The Catholic Church is exposed. A number of wide-ranging, deeply researched reports of molestation, rape, abuse, corruption, and concealment have been released in close enough time to one another that the magnitude of the horror might actually—for the average American, anyway—sink in. It all feels monumental, if also powered in part by coincidence. The recently published Pennsylvania report, in which a grand jury details the sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by more than 300 priests and systematically argues that church officials were complicit, was two years in the making. It didn’t need to be released two weeks before BuzzFeed published Christine Kenneally’s yearslong investigation into the abuse of children—some of whom didn’t survive—by nuns and priests at St. Joseph’s Catholic orphanage. But it was, and the effects of those stories are stacking up. These two reports came out just three months after every Chilean bishop offered to resign over a massive sex abuse scandal, and a year or so after Netflix documentary series The Keepers revisited an unsolved murder and allegations of abuse in a Baltimore Catholic school. That these are all different—but all cover the same institutional atrocity—is the kind of perfect storm that may get us to focus in ways that the abuse of tens of thousands of children worldwide has not managed to. Humans find numbers like that hard to absorb.
from Slate Articles https://ift.tt/2N4gBDj
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