CHICAGO (IL)
City of Angels
by Kay Ebeling
My luck. I click on Chicago radio to hear about the snow and instead find out Cardinal George is releasing names of 30 priests credibly accused as pedophiles. (30 more priests, why doesn’t the Archdiocese release say 30 more priests?) Standing there in my kitchen hearing the news I shout out loud, as I doubt the Chicago Archdiocese and Francis George are ever going to acknowledge my perp priest and what they let him do to me and my sister in the 1950s.
Father Thomas Barry Horne was founding pastor at St. Peter Damian Church in Bartlett, which today is a Northwest Suburb but in 1949, when the parish began, was just a small country farm town with a few thriving nightclubs downtown near the train station. In all there have been three pedophile priests as pastors of this one small town church, which curiously, was named for the monk who first wrote about the perils of pedophilia in the priesthood in the Eleventh Century.
Last week Cardinal George said in his muddled explanation for the release of the list and the church’s handling of pedophile priests, “The response, in retrospect, was not always adequate to all the facts, but a mistake is not a cover up.”
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