stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

268 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Nearly two hundred people [one of them just four years old
at the time] who say they were raped or fondled by [the nowlate
Rev. John J.] Geoghan have filed claims against him and
his supervisors in the last several years. Experts believe he
probably molested three to four times as many people as
have come forward....
By most accounts at least fifteen hundred priests [by
now, over four thousand (Zoll, 2005)] have faced public accusations
of sexual misconduct with minors since the mid-
1980s (Boston Globe, 2003).
Father Anthony Corbin ... confessed to having had sex with
an eighth-grade boy. Corbin dressed his victim in a loincloth
to resemble Christ headed for the crucifix[ion] (Bruni and
Burkett, 2002).
Some of what was done [by the Catholic Christian Brothers
and the Sisters of Mercy] was of a quite exceptional depravity,
so that terms like “sexual abuse” are too weak to convey
it. For example ... the account of a man who as a boy was a
particular favorite of some Christian Brothers at Tardun
[Australia] who competed as to who could rape him one hundred
times first, his account of being in terrible pain, bleeding
and bewildered (Raftery and O’Sullivan, 2001).
With “holiness” and “purity” like that, who needs obscenity?
With conscienceless “saints” and “representatives of God on
Earth” like these, who needs demonic sinners?
The family-incest-like attempted cover-ups of alleged Catholic
clergy sexual abuse further show quite brutally how little the supposed
“checks and balances” within that same system actually
work. So, too, do the related and utterly cruel attempts to discredit
the victims, and the closing of the upper clerical ranks against the
latter. (Thomas Doyle characterized the Church’s response to that
reported abuse as involving “a defrauding, a stonewalling, and outright
lying to the people” [in Berry and Renner, 2004].) For there,
offending priests, even those with known and extensive histories of
sexual abuse, were more likely to simply be transferred to another
parish—if not simultaneously promoted, suspended with pay, or
retired with pension—than to be meaningfully censured. That was
done even after the violated families had been explicitly guaranteed
by religious superiors that specific, appropriate steps would be