The Sun should continue to aim needed spotlight on archdiocese

I write in response to Don Killgallon’s letter to the editor that asks the loaded question: Has The Baltimore Sun turned anti-Catholic? (“Has The Baltimore Sun turned anti-Catholic?” May 16). The writer explains that the men of the Archdiocese of Baltimore who shielded the abusers, whose names The Sun revealed, probably did so not out of malice but out of pastoral kindness and forgiveness for the sinners with the hope that the abusers would reform. If that was the case, the kindness toward the pedophiles was misplaced, to say the least.

Pedophilia is the hardest of maladies to cure. There are pedophiles who are sexually attracted to children and never act on their fantasies and those who act on their sexual attraction to children. Priests and other officials in Baltimore’s archdiocese acted on their fantasies, and that is a felony regardless of where it happens, among the laity or in church.

Once a pedophile priest acts on his or her sexual proclivity for children and internal investigations prove the accusers to be right, forgiveness and kindness should not include withholding the identity of the offender from the police or transferring the offender to another archdiocese. Victims should be urgently believed, protected, counseled and cared for while their accusations are being investigated, regardless of their age when they come forward. Transparency is of the utmost importance to get to the truth. There should be no obfuscations or lies, and financial or legal consequences for the church should be set aside to honor the truth.

None of these things happened with the five non-abusing clergymen that Don Killgallon defends. Considering the children abused were numerous and the abusers were bold, their child sexual abuse being flagrant and repetitive, it should have been obvious to the meanest intelligence that these abusers were hardened criminals against children and could not be salvaged by prayer and hope alone. I can only compare Killgallon’s stance on your paper’s shocking revelations about child abuse in Baltimore’s archdiocese to the Republican Party’s stance on guns and gun violence in America. In both cases, “thoughts and prayers” have not been enough.

Actions speak louder than a thousand words, and actions to stop further violence is paramount. That is where the five non-abusing clergymen failed the children and even failed the perpetrators. The latter needed to be turned over to law enforcement without further ado.

Forgiveness does not have to be accompanied by reconciliation or conciliation. Ongoing abuse on the part of the perpetrators does not show that they felt remorse, or they changed course or they reformed, and forgiveness for them did not have to include protection from the higher ups of the archdiocese, even by the standards of Christian charity and ethos.

The past informs the present, and in knowing what went wrong with Baltimore’s archdiocese in the past, we learn what we must do and what we must not do in the present, to protect children from predators in all walks of life. To blame the sexual revolution of the past for the behavior of the priests in the 1960s and ‘70s is to say, pedophilia is an outgrowth of the sexual revolution, and it did not exist before then. That is not true.

We now understand far better what lasting physical and mental harm sexual abuse does to children, and hence we know how we must react to it, legally and morally. True, sexual abuse of children and adults occurs in all religions and religious denominations. The Sun must continue to pursue them as they come to light. No, it is not time to turn it off or turn it down on the Catholic Church for the sake of the victims and, most importantly, for the sake of the Catholic Church.

— Usha Nellore, Bel Air