Monsters in Black

I wonder what if it had been me? I was an altar boy from 1959 to 1964. I attended a large Catholic elementary school in one of the largest parishes in Brooklyn, New York. It was so big, we had a bishop as our pastor with about five priests working under him. You felt special being an altar boy. This was before the changes of Vatican II. We would have weekly meetings in the church before school to learn the Latin responses for mass. We could carrying our cassocks and surpluses to school if we had an early weekday mass, or had to leave class to serve a funeral mass. We sometimes got tips from the families for those. I remember a couple of bus trips to the old Madison Square Garden to see a New York Ranger hockey game. We had a big, young athletic priest who as in charge of the altar boys. I heard he was a pretty good basketball player. We all thought it was an innocent time. We now know evil was lurking then, and for decades before and after, when some of the very men we held above all reproach, were committing unspeakable crimes against children like me, and their superiors were covering it up. I often think was I just lucky it didn’t happen to me.

I never suspected any priest of doing anything wrong. I never heard other kids talk about such things. But, I wonder now, as an adult, what would I have done if something did happen? Would I have resisted? Would I have told my parents? My father used to go to Mass on Sunday to set an example for me. My mother was more devoted to the church, but she couldn’t handle the modernizing changes brought on by Vatican II. Guitars on the altar weren’t for her. I’d like to think they would have believed me if I told them something had happened. I do think they would have. But we have all heard the horror stories of the victims of priest sexual abuse. They were groomed by the predator priests. Their parents held the priest is such high esteem, they could never imagine such a betrayal. Thousands of children suffered years of abuse in silence. Their lives destroyed by drug abuse, depression, and even suicide.

The Boston Globe’s investigative unit broke the priest sexual abuse scandal wide open in 2002 with some of the finest journalism in our lifetime. The church was criminally slow in responding to the cancer that had spread world wide. Law enforcement officials around the country started to investigate. In 2005 and 2011, grand juries in Philadelphia issued reports of widespread priest sexual abuse, and the cover up by the cardinal at the head of the archdiocese. The district attorney got the first conviction of a monsignor for covering up and transferring priests accused of sexual abuse of children. Now, a Pennsylvania grand jury investigating six other dioceses found over 300 priests abused 1,000 victims over decades, and the cover up reached all the way to the Vatican. There are now accusations by a former Vatican official to the US that Pope Francis knew about abuse allegations against former Washington DC Cardinal Theodore McCarrick years ago, and didn’t force him to resign until this summer. McCarrick is accused of abusing at least one minor, but he’s also accused of abusing adult seminarians over years.

When the pope was questioned by reporters about these allegations, he said, “I won’t say a word about it”. He has apologized and said the church failed to protect children, and will make sure it never happens again. All this has been said before. The church has proven it can’t police itself. Most of the offenses committed over the years can’t be prosecuted because of statue of limitation laws. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who oversaw the grand jury, is pushing to change the law in his state so that the statue of limitations will not run out on such crimes. Attorneys general in five other states have now followed Shapiro’s lead, and have started their own investigations into possible sexual abuse by the clergy.

Walter Robinson, the editor-at-large, who runs the paper’s Spotlight unit wrote a piece last week about the Pennsylavania grand jury and the scope of the scandal. He wrote, “In 2002, some theologians declared the scandal to be the church’s most serious crisis since the Reformation. It has now morphed into a catastrophe with the potential to be far worse than that historic schism. In our lifetime, there have been few cataclysmic moments when the gulf between good and evil has been so wide and so evident…It is a betrayal of staggering dimensions.” It has taken too long, but the curtain has been pulled back by journalists and determined law inforcement officials to reveal the monsters in black. It’s now up to us to make sure those responsible are held accountable no matter how high the cover up reaches.