I don’t know if this is getting much attention in disability circles, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently exposed another facet of the seemingly never-ending child molestation scandal in the Catholic Church that involves a priest at a Milwaukee school for the deaf. Much of the abuse occurred thirty or forty years ago, but the victims kept silent for decades and are only now beginning to come forward. The article highlights the unimaginable isolation that confronted the boys at the school while the abuse was ongoing. Many of them couldn’t even communicate with their parents because their parents didn’t know sign language. The priest who committed the abuse, now dead, apparently had no qualms about exploiting that isolation for his own purposes.
The Milwaukee Archdiocese has acknowledged that the abuse occurred, but that’s probably cold comfort to the victims. And it’s difficult not to wonder whether similar tragedies occurred at other Catholic schools for children with various impairments.
