A tragedy to residents of Arizona’s Mother Road July 11, 2011

A heartbreaking story in the New York Times on Sunday told about a Catholic priest, the Rev. Clement A. Hageman, who sexually abused boys in the Arizona Route 66 towns of Kingman, Winslow, and Holbrook from the early 1940s until his death in 1975.

The church claims its problems with priest abuse coincided with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. But much of the Hageman case predates that era.

The whole story is worth reading. I made a few observations of my own while checking other aspects of the report:

— Although the Times reports Hageman’s abuse goes to the early ’40s, diocese documents posted at BishopAccountability.org make it clear his problems with boys date to the late 1930s, at least. A cryptically worded letter indicated red flags in 1927, and it’s very likely he became a problem priest shortly after his ordainment in 1930.

— Those who aren’t familiar with the Southwest can’t conceive how much power Catholic priests wield, especially over local Hispanic culture. Because of that, victims and their families would have been much less likely to rat out abusive priests.

— Folks will claim Hageman was just one bad apple. That said, there must be a lot of bad apples. Even my central Illinois hometown of just 1,200 people fell victim during the 1970s to an abusive priest who — you guessed it — was reassigned by the diocese to another parish. He finally went to prison during the 1980s. (For the record, I’m non-Catholic, so I never had the misfortune of directly dealing with him.) The decades-long priest-abuse scandal will remain a black eye for the Catholic Church for a long, long time.

One has to wonder … how many men are still walking the streets of Holbrook, Winslow, and Kingman, filled with torment because of one man’s terrible actions?