The Pedophile Priests of Pennsylvania have a legacy that will continue to affect our entire country for many more generations. Young boys who were molested do not grow up to be healthy, happy, productive members of our society. They grow up to be angry men. They become scared, lost, confused, and looking for reasons why their God would forsake them. Then they are launched into toxic culture that tells them that emotions are harmful. These emotions, not being acknowledged, spoken, or processed, creates a vault of pressure inside the individual. As a mental health counselor and sex therapist, I see this often in my office.
The outcome of this mindset expands through our culture, because abused children grow up to be adults that are no longer powerless. The power we all inherit when we become adults becomes a way to deal with that pressure leftover from the pain of being abused when they were small. Abused children struggle to pick up the mantle of adulthood without excesses of either introversion or bluster. Most fail.
They sometimes turn to pedophilia themselves to relieve that emotional pressure from inside, creating another generation of kids being abused and perpetuating the cycle. They sometimes turn inward and commit suicide rather than hurt another person, but this hurts their family and friends anyway. They sometimes explode outward and turn into hateful, hurtful, vengeance-seeking missiles, stockpiling guns and barricading their psyche. But they do not simply grow past it without lots of help.
There were 300 *known* Pedophiles in one city alone. And they were transferred to other places, moved around like chess pieces to hide their crimes. This allowed them to spread their harm across our entire country. If one priest abused ONLY one boy per week for 1 year that would be 52 victims per year…of one man. Multiply that by 300. Then multiply that by the number of years this went on. Then multiply that by the ones that we don’t know about and can only guess at. That’s how many broken people are out in your world; working, driving, buying stuff…becoming Dads who have children who are now also at risk. And voting.
Let’s not forget that they vote with reasoning skills that have become frozen in time by fear they can’t process. They vote for things that make them feel safer. They are mostly white men, cisgender, heterosexual, coming from families that had enough money to send them to private schools. Who do you think they are voting for?
This is not a small sideline story, people. This is one of the Big Red Arrows that points to an early part of the story of “how did we get here?”