THE FILTH IN THE CHURCH

By Tim Rohr

As April is "Child Abuse Awareness Month," I've been seeing multiple articles and notices about what the Archdiocese of Agana is doing.

The Guam Daily Post reports:

Guam's Catholic church is holding a series of forums in April in conjunction with Child Abuse Prevention month, Sexual Assault Awareness month, and Youth Violence Prevention month.

The meetings, to be hosted at various parishes across the island, were also mandated by a federal bankruptcy court settlement in the clergy sexual abuse cases. 

One wonders if the archdiocese, or more specifically, the current archbishop, would be doing anything if not MANDATED by the federal court settlement. 

I ask this because sex abuse of minors was rampant for decades in this diocese and it wasn't a secret. It was whispered about everywhere, and not just by clergy, but many lay people too. 

But no one did anything. And when finally a very few people did do something, we were publicly threatened with "canonical and legal measures." 

As the Pacific Daily News reported on June 1, 2016:

“Those who are orchestrating this campaign are inciting people into hatred of the Archbishop and the Catholic Church. They have produced scandal, confusion and grave errors with the cruel intent to injure the Archbishop, the Catholic Church in Guam and many other people of good will who have been outraged and harassed. Therefore, the Archdiocese of Agana is in the process of taking canonical and legal measures against those perpetrating these malicious lies,” the Archdiocese said.

Such threats cost some of us a lot: financially, personally, societally, psychologically. And some of us paid with our families. You might say that those who spoke up for the abused were just as abused, and maybe even more given that the majority of abuse victims who came forward never had to give their names, but our names were front page news for months.

After years of being at the center of this ugliness, I have to wonder if those of us who stood up accomplished anything at all. Sure, Apuron is gone (or is he?), as well as some of his gestapo (Adrian, David the Tall, Edivaldo), but has anything been done to address the clerical culture in this diocese that engendered, protected, and promoted this filth for decades? 

Giving kids a "safe space" sounds good, but there is no safe space as long as the demon at the core of all this filth is still allowed to roam. 

And what is that demon? I won't go into it here, but I'll leave a clue. The real abuse was not pedophilia, but ephebophilia. There is a big difference. 

Meanwhile, the archbishop would do well to apologize for all the hell his predecessor wreaked on the few brave people who stood up to what Benedict 16 famously called "the filth in the church."