Sickness in the Church

In the summer of 2002 I was in California, accompanied by the Director of Development and Alumni Affairs of St. Jerome’s University, visiting some of our graduates and donors. It was a routine business, until I was taken aside by one of our highly prosperous grads from the 1960s and asked, sotto voce, if I would have lunch with his daughter. I agreed; and what transpired was neither earth-shattering nor devastating, but both deeply sad and inspiring. The daughter, a recent master’s graduate from Berkeley currently working for her father, wanted my advice on a personal matter, a personal matter with public consequences. As a child, she had been sexually abused by a trusted priest-friend of the family; she had proceeded to wrestle with the issue with impressive maturity, and she had approached all the relevant authorities in her quest to achieve some measure of justice and closure to this damaging time in her life. She was resolved to face forthrightly and without...