Posted by Harcamone
When the Pope died I tended to be on the softer side of the critical scale. But others were not. Some, like Christopher Hitchens, were vicious in their loathing of him, and much of their reason was his innattention to the matter of sexual abuse of children by priests. I can certainly understand their position.
Like spawning salmon, a million memos try to fight their way up an organizational pyramid. It is shocking that the ones having to do with child sexual abuse did not make it to the top of the Roman Catholic pyramid. Or, if they did, the man at the top — the Pope — didn’t think they were worthy of his attention.
This LA Times article — or here — is explicit about an aspect of the story that is usually handled more delicately or evasively — the actual mind, personality and predator-style of a particular offending priest, Oliver O’Grady. It’s chilling to read about a videotape on which this priest described these things in his own words; even more chilling to watch actual pieces of the videotape, where you can see the face out of which the words are coming, and the weird affect that accompanies the confession. My computer loaded this a bit slowly, and stalled few times along the way. If you have a cable modem and more RAM than I do this probably won’t be a problem for you.
Father Oliver O’Grady, was, during his days as an abuser of children, under the authority of now-Cardinal of LA Archdiocese Mahoney, who was then Bishop of Stockton. Mahoney, as you will see, does not come out clean in this story.
Having, just above, written the word “father,” I am struck by the fact that the word doesn’t appear in the story, even though that was Oliver O’Grady’s title — he would have been called “Father O’Grady” by all who knew him. That omission — in no way deliberate, I am sure — is sort of creepy, I think.
Maybe the most horrifying sentence in the story is the last one: “After a molestation, O’Grady testified, he always went to a priest and confessed his sin.”
Of course, the man hearing Oliver O’Grady’s confession was bound by his oath and office — and more than a thousand years of tradition — to keep it private. Might he have been bound by more personal constraint, as well?