Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church

By Leon Podles and Leon J. Podles

Book Overview

Sacrilege explores the deep roots of the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse scandal, revealing its full depth and breadth. In horrifying yet necessary detail, former federal investigator Leon Podles... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0979027993
• ISBN13: 9780979027994
• Release Date: November 2007
• Publisher: Crossland Foundation Press
• Length: 675 Pages
• Weight: 2.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.4" x 9.1"
• Age Range: 20 years and up

Customer Reviews

Practicing catholic review

This is a tremendous and tough read. Leon Podles book is a challenging book to read because he has courageously broke through many psychological barriers. He not only describes the crimes but points out the flaws in human behavior that perpetuated them. In the end he gave constructive information. I have purchased five copies for friends and relatives. Interestingly, I found most could not bring themselves to read it! Why?

Horrific Read

The author purports to have gathered his facts from public records so we assume the facts are more or less accurate. They reveal a ecclesiastical corruption of the deepest hue at all levels, from the Vatican to the parishoner. Page after page of incredulous inhumanity should, but has not, caused Catholics to rise up in horror, demanding change and punishment. Should be required reading in every parish.

It's OK to Be Angry

Leon Podles is angry, and wants us to be angry, too. He wants us to be angry at the sin of sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy. But more than that, he also wants us to be angry at the bishops and pope for not being angry at that same sin. That's what irks him about this crisis more than anything else--never have the bishops or popes expressed any anger that priests molested kids or that other bishops covered it up and transferred the predators to new hunting grounds. Podles had done his work well. Others who have written about the sexual abuse crisis, including Jason Berry and Gerald Renner, give us great detail about particular epicenters of the crisis and their own journeys as they covered the stories, but Podles' work stands out as a masterful portrayal of the big picture, linking the stories Berry and Renner reported with stories from other times and places. He paints with broad strokes in places, but gets into some very fine detail in others to help us to grasp the magnitude of some truly horrendous cases. Podles also gives us analysis of the abusers and the victims, and of how each was treated by bishops, and what went wrong. The bishops are clearly the focal point of his anger. He asks pointed questions: "Why hadn't bishops ever gotten angry at abusers? Why were abusers treated so gently, when men who left the priesthood to marry were treated so harshly? Why had bishops lied to parents? Why hadn't they disciplined their clergy, when they seemed so eager to micromanage everything else in America, from what married couples did in bed to what the government did about immigration?"(3) But he goes further, seeing the crisis as about more than the bishops and the priests they coddled: Catholic culture is implicated; specifically a narcissistic clericalism in which the laity, including police and judges and prosecutors colluded.

Essential for comprehending clergy sex abuse

Podles has the investigative skills and background and the intellectual and academic credentials to present a book that not only tells the story of the tragic Catholic clergy sex abuse nightmare, but why it happened. This book is foundational to an accurate comprehension of this complex and highly emotional issue. Having read just about every book on the topic I find Podles' book a heavyweight in the very best sense. His style is somewhat unique in that he fortifies his analytical opinions with well laid out factual cases. The book reads well but it should and will evoke strong feelings as it brings to life one of the greatest scandals the instititional Catholic Church has faced and continues to experience.

The best yet

As a journalist who has been doing research on clergy sex abuse for five years, I consider "Sacrilege" to be a seminal work, the best yet of the many books on this subject. It is biblical in its scope and depth. It provides telling detail of the horrific abuses of Catholic priests, but goes beyond that to blame the bishops for condoning and covering up this worst scandal in the history of the American Catholic church. And it puts a proper focus on the children who suffered greatly from the abuses. I recommend this book as a must read for all those who want to know how a lack of accountability allowed a huge religious bureaucracy to become corrupted at the core.--Joe Rigert, Minneapolis, MN.