HUNTINGTON (WV)
Herald Dispatch
August 6, 2019
By John Patrick Grace
Catholics across the U.S., just as here in West Virginia, are now reading a 103-page book titled “Letter to a Suffering Church,” distributed in bulk in thousands of parishes. The author is Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron, formerly rector of Mundelein Seminary just northwest of Chicago.
Barron readily admits the gravity of the abuse scandals that have ravaged Catholic parishes in dozens of countries and which, he says, have caused 37 percent of practicing U.S. Catholics to consider leaving their church.
While evoking the outrageous abuse behavior of former Washington, D.C., Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and cases of abusive priests and negligent bishops over the last six decades or so, Barron’s book reminds us of periodic abuses that have marked the long history of the church.
The worldwide clerical sexual abuse crisis of our day is part of a pattern that goes back to Old Testament times and has occurred also in Christian circles right from the first century A.D.
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