Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => Catholic Living in the Modern World => Topic started by: poche on January 12, 2019, 01:24:10 AM
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Even the prosecutor argued Wednesday against convicting Cardinal Philippe Barbarin and other church officials, saying there were no grounds to prove legal wrongdoing.
https://apnews.com/b4e13efec9934047a40b7696df5b6bd0
Even the prosecutor is calling for an acquital? There has to be more to this than meets the eye.
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August 15 is the Feast of the Assumption, a “holy day of obligation,” when Catholics are expected to attend Mass. This year millions of Catholics went to church sick at heart. I was among them.
The day before, the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had released a grand-jury report declaring that hundreds of Catholic priests had sɛҳuąƖly abused minors. The grand jury’s conclusions were summarized in reports that landed on the front pages of the New York Times and other newspapers around the world, as well as lead stories on all sorts of television news programs. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro spoke on The Today Show and nightly news broadcasts. No Catholics serious about their faith, indeed no one of any sensitivity, could have read about the report without feeling horror and shame. And anger. It was bad enough to read graphic accounts of anal and oral rape, sometimes combined with sacrilegious perversities; it was doubly appalling to be told that church leaders had systematically covered up these crimes and allowed abusers to go unchecked.
Within hours, the Pennsylvania grand-jury report was propelled to international status. The Vatican expressed “shame and sorrow.” Adjectives piled up from Catholic and secular sources: abominable, revolting, reprehensible, nauseating, diabolical. The New York Times editorialized on “The Catholic Church’s Unholy Stain. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/opinion/pope-catholics-sɛҳuąƖ-abuse.html)”
Months have passed but the report’s impact has not. At least a dozen states have announced they would follow Pennsylvania in conducting their own investigations (Illinois issued a preliminary report in December); the Justice Department has suggested that it, too, might get into the act. Pope Francis has called for bishops from around the world to address the sex-abuse scandal at the Vatican in February, where the Pennsylvania report will undoubtedly be a chief exhibit—as it currently is for Catholics both on the right and the left writing farewells (https://theweek.com/articles/792775/unbearable-ugliness-catholic-church) to the church.
In fact, the report makes not one but two distinct charges. The first one concerns predator priests, their many victims, and their unspeakable acts. That charge is, as far as can be determined, dreadfully true. Appalling as is this first charge, it is in fact the second one that has had the greatest reverberations. “All” of these victims, the report declares, “were brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institutions above all.” Or as the introduction to the report sums it up, “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all.”
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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Is that true?
On the basis of reading the report’s vast bulk, on the basis of reviewing one by one the handling of hundreds of cases, on the basis of trying to match diocesan replies with the grand jury’s charges, and on the basis of examining other court docuмents and speaking with people familiar with the grand jury’s work, including the attorney general’s office, my conclusion is that this second charge is in fact grossly misleading, irresponsible, inaccurate, and unjust. It is contradicted by material found in the report itself—if one actually reads it carefully. It is contradicted by testimony submitted to the grand jury but ignored—and, I believe, by evidence that the grand jury never pursued.
These conclusions are dramatically at odds with the public perception and reception of the report (https://www.attorneygeneral.gov/report/). Obviously they must be substantiated. To do that it is essential to examine, step by step, how this report was produced, organized, and presented; what it omits as well as includes; and finally whether a careful sampling of its contents supports its conclusions.
I realize that for many people, especially many angry and dismayed Catholics, such an inquiry flies in the face of almost overpowering headwinds. To question let alone challenge the report is unthinkable. It borders on excusing the crimes that bishops and other church leaders are accused of committing.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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This resistance is understandable. The report came on the heels of revelations about ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sɛҳuąƖ abuse of both adult seminarians and two minors. Ten days later, accusations from a former Vatican official, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, essentially enlisted the abuse scandal into the ongoing war between Pope Francis and his critics. Lurking in the background were other abuse scandals in Ireland, Chile, and Australia. And lurking at a much deeper level are years of often confusing but always mortifying reports of sɛҳuąƖ abuse by priests, inevitably reinforcing whatever doubts and disappointments Catholics have experienced.
Then there is the hard reality that not many people have actually read the report, let alone read it critically. That includes, I wager, even many of those publicly registering their outrage or privately nursing their spiritual distress. It includes, I can pretty safely add, the journalists on whose news accounts most of these people relied. Almost every media story of the grand-jury report that I eventually read or viewed was based on its twelve-page introduction and a dozen or so sickening examples the introduction and the report highlight, written in a language that Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court later called “incendiary.”
How could it be otherwise? The report was alternatively described as 884 or 1,356 pages long—more on that strange discrepancy later. As a lifelong perpetrator of journalism I know about deadlines and how dependent a reporter can be on a summary, an introduction, or a spokesperson like the attorney general of Pennsylvania. You have time only to read a tiny fraction of such a massive docuмent. You cannot get knowledgeable, independent comment when no one else has read the docuмent either. You turn to soundbites from church officials or victims’ advocates that echo established scripts of what a story is about.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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In this case it is a script about bishops, bishops who were fully aware of the dangers that predatory priests posed to children and adolescents but who nonetheless “shuttled” or “shuffled” them from parish to parish to shield the reputation of the church and the clergy. That script was engraved in the public mind by the Boston Globe’s 2002 revelations and by the litigation that followed. It was the script that brought a well-deserved best-screenplay Oscar to the movie Spotlight. It is the script that animates the Pennsylvania grand-jury report. And it is a script so familiar as to defy any questioning.
The third source of resistance to any reconsideration is the sheer awfulness of the abuse the report docuмents. “Hear this,” its introduction summons readers in the first sentence. You may have read about “child sɛҳuąƖ abuse within the Catholic Church, but never on this scale.” The prose is graphic in its sɛҳuąƖ details. The third paragraph specifies masturbation, oral sex, and vaginal and anal rape, along with manipulation by alcohol and pornography. The next eleven pages describe some twenty abominable and especially grotesque cases of sɛҳuąƖ perversity. I have heard reasonable people object that in grinding such details into our faces the report itself is manipulative. But then this is what sɛҳuąƖ abuse of children and teenagers is. It’s not a legal or abstract concept, not a statistic. It is the most intimate kind of violation—whether perpetrated by a schoolteacher, coach, physician, or, above all, a person in a special relationship of responsibility and authority, like a parent or cleric.
Over the past three decades I have read scores of abuse survivors’ stories and heard directly dozens: stories of shattered trust, religious and sɛҳuąƖ confusion, and years of life-derailing consequences. Some victims of course slough their abuse off, or at least appear to. For others, it trails them through depression, broken marriages, substance abuse, self-destructive crimes, petty or serious, even ѕυιcιdє. The report’s insistent cataloging of physical acts scarcely captures these human complexities, but it is a start.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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The sad and infuriating stories in the report, even in their sometimes excruciatingly graphic detail, were not news to those of us who were reading newspapers and watching TV in 2002. “Reports of sɛҳuąƖ abuse by priests of children and teenagers have taken on the dimensions of a biblical plague,” read a story on page one of the New York Times’s Sunday Week in Review. It mentioned estimates of victims over several decades ranging from 15,000 to 100,000. As the senior religion reporter at the Times from 1988 to 1997, I wrote that story in June 1993, almost a decade before the Boston Globe revelations.
Recalling such stories from the 1990s to 2002, I wondered whether Catholics and others had forgotten that flood of painful 2002 revelations, to say nothing of the prime-time exposés of the early 1990s. (In 2002 the Globe ran 770 Catholic sex-abuse stories, compared to twenty-five the year before; the New York Times ran 692.) What about the 2004 and 2011 studies by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice concluding that 4,392 priests, between 4 and 5 percent of the Catholic clergy, had been responsible for more than 11,000 cases of sɛҳuąƖ abuse between 1950 and 2002? Had no one really taken to heart those earlier disclosures?
What precisely, I asked myself, did the Pennsylvania report tell us that was new? Did it refute the crucial and widespread belief that the Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People—passed by the Catholic bishops in June 2002, implemented nationwide, and backed by regular audits since then—had changed things dramatically? Did the report speak to the question, uppermost in many parents’ minds, whether children and teenagers were particularly at risk, right now, in Catholic schools and parishes, as media phrases like “the expanding Catholic sex-abuse scandals” or “a new wave of sex-abuse scandals” or sɛҳuąƖ-abuse scandals now “engulfing the church” might reasonably suggest?
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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What did the report add to the intense and important debates about priestly celibacy, teachings on sɛҳuąƖity, ingrown clerical culture, church authority, ɧoɱosɛҳųαƖity in the priesthood, and responsibility toward victims—to say nothing of older conflicts, going back to the Second Vatican Council and its aftermath, about contraception, women’s roles in the church, sɛҳuąƖ ethics, religious education, Vatican authority, and any number of other issues big and small?
I have written elsewhere on many of these topics, in essays and a book that hardly cast a favorable light on the nation’s Catholic bishops or their handling of the sex-abuse crisis. I am not addressing those topics here. I am not taking sides in the smoldering arguments about Pope Francis. I am not asking who knew what, when, and how about Cardinal McCarrick. I am not floating new ways to assure episcopal accountability. I am looking only at the Pennsylvania report’s ringing charges about the handling of abuse: Are they true?
Yet something even more basic triggers the resistance to any questioning of the Pennsylvania report—what is popularly labeled binary thinking. To question the report’s conclusions is to affirm the very opposite. If it is not true that all victims were “brushed aside,” then it must be true that no victims were ever brushed aside. If it is not true that church leaders routinely acted to protect their priests and institutions, then it must be true that no church leader ever did that.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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That is not my claim. I believe that the grand jury could have reached precise, accurate, informing, and hard-hitting findings about what different church leaders did and did not do, what was regularly done in some places and some decades and not in others. It could have presented ample grounds for at least three of its four rather unoriginal recommendations without engaging in broad-brush denunciations. It could have confirmed and corrected much that we think we know about the causes and prevention of the sɛҳuąƖ abuse of young people.
Instead the report chose a tack more suited to our hyperbolic, bumper-sticker, post-truth environment with its pronouncements about immigrant rapists and murderers, witch hunts, and deep-state cօռspιʀαcιҽs. Imagine, at least for a moment, that a declamation like “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all” came from one of our elected or televised demagogues. Would one really dismiss any fact-finding as uncalled for?
But it wasn’t a demagogic pundit or politician who chose that language right out of a nineteenth-century anti-papist tract. It was a grand jury. And therein lies a major misunderstanding.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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Investigating grand juries
Grand juries are legal entities deeply rooted in common law and incorporated into the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. Their purpose is not to determine guilt or innocence but only whether there are sufficient grounds to bring an indictment and trigger a trial. The trial is where guilt or innocence will be determined by all the adversarial procedures of examining evidence and testimony presented by both sides under strict supervision by a judge. Grand juries do not operate under those rules. They hear evidence ex parte—that is, with no representation from those under investigation. They operate in secret. And in practice, they operate almost completely under the direction of a local, state, or federal prosecutor, a district attorney or attorney general, whose conclusions they almost invariably rubber-stamp.
For this reason grand juries have become controversial. Whether indictments are obtained or not may depend on the political needs of elected prosecutors, an issue raised by minority communities in regard to killings by white police. Investigating grand juries, like the one in Pennsylvania, has also proved problematic. Stanley H. Fuld, a noted jurist who was chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, once pointed out that an indictment “is but the first step in a long process in which the accused may seek vindication through exercise of the right to a public trial, to a jury, to counsel, to confrontation of witnesses against him and, if convicted, to an appeal.” On the contrary, a grand-jury investigative report, “is at once an accusation and a final condemnation, and, emanating from a judicial body occupying a position of respect and importance in the community, its potential for harm is incalculable.” As a judicial docuмent, a grand-jury report, Fuld continued, “carries the same sense of authoritative condemnation as an indictment does, without, however, according the accused the benefit of the protections accorded to one who is indicted.”
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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Fuld believed this potential for abuse was particularly great when an investigatory grand-jury report named names; and the Pennsylvania report of course names not only hundreds of predators, but also more than fifty bishops and diocesan administrators treated as similarly guilty. The report’s introduction makes no bones about its intention to be judge and jury, and to hand down convictions for “crimes that will go unpunished and uncompensated” otherwise: “This Report is our only recourse. We are going to name names and describe what they did—both the sex offenders and those who concealed them. We are going to shine a light on their conduct, because that is what the victims deserve.”
It is clear that most people have taken the Pennsylvania report as what Judge Fuld called an “authoritative condemnation” without realizing its limitations. It is ironic that people raising perfectly legitimate questions about the accountability of bishops should overlook questions about the accountability of investigating grand juries. The findings of such reports can only be challenged after they are made public: by those impugned, by informed critics, independent investigators, dissenting politicians, the media, and so on.
In the Pennsylvania case, of course, the bishops are paralyzed. Not only has their credibility been sullied by past failures, often by deceased predecessors, but they long ago recognized that their first priority, rightly, must be to avoid making any excuses for predatory crimes or “re-victimizing” survivors. Who else might fill this void? Liberal journalists, civil libertarians, or academics unhappy with Catholic teachings on abortion and same-sex marriage? ProPublica? Frontline? Conservative Catholics unhappy with Pope Francis? Liberal Catholics unhappy with a conservative hierarchy? Not likely.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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When is Cardinal Pell facing his second trial?
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When is Cardinal Pell facing his second trial?
I don't know but if the 'proof' is anything like the first trial then it doesn't say much for Australian justice.
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The report’s structure
The Pennsylvania report is divided into five parts, of very different proportions. Following Part I, that impassioned twelve-page Introduction, Part II devotes hundreds of pages to eighteen shocking, in some cases grotesque, examples of abuse, three from each of the six dioceses.
Otherwise Part II lists the bishops and other key officials of each diocese and all accused abusers over the past seven to eight decades. In almost boilerplate language, the grand jury declares that that it has found evidence in each diocese of sɛҳuąƖ abuse (“grooming and fondling of the genitals” and “penetration of the vagina, mouth, or anus”); that bishops and administrators “had knowledge of this conduct” but regularly placed abusers in ministry despite complaints, thus enabling offenders and endangering children. Dioceses were found to have consulted with lawyers and reached confidential settlements with victims prohibiting them from speaking out. Likewise, dioceses were found to have dissuaded victims from going to the police or conducting their own “deficient, biased investigations” without reporting these crimes.
Obviously, this means not just that such things occurred sometimes and in some places over more than seven decades, but that they occurred regularly, routinely, and as the introduction states, “everywhere.”
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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Part III is a nine-page overview of “The Church and child abuse, past and present.” Part IV devotes six pages to spelling out the recommendations mentioned in the introduction.
Then, in a 569-page “Appendix of Offenders,” the report profiles, diocese by diocese, all priests, deacons, or seminarians against whom the report concludes credible allegations of abuse have been found. The report calls those profiles of more than three hundred priests possibly its “most important” and “final” section. Indeed, in some PDFs of the report online, including, shockingly, the one on the website of the attorney general’s office, the docuмent ends there, at page 884. In fact, more than 450 pages follow. These consist of photocopied responses from dioceses, former bishops, other diocesan officials, and even some accused priests protesting their innocence. Many of these docuмents raise important questions or present substantial criticisms. Although the report states that dioceses were invited to submit statements about their recent policies, there are no substantive grand-jury comments or replies.
This organization is effective, lopsided, and unwieldy. Effective because of the dramatic, almost inflammatory rhetoric of the introduction and then because of the chosen eighteen examples. Lopsided, because the report devotes well over eight hundred pages to its chosen examples and encyclopedic “Profiles in Abuse.” Fewer than fifty pages, including that introduction, are devoted to the grand jury’s own analysis, findings, and recommendations. Unwieldy, because hundreds of pages separate each diocese’s three “horribles” from its complete roster of offenders in the appendix and again from any of the responses. Whether scrolling online or rustling through pages in print, it is daunting to track the claims and replies.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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What is in the report—and what is not
Before examining more closely what is in the report, it is important to ask what isn’t. Beyond those references to more than 300 predator priests—actually 301—and more than 1,000 child victims, to dozens of witnesses and half-a-million subpoenaed church docuмents, there are almost no numerical markers. There is, for example, no calculation of how many ordained men served in those six dioceses since 1945, a figure that might either verify or challenge previous estimates of the prevalence of sɛҳuąƖ abuse among the clergy. There are no efforts to discern statistical patterns in the ages of abusers, the rates of abuse over time, the actions of law enforcement, or changes in responses by church officials.
Nor are there comparisons to other institutions. One naturally wonders what a seventy-to-eighty-year scrutiny of sex abuse in public schools or juvenile penal facilities would find.
That huge timespan results in some memorable cases. Martin J. Fleming, for example, was born in 1869, the year Ulysses S. Grant became president. He was ordained in 1898, a few months after Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders captured San Juan Hill. He died in 1950, when Harry Truman was president. Fifty-six years later, in 2006, the Diocese of Venice, Florida, notified the Scranton, Pennsylvania, diocese that a woman reported having been abused by Father Fleming in 1940 when she was six. She was now in heart failure and wanted to “put all of her ducks in a row.” Whatever occurred—the report is untypically reticent—had haunted her for more than six decades, caused emotional distress, and led her to seek counseling. The bishop of Scranton and staff members promptly met with her, called the abuse an abomination, voiced sorrow over her wounded childhood, and encouraged therapy.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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Even without details, one can imagine this woman’s recurring pain; one can speculate that she was not the only victim; one can wonder what else was locked into secrecy or denial in a very different era. But all these unknowns from the first half of the twentieth century seem well beyond the bounds of what presents itself as a rigorous legal investigation.
Is this example exceptional? Yes, but not unique. One can say the same of some examples the report spotlights.
In fact, one could find similar examples where the investigation’s span of more than seven decades—and gaps of half a century between likely abuse and the first word of it to reach church officials—raise questions about the report’s concept of accountability.
But the report’s chosen timespan and unexplained notion of accountability are merely symptoms of a larger issue. What is missing from the report, above all, is any sense of history. The report treats the more than seven decades from 1945 until yesterday as a block. That is a long time in the life of even the most basic institutions. Could you inquire into family breakdown since 1945 or patterns of sɛҳuąƖ activity over that timespan without giving considerable attention to demography, single parenthood, feminism, contraceptives, the “Sixties,” gαy rights, and changing norms regarding autonomy, privacy, and personal fulfillment? Or, for another instance, race relations? Could you accurately describe the period from World War II to yesterday without highlighting the civil-rights movement, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and the election of Barack Obama?
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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This latest incarnation of the accusations hurled at the Novus Ordo Church reeks of a political stunt. I think this is a means by the politically influential to box the Novus Ordo Church into a defensive position and a cornered one at that. These Novus Ordo clerics have been doing the bidding of the enemy since the end of Vatican II so it shows to us, although never figured out by evildoers, is that you can't team up with evil because once it no longer needs your support it discards you.
I don't engage in defense of the Novus Ordo but this latest much publicized storytelling is a planned event for either political expediency (we did see a sitting governor in one large state further liberalize abortion laws and a different sitting governor give what seemed to be approval for infanticide (although he was clear about making the baby comfortable - just what the world needs, merciful executioners). With the Novus Ordo chasing after every fad that comes it's way, it just isn't capable of leading the flock, at least not leading the flock anywhere good.
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This latest incarnation of the accusations hurled at the Novus Ordo Church reeks of a political stunt. I think this is a means by the politically influential to box the Novus Ordo Church into a defensive position and a cornered one at that. These Novus Ordo clerics have been doing the bidding of the enemy since the end of Vatican II so it shows to us, although never figured out by evildoers, is that you can't team up with evil because once it no longer needs your support it discards you.
I don't engage in defense of the Novus Ordo but this latest much publicized storytelling is a planned event for either political expediency (we did see a sitting governor in one large state further liberalize abortion laws and a different sitting governor give what seemed to be approval for infanticide (although he was clear about making the baby comfortable - just what the world needs, merciful executioners). With the Novus Ordo chasing after every fad that comes it's way, it just isn't capable of leading the flock, at least not leading the flock anywhere good.
I think it is a prelude to a persecution.
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My own first encounter with sɛҳuąƖ abuse (https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/what-we%E2%80%99ve-learned) came when I had just turned seventeen. I was working at a Boy Scout camp and discovered and managed to inform higher-ups that a camp official was abusing fourteen-year-old “trainees.” He was fired, and that was that. But of course it wasn’t. A school teacher, he moved to another state where, through an extraordinary coincidence, I learned years later that he continued to molest. That experience in the summer of 1958 sensitized me to the radical and welcome changes in societal responses to sɛҳuąƖ abuse since the hush-hush attitudes that then prevailed among parents, victims, health care professionals, and law enforcement officials as well as Boy Scout authorities. It took time to recognize that child molestation, once portrayed as a threat from lurking strangers in raincoats, could be the work of family friends, doting uncles, Scoutmasters, physicians, fathers and stepfathers, or even an admired clergyman. It took even longer for therapists, judges, and legislatures to decide what to do about it.
As for Catholicism, the Second Vatican Council, along with major social changes, disrupted the church and the shame and silence imposed by its deferential culture. Jogged by lawsuits and publicity and the very fact of increasing instances of abuse, bishops’ responses began to change, belatedly but significantly, in the late 1980s to mid-1990s. Attitudes took a definitive turn in 2002 with the bishops’ adoption of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, passed in the wake of the Boston Globe’s revelations. Even sex abuse by priests has a history. If we are to believe the findings of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, it increased in the latter 1960s, spiked in the ’70s, and declined in the ’80s.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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Don't overlook the fact that the Novus Ordo Church is a proverbial cash cow for the leftists in the U.S. In addition to donations to leftwing causes (organizations that would, pre-Vatican II, be considered enemies of the Chuch) these faux-outrages usually lead to very large cash settlements that go directly to either the State (which in America circa 2019 is a force for evil) or leftist trial lawyers and anti-Catholic advocacy groups.
Billions in dollars exchanged between the Novus Ordo Church and the same group of enemies in that last go around (2002-2005).
One clear sign that these charges are all manufactured is the complete lack of any demand for evidence from the press. The charges are just assumed to be true and the Novus Ordo is assumed to be guilty.
It's such a simple fix. Any seminarian who shows any signs of sɛҳuąƖ depravity should be screened out. But I think it's pretty common knowledge that the Novus Ordo seminaries are only screening out Traditionalists.
Here's a good question: Why are these charges being recycled? There is certainly no new evidence. What's the reason?
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Don't overlook the fact that the Novus Ordo Church is a proverbial cash cow for the leftists in the U.S. In addition to donations to leftwing causes (organizations that would, pre-Vatican II, be considered enemies of the Chuch) these faux-outrages usually lead to very large cash settlements that go directly to either the State (which in America circa 2019 is a force for evil) or leftist trial lawyers and anti-Catholic advocacy groups.
Billions in dollars exchanged between the Novus Ordo Church and the same group of enemies in that last go around (2002-2005).
Very interesting incite, it all makes sense now. They, the counterfeit Vatican II church and the NWO, are are colluding in the milking of the ignorant faithful, it is all about keeping the money stream going and the redirecting of the true faith to a powerless false sect, like all of the other false religions of the World.
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Very interesting incite, it all makes sense now. They, the counterfeit Vatican II church and the NWO, are are colluding in the milking of the ignorant faithful, it is all about keeping the money stream going and the redirecting of the true faith to a powerless false sect, like all of the other false religions of the World.
If they are such a cash cow, then why kill the goose that is giving you all that gold?
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If they are such a cash cow, then why kill the goose that is giving you all that gold?
Indeed, that was my point, why kill the goose that is giving you all that gold, keep milking it forever. That is why ALL the Vatican II church hierarchy has not left as Martin Luther did.
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Indeed, that was my point, why kill the goose that is giving you all that gold, keep milking it forever. That is why ALL the Vatican II church hierarchy has not left as Martin Luther did.
Maybe things are not really as you think.
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If they are such a cash cow, then why kill the goose that is giving you all that gold?
Where do you get the idea that the secular world wants the Novus Ordo Church killed?
They don't. They would not want that. When they aren't collected large sums of money from false charges, they have "Pope Francis" saying that things like "there's no such thing as right and wrong" or some such nonsense.
This latest false charge (which allegedly has priests engaging in wrongdoing as far back as 70 years - wow! Who's going to verify those charges? Silly question, right? No proof needed) will bring about a large settlement and more requirements of the Novus Ordo to post more warnings in their bulletins or even have a local government agent audit them regularly but there will again be more charges in another 9 - 14 years. There is an endless supply of young gαy men willing to say that Father So-and-So sɛҳuąƖly assaulted me over a decade ago with no one around and no way of proving it.
I want to be clear that I am not defending the Novus Ordo. But these going's-on are so contrived as to be laughable.
As for the where the Novus Ordo gets it's money, I have a hunch it's not through the Sunday basket.
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The writers of the report from the attorney general’s office struggle mightily to discount this reality. The report’s conclusions about abuse and coverup are stated in timeless fashion. Whenever change is acknowledged, the language is begrudging.
Readers who persevere to page 297 will find a mere eight pages devoted to “The Church and sex abuse: past and present,” i.e., before 2002 and after. Four pages simply expand on the opinions attributed to FBI “experts” cited in the introduction. These are said to demonstrate that euphemisms for sɛҳuąƖ abuse found in church records (and evidently not elsewhere) are part of a “playbook” for concealment. This claim culminates in a half-page full-color chart illustrating this “circle of secrecy.” The phrase “circle of secrecy” and the corresponding analysis are attributed to then-Pittsburgh Bishop Donald Wuerl, who went on to serve as cardinal archbishop of Washington. (He recently resigned.)
If curious or determined readers turn to page 1,124 of the report, they will discover that the words “circle of secrecy” are (a) not Wuerl’s and (b) have nothing to do with the way that the report uses them. Scribbled on a 1993 request from an offending priest for a return to ministry, the phrase signaled that despite his apparent recovery, the priest could not have an assignment without full public disclosure of his past conduct and treatment. As it happens, the priest’s request was refused. And the jotting wasn’t Wuerl’s. Before the report was issued, Wuerl informed the attorney general of this. His correction was ignored. The “circle of secrecy” concept and impressive chart appear to be entirely the concoction of the report’s writers.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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The next four pages correctly identify the 2002 Boston Globe exposé as critical in compelling the Catholic hierarchy to draft and implement the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. “On the whole,” the report allows, “the Charter did move things in the right direction.” But virtually every paragraph before and after that concession is skillfully written so as to minimize or dismiss the Charter’s importance.
The grand-jury report prides itself on being a “historical record,” but this passing gesture toward a history is a caricature. It registers absolutely no account of the lengthy docuмents submitted to the grand jury by the six dioceses.
These submissions can be captured by what Bishop Edward C. Malesic, the recently appointed bishop of Greensburg, stated for himself and his own diocese. The essential response to the grand jury’s report, he wrote in italics, “can be summarized in five words: This is not today’s Church.”
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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As evidence, he and each of the other dioceses docuмented detailed policies, some dating from the mid-1990s but constantly updated and tightened, especially since the 2002 Dallas Charter, for facilitating and investigating allegations; suspending accused priests and removing them from all ministry if accusations prove credible; prompt reporting of allegations to law enforcement; establishing and empowering lay review boards with professional expertise to guide the bishop; offering outreach and assistance to victims; screening seminarians; instituting extensive preventative measures including rigorous background checks and mandatory training for all church workers and volunteers dealing with children and adolescents; education of parents; and opening all such programs to regular auditing by independent agencies. After 2002, some dioceses combed their files or opened them to district attorneys to make sure no abusing priests were still in ministry.
There is no reason, of course, why a grand jury has to take such diocesan testimony at face value. Perhaps the impressive policies for handling and reporting allegations or assisting victims exist only on paper rather than in practice. Perhaps the impressive numbers of clergy, educators, youth workers, and employees vetted and trained, parents and students informed, dollars spent, and audits conducted are false, flimflam trumped up for public-relations purposes. Perhaps these impressive safeguards, many of which are less than two decades old, operate effectively in some dioceses, but not in others. These are serious possibilities that a serious grand-jury investigation might have looked into. There is not the slightest indication, not the slightest, that the grand jury even sought to give serious attention to the kind of extensive, detailed testimony that the dioceses submitted regarding their current policies and programs.
The lack of historical consciousness blinds the grand-jury report to two other factors essential to understanding church officials’ responses to accusations of abuse. One was the recourse to therapeutic treatment. The other was the frequent gap between the time of abuse and the time of accusation. For both factors, the year 2002 was critical.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
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Recourse to treatment
By the mid-1980s Catholic leaders began to emerge, all too unevenly, from their state of clerical denial and psychological cluelessness regarding sɛҳuąƖ abuse. It was increasingly recognized that abuse of minors was not simply a sin requiring repentance, perhaps a retreat, and “a firm purpose of amendment”; such misconduct signaled a serious psychological pathology. Bishops began sending accused clergy for evaluation and treatment to a handful of treatment centers, mostly church-related and often originally founded to treat clerics suffering from alcoholism. At a time when official church procedures made removing individuals entirely from the priesthood an uncertain and prolonged affair, this “therapeutic option” seemed more promising. Unlike laicization it also seemed to maintain leverage over treated priests to comply with ongoing monitoring, restrictions, and aftercare.
Serious questions about these centers and their effectiveness remain open. The litigation seeking compensation for victims, which has overwhelmingly informed and framed media coverage of the clergy sex-abuse scandal, has targeted bishops. The treatment centers have largely escaped public attention, except when victims’ lawyers argued that these centers were either telling the bishop, who was after all paying for their services, whatever he wanted to hear or giving him cover even when he ignored their recommendations. In fact, it was a controversial director of St. Luke Institute in Maryland who first raised the alarm that clergy abuse was not a problem of a few bad apples but a systemic one. Many individuals staffing those centers had good professional qualifications. Recidivism, they believed, was exceptional.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/pa-grand-jury-report-not-what-it-seems?utm_source=Press+List&utm_campaign=f098968bc0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_01_09_05_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_01bf0cc1e6-f098968bc0-92468121
I remember my mother asking if these were the same psychologists who were saying that there were marriages of 20+ years that were invalid.
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The Lyon court handed Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, Archbishop of Lyon, a six-month suspended prison sentence for not reporting the cases in the period between July 2014 and June 2015.
The 68-year old cardinal was not present in the Lyon court on Thursday to hear his conviction. His lawyer, Jean-Felix Luciani, said he will appeal: “The court’s reasons do not convince me. We will therefore contest this decision,” the lawyer said, adding that the court had been under pressure as a result of docuмentaries and a film about the case.
At the end of the trial in January the prosecutor had not sought punishment for the cardinal or the five other church officials accused alongside him.
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2019-03/cardinal-barbarin-suspended-sentence-lyon-abuse-vatiab.html
Isn't he the one the prosecutor wanted to acquit?