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How old is the Catholic Church? Well, what year are we in? It’s 2018 years old, the oldest, continually-functioning institution on earth. Along the way it’s been corrupted and reformed more than once and we’re overdue for another purge. When now-former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was credibly accused earlier this month of having molested young men and boys for decades, I was shaken. When the sexual abuse scandal first broke in 2002, McCarrick had been a prominent spokesperson assuring us all that he and other bishops would straighten everything out. Now we see he’d been a predator himself the entire time.
Then came the grand jury report in Pennsylvania earlier last week documenting that a thousand young people, mostly adolescent boys, were systematically molested by over three hundred priests. How many more were there who never came forth? Even worse, it was covered up for decades by other priests and bishops just like McCarrick. Those bishops live in mansions, but they belong in prison cells. How many clergy knew what was going on but lacked the courage to speak up? They should resign immediately. The time for pious platitudes is over.
I was born a Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrat in 1951 and went to mass every Sunday. I attended Catholic schools from second grade through high school. After eighteen, my attendance declined. After going out on my own I had stopped attending altogether. Only when I had children who asked me about God did I go back.
Some years later The Boston Globe published its 2002 Spotlight Series on the huge scandal in the Boston Archdiocese. Priests had been raping altar boys by the hundreds across eastern Massachusetts for decades — all covered up by bishops, Cardinal Bernard Law, and others until the Globe blew it wide open. The Globe had done us all a service but they were wrong about one thing. They spun it as a “Pedophile Priest Scandal,” and yes, there were a few pedophile priests who molested children, but the vast majority of assaults were by homosexual priests preying on pubescent boys and young men. It was most definitely a homosexual priest scandal, but Cardinal McCarrick and others the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) carefully painted it as something else. Now we know why.
The rest is here.
