Patheos blog
July 21, 2019
By Guest Contributor
It is the apparently tenuous question so much of the debate with the sex abuse scandals surrounds – Do victims matter?
I was just informed by the host of a popular podcast for Catholic women that we in fact don’t; at least, we don’t when it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient for other Catholics. I have followed this podcast for at least a year and was a subscriber on its email list. Yesterday morning, an email in my inbox from the podcast described this week’s episode (concerning the Church’s teaching on birth control). I skimmed to the bottom to see if I recognized the interviewee’s name, since I have a few times in the past. What I found instead made my stomach clench.
My alma mater, Franciscan University of Steubenville, was this episode’s sponsor. When I pointed out (both in private message and publicly on the podcast’s Facebook page) that having a university with an abusive past (and present!) was hurtful to victims, the response was sickening.
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