The Catholic Church is under fire following a newly released child abuse report involving more than 300 Pennsylvania priests that is beyond sickening!
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A shocking grand jury report released Tuesday concluded that 6 Catholic Church dioceses in Pennsylvania hid and protected upwards of 300 “predator priests” who sexually abused more than 1,000 children from as far back as 1947. Those priests were stationed in the dioceses of Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Scranton.
“Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades. Monsignors, auxiliary bishops, bishops, archbishops, cardinals have mostly been protected; many, including some named in this report, have been promoted,” the grand jury report said.
Grand jurors described the Catholic Church child abuse method as “a playbook for concealing the truth.”
As Catholic families entrusted their children to church priests, many of these so-called “men of the cloth” regularly violated their vows of celibacy by taking sexual advantage of their parishioners’ sons and daughters. If they were caught in the act, church leaders either turned a blind eye or simply reassigned the violator to a new diocese — where they’d have their pick of a new crop of little boys and/or girls and could continue right where they left off.
The church’s priority was not to help or protect children, but to avoid scandal and embarrassment.
According to the report, victims were frequently plied with alcohol then groped and/or molested. Others were orally, vaginally, or anally raped.
“But all of them were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institution above all,” the grand jurors added. “We believe that the real number of children whose records were lost or who were afraid ever to come forward is in the thousands.”
READ THE FULL REPORT HERE
The Catholic Church abuse report was beyond horrid:
• In the Greensburg diocese, a priest impregnated a 17-year-old, forged a pastor’s signature on a marriage certificate, then divorced the girl months later. According to the grand jury, the priest was allowed to stay in ministry by finding a “benevolent bishop” willing to give him another chance.
• Another priest in Greensburg groomed middle-school students for sex by telling them that Mary had to “bite off the cord” and “lick” Jesus clean after the Nativity.
• In Scranton, a priest who served prison time for abusing children was found to have been HIV-positive for years.
• In Allentown, a priest who abused several boys was given a recommendation to work at Disney World.
“When you have the priest touching you every day, that’s a hard memory to have. The first erection that you have is at the hands of a priest,” a male victim said.
“There have been other reports about child sex abuse within the Catholic Church. But never on this scale,” the grand jurors wrote in their report. “For many of us, those earlier stories happened someplace else, someplace away. Now we know the truth: it happened everywhere.”
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At a news conference announcing the report’s release, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro called it the “largest, most comprehensive report into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church ever produced in the United States.”
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Bishop Timothy L. Doherty, chair of the bishops’ Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People, issued a collective statement following news of the widespread abuse.
“The report of the Pennsylvania grand jury again illustrates the pain of those who have been victims of the crime of sexual abuse by individual members of our clergy, and by those who shielded abusers and so facilitated an evil that continued for years or even decades,” the church leaders said. “As a body of bishops, we are shamed by and sorry for the sins and omissions by Catholic priests and Catholic bishops.”
Regrettably, this ‘apology’ is too little, too late. Children and babies were robbed of their innocence. Lives were ruined. Church leaders looked the other way and allowed colleagues to molest, rape, and abuse over and over again.
Perhaps it’s time to stop calling this a ‘church’ and call it what it really is: a breeding ground/hiding place/shopping mall for pedophiles!
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Perhaps it’s time to stop calling this a ‘church’ and call it what it really is: a breeding ground/hiding place/shopping mall for pedophiles! […]
Hear-Hear!…DJ. You are absolutely right! And thank you for this post.
Needless to say I am pleased that my home-state has released this report, which is indeed incredibly damning.
Let’s begin with the obvious. For any church to try to force grown men (and women) – who are seeking positions of power and authority over others -to suppress their natural sexual impulses was..is..and always will be…pure madness!!!
Quite naturally, the kinds of men (and women) who’d be attracted to that kind of church would be (mostly) gay male pedophiles and rapists. And let’s not even talk about the fact that so many children were victims of severe physical abuse at the hands of priests and nuns.
What a H*llish environment for any child to be subjected to. Predators from the highest levels on down allowed to roam from parish to parish, all over the World, destroying the lives of kids…mostly young boys.
At the center of all of it are the wicked creatures who protected those predatory bastards….smh!
The entire gut-wrenching and repulsive saga is (as my beloved grandmother would’ve called it) “a sin and a shame before God.”
I read something a long time ago that said the catholic church is nothing but a cover for gay pedophiles. It looks like they were right.
TAC Reader:
This is beyond tragic. It pains me. I was raised Catholic, was an altar boy, went to Catholic school from 1st grade through high school. I have two cousins who became priests. My mother became an oblate of St. Benedict, and her ashes are buried on the monastery’s grounds. My sister ran a small Catholic hospital here in California.
All that time, I had nothing but enormous respect for the clergy. The whole Boston sex scandal was like a giant tidal wave. This is another, and it feels as if the entire Church is made of sand now. It’s not just the horror of the crimes, but the horror of the covering up and covering for these wicked predators.
While I’ve been a “bad Catholic” in terms of neve “getting” much of the catechism, I’ve always loved the Church, nonetheless. This feels almost like a divorce some how.
All we can really do, I suppose, is just use this as a painful teaching that even the Church is worldly, and not to confuse it with God himself. And in humility, just ask God to fill us and use us in this brief life. […]
TAC Reader:
Attempting to read this report is weathering. It feels like being pummeled in an 800 round boxing match where I can’t get one hit in, but somehow I never fall down. Horrible.
One State down Forty-nine to go. All of this must come to light. All of it must be dealt with. These victims break my heart. It sickens me inside to see what a vile fashion these degenerates treated those who were taught to trust them the most. Particularly unsettling are stories of children who came forward only to be disbelieved and then beaten in their homes by their parents. How could anyone endure such an existence. For each assault, and each blow, justice must come. Both putative justice and a justice that forbids and prevents anything such as this from ever happening again. Anywhere. […]
Redstate reader:
Our church (the Catholic Church) is slowly dying. Between the growth of atheism and these scandals, I’m not sure how long we will last. My son recently visited Germany. Most Catholic churches there no longer have Sunday Masses every Sunday. They have communion services, but a priest is only present for Mass at a particular Church on certain Sundays as there aren’t enough priests to go around. In addition, my 18 year old son was the only person at the Church on Sunday that didn’t have gray hair. The scandals are the nail in the coffin of a dying church. I’ve done my bit to try so slow down this loss–our local parish is thriving, and both of my sons (18 and 20) are still active Catholics, and I do help with the youth group. I hope Pope Francis begins to harshly punish the molesters and more importantly the clergy who hid the molesters. I think we should get everything out in the open, and try to keep going. […]
“Cleansing the Catholic Church of Its Sins”
Aug, 17, 2018
Excerpts:
How much of a role did homosexuality play in all this? There is of course a vital distinction to be made here between sexual orientation and sexual abuse, and between being gay and being a pedophile, hebephile, or ephebophile. Many gay priests are fine and honorable servants. It horrifies me they are tarred by association, by some of the more reactionary voices in the church. It’s also true that one reason young men and boys were targeted was that they were far more readily available to priests than girls.
But it remains true that the overwhelming majority of Catholic abuse cases are between men and boys, or men and men, not men and girls, or men with women (although that happened too). And the way in which homosexuality has been treated by Catholicism — the only option for all gays is a life of celibacy and emotional repression — is not likely to lead to healthy homosexual lives, let alone priests.
Homophobia may also have increased the proportion of priests over the centuries who have been gay, because the priesthood has always been a reliable cover for not dating women. And these closeted, fucked-up gays are the ones who may well have internalized many of the slurs against gays in the past, hated themselves, never come to terms with themselves, and seen no real difference between sexual abuse and sex. So gay priests may well have covered this stuff up for aeons, or formed cliques that perpetuated it, or developed personae that could create some campy subculture to make the awful contradictions and cruelties of sexual repression and self-loathing bearable. When no form of sex is allowed, all forms of sex can seem equally immoral. And if your celibacy has ever slipped, you sure don’t want to snitch on someone else, do you?
It’s a vicious, destructive, evil circle. Which is why, it seems to me, that the clerical closet has to end. Secrecy and shame abet sexual dysfunction. Openness and self-respect are the cure. If a priest is celibate and openly gay, he is in no way disqualified for the priesthood — the church teaches that being gay is in itself no sin — so why can’t he be out? The stricture against this kind of honesty and transparency has only compounded the fucked-upness of it all. Allowing married people and women to be priests is also a no-brainer. We have long discovered that secretive, hierarchical cabals of single men are usually trouble in any context and I have a feeling that a female priest would not react to the news of an abused child with concern for the abuser. The church’s moral credibility is now close to zero. All the more reason to throw open the doors and let the light in. […] Andrew Sullivan writer at The Atlantic