Just recently we heard about tens of millions of dollars in cash being laundered in the Vatican. Clearly the Vatican and the Catholic Church are still imperial institutions, very much disconnected from the real world. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the almost twenty year history of sex abuse in the Catholic Church. We often think about these stories on a very human, very tragic case by case basis. But from thirty thousand feet, the numbers are staggering. 500+ priests sent to prison, over 3 billion paid in settlements, single priests that have abused more than 200 individual children and these are just a few of the statistics.
How did this happen? How did horror and human degradation become so institutionalized, covered up and almost accepted from the Pope on down?
This is the story that Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Michael D’Antonio tells in his new book Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal
.My conversation with Michael D'Antonio:
