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Father Roger Landry: Cleaning Up the Bishop Sex Abuse Scandal Requires A Lot of Changes

August 8, 2018

Father Roger Landry says the Roman Catholic Church needs a clear and trustworthy reporting system for sexual immorality by bishops and other clerics — “and at present, it doesn’t exist.”

The Church also needs to stop tolerating the double lives of priests and bishops who cheat on their vocations with men and women, he writes in The Pilot, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston.

Father Landry has seen clerical immorality firsthand, including a time as a seminarian he travelled to a foreign country “when the priest tried to make his move ten minutes after picking me up at the airport.”

Some of the solutions floated by discontented Catholics are fast out wrong — allowing priests to marry won’t solve the problem of clerics who stalk post-pubescent boys, such as former Cardinal Theodore McCormick and others have, he says.

“Fidelity is the only adequate response to infidelity, and holiness to sin and corruption,” Father Landry writes.