Bless Me Father

This is a picture of Robert Van Handel, a convicted sex offender.  You probably will not be surprised to learn he is also a former priest.

Recently (as if this doesn't happen every day) it was revealed that at a Franciscan boarding school in California, child abuse was as common as breathing.

When Van Handel was fifteen at the seminary school, he was abused by a priest while he was sick in the infirmary.  Years later he became an abusive priest himself.

There are approximately 8,000 pages of evidence against nine priests in the secret files of the Franciscans depicting a pervasive culture of abuse that went on for years and about which nothing was done.

We believe that seminaries no longer accept teenagers as priest fodder.  Never should young boys have been locked away in an unnatural environment with priests who were similarly treated at that age.  Never should such a situation have been permitted.

The nonsensical thought that priests are good people and can do magic no doubt fostered the blind approval parents gave when turning their children over to the care of abused, frustrated men.

And yet all the Catholic Church cares about is what women are doing with their own bodies.