Sunday, April 10, 2005
NEXT POPE MUST CONFRONT ABUSE SCANDAL
From an article by Jason Berry at SFGate sent in by a reader:
As the world's cardinals prepare for the Vatican conclave to elect a new pope, they owe it to the faithful to choose a man who will confront the crisis that stains Pope John Paul II's legacy: bishops and religious order superiors with a long history of sheltering priests who molested children.
One contender they should not choose is Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa, Honduras. In 2002, he compared the American media to Stalin and Hitler for reporting the scandal. He also helped a Costa Rican priest accused of child molestation find a safe haven in Honduras, according to a recent Dallas Morning News investigation.
The drenching TV coverage in Rome has downplayed the abuse crisis. But a clergy "sexual underground" -- a term coined by Barry Coldrey, an Australian member of the Irish Christian Brothers -- has rocked the church not just in the United States but in many countries.
In the early 1990s, Australia, Canada and Ireland saw epic scandals in which adults who were raised in large orphanages run by Coldrey's order testified about being sexually brutalized.
In 1994, Brother Coldrey spent six weeks in Rome doing research at his order's archives for an internal report, which found its way to the media. Ten percent of the Irish Christian Brothers members -- a huge percentage -- had sexually assaulted youths, he wrote, and hid "within a sympathetic underworld of other clergy and church workers who are merely breaking their vows by having heterosexual or gay sex with consenting adults."
If the house is going to be cleaned up, the adults are going to have to give up their consenting sexual activity as well, and get back to defining chastity-or celibacy or whatever new terminology they use to redefine what they are about-as a life without sex.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
