Let us be plain. The institutional Roman Catholic Church as it currently exists is a prima facie international criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice. Absent the scent of incense, this would be the easiest RICO case any prosecutor ever brought. Consider what we've learned just in the last week.

1) Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan announced that her investigation had discovered that the identities of more than 500 priests against whom charges of sexual abuse had been lodged were still being kept secret by the institutional church in that state. From the Chicago Tribune:

The determination is part of a preliminary report made public Wednesday by Madigan’s office, which has been investigating Catholic clergy sexual abuse of minors following revelations during the summer of widespread abuse and cover-ups by Catholic officials in Pennsylvania. The report was critical of the six Catholic dioceses that govern parishes across Illinois for their lack of transparency and flawed investigations.

Lisa Madigan Getty Images

Although the report says that “Clergy sexual abuse of minors in Illinois is significantly more extensive than the Illinois Dioceses previously reported,” it does not estimate how many of the allegations against the 690 clergy should have been deemed credible. Some of the allegations go back decades. The report says Illinois dioceses “have lost sight of both a key tenet” of policies laid out by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as well as “the most obvious human need as a result of these abhorrent acts of abuse: the healing and reconciliation of survivors.”

“Long after legal remedies have expired, the Catholic Church has the ability and moral responsibility to survivors to offer support and services, and to take swift action to remove abusive clergy,” the report states.

The Church's lawyers are as pigheaded and inhumane as some of their clients are.

William Kunkel, the general counsel for the Archdiocese of Chicago, said he doesn’t anticipate the public list of Chicago-area priests with credible allegations of abuse to grow. The archdiocese has no immediate plans to review past allegations — some of which go back decades — because it has already reported past allegations to prosecutors in Cook and Lake counties, Kunkel said. In cases involving a priest who has died, children are no longer at risk, Kunkel said.

This is absurd. There is no reason not to identify an abusive priest who has died, and Kunkel's glib formulation completely ignores the fact that, very likely, some of the dead priest's victims are still alive and living with the trauma he'd inflicted on them.

Jesus, these people.

Tim Boyle Getty Images

2) It was revealed this week that the Society of Jesus had been stashing abusive Jesuits at a kind of safe house on the campus of Gonzaga University in Spokane. The account concerning one of these criminals, here from America magazine, is abhorrent in the extreme.

A 1978 story in People magazine called Poole "Western Alaska's Hippest DJ . Comin' at Ya with Rock'n'Roll 'n' Religion." Behind the radio station's closed doors, Poole was a serial sexual predator. He abused at least 20 women and girls, according to court documents. At least one was 6 years old. One Alaska Native woman says he impregnated her when she was 16, then forced her to get an abortion and blame her father for raping her. Her father went to prison.

Like so many other Catholic priests around the country, Poole's inappropriate conduct with young girls was well-known to his superiors. A Jesuit supervisor once warned a church official that Poole "has a fixation on sex; an obsession; some sort of mental aberration that makes him see sex everywhere." But the last chapter in his story reveals a new twist in the Catholic abuse scandal: Poole was sent to live out his retirement years on Gonzaga University's campus in Spokane, Washington.

One of the people who worked for transparency during the Boston abuse crisis told me that the next biggest shoe to drop was going to be cases that occurred in places far from the media spotlight—missions in Africa or the South Pacific, he said, or in out-of-the-way places in this country.

Gonzaga University gregobagel Getty Images

Like Alaska, I guess.

For more than three decades, Cardinal Bea House on Gonzaga's campus served as a retirement repository for at least 20 Jesuit priests accused of sexual misconduct that predominantly took place in small, isolated Alaska Native villages and on Indian reservations across the Northwest, an investigation by the Northwest News Network and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.

A trove of internal Jesuit correspondence shows a longstanding pattern of Jesuit officials in the Oregon Province — an administrative area that included Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho and Alaska — privately acknowledging issues of inappropriate sexual behavior, but not releasing that information to the public, which avoided scandal and protected the perpetrators from prosecution. When abuse was discovered, the priests would be reassigned, sometimes to another Native community.

Certainly, the Native peoples of North America didn't really need another reason not to trust white society, but the Church gave them one anyway.

(Poole's case tracks in its M.O. with the arrest earlier in December of Father Kenneth Bernard, who apparently was running a private harem of young boys in the back areas of the Philippines.)

Bishop Alexander Salazar Kevin Sullivan AP

3) The pope this week accepted the resignation of Bishop Alexander Salazar, auxiliary of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, in the wake of revelations that the Church had buried abuse accusations against the bishop dating back to the 1990s.

This story is simply not going to end. As my friend pointed out, and as the Poole and Bernard cases demonstrate, there are places in this world where priests likely are operating as the sexual-abuse equivalents of Colonel Kurtz. It is time now to start seizing property and building massive conspiracy cases. It's time to start impoverishing the Clan of the Red Beanie in all the ways it is possible to impoverish people. The Founder told us that the gates of Hell would not prevail against his Church, but he didn't say anything about how perverts could bring it down from within.

This story is simply never going to end and it's never not going to be a stench in the nostrils of God and the world.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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