UNITED STATES
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
David Clohessy
Last week, while many Catholic eyes were focused on new and hopeful moves to streamline the home office, the supervisors in the field offices were focused on very old and depressing moves to do what’s long been done: ignore, conceal, and “spin” child sex crimes and cover-ups.
And while in Rome all seems to have gone swimmingly, in US chancery offices all hell was breaking loose.
In St. Paul, a police report surfaced saying that St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese staff withheld evidence of likely child porn and now the alleged sex offender can’t be criminally charged. (And in the wake of a different but new child sex scandal there, the vicar general also stepped down this week.)
In Trenton, Bishop David O’Connell essentially admits that, for months, he has hidden the fact that one of his priests sent 1,200 inappropriate sexual text messages to what he thought was a teenaged boy and had sexually harassed at least five teenagers and young men, some of whom were seminarians.
In Chicago, a suspended and credibly accused archdiocesan priest who faces three allegations has taken a secular job counseling grieving families, and Cardinal Francis George claims he’s powerless to stop this.
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