The sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church has reached
a “degree we could not have imagined," according to a statement made by Pope Benedict XVI on Monday that was quoted the December 20th New York Times.
Indeed: Just recently, a prominent Jesuit scholar, Keith Pecklers, SJ, was accused by 48-year-old Keith Brennan of sexual abuse, as reported in the December 12th Star-Ledger.
Pecklers
is a professor of liturgy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in
Rome and widely regarded as one of the foremost authorities on Catholic
liturgy in the world. He is also a frequent commentator on Vatican
Affairs for ABC News. Pecklers is a native of Jersey City and
it was in St. Paul’s Church in the Greenville section of Jersey City
that then-14-year-old Brennan was abused by him starting in 1976.
In a December 5th story, the Star-Ledger also
reported about how John J. Myers, the Archbishop of Newark, shielded at
least four priests who had been accused of sexual abuse against
children and one adult:
In the four instances, the priests
have either admitted improper sexual contact, pleaded guilty to crimes
stemming from accusations of sexual misconduct or been permanently
barred from ministry by the archdiocese after allegations of sexual
misconduct.
In his Christmas message to the Vatican hierarchy, the Pope wrote that
“We
must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the
injustice that has occurred.......We must ask ourselves what was wrong
in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to
allow such a thing to happen.”
In the past year, investigations in Ireland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands,
and the United States have found that clerics from parish priests to
those at high levels like Fr. Pecklers, committed sexual abuse against
children in many cases. And in many if not most cases, the church
hierarchy covered up the abuse, sometimes moving priests with a history
of sexually abusing children from parish to parish, and without
informing parishioners of the priests' history.
In his
Christmas letter, even though the Pope states that '“We are well aware
of the particular gravity of this sin committed by priests and of our
corresponding responsibility,”' he also says that the abuses should be
viewed 'in the context of these times."'
But rather than blaming 'these times' for the catalogue of abuses committed around the world,
should not the Pope be looking at the culture of the Roman Catholic
Church, a culture that, indeed, shielded and continues to shield---to
protect---clerics who committed terrible crimes? As a July 8 editorial
from the National Catholic Reporter states, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church is 'as it has evolved in the past half millennium is deeply damaged from within.'
Earlier this year, the Vatican revised its law on sexual abuse, a step in the right direction----but a step that seems to be not only too little, but too, too late.
SIC: C2C/INT'L