Unforgivable

January 6, 2025
Catholic doctrine led to institutional breakdown that promoted sexual abuse of children, according to this mordant study of a pedophile priest. Anthropologist O’Neill (Hunted) profiles Fr. David Roney, a Catholic priest who molested dozens of young girls in a Minnesota diocese from the 1960s through the ’80s. His assaults were varied and extensive—they included the surreptitious fondling of kids in front of their parents as well as outright rape. Almost as horrific was the nonresponse of adults who knew about it, among them housekeepers who witnessed the abuse and the diocese’s bishop. While Church officials sometimes confronted Roney, when he stonewalled and refused psychiatric treatment, they took no further steps to stop him. In semiretirement, he was sent to an orphanage in Guatemala—where he continued abusing kids. O’Neill provides a complex examination of the Church’s complicity in Roney’s crimes, scrutinizing the irrevocable nature of ordination, the Church’s self-serving ethic of forgiveness for priestly transgressions, and the imperative to protect the Church above all. These systemic failings are more resonant than O’Neill’s scholarly analysis, which draws on Michel Foucault to contend that perceptions of the reality of sexual abuse are determined by elite ideology and language—a framework that feels too forgiving of what amounts to a cover-up. Still, it’s a moving look at a disturbing failure of religious mores.