(June 8, 2024 at 3:33 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: A priest who taught at BC High wrote in praise of clerical celibacy. He’s now been charged with raping a child.
In 2002, as celibacy for Catholic priests became a subject of public debate amid the scandal over child sexual abuse in the church prompted by a Boston Globe Spotlight Team investigation, the Rev. Kevin R. White wrote on the Globe’s Opinion page that “celibacy is ultimately an expression of great love.”
“Celibates urge us to trust that God’s promise of love and grace makes us rich enough and wanting for nothing more,” White wrote in the essay, which was published March 6, 2002. “Celibates stake everything on God, convinced that God is worth a life.”
White, then a theology teacher at the private Catholic boys’ high school in Dorchester, recalled taking his vows of “perpetual poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Jesuit” and said he later had “come to realize only through the living of my vows that I also vowed to ... empty myself for the benefit of others.”
White, 62, of Weston, was indicted last week by a Suffolk County grand jury on a charge of rape of a child. Prosecutors allege that White forced a boy under the age of 16 to perform oral sex on him on an unknown date during the 2008-2009 school year.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/06/07/m...g-student/
Augustinian Catholic order paid $2 million settlement over rape accusations against priest but left his name off sex abuser list
The Catholic religious order won’t explain why the Rev. Richard McGrath, who was accused of sex abuse and having child pornography on his phone, isn’t on the group’s newly posted public listing.
McGrath subsequently was accused in a lawsuit of having “repeatedly orally and anally” raped a student years earlier. The priest denied those accusations but refused to say when questioned under oath for a deposition whether he had ever viewed child pornography, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Church officials settled that suit with the accuser in late 2023 for $2 million but said they weren’t admitting any wrongdoing.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported last year that more than a dozen people have settled legal claims with the order and the Archdiocese of Chicago, the arm of the church for Cook and Lake counties led by Cardinal Blase Cupich, over child sex abuse accusations against Rev. John D. Murphy.
But Murphy has never been included on Cupich’s public listing of Catholic clergy members deemed to have been credibly accused of child sex abuse, which the archdiocese has described as comprehensive.
Murphy, who was never charged with any crime, has been living in West Dundee across from a Catholic parish and school.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchdo...rd-mcgrath
What amazes me is the previous lack of outrage against religious organizations that have a history of financial, political, and sexual abuse when it has been plain for decades, if not centuries, that all of thise horrors have been going on in plain sight, and swept under the carpet simply because no one dared say anything about it.
I fear it is only because they claim to be religious in some way that they have been exempted by those who do not wish to see the evil that is being done as a matter of course. One then can place politics as form of religion, since it mimics religion so well.
The label of being religious is not, and should not be, an excuse to ignore what is the worst of human behavior. Religion is not in and of itself necessarily benign, it it?
