Getting your player ready...
The founder of a religious order that treats priests who molest kids concluded in the 1950s that offenders were unlikely to change and shouldn’t return to ministry, according to his letters obtained by plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald of the Servants of the Paraclete was so sure of the priests’ inability for self-control that he tried to buy an island to isolate them.
Fitzgerald discussed the issue with Pope Paul VI and in correspondence with several bishops, the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper, reported Monday.
The documents challenge statements by U.S. bishops that before the clergy sex-abuse scandal of the 1980s and 2002, they were unaware of risks in moving predators among parishes.
