By ROD DREHER • September 8, 2014
This news jolted me when I learned it just now:
Robert Larson, the Catholic priest convicted of sexually abusing altar boys while serving in the Wichita diocese, has died.
Diocesan officials on Thursday said Larson died Aug. 27 at the age of 84. He was buried in his home state of Michigan.
“We pray for all victims of sexual abuse and for their families,” the Most Rev. Carl Kemme, bishop of the Wichita diocese, said in a statement following Larson’s death. “We continue to learn from them and we recommit ourselves to vigilance in protecting children and young people from the tragedy of sexual abuse.”
Bob Larson was not just any child-molesting priest. As the Wichita Eagle reported back in 2000, Larson destroyed a number of lives. Here, from a National Review Online piece I wrote in 2002, is the story of several of them:
No statistics exist documenting the number of clergy-abuse victims who have killed themselves, but stories like that of Horace and Janet Patterson of Conway Springs, Kansas give us a feel for the worst kind of pain priest sexual abuse can contribute to. In the fall of 1999, their son Eric, 29, shot himself in the head with a Colt .45, ending years of torment that seemed to begin when he was first molested at age 12.
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