As a Christian, I am supposed to pray for the conversion of every soul and to trust in God’s mercy. But when I read about Father Thomas Francis Kelly, I find myself hoping that hell is far hotter than I ever imagined.
The Catholic Church entrusted Kelly with the priesthood, the bishop entrusted him with a parish, and parents entrusted him with their children. Kelly abused that trust, abused the priesthood, and abused more than 15 boys before dying in 1990.
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Sorrow is inadequate here. Mercy seems unfitting. Rage and a thirst for justice seem more in order.
Likewise, a Catholic today ought to see many government prosecutors as persecutors, from the U.S. Department of Justice down to local district attorneys. Certainly, Democratic state attorneys general are not friends of Catholics.
But the church’s historic failure to protect children, and its decision instead to protect their own priests who raped and abused children, leaves every Catholic of good conscience with no choice but to thank some of these prosecutors for investigating the church.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul issued a new report on Tuesday on sex abuse by priests and religious brothers in that state. The facts and numbers are horrifying. Going back to 1950, the attorney general's office found 450 priests credibly accused of sexual abuse. As happened in other dioceses around the world, the hierarchy failed to defrock or punish some of these abusers and moved them around to new locations where they continued their predations on boys and girls.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that Chicago’s archdiocese got serious about investigating and acting on allegations of abuse by priests. The norm in midcentury American dioceses was to handle abuse internally, often with a slap on the wrist and a demand for therapy, rather than calling the police and helping prosecute the cretins.
Still, the church in America didn’t right its ways. Here’s what I wrote a few years ago:
At that time, in 2004, the church’s scandals were already front-page news. Priests who abused their power and molested and raped young boys and girls had been protected by the bishops of the church. Cardinal McCarrick was one of the spokesmen, apologizing for the church, explaining how we had righted our ship. I believed the apologies and the resolution by the church’s leaders not to commit this sin again.
I guess I shouldn’t have.
Even then, in 2018, the church seemed to drag its feet, leaving in place for months McCarrick’s successor, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who had protected at least one pedophile priest back when he ran the Pittsburgh diocese.
Christ called on us all, particularly priests and bishops, to emulate him, the Good Shepherd. Bishops even carry a staff called a crozier, which evokes the shepherd’s crook.
It is no surprise that wolves would infiltrate the church — sexual predators have sought positions of authority in every institution in the world, including public schools, Hollywood, medicine, and sports. But the bishops who had a divine mandate to protect the sheep instead protected the wolves. That’s evil on a higher level.
The next few decades, I predict, will be ones of real trial for Christianity in America. Governments will persecute the church. Yet on a day like today, when the church’s past failings are laid so bare, we have to be glad that the attorney general of Illinois was willing and able to do what the church failed to do.
And again, while Catholics pray that Jesus leads all souls to heaven, it's impossible when we think of some of these priests not to hope they are burning in hell.