Horrible Acts Too Horrible to Release
In the AP’s story about the Milwaukee diocese having to release its records of priestly sex abuse and shuffling priests around to protect Holy Mother Church, one part jumped out at me:
Listecki, who succeeded Dolan in Milwaukee, said Tuesday in his weekly email to priests, parish leaders and others that he hoped releasing the documents would allow the church to move forward. But he also warned that descriptions of abuse can be “ugly.”
“I worry about the reactions of abuse survivors when confronted again with this material and pray it doesn’t have a negative effect on them,” he wrote.
which I think translates to “the things we did to those people are so horrible, we don’t want to hurt them further by releasing the details of our horrible actions to the public.”
This deserves to be the the prime textbook example of a self-serving rationalization.
And here I thought confession was supposed to be good for the soul.
If the Church cared about victims that much they’d stop being responsible for creating so many of them in the first place.
Well, yeah. But I thought they were smarter than to utter such obvious self-serving rationalizations out loud in public and such.
Or have years of studying theology left priests unable to smell bullshit?