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| Archbishop Anthony Sablan Apuron of Guam "On Leave" |
Life can be so hard for a humble Catholic priest! You wonder sometimes how they manage to put up with it.
Take for example Rev. Louis Brouillard. Brouillard served in Guam from the 1940s through the 1970s, teaching at San Vicente and Father Duenas Memorial schools. He is now 95 and lives quietly on his church pension in Pine City, Minnesota, USA.
While in Guam he molested somewhere between two and twenty boys - he could not remember the exact number. Nor could he remember Leo B. Tudela, now aged 73, who gave an emotional testimony to the Guam Legislature appealing for it to raise the statute of limitations from the current two years for those who have sexally abused minors, so that a case can be brought against the former Archbishop of Guam, Anthony S. Apuron, under whose jurisdiction the abuses took place.
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| Father Louis Brouillard |
Apoun has been placed on leave by the Vatican while the allegations are investigated and a temporary replacement in the form of Archbishop Savio Hon Tai-Fai has been appointed to oversee the archdiocese.
However, it is to poor Rev. Louis Brouillard that our sympathy must go for the savage punishment he had to endure when he confessed to his crimes in the 1970s. He was told not to do it again, to say his prayers and to say several Hail Marys in atonement! Apparently, he had to struggle really hard to resist abusing any other children and muttering a few magic spells to no-one must have been an awful burden to carry!
Brouillard says that at the time he thought the boys enjoyed it so he went ahead with it. He now knows it was wrong though, so he says he prays daily for his victims and has volunteered for a local Meals on Wheels program as an act of atonement.
I'm wondering if there is a single Catholic diocese anywhere in the world in which these abuses weren't commonplace and where what 'punishment' there was, even if the abuse wasn't actively condoned and participated in by senior clerics, was as minimal as that savagely meted out to poor Rev. Brouillard.
The fact that Rev Brouillard was "punished" at all, even if only thrashed with a feather, is still more "punishment" than has been given to a vast number of religious sex offenders in my country, Australia. Our Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been running for some years and it seems that every week we hear new, extensive and outrageous evidence of collaborative sexual abuse of children, mainly boys, by bishops, priests, brothers, nuns, clerics,
ReplyDeleteand ministers of the established Christian churches. At the moment the Commission is holding a major hearing into the activities of the Anglican Church in the Diocese of Newcastle, a major regional city north of Sydney. So far nine former bishops of Newcastle are alleged to have had knowledge of abuse by a significant group of priests and to have been involved in cover-ups, transfers, threats to complainants, etc., for many years. The "bells and smells" Anglicans, often called "High Church of England", are very obviously no better or worse than their Catholic counterparts as both organizations have refused to "punish" their recalcitrant priests and seem to prefer to reward them with a soft retired life, on the religious teat, at the expense of poor deluded members of their churches.