ROME
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
Posted by David Clohessy on March 16, 2013
In his first hours as the new head of the church, Pope Francis made a self-effacing joke, carried his own luggage, rode on a bus, paid his hotel bill and asked his flock to bless him.
Then, he visited Cardinal Bernard Law.
I’m not a sophisticated or well educated person. And while much of the world’s problems seem complicated to me, I’m sure I too often see too much in “black and white.” But when it comes to sex crimes against kids I can’t help it. It’s seems very simple to me: we ought not to celebrate or honor or promote or praise adults who enable predators to hurt children.
And so to me, whatever good will Pope Francis may have begun to engender with his humility and his ‘common touch’ was immediately erased by his visit with the prelate who is the most disgraced Catholic official in the US.
(Granted, LA’s Cardinal Roger Mahony may have stripped Law from that title in recent years.)
I’m sure the Pope didn’t intend to further hurt already wounded victims and already betrayed Catholic. But I’m sure the same could be said of Ireland’s Cardinal Brady or Germany’s Archbishop Mueller or Kansas City’s Bishop Finn or any of the other thousands of prelates who have enabled child molesting clerics to molest more children – they didn’t intend to let more boys and girls be raped and sodomized.
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