Mark White Abuse Silence
This spring, I received a letter from my boss ordering me to take down my blog or lose my job.
Workers all over the country have found themselves in this kind of situation. But I may yet become the first Catholic priest removed for blogging.
Until recently, I was the pastor of two parishes in southwest Virginia, one in Martinsville and the other in Rocky Mount. I love my work and my community of some 800 families. I began blogging in 2008 as an additional way of reaching the faithful. For the first decade, my digital homilies and musings attracted little attention outside my parishes.
In 2018, though, like many Catholics, I was shaken when news emerged of sexual abuse by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the archbishop of Washington.
I had been a seminarian when the Catholic Church was rocked by revelations of abuse 16 years earlier, in 2002. One of the many distressing facets of that crisis was that bishops had covered up the crimes of abusive priests, often transferring them to new positions instead of calling the police. McCarrick led much of the U.S. Catholic Church’s response to that scandal, speaking often to the press and championing a supposed “zero-tolerance” approach.