Ugh. Reading the new revelations about the decades-long sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, I have to skip all the horrifying details after the first wave of nausea hits. Dear God, these men were monsters.
 
 
Is there really any worse sin than violating the trust of a child, destroying their innocence, emotionally crippling them for life – merely to sate your own sick, twisted desires?
 
According to the just-released grand jury report, the scope of the abuse is staggering; they turned up some 300 abusive priests and more than 1,000 victims. And that’s just in Pennsylvania! As John Zmirak quipped, makes you wonder about the other 49 states, doesn’t it? Indeed.
 
Even more tragic, it’s the church’s own willful blindness that amplified the wickedness by several magnitudes. John Daniel Davidson, writing about this nightmare at The Federalist, makes the point that the enablers share considerable guilt ~

Then there is the insidious evil of the bishops who covered up this abuse. The bishop in the Diocese of Erie who, despite a priest’s admission that he had assaulted at least a dozen boys, wrote to thank him for “all you have done for God’s people … The Lord, who sees in private, will reward.” Or the bishop in Scranton, writing to the priest who had arranged for an abortion for his victim, “This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are. I too share your grief.”

 
Evil upon evil.
 

Beyond the incalculable, psychological damage done to the victims themselves there will be an inevitable church-wide fallout. This whole sordid mess will have a corrosive effect, not just on the Roman Catholic Church (and by the way, Protestants aren’t exactly immune to these evil acts), but I believe, on the entire Christian Church – all denominations.
 
While this wickedness is diabolical – emphatically not of Jesus Christ – these men are supposed to be His representatives on earth. Instead they’ve betrayed the children in their care, their vows, their God. These are grave transgressions, as Davidson explains ~

This is not what one expects from the successors to the apostles, from men who are “living instruments of Christ the eternal priest,” in the words of Vatican II. A Catholic priest is not a religious bureaucrat authorized to conduct church business, but a living icon of Christ himself, one who stands in persona Christi, “in the person of Christ,” making Christ physically present in the church.
 
Bishops are both priests and overseers of the local parishes for which they are responsible. They are the shepherds, the protectors, and they have manifestly failed.

 
Back in 2002 when many of these scandals first surfaced, tens of thousands of Catholics fled the church in disgust. Others just stopped attending mass entirely. How many more will leave now – their faith completely shattered? And how many other marginal Christians of other denominations will also walk away, unable to disassociate the grievously, sinful men from an all-loving, ever-faithful God.

 
This is not His doing. This, as Davidson points out, is all on the shepherds, for leading the flock astray ~

The crisis did not arise from the teachings of the Catholic Church, it arose from the abandonment of those teachings by a faction of U.S. priests, bishops, and theologians amid the ferment of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and ‘70s.

The crisis is one of fidelity to the word of God. And while it will have done lasting damage, ultimately the one true Church of Jesus Christ will prevail – long after these evil men are rotting in hell.
 
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Related:
Practicing Satanists In the Hierarchy of the Institutional/Antichurch: The Other Shoe That Still Needs To Drop – And Will, Eventually ~ Brutally honest as always, Ann Barnhardt addresses this horror show from a faithful Catholic perspective
 
Episcopal Sodomy: Wuerl Defiant ~ Pennsylvania is just the beginning. Check out these videos from Church Militant
 

In the face of horror, the Catholic Church is worried about PR ~ From the NYPost ~

The most painful aspect of all this is the blasé response of many American hierarchs and especially those, like Washington Archbishop Donald Cardinal Wuerl, who are implicated in the report. Wuerl and his colleagues have treated the report as a PR headache rather than a moral and spiritual wake-up call. They have acted like corporate reputation managers rather than successors to the Apostles. Instead of venting prophetic anger, they’ve taken refuge behind flacks.