Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal Intensifies As Illinois AG Blast Church for Cover Ups

The 2018 has not been good for the Roman Catholic Church as a number of cardinals and bishops have been forced to resign over sexual abuse of children and minors or for covering up for predatory priests. This week, in the wake of the criminal conviction of the highest ranking prelate in Australia and the 3rd highest official at the Vatican and the launch of criminal investigations by federal and state prosecutors, a California bishop has been forced to resign due to credible accusations of sex abuse and the Illinois Attorney General blasted the Illinois diocese of failing to disclose close to 350 accused predator priests.  Despite voluminous quantities of crocodile tears, the Vatican has failed to take effective measures to clean house of bishops and cardinals implicated in cover-ups,  As a result, many are left with the impression that the Catholic clergy feel the equivalent of a droit du seigneur - historically, a supposed legal or customary right of a feudal lord to have sexual relations with a vassal's bride on her wedding night - when comes to sexually abusing children and youths.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the latest developments in Illinois.  Here are excerpts:

Illinois' attorney general’s office Wednesday accused the Catholic Church of dramatically lowballing the scope of allegations of clergy sex abuse, saying her investigators found at least 500 additional accusations against priests and clergy — compared with the 185 cases the church has found credible. 

[S]he alleged in a statement that a probe her office opened into the Church in August is finding that Catholic leaders are failing to dig deep into the guilt of their clerics. The probe “has revealed that allegations frequently have not been adequately investigated by the dioceses or not investigated at all,” the statement said. Madigan’s office is one of more than a dozen to open state investigations this year into Catholic handling of abuses cases. But Wednesday, some experts said, seemed to up the ante because it pushed on a controversial topic that has angered Catholics from left to right -- whether the Church, under fire since the early 2000s, is really coming clean with its lists. The problem: There is no standard within the Catholic Church for what constitutes “credible" accusations, and many Catholics and members of the public are skeptical that church leaders are coming forward to civil authorities and the public with everything they have. Madigan, said longtime survivor advocate Terry McKiernan, is trying to force the church to produce lists that are more transparent and meaningful. Even in recent weeks, McKiernan said Wednesday, some lists around the country are being shown to not have included names that they should have.

“There’s a big debate about what ‘credible’ means, but these lists are clearly incomplete in a number of ways. Or at least there is lag before names are added,” he said. “Let’s face it, an allegation is an allegation, and very few are unsubstantiated if the diocese does the work to look into it."

Dioceses are dragging their feet on substantiating allegations "because they don’t want to acknowledge the crisis they’re in, ”McKiernan said.

Earlier Wednesday, the Vatican announced that a Los Angeles bishop was being removed after a review of a child sex abuse charge from the 1990s.

Since Madigan’s probe began in August, her spokeswoman said, the six Illinois dioceses have had to add 45 new names to their various lists of credibly accused priests. This reflects a lack of candor, said the office’s communications director, Maura Possley, and it’s why Madigan publicized the number of accusations.

Cardinals, bishops and other top clergy say they want to make amends and help victims heal, but the church’s glacial pace of revealing allegations runs counter to that stated goal, said Towey, who was a lawyer and a Bush administration official before taking the helm at Ave Maria University, one of the nation’s most prominent conservative Catholic colleges.

"It won’t start until all the names are out there. The church has to clean up its act,” Towey said. “The fact is – this is a mess of the Church’s creation and all of us, laity and ordained, have to come together and fix it.”

With Christmas but days away, what should decent, moral Catholics sickened by the sex abuse scandal do?  Perhaps attend the midnight mass service at their local Episcopal church or Evangelical Lutheran Church in America parish rather than their home parish.  The service will be remarkably the same and they will not feel dirtied by supporting a morally bankrupt institution.

Why Leaving the Catholic Church the Moral Thing to Do

I left the Catholic Church in early 2002 in the wake of the sex abuse scandal explosion in the Archdiocese of Boston.  I had not been a casual Catholic.  I had been an altar boy for 10 years and was involved in the Knights of Columbus and achieved the 4th Degree.  But on finding that bishops, cardinals - and yes, popes - had known of the abuse of children and youths for decades (if not centuries) and viewed it as no big deal but for the bad PR for the Church.  With three children of my own, I cannot comprehend the callousness of the celibate, self-centered, power hungry clergy to whom the rape and molestation of children and youths was no big deal.   Yes, coming out as gay was an added reason to leave a gay-hating church, but ultimately I believed it was the only moral thing to do.  Over time, the balance of my family has followed suit. An opinion piece in The Week by a recent refugee from the Catholic Church lats out this moral argument.  Here are excerpts:

Three months ago, I announced I was leaving the Catholic Church. My reason was that the latest revelations in the church's interminable sex abuse scandal had revealed "a repulsive institution — or at least one permeated by repulsive human beings who reward one another for repulsive acts, all the while deigning to lecture the world about its sin." Let's just say subsequent events haven't led me to regret the decision.

That would include Wednesday's news that the offices of the cardinal-archbishop of Galveston-Houston, who also happens to serve as president of the United States Catholic bishops' conference, were raided by "dozens of local and federal law enforcement officers … looking for evidence in a clergy sexual abuse case." A couple of weeks ago, the story was the Vatican's decision to nix plans by the American bishops to devise some kind of response to the scandal — on the grounds that it's mostly just a conspiracy drummed up by troublemaking right-wing clerics and laypeople. A week or a month from now, the story is bound to be something arising from the dozen or so investigations underway by the Justice Department and attorneys general around the country.

It's hardly surprising that writers deeply devoted to the Catholic Church would reject the reasons for my decision to leave the church. . . . . As I say, the response was unsurprising, even perfectly understandable. Though I do wonder whether any of these apologists for the church quite grasps why I left the church — and why so many others are likely to make the same move over the coming months and years.

The Catholic Church does make extraordinarily high claims for itself — not that its priests and bishops and cardinals and popes are angels but that the church as an institution is, of all the churches that follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, the one most fully and rightly ordered through time.

If I may be permitted some speculation of my own — this time of a psychological variety — I'd like to suggest that those objecting to the departure of fellow Catholics from the church may be moved to express those objections because they recognize how weak and frankly unpersuasive such ecclesiological claims really are. They are really arguing with themselves, in other words, trying to muster reasons to continue affirming something that, at a certain level, they fully recognize to be just a few millimeters away from outright absurdity.

What's absurd? The claim that, of all the Christian churches, the Roman church is the very best, the truest of all, the one most fully and rightly ordered through time. That would be not only the church of the great diabolical popes of the past (like John XII and Alexander VI and Boniface VIII and Leo X), but also the church that in recent decades has seen literally thousands of priests in countries across the globe accused of sexually abusing children — 271 of them in the archdiocese of Boston alone — with untold numbers of bishops covering it up year after year after year. The number is untold, by the way, because we are still nowhere near knowing just how many members of the Catholic hierarchy around the world — all the way up to popes themselves — knew exactly what was happening and responded like self-protective bureaucrats and PR flacks out to protect a corporate brand from bad press.

It's become commonplace for Catholic laypeople to ask themselves why the clergy has responded in the way it has to the scandal — how Pope John Paul II (along with Neuhaus) could have turned a blind eye to the myriad abuses committed by Marcial Maciel Degollado; how Archbishop Cardinal Bernard Francis Law could have been rewarded with a cushy sinecure at the Vatican as his "punishment" for basically overseeing a decades-long child-rape gang in Boston; and how Theodore McCarrick could have been promoted to one of the most powerful and prestigious positions in the Catholic Church in the United States after decades of alleged sexual predation with the full knowledge of (once again) untold numbers of priests, bishops, and possibly popes.

The behavior is only mysterious if you assume that anyone in their place would respond the way you and I would: with revulsion. But it isn't mysterious at all if you assume what should be obvious by now to everyone: They just didn't think it was such a big deal. Judging by the current stance of the Vatican to the pope's pesky American critics, the character of that response hasn't changed one bit down through the years.

[T]o believe that this particular church, of all the Christian churches in the world, is the one most fully and rightly ordered through time, over and above all of the others? You can't possibly be serious.

To react with anger and incredulity to this suggestion isn't to display unrealistically high hopes or expectations about the church. It's to respond reasonably to a claim that the church makes about itself — a claim that is flatly implausible on its face.

And that, my former fellow Catholic communicants, is why I have left the church — and why I fully expect quite a lot of the rest of you to be joining me in my unregretted exodus very soon.

Decent and moral people should want nothing to do with this corrupt and disgusting institution.

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. 

States Belatedly Take On Catholic Church

While there is plenty of blame to go around within the Catholic Church hierarchy for allowing the rampant, world wide rape of children and youths to go on for decades, if not centuries, civil authorities share much blame as well.  For many, many decades the Catholic Church and other denominations have been afforded undeserved deference due in part to the myth that churches do charitable works.  Secondly, rather than upset reactionary constituents, police officials and politicians turned a blind eye toward misdeeds within churches.  If any good comes out of the Pennsylvania grand jury report containing damning details on predators and their enablers within the hierarchy, it will because some state attorney generals are finally willing to take on the Church rather than turning a blind eye and pretending all church actions are for the good. I suspect that a detailed review of Catholic parishes - and other denomination operations as well - would show meager pennies on the dollar going to charitable works while the remainder goes to maintaining parasitic priests/pastors and spreading religious propaganda.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this welcome development.  Here are excerpts (note how some Republicans remain reluctant to investigae and potentially alienate right wing "Christian" voters):

Attorneys general across the United States are taking a newly aggressive stance in investigating sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy, opening investigations into malfeasance and issuing subpoenas for documents.

On Thursday alone, the New York State attorney general issued subpoenas to all eight Catholic dioceses in the state as part of a sweeping civil investigation into whether institutions covered up allegations of sexual abuse of children, officials said. The attorney general in New Jersey announced a criminal investigation.

The new inquiries come several weeks after an explosive Pennsylvania grand jury report detailed the abuse of more than 1,000 children by hundreds of priests over decades. With Catholics clamoring for more transparency from their church, demanding that bishops release the names of accused priests, civil authorities are beginning to step up to force disclosure.

In the three weeks since the release of the Pennsylvania report, the attorneys general of Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska and New Mexico have also said they will investigate sex abuse by Catholic priests in their states and have asked local dioceses for records. Most bishops have been saying they will cooperate. 

Attorneys general in some states said in statements Thursday that they were inspired to take action by the scathing Pennsylvania report, and said they were seeking to bring similar transparency to constituents in their states.

“The Pennsylvania grand jury report shined a light on incredibly disturbing and depraved acts by Catholic clergy, assisted by a culture of secrecy and cover-ups in the dioceses,” the attorney general of New York, Barbara Underwood, said. “Victims in New York deserve to be heard as well — and we are going to do everything in our power to bring them the justice they deserve.”

New Jersey’s attorney general, Gurbir S. Grewal, announced Thursday that he had appointed Robert D. Laurino, the former acting prosecutor of Essex County, to lead a task force that will investigate clergy sex abuse and any effort to cover up claims of assault. The task force will have subpoena power through a grand jury in order to compel testimony and demand the production of documents.

“I was deeply troubled to read the allegations contained in last month’s Pennsylvania grand jury report,” Mr. Grewal said in a statement. “We owe it to the people of New Jersey to find out whether the same thing happened here. If it did, we will take action against those responsible.”

But the probes announced in various states were not equally independent or combative. In Missouri, [Republican] Attorney General Joshua D. Hawley said last month that he will conduct an “independent review” of files that the archbishop of St. Louis, Robert J. Carlson, had just volunteered to make available to review. The two men each released letters about the arrangement on the same day, after survivors of sexual abuse by priests had organized protests calling for an investigation.

Mr. Hawley, a Republican running for the United States Senate, said in a telephone news conference that his power is limited because under Missouri law, he cannot convene a grand jury or issue subpoenas for documents.  But a lawyer for abuse victims called his claim a “half truth.” . . . . “He’s allowing the perpetrator to run the investigation,” Ms. Gorovsky said in an interview. “It’s exactly backwards.”

The potential scope of the investigations is huge. In the Archdiocese of New York alone, 315 victims of sex abuse by clergy have recently received compensation through an independent program sponsored by the church. In the Diocese of Brooklyn, some 250 victims have filed claims through a similar program. These programs did not offer compensation to victims abused by priests working for religious orders, so many more victims may reach out to report abuse through the hotline.

The Diocese of Buffalo has been swamped with abuse revelations in recent months. In February, a retired priest admitted to The Buffalo News that he had molested probably dozens of boys at multiple parishes from the late 1960s until the 1980s. Since then, abuse by other priests has also come to light, raising questions of why it was kept secret for so long.

“Little is known about clergy abuse of children in New York, because of the state’s antiquated and predator-friendly statute of limitations, and because the church has kept the evidence secret all these years,” Terence McKiernan, president of BishopAccountability.org, said Thursday in a statement.
“Finally we will learn the truth in New York.”

Don’t Blame the Catholic Church Sex Abuse Crisis on Gays

Photo by Chris Karidis on Unsplash.

Many on the far right of the Roman Catholic Church ranging from reactionary bishops and cardinals and, in my view, parasitic, self-enrichment organizations such as Church Militant and Bill Donohue's Catholic League (which is comprised of one well paid Donohue and one staffer) are working overtime to blame the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal on gays - specifically, gay priests - rather than the Church's clericalism, the Church's bizarre 12th century dogma on sexuality, or the Church hierarchy's active cover ups of abuse.  As always, scapegoating gays and shielding the reputation of the Church is the prime goal regardless of the lies and subterfuge required.   In response, a piece in America, the official outlet of the Jesuits - historically the best educated and most zealous defenders of Catholicism - argues that this scapegoating effort is wrong and not to be believed.  Indeed, gay Catholics, perhaps more than any others, have had to truly ponder the Gospel message and what - if one believes them to be more than myths of ignorant herders - the Old Testament seeks to tell.  Because of this, psycho-sexually mature gays have much to teach the Church. Here are excerpts:

This is not a fun moment to be Catholic, I know, and we are all grasping for sense and answers. But here’s the thing: Using an abuse and accountability scandal to scapegoat Catholic queerness is not O.K.

Take, for example, this letter from Bishop Robert Morlino. I trust the bishop has the best intentions, but some of his most scorching indignation aims not at the abuses of power and accountability he is supposed to be talking about but at homosexuality, in general, which he reminds us the church regards as “intrinsically disordered” and that “cries out to heaven for vengeance” and possibly—the referent is not fully clear—is to be “hated with a perfect hatred.”

There are other concurrent truths, too. . . . . Each time I read something like this, I think of how, over and over, the people who have saved my faith when it was on the brink happened to be queer folks. I suspect this is not an accident. I cannot be sure, but I expect it was their experience of marginalization and their humanness against it that helped me see where God is.

Some of these people have been of the left, some of the right. Some have been on TV, some will never be so seen. Sometimes things have even gotten inappropriate. But that was not because they were queer. Straight folks in the church cross boundaries, too, just as much.

I came into this church right in the heat of the Boston Globe revelations. I was baptized in 2003. Many times I have been grateful to have been called to this church as an adult (barely, I was 18). But I was old enough to know the difference between the nonsense and the glory.

I would not have begun to know God were it not for a person, harbored in holy orders, whose life could only be described as queer, and who drew me in, safely and respectfully, when the straight dudes wanted to drive me out.

I never noticed queerness in one of the people I looked to early in my Christian life as a guide and model. But years later I ran into him with his partner at a famously welcoming evening Mass, on the other end of town from where he lived.

And it was from some corners of this church, believe it or not, that queer experiences seemed to make the most sense. From one corner, a nun had to keep her ministry to the trans community secret. From another, the sweetest friendship I have ever seen was between a famous, withering Jesuit and a woman whose husband, while dying from AIDS, the two of them had tended to decades earlier.

In a sense, there is some truth that the problem of abuse has to do with a problem of queer sexuality. It is the problem of a repressed, denialist, immature queerness that discovered itself a little after Vatican II but was not able to go beyond that.

There is a revelation at hand here. It is not a liberal revelation or a conservative one. It is something else, something ancient. Blindness to it has caused so, so much pain. It has caused good people and good leaders to be their worst selves.

As I traveled my coming out journey, I read a great deal on religion, the Bible and Catholicism and worked with a licensed therapist who was an ordained minister. In the process, I suspect I gave more thought and analysis to my faith than the average Catholic and many members of the Church hierarchy who seem most focused on power, status, control of others and living like "princes."

Prayers Will Not Stop Sex Abuse in the Catholic Church

Some readers will likely roll their eyes and think "there he goes again" as I again look at the continuing sex abuse scandal that envelops the Catholic Church literally on a global basis.  The findings of the grand jury report released this past week in Pennsylvania mirrors what has been the norm across the globe from Australia, Guam, South America, Europe, parts of Africa and, of course, across America.  There is a systemic problem within the Catholic Church, much of it deriving, in my view and in the view of a number of mental health professionals, from the Church's more or less Medieval doctrines on sexuality and anti-women mindset. If one reads about the development of these bizarre views on sexuality - -the book The Origins and role of Same Sex Relations in Human Societies does an excellent job - the conclusion is that many of the so-called Church fathers had very serious mental issues.  Why must this be addressed and ended?  One reason, of course, is so that such rampant sex abuse of children and youths ceases to be a norm with far too many of the Catholic clergy.  The second is to end the emotional and psychological damage being done even as I write this post as more Catholic youth is brainwashed with the Church's bizarre and unhealthy sexual mores that push many toward constant self-hate and, in some instances, suicide. A third reason is to end the Church's and right wing Catholics' efforts to scapegoat gays rather than admit that the Church's warped teachings and forced celibacy are at the root of the problem.  Several pieces represent the reverberations from Tuesday's release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report.  One comes from Canada's Globe and Mail:  

The church has reacted of course, but always slowly, usually reluctantly and often incorrectly. It still treats offenders leniently, still covers up when it thinks it can and still refuses to address the major causes of abuse. One horribly regrettable response, for example, has been to try to link sexual abuse with homosexuality. It’s probably more difficult for a celibate gay man to enter a seminary under the allegedly progressive Pope Francis than it was under his more conservative predecessors. It’s not only an odious fallacy, but also a painful digression.

In fact, there are three genuine issues. First is enforced celibacy. Men denied sex do not become abusers, but abusers do look for places where they can disguise their crimes. There are a large number of gay priests – estimates are between 25 per cent and 50 per cent – and these men, some in relationships and some not, have to live a lie. Abusers exploit this culture of obfuscation to hide their crimes. A solution would be to ordain married men and to allow gay clergy to be open and honest.

Second is the extraordinary patriarchy that exists within the church. Women are not ordained, have very little influence and are excluded from decisions. While the presence of women doesn’t make abuse impossible, it certainly reduces the likelihood. The vast majority of abusers in any situation are men; women are more often survivors and have greater empathy and sensitivity to the issue, and they inject a gender balance that makes an abusive context more difficult to maintain.

Third is the rigid sense of authority that permeates the church, even under more liberal-minded pontiffs. This is still a clerical church, and until it is democratized, closed circles of secrecy will be formed whenever leadership is challenged.

The reality, however, is that the church will almost certainly continue to regard loving same-sex relationships as sinful, will never ordain women, and as Roman Catholicism is based on absolute central authority, will not genuinely empower the laity.

[U]nless we admit that child sexual abuse within Roman Catholicism is due to systemic problems rather than human failing, the obscenity will not stop. Prayers simply aren’t enough.

A second piece comes from Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic - I left the Church in 2000 - in New York Magazine.  Here are excerpts:

After a while, I couldn’t continue reading the Pennsylvania grand jury report on sexual abuse in six dioceses in the Catholic Church. Apart from the rising nausea, I realized the horror of each incident had begun to numb my conscience, and the sheer number of cases had numbed it still further. One case is a tragedy; thousands of cases can too easily become a statistic. Like dealing with Trump’s lies, you can get dizzy following the specific horrors committed against children, and the excuses and prevarications and silence of so many in the hierarchy. Which is why specifics matter. They reveal the core nature of the evil involved. 

And then the kicker: the diocese was aware of Zirwas’s abuses as early as 1987. Zirwas continued in the priesthood until 1994, when he was placed on leave, citing “personal reasons.” Bishop, soon-to-be Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua did nothing to punish or report this man for molesting countless children. Then he was actually re-appointed as a priest by Bishop Donald Wuerl, who is now a cardinal in my own archdiocese of Washington. When another complaint of abuse found its way to Wuerl, he removed Zirwas, who then moved to Florida, fled to Cuba, and was found strangled to death in Havana in 2001. Nonetheless Wuerl presided at Zirwas’s funeral and made some remarks: “According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Wuerl described how Zirwas was a kind man, and had preached a message of salvation through faith in Jesus. ‘A priest is a priest,’ Wuerl said that day. ‘Once he is ordained, he’s a priest forever.’”
 This case is, in many ways, a microcosm of the entire wicked business: the abuse, the cover-up, the continued abuse, the conspiracy of silence. But more deeply for this Catholic: the cynicism. The giggling priests — by their very actions — could not possibly believe in the Gospels. They were merely using the Gospels to commit unspeakable crimes. The upper ranks, by their indifference and cover-up, are also deeply suspect. There is simply no way to square a belief in the Gospels and enabling, promoting, and covering up the rape of children. All of these men come off as cynics, incapable of summoning the overwhelming sense of outrage any nonbeliever, or any decent human being, would feel in the face of this kind of accusation; all protecting their own ranks, all far more committed to good public relations than saving children. There is simply something deeply wrong with these people.

All I can say is that I cannot understand why any human being — let alone a bishop — wouldn’t immediately suspend the priest and call the cops after a credible allegation. It doesn’t matter if it’s the 1980s, 1990s, or 1890s. You save the children first. And instead of PR, what about shame, penitence, taking responsibility and begging for forgiveness? Are those only for the laity?

How much of a role did homosexuality play in all this? There is of course a vital distinction to be made here between sexual orientation and sexual abuse, and between being gay and being a pedophile, hebephile, or ephebophile. Many gay priests are fine and honorable servants. It horrifies me they are tarred by association, by some of the more reactionary voices in the church. It’s also true that one reason young men and boys were targeted was that they were far more readily available to priests than girls.

And the way in which homosexuality has been treated by Catholicism — the only option for all gays is a life of celibacy and emotional repression — is not likely to lead to healthy homosexual lives, let alone priests.

Homophobia may also have increased the proportion of priests over the centuries who have been gay, because the priesthood has always been a reliable cover for not dating women. And these closeted, fucked-up gays are the ones who may well have internalized many of the slurs against gays in the past, hated themselves, never come to terms with themselves, and seen no real difference between sexual abuse and sex. . . .  When no form of sex is allowed, all forms of sex can seem equally immoral. And if your celibacy has ever slipped, you sure don’t want to snitch on someone else, do you?

It’s a vicious, destructive, evil circle. Which is why, it seems to me, that the clerical closet has to end. Secrecy and shame abet sexual dysfunction. Openness and self-respect are the cure.

Allowing married people and women to be priests is also a no-brainer. We have long discovered that secretive, hierarchical cabals of single men are usually trouble in any context and I have a feeling that a female priest would not react to the news of an abused child with concern for the abuser. The church’s moral credibility is now close to zero. All the more reason to throw open the doors and let the light in.
 We may still believe in Jesus. But precisely because of that, we can no longer believe in the church. No one is untouched. Even Pope John Paul II personally advanced and championed one of the worst abusers in the church, the Legionaries of Christ’s Marcial Maciel Degollado, because of the money he brought in, and the rigid ideology he upheld. And they made John Paul a saint! This is no time to shore up the institution. It’s time to open it up and cleanse it. We could start with Cardinal Wuerl.

Lastly, a letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune gets to what may be the only way to force the Church to change: everyday parishioners need to end their financial support of the Church and, better yet, cease attending mass and find a different denomination if they feel compelled to attend church:  

It’s hard to be a Catholic. In response to the recently released Pennsylvania grand jury report on some 300 priests accused of abuse, let it be known — let it be shouted from the rooftops — that those warped, vile, disgusting clerics who have violated children over the past several decades have made victims not only of the children but of all Catholics everywhere. Their victims number tens of millions.

As a church-going Catholic, I have found nothing more maddening over the last couple of decades than recurring revelations of priestly abuse and the church’s attempts to hide it. I think of the donations, which the faithful give at Mass every week, going now not to maintain churches, pay staff or upgrade schools, but to compensate plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases and enrich the lawyers who represent them. Why should I give?

I think of the harm to the church’s moral credibility on matters such as the roles of women inside and outside the church, gay marriage, gender dysphoria, in vitro fertilization and embryonic stem-cell research. How can an institution that has harbored so much sexual abuse over so many years purport to instruct others on anything involving sex?

I must suspect that the requirement that its clergy be celibate — a requirement that among religious organizations seems all but unique to the Catholic Church — not only disqualifies many otherwise capable men from the priesthood but, more ominously, tends to select in favor of men who lack healthy libidinal drives.

The Perverted Values of the Roman Catholic Church Hierarchy

Today the much anticipated grand jury report into six of the eight Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania was finally released and it was damning.  Sex abuse crimes against at least 1000 some victims - many belief the true numbers is in to the thousands - by over 300 priests were systematically covered up by bishops who maintained secret archives and files that thankfully were subpoenaed by the grand jury.  Over 500,000 church documents were reviewed that showed the clear and deliberate cover ups of crimes against children and youths.  Not surprisingly, its the same pattern that was seen in the Archdiocese of Boston, dioceses after diocese in Ireland, across dioceses in Australia and Chile and pretty much everywhere across the globe.  

Yet what are Catholic bishops lamenting?  Certainly not the victims of large scale sex abuse crimes.  Rather, as my Google search agent revealed, in Costa Rica, the Catholic News Agency is reporting on Catholic bishops are decrying that country's ruling legalizing same sex civil marriage.  Per the Indianapolis Star, Roncalli High School in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, is obsessed with firing a long time guidance counselor after it was discovered she is married to a woman.  Meanwhile, The Guardian is reporting that a LGBT Catholic group has been denied permission for a vendor stall at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin, which Pope Francis is attending on August 25th.  

What can one expect in the wake of the release of the damning Pennsylvania grand jury report.?  More crocodile tears and disingenuous apologies and lamentations of regret even as nothing is done to punish or remove from office the bishops and cardinals that engaged in the cover ups of sex crimes against children and youths.   It is little wonder that younger generations are walking away from Catholicism in droves.  And it is not just the younger generation (many of whom are not having their children baptized at all).  Not long ago, the last member of my extended family who had remained a Catholic Church member walked away.   Many older generations are leaving as well either out of disgust for the Hierarchy's moral bankruptcy or the Hierarchy's continued anti-gay and anti-contraception jihads.  Here are excerpts from the Allentown Morning Call about the grand jury report:

A scathing grand jury report released Tuesday reveals accusations of sexual abuse against 301 priests — 37 from the Allentown Diocese — whose actions went unchecked for decades in dioceses across Pennsylvania, including Allentown.

Instead of reporting pedophiles, dioceses routinely shuffled them from parish to parish, enabling them to prey upon new victims, the document shows. The statewide grand jury, launched by former Attorney General Kathleen Kane, spent two years on the most exhaustive investigation of the church taken on by a state. It covered allegations in the Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton dioceses, which collectively minister to more than 1.7 million Catholics.

Among those cited as enablers was Allentown’s bishop, Alfred Schlert, who played a role in the diocese’s handling of complaints when he was vicar general under Bishop Edward Cullen. Shapiro pointed out that Schlert was among those promoted in the years since he handled abuse allegations. The 23 members of the grand jury took testimony from dozens of witnesses. But it was in the church’s own files — more than half a million pages of internal diocesan documents in “secret archives” — that the grand jury found the names of more than a thousand children who were victimized, most of them boys.

“We believe that the real number — of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward — is in the thousands,” the report noted.

Shapiro said the abuse was “systematically covered up by church officials in Pennsylvania and at the Vatican.” He said those officials weaponized the faith, using it against victims and to protect the institution at all cost. Shapiro highlighted the case of the Rev. Thomas D. Skotek, who sexually assaulted a girl in the Scranton Diocese while he was pastor of St. Casimir in Freeland in the 1980s and then aided her in getting an abortion when she became pregnant. Bishop James C. Timlin, then head of the diocese, wrote a letter to Skotek informing him that he would be sent for treatment, adding: “This is a very difficult time in your life, and I realize how upset you are. I too share your grief. … Please be assured that I am most willing to do whatever I can to help.” That letter, Shapiro said, was in the diocese’s files.

Arthur Long, a Harrisburg Diocese priest at the time, admitted to a sexual relationship with four or five girls, telling a church official, “God wants us to express our love for each other in this way.”

And in graphic detail, Shapiro summarized an allegation against Monsignor Thomas Benestad, former pastor of Notre Dame of Bethlehem and St. Francis of Assisi in Allentown, who is accused of sexually abusing a boy for two years beginning when the child was 9 and taking catechism classes at St. Bernard's. A nun brought the boy to Benestad because he had worn shorts to class, which was against the rules. Benestad, the report says, told the boy to get on his knees and pray. The priest then forced the boy to perform oral sex on him. And afterward, washed the child’s mouth out with holy water, the report says. Benestad later retired and moved to Florida.

Among the most tragic cases was that of “Joey B,” who was so severely sexually assaulted by the Rev. Edward Graff in the Allentown Diocese that he injured his back and later became addicted to painkillers and overdosed. Before his death, Joey wrote, "Father Graff did more than rape me. He killed my potential.”

Shapiro said the investigation reveals that law enforcement as well as church officials failed to protect children. The “coverup,” he said, “was sophisticated.” There have been other reports about child sex abuse in the Catholic church, he said, but never on this scale.

"They claim to have changed their ways. They claim to have put appropriate safeguards in place," Shapiro said of the dioceses. "Statements are one thing. The proof of their claims will be if they support the grand jury recommendations."

Mitchell Garabedian, who represented many of the Boston victims and was featured in the movie “Spotlight,” said those who spoke up about being abused should be commended for having the courage to come forward. He added that the report, “lays out the standard blueprint of dishonesty, immorality, criminality and coverup of the Catholic Church which has been previously revealed in Boston and archdioceses and dioceses worldwide.”  He called the Vatican “complicit in the coverup.”

Since the Vatican has proven itself incapable of enacting change and punishing bishops and cardinals involved in cover ups, three things will have to take place before any real change occurs in the sick  priorities of the Vatican and Church hierarchy: (i) criminal prosecutions and imprisonment of guilty bishops and cardinals, (ii) a mass exodus of Church members, and (iii) massive declines in financial contributions to the Church, especially in America, one of the main financial supporters of the Vatican worldwide.  The Catholic Church may be growing in poor and uneducated areas of Africa, but those regions do not have money to support the bloated Church bureaucracy.   If you are Catholic and want to see meaningful change, walk away and stop writing checks to your local parish and diocesan appeals.

Maine Catholic Diocese Quits Council of Churches Over Gays

Anti-gay Catholic bishop Robert Deeley

Time and time again we see news outlets breathlessly gushing over supposedly "gay friendly" statements by Pope Francis.  Meanwhile, NOTHING has changed in terms of official Catholic Church dogman which labels gays as "intrinsically disordered" - this from a church with a still rampant global sex abuse scandal driven by its celibacy requirement for clergy (even though eastern rite priests can marry) and a bizarre obsession with sex and sexuality.  If Francis truly wanted to change the Church's treatment of LGBT individuals, he need mere issue a pronouncement "ex cathedra" - e.g., the pope speaks infallibly when speaking ex cathedra on questions of faith or morals.  This has not and, I suspect will not, happened.  Thus, all the gushing and breathlessness in the media is meaningless and simply provides cover for Catholics who like to pretend that they are not supporting an anti-gay church (not to mention the rape of children and youths).  The real story of the Catholic Church's position on gays is on view in articles reporting on the firing of LGBT teachers and staff and, recently, the exit of the Maine Catholic diocese from the Council of Churches which is too "gay friendly."  Here are excerpts from the National Catholic Reporter:  

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, Maine, is withdrawing from the Maine Council of Churches in a bid to distance itself from LGBT advocacy and other stances that the church says could compromise its public moral witness. The decision comes after a council decision to let its public positions be determined by a majority vote among its members. Previously, the council would only take a stand when its eight denominational members voted unanimously to do so. "Our continuing participation could result in me advocating for two different, and even contradictory, positions," writes Portland Bishop Robert Deeley in an open letter published by the Portland Press Herald. "What I advocate for cannot be simply determined by a majority vote. Executive Director Jane Field. She noted that mainline Protestant churches represented on the council have become more affirming of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people as full participants in their churches and ministries. Roman Catholic teaching holds that homosexuality is "intrinsically disordered" and does not condone same-sex relationships.

"Remaining silent on issues, especially related to LGBTQ justice and equality, wasn't tenable for all of our other seven denominations," the Rev. Field explained. "It was enough of a discomfort that it needed to be addressed openly. It wasn't healthy to be silent anymore."

Field said member denominations discussed the option of issuing a minority report in situations when not all members could support the council's stance. But the diocese opted instead to withdraw.

Other dioceses in recent years left state councils in New Hampshire and North Carolina, Field said.

Catholic Cardinal in Australia to Stand Trial for Sex Abuse

Cardinal George Pell has been committed to stand trial on multiple
 charges related to historical sexual assault.
Photo: Jason South

While the Vatican dilly dallies, sheds crocodile tears, and fails to hold senior Catholic Church clerics responsible for the world wide sex abuse scandal wracking the Church - Australia, Guam, Pennsylvania and New York State are current centers of  the scandal - civil authorities are stepping in to fill the gap.  In Australia, civil authorities are being especially aggressive after a scathing report by a royal commission which, among other things, found the western rite requirement of priestly celibacy to be a significant factor in creating the priestly abuse phenomenon.  Now, Australian authorities are set to proceed with a criminal trial of Cardinal George Pell, the highest Catholic cleric in Australia and arguably the number two office holder after the Pope.  The Sydney Morning Herald looks at this one unheard of development.  Here are excerpts:

George Pell will be the most senior Catholic leader to face a jury after being committed to stand trial on multiple historic sexual assault charges.

In a decision that will ring loud through the Vatican and around the religious world, Australia's most senior Catholic and the man who a year ago oversaw management of the Vatican's finances was on Tuesday committed to stand trial on half the charges he faced, involving multiple accusers.

[M]agistrate Belinda Wallington . . . committed the 76-year-old on charges against multiple complainants, involving alleged sexual offending at a swimming pool in the 1970s in Ballarat, where the accused man was then working as a priest; and at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in 1990s, when he was the then Archbishop of Melbourne.

Asked to enter a plea, Cardinal Pell sat seated in a packed Melbourne Magistrates Court but said in a loud, clear voice: "Not guilty."

Magistrate Belinda Wallington said there was no evidence the two Ballarat accusers had colluded in their evidence.

Flanked by up to 40 police officers, Cardinal Pell arrived at the court in a white sedan just after 9am. He wore a dark coloured suit and white shirt.

The police separated the Cardinal’s path from the public as protesters arrived with laminated signs reading “every child deserves a safe and happy childhood”.

Archbishop of Melbourne Denis Hart released a statement saying he declined to make any comment about the decision to commit Cardinal Pell to face trial in the County Court.

 In addition, ABC News Australia has these highlights:

A number of onlookers applauded as the magistrate left the court room after delivering her 70-minute ruling.

Defence barrister Robert Richter QC said the most "vile" of the charges had been dismissed.

Cardinal Pell will face a directions hearing in the County Court tomorrow morning, when it's expected a date will be set for a trial before a jury. He is on bail and has already handed in his passport, the court heard. He is unable to leave Australia as a condition of his bail.

Today's ruling follows a month-long committal hearing in March.

Among the allegations, he is accused of sexual offending at Melbourne's St Patrick's Cathedral in the late 1990s when he was Archbishop of Melbourne.  Cardinal Pell is also accused of committing sexual offences at a Ballarat pool during the 1970s, when he was a priest in the area.

Ms Wallington told an earlier hearing she believed an accused person should be committed to stand trial unless there was a "fundamental defect" in the evidence.  "I think issues of credibility and reliability are matters for a jury, except where you get to a point where [a complainant's] credibility is effectively annihilated," she said.

As a child when I was indoctrinated by Catholic priests and nuns, I never imagined that a day would come when a "prince of the church" would be laid so low.  Sadly, given the Church hierarchy's arrogance and utter indifference to the lives of children and youths, not to mention the Vatican's refusal to punish the 1/3 or more of American bishops who protected predators, the Church's humiliation is deserved and long. long overdue.   

Pope Francis Fails the Test on Sexual Abuse

Pope Francis' visit to south America has not been well received by many.  True, large crowds of lemming like Catholics have turned out for his appearances, but many are unmoved by Francis' crocodile tears and false pleas of sorrow for the rampant sexual abuse that the Vatican and the Church hierarchy have allowed for many decades, if not longer.  There has been no real repentance and no real action to punish those who allowed this attitude that sexual abuse was a case of droit du seigneur for the hypocrisy filled priesthood.  In Chile, as CBS New notes, violence greeted Francis:

Overnight three more Catholic churches were torched, including one burned to the ground in the southern Araucania region where Francis will visit on Wednesday to meet with Chile's indigenous peoples. While not causing any injuries, the nine church firebombings in the past few days have marked an unprecedented level of protest against history's first Latin American pope on his home turf.

Sadly, no reform will come from within the Church and decent people should walk away.  If the fail to do so and continue to support the Church, they are complicit in abuse and continued cover ups.   An editorial in the New York Times rightly takes Francis to task for his continued failure to take decisive action.  Here are highlights:

 Pope Francis arrived in Chile with the right message: He was “pained and ashamed,” he said on Tuesday, about the irreparable damage abusive priests have inflicted on minors. Yet he refused to meet with victims of the country’s most nefarious sexual abuser, and when pressed about his support of a bishop linked to that priest, he dismissed the accusations as slander.

For all his professions of horror at the revelations about predatory priests whose activities were covered up by the hierarchy — and for all his other admirably enlightened and pastoral actions — it seems the pope has yet to fully appreciate that the abuse of minors is not simply a matter of a few deviant priests protected by overzealous prelates but of his church’s acceptance of a horrible violation of a most sacred trust: that of a devout and questioning youth and a spiritual guide.

Acknowledging and regretting the damage is not enough. If the Catholic Church is ever to lift the deep stain of child sex abuse, the pope must take every opportunity to reject not only clear violations but also the slightest appearance of tolerance for such behavior.

He missed that opportunity by attending the funeral last month for Cardinal Bernard Law, the powerful former archbishop of Boston who resigned after revelations that he protected abusive priests for years and became, in effect, the image of a hierarchy that concealed and thereby enabled sexual abuse. He missed it in the failure of the Vatican so far to appoint a new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors after the commissioners’ terms expired in December.

And Pope Francis missed it again in Chile. One of Latin America’s most staunchly Catholic countries, Chile had been shaken by revelations about the sexual crimes of Fernando Karadima, once one of Chile’s most respected and influential priests. It took years for the church to act on complaints about him, but a Vatican investigation in 2011 finally found Father Karadima guilty of sexual abuse and restricted him to a life of isolated penitence. A Chilean judge later determined that the allegations against the priest were truthful, but the statute of limitations had expired.

Among those accused of turning a blind eye to Father Karadima’s behavior was a priest and longtime member of Father Karadima’s entourage, Juan Barros Madrid. Yet Pope Francis made him a bishop in 2015 and, despite protests from victims of Father Karadima and from many priests and laypeople in the diocese, Bishop Barros participated in the pope’s official ceremonies in Chile. When reporters raised the subject on Thursday, Pope Francis answered sharply that there was “not one single piece of evidence” against the bishop. “It is all slander,” he declared. “Is that clear?”

Victims of sexual abuse may have only their tortured memories as evidence, and these have been dismissed for far too long as slander by a hierarchy intent on protecting the church’s reputation. Pope Francis has repeatedly pledged action to end the abuse and the cover-up, . . . . . . But too often he and his church raise doubts that they’re fully committed.