MINNESOTA
Duluth News Tribune

By Damien Cronin on Apr 12, 2015

As a member of the Catholic Church that I love and as a victim of clerical physical and sexual abuse, I am appalled, embarrassed, but mostly profoundly saddened by the ways priests, bishops, cardinals and even popes deliberately and knowingly have mishandled clerical sexual abuse issues. Instead of being transparent, honest and law-abiding, they consistently have chosen to cover up these crimes, usually only releasing somewhat accurate information and evidence and only when they are dragged into court or forced to do so by laws that bound the rest of us.

I don’t believe the bishops, the cardinals and especially the entrenched bureaucracy in the Vatican and Catholic Church worldwide get it yet. For more than 50 years they have been aware of the accusations and the wrenching stories from thousands of victims.
How could they not…