Conor Daly: Repenting and asking others to do the same

This year, Ash Wednesday felt a lot different. I have never been much of Bible-toting Christian, but I have always valued my religion and the rituals and ceremonies that go with it. On Ash Wednesdays of my past, I always wore the black cross of palm ash on my forehead proudly, especially at Penn where practicing Catholics seem a scarce phenomenon. But this week, no such feeling enveloped me. Instead, what dominated my thoughts was the continually intensifying controversy related to sexual abuse that has afflicted the Catholic Church over the last three years. Every Catholic has heard at one time the jokes and stories about sexual abuse of children by priests and church workers. But until three years ago, a widespread realization of the credence of these tales had never taken place. Sure, occasionally, you heard about a priest going on trial for sexual abuse, but those instances never created anything close to what we have seen since the middle of 2000. That was when the original trickle of pedophilia cases suddenly became the tidal wave that eventually shook the Catholic community's collective conscience and created the skepticism about church leadership many Catholics now exhibit. The majority of parishioners at St. Agnes Church in Middleton, Mass., always admired Chris Reardon, a resident of the small town for most of his life, for his tireless work in the interest of the congregation's children. He did everything from coordinating youth group to teaching religious education to running church programs at the local YMCA. It was a surprise to the community, then, when he was arrested in June 2000 at a church picnic and summarily indicted on 130 counts of sexually abusing the parish's children. At the time, Catholics could not believe what they were hearing as details of Reardon's sordid activities came spewing out of nightly news programs: computer-generated charts with names of 250 boys and intimate facts about their bodies, jars of bodily fluid located in his office closet and at least one videotape of himself masturbating with a boy in the church rectory. Although Reardon's case acquired the descriptive phrase "the largest case of child pedophilia in Massachusetts history," the widespread scandal had yet to materialize at that time. The indictment of John Geoghan would change that. Defrocked priest John Geoghan finally appeared before a jury on a charge of "sexual abuse of a child" in January 2002 and was found guilty by the jury after only seven hours of deliberation. It was a relief that he was going to jail for his abuse of that child almost a decade ago, but it was a bittersweet outcome. It was found that since his first assignment as a priest in 1962, Geoghan molested more than 100 young boys -- some accounts place the number closer to 140 -- and he was convicted of only a single count. But these cases, and the countless others that have followed them, left no diocese unaffected as the wave of scandal progressed across the country. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia acknowledged a year ago that it had evidence of at least 50 sexual abuse cases involving priests. Still, this wasn't as damaging as what would be exposed as the media and prosecutors began to subpoena classified church documents. They found that many of the high profile church leaders knew the whole time. Boston Cardinal Bernard Law, once the highest ranking Catholic Church official in the United States, had known about Geoghan since 1984 and moved him from parish to parish in the wake of reports of his continued abuse of young boys; he and other bishops have been found to have done this for other priests around the country as well. Reardon and Geoghan have since trotted off to jail, and Law was forced to resign -- as were at least another eight of his high-ranking colleagues around this country and 11 internationally for similar cover-ups. In the meantime, American Catholics continue to be told that we have a new "zero tolerance" leadership that greatly desires the "healing process" to begin this Lenten season. Lent is about forgiveness, healing and penance, and I am sure that most Catholics wish to put this awful chapter of our religion's history behind us. But the question remains, on whose terms will this healing occur? Those responsible for administering the faith to their faithful were the ones who sexually abused children and covered up those activities, not the lay people. The posture of the new church leaders has been to start "healing" as quickly as possible and have the faithful repent and pray or this scandal will never die. But they do not consider that such a process cannot occur until faith in the Catholic leadership is restored. Too few involved in Catholic Church leadership have made great efforts to apologize and repent for their sins; many times they publicly prayed about it, but few times did they ever directly and unquestionably apologize for having destroyed the faith that many once had in their leadership. Everyone wants this scandal to end, but this will not occur simply because Lent has arrived and archbishops are telling us to "begin the healing process." A mea culpa by the leadership is needed, and until the rank-and-file Catholics hear one, this scandal will not go away.

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