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Cardinal Edward Egan expressed skepticism over sexual abuse allegations against priests when he was a Connecticut bishop a decade ago: "These things happen in such small numbers," Egan said in a 1999 deposition. "It's marvelous when you think of the hundreds and hundreds of priests and how very few have even been accused, and how very few have even come close to having anyone prove anything. So it is not a commonplace, by any means at all. It's a unique and unexpected occurrence."
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"I believe that Bishop Egan was aware _ when he took over and during his tenure _ of these complaints, yet in some circumstances let the priests continue and was very aggressive in his defending of these cases and re-victimizing the victims," said Jason Tremont, one of the attorneys for the clergy abuse victims, said the documents "confirm the mishandling and cover-up of sex abuse claims" by Egan and his predecessor, Bishop Walter Curtis, who died in 1997. - Source
Yes. I read the NY Times quotes of him. But he is not unique. In fact there were two scandals: the sexual abuse done by a small percent often to a larger number of victims...but the second scandal was the cover up and shunting by many like Egan who also had his obtuseness and the lawyer approach to reality which frankly can be seen in much of our apologetics (the Inquisition wasn't so bad because others were doing similar things...the sex abuse was not so bad because public school teachers also do it...the Crusades were not so bad because people in general were crude at that time).
ReplyDeleteBut there is a third scandal that no one mentions since so many Catholic salaries depend on not mentioning such things: the Church leadership should pay (and has not) the best consultancy firm they can find to study why its Bishops and Cardinals were dysfunctional as to protecting children and boys for 4 decades with a feeling that this was an emergency as when Christ made a whip of cords and did not act like a lawyer. Was the mega historian, Arnold Toynbee, correct in seeing in Catholicism...elements of an arrested culture in its defensiveness. The Church is not looking into why its magisterium was dysfunctional because the people who should be eliciting the help of the best consultancy firm are not all that different from Egan...remember when Ratzinger smacked the reporters hand who was asking him about this while walking and the Ratzinger who guessed to the press that it was 1% of priests prior to the research which said in some areas like Boston, it was far more so that taking the whole globe as the study sample might not be an effective approach to alarm. If the whole mass of administrators are cut from the same cloth as Egan within degrees of resemblance, who will tell them that they are wearing no clothes at all in the eyes of many intelligent non Catholics.