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The Catholic Church’s Unholy Stain

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The Editorial Board
, New York Times
The Catholic Church’s Unholy Stain

Pope Francis has summoned senior bishops from around the world for the first global gathering of Roman Catholic leaders to address the crisis of clerical pedophilia. The action is long overdue, and the outcome cannot be yet more apologies and pledges of better behavior. The unending revelations of clerical sexual abuse and cover-ups demand radical, public, convincing systemic change.

The latest barrage of revelations and developments — including a gut-wrenching report by a grand jury in Pennsylvania detailing seven decades of sexual abuse of at least 1,000 children, and probably thousands more, by more than 300 Catholic priests — has left no question that Francis’ legacy will be decided by how he confronts this crisis. It is devouring the Roman church — erasing trust in its hierarchs, dismaying the faithful and blackening its image. To be meaningful, any further response must include openly addressing allegations that the pope was himself party to a cover-up.

The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, met with the pope Thursday to demand a full investigation into how the former archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, rose to high rank despite a long and apparently well-known history of sexual predation. As if to underscore the importance of the meeting, it coincided with an announcement that Francis had accepted the resignation of a bishop in West Virginia, Michael Bransfield, and ordered an investigation into allegations he had sexually harassed adults.

The current archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, was also en route to the Vatican to discuss his own possible resignation over a former posting in Pittsburgh.

The crisis has been further complicated by a scathing public letter from a former Vatican envoy to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, accusing Francis of lifting sanctions against McCarrick. The accusations are tainted by Viganò's open hostility to Francis, and his bigoted view that homosexuality is at the root of the sexual abuse.

But the Viganò letter, the culture wars it reveals within the church, the McCarrick affair and even the Pennsylvania grand jury report must not deflect attention from the core of the crisis. They are only the latest in a string of scandals and revelations in the 16 years since The Boston Globe first shed light in 2002 on the systematic cover-up of pedophilia among Boston priests by Cardinal Bernard Law, forcing his resignation and unleashing a torrent of similar accounts.

The Pennsylvania report on abuse of children ran to 1,400 pages, and it is sickening. “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades,” the grand jury wrote.

That report has prompted attorneys general in New York and New Jersey to open their own investigations into whether institutions covered up sexual abuse, and prosecutors in Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska and New Mexico have said they plan to do the same. In Germany, Spiegel Online wrote on Wednesday that it had seen a report commissioned by the German bishops’ conference detailing 3,677 cases of abuse by at least 1,670 clergymen from 1946 to 2014.

This is not some flaw to be healed through spiritual renewal. This is a pattern of widespread and gross violations of the power a man of God has over a child, and of cover-ups stretching from Pennsylvania and Boston to every corner of the United States and the world.

How have so many pedophiles been allowed into the priesthood? How could so many bishops have so consistently looked the other way or worse, paid off victims or foisted predatory priests on unsuspecting parishes elsewhere? Many explanations have been offered: the all-male priesthood and the celibacy imposed on Catholic priests; the elitism, careerism and clericalism of the church hierarchy; the lack of transparency or accountability among bishops.

All that must be addressed by the pope and his bishops, but not only by them. DiNardo and his delegation of American bishops intend to demand not only a full investigation into questions surrounding McCarrick, but also better mechanisms for reporting abuse by bishops, and for resolving complaints. Critically, the bishops have listed “substantial leadership by laity” as one of their goals.

That is essential. Francis has made strides in changing the culture of the papacy and in making the Catholic Church more inclusive, and he seems now to have grasped the gravity of the sickness afflicting the church. But for what is sure to be a defining struggle of his papacy, he will need to look beyond the cardinals, prelates and priests — indeed beyond himself — for answers and solutions.

Any credible effort at reforming the clerical culture of the church, restoring trust, instituting accountability and eradicating the cancer of sexual abuse will require the full participation of experts, prosecutors, victims and many others outside the clergy and the church — women as well as men. If that runs against tradition and practice, so be it.

Trump Honors Only One Victim in Puerto Rico: Himself

If you’ve stopped being surprised by the flagrancy of President Donald Trump’s deceptions, you’re not alone. Yet the president’s effort on Thursday to deny the nearly 3,000 American lives lost in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria last year — and to accuse Democrats of inflating the death toll for political gain — should amaze even the most jaundiced Trump-watcher.

Trump delivered his latest bit of mendacity with a one-two presidential Twitter punch:

“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the island AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000 ...”

“ ... This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!”

For most presidents, thousands of dead Americans would be a cause for grief. For Trump, they are evidence only of his own victimhood.

On Wednesday, even as Hurricane Florence bore down on the Carolinas, there he was, whining on Twitter that his team had done “an unappreciated great job in Puerto Rico, even though an inaccessible island with very poor electricity and a totally incompetent Mayor of San Juan.”

Unsurprisingly, the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, took exception to the president’s boasting, tweeting: “This is what denial following neglect looks like: Mr. Pres in the real world people died on your watch. YOUR LACK OF RESPECT IS APPALLING!”

Cruz was joined in her anguish by other Puerto Rican officials, Republicans in Florida and Democrats in Congress, none of whom share Trump’s rosy assessment of his disaster response. Nor, for that matter, do a majority of Puerto Ricans, more than half of whom recently rated Trump’s response “poor,” with a quarter more rating it only “fair.”

To be sure, the recovery effort, after a slow start, wound up being substantial, and Puerto Rico’s shoddy infrastructure was one of many extenuating challenges. Even so, there is little question that things could have been handled much better — Trump’s memorable chucking of paper towels at devastated islanders notwithstanding. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Government Accountability Office have found as much.

Certainly, it must have been vexing, perhaps even confusing, for Trump last month when the storm’s death toll was revised sharply upward, from 64 people to 2,975. This shift was not a result of partisan trickery, but of the preliminary findings of a study by the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University. The study is continuing, meaning that the numbers could shift again.

Trump seems incapable of processing new information or learning from mistakes. Instead, he did what he always does: reject inconvenient data in favor of a story in which he is the hero. In the president’s view, increases in the official death toll cannot possibly stem from a more comprehensive analysis. They must stem from yet another conspiracy by his political enemies. The 3,000 lives lost, in other words, are all about him.

Democrats don’t need to lift a finger to make him look bad. He is managing that all on his own.

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