UNITED STATES
The American Conservative
By ROD DREHER • May 1, 2017
Rodrigo Duterte, the violent, authoritarian populist president of the Philippines, claims he was sexually abused by a Jesuit priest in his youth. From a 2015 story published when he was mayor of Davao City:
Mayor Rodrigo Duterte has named the priest who allegedly molested him and several other high school boys when he was a teenager studying at the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Davao University (AdDU) here.
Duterte said the sexual abuser was the late Fr. Mark Falvey, SJ, one of the Jesuit priests at AdDU, and that the abuse happened once when he was a high school freshman in 1956. And he spelled out the name of the American Jesuit priest.
“It happened during our generation, two years ahead of us and two years following us,” Duterte told reporters here late Thursday. …
All of this makes emotional sense to me. As many of you readers know, it was becoming deeply involved in reporting and commenting on the sex abuse story in the early 2000s that ended up costing me my Catholic faith. The other night in Nashville, in conversation with a new Catholic friend, I tried to explain to him what that felt like from the inside. He had said, reasonably, “I don’t understand why the sins of priests made you quit believing in the teachings of the Church.”
What I explained was that I too had believed that as long as I had all the arguments clear in my mind, my faith would be impregnable. And you know, that may work for some people. But entering into the stories of Catholic child victims of molester priests, and their families, changed me in ways that I could never have anticipated.
William Lobdell, once the religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes about how the same experience cost him his faith in Christianity, period. He used to be an enthusiastic churchgoer, and had entered into the process by which one joins the Roman Catholic Church. When he started covering the abuse scandal, a priest warned him to keep his eyes on Christ, not on priests. But then:
But then I began going over the documents. And interviewing the victims, scores of them. I discovered that the term “sexual abuse” is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ’s representative on Earth. That’s not something an 8-year-old’s mind can process; it forever warps a person’s sexuality and spirituality.
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