WASHINGTON (DC)
American Conservative
October 23, 2018
By Rod Drehrer
Without a doubt the most searing document on the Catholic sex abuse scandal I’ve ever read — much more agonizing than this past summer’s Pennsylvania grand jury report, for example — is Leon Podles’s 2008 book Sacrilege, which is out of print and very hard to find now. Here’s a link to Lee’s web page for Sacrilege. Lee is a Catholic, an abuse victim, and a professional investigator who put his skills to work to try to get to the bottom of what happened in the Catholic Church.
I started reading the book in galley form, and couldn’t get past the first couple of chapters. It’s not that it was a bad book — not at all! It’s that the stone-cold realities Lee wrote about — based on police reports, documents, and interviews — were overwhelming to me. Admittedly, I was at a very weak place, having just left the Catholic Church over the scandal. Still, the book was raw. Because Lee is a friend, I knew how much work he had put into it, and how he suffered while writing it.
But it was true, and important.
Now, in Touchstone, S.M. Hutchens talks about how Lee Podles has been vindicated by this year’s terrible revelations of abuse and sexual corruption in the Catholic Church. Hutchens recalls a 2008 post from a Catholic site called “Fringe Watcher” that dismisses Podles as a crazy ranter who was aiding and abetting anti-Catholics. In a First Things item in that same year, Richard John Neuhaus said:
Very different is Leon Podles’ Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (Crossland). It is a rambling essay of more than five hundred pages on a potpourri of items picked up from the public media and the blogosphere, including, along with the kitchen sink, stomach-turning details of abuse, mainly with boys, and a scathing, if familiar, indictment from a conservative perspective of liberal depredations that brought things to this sorry pass. Regrettably, the tone is shrill, and even righteous anger does not justify the author’s suspension of caution and charity in attributing motives. Among the repercussions of the crisis is a publishing stream that goes on and on, which is inevitable.
Ah, Neuhaus. He never could bring himself to see clearly what was right in front of his face.
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.