The shameful secrets of America’s Catholic Church
A boy forced to pose naked like Christ on the cross while priests took Polaroid pictures. A seven-year-old girl raped in hospital. Abused children given gold crosses to wear as a signal to other predatory priests that they were ripe for further victimisation. “They read like scenes from a Marquis de Sade novel,” said Sohrab Ahmari in the New York Post. Yet these are just some of the horrifying details that emerged last week in a grand jury report into Catholic clergy abuse in six dioceses in Pennsylvania. The most comprehensive such report in American history, based largely on secret archives kept by the dioceses, it found evidence that 300 priests had victimised at least 1,000 young victims – and possibly many more – over the past 70 years. The crimes were systematically covered up and almost all of them are now too old to be tried under Pennsylvania’s statute of limitations.
Alas, Pennsylvania is far from the only diocese afflicted by such scandals, said Denise Lavoie in Time. Back in 2002, The Boston Globe revealed that in Massachusetts at least 250 priests had abused more than 500 victims – a scandal revisited in the Oscarwinning film Spotlight. In fact, about 40 of the nearly 200 dioceses in the US have released lists of priests accused of abusing children. Yet there have been no more than nine investigations of a Catholic diocese or archdiocese by a prosecutor or grand jury. One has to wonder whether “the Church will ever truly take responsibility or be held accountable”.
Quite clearly not – it “has proved itself incapable of self-investigation and self-policing”, said Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. That’s why we need a full-scale independent investigation. And a good person to lead it would be Frank Keating, the former Oklahoma governor. In 2003, he angrily resigned from a lay-member Church-appointed board looking into abuse, accusing self-protecting bishops of acting like the Mafia. We also need resignations, starting with that of the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl. Although there’s no evidence that he has ever abused anyone himself, the Pennsylvania report shows that, as bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006, he helped sustain the culture by reassigning predator priests and requiring at least one victim to sign a confidentiality clause as part of a settlement. Enough. “The Church must be cleansed, and the conspiracy of silence ended.”