Thank you so much for covering this story. Institutional Christianity’s tendency to be severely sexually repressive while overlooking, minimizing, or even condoning their leaders' sexually abusive behavior is an astounding phenomenon that I think will be noted in history as a defining crisis of late 20th and early 21st century Christianity.

Oddly, much of the theology that leads Christian institutions to be sexually repressive in the first place can work to make cover-ups almost inevitable.

When all sex outside certain very narrow limits is shameful and sinful, and when most Christians can’t or don’t perfectly abide by those repressive limits, then sexually abusive behavior starts looking like just another ordinary sin to forgive.

I’ve written before about a Catholic seminary in which young-adult seminarians were strongly morally condemned for having consensual sex with other students, lumped in with other seminarians who were criminally sexually abusing young teenagers at an affiliated school.

Reading Church reports, it quickly becomes apparent that leadership was (and probably remains) unable to distinguish the moral difference between the two behaviors.

Initially, the entire situation was covered up. Seminary officials chose to counsel and forgive. When scandal broke out and the public expressed outrage, Church leaders took strong disciplinary measures — but not just against the sexually abusive seminarians. They treated the seminarians who had engaged in consensual adult sex as equally scandalous and equally guilty as the criminal seminarians.

I think this is an excellent example of how churches cannot or will not recognize the particular harm of sexual abuse. They’re too blinded by their condemnation of sex in general.