In Philadelphia, on February 10, the District Attorney’s Office charged four people with sexually assaulting two young boys over the course of several years. Three priests — 68 year old Edward Avery, 64 year old Charles Engelhardt, and 47 year old James Brennan — and a parochial school teacher, 48 year old Bernard Shero, were all charged with rape, indecent sexual assault and other criminal charges.
60 year old Monsignor William Lynn, the Secretary for Clergy for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia under Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, has been charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child in connection with the assaults.
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From 1992 until 2004, Msgr. Lynn was responsible for investigating reports that priests had sexually abused children. He was in charge of recommending appropriate action to ensure that priests could not reoffend against other children. The Grand Jury found that Msgr. Lynn endangered children, including the victims in these most recent cases, by knowingly allowing dangerous priests to continue in the ministry in roles in which they had access to children.Read the press release on this matter from the office of District Attorney Seth Williams here. Williams, himself a Catholic, speaks more personally to the issues here.
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Scandals continue to rock the Church and no amount of belated public apologies will changed the harsh perception held by many that the Catholic Church is a safe haven for pedophile priests. No matter how strong our defenses are of the Church’s many great priests, the human response of the public is still to recoil from the stories of alleged abuse and to paint its critism with a very broad brush. This response is understandable and an appropriate response to a horrific reality that has enhanced the public scrutiny of every member of the clergy. The question confronting the Church is not what are the Church’s best “defenses” to the allegations; rather, the question is how do we, as Catholics, respond to and overcome these presumptions and perceptions in order to refocus the world on the person Jesus Christ. The Sacrament of Reconciliation provides the model. We cannot be reconciled with God without true sorrow, a confession of our sinfulness and request for foregiveness. Therefore, a required response is a willingness to admit the wrong, accept the deserved harshness of the criticisms and to empathize and suffer with those who have been hurt the most. We must accept the unwanted role of a target of the antipathy that currently exists towards the Church and through emulating the responses of Jesus, accept the undeserved punishment for the sins of others and love those who despise us, will we ever convert the world. This is the call of the Lord in the Gospel.
ReplyDeleteThose who hate us will look for every opportunity to find hypocrisy in our conduct. Therefore, consistent with the quotation attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi, we must "preach the Gospel every day, and if necessary use words." This is a duty of all Catholics. But we cannot teach what and Who we do not know. So it remains essential that we continuously turn to His Word and know Him. The perception of the world of Catholics will become a reality irrespective of the facts. Empathy and restraint, coupled with the compassion of Christ and knowledge of Gospel of Jesus Christ must be in our consciousness at all times and the guideline of every response. The question we must constantly answer is “am I living my life as Christ wants me to? Or am I living a life of self?” The world needs to see the former; there are too many examples of the later.
Don’t let the evil one win.
Thanks for covering this. Catholic blogs quite silent on this
ReplyDeleteperhaps from fatigue. Hopefully Mr. Donahue will let go of his concept that we are now the safest place for children as though such a tendency ends with new policy on paper.
In case you didn’t have time to read the source documents, let’s look at what these predators are charged with, according to the Philly DA.
ReplyDeleteCharles Engelhardt, at the time, a 51 year old Oblate priest, is accused of orally sodomizing and molesting a 10-year-old altar boy in 1998 in the sacristy
Edward Avery, at the time, a 55 year old Archdiocesan priest who was defrocked in 2006, is charged with orally sodomizing and molesting the same 10-year-old altar boy.
This boy’s sixth-grade teacher at St. Jerome School, at the time, 36 year-old Bernard Shero, is accused of orally and anally sodomizing the then-11-year-old in the back of the teacher’s car.
James Brennan, at the time, 32 years old, an Archdiocesan priest, is accused of forcing his penis into the buttocks of a 14-year-old former parishioner when he was in the priest’s bed. At the time, the summer of 1996, Father Brennan was on leave from Cardinal O’Hara High School. In 1997, he was returned to active ministry and assigned to St. Jerome Parish.
This wasn’t 30, 40, 50, or 60 years ago. It was only 6 years before the scandal exploded on the front page of the Boston Globe. Still, Monsignor Lynn protected the pedophiles, not the innocent children.
The DA says, “We have far more specific evidence, within the statute of limitations, directly linking Monsignor Lynn’s actions to the abuse of two new victims. He had all the information he needed to protect them. Instead, he lied to parishioners and went out of his way to put known abusers into contact with adolescents, resulting in assaults against at least two more young boys.”
The is the most recent, but sadly not the last, example of the institutional church’s inability and/or unwillingness to discipline itself and hold itself accountable. This is the true danger to the church and to your children. But where is the outrage?
Cardinal O’Malley promised in 2009 to release the names of all priests who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse. It’s February 2011. Where’s the list? Why aren’t the Catholics in the pews demanding to see the list, especially in light of article after article that chronicles the church’s lack of accountability. Where are the priests whose names are on that list? I’ll bet some of them are back in active ministry.