CHICAGO (IL)
Chicago Sun-Times – Voices
By Sue Ontiveros
I was an infant when baptized a Roman Catholic. Went to Catholic grammar school, was married in the church, sent my only child to Catholic grammar school (and three of his four years of high school), was extremely active in my parish (particularly when it came to fund-raising) and went to mass faithfully almost every week (contributing generously), until the current cardinal got so ugly over gay marriage in Illinois. It was only in late 2012 that I stopped attending mass because I did not want to give any money to that mean-spirited effort.
Why am I telling you all this? So you realize that I am not and never was someone who is out to “get” the church, as critics of the sexual abuse tragedy and what we saw as the mishandling by the Archdiocese of Chicago often have been labeled. I loved the church and participating in it. But I could not be silent on the abuse of children and what I always felt was a massive effort to hide the problem.
And now, after reading through the documents, it makes me sick to see I was right, but I had no idea how widespread the archdiocese’s efforts to hide the problem and protect the abusing priests rather than the children was.
While many Catholics (among them Catholic priests) appreciated that I would write candidly about the situation, others (particularly those within the hierarchy of the archdiocese) took great issue with what I was writing. Why do you have to stir up old wounds, I would hear repeatedly. There was enough of a backlash that I stopped being a lector at my parish, something I found very fulfilling, because I did not want my outspoken columns to cause a problem there.
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