WESTMINSTER (MD)
Carroll County Times
September 18, 2020
By Frank Batavick
I am a child of the 1960s. I was a high school freshman when the new decade clicked over. I remember Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” that created a common soundtrack for a rising youth culture and popularized dance crazes and hair fashions.
In high school at Friday night dances I twisted and strolled, Bristol Stomped, and dreamily swayed to “Can’t Help Falling in Love” by Elvis Presley and “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers.
*
I graduated from college in 1967 and in the blink of an eye found myself in olive drab at Ft. Dix, New Jersey, shorn of my Beatles haircut and clutching orders for Vietnam. The Army canceled these when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and the cities erupted in rage and fire. I was put on riot control in Washington, D.C.
*
In a 2011 investigation commissioned by Catholic bishops, they blamed sexual abuse by priests on the 1960s and ’70s because of the era’s “drug use and crime, as well as social changes, such as an increase in premarital sex and divorce.” I’m not buying it.
I am a coreligionist of Barr’s and a proud product of 16 years of Catholic education but blaming the ’60s for all of today’s ills is misguided. I’d wager the clergy’s sexual abuse has been going on since the fourth century monastery movement, if not before. The urges and impulses of human nature have not changed over the millennia, and abuse thrives in closed, protected societies. In January we learned of patterns of abuse in the Amish community, following an exposé in “Cosmopolitan.”
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.