Hey, USCCB: Maybe some public penance and resignations would help.

or decades in the Church, bish­ops have shield­ed priests who were known to them to be abus­ing minors. Chile’s bish­ops final­ly did one right thing and resigned en masse. (The pope accept­ed three of them.) And ear­li­er this year, Pope Fran­cis lai­cized Arch­bish­op McCar­rick, him­self an abuser. After a while, things like this appear like token ges­tures, as bish­ops make a dis­play of “demand­ing account­abil­i­ty” and “tak­ing steps to ensure,” and then return to busi­ness as usu­al. Except some­times they look up from the cozy trap­pings of cler­i­cal­ism long enough to notice: Gee, peo­ple are leav­ing the Church. How can this be?

In June, Mary Pez­zu­lo at Steel Mag­ni­fi­cat had some words to say about that:

They left because you hurt them, Fathers. Don’t you remem­ber? You par­tic­i­pat­ed in phys­i­cal, sex­u­al, emo­tion­al and spir­i­tu­al abuse of your flock. Some of you abused them your­selves. Most all of you pro­tect­ed abusers from being stopped, at one time or anoth­er. You cod­dled abusers. You sent them away for coun­sel­ing instead of expos­ing and stop­ping them. You trans­ferred them to dif­fer­ent parish­es so they’d do it again. At every time you could have made your flock your pri­or­i­ty, you made abu­sive priests your pri­or­i­ty instead. You gaslit vic­tims. You lied to and about vic­tims. You threat­ened vic­tims. You re-trau­ma­tized them. You emo­tion­al­ly abused peo­ple who had already been sex­u­al­ly abused, to make them shut up and go away. You killed peo­ple– you forced abor­tions, which is killing, and you drove vic­tims to sui­cide. Their blood is on your hands. The only mys­tery is why the num­ber isn’t high­er. By the grace of God and not by your efforts, some of us are still here.

In short, you turned the Church into a con­cen­tra­tion camp.

And then yes­ter­day, the USCCB post­ed on Face­book a piteous plea for Catholics to “stay with us.” That’s the theme for Cat­e­ch­esis Sun­day this year, the USCCB said: Stay with us!

Gol­ly, you know, that’s just what abusers say: Stay with me. Don’t leave. I promise this time it will be dif­fer­ent.

Right.

•••

Here’s an idea. You want to hand on the faith? You want to be a wit­ness to the Gospel? Then here’s a Gospel text for you to start wit­ness­ing to:

Then said he unto the dis­ci­ples, It is impos­si­ble but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come! It would be bet­ter for him to have a mill­stone hung around his neck and to be thrown into the sea than to cause one of these lit­tle ones to stum­ble.

How many Catholics have been abused or have stum­bled in their faith because you shield­ed abusers, or were abusers your­selves? Woe unto you, through whom these offens­es have come!

If it is so impor­tant to you that Catholics not leave and find oth­er church­es (or no church at all), then how about some pub­lic penance—and I mean severe pub­lic penance? How about cat­e­chiz­ing Catholics on the tem­po­ral pun­ish­ment due to sin by accept­ing it for your­self and resign­ing? You have been the cause of grave scan­dal in the Church, and it requires a great deal more than going to con­fes­sion in pri­vate and say­ing a cou­ple of Aves in pri­vate. This requires a seri­ous pub­lic act of per­son­al account­abil­i­ty before God and before the Church. What is most cer­tain­ly not need­ed are tone-deaf, plain­tive pleas to “please stay.”

Resign.