A theologian's view

I saw an interesting post at America magazine's blog - The Expiration Date of This Catholicism: Being a Theologian in an Abusive Church by Tom Beaudoin, a professor of theology at Fordham university, who writes in part ...

I am a member of a church that has abused thousands of kids and teenagers over the last several decades. How does my work in religion and culture relate to this trauma, to this Catholic evil? I have argued in a recent book that “the physical-spiritual violence toward thousands and thousands of young souls in the past several decades calls fundamentally into question the content and purpose of thinking for and with this religious institution. As theologian Stephen Pattison has argued, the ‘long-overdue ‘discovery’ of child abuse must be to Western theologians what the challenge of the poor has been to colleagues in South America—an imperative to a fundamental re-visioning of theology.’ Sexual abuse of minors is the awful lodestar for all future American Catholic theology.”