Is an Overdue Reckoning Coming for the Catholic Church on Sexual Abuse?

For centuries the Roman Catholic Church has been allowed to be above the law, especially in nationals like Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Germany, but so too in America.  Politicians have deferred to Church prelates and law enforcement officials rarely dared take on the Catholic Church establishment.  This thankfully began to change in 2002 when the Boston Globe blew the lid off of the sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston.  Similar stories have since swept the globe, with the Church going into a free-fall in Ireland and major government investigations like that done in Australia that lead to the first criminal convictions against members of the hierarchy for their role in the cover up of crimes against children and youths.  Now, the U.S. Attorney's office in Philadelphia has announced it is launching an investigation of seven of the eight dioceses in Pennsylvania.  Meanwhile the Attorney General of the District of Columbia is launching an investigation of the Washington Archdiocese.  Since the Vatican and bishops and cardinals have failed to date to come clean and clean house, some are hoping that a long overdue reckoning is about to overtake the Church.   I was never abused by priests, but I know those who were.  The hypocrisy of the hierarchy has been stunning as has the indifference towards crimes against children and youth.  A piece in Rewire looks at what may be coming.  Here are excerpts:

I remember the moment when the gravity of the Catholic hierarchy’s long-term cover-up of rampant sexual abuse within the priestly ranks was driven home to me. It was in 2010, and I was conducting an interview for my book Good Catholics with the noted Catholic feminist theologian Mary Hunt. We were discussing her reflections regarding what had, at that point, been a decades-long adversarial relationship with the powers-that-be in the Catholic Church, dating from when Hunt was one of the leaders of an effort in the mid-1980s to assert the validity of a pro-choice position in the face of an increasingly authoritarian Vatican.

Hunt told me. “We thought we were dealing with people of good will.” But it’s what she said next that sent a chill down my spine. “What we didn’t know then was that we were up against criminal behavior—people participating in criminal behavior and ignoring criminal behavior.”

As last week’s move by the Justice Department to launch an investigation into the abuse of children and young adults by Catholic clergy (and the subsequent cover-up by bishops) makes clear, Hunt was prescient.

The news that former Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had been serially abusing young men and seminarians for decades was eclipsed by the damning Pennsylvania grand jury report that detailed decades of abuse and cover-up in dioceses throughout the state. This in turn prompted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl as archbishop of Washington—Wuerl helped formulate the Church’s rules for preventing sexual abuse by priests—for his role in shuffling predator priests around the state when he was the head of the Pittsburgh diocese.

But the recently announced U.S. attorney’s investigation marks a major turning point and a potential moment of reckoning in the long-running and sordid sex abuse scandal that first burst into public view with the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigation in early 2002. The Justice Department investigation promises to fundamentally reshape the relationship between the U.S. Catholic Church and civil law enforcement authorities.

To date, no matter how messy the scandal became, civil authorities largely left the Church alone to clean up its own mess. While individual priests have been charged with crimes as the result of abuse, and culpable prelates like Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law were shuffled into retirement, the larger question of criminality on the part of the Church’s leadership has been off the table. It was, admittedly, an odd arrangement, with the U.S. government in effect deferring to the government of the Catholic Church, an arrangement neither codified in the Constitution nor available to any other religion.

But if this federal investigation does go forward—and it should be noted that it’s coming from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia, so it could be impeded by higher-ups in the Justice Department—it would be a landmark moment as the federal government usurps the authority that Vatican has long claimed to police its internal affairs.

And the nature of the investigation reported by the AP, which spans seven of the state’s eight dioceses, suggests just how deep such an inquiry could go. According to the Washington Post:

The subpoenas seek years of internal records, including any evidence of church personnel taking children across state lines for purposes of sexual abuse, any evidence of personnel sending sexual material about children electronically and any evidence that church officials reassigned suspected predators or used church resources to further or conceal such conduct.

[T]he prosecutors could be planning a racketeering case against Church leaders: “Human trafficking, child pornography, the Mann Act—any of these could be the underlying crimes for RICO.”

The leveling of criminal conspiracy charges against members of the Catholic hierarchy would be a stunning denouement for men who, until recently, regularly met with U.S. presidents and influenced public policy on everything from women’s access to contraception to the simmering argument about transgender identity. It would signal that after a century of acquiescence to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church as a separate political structure operating with impunity outside of the U.S. legal system, U.S. civil authorities no longer consider the Church above the law.

As Emma Green notes in The Atlantic, the scope of the investigation “will test the Catholic bishops’ stated resolve to give secular authorities full control and transparency in abuse investigations, as the moral and legal stakes of the crisis continue to grow.” This will be especially important if subpoenas seek the contents of so-called secret archives that may hold previously unreleased information about efforts to cover up the activities of abusive priests.

And despite pledges of transparency, there are indications that the Church will not surrender without a fight. Even as bishops in Pennsylvania promised to cooperate with civil authorities in the wake of the grand jury report, behind the scenes the church fought tooth-and-nail to derail a popular measure that would have created an exemption to the state’s statute of limitations for sexual abuse suits.

Now the question becomes: Will the public—both inside and outside of Pennsylvania—stand any longer for the extraordinary dispensation that has been granted for so long to an organization that has engaged in what may prove to be a decades-long criminal conspiracy?

I continue to urge Catholics sickened by the sex abuse cover ups to vote with their feet and walk away.  The Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church offer good alternatives that are free from the thoroughly corrupt Catholic Church hierarchy. 

The Pope’s Pedophile?

I began my exit from Catholicism back in late 2001 after beginning my "coming out" journey.  I found it impossible to remain a member of a church that so thoroughly denigrated gay individuals.  But my exit was suddenly made much easier when in 2002 the Boston Globe broke its story on the rampant sex abuse in the Archdiocese of Boston - a story that was basis for the Academy Award winning movie, Spotlight, and which let loose the torrent of exposes of similar abuse and deliberate cover ups on literally a world wide basis.  Indeed, the cover ups traced all the way to the Vatican and, to my mind, underscored the utter moral bankruptcy of almost the entire Catholic Church hierarchy with very few exceptions.  And in truth the problem had been know in some circles long before 2002 as shown here.  With the resignation of the vitriolically ant-gay and right wing Pope Benedict XVI, many Catholics had hoped Pope Francis would usher in a new period of reform and serious action against bishops and cardinals who had either aided and abetted predatory priests or turned a deliberate blind eye to the sexual abuse - in some cases actual rape - of children and youths.  Sadly, nothing has happened other than lip service and crocodile tears.  Now, with the criminal indictment of Cardinal Pell - a main player in Australia's still roiling abuse scandal - for sexual abuse, Pope Francis may be facing a long over due day of reckoning.  As Andrew Sullivan lays out, it is mind boggling why Francis ever elevated Pell to the number  three position at the Vatican.  Here are column highlights:

Well into Pope Francis’s pontificate, one of his closest aides, the third-highest official in the Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell, has now been credibly accused of several acts of sexual assault, including one of rape. Australian police have concluded that the evidence they have is sufficient to move forward, even in cases that happened long ago. Yesterday, Pell was allowed to hold his own press conference at the Vatican to tell us that he spoke with the Pope only a few days ago about a campaign of “character assassination” against him . . . . The Pope’s spokesperson defended the Cardinal by saying that “it is important to recall that Cardinal Pell has openly and repeatedly condemned as important and intolerable acts of abuse committed against minors.” And, of course, we should respect a presumption of innocence before a trial on crimes of this magnitude and depravity.

But it all feels sickeningly familiar. And this denouement comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has been following the sex-abuse crisis in the church — including Cardinal Pell’s own behavior — for the last few decades. A cloud has hung over Pell since he was an Episcopal vicar in a parish in the 1970s that has been described as a “pedophile’s paradise and a child’s nightmare.”

A full 15 years ago, Pell was accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy but when the church investigated, a retired Supreme Court justice found that there wasn’t enough evidence, even though the victim appeared to be “speaking honestly from actual recollection.” A year later, Pope John Paul II made Pell a cardinal. Several new alleged victims spoke out in a book published only last month.

In 2015, Australia’s Channel 9 ran a 60 Minutes segment that can only be called horrifying. In it, one of Francis’s own appointees to investigate sex abuse, Peter Saunders, described Pell’s record on sexual abuse as “almost sociopathic.” Pell had a “catalogue of denials … a catalogue of denigrating people, of acting with callousness,” Saunders said on camera. “I would go as far to say that I consider him to be quite a dangerous individual.”

The report revealed a pattern of concealment of sex-abuse cases, callousness toward the victims, offers of pathetically small settlements, and testimony demonstrating that Pell moved around a pedophile priest for years who was later convicted of 138 counts of indecent assault and child sexual abuse. That priest, the notorious Gerald Ridsdale, even allegedly raped two of his own nephews. Who was his roommate and close friend in the 1970s? Who publicly accompanied him to his trial in a show of support? One George Pell . . . .

Many historical cases of sex abuse of minors are hard to prove. But it seems to me that multiple accusations of cover-ups and molestations against a Catholic priest from the 1950s through the 1970s should at this point raise, ahem, red flags. Appalling abusers have advanced for years in the church, defending themselves as definitively as Pell has — only to be found guilty. The notorious case of the founder of the Legion of Christ, Marcial Maciel, comes to mind. Protected by Pope John Paul II, coddled by Benedict XVI, he was also defended by an array of theological arch-conservatives as a paragon of virtue.

It has not been easy being a Catholic in the 21st century. For a gay Catholic, it has been close to agony. It comes as no surprise, for example, that Pell has upheld, like Maciel, a highly conservative theology on sexuality — which was why he was so favored by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He opposed the use of condoms to stop AIDS in Africa, refused to give communion to openly gay people, campaigned strenuously against marriage equality, and described the church sex-abuse scandal as not a function of minor abuse and cover-up but of allowing homosexuals to be priests . . . .

What I cannot understand is why Pope Francis chose to advance this man under this cloud so high up the hierarchy. If Pell is found guilty, Francis will have advanced an accused abuser of children to the highest echelon in the Vatican. Far from cleaning the church of this evil, he will have contaminated it at its very apex. That’s why this case is indeed a watershed for Catholicism and Francis himself. If Francis can turn a blind eye to this, we can trust no one.

We were told that this Pope’s overriding theme was mercy. It would be a tragedy if the exception to this rule were to be any youngster whose life has been ruined, body violated, and soul raped by one of the Pope’s own right-hand men.

Sullivan - in what I see as a form of masochism - has remained a Catholic.  I could not do that.  I would literally feel dirty if I remained a part of, and worse yet, financially supported and institution that has no regard for the bodies and psyches of children and youths.  With children and now grandchildren of my own, I cannot fathom the callousness and lack of horror over such abuse.

For more background on Pell, this is a good piece from the Sydney Morning Herald. 

Boston Globe James Comey Should Resign

Trump supporter Comey and Clinton

As noted in a number of posts, I believe that FBI Director James Comey should resign - and if he will not resign, then he needs to be fired.  He has likely violated the Hatch Act, sought to throw the presidential election to Donald Trump and has sat on and kept from the American public information about possible Trump ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin.  The man is certainly not concerned with the best interests of the public or the country.  Now, the Boston Globe has joined the chorus of those demanding that Comey resign.  Here are highlights from the paper's editorial:

James Comey really messed up.

The FBI director did not commit some garden-variety mistake. This is not an “oops” moment. For reasons that have more to do with protecting himself from dishonest Republican attacks, Comey committed an overtly egregious and political act that roiled the nation’s politics 11 days before Election Day — and undermined public trust in the nation’s criminal justice institutions.

And he needs to go.

[I]t is now increasingly clear that Comey was holding a dud. What he did know is that e-mails from Clinton’s assistant, Huma Abedin, had been found on the computer of her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. The problem is, that’s all he knew. There was no evidence that the e-mails were from Clinton, contained classified material, or had any investigative value.

The paucity of new information is bad enough, but what’s most troubling about this episode is that Comey violated a long-standing Justice Department precedent discouraging action on a criminal investigation 60 days before an election, because such disclosures risk undermining the political process.

Why didn’t Comey wait until after the election to tell Congress — or at least wait until agents had a chance to review the e-mails? The answer, unfortunately, has everything to do with Comey and little to do with what’s good for the country.

As best that can be gleaned from the now torrent of leaks emanating from FBI headquarters, Comey was concerned that news about the e-mails would become public, which might lead to accusations from Republicans that the FBI was covering up evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton.

Ironically, we know now that FBI agents have been aware of the e-mails for weeks — and yet, somehow, the information didn’t leak out. But for Comey that was too big a personal risk to take.

While some Democratic partisans would like to believe that Comey, a Republican, is trying to tip the election to Trump, in reality the answer is more clear-cut: He’s covering his own posterior.

All of this began back in July, at Comey’s now fateful press conference in which he personally announced that there would be no prosecution of Clinton — even though the decision to prosecute was not his to make. That was bad enough, but then he made matters far worse by editorializing about the case.

Comey’s dubious description at the time — of Clinton’s handling of classified information as “extremely careless” — was prejudicial and inappropriate. But what makes it worse is that he did this, almost certainly, to inoculate himself and the FBI from inevitable GOP attacks asserting that he was not recommending charges against Clinton for political reasons. It speaks to how harmful the GOP’s assertions of an FBI cover-up have been, but that is no defense. Comey has a responsibility to ignore politics in this case. Instead he’s allowed it to dictate his actions.

Now he has doubled down with this latest abuse of power and, in the process, cast undue — and unfair — suspicion on Clinton.

Comey has cast a cloud over this interminable election. His actions run the very real risk of affecting its outcome.

Whatever the result on Election Day, Comey’s path forward is clearer.

He can’t un-ring the bill, since any step to clean up the damage could lead Republicans to believe a cover-up is afoot.

Having fundamentally undermined confidence in the justice system — and abused his power as FBI director — the only way he can repair it is by resigning his office.

I still want to see him prosecuted under the Hatch Act, especially if Clinton wins next Tuesday.  An example needs to be made.

Spotlight: A Must See Movie

As long time readers know, I was raised Roman Catholic and once was a member of the Knights of Columbus and achieved the 4th Degree.  After the Boston Globe blew open the systemic, worldwide sex abuse scandal in 2002, I decided that I could be longer in good conscience be a part of such a corrupt and morally bankrupt institution.  In February 2002 I did a guest editorial in the Virginian Pilot in response a letter to the editor by then Bishop Richmond, Walter Sullivan's January 30, 2012, decrying a January 21 2002, editorial cartoon and claiming that the stories about the Church were "pure bigotry against the Catholic Church.''  The cartoon in question focused on the Catholic Church's track record in respect to pedophile clergy. Subsequently, I was attacked in letters to the editor, including a letter from a subordinate of Bishop Sullivan.  Time has proven the accuracy of the Globe story and sex abuse cover ups have been exposed virtually worldwide.  The ultimate hypocrisy is that subsequently Sullivan himself was implicated in the cover up of sexual abuse by a diocesan priest in the Diocese of Richmond that was among Sullivan's favorites.   The tenaciousness of a friend of mine and other victims of the priest in question finally resulted in a criminal prosecution against the priest and a plea deal.  

For me, the timing of the Globe bomb shell was especially unique because it occurred when I was coming out and trying to purge myself of the psychological poison that had been inculcated into me as a Catholic child and youth.   Seeing the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of an institution that preached anti-gay bigotry and which had fueled so much of my self-hatred was a huge part of my ability to finally find self-acceptance and comfort with my sexual orientation. 

Today, the husband and I went to see Spotlight, the movie that tells the story of how the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe exposed the truth and the opposition that they had to counter to tells story that desperately needed to be told.  The one of the big take away from the film is that no institution deserves unquestioning deference and that bad things happen when good people lack the courage to speak out.  Without the contrivance of attorneys, police officials, district attorneys, school heads and others, the Church would never have been able to so effectively cover up the sexual abuse of literally thousands and thousands of children and youth.  

What is also distressing is the reality that NONE of the bishops and cardinals who conspired in the cover ups of abuse has been removed from office and tossed out by the Vatican.  Even today Cardinal Law who figured in the movie holds a plum position at the Vatican where he is safe from extradition for criminal prosecution. 

This is a MUST see movie and those who most need to see it are the Catholics in the pews who (i) continue to bow and scrape to a Church hierarchy that deserves to respect or deference, and (ii) continue to support the criminal conspiracy orchestrated from the Vatican.  Pope Francis can shed crocodile tears and feign contrition, but until he removes ALL of the bishops and cardinals from office and who have participated in cover ups, his words will be meaningless.

For locals an added benefit is that Mark Ruffalo, a First Colonial High School (in Virginia Beach) grad has a major role.

Why Society is Responsible for the Sins of Religion

I often complain of the undeserved deference given to religion in America.  The complaint also applies to other nations as well, but of the modern industrial nations America alone has the strongest fixation of hanging onto discredited religious beliefs and institutions.  True, most of us - especially in older generations - were brainwashed growing up in pews across the country, but at some point one needs to grow up and open their eyes.  Most of us grow up being fed with the Santa Claus myth, but at some point we acknowledge that the story line is untrue and that adults have misled us.  The same needs to happen with religion in general and denominations that preach division and contempt for others in particular and demand exalted respect for themselves.  A column in the New York Times from last week looks at the horrible consequences of giving undue respect to religious and clergy.  While focused on the Roman Catholic Church, the piece could just as easily be about the Southern Baptist Convention which likewise has a huge problem of sexual abuse by clergy.  Here are column highlights:

It’s fashionable among some conservatives to rail that there’s insufficient respect for religion in America and that religious people are marginalized, even vilified.

That’s bunk. In more places and instances than not, they get special accommodation and the benefit of the doubt. Because they talk of God, they’re assumed to be good. There’s a reluctance to besmirch them, an unwillingness to cross them.

The new movie “Spotlight,” based on real events, illuminates this brilliantly.

“Spotlight” — which opens in New York, Los Angeles and Boston on Friday and nationwide later this month — chronicles the painstaking manner in which editors and writers at The Boston Globe documented a pattern of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests and the concealment of these crimes by Catholic leaders.

[I]t isn’t about journalism. Or, for that matter, Catholicism.  It’s about the damage done when we genuflect too readily before society’s temples, be they religious or governmental. It’s about the danger of faith that’s truly blind.

It takes place in 2001 and 2002, and that time frame itself is a remarkable reflection of how steadfastly most Americans resist any intrusion into religious groups, any indictment of religious officials. 

“Spotlight” is admirably blunt on this point, suggesting that the Globe staff — which, in the end, did the definitive reporting on church leaders’ complicity in the abuse — long ignored an epidemic right before their eyes.

Why? For some of the same reasons that others did. Many journalists, parents, police officers and lawyers didn’t want to think ill of men of the cloth, or they weren’t eager to get on the bad side of the church, with its fearsome authority and supposed pipeline to God.

“Spotlight” lays out the many ways in which deference to religion protected abusers and their abettors. At one point in the movie, a man who was molested as a boy tells a Globe reporter about a visit his mother got from the bishop, who was asking her not to press charges.

“She put out freakin’ cookies,” the man says.  When the cookies finally went away, many Catholic leaders insisted that the church was being persecuted, and the crimes of priests exaggerated, by spiteful secularists.

But if anything, the church had been coddled, benefiting from the American way of giving religion a free pass and excusing religious institutions not just from taxes but from rules that apply to other organizations.

A 2006 series in The Times, “In God’s Name,” noted that since 1989, “more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into congressional legislation, covering topics ranging from pensions to immigration to land use.”

To cloak sexual abuse and shield abusive priests, Catholic leaders and their lawyers routinely leaned on the church’s privileged status, invoking freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and the secrecy of the confessional. They thus delayed a reckoning.

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” says a character in “Spotlight.” Indeed it does: a village too cowed, and a village too credulous.

We all need to grow up, open our eyes and demand tat the special privileges and exemptions enjoyed by churches and religious organizations (and their often charlatan leaders) end.  If they cannot operate and survive under the dame rules and tax policies as other institutions, then the deserve to wither and die.