UNITED STATES
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“MORTAL SINS: SEX, CRIME AND THE ERA OF CATHOLIC SCANDAL”
By Michael D’Antonio
St. Martin’s Press ($26.99).
By Nicholas P. Cafardi
Every time I think that the American Catholic bishops have the clergy child sexual abuse crisis behind them and that they are committed to the changes they made in Dallas in 2002, when they adopted a Charter and Norms assuring no priest with a credible allegation of child sexual abuse would remain in active ministry, reality sets in.
Just this past month it came to light that John Myers, the archbishop of Newark, maintained in active ministry a priest who had confessed to two instances of sexual misconduct with a young boy. Lest we forget, the bishop of Kansas City, Mo., Robert Finn, is himself a convicted criminal, having pleaded guilty last year to the charge of failure to report suspected child abuse by one of his priests. Yet he continues to serve as a diocesan bishop in our church.
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Reading Michael D’Antonio’s “Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime and the Era of Catholic Scandal” in this context is a chilling experience. Mr. D’Antonio’s book is a reasonably complete history of clergy child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the United States, starting from 1984, when the first case of a serial child molester priest, Gilbert Gauthe of the diocese of Lafayette, La., came to light. There are some side trips into the clergy child sexual abuse crisis in Ireland, which in many ways, parallels the American crisis, but Mr. D’Antonio’s story is primarily about American monsters.
Mr. D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, tells his story mainly through courtroom battles. He writes of plaintiffs’ lawyers who sued dioceses for keeping men in ministry, priests whom the bishops knew to be active child sexual abusers, who then went on to use their Roman collars to gain the trust of yet more victims.
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