Our Moral Edifice Has Fallen, by Anthony Esolen

By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine, Nov. 24, 2021

Anthony Esolen, a contributing editor at Crisis, is a professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts. He is the author, most recently, of Sex and the Unreal City (Ignatius Press, 2020).

In a recent article at The Pillar, the estimable J.D. Flynn interviews a family in the Cleveland archdiocese whose son was preyed upon—through two years of utterly demonic enticement, spiritual blackmail, and cruelty—by a priest now serving a life sentence in prison. It is an agony to read, as it should be. The young man deserves our sympathy and needs our prayers. He did not create the horrors of the world he must live in. He did not take advantage of those horrors to prey upon the vulnerable.

Now, this priest glad-handed his way into the lives of his victims and their families, passing himself off as having a special ministry to people addicted to pornography. …