Free The Silence We Keep: A Nun's View of the Catholic Priest Scandal by Karol Jackowski Page A

century. This is the twenty-first century. Do I know who they’re talking about? No. But do the media, the priesthood, and the Vatican? I think they do. Apparently there are quite a few Vatican-appointed “dominoes” lined up and ready to fall.
    The first truth we see when we look at the Catholic priesthood today is the way in which Church Fathers are making the daily news. That’s the Catholic priesthood the whole world sees and knows. More hidden crimes and scandals being revealed, with more incriminating evidence that the buck does stop at the Vatican. All we see in response is the Catholic Church’s attempt at whitewashing the issue. Repeatedly we are encouraged by the priesthood to believe that “this too shall pass.” And it will—but not before revealing its darkest and most painful truths.
    It’s as though it’s in fulfillment of Scripture, and clearly by the power of a very Holy Spirit, that the silence kept for centuries is destined to be spoken now, bringing all the dark deeds and deadly sins of the fathers into the light of day. “Nothing is concealed that is not being revealed, and nothing hidden that will not become known” (Matt. 10:26). We were warned by Jesus more than two thousand years ago that this would happen. And even though it did take that long for us to see, we’re beginning to.
    I believe what we see in the Catholic priesthood is the beginning of the end. We see that the Church Fathers don’t practice what they preach when it comes to celibacy, homosexuality, birth control, abortion, and all sexual activity outside marriage. Sex scandals and criminal activity continue to spin out of control, as does public ridicule of clerical crimes, now topping the monologues of nearly every talk show host. That’s part of what we have to look forward to in the months and years to come. This priesthood has made of itself a laughingstock, and we are just beginning to see the heights and depths of the hypocrisy, scandal, and betrayal. And what’s to come is likely to get far worse before it gets better, especially given what feels like the divine forces of Fate at work in the unfolding of events.
    Every time I get news of another soul-stunning scandal, as happens almost daily, I can’t help but feel that we are being touched once again by a hidden God. Some huge truth gets set free and some enormous evil once again becomes its own undoing. Everything that’s been concealed is being revealed. So out of control is criminal sexual activity in the priesthood that they cannot help but end up in the daily news, not even while attending the pope’s 2002 Summer Youth Rally in Toronto. The news from the end of the rally revealed two priests in their sixties from New Jersey were arrested downtown by police one night as part of a pimping and prostitution sting. According to church authorities, neither priest had a previous record. As one critic said, “I bet all the pedophile priests attended the pope’s Youth Rally.” I bet the same. If this is not the beginning of the end of this “laughable” priesthood, then what in God’s name is it? When all the Church Fathers inspire today is anger, division, disgust, and ridicule, we can be absolutely sure that these are not “men of God” and clearly not the priesthood of Jesus Christ. The deadly sins of Church Fathers are being heaped upon all of us whether we likeit or not, coming to us with the divine forces of Fate and all the signs of the hidden presence of God—and an angry God at that.
    We are now all forced to see that sexual permissiveness and deviance has an old, unreformed soul in the Catholic priesthood. An April 2002 article by Maureen Orth in Vanity Fair on the indicted pedophile priest Paul Shanley quotes Richard Cardinal Cushing, who was at the time the archbishop of Boston and was leading a retreat for seminarians, that the theologian Fr. Richard McBrien (two years behind Shanley in the seminary) never forgot:
Men, if you’re going to do