Patheos blog
Sept. 12, 2019
By Mary Pezzulo
In case you haven’t noticed, the Church is a ghastly mess.
I almost said “an ungodly mess,” but that’s not the case at all. God is here, suffering with us. But the hierarchy’s sins are being laid bare and we see that the Bride of Christ was abused by the people who were supposed to be her caretakers, and she is a mess. At the moment we are all watching the Diocese of Buffalo fall apart in real time, with that public disgrace Bishop Malone flailing and claiming he won’t resign. We’re told that Archbishop Dolan is looking into it, and I’m not really convinced that will help.
What seems like moments ago, we were supposed to be happy that a bill had been struck down in one part of the country which would’ve forced priests to report sexual abuse confessed to them, violating the seal of confession. And I do not think that priests ought to be forced to violate the seal. But it was hard to not find it a bit ironic when we found out that Malone had allegedly protected a priest who had a credible accusation of violating the seal of confession against him. One can be forgiven for surmising that in practice, it’s persecution if a priest is compelled to violate the seal to help somebody, but it’s perfectly fine to violate the seal in order to participate in sexual harassment. That’s just one example of the layers of horror we’ve had to process lately.
And this is on top of what happened in the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston a few short months ago, and all that’s gone on in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, and what’s going on all over the country.
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.