UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Here’s a letter from the heart I have written (by email) this morning to an e-friend, a very good person, who had emailed me to add to the chorus of those who pointed out that my reference to Bishop Robert Finn several days ago as a convicted felon is not technically correct: Bishop Finn was convicted for a misdemeanor, not a felony. The friend who emailed me about this is ordained, and I cannot help but be struck by the fact that those who have picked at this point are all ordained, all clergymen.
My friend tells me that those defending the use of the term “felony” to apply to Finn’s crime in shielding a known pedophile and keeping children in harm’s way by keeping that priest in ministry have an agenda. My friend also appears to think that convicting priests of crimes of child molestation and of endangering children’s well-being is counter-productive, not a way of healing their pedophilia (I myself don’t think pedophilia is curable), and is premised on vengefulness and not love.
Here’s my response to these observations in an email this morning:
I suspect we all have agendas. And, though I don’t have children of my own, I can understand and empathize with the agenda of seeing children protected from child molesters—and the outrage of so many Catholics that this concern seems to have been far down the list of concerns for the hierarchy and the clerical club, as the abuse crisis in the Catholic church came to light.
The frustration I think many lay Catholics feel is that we keep discovering that what seems to us the obvious top priority here—keeping children out of harm’s way—is not really even on the radar screen of many in the clerical club, whose fundamental instinct is to make excuses for each other and protect each other from exposure and prosecution. The anger of lay Catholics builds, I think, and understandably so, as we see these concerns playing out within the clerical system, and find ourselves talked down to in a bizarre way about the distinction between a felony and a misdemeanor—a very strange, insubstantial, diversionary straw to clutch at in this disucssion, it seems to me.
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