It’s sad to me when I hear of people who leave the church because of abuse or scandals due to the sinfulness of men, of people in the church. If they leave due to suffering abuse at the hands of a pedophile priest, of course that horrifies me and I feel great compassion and sympathy for the abused person and feel strongly that the abusers should have been prosecuted and if convicted, sentenced like any other law-breaker. And I can absolutely understand why they would leave the church because of it.
To answer the question, no I have not been personally involved in any impropriety by any priest. The entire scandal was a huge shock to me … until I remembered a Brother (not an ordained priest) who taught at my college.
I had one class with him. He had also been a teacher at an all-boys high school in the same city, one attended by a lot of boys who went on to college where I went. He was notorious for being a lecherous creep, and heard second-hand many stories of his ass-grabs, propositions and invitations. He was, in fact, known far and wide as “Brother BuFu.”
Age 37, lifelong Catholic. I never encountered a skeezy priest as a child and even as an adult I’ve never heard any rumors about the priests I knew from that time being kiddy-diddlers. Some did have affairs with adult women or men, as I found out later, but us kids were perfectly safe.
A priest from our church growing up was arrested for a relationship with a 14 year old girl, 16 at the time of arrest. I started typing some details from my rusty memory and then looked for a news article on it. Good thing to since I was getting all sorts of things wrong.
I didn’t go to St. Scholastica school (just church) but my sister did. My mother received counseling from the guy when she was going through her divorce.
When I was a freshman at Notre Dame, the priest teaching Theology 101 (or whatever it was called) invited anyone who was interested to come to his quarters for Thanksgiving if they were going to be stuck at school. I didn’t even consider it since I was going home, but an acquaintance of mine decided to go.
When I got back, there were a ton of rumors flying that my acquaintance had been propositioned (possibly groped. Honestly, I don’t remember exactly. I know I talked briefly to the acquaintance but he wasn’t gung ho to talk about it) during his visit for Thanksgiving. A couple of years later, he resigned under the pressure of an investigation.
There were no public accusations against him that I know of while I was in high school, and I never had a class with the guy, although I interacted with him occasionally.
13 years of Catholic school, plus Mass weekly until I was 18. I never experienced or heard about any issues at either of the two parishes or 3 schools I attended.
Raised RC, educated K-8 and college by them. I never knew anyone who was molested, but later found out through the news media that one of our parish priests and two of the priests from my elementary were accused / convicted of molestation. Another of our parish priests had an ongoing affair with a friend of mine (male) who was in college at the time.
The small town where I grew up had a few protestant ministers who liked to get a little strange, be it kids, same sex or a woman to whom they were not married. Whenever they were found out, they tended to either change denominations or start up their own independent church.
I’m a female. When I was maybe 8 or so, we had a new priest in the parish who looooooved taking pictures of me. Although I don’t remember ever going into the rectory, he always wanted me to pose for him, usually in the rectory yard. In retrospect, it was pretty creepy, but he certainly never made a move on me.
My oldest brother got into some trouble as a youth and my parents sent him to a sort of Catholic reform boarding school. This would have been the early '50s. He was molested by the priests there.
I did witness enough shenanigans between a priest and a mother of a classmate that even in 5th/6th grade that I knew what was going on. It was always painted as his being a really good friend of their family, but we had priests out for barbecues and waterskiing and over to our house all the time and I never saw the “friendliness” that the mother and priest had. Oh, and she was his housekeeper too- so that was why she was over at the rectory so much.
I had nothing, so I searched on the parish I was raised in… all I found was a set of “Guidelines for Adults Working with the Youth of” the parish. One of the requirements at the top was
“Virtus training: Sexual abuse awareness training approved by and presented under the auspices of the Diocese of Cleveland.” The document imposed stringent restrictions on contact between children and adults, and requirements to report, and looked like a masterpiece of pre-emptive c.y.a. (Not to be confused with the C.Y.O. which they used to send me to Catholic summer camp). It was required to be signed and dated and witnessed by anybody who took on any position with the parish. Instituted in 2004.
I dug a little deeper and found:
“a planning meeting was held” at my old parish “to establish a Cleveland chapter of Voice of the Faithful, the Boston-based splinter group of Catholics dissatisfied with the way the bishops have responded to the sex-abuse crisis in America.” This took place in 2003.
On their grade-school athletic home page, they posted:
“In 2004 the Diocese of Cleveland began implementing Protecting God’s Children™, also known as Virtus, a program aimed at the prevention of child sexual abuse.”
A thorough search on Google turns up nothing else. Just that they’ve been proactive on the matter. Of course, when I was a kid there in the early 1970s and got raped by Catholic boy scouts of the troop sponsored by my parish, I didn’t report anything. In those days Catholic kids were raised shamed into not ever talking about any sexual subject and there was no support network for survivors or anything like that, and if you were a victim you just tended to blame yourself for it and stay quiet.
Nebraska, early 1970’s, Sister Athanasia would watch with a sideways view of all the ten year old boys pissing, “So they didn’t misbehave”. Not sure what was up with that.
The only contribution I have is this: after the scandal broke, the Archdiocese of Boston published a list of priests who had been accused and also those who had been convicted of these offenses. In the list was a priest whom I had known as a boy-as far as I know, I never heard anything bad about this man. I learned later that he was accused, but that the accusations came after the guy had passed away. So I guess the charges will never be proven or disproved.