Last week, Cardinal Rigali
of the Philadelphia Archdiocese announced that two retired priests were
being put on "administrative leave."
That means that child sex abuse
victims had made allegations against them. It is a simple fact that
abusers abuse well into their elderly years, so these two men could
still be a risk to children.
That brings the number of priests in
Philadelphia with allegations against them to twenty-eight.
Two were
indicted following the 2011 Grand Jury Report, three were named in the
Report, twenty-one were suspended in the wake of the report, and now two
more.
That is all news, but the monumental indifference of
Cardinal Rigali persists.
The twenty-three most recently suspended were
not named by the Archdiocese, for reasons only their lawyers can
understand.
We
eventually learned the identities of the twenty-one suspended active
duty priests, no thanks to the Archdiocese.
Reporters had to compare
previous and current Archdiocese web pages to deduce who they were, and
then they had to verify those deductions according to which parishes
were notified about the removals.
The most recent two were
retired, though, and, therefore, no such comparison could be done
because non-active priests are not listed on the website.
Some have
guessed that one is Fr. Givey. No one outside the Archdiocese knows who
the other retired priest is.
So now in Philadelphia, we have yet another
priest who has allegations of child sex abuse against him, and the
people have no idea who it is.
Speaking solely as a mother here, if you
let your child alone with a priest in Philadelphia, shame on you.
And
victims will tell you that the more charming he is, the more you need to
fear.
The basic problem here is that the Philadelphia Archdiocese
cannot work itself out of its urge to protect priests before children.
Irish Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, speaking at Marquette University this
week, urged American bishops to change their ways.
He said: "The truth
will set us free."
No one understands this fact better than the Irish
bishops, who have seen their Church all but shrivel away in Ireland in
the wake of the abuse crisis there.
Good lesson for Philadelphia, where
pettiness continues to dominate transparency.
In a moral universe,
Philly's suspended priests would have been delivered up to prosecutors
the minute there was an inkling that children were at risk.
And the
message would have come from many of the adults in these children's
lives, from teachers to priests to principals.
Priests living in
rectories with abusers would have spoken to their local policemen about
the kids coming to their fellow priests' rooms, and about the summers at
the Shore in Religious Order homes where kids visited certain priests
in their rooms.
And when news trickled to the Cardinal, whether it was
Krol, Bevilacqua, or Rigali, he would have personally called the police
to urge them to investigate.
For those who are resting more easily
at night now that the Archdiocese has removed nearly thirty priests
from active ministry, wake up.
Last week, in Madison, Wisconsin, a
priest was criminally charged with sexually assaulting a girl in 2003
and 2004.
Several years earlier, in 1999, he had been removed from
active ministry for taking sexual advantage of a woman who had sought
him out for counseling.
Removal from active ministry does not
protect our children.
All it really does is give the priest more free
time to commit more crimes.