Word: romane
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...Michael Shanahan is struggling to find the Spanish word for pedophilia. First, he ad libs, referring in Spanish to the "crimes of the priests." Then, seeing the rows of blank faces, he resorts to saying pedophilia with a Spanish accent--which turns out to be right. A white Roman Catholic priest of Irish descent ministering to a mostly Hispanic congregation, Shanahan, along with his flock, is the picture of the Roman Catholic Church's future in the U.S. For a year and a half, he has been the only full-time pastor for the 600 families, most of them Puerto...
...many cases have spilled like stained vestments into public view--not just in Boston but in Los Angeles and St. Louis, Mo., and Philadelphia and Palm Beach, Fla., and Washington and Portland, Maine, and Bridgeport, Conn. The horror is not their singularity but their ghastly similarity: claims of a Roman Catholic priest sexually abusing children, and the church covering it up whether it involves Father Dan or Father Oliver or Father Rocco...
...medieval Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences to sinners who thought cash could purchase exoneration in heaven. Today it's the church that is handing out money in hopes of buying forgiveness for itself. The surging scandal over sexual abuse by the priesthood is proving as financially damaging to the church as it is hurtful to the faith, as Catholic dioceses across the country dole out huge sums to victims to compensate them for their pain and keep them silent...
...pretty seedy character. To claim supernatural powers and then be caught in sordid acts--sexually abusing children or, even worse, shielding the abusers--is not only a moral problem. It is a near fatal professional error. I wonder if the hierarchy knows how gravely the Roman Catholic Church, especially the American church, has been wounded. There's massive internal bleeding, a hemorrhage of credibility--yet, in the face of all that, a squirming official attitude mixing anguish and evasion. At least Jimmy Swaggart had the good grace to bawl on television and beat his breast and otherwise oblige the audience...
...novelists stress that there is no real Mrs. X, that the events are exaggerated versions of things that happened to them or people they knew and that they didn't start the book until after they had stopped nannying. Nor did they set out to write a sizzling roman a clef; they were shooting more for Chekhov. "We noticed that in a lot of books in N.Y.U.'s Great Books Program, nannies were mentioned," says McLaughlin. "They were always a peripheral but pivotal figure...