With Pope on victims’ side, time to get rid of paedophiliac priests

A recently streaming ABC News video clip was terse: A grand jury report accused more than 300 Catholic priests of molesting children in Pennsylvania, United States.

It censures church officials for routinely and deliberately covering up offenders on excuses that they were only involved in “horseplay, wrestling and inappropriate contact”.

Horseplay is an old-fashioned rough noisy play in which people push and hit each other for fun.

The commentator in the ABC News insists that what happened in Pennsylvania was child sexual abuse, including rape, period!

With more than 1,000 children abused over a span of seven decades, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has described what happened as a “moral catastrophe”.

MONEY

The gravity of the matter is such that it has not only swept away a former cardinal and archbishop of Washington, Theodore Edgar McCarrick, but also moved Pope Francis to describe what happened as cause for “shame and sorrow”. The Pope is on the victims’ side, he has said.

It is tempting to dismiss what is happening in the US as none of our business.

A recent chat with a Catholic priest reveals a similar catastrophe unfolding in Kenya, and which could make the US clergy sex scandal pale in significance.

The priest spoke strictly on the understanding that his name would not be mentioned because of the sensitivity of the matter and fear of victimisation.

He views the Kenyan scandal as having economic underpinnings, partly because of the mode of recruitment of diocesan priests.

Many of them hail from poor families and join the ministry for socio-economic reasons, he said. For some priests and nuns, ministry has nothing to do with vocation.

EDUCATION

That something is wrong with the recruitment is their fixation with accumulating academic degrees.

As the priest asks: “When are you going to minister when you are all the time studying?” No wonder, for many, once they achieve their educational goals they quit.

And that’s not all: Many priests who stay on owe their loyalty to their clans. They are captives of culture and their families expect them to sire children to perpetuate the clan.

Many parents do not support their children’s vocations and, instead of weeping in shame when they are handed their priest sons’ children, applaud them for giving them grandchildren.

Here, the much-touted vows of poverty, chastity don’t count for much. The priest reserves his harshest criticism for the church leadership.

Instead of punishing offenders, the bishops often move offending priests to other parishes or reward them with further education opportunities.

But it cannot continue for long, and that is why the Pope is confronting the scandal head-on.

VOCATION

His letter “to the People of God”, issued from the Vatican ahead of his recent visit to Ireland for the World Meeting of Families, confirms his resolve to chart a different path in dealing with predator priests.

“The heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to Heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced,” the Pope’s letter reads.

“But their outcry was more powerful than all the measures meant to silence it, or sought even to resolve it by decisions that increased its gravity by falling into complicity.”

Naturally, the Western media are treating the letter with scepticism and a wait-and-see attitude.

Does the Opus Dei Prelature and other Catholic congregations that place a premium on a good education and a profession ahead of ordination have something to offer?

This approach treats priesthood not as a job to alleviate a priest’s personal poverty and that of the homes they come from, but as a vocation.

LAWSUITS

Opus Dei priests are only ordained after they qualify as engineers, lawyers or accountants.

Such priests are more exposed and have most likely made up their minds on what they want to do than the ones who are recruited straight from school.

The priest I talked to warns that the Catholic Church in Kenya may be sitting on a time bomb.

Anticipating lawsuits and compensations when victims of clergy paedophile sex finally speak out, he quipped: “We will even sell the cathedral to pay the victims, if the law works.” That’s how bad things are.

Ms Kweyu is a freelance journalist and consulting editor. [email protected]