From The Daily Intelligencer-
After
a while, I couldn’t continue reading the Pennsylvania grand jury report
on sexual abuse in six dioceses in the Catholic Church. Apart from the
rising nausea, I realized the horror of each incident had begun to numb
my conscience, and the sheer number of cases had numbed it still
further. One case is a tragedy; thousands of cases can too easily become
a statistic. Like dealing with Trump’s lies, you can get dizzy
following the specific horrors committed against children, and the
excuses and prevarications and silence of so many in the hierarchy.
Which is why specifics matter. They reveal the core nature of the evil
involved.
And
so we come across a case like this: A teenage boy called George was
befriended by a young priest in his twenties, Reverend George Zirwas.
The boy’s family saw this as a good influence, as most Catholic families
in the 1970s and 1980s would have. One afternoon, the priest invited
George, who was around 14 at the time, to a rectory 25 minutes south of
Pittsburgh, where he met
several other priests: “During a conversation about religious statues,
the priests told George to get onto a bed and remove his shirt, and
strike a pose like Jesus on the cross. Then they instructed him to strip
off his pants and underwear,” writes the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“In the unnerving moments that followed, George claimed that [the
priests] began taking photos of him on a Polaroid camera. All of the
priests giggled — and then added the photos of George to a collection of
photos of other teen boys.” This was a grooming gang.
More here-
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