As you probably know through several
news streams, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles released files on Thursday of
priests accused of molesting children and removed retired Archbishop Cardinal
Mahoney and an auxiliary bishop from duties in the archdiocese. You may review
the files released by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles here.
One of the things that caught my attention was that the
period when the greatest amount of abuse incidents took place was between 1959
and 1989, just before the dawn and right after the sunset of the "sexual revolution". You may see the graphic provided by the archdiocese below. Click it to make enlarge it:
As I went through some of the files and therefore my
impressions are contingent on further study, yet I also found out that many of
the abusive priests had been born at the turn of the 20th century
and had been ordained in the first half of that century. I had expected to find
the bulk of the abusers trained in post-Conciliar seminaries where priestly
spirituality had been replaced by narcissistic psychology, and where men
suffering from same-sex attraction had been admitted to the priesthood willy-nilly
without attention for possible consequences further down the road; but in at
least half of the ordinations, this was clearly not the case. Several abuse incidents were heterosexual in nature, yet still perpetrated on underage women. A number resulted in pregnancies. Overall, this shows that the rot in our priesthood
started well before conventional post-conciliar dates advanced by many who
object to post-conciliar developments. A "restoration" of pre-conciliar discipline, structures, and methods in seminaries and houses of formation does not present a cure-all.
The lesson I draw from all this is that we ought to pray,
fast, and sacrifice for our bishops, priests, deacons, and our consecrated religious.
Our men (and women, although none are to be found among the ranks of the abusers
in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, some enabled the abusers but many more protested furiously but were ignored or silenced) have unresolved sins and fractures in their
personalities making them susceptible to particular sins. In this they are no
different than the rest of us, but they need our prayerful support in virtue of
their calling and mission. Jesus called them to be “wounded healers” but the
fact that so many of them were unable to heal and voluntarily killed the souls
of so many innocents should give us pause.
Let us make this upcoming Lent a period of sacrifice and penance
for our men in holy orders and men and women religious, that they may be
strengthened at the time of temptation, and that the victims of their abuse be
healed and restored in body, mind, and soul.
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