Loading ...A voice that cried in the wilderness…
flockwoodThere’s an absolutely extraordinary story about a priest who tried to warn the Vatican about the dangers posed by pedophile priests.
According to the National Catholic Reporter, “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.”
The story continues:
“In a 1957 letter to an unnamed archbishop, Fitzgerald said, “These men, Your Excellency, are devils and the wrath of God is upon them and if I were a bishop I would tremble when I failed to report them to Rome for involuntary layization [sic].” The letter, addressed to “Most dear Cofounder,” was apparently to Archbishop Edwin V. Byrne of Santa Fe, N.M., who was considered a cofounder of the Paraclete facility at Jemez Springs and a good friend of Fitzgerald.”
If the church had listened to Fitzgerald, it might have saved $2 billion and spared thousands of victims.
April 7th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Fr. Fitzgerald originally founded the order to help alcoholic priests. Later, in the ’50s, when pedophile priests began popping up, the church had nowhere else to go but to send them to him. He originally didn’t want to take them, but ultimately did, I suppose on the theory that they had nowhere else to go. I read one quote in which he said that he wished that the church could just buy an island somewhere and put all these priests on the island where they couldn’t hurt anyone else. I suppose he thought of the isolation of Jemez Springs as like that island.
Even this didn’t stop the victimization; one of the largest lawsuits brought against a Catholic Diocese was brought against the Diocese of Santa Fe, the diocese in which Jemez Springs is located. The priests being “treated” there were allowed to serve as part time priests in local churches, with the result you’d expect.
I can’t decide whether to admire or despise the Servants of the Paraclete. On the one hand, they stepped up to the plate and did something about the problem of pedophile priests. On the other hand, what they did made the problem far worse in the end, because the secrecy of the church prohibited Fr. Fitzgerald’s wisdom about the true nature of pedophiles to be widely disseminated. After Fr. Fitzgerald’s death particularly, the Servants became nothing more than another cog in the secrecy machine that ran the church: Priests were sneaked off, often in the middle of the night, to Jemez Springs, where they stayed awhile, then brought back by their bishops, usually to another parish, and always without disclosure of why they had been sent away.
The tragedy caused by this is unspeakable, and those who really are to blame, the archbishops and bishops, and even the popes, have never been, and will never be, brought to justice.
April 7th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Caleb – Regarding your last sentence….Yes, they will! Some already have been. I wouldn’t want to stand before God with that on my record.