The Catholic Church Has Been Covering Up Crimes for a Long Time

Caption: On left, Maria Conzemius; on right, husband Jim Conzemius. We're on a bike ride on the Cedar Valley Nature Trail in August 2018 and some fellow riders in Lafayette offered to take our picture.

When I worked as a social worker for a private nonprofit in child welfare as a subcontractor for the Iowa Department of Human Services, my boss for a time was an elderly nun who lived in a convent. She invited me and the rest of her staff to the convent for a staff meeting. I wondered if that was appropriate.

It turns out that she and another resident (not a nun) of the convent were involved in an argument about whether to lock the convent door or not. My boss, whose name I'm blocking out and I wouldn't reveal her name if I could remember it, was of the persuasion that the door didn't need to be locked. Her roommate thought the convent door should be locked. They argued about it a lot. I would have sided with the roommate had I been asked, but I was blissfully unaware of their contretemps.

I was unaware, that is, until my purse, including my car keys, turned up missing. My boss had to drive me home. Finally reaching Iowa City, she bristled at the luxury of our babysitter's neighborhood, which was near my own, but nicer. She was shocked by Iowa City's apparent opulence from the northeast side. I could see her jowls quivering as she drove and laughed to myself at her apparent assumption that we were somehow wealthy and had been hiding it. As if you can be wealthy on a bus driver's and social worker's salaries.

My boss dropped me off at our babysitter's house. I thanked her and walked the kids home to our house, a stone's throw as the crow flies from our babysitter's neighborhood, and fed them a snack. Then I got busy canceling all of my credit cards.

The police detective who investigated the theft found out that my boss's roommate had stolen my purse and dumped it in a pond or small lake. He recovered my car keys, but a lot of the other stuff was ruined, and of course the credit cards were already canceled. Why did she steal my purse? To prove to my boss that the convent door should be locked. I became a pawn in their argument. The police detective, being a good Catholic, promised to keep the incident secret and made the thief pay for a new purse, a bigger and nicer one than the one I had. She stocked it with a lace handkerchief, a coin purse, a wallet, and so forth. She spared no expense.

I got new credit cards in the mail.

The detective told me that he thought the thief was compulsively light-fingered. He planned to ask her about things that had turned up missing at the Catholic church, all to be kept secret, of course.

Secrecy is not new in the Catholic church. Keeping child sexual abuse secret and passing on pedophile priests to other parishes to continue to abuse more children is par for the course. Anybody who pretends that this hasn't been going on for decades and to thousands of children is lying through their teeth.