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Of Many Things
Revelations over these past few months are enough to dizzy one’s mind. Even more dizzying, though, are the perhaps millions of words that have been penned in the media worldwide. Have we heard enough? Have we heard more than enough? What’s to be done? Shocking...scandalous...disgraceful.
As revelations of new victims of clerical sexual abuse spill into the news daily, we must face one mare discomforting truth: this scandal has sobering generational overtones. Many, if not most, of the victims are Gen-Xers, born in the 1960’s and 70’s. To be sure, those coming forward ran
Disclosures about sexual abuse among priests and coverups by the hierarchy have elicited, at least in Boston, levels of lay dissatisfaction and anger that rival the response to Humanae Vitae, the birth control encyclical issued in the summer of 1968. An interesting question now is whether lay reacti
Arts & Culture
Books
Jun 03, 2002 issueAndrew Delbanco has persuasively argued in his book The Death of Satan How Americans Lost Their Sense of Evil that the word evil has all but vanished from the American vocabulary and with it the symbols once used to articulate our experience of evil In the wake of the tragic events of last Septemb
News
Bishop Gregory Says Bishops Will Hear, Pray With Victims in DallasWhen the U.S. bishops meet in Dallas from June 13 to 15 to develop a national policy on clergy sexual abuse of minors, there will be “direct participation by some who have been directly harmed by a cleric,” said Bishop Wil
In terms of its harm and far-reaching effects, the present crisis in the church must be compared with the Reformation and the French Revolution. It is this conviction that brings to my mind the forthright declaration of the Second Vatican Council, Our era needs wisdom more than past ages.... The fut
Has there ever been anything like it in the history of the church? That is a question I have been asked a number of times since the sexual abuse scandal swelled to its present din. Not a day goes by without allegations of improper conduct by Roman Catholic clergy. Not a day goes by without evidence
The expectations surrounding the meeting in Rome on April 23-24 of the U.S. cardinals, the leaders of our bishops’ conference and members of the Roman Curia were enormously unrealistic. Those hopes ranged from a quick and final plan to end decades of child abuse in the church to a Third Vatica
Letters
Compassion
You’ve done something wrong, repented and have spent the following years, even decades, in faithful, compassionate service to others. Then, without warning, you’re placed on extended medical leave, and your calling is gone overnight (4/22). The resultant trauma is mind-boggling.
We need to remember such priests now with a note that details their kindnesses to us and ours. We need to let them know how their counsel, homilies and actions have made us better people, and how, through us, this good continues in the world. As even that flawed place tells us, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Joan Huber Berardinelli
We have struggled this season with a number of deeply troubling issues related to the tragedies of sexual abuse of minors by priests in this country. The first wave of responses, rightly enough, has been to put a stop to systems and behavior patterns that pose immediate risks to potential victims. T