Not much of a headline anymore, sadly.
Richard A. Emerson is being sued by the family of a sixteen-year-old boy who claims he was molested by Emerson when he was eleven and a member of the St. Thomas More Parish, where Emerson was a priest. This was far from the only allegation of abuse for Emerson, who was de-frocked in 2006. Two monks and another priest, all victims-rights advocates, reviewed Emerson’s career in the priesthood and reported repeated incidents of inappropriate behavior with young boys dating back as early as 1978.
And yes, Pope Benedict was made aware of this problem priest back when he was Cardinal Ratzinger. According to the Chicago Tribune:
In a 2004 letter to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who would later become Pope Benedict XVI, Bishop Dale Melczek of the diocese of Gary wrote that, since 1992, “on a number of occasions priests and laypeople have expressed their concern to me about Father Emerson.” The letter said Melczek warned Emerson about taking boys on vacations and letting them stay in his rectory.
“There were never allegations of any kind of sexual misconduct or sexual abuse. But I thought that the behavior was inappropriate, and thus I warned him about it,” Melczek said when asked about the letter Wednesday. “I didn’t have any reason to believe there was something amiss going on.”
Well, sure he had reason to believe something amiss was going on. Otherwise, why the letter? Why “a number of allegations”? If you were a middle manager at a paper clip company and you received several reports that one of your employees was raping children in the on-site daycare, wouldn’t you have reason to believe something amiss was going on? Sure you would.
What else would you do? Would you pull his work history? Would you contact an organization that specializes in these things for assistance with getting to the bottom of this potentially hideous problem? Would you contact an attorney? Would you call the police at the first sign of evidence?
But of course, none of these things happened. At least, not for thirty years, they didn’t.
Because everyone from the top down wanted to avoid a scandal.
And how did they handle this scandal? According to a 2005 article about the same priest, Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk, said it seems to be such a common problem to have abusers in leadership positions in their diocese that there is a procedure for scandal maintenance in place.
“How do you handle a scandal? One way is to send them out to the boondocks or move them around a lot,” Sipe said. “But the other way is to draw them close to the bishop so they can be better managed. You draw them into the chancery. I’ve seen dozens of cases in which these guys are chancellors or other leaders within their diocese.”
Well, that worked out well, didn’t it?
Now, in the United States at least, Catholic priests have the same reputation as frat boys. Sure, not all of them are pedophiles or rapists, but still, don’t leave your children alone with them or leave your drink unattended when you go to one of their parties.
The problem in dealing with this, as I see it, is two-fold. One is obviously with the organization itself, which is more concerned with power and control than with the well-being of children and families, and instead of working with the authorities, decided to handle the issue by covering it up and refusing to punish the offending priests.
The second problem, I’m sorry to say, is us. Our tendency to treat religious leaders with respect and deference solely because they claim to be all buddy-buddy with God. Nobody wants to be seen as being bigoted or intolerant against someone’s religion, even when presented with overwhelming evidence that their leaders are covering up a horrible crime. If this happened, say, within a Little League organization in Akron, Ohio, and it came out that everyone on the board knew their coaches were raping countless children and they covered it up, heads would be rolling all over the place and the entire organization would have gone down the toilet, and everyone would be rounded up and headed off to prison. And rightfully so.
