Ethics

Church Warned of Priest Abuse Problem Decades Earlier

By Ed Brayton

The National Catholic Reporter has an article documenting that the Catholic Church hierarchy was warned from within in the 1950s about the serious problem of sexual abuse of children by priests, decades before doing anything about it that didn't just cause more abuse.

As early as the mid-1950s, decades before the clergy sexual-abuse crisis broke publicly across the U.S. Catholic landscape, the founder of a religious order that dealt regularly with priest sex abusers was so convinced of their inability to change that he searched for an island to purchase with the intent of using it as a place to isolate such offenders, according to documents recently obtained by NCR.

Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paracletes, an order established in 1947 to deal with problem priests, wrote regularly to bishops in the United States and to Vatican officials, including the pope, of his opinion that many sexual abusers in the priesthood should be laicized immediately.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on April 06, 2009 (boomark / email).