Fr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR, a prominent priest whose Sunday night show airs on the theologically conservative EWTN (the home of Mother Angelica, right-wing shill and occasional Laura Ingraham fill-in Raymond Arroyo, rabidly anti-choicer Fr. Frank Pavone, their daily masses having a mix of Latin and English, the channel that sued the Obama Administration over the contraception mandate, and home to a VERY controversial decision by former Archbishop Foley on how their daily mass would be celebrated back in the late 1990s), is in REALLY hot water over his comments on child sexual abuse.
Think Progress
Father Benedict Groeschel, the director of the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, wrote an opinion piece for the National Catholic Register (which has since been taken down and replaced with several apologies) calling Sandusky a “poor guy” and blaming the victims of sexual abuse. Andrew Sullivan has the remarks:
People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer … It’s not so hard to see — a kid looking for a father and didn’t have his own — and they won’t be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that.
It’s an understandable thing …
Here’s this poor guy — [Penn State football coach Jerry] Sandusky — it went on for years. Interesting: Why didn’t anyone say anything? Apparently, a number of kids knew about it and didn’t break the ice.
Groeschel was one of the founders of a Catholic ex-gay group named “Courage” and wrote a book titled “The Courage To Be Chaste” that urges gay men to lead a life of celibacy to avoid temptation.
The New Civil Rights Movement:
What follows is nothing short of incredible. For decades the Catholic Church has not only had a raging pedophile priests problem that has directly touched thousands upon thousands of children around the world. And now we learn that for decades, the attitude of the Church’s leaders and gatekeepers has been to say “poor guy” — to the rapists, not their victims.
Fr. Groeschel, who is a member of the American Psychological Association, admits that he’s been screening priests to avoid potential pedophiles for 40 years.
“It takes a lot of time — four or five hours — to do a psychological screening, and I don’t have a lot of time. There were times in the past when I’d do 30 of them.”
Perhaps someone in the past 40 years should have realized that the gatekeeper was a sympathizer to rapists? Did no one ever examine Groeschel’s batting average?
I have some sound advice to EWTN: Pull him off the air permanently!