act of unlawful sexual intimacy, sexual molestation or sexual assault” available for $2,500 per cleric per year. Presumably such insurance policies would not exist without ample need for them. Insuring pedophiles? Really?
Pope Benedict XVI, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger and head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly called The Inquisition — yes, that Inquisition) was tasked with collecting all data worldwide on priestly sexual abuse cases. Doesn’t that mean he has possessed for decades all the data that was hidden from the law and the laity? Yet victims of these brutal crimes must still fight, diocese by diocese, and lawsuit by lawsuit to have the truth of the priestly sexual predators who abused them laid bare? Does anyone hold the Pope and his minions accountable for their complicity in the cover-up, I wonder? Maybe only God.
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