Mission & Justice

Maureen Paul Turlish; 5/5/10

Maureen Paul Turlish, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, is a victims’ advocate and writes from New Castle, Del.

The institutional Roman Catholic church can attack every newspaper in every country in the world but that will not change the fact that as an institution it has participated in an extremely well documented, egregious pattern of enabling and covering up for the sexual abuse of thousands of innocent children the world over during almost an entire century.  Today, members of the hierarchy are railing against The New York Times. Eight years ago the Boston Globe was the recipient of Archbishop Bernard Cardinal Law’s calling down of the wrath of God. It has been eight years since the U.S. Catholic church was rocked to its foundations by revelations of clergy sex abuse in the Boston archdiocese and five years since a Philadelphia grand jury released a report documenting in explicit detail decades of abuse by clergy and cover up by the Philadelphia archdiocese, where I was born and baptized, and still church leaders are spinning their wheels trying to place blame on the messengers rather than on themselves and on a system that has become so corrupted that it put the protection of individual sexual predators along with an institution’s reputation before the protection of the most vulnerable of its members, the children.

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Richard McBrien; 3/5/10

Richard P. McBrien. is the Crowley-O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

The situation in the Catholic church is similar to the situation we find today in U.S. politics. In both realms, there is a significant group that is disaffected. The difference is that seriously disaffected Catholics tend to be somewhere left of center, while seriously disaffected Americans tend to be on the right. What they have in common is a deep sense of alienation from those in power, whether in the church or in the nation. Catholics who had invested their hopes in the renewal and reforms brought about by the Second Vatican Council are discouraged and demoralised because those hopes seemed to have been dashed by two consecutive, aggressively conservative papacies and the bishops they have appointed and promoted.

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Richard Owen; 30/4/10

The Pope’s chosen replacement to investigate sex abuse cases in the Catholic Church has been accused of failing to take action against a Californian priest after learning that he had allegedly molested an altar boy 11 years earlier.  Cardinal William Levada, who at the time the alleged offence came to light in 1995 was Archbishop of San Francisco, said in testimony five years ago that he had not contacted police about Father Milton Walsh because he believed that his predecessor had dealt with the case adequately. He also said he had trusted that Father Walsh would not reoffend. Jeffrey Lena, the lawyer acting for the Vatican in US abuse cases, said that Cardinal Levada acted appropriately according to the standards of the time. There was no evidence that Father Walsh had gone on to commit any further sexual offences. Father Walsh was removed from active ministry in 2002 when police opened an investigation into his behaviour. In the same year the US Bishops Conference issued a “zero tolerance” policy on clerical sex abuse after being summoned to Rome.

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