Unlike Penn State, church evades sex scandals

As a cradle Catholic I find it difficult to differentiate between the behavior of the high-ranking officials at Penn State and those in the Catholic Church.

The Freeh Report made liberal use of phrases like “extremely poor leadership,” “irresponsibility,” “creating dangerous situations for children,” “repeatedly concealed facts” and “showing no concern for the victims.” The behavior of top officials at both institutions was characterized by conspiracies of silence and structures of deceit, denial, corruption, cover-ups, as well as the shockingly callous disregard for the victims of the abuser.

Unlike Penn State, there has been no Freeh Report on an investigation of the leadership of the Catholic Church. No independent oversight by a governing board of religious and laity has led to prosecution of responsible hierarchy. Church leaders did not step down — rather, many were promoted while priest predators were neither prosecuted nor removed, but were moved to prey on other innocent children.

The church chose to exercise further controls not on its governance system but rather by reasserting its power via revival of medieval-like inquisitions. Penn State officials did not generate headline-grabbing disputes and protests to serve as distractions from its sex-abuse scandal, unlike the Church’s: small-minded, nitpicking complaints related to Sr. Elizabeth Johnson’s 2007 book, Quest for the Living God, orchestrated by Donald Cardinal Wuerl and his USCCB Committee on Doctrine, and the USCCB’s campaign against the Healthcare Law led by its president, Timothy Cardinal Dolan — like Wuerl a Romanized American prelate.

When combined with the Vatican’s hostile takeover of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the end result has been unprecedented media coverage of these issues but little if any mention of the church’s horrific sex abuse scandals and cover-ups — all too many of which can be compared with the Penn State scandal.

Frank G. Splitt

Mount Prospect