UNITED STATES
These Stone Walls
“Father Jim” is a senior priest suspended under terms of the Dallas Charter, barred from ministry and from defending his good name due to a claim from 1972.
Editor’s Note: The following guest post by “Father Jim” was received as a comment on a recent post at These Stone Walls. Due to its length and subject matter, we are posting it as a guest post with Father Jim’s permission, but we have shielded his identity because his case is still pending at the Holy See.
Father Gordon MacRae recently wrote of a terrible tragedy in the post, “Jesus Wept: The Death of Father Kenneth Walker, FSSP” on his blog, These Stone Walls. In that post he asked a truly provocative question. Allow me to respond to it in light of priests falsely accused of sexual abuse, the exact situation that has confined Father Gordon to prison for almost twenty years. His question was:
“Has Catholic culture in America become so comfortable with the notion of the last two decades that its priests should be little more than expendable targets with no ability or right for self-defense?”
I believe most priests in the United States unfortunately know the answer to that question. No one talks about it openly, but it can be sensed in the low morale and anxiety among priests. It can be traced directly to a failure of leadership in the American Catholic episcopacy that places public relations and public respect as higher priorities than the truth and the innocence of many good and faithful priests by their bishops’ wholesale embrace of the Dallas Charter. In effect, our bishops have betrayed their pastoral role in loving and caring for their priests as a father loves and cares for his sons. They have allowed themselves to be intimidated by human opinion and political correctness, placing their trust more in lawyers than the Gospel of Jesus who calls us to lay down our very lives for the ones we love.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.