On the Case of Father Alex Crow

I’ve been trying to keep track of the case of Father Alex Crow.

I’m going to try to get the facts straight, as more information seems to come out every minute. It seems that late last month, a 30-year-old priest by the name of Alex Crow, who had only recently been ordained and who had a lurid obsession with exorcisms and Marian apparitions, fled the country with an 18-year-old girl. There was speculation that he’d taken the girl to Europe for an exorcism. Eventually the two ended up in Italy, where they claimed to be living in a Platonic relationship in separate bedrooms and where the girl refused to speak to her parents or anyone else without him present. The girl had been a high school student at a school where the priest ministered. Just a day or two ago, two truly disturbing letters written by Father Crow were released to the press. In one of them he claimed that he was ordered by Jesus and Mary to take the girl to Europe. In the other, written on Valentine’s Day to the girl when she was seventeen, he professed his love for her, told her that they were secretly married, and expressed a wish to steal flowers from the Virgin Mary’s shrine as a present for her.

It is now being alleged that this isn’t Father Crow’s first time grooming a young girl. The police have reason to believe this was a regular thing for him. A witness is said to have spotted a seventeen-year-old girl from the same school going into the priest’s hotel room at 1:30 at night during a class trip.

For the record, the age of majority is nineteen in Alabama, and there is a separate state law forbidding sexual contact between students of any age and school employees. This is in addition to any canonical issues and the fact that it would be grotesquely wrong for a priest to do any of this even if it weren’t illegal.

I am not asking the following questions to be snarky and rude. I really want to understand the rationale behind these things: why, at this point in history, knowing what we know, did the school allow a priest to chaperone a class trip? Why was the young handsome telegenic priest who used to be in a band working with teenage girls at the school in the first place, instead of somebody else? Couldn’t anyone spot the dangers of that combination a mile away? Why would any parent in their right mind send their child on a class trip overnight with a priest? For that matter, while I’m asking questions, why would anyone send their child to a Catholic school anymore? Because they’re doing everything in their power to show us they don’t care about children’s safety. How much more obvious does it have to be?

And why wasn’t Father Crow arrested or at least removed from ministry after the teenager went into his hotel room?

And why was a man obsessed with demons and exorcisms allowed to enter the seminary in the first place?

And how many times do we have to see horrific news of a would-be exorcist sexually exploiting a young woman before we get wise?

There have been so many such scandals, I’m almost not surprised about Father Crow himself. I hope and pray that the poor girl he abducted is returned safely. My heart goes out to her and her parents, and to the other alleged victim and her family as well. But what really floors me is the responses I’ve seen to the incident.

When they first ran away together, I got in an argument with an internet Catholic who kept insisting “maybe they’re in love.” They honestly didn’t think there was anything improper about this because the girl was eighteen (the state of Alabama disagrees, as I’ve already mentioned).

I have seen quite a few Catholics defending the priest as mentally ill or under the influence of a demon.

Commentators have said “at least she’s a woman.”

A priest who denounced Father Crow was given a copy and paste of that weird old alleged “prophecy” from the Pieta book about never speaking ill of a priest.

So, the same old things that enablers of clergy abuse have been saying forever.

Is everyone saying that? No, not at all. Most of the commentary I’ve seen is from people disgusted by Crow. But the fact that anyone still parrots those lines is extremely disturbing.

The Church has not changed– or at least, she hasn’t changed nearly enough. And she will not change, in part because of her enablers in the laity.

The Church can never change until the laity, as a whole, stop putting up with this. Stop making excuses for priests. Stop blaming victims. Stop tolerating Catholic schools that leave students alone with priests. Stop signing off on your children being alone with priests. That won’t fix it entirely, because the problem is the clergy and the hierarchy and not us. But that’s one step. And I’m beginning to despair that it will happen.

I hope I’m wrong.