A lawsuit by a former alter boy about sex abuse at the hands of Father Ivan Ferguson that took place in the 1980’s, exposes the cover up of the Catholic Church. They think curing alcoholism in Father Ivan Ferguson by sending him to Alcoholics Anonymous will do the trick.

So we don’t just have the problem of the court system sending sexual predators to Alcoholics Anonymous, but the Catholic Church started thinking years ago that sending their pedophile priests to AA was the way to go. This just makes me sick. These poor children. Let’s start protecting the children and stop protecting the pedophiles by covering up their crimes, and hiding in AA granting anonymity.

The suit claims that senior church officers, including former Archbishop John F. Whealon, knew that Ferguson had abused two brothers in the Tarriffville section of Simsbury two years earlier, in 1979, but failed to prevent the priest from having further contact with children.

Church records entered as evidence in the case show that Ferguson was a teacher at Northwest Catholic High School in West Hartford when he confessed to abusing the Tarriffville brothers. Whealon removed Ferguson from the high school and sent him, for three months, to a church clinic that noted Ferguson’s pedophilia but existed principally to treat alcoholic nuns and priests.

The records show that Whealon and the clinicians who treated Ferguson at the St. Luke Institute in Holliston, Mass., in 1979 believed his pedophilia could be controlled if he attended Alcoholics Anonymous and controlled his drinking.

Upon Ferguson’s release from St. Luke, Whealon assigned the priest to a Catholic high school for girls in Milford. Not long after his assignment in Milford, the records show that Ferguson was pressing to be assigned to a school for boys.

The assignment to a boy’s school “did not materialize,” according to the records. But by 1981, he had been assigned as the principal of a Catholic grammar school in Derby for boys and girls. It was while Ferguson was at St. Mary’s School in Derby that he is accused of molesting the altar boy, known in his suit as Jacob Doe, and the altar boy’s best friend. The boys were age 13 to 15 when the abuse took place.

The records show that by 1982, Ferguson and the people who treated him at St. Luke were proposing that Whealon assign him to a “teen ministry.” The records do not reflect how Whealon received the proposal.

Ferguson died in 2002.

Dubay’s ruling prevented the archdiocese from calling former Penn State University history professor John P. Jenkins as a witness.

Jenkins is a widely published historian with specialities in the Catholic church and aberrant behavior. In the 1990s, Jenkins wrote, among other things, “Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America” and “Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis.”

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-priest-abuse-0203-20120202,0,91891.story