SACRAMENTO (CA)
Sacramento Bee
April 30, 2019
By Marcos Breton
After publishing the list of priests credibly accused of molesting children within the Catholic Diocese of Sacramento over the last 70 years, the first email I received was from a gentleman concerned with the image of the church:
“Demonizing the Catholic Church. Well it’s just wrong,” he wrote. “It sends a message that like 90 percent of priests are sexual abusers. You have to go to page 7, deep into the article to read that 3 percent are abusers. That’s 3 percent too much. But it’s shameful the need to sensationalize. To focus and unfairly categorize. Attack an institution like the Catholic Church because it sells papers?”
He then emailed me a Bee story about homeless people being evicted by the county from a camp on Stockton Boulevard and asked: “What percentage of sexual predators within this community? Do a study. Will it hit the headlines? Front page. Above the fold.”
This is a common refrain about the coverage of pedophile priests within the Catholic Church. The argument being: It’s a small percentage. It’s a few bad apples. Why are you condemning the whole church?
Well, as a cradle Catholic and a journalist for more than 30 years, I can’t categorize these complaints as anything other than denial. Yes, the names of Catholic priests that Sacramento’s Diocese made public on Tuesday – 44 in all – constituted about 3 percent of personnel files of priests, bishops and deacons who have ministered to Catholics from Vallejo to the Oregon.
And three notorious former priests – Francisco Javier, Mario Blanco and Gerardo Beltran – accounted for almost half of the 130 victims in the list of sexual abuse cases made public by the diocese.
Does that mean many wonderful priests have tended to the spiritual well being of Catholics throughout the region? It is absolutely true. My life has been enriched by knowing wonderful men such as Monsignor James Murphy, the former vicar of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament.
The late Bishop Francis Quinn was as dear a man as you would ever meet and one of the most beloved figures in Sacramento of the last half century.
The current Bishop, Jaime Soto, is a fine man who is trying to bring more transparency to a church that once shielded pedophiles and moved them around to different parishes, where they preyed on more people.
So how do we balance the good within the church with the criminals who abused children and, in too many instances, got away with it?
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