More church scandal

“It’s with a heavy and sad heart I acknowledge that some of our priests and bishops have abused the grace and beauty of the priesthood. They have sexually abused innocent children.”

That's Sioux City Bishop R. Walker Nickless yesterday, at a news conference set up to announce what their own investigation into accusations of sexual abuse had uncovered. The numbers are telling: between 1948 and 1995, 29 of the priests in the diocese were accused of sexual abuse. Those priests were named and listed; most of them are deceased. None had been exposed before.

Sexual abuse is a crime that violates bodies and souls. The number of such transgressions is horrifying, but the abuse created--and presumably still does create--yet another horror that only adds to the dishonor: when it's covered, when the abusive priests are not exposed and punished, the victim can't help but feel not only violated and but also powerless.

It's been 17 years since the Boston Globe revealed systematic abuse in the Boston diocese. Last month a grand jury in Pennsylvania determined that thousands of children were abused by over 300 priests. In Australia, just this week, a Cardinal, Father George Pell, who was the Treasurer at the Vatican, was found guilty of abuse, the highest ranking member of the Roman Catholic priesthood yet convicted. 

No religious fellowship is without sin. Right here, the community still suffers from the effects of popular teacher who abused kids in the Christian school my own grandchildren attended--and still do. The largest Protestant denomination in America, the Southern Baptists, a fellowship that disdains centralized governing powers and lauds the independence of individual congregations, had to come together to determine what could be done about what it couldn't help but consider a rising tide of sexual abuse among its clergy.

Not long ago, a Vatican woman's magazine ran the story of a nun victimized by a priest. Pope Francis himself admitted the problem. “It’s a path that we’ve been on,” he said. “Pope Benedict had the courage to dissolve a female congregation which was at a certain level, because this slavery of women had entered it - slavery, even to the point of sexual slavery - on the part of clerics or the founder.”

All over the world, as we speak, Roman Catholic priests who have never done anything unseemly, never hurt people under their care, are, as we speak, readying themselves for mass, reading, praying, practicing spiritual disciplines too numerous to mention. The church has countless good, good men in the priesthood, men who love God and selflessly serve others.

Years and years ago, when I was a college student, my parents called me just to talk. Mid-conversation, my mother started crying--I could hear her over the phone. A preacher in town had run off with another woman. He wasn't my parents' preacher; he was the preacher from the church down the street. "Everybody is so sad," she said, or something like that. What he did--it effects all of us. That's what she meant.

And it does. The abused are the real victims. They need our help and God's love. 

But all of those--of us-- who believe in the institutional church are also affected. Our souls too, in a less punishing way, are abused.