{"id":7720,"date":"2004-03-15T08:29:12","date_gmt":"2004-03-15T08:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/our_fathers.html"},"modified":"2004-03-15T08:29:12","modified_gmt":"2004-03-15T08:29:12","slug":"our_fathers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/our_fathers.html","title":{"rendered":"Our Fathers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Globe reviews<\/a> a new book on the sexual abuse scandal<\/a><\/p>\n

On the other side of the ledger, France’s righteous zeal for the survivors\/victims also leads him, now and then, to rely on hyperbole and interpretive liberties that serve, unfortunately, to weaken his credibility. Alcoholism, we are told, “ran endemic” among the nuns and priests who administered Catholic schools. (No one doubts that alcoholism was a problem; no one has demonstrated, however, that it was rampant.) As the Catholic Church entered the 1990s, France judges, the priesthood was thoroughly discredited and “seemed in danger of vanishing.” Hardly.<\/p>\n

Apart from such quibbles, the overall tone and content of the book are driven by the determination to demonstrate that a major “cause” of the scandal was the church’s erroneous teachings on sexuality, reinforced by “repressive” attitudes and unwise practices, including mandatory celibacy for priests.<\/p>\n

France may well be correct in this assumption, but it remains nothing more than an assumption in the absence of careful scrutiny and examination of the larger picture of Catholic priesthood in the latter half of the 20th century. Such scrutiny will require something more solid than “instant history” whose tragic and poignant character is allowed to eclipse every other dimension of Catholic ministry. One searches long and hard in “Our Fathers” for evidence that most priests, even in the disgraced Boston archdiocese, were neither pedophiles nor abusers but instead humble and often heroic servants of the people of God. That they accomplished this underreported feat while laboring under the presumed burden of celibacy and other restrictions on freedom of sexual self-expression is also part of the dramatic story of these years. That story cannot be told without careful consultation of this difficult but rewarding account by David France. But neither can it be told by this alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Globe reviews a new book on the sexual abuse scandal On the other side of the ledger, France’s righteous zeal for the survivors\/victims also leads him, now and then, to rely on hyperbole and interpretive liberties that serve, unfortunately, to weaken his credibility. Alcoholism, we are told, “ran endemic” among the nuns and priests…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nOur Fathers - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/our_fathers.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Our Fathers - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Globe reviews a new book on the sexual abuse scandal On the other side of the ledger, France’s righteous zeal for the survivors\/victims also leads him, now and then, to rely on hyperbole and interpretive liberties that serve, unfortunately, to weaken his credibility. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}