Unforgivable
An Abusive Priest and the Church That Sent Him Abroad
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
The first book to expose how the Catholic Church systematically covers up scandal by moving abusers across borders.
Clerical sexual abuse is as global as the Roman Catholic Church, with bishops moving credibly accused priests not simply between parishes but also across international borders. Unforgivable follows the movement of one such perpetrator from the Great Plains of central Minnesota to the Indigenous highlands of Guatemala, where this priest had access to children and even raised one as his own.
Although Father David Roney is at the center of this particular story, author Kevin Lewis O'Neill offers ample evidence that offshoring priests is a common practice. These maneuvers and the callous indifference of the Church—even once caught red-handed—reveal the limits of justice. They also lay bare the disturbing fact that the scale of clerical sexual abuse is far bigger than anyone has yet considered. Rigorously researched and viscerally important, this book raises urgent questions about holding the Catholic Church accountable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Catholic doctrine led to institutional breakdown that promoted sexual abuse of children, according to this mordant study of a pedophile priest. Anthropologist O'Neill (Hunted) profiles Fr. David Roney, a Catholic priest who molested dozens of young girls in a Minnesota diocese from the 1960s through the '80s. His assaults were varied and extensive—they included the surreptitious fondling of kids in front of their parents as well as outright rape. Almost as horrific was the nonresponse of adults who knew about it, among them housekeepers who witnessed the abuse and the diocese's bishop. While Church officials sometimes confronted Roney, when he stonewalled and refused psychiatric treatment, they took no further steps to stop him. In semiretirement, he was sent to an orphanage in Guatemala—where he continued abusing kids. O'Neill provides a complex examination of the Church's complicity in Roney's crimes, scrutinizing the irrevocable nature of ordination, the Church's self-serving ethic of forgiveness for priestly transgressions, and the imperative to protect the Church above all. These systemic failings are more resonant than O'Neill's scholarly analysis, which draws on Michel Foucault to contend that perceptions of the reality of sexual abuse are determined by elite ideology and language—a framework that feels too forgiving of what amounts to a cover-up. Still, it's a moving look at a disturbing failure of religious mores.
