UNITED STATES
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • July 21, 2013
I’ve been thinking lately about a serious situation I’ve learned about recently in which some good people I know prefer preserving their peace of mind to facing the painful truth. In talking to a friend about this stuff the other day, I brought up the conversation my niece Hannah and I had in Paris — I tell this story in Little Way — in which I told her there’s nothing wrong with happiness, but we must not seek to maintain or achieve happiness at the expense of the truth. That prompted Hannah to immediately put me to the test by revealing an extremely painful truth about how her sister saw me. I’m still struggling with the fallout from that, but I have never for one moment regretted her telling me this, because it is much, much better to deal with the real world, in all its disorder, than with a comforting lie. In most cases, the happiness believing in the comforting lie brings us is bought at too high a price.
That came to mind this morning in reading posts by Kevin O’Brien that a reader sent to me. Kevin is a St. Louis Catholic who has been blogging about a growing scandal in his archdiocese. The details are here, but the outline is a familiar one: priest molests minor after getting close to her family, family complains to archbishop, archbishop refuses to remove priest from service, until criminal charges were filed. A twist here is that Archbishop Carlson, according to a civil suit, allegedly tried to destroy physical evidence testifying to the accused priest’s guilt. The priest lived with Abp Carlson, and was very close to him, having followed him to St. Louis from his previous post in Michigan.
Kevin O’Brien notes this in one of his postings on the subject:
The family claims that they discovered emails of a sexual nature the priest was secretly sending the daughter. If these emails actually exist, their content will be revealed in both the criminal and the civil trials – if either case comes to trial. Since the DA in Lincoln County is prosecuting this case, it is almost certain that these emails do in fact exist; a case like this would not be prosecuted on the victim’s verbal claims alone, if the claims were not somehow substantiated with hard evidence.
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