Looking back at a predator
When death does not stop the pain
I was thinking today about Father Edward McKeown and how he died in prison a year before his parole would have come up again. We all have the tendency to say, "That's it. He's dead and gone. Pain over."
Not so. With pedophiles and predators of all kinds, the pain lives, sometimes muted by time but sometimes not gone at all. It's a personal response to a personal crime. The objective reality that the inflictor of pain and shame is gone is only one reality. The other reality is that the effects of the abuse linger and sometimes fester no matter how much we wish they wouldn't.
Father Edward McKeown abused in Middle and East Tennessee when the area was all the Diocese of Nashville. McKeown's abuse at Blessed Sacrament Church in Harriman, Tennessee, is well grounded in fact, but the people in that parish are still left in the dark. Even the priests assigned there over the years may or may not know about McKeown. The current Diocese of Knoxville finds it easier not to acknowledge the years before 1988 when it was established. That way victims of priests who molested in any year before 1988 can be turned away with the admonition to "Go to Nashville. We didn't exist then."
Except they did exist.
On September 8, 1988, when Knoxville became a diocese, all that changed was the name and the bishop. And that bishop was a pedophile, Anthony J. O'Connell. Most priests in the Diocese of Knoxville stayed the same. Parishes stayed the same. This diversionary tactic works legally but it is an insult to the faithful in these churches. More later.
The devastation that the abuse of Father Edward McKeown wrought on so many young boys is horrific. But he never paid for his sexual abuse of boys in the Catholic Church. It was after the Diocese of Nashville turned him lose on the unsuspecting public that McKeown abuse 4 boys in the trailor park where he lived. A non-Catholic mother caught him and turned him in. He went to jail for 20 years for his crimes but died after 19 years there.
Never say that death ends abuse. Would to God that it did. We can only hope that it is some manner of consolation to so many men who surrendered their youth to crimes against their childhood. Edward McKeown is dead. It's something at least but will never be enough. The Catholic Churcs knows that; it just does not care.
