Sins of the Fathers

(From thefederalistpapers.org)

These events all happened 15 to 70 years ago, but time's distancing lessens the horror only slightly.

Top Roman Catholic leaders in Pennsylvania covered up decades of child sex abuse involving more than 1,000 victims and hundreds of priests, according to a long-awaited grand jury report released Tuesday....

The allegations stretch back to the 1940s, detailing child rapes and groping that mirrored the reports that have roiled the church worldwide. But the document includes several uniquely disturbing accounts of its own — including one of a 1970s pedophile and child pornography ring in Pittsburgh among priests who whipped their victims and took photos of one boy as he posed naked as if on the cross.

The evil acts weren't perpetrated by just one or two outlier priests; they were a gang protected by the Church. According to the Grand Jury report: [bold added]

But the biggest crime of all is this: it worked. The abuser priests, by choosing children as targets and trafficking on their trust, were able to prevent or delay reports of their sexual assaults, to the point where applicable statutes of limitations expired. And Archdiocese officials, by burying those reports they did receive and covering up the conduct, similarly managed to outlast any statutes of limitation. As a result, these priest and officials will necessarily escape criminal prosecution. We surely would have charged them if we could have done so.

But the consequences are even worse than the avoidance of criminal penalties. Sexually abusive priests were either left quietly in place or “recycled” to unsuspecting new parishes – vastly expanding the number of children who were abused. It didn’t have to be this way. Prompt action and a climate of compassion for the child victims could have significantly limited the damage done.

In the Age of Twitter, when speech offenses evoke comparisons to the slaughterers of millions, we have lost the ability to make distinctions. Dante, in his description of Hell, assigned the treacherous---those who betrayed the trust given to them---to the worst (Ninth) circle of hell. Sounds good to me.

Additional comments:
1) Atheists who don't believe in Final Judgment can rationalize committing evil, but what about these priests? I suspect that after the first act they thought they were going to Hell anyway. In for a penny, in for a pound.

2) I am hopeful that this won't happen again, at least on such a scale. The optimism is less due to Church reform than to the inability to keep information, especially shameful information, secret for long.