Corapi, accused priests get the short straw

Today is a very sad one for the Church in America. We've lost one of our most prominent, influential and hard-hitting priests, Fr. John Corapi, SOLT.

After an allegation of sexual misconduct was made against him several months ago, Corapi announced he has been indefinitely suspended from ministry.

The announcement was made via his YouTube channel earlier today. Corapi said that his superiors with the Society of Our Lady of the Trinity were strong-armed into removing him following pressure from certain bishops. You can watch the entire thing here.

I'm not going to make any comments as to his guilt or innocence. We can't know for sure what exactly led to the allegations, and from the sounds of things we probably never will. As much as I love my Church, we're not exactly fans of transparency.

And there, I think, lies the problem.

The abuse scandal has been going on for decades with varying degrees of publicity, and people both in and outside the Church demand answers. For the most part, I feel like we've gotten little more than canned, empty PR.

Of course, as a Catholic I can understand the need to protect our reputation. That's important. But in today's society, we can't expect to "keep things in the family" and have that be acceptable to everyone else. Corapi deserved at the very least a fair hearing. The faithful also deserve to have all of the details laid out in the open. Yet in this case, as with so many others like it, all of us will be left guessing.

Beyond that, the way we treat our accused priests in reprehensible. As Corapi said, in civil law we are innocent until proven guilty. Yet in the Church, if you sneeze the wrong way while wearing clerics, you can generally expect to have your ministry irreparably soiled.

We've done a lot of work to remove guilty priests of late. That's laudable. At the same time, I believe we should be a hell of a lot more aggressive ... but this is not the way to go about that. Not even close. Too often, we are throwing out our good men just as often as the bad. In doing that, the Church is only hurting more.

What we're left with is good men who are forced to live their priesthood in fear, both in their personal lives and in what they say at the pulpit. And, heaven help us, the true criminals.

Now if we could only be so merciless in dealing with bad doctrine.

St. John Vianney, pray for our priests.