A Catholic priest who specialized in treating sexually abusive priests strongly advised church leaders—including Pope Paul VI—that abusers should be defrocked and possibly exiled to a Caribbean island, according to correspondence recently unearthed by an independent Catholic newspaper.
During the 1950s and ’60s, Gerald Fitzgerald, the founder of the Servants of the Paraclete order, repeatedly wrote to Catholic bishops and Paul VI to warn them about the persistence of pedophilia among abusive priests.