Protesters Want To Know Why Bishop Tobin Is Unwilling To Aggressively Protect Children from Abuse

11/25/09-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
“He claims that it’s important that we protect the unborn. But it’s equally as important to protect those who have been born and those young children who have been raped and sodomized by clerics and priests. But yet he seems to protect those clerics.” Backlash against Bishop Thomas Tobin has begun over his decision to ask Representative Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island to not take Communion. Ruth Moore, of Hull, Mass, said the above while being part of a small group of protesters who gathered outside of Bishop Tobin’s office.

The scandal over pedophile priests has hit the Catholic Church hard, especially in light of a report showing how gay priests are no more likely to molest children than straight priests despite the tendency to scapegoat gays on that issue. It is a report that is often ignored by the very Bishops who commissioned it.

The protesters want more done to redress the crimes committed against children over the course of the last fifty years of the Roman Catholic Church’s cover up of child abuse within the Church. A recent report in Ireland on a related subject, the Magdalene Asylums, was expunged of all priest and nun names. The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse was blocked from publicly naming the abusers in Ireland. The Roman Catholic Church in America has been reluctant to name people if they have already passed on, or the allegations were later recanted. However, they have been resistant to publishing the names of those who have been proven to have been involved in child abuse, even if the case is pending before the courts. Currently the Roman Catholic Church is considering the situation, and may begin publishing the names at a later date.

One of those who called upon the Church to make those names public is Skip Shae. Mr. Shae was abused by a priest he later saw working near a children’s section of a bookstore. “There has to be some sort of safeguard to protect kids. I don’t think it ends with removing them from active ministry and I don’t think it ends with defrocking,” he told the AP. In times passed, a disgraced priest was often sent to an isolated monastery where they would be unable to commit the crime or sin that caused their downfall.

Shae went on to address the problems caused by Bishop Tobin’s attack on Representative Kennedy by stating “Everybody, including these priests, deserve Communion. Because that’s the whole point of it. That’s part of the point of the church. I don’t think anybody should be disqualified from it. It’s politics. I think the bishop’s playing politics.”

The Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, of course, disagrees calling Bishop Tobin’s actions courageous.

Unfortunately, many Catholics feel that his actions undermine the moral authority of the Catholic Church as a whole by interfering in the political process.