A priest: Catholic church and sex abuse

This is really a great short essay. – 16 paragraphs in toto.  It was only when i got to the end that I realized I'd been in touch with this guy a couple of years ago when I bought some lapel pins and rubber bracelets (picture at end) off this website nasarean.org which he runs to support persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

A few weeks before I was ordained a Catholic priest in the late autumn of 1994, my superior in the seminary told me that, in his opinion, it was probably the most difficult time in a century to become a priest. Yet, he went on, it was also the most exciting time. I really did not take much notice of what he said. In fact, in my overconfidence, I thought he was talking nonsense. The Nazis had a special section of the Dachau concentration camp for priests. The “evil empire” of the former Soviet Union tortured, imprisoned, and executed thousands of priests. And, of course, more recently, many faithful priests have been murdered by Islamists in multiple countries. To even speak of “suffering” priests in the West over the past 24 years would be absurd, histrionic, and untruthful. It would also be an insult to all those brave and faithful men who have truly suffered for their profession of the Catholic faith.

Perhaps it would be more reasonable for me just to describe the experience of being a priest, especially during 2001–02, and at this moment of crisis for the Church. I do this not to elicit sympathy. It is possible that having experienced what seemed to be the worst of times, and now experiencing them again, I might be able to collect some thoughts and shed some light on ways forward.

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Tacit acceptance of illicit relationships among the clergy, noticeably among those formed in the tumultuous years from the late 1960s to the late ’80s, allowed the abuse of power that seemed to have reached a peak with the revelations at the beginning of the century but now has reemerged both with McCarrick and the seminary abuses in Chile and Honduras. There is a feedback loop: Illicit behavior allows and encourages illicit power structures, which in turn allow the illicit behavior. The behavior cannot continue without the connivance or tacit acceptance of those in command of the structure. As in 2002, so in 2018, the most charitable explanation for the failure of the bishops to police themselves is naïveté, often coupled with mediocrity of character and intellect. The darker explanation is that some, certainly not all, were practitioners of the very things they were called to condemn.

Hit the link for the whole essay, which only takes five minutes to read. And here's the picture mentioned above.