- Feb 5, 2002
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The costs of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church are impossible to quantify. The casualties are too many to count. Thousands of innocent souls have been harmed by the sins and crimes of men who ought to have been spiritual fathers and shepherds but who instead preyed upon their sheep like so many wolves.
But consequence of such evil, such sin, has a way of spreading beyond the personal guilt of the abuser or even the grievous and lasting harm done to the victim. The damage is never contained to the evil deed itself, terrible as it may be. Nor is the burden of the sin carried only by the immediate victims, no matter how alone or abandoned they may feel. The consequences of sin radiate through space and time, like the ripples of a stone cast into a placid pool. Sins committed decades ago continue to bear grotesque and putrid fruit generations later.
The material costs of the crisis are easier to quantify, even if they are less important. Billions of dollars have been paid out in reparation for those wicked deeds, and in recompense for failures of bishops who, whether through ignorance, or arrogance, or cowardice, tried to hide the evil deeds of their priests. Not all these failures were due to malice. Some bishops were misled by experts. Some thought they were defending the Church from further harm and scandal. Some were simply not up to the responsibility laid upon them.
What we now know as “the abuse crisis” was already growing in the years between the Second World War and the Second Vatican Council. In the Church, as in many other parts of society, the decades between 1960 and 1980 saw an explosion in cases of child sexual abuse, most of which would not be reported until decades later. While reports of clerical sexual abuse occasionally made it into the press in the 1980s and 1990s — the bishops were secretly briefed on the scale of the problem in the mid-1980s — it wasn’t until the Boston Globe’s reporting in 2002 that most of the world became aware of the scope and scale of the problem.
Continued below.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
But consequence of such evil, such sin, has a way of spreading beyond the personal guilt of the abuser or even the grievous and lasting harm done to the victim. The damage is never contained to the evil deed itself, terrible as it may be. Nor is the burden of the sin carried only by the immediate victims, no matter how alone or abandoned they may feel. The consequences of sin radiate through space and time, like the ripples of a stone cast into a placid pool. Sins committed decades ago continue to bear grotesque and putrid fruit generations later.
The material costs of the crisis are easier to quantify, even if they are less important. Billions of dollars have been paid out in reparation for those wicked deeds, and in recompense for failures of bishops who, whether through ignorance, or arrogance, or cowardice, tried to hide the evil deeds of their priests. Not all these failures were due to malice. Some bishops were misled by experts. Some thought they were defending the Church from further harm and scandal. Some were simply not up to the responsibility laid upon them.
What we now know as “the abuse crisis” was already growing in the years between the Second World War and the Second Vatican Council. In the Church, as in many other parts of society, the decades between 1960 and 1980 saw an explosion in cases of child sexual abuse, most of which would not be reported until decades later. While reports of clerical sexual abuse occasionally made it into the press in the 1980s and 1990s — the bishops were secretly briefed on the scale of the problem in the mid-1980s — it wasn’t until the Boston Globe’s reporting in 2002 that most of the world became aware of the scope and scale of the problem.
Continued below.
An up-close look at the state of Catholic priests in America
A new survey of Catholic priests shows that the clergy sex abuse crisis has caused a lack of trust between priests and their bishops.
www.oursundayvisitor.com
