Judiciary & Law

Description:

Attorneys for victims Adam and Moffat asked if there are secret archives at the Seattle archdiocese.

"Every diocese has such archives. They are mandated by church law," Ryan said.

The sensitive information contained in the secret archives, Ryan admitted, would include documents relating to priests who have sexually abused minors.

The Church cannot and will not fix itself. The very reality of the systemic abuse in the Irish institutions (and elsewhere as well) reveals a deep disdain for people by those charged with leading the Church. There has been an abandonment of the fundamental values that are supposed to vivify the Church if indeed these values were ever really internalized by many in positions of power. There is something radically wrong with the institutional Catholic Church. This is painfully obvious because it allows systemic abuse and radical dishonesty to coexist with its self-proclaimed identity as the Kingdom of God on earth....

The institutional Church is defensively changing its approach to the systematic abuse all too slowly and only because it is forced to do so by external forces it cannot control. The Irish government commission is one and the U.S. legal system is another.


Laura said she was deeply relieved when she determined she hadn't become pregnant by the priest, and deeply angry that, although she saw him many times afterward, he never said he was sorry. "I confronted him, I yelled at him. He kept telling me it was OK, it was normal. I kept insisting it was not OK. You could see from his attitude that he didn't see anything wrong with it."

Until the rape, she had retained her virginity by "being very aggressive" with harassing priests. "I kept threatening them. I told them 'I will expose you,' " she said.

Some nuns tolerate the harassment and even comply with demands for sex "because they don't know any better," Laura said. "A lot of them are ignorant. They enter the convent at a young age. Many come from very poor backgrounds. Their parents are illiterate and may not even have enough to eat." When a daughter from such a family enters religious life, "it raises your status. Families are very proud of it."Women stay despite problems, she believes, "because many have a better life in the convent than they would have at home."

"The nuns don't study theology," she said. "A lot of the priests have been to Rome to study, and when they come back, the women think they know everything, so whatever the priests tell them they believe. They believe them when they say it's OK to have sex. They think it's normal, and they become very defensive" if someone tells them it isn't right.

"Maybe these women will eventually realize they were used," she said. "But I am sure that for many it will take a long time."

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