MANHATTAN (KS)
Manhattan Mercury
April 3, 2019
Most of the incidents of sexual abuse happened years ago, and most of the priests who committed the abuse are dead now. Those who aren’t are no longer members of the clergy.
But the Salina Catholic Diocese’s report last week naming 14 priests who, according to substantiated reports, abused children while serving in positions of power in churches and schools, is still tragic and deeply disturbing.
The Salina Diocese oversees Manhattan’s Catholic churches. Of the 14 people named, three of the accused priests had served in Manhattan.
One of them, Monsignor William Merchant, was the superintendent of the Catholic schools here in the mid-1950s to late 1960s. According to a firsthand account from three men who were students at that time, Merchant molested and sexually assaulted them and others while he was overseeing the schools.
“In our collective opinion, Msgr. Merchant’s avocation was masquerading as a Catholic priest while pursuing his true vocation as an aggressive sexual predator,” they wrote, as part of the report.
To learn of such incidents even all these years later is heart-wrenching for our community and especially for the faithful. Parishioners put their trust in these men, and that trust imbues them with power. Some abuse that power.
Over the last decade or so, we’ve learned that across the country, sexual abuse among the clergy is not just a rare anomaly; it’s a disease, an epidemic. The cases now number in the thousands over the last 50 years. That’s appalling.
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