UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Father Tom Doyle and Jerry Slevin on Abuse Crisis and Pope Francis: When Will Words Yield Actions?
I highly recommend Father Tom Doyle’s recent presentation (pdf) to the group Voice of the Faithful regarding where we find ourselves with the abuse crisis in the Catholic church today. It’s entitled “Clergy Sexual Abuse and the Church Today: Turning Talk into Action.” Doyle’s assessment of where we find ourselves is sobering (and, for my money, right on target):
There are no clear signs of hope that the institutional Church is beginning to comprehend the horrendous nature of sexual abuse by clerics. There has been a great deal of rhetoric and public relations bluster but there is little if anything to show sincerity. To date no bishop has been subjected to any penal process or penal sanctions for sexually abusing minors or adults himself or for their failure to remove known perpetrators.
There’s lots of talk. There’s not any action to speak of. Convicted criminal Bishop Robert Finn continues to sit undisturbed on his episcopal throne in Kansas City, and, as Tom Doyle notes, bishops keep right on playing cruel hardball games with abuse survivors, forfeiting pastoral imperatives to do instead what lawyers tell dictate to them, withholding information about abusive priests, putting known predators into ministry, and letting the odious Bill Donohue function freely as their vicious media attack dog.
Tom Doyle does not find a great deal of hope in the appointment of the new eight-member papal advisory commission on abuse, because, well, our popes have long since been advised. They know the score. They know what to do.
The problem is and has been doing, not talking. …
As Jerry Slevin notes,
Instead of really facing the abuse problem, Pope Francis instead usually just tries to change the subject, for example, by more mystical propaganda ploys like the upcoming canonizations of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII. Of course, neither of their abysmal records on holding bishops, or even priests, accountable for abusing children has even been addressed in the “rush to sainthood”. How long does Francis think he can go on trying to change the subject? Although many Catholics sometimes appear to be overly docile and wishful thinkers, most of them are not that naïve, as the 30 plus million US Catholics who have left the Church appear to indicate.
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