For further reading about the priest sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, see the Australian Catholic layman Kiernan Tapsell's book Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sex Abuse (ATF Press, 2014).
Now, Charles Nadeau says that the well-publicized process of certain Catholic dioceses filing for bankruptcy due to the expenses of lawsuits brought against them by the survivors of clergy sex abuse needs to be carefully considered.
He argues that the dioceses filing for bankruptcy need to experience repentance for the clergy sex abuse in each respective diocese.
Charles Nadeau argues that filing for bankruptcy does not necessarily involve the respective dioses in repentance.
As a result, the bankruptcy process robs the sex abuse victims of what Charles Nadeau refers to as "voice" - a term that he does not carefully define and explain, but he seems to mean by it that the clergy sex abuse victims lose their sense of individual personhood in the bankruptcy process.
Now, among other things that Charles Nadeau says, he says that there is a "disconnect between the church's public language and the private mechanics of the [bankruptcy] process."
He claims that the "legal resolution [is] presented as moral closure."
But he does not explore exactly what all would be involved in the church providing moral closure for the victims of clergy sex abuse.
However, he does say that repentance is a moral act that should mean "engaging survivors not only as claimants, but as witnesses to institutional failure."
According to Charles Nadeau, bankruptcy cannot "repair what abuse has broken." As a result, bankruptcy leaves "survivors unheard and lessons unlearned."
Amen.
Now, the clergy sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church led the author Philip Shenon to write his bleak 2025 book Jesus Wept: The Struggles for the Soul of the Catholic Church (Alfred A. Knopf).
I have written about Philip Shenon's bleak 2025 book Jesus Wept: The Struggles for the Soul of the Church in my wide-ranging and extremely associative OEN article "Philip Shenon on the Last Seven Popes" (dated March 11, 2025; viewed 677 times as of February 10, 2026):
Now, I want to situate my OEN article "Philip Shenon on the Last Seven Popes" (dated March 11, 2025) in the broader context of my 691 OEN articles over the years.
In my first OEN article "Why Obama Should Shun the Pope's Views on Abortion" (dated October 10, 2009; viewed 1,755 times as of February 10, 2026), I articulated my support of legalized abortion and my opposition to the Roman catholic Church's official opposition to legalized abortion:
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
