Perversion of Power When Mourning Never Comes

Mary Gail Frawley-Odea is a psychologist with expertise in child abuse cases. Drawing from her professional experience–including having been asked to speak to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002 on child abuse–as well as her own Catholic spiritual history, here she offers an incredibly thoughtful reflection on the nature of the Catholic Church’s spiritual malady.  Readers may disagree with some or all of it, but rarely have I seen such an attempt to make deep spiritual sense of the failures of the institutional Church in responding to the sexual abuse problem.