Monday, March 28, 2011

New Lawsuit Alleges Jesuits Ignored Warnings About Predator Priest

Having just reached a near record $166 million settlement in the Pacific northwest, the Society of Jesus, a/k/a the Jesuit order has been hit with a new lawsuit in the Chicago area that alleges that leadership within the order ignored and/or kept secret numerous reports over a period of decades that a prominent priest was sexually abusing teenage boys. It's the same sick and familiar pattern that we have seen time and time again all around the globe where the sexual predators were/are protected by the Catholic Church while zero care or regard is shown to the young victims. As a parent, words do not adequately express the revulsion I feel for such falsely pious hypocrites who knowingly and callously endangered children and youths. These individuals and the Church hierarchy deserve no respect and no deference. Indeed, many of the "princes of the Church" ought to be behind bars. Here are highlights from the New York Times:
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Jesuit leaders in Chicago largely ignored or kept secret numerous reports, spanning four decades, that a prominent priest was sexually abusing teenage boys, lawyers for victims charged on Monday in a motion for punitive damages in a Chicago court.
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Included in the motion were more than 65 recently obtained church documents and depositions that, the lawyers said, demonstrated “a reckless disregard for the safety of others in the face of repeated reports of sexual misconduct” on the part of Chicago Jesuit leaders.
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The newly public documents date from the early 1960s, when a concerned Austrian priest, in imperfect English, first observed in a letter to Chicago Jesuits that Father McGuire, newly ordained and studying in Europe, had “much relations with several boys.” The reports extend into the last decade, when Father McGuire reportedly ignored admonitions to stop traveling with young assistants, molesting one as late as 2003, as law enforcement was closing in. The legal motion argues that Father McGuire’s superiors in Chicago turned “a blind eye to his criminal actions.”
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Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, a victim advocacy group that has long monitored the church’s response to sexual abuse charges, said that the series of warnings given to Jesuit leaders by parents and fellow priests was unusually long and clear.

I have never seen such detailed and frequent notice received by the priest’s superiors, so many ‘directives’ regarding the priest’s future behavior, and so much evidence presented to his superiors that those directives were being violated, without the priest being removed from ministry,” Mr. McKiernan said. His group has posted a history of the case and many of the key documents.
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The motion filed on Monday charges that the church misled prosecutors in 2006, with its lawyers claiming that they had little information about the priest — despite the lengthy record of complaints.
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For about two decades, starting in the early 1980s, he was a spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa, who put him in charge of retreats for the nuns in her worldwide order, Missionaries of Charity. Several times each year, in India, the United States, Russia and other countries, he led retreats for the sisters. In these travels he routinely took along a teenage boy as an assistant,
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As late as 1998, the new documents show, the Chicago provincial wrote a letter of “good standing” for Father McGuire to allow him to minister in a diocese, stating that “there is nothing to our knowledge in his background which would restrict any ministry with minors.”
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Father McGuire was formally removed from the priesthood in February 2008 after a conviction in Wisconsin and after a federal indictment had been issued in Illinois.

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