UNITED STATES
Whispers in the Loggia
Simply put, in the long, horrid road of American Catholicism’s tragic history of sexual abuse and cover-up, few days have been as stunning as this.
Add in the mounting questions swirling around Rome over the Pope’s commitment to tackling the global storm, and at least on some levels, it almost feels as if the ghost of 2002 has returned….
And yet again, just in time for Holy Week.
* * *
Early this morning, word circulated from San Antonio that Fr Virgilio Elizondo, the widely-hailed godfather of Latino theology in the US – and with it, long the lead prophet of a Hispanic ascendancy that’s since come to comprise a plurality, if not the current majority of the nation’s 70 million faithful – had been found dead at 80 yesterday, amid the looming cloud of a lawsuit alleging his abuse of a seminarian in the 1980s.
While the city’s newspaper only relayed the statement of the cleric’s assistant that Elizondo “died of a broken heart,” an independent local news-site, The Rivard Report, cited unnamed sources in saying that the vaunted theologian had taken his own life by “a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” The shocking news confirmed shortly thereafter by a Whispers op appraised of the situation, later in the day it emerged that the Notre Dame professor’s death had indeed been ruled a suicide. …
Hours after that first jolt, at midmorning another press conference was called in Midstate Pennsylvania, the attorney general again presiding.
Two weeks after a Commonwealth grand jury leveled a searing indictment of generations of leadership in the diocese of Altoona-Johnstown, today saw the other shoe drop as charges were announced against three former provincials of the area’s Third Order Regular (TOR) Franciscans, all indicted on child endangerment and conspiracy counts in enabling prolific abuse by one of their own.
Fourteen years after Boston, the move represents a watershed: never before have the superiors of a religious community been held criminally liable for facilitating a cover-up among their confreres. And with all of two US church administrators having faced similar charges until now, with today’s development, the number suddenly stands at five.
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.