{"id":169,"date":"2011-02-14T10:21:07","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T10:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/the-abuse-crisis-continues.html"},"modified":"2011-02-14T10:21:07","modified_gmt":"2011-02-14T10:21:07","slug":"the-abuse-crisis-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/02\/the-abuse-crisis-continues.html","title":{"rendered":"The abuse crisis continues"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Will it never end?” Michael Sean Winters asked<\/a>
\nlast week in contemplating the indictment handed up by a Philadelphia
\ngrand jury for sexual abuse against three priests, a lay teacher,
\nand–most importantly–the high archdiocesan official who managed the
\ncover-up. The answer I’d give is no, not as long as the Catholic church
\nin America is what it is.<\/p>\n

You can say that Philly was one of the toughest nuts<\/a> for critics to crack. You can hope, for his sake, that Tim Dolan of New York didn’t squirrel away<\/a>
\ntens of millions of dollars to avoid settling abuse suits when he ran
\nthe show in Milwaukee. You can enjoy the irony of outgoing Roger Mahony
\nof L.A., he of many sins, summarily dismissing<\/a> his Vicar for Clergy for assigning a parish to a priest who had abused a teenage girl in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

Then consider the latest news<\/a> from Ireland:<\/p>\n

The Pope will be officially told the Irish Catholic Church is “on the
\nedge” of national collapse and has only five to 10 years to make a
\nradical recovery by giving laymen and women a greater say in
\ndecision-making. \n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s according to Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who’s got the job
\nof reporting to the Vatican on the state of the Irish church. But if
\nO’Malley tried to deliver the same message regarding the American
\nchurch, his fellow bishops would laugh him out of town. In Ireland, they
\nunderstand that clericalism is the problem. Here, they think it’s the
\nsolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Will it never end?” Michael Sean Winters asked last week in contemplating the indictment handed up by a Philadelphia grand jury for sexual abuse against three priests, a lay teacher, and–most importantly–the high archdiocesan official who managed the cover-up. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}