Silly talk academic: Kim Daniels of Georgetown University
Just when you thought every single possible imaginable angle of the Church abuse story had been ground to a fine powder over and over again, along comes an online forum last Wednesday called "Neglected Voices in the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis."
Hosted by Georgetown University, a nominally "Catholic" college at best (1, 2, 3), this forum claimed that not enough minority voices have been heard in the never-ending din of media coverage of the past three-plus decades. Think of it as affirmative action victimhood.
A forum built on sand
Built upon the demonstrably false premise that clergy abuse is still an "ongoing crisis," the moderator of the event, Georgetown professor Kim Daniels, began the event by rambling about a vague "culture of clericalism" in the Church and then claiming that Black, Native, and Latino Catholics have "suffered disproportionally from abuse" by the Church.
And the forum went downhill from there, as Daniels' very first speaker, a Fordham University priest, soon stated that "we have no idea how many [Black] victim/survivors there are" because such information has not been gathered, thus rebutting Daniels' earlier premise that Blacks have suffered "disproportionally." Oops.
Sleeper alert: More Church bashing
What followed in the forum was just the usual Church bashing, essentially faulting the Church for failing to follow in lockstep with the ultra left-wing sensibilities of 2022 many decades ago.
Ultimately, the forum was very divisive and anti-Christian, espousing an angry, tribalistic worldview in which the Catholic Church is not seen as one body in Christ but a divided group of ethnic tribes, each of whose "truths" need to be asserted and fought over. There was barely a syllable in this so-called "Catholic" forum that an atheist social worker would have objected to.
In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul reminds us, "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
I guess some Catholics still haven't caught the meaning of this passage.
