State Bows Out Of Church Prosecution

There are no statutes under which he can press any cases, Reilly complains. All he can do now is announce that, in his judgment, the overall total abuse by churchmen has been roughly 1,000 instances or more over six decades.

Reilly actually would like to bring these abusers to justice. At least 237 priests, plus some 13 other Church workers who have been identified in court papers, molested at least 789 minors, and church leaders essentially gave them all a pass, moving them around like so many twisted chess pieces.

Reilly is sure there are many more unreported cases of child abuse and says 1,000 is his most conservative guess.

Of course this is a far, far worse report than had ever been expected. This report, just released, prompted Reilly to say, "The mistreatment of children was so massive and so prolonged that it borders on the unbelievable."

It surely does.

It is even more incomprehensible that nothing will be done about the majority of the offenders, much less the administrators who forgave them and moved them to new environments, where more unsuspecting parents and children would respect them as men of God, ordained by the church.

There were no laws on the books mandating reporting of child abuse until last year. And Reilly was probably right in judging that the hierarchy of the church could not be charged with conspiracy for merely moving troubled priests around, primarily because there was no visibly apparent attempt to use such movement as a way of raining new abuse upon innocent children.

So conspiracy cannot be proven, at least not in court.

All of this, of course, leaves one person alone as the possible savior of the church in Massachusetts: Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley. His primary job has got to be changing priorities. Specifically, he has to make the physical safety of children overshadow the religious safety of the Church and its clergy.

It will be very tempting to let a few years of quietude wash away the horror. After all, there will be no prosecutions. So O’Malley could try to ride it out softly for a couple of years. But he cannot.

O’Malley can’t let the Church wash itself.

The people, the congress of Catholic people, must help. Not just to provide their invaluable expertise; but because the Church must look outside its clergy for the solutions.

Priests cannot fix sex problems; not in any sanctified fashion such as married sex, not in illegal forms such as child sex abuse, or in any other fashion.

This cannot be solved behind rectory doors.

And this amazing problem needs to be checked world-wide.

Rome must handle this, and must test its whole body of personnel in all its churches, no matter how remotely they are located.

Unfortunately, Rome won’t.

So what the Boston Catholic Church needs is an active group of lay people to press, hard, for large change. And unfortunately, the whole government apparatus has basically left them to their own devices. It has amassed 76 pages of documentation of loathsome, unfathomable, sickening activities committed on children by ordained clergymen of the Roman Catholic Church.

And what does the Catholic church administration intend to do?

Zip.

Legalese has apparently tied the government’s hands.

How preeminently Catholic this is.

Monumental wrongdoing, proven by the attorney of the state, is revealed, the facts standing barefaced and naked before all the people to see; conclusive evidence which is – remarkably – un-prosecutable.

So nothing can be done by out-of-church authority. This obviously leaves the whole rehabilitation job to the men who made the problem exist in the first place. If the church pulls this evil doing inward and tries to ignore its consequences, it will almost certainly create a backlash that will finally change the Church. It is hard to say if the manifestation will be a huge abandonment of Catholicism or a move to start an American religious institution in place of Catholicism.

Only time will show what course will be taken by lay people, but accepting things they do not comprehend is a natural thing for congregation members: the resurrection of Christ, his virgin birth and hundreds of other miracles pave the pathway of Catholicism.

Yet the government’s report is no miracle. In the eyes of common lay people, someone must try to rectify the six decades of unmitigated sinfulness by churchmen.

Who would want to have faith again in their clergy? A large number of Catholics have already answered ‘not me,’ to that question, yet an even larger group of Catholics is struggling to find a way to again believe in the honesty, the purity, yes the sanctity of the church. Whether they will succeed will depend much upon themselves, and the actions they are able to take both individually and collectively, even though it is Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley who is in the spotlight as the so-called reformer.

If they are not successful, the Catholic Church will die.

The reality is that stark.