Dan Broadbent
As I’ve written before, there seems to be almost no end to the horror that is the Catholic Church.
It’s time to quit the Catholic Church.
We had the predator priests in Pennsylvania who ran a child pornography ring. Then there was the cover-up and minimization. There was even the story of how Pope Francis, before he was a pope, oversaw a situation where deaf children were groomed for sexual abuse.
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And now, Aaron Schrank of NPR reports that known predator priests were sent into Los Angeles immigrant communities where they knew people would not speak up about the abuse.
Seriously.
Catholic Church leaders in Los Angeles for years shuffled predator priests into non-English-speaking immigrant communities. That pattern was revealed in personnel documents released in a decades-old legal settlement between victims of child sex abuse by Catholic priests and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
This goes far beyond willful ignorance and ineptitude of leadership. This is pure evil.
After Father Carlos Rodriguez abused a child in south Los Angeles, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles sent him into an out-of-state treatment program for pedophile priests. Then, local officials brought him back to minister to Spanish speakers in the Office of Family Life.
While this seems like just another example of the pure evil that’s baked into the Catholic Church, what makes this story different is the intent by the church.
It’s time to quit the Catholic Church.
Tony DeMarco is an attorney who has represented clergy sexual abuse survivors for well over a decade, and he spoke to NPR about how extensive the sexual abuse and the subsequent cover-ups were. The Catholic Church viewed immigrant communities as prime targets for known predator priests because they knew people in these communities were unlikely to report being sexually abused.
“Blatant statements as to ‘there is no need to take corrective action, because folks who were undocumented won’t report,'” DeMarco says. “That’s in some of these files.”
There are dozens of examples of immigrant communities thrown under the bus.
They singled out non-English speaking communities because they knew they would make for better victims for the predator priests.
There’s a good reason Latino Catholics view this issue differently than the rest of the Church, says Cecilia González-Andrieu, who teaches theology at Loyola Marymount University.
“The Latino Church was already in a really painful spot and needed the Catholic Church with moral authority to continue to fight for our human rights,” she says.
Immigrant Catholics depend on the Church to speak out on issues related to legal status, poverty and healthcare.
“With this scandal cropping up, that voice is now completely gone from the conversation,” González-Andrieu says.
Thankfully, sexual abuse survivors all over the state of California are calling for the state’s Attorney General to investigate the allegations and cover-up. After what we’ve seen in Pennsylvania, I can only imagine how much worse the reports of what happened in California will be.
And there will be more reports, from more states and dioceses, because this was not a case of just a few “bad apples.” This was Catholic Church-endorsed sexual abuse of children all over the world.
The Catholic Church has been able to run the most efficient and longest-running child sexual abuse ring in the history of the world. No other organization in the history of history has outperformed their efficiency in grooming children for sexual abuse, sexually abusing children, lying about the sexual abuse, covering up the sexual abuse, or paying off the victims of sexual abuse.
It’s time to quit the Catholic Church.
Given everything we know, if you still still support and stand with the Catholic Church, you are complicit with the sexual abuse of children. Period. The continued support tells the church that they literally cannot do anything wrong, and that there is no reason for them to change.
