Vatican City: All that glitters is not always gold. Religion is for personal life and for organized life we have secular governments
Source: USA Today
By Tim Roemer
Disappointed and angered once again by the Catholic Church, we lay people must act to protect our faith.
I have done a lifetime of public speaking, in the chambers of Congress in Washington and in a foreign country as a diplomat. But that was not enough to keep my knees from shaking when I stood up during Mass after the priest’s homily in August at St. Thomas à Becket and called out loudly: “Justice in the name of Christ. Justice for our children.”
It was righteous anger for our innocents — the hundreds of children recently revealed in a Pennsylvania grand jury report as victims of both sexual abuse and a cover-up by high-level Catholic clergy.
The Catholic Church has repeatedly tried to explain away its history of sexual abuse as a lamentable but distant part of its past. Yes, that was wrong, officials say, but it was a different time and we have changed.
Like many, the Pennsylvania report has filled me with a sense of betrayal from our church. It shows the same patterns of callousness and concealment that have become all too familiar to Catholics. In Boston, Cardinal Bernard Law presided over an empire of child sexual abuse and a cover-up. It was only through an investigation by The Boston Globe — fought at every step by the church — that we learned about the abuse.