The ripple of the priest scandal continues to be felt. The NYT this morning has a lead story on the LA scandal. Link. Excerpts:
The confidential personnel files of 126 clergymen in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles accused of sexual misconduct with children provide a numbing chronicle of 75 years of the church's shame, revealing case after case in which the church was warned of abuse but failed to protect its parishioners. . .
The personnel files - some of which date from the 1930's - were produced as part of settlement talks with lawyers for 560 accusers in a civil suit here. The church provided them to The New York Times in advance of their public release in the next few days. The archdiocese is releasing them in part to make good on a promise to parishioners to come clean about the church's actions in the scandal, church officials said. It also hopes that the release will spur settlement talks, which appear to have stalled in recent months.
I was pleasantly surprised to see this passage, though:
In the case of the Rev. Kevin Barmasse, parents of a young boy wrote to top officials of the archdiocese in 1983 to complain that the priest had abused their son at St. Pancratius Church in Lakewood, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. Two weeks later, the archdiocese sent Father Barmasse to serve as associate pastor at a parish in the Diocese of Tucson, on the condition that he receive therapy.
Within three years, according to later reports, he made sexual advances toward several male high school students. In 1992, he was stripped of his priestly duties.
It's not too often that the press acknowledges, even if only implicitly, that it's often a homosexual thing.
