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Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal
Our Fathers is history at its best—as intimate as a diary, as immediate and epic as a novel.
When, in early 2002, a team of Boston Globe reporters broke open the pedophilia scandal around Father John J. Geoghan—and then Paul Shanley, Joseph Birmingham, and hundreds of other priests in Boston and across the country—the entire American Catholic Church spun into crisis. But by that time, the damage was already done. Perhaps a hundred thousand children had already fallen into traps laid by their priests. Every Catholic in the country – and everyone who had ever set foot in a church—faced troubling questions: Why had this happened? How could the secrets of this abuse have been so widely held, and so closely protected? How could the church have let it happen?
David France takes us back to the church of the 1950s, a time of relative innocence, to look for answers. With deft nuance, he crafts a panoramic portrait of the faithful, encompassing the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and courage of hundreds of Catholic and non-Catholic families over the last fifty years. Based on hundreds of interviews, private correspondence, unpublished scientific probes and secret Vatican documents, and tens of thousands of pages of court records, he shows how the church’s institutional suspicion of human sexuality ironically lit the fuse on the crisis.
Our Fathers braids a heartbreaking narrative from the personal lives of good and bad priests, pious and heartless prelates, self-interested lawyers turned heroes, holy altar boys turned drug-addicts, mothers torn between their children and their faith, hard-bitten investigative reporters reduced to tears, and thousands of church critics who, through this crisis, returned to their faith renewed and invigorated. He shows us the intense history of dissent within the ranks, especially regarding Catholic teachings on sexuality and homosexuality. He tells the heroic stories of whistle-blowing nuns, independent pastors, church insiders trying to do the right thing, and—ultimately—a group of blue-collar men, all molested by the same priest, who overcame their bitterness and took it upon themselves to try to save their church.
This book is a tribute to those ordinary Catholics called upon to make extraordinary contributions. Our Fathers is the sweeping, authoritative, and gripping work the scandal and its aftermath demand.
When, in early 2002, a team of Boston Globe reporters broke open the pedophilia scandal around Father John J. Geoghan—and then Paul Shanley, Joseph Birmingham, and hundreds of other priests in Boston and across the country—the entire American Catholic Church spun into crisis. But by that time, the damage was already done. Perhaps a hundred thousand children had already fallen into traps laid by their priests. Every Catholic in the country – and everyone who had ever set foot in a church—faced troubling questions: Why had this happened? How could the secrets of this abuse have been so widely held, and so closely protected? How could the church have let it happen?
David France takes us back to the church of the 1950s, a time of relative innocence, to look for answers. With deft nuance, he crafts a panoramic portrait of the faithful, encompassing the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and courage of hundreds of Catholic and non-Catholic families over the last fifty years. Based on hundreds of interviews, private correspondence, unpublished scientific probes and secret Vatican documents, and tens of thousands of pages of court records, he shows how the church’s institutional suspicion of human sexuality ironically lit the fuse on the crisis.
Our Fathers braids a heartbreaking narrative from the personal lives of good and bad priests, pious and heartless prelates, self-interested lawyers turned heroes, holy altar boys turned drug-addicts, mothers torn between their children and their faith, hard-bitten investigative reporters reduced to tears, and thousands of church critics who, through this crisis, returned to their faith renewed and invigorated. He shows us the intense history of dissent within the ranks, especially regarding Catholic teachings on sexuality and homosexuality. He tells the heroic stories of whistle-blowing nuns, independent pastors, church insiders trying to do the right thing, and—ultimately—a group of blue-collar men, all molested by the same priest, who overcame their bitterness and took it upon themselves to try to save their church.
This book is a tribute to those ordinary Catholics called upon to make extraordinary contributions. Our Fathers is the sweeping, authoritative, and gripping work the scandal and its aftermath demand.
672 pages, Hardcover
First published January 20, 2004
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July 8, 2016
This book could have provided the basis for the docudrama Spotlight (an excellent movie, by the way.) You will also, after reading it, realize how the movie barely scratched the surface of the problem and how much the reporters owed to work done by others, work that had been shown them years before and which they ignored.
It’s a very interesting book concerning the raging pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church, which has spread way beyond the United States into Ireland (!), Germany , and the Netherlands. Der Spiegel ran a series awhile back linking Pope Benedict (formerly Cardinal Ratzinger) to the cover-up in Germany so it’s hard to see how anything will change in spite of Pope Francis.
France begins by tracking the biographies of several seminarians looking for early hints of their later problems. The Church, it appears, attracts a certain personality already conflicted with their sexual persona. The attitude of the Church toward celibacy just made things worse. It was treated as some holy relic. “Years later, when scandal buckled the American church, theologians would look back and see the problem inherent in this approach. By casting celibacy as a fragile rarity in a world of temptation, it placed sexual action out of the hands of the actor, [the temptation to pun here is overwhelming] condemning him (or empowering him) to fail from time to time.”
To deal with temptations, which were totally removed from seminarians, the Papacy had little to offer other than to avoid movie theaters. Pray to the Virgin Mary. Receive the Eucharist often—because celibacy may be a gift to God, but God’s gift back is the power to sustain it. Sounding a practical note, Pius promoted a technique he called “flight and alert vigilance,” and he spelled out the many ways to elude temptation The experience of one seminarian, Sprags, is instructive: Especially on matters of sexual drive, the one enormous struggle they all faced, the seminarians were left to their own devices. The subject was cordoned off like a crime scene, to be milled around and gawked at but never approached. For Spags, this had the unintended consequence of making sex sexier, a succulent and mysterious thing too deliciously outré to mention. Matters relating to reproduction and marriage in moral theology textbooks, for instance, were rendered in Latin, as though in some sort of secret code to be pored over intensely. Spags had never once masturbated. This required a great struggle of the will and prayer, but temperance always triumphed. He wondered if this meant he was especially headstrong, or just a lot less hormonally charged than his peers. He would never know—the closest Spags ever came to discussing it came during his annual evaluations, at which point his spiritual director would frankly inquire, “Any issues with celibacy?” Honestly, Spags answered, “None.”
As the historian Garry Wills wrote in Papal Sin, “The more the assembled members [a lay conclave] looked at the inherited ‘wisdom’ of the Church, the more they saw the questionable roots from which it grew—the fear and hatred of sex, the feeling that pleasure in it is a biological bribe to guarantee the race’s perpetuation, that any use of pleasure beyond that purpose is shameful. This was not a view derived from scripture or from Christ, but from Seneca and Augustine.”
After a while the litany of constant evil gets a bit overwhelming.
The Cover-up
As we all learned from Watergate, the initial problem is never as damaging as the cover-up that follows. So it has been with the Catholic Church. Critics and supporters divide into two camps, it seems after reading reviews and other books, those who think what happened with priests is simply a reflection of the 6% problem in society in general, and those who believe the celibate culture of the church tends to attract persons struggling with their sexuality coupled with a hierarchical structure that distributes power to its priestly class.
Both groups tend to miss the point. It’s the cover-up that’s a much larger and costly (exceeding $3 Billion) problem. Had the hierarchy recognized (heaven knows they had plenty of evidence) that some priests had a problem with kids and got them help (instead of just praying about the issue) and moved them to a monastery or some function removed from children and then got help for the molested kids, they would have been celebrated as a caring and well-functioning institution. Instead, they buried their collective heads in the scripture, suppressed those trying to warn them, hid documents, bought off victims, used their institutional power to prevent investigations, and generally hoped everything would go away.
Father John McNeill’s book The Church and the Homosexual dealt with some of the issue related to chastity and its impact on homosexuals as opposed to heterosexuals in an environment that demanded chastity. “This is not an equivalent demand for a heterosexual priest and a homosexual priest. Most people miss that, they seem to deal with the fact that chastity would be the same thing for both groups. But a heterosexual priest’s sexual desire to reach out to a woman is considered good in itself. And always a valid choice if they chose to leave the priesthood. Whereas the homosexual priest is taught that his desire to reach out to another male is evil. And never an option. Therefore it’s not a question of sacrificing a good as it is for a heterosexual, it’s repressing an evil desire. The church wants gay priests to interiorize homophobia and self-hatred and this leads to all sorts of neurotic stuff.” Father McNeill was expelled from the Jesuits by Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict.)
This is not an issue unique to the United States. Investigations have surfaced in almost every country revealing a conspiratorial pattern of abuse and cover-up. (The example in Africa of priests forcing nuns to service them out of fear of HIV is especially egregious.) Those who are doubtful need only to read the Irish Murphy Report (available online in its entirety), which shows a pattern of institutional neglect, abuse, and cover-up on the part of the Catholic Church. The standard defense of the church that I have heard repeatedly is that the number of priests who were pedophiles is no larger a percentage than in the general population. That may indeed be true; the difference being that the church made a deliberate and concerted effort to hide their predations and continued to put children in harm's way. For that alone, the church deserves to be dismantled.
Additional reading:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://verdict.justia.com/2013/04/18...
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/...
http://www.hiainquiry.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholi... (an extraordinary resource for additional citations.)
For information about how the money was manipulated by the church in the settlements, see Render unto Rome the Secret Life of the Catholic Church by Jason Berry
The larger question is whether abstinence makes the church grow fondlers. (Slate)
It’s a very interesting book concerning the raging pedophile scandal in the Catholic Church, which has spread way beyond the United States into Ireland (!), Germany , and the Netherlands. Der Spiegel ran a series awhile back linking Pope Benedict (formerly Cardinal Ratzinger) to the cover-up in Germany so it’s hard to see how anything will change in spite of Pope Francis.
France begins by tracking the biographies of several seminarians looking for early hints of their later problems. The Church, it appears, attracts a certain personality already conflicted with their sexual persona. The attitude of the Church toward celibacy just made things worse. It was treated as some holy relic. “Years later, when scandal buckled the American church, theologians would look back and see the problem inherent in this approach. By casting celibacy as a fragile rarity in a world of temptation, it placed sexual action out of the hands of the actor, [the temptation to pun here is overwhelming] condemning him (or empowering him) to fail from time to time.”
To deal with temptations, which were totally removed from seminarians, the Papacy had little to offer other than to avoid movie theaters. Pray to the Virgin Mary. Receive the Eucharist often—because celibacy may be a gift to God, but God’s gift back is the power to sustain it. Sounding a practical note, Pius promoted a technique he called “flight and alert vigilance,” and he spelled out the many ways to elude temptation The experience of one seminarian, Sprags, is instructive: Especially on matters of sexual drive, the one enormous struggle they all faced, the seminarians were left to their own devices. The subject was cordoned off like a crime scene, to be milled around and gawked at but never approached. For Spags, this had the unintended consequence of making sex sexier, a succulent and mysterious thing too deliciously outré to mention. Matters relating to reproduction and marriage in moral theology textbooks, for instance, were rendered in Latin, as though in some sort of secret code to be pored over intensely. Spags had never once masturbated. This required a great struggle of the will and prayer, but temperance always triumphed. He wondered if this meant he was especially headstrong, or just a lot less hormonally charged than his peers. He would never know—the closest Spags ever came to discussing it came during his annual evaluations, at which point his spiritual director would frankly inquire, “Any issues with celibacy?” Honestly, Spags answered, “None.”
As the historian Garry Wills wrote in Papal Sin, “The more the assembled members [a lay conclave] looked at the inherited ‘wisdom’ of the Church, the more they saw the questionable roots from which it grew—the fear and hatred of sex, the feeling that pleasure in it is a biological bribe to guarantee the race’s perpetuation, that any use of pleasure beyond that purpose is shameful. This was not a view derived from scripture or from Christ, but from Seneca and Augustine.”
After a while the litany of constant evil gets a bit overwhelming.
The Cover-up
As we all learned from Watergate, the initial problem is never as damaging as the cover-up that follows. So it has been with the Catholic Church. Critics and supporters divide into two camps, it seems after reading reviews and other books, those who think what happened with priests is simply a reflection of the 6% problem in society in general, and those who believe the celibate culture of the church tends to attract persons struggling with their sexuality coupled with a hierarchical structure that distributes power to its priestly class.
Both groups tend to miss the point. It’s the cover-up that’s a much larger and costly (exceeding $3 Billion) problem. Had the hierarchy recognized (heaven knows they had plenty of evidence) that some priests had a problem with kids and got them help (instead of just praying about the issue) and moved them to a monastery or some function removed from children and then got help for the molested kids, they would have been celebrated as a caring and well-functioning institution. Instead, they buried their collective heads in the scripture, suppressed those trying to warn them, hid documents, bought off victims, used their institutional power to prevent investigations, and generally hoped everything would go away.
Father John McNeill’s book The Church and the Homosexual dealt with some of the issue related to chastity and its impact on homosexuals as opposed to heterosexuals in an environment that demanded chastity. “This is not an equivalent demand for a heterosexual priest and a homosexual priest. Most people miss that, they seem to deal with the fact that chastity would be the same thing for both groups. But a heterosexual priest’s sexual desire to reach out to a woman is considered good in itself. And always a valid choice if they chose to leave the priesthood. Whereas the homosexual priest is taught that his desire to reach out to another male is evil. And never an option. Therefore it’s not a question of sacrificing a good as it is for a heterosexual, it’s repressing an evil desire. The church wants gay priests to interiorize homophobia and self-hatred and this leads to all sorts of neurotic stuff.” Father McNeill was expelled from the Jesuits by Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict.)
This is not an issue unique to the United States. Investigations have surfaced in almost every country revealing a conspiratorial pattern of abuse and cover-up. (The example in Africa of priests forcing nuns to service them out of fear of HIV is especially egregious.) Those who are doubtful need only to read the Irish Murphy Report (available online in its entirety), which shows a pattern of institutional neglect, abuse, and cover-up on the part of the Catholic Church. The standard defense of the church that I have heard repeatedly is that the number of priests who were pedophiles is no larger a percentage than in the general population. That may indeed be true; the difference being that the church made a deliberate and concerted effort to hide their predations and continued to put children in harm's way. For that alone, the church deserves to be dismantled.
Additional reading:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://verdict.justia.com/2013/04/18...
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/...
http://www.hiainquiry.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholi... (an extraordinary resource for additional citations.)
For information about how the money was manipulated by the church in the settlements, see Render unto Rome the Secret Life of the Catholic Church by Jason Berry
The larger question is whether abstinence makes the church grow fondlers. (Slate)
September 3, 2016
I didn't quite realize how long this book was when I started it. It's taken me more than a week to finish, which is unusual (in my defense, I had to go back to work four days ago). This is a dense but well-written book about one of the more horrid chapters in Boston, and American, history.
Here's a little background: when this story broke in 2001, I was not a practicing Catholic, and had not been for almost two decades. I didn't pay much attention to the Church and her doings, having set it all aside as a teenager and moved on. At this particular time in my life--and especially after the events of September 11th and the subsequent build-up to the invasion of Iraq--I began to wander back into church, now as an adult instead of an angry 15 year old boy. Blah blah blah, long story short, I returned to Catholicism just as it was imploding in Boston.
There is no need for me to recap the story here. You can see the movie Spotlight, an excellent film about the Boston Globe's heroic reporting on this issue. You can read Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church or see the 2005 film based on this book, Our Fathers. The story has been told well, and it deserves not only to be remembered, but to be kept in mind, always, because the structures that allowed this evil to move unseen among the innocent still exist.
First, the pedophiles: In any profession where there is access to children, you will find abusers. Sports coaches, teachers, day care workers, youth group leaders, etc. It's like chumming the water for sharks: where there are kids, there will be predators. It's a sad fact of our existence that some small percentage of the human herd is diseased in this way (and in many other ways, too). So I don't blame the Catholic Church for having attracted some sick fucks: it happens anywhere people work with kids.
What I do blame the Church, entirely, is how it handled the allegations of abuse. The bishops and cardinals acted like the mafia; there is no other way to describe it. Entitled, arrogant, dismissive, privileged, cruel, selfish, and beset with what Hannah Arendt called 'the banality of evil'. Those who preyed on children were moved from unsuspecting place to unsuspecting place, and their predations were seen more as a potential for embarrassment than as the crimes they actually were. There is no excuse for this, and I believe today and I believed fifteen years ago: bishops and cardinals who were involved in this malfeasance should be in jail next to the men who hurt innocent children. No compromise, no question: lock them up and throw away the keys.
But to be honest, most of the abuse stories were not about pedophilia. They were about men who were deeply confused about their sexuality, and who acted out in completely inappropriate ways with teenage boys. The Church owns this one, too. Men who do not understand their own sexualities, or who fail to develop healthy and mature sexual identities due to the insanity of the Church's teachings, do things that are unconscionable. Were the majority of these men gay? Or deeply sexually frustrated and confused heterosexuals who targeted the weak and vulnerable nearest to them (altar boys)? Something in-between? We may never know. What we do know is that many Catholic priests have sexually molested teenage boys (and some girls, too, although that is much more rare). Scapegoating homosexual men who are priests is lazy, unfair, and an all too predictable part of the Catholic Church's screwy teachings about sex.
No pun intended.
Here is the ultimate truth: the Catholic Church in the United States is, more likely than not, going the way of the Catholic Church in Europe. Fewer and fewer people go to mass; there is a perpetual shortage of priests, and the Church's moral witness in the public square has been ruined forever. It is all over here, I think, although the corpse is still twitching because so many immigrants are Catholic, and because there are deep pockets of faithful Catholics scattered around the USA. Like the mainline Protestant churches, the Catholic Church will eventually wither and shrink into a shadow of what it once was, which is tragic because so much of the what the Church is can be beautiful, inspiring, challenging, and deeply spiritual. I don't expect that my children will remain practicing Catholics once they leave home and go out on their own. I'm not even sure if that disappoints me.
I can only imagine what is taking place in Africa and Asia these days with regard to sexual abuse and the Catholic Church. I pray that those who send their children into the house of God are spared the horrors of sexual abuse and degradation that seems to be an unfortunate, and perpetual, thread in the tapestry of Catholicism. Cardinal Bernard Law deserves all the opprobrium and dishonor that can be heaped on him, along with other bishops and leaders. God damn them all.
Here's a little background: when this story broke in 2001, I was not a practicing Catholic, and had not been for almost two decades. I didn't pay much attention to the Church and her doings, having set it all aside as a teenager and moved on. At this particular time in my life--and especially after the events of September 11th and the subsequent build-up to the invasion of Iraq--I began to wander back into church, now as an adult instead of an angry 15 year old boy. Blah blah blah, long story short, I returned to Catholicism just as it was imploding in Boston.
There is no need for me to recap the story here. You can see the movie Spotlight, an excellent film about the Boston Globe's heroic reporting on this issue. You can read Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church or see the 2005 film based on this book, Our Fathers. The story has been told well, and it deserves not only to be remembered, but to be kept in mind, always, because the structures that allowed this evil to move unseen among the innocent still exist.
First, the pedophiles: In any profession where there is access to children, you will find abusers. Sports coaches, teachers, day care workers, youth group leaders, etc. It's like chumming the water for sharks: where there are kids, there will be predators. It's a sad fact of our existence that some small percentage of the human herd is diseased in this way (and in many other ways, too). So I don't blame the Catholic Church for having attracted some sick fucks: it happens anywhere people work with kids.
What I do blame the Church, entirely, is how it handled the allegations of abuse. The bishops and cardinals acted like the mafia; there is no other way to describe it. Entitled, arrogant, dismissive, privileged, cruel, selfish, and beset with what Hannah Arendt called 'the banality of evil'. Those who preyed on children were moved from unsuspecting place to unsuspecting place, and their predations were seen more as a potential for embarrassment than as the crimes they actually were. There is no excuse for this, and I believe today and I believed fifteen years ago: bishops and cardinals who were involved in this malfeasance should be in jail next to the men who hurt innocent children. No compromise, no question: lock them up and throw away the keys.
But to be honest, most of the abuse stories were not about pedophilia. They were about men who were deeply confused about their sexuality, and who acted out in completely inappropriate ways with teenage boys. The Church owns this one, too. Men who do not understand their own sexualities, or who fail to develop healthy and mature sexual identities due to the insanity of the Church's teachings, do things that are unconscionable. Were the majority of these men gay? Or deeply sexually frustrated and confused heterosexuals who targeted the weak and vulnerable nearest to them (altar boys)? Something in-between? We may never know. What we do know is that many Catholic priests have sexually molested teenage boys (and some girls, too, although that is much more rare). Scapegoating homosexual men who are priests is lazy, unfair, and an all too predictable part of the Catholic Church's screwy teachings about sex.
No pun intended.
Here is the ultimate truth: the Catholic Church in the United States is, more likely than not, going the way of the Catholic Church in Europe. Fewer and fewer people go to mass; there is a perpetual shortage of priests, and the Church's moral witness in the public square has been ruined forever. It is all over here, I think, although the corpse is still twitching because so many immigrants are Catholic, and because there are deep pockets of faithful Catholics scattered around the USA. Like the mainline Protestant churches, the Catholic Church will eventually wither and shrink into a shadow of what it once was, which is tragic because so much of the what the Church is can be beautiful, inspiring, challenging, and deeply spiritual. I don't expect that my children will remain practicing Catholics once they leave home and go out on their own. I'm not even sure if that disappoints me.
I can only imagine what is taking place in Africa and Asia these days with regard to sexual abuse and the Catholic Church. I pray that those who send their children into the house of God are spared the horrors of sexual abuse and degradation that seems to be an unfortunate, and perpetual, thread in the tapestry of Catholicism. Cardinal Bernard Law deserves all the opprobrium and dishonor that can be heaped on him, along with other bishops and leaders. God damn them all.
October 17, 2008
A monumental examination of what will be remembered, unfortunately, as one of the most important series of events in the recent history of the Catholic Church. It reads as a well-researched assemblage, neither hysterical nor unduly judgmental of any of the various protagonists. Heartbreaking tales of broken lives are skillfully woven together to unfold concurrently in a grand narrative of duplicity, conspiracy, and shame. Well worth the reading for those interested in this crisis.
As discouraging as these continued revelations are to life-long Catholics like myself, the truth must be told, and to those who decry coverage of this topic as maliciously damaging to the Church I suggest they should point their righteous indignation at the senior clerics who collaborated in bringing things to this pass.
As discouraging as these continued revelations are to life-long Catholics like myself, the truth must be told, and to those who decry coverage of this topic as maliciously damaging to the Church I suggest they should point their righteous indignation at the senior clerics who collaborated in bringing things to this pass.
November 8, 2020
This book far exceeded my expectations in its reporting of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. It had the perfect mix of describing abuse and victim impact and how the Catholic Church was also impacted. It’s insane to me how big of a coverup this was and how long it took to uncover. Super book, very long, but totally worth reading, especially people who grew up in the Catholic faith. My compliments to this author!
September 3, 2019
Took a while to finish because the depth and reality of the abuse and the subsequent coverup was difficult to read and comprehend. What is truly disturbing is that the abuses have continued to happen and to be uncovered.
June 30, 2025
Why wasn't this a Pulitzer Prize nominee? Yes, it's disturbing. but true. And why such few reviews? This book is engrossing from an American history perspective, from an international Catholicism perspective, and from a psychological perspective.
March 28, 2024
This confirms the long disgust public keeps on the scandals of Catholic Church.
November 16, 2008
A very well written and devastating history of sexual abuse in the Catholic church from the late 50's through to 2005 or so. I remember living through the scandal as it broke here in Boston. This book is thorough in its research, effectively written and cannot but help make any reader aware of the far-reaching consequences of the abuse through both the institution of the church and the lives of her victims.
I am reading this book as part of my research supporting my direction of John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt: a parable.
The very ending of the book is a little forced, but besides that a terrific experience.
I am reading this book as part of my research supporting my direction of John Patrick Shanley's play Doubt: a parable.
The very ending of the book is a little forced, but besides that a terrific experience.
July 17, 2009
The local Catholic parish is having a priest misconduct scandal. I was appalled by the lack of diocese response. Somebody suggested this book, and reading it I realized that the non-response is sadly standard.
This (hefty) book is well-researched, and though the writing style is a bit frenetic and breathless for my taste, it carefully builds a rather damning case.
Five stars for research, passion and interweaving many story lines, despite the minor stylistic misgivings.
This (hefty) book is well-researched, and though the writing style is a bit frenetic and breathless for my taste, it carefully builds a rather damning case.
Five stars for research, passion and interweaving many story lines, despite the minor stylistic misgivings.
January 13, 2023
As a Catholic this book both devastated and infuriated me. It is a thorough, well-documented, well researched accounting of the Church's sexual abuse scandal. It was written so well that it read like a novel and I could not put it. My devastation comes from the scandal and the way that the hierarchy covered it up with little regard for the children, survivors and families. I think every Catholic should read this and work toward changing the power structure of a very flawed institution.
March 24, 2016
A sad, sad account of the Catholic Church's abysmal reactions to the sex abuse scandals.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews