Evidence has emerged in the US that the founder of an American religious order wrote regularly to bishops and to the Vatican warning that sexual abuser priests should be laicised and even searched for an island to purchase to isolate such offenders. As early as the mid-1950s, decades before the clergy sexual abuse crisis broke publicly across the US Catholic landscape, the founder of a religious order that dealt regularly with priest sex abusers was so convinced of their inability to change that he searched for an island to purchase with the intent of using it as a place to isolate such offenders, according to documents recently obtained by National Catholic Reporter.
Fr Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paracletes, an order established in 1947 to deal with problem priests, wrote regularly to bishops in the United States and to Vatican officials, including the pope, of his opinion that many sexual abusers in the priesthood should be laicised immediately.
Fr Fitzgerald was a prolific correspondent who wrote regularly of his frustration with and disdain for priests "who have seduced or attempted to seduce little boys or girls."
His views are contained in letters and other correspondence that had previously been under court seal and were made available to NCR by a California law firm in February.
Fr Fitzgerald's convictions appear to significantly contradict the claims of contemporary bishops that the hierarchy was unaware until recent years of the danger in shuffling priests from one parish to another and in concealing the priests' problems from those they served, NCR says.
The letters between Fitzgerald and a range of bishops, among bishops themselves, and between Fitzgerald and the Vatican, also make clear that the hierarchy was aware of the problem and its implications well before the problem surfaced as a national story in the mid-1980s.
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(Source: CTHN)