EUREKA (CA)
North Coast Journal
February6, 2019
By Jennifer Fumiko and Thadeus Greenson
While the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal has been widely known and reported on the North Coast going back 25 years, the Santa Rosa Diocese’s recent release of a list of 39 accused priests illuminates the systemic nature of the problem. These were not the isolated incidents of a few bad actors. As you’ll see in this week’s cover story, this was a case of widespread predation by a significant portion of the diocese’s clergy that its leaders worked to conceal and allowed to continue with horrendous consequences, especially for Humboldt County families.
While we can all hope the days of the diocese turning an indifferent eye to priests molesting children, and then simply moving them to another community when parishioners refused to do the same are over, it’s important to recognize the ripple effect of this abuse continues to sprawl. People’s faith has been broken. Lives have been shattered, consuming families and, in turn, communities. Studies have repeatedly shown that sexual abuse perpetrators are more likely than the general population to have experienced sexual abuse themselves as children, meaning some of the church’s victims have themselves likely grown up to victimize, continuing a devastating cycle.
There is no salve that can heal this wound, nothing that can stop the ripples. The best we as a community — and the Catholics among us, especially — can hope for is atonement.
The Santa Rosa Diocese took a marked step in that direction this week, releasing the list of the accused and devoting much of the January issue of its newspaper to the subject, with a lengthy apology from Bishop Robert Vasa, an urging for additional victims to come forward and an explanation of the diocese’s revised “policy for the protection of children and young people,” which makes clear that clergy should be considered mandated reporters and that anyone who hears an abuse allegation should report it to police. While these are all positive steps, they are also woefully inadequate — and decades late. The idea that in 2019 an institution that asks parents to entrust it with their children should be applauded for making clear it has a zero -tolerance policy toward sexual predators would be laughable if it didn’t expose the horrid depths from which we have come.
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