As a survivor of clerical sexual abuse at the hands of the late Theodore McCarrick, I want to express my profound indignation at Msgr. Richard Antall’s recent essay (published on AngelusNews.com April 30). The piece soft pedals horrors that thousands of survivors have spent decades forcing into the light.

Antall highlights McCarrick’s former charitable work while glossing over the 2018 Vatican report on McCarrick, the civil suits in New Jersey, and the criminal indictment against him. Downplaying all that evidence presented against him insults every victim who risked retaliation to testify.

Antall’s suggestion that McCarrick’s downfall stems from a “cultural overcorrection” rather than decades of stone-walling by bishops is either historically tone deaf or an intentional diversion from institutional culpability.

I recognize opinion columns allow strong viewpoints. What Angelus published, however, muddles opinion with omission so egregiously that it lands in the realm of revisionism. I am appalled that you would allow one of your writers to treat survivors’ pain as a footnote to clerical reputation. When the Catholic press skirts the full truth, it deepens the very distrust the late Pope Francis, and now our new Pope Leo XIV, want healed.