Category: Who Is The Church

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N.J. man publishes book on abuse by priests in the Diocese of Trenton

It took Bruce Novozinsky more than seven years and 14,000 pages of letters, memos, manuscripts and interviews to produce his book on the decades of sexual abuse allegedly covered up by the powers that be in the Roman Catholic Church.

“Purple Reign: Sexual Abuse and Abuse of Power in the Diocese of Trenton”, written with co-author Linda Vele Alexander, hit stores and online in June and recently became the sixth-most purchased e-book about Christianity on Amazon.com.

“Purple Reign,” the result of what the Upper Freehold resident calls an “obsession,” chronicles his memoirs in Catholic school — and three years at the former Divine Word Seminary in Bordentown — and the sexual abuse suffered in the Diocese of Trenton through the mid- to late 20th century.

“We were all products of the 1970s, where you just kind of prayed to, obeyed and paid the church. Nobody ever questioned the politics involved,” Novozinsky said in a telephone interview earlier this week.

The book reads like a conversation with Novozinsky — “I write like I speak and that’s with candor and very little filtering,” he writes. The book is interspersed with firsthand accounts of others’ sexual abuse, correspondence with the alleged perpetrators more than 40 years later, and reflections on the abuse perpetrated by men wholly trusted by their victims.

“I didn’t look like the typical candidate for a kidnapping, or a sexual assault for that matter, and yet less than an hour before, I had a priest on top of me,” Novozinsky writes of his own close call with sexual abuse by his parish priest decades ago.

He latched onto the subject when news broke of the sexual abuse scandal 10 years ago in the Archdiocese of Boston, as those experiences and rumors started “eating at him.”

“To say that the Catholic Church abuse crisis started in January 2002 in Boston, Mass., is naive and simply not true,” Novozinsky writes. “Sexual abuse and the abuse of power in the Church have been around since Adam bit the apple.”

The book includes anecdotes of weeping parents pleading with priests to take action over the abuse witnessed by their sons — and the resulting inaction.

“Everybody had a horrible, horrible story to relay, but the common theme was, ‘Nobody did anything about it,’ ” Novozinsky said. “Or they settled a case and were told to be quiet, or were told, ‘This is a secret between us and God.’ Just being in a workforce and in corporate America, it just dawned on me that this is the highest degree of sexual harassment.”

“The abuse is bad enough. It’s horrid,” Novozinsky said. “But the cover-up is worse, as far as I’m concerned.”
Many of the alleged perpetrators — who he said were never charged due to a “loophole” in the legal system — still live in the area, still wearing priest collars.

Even Novozinsky’s attempted abuser lives “scot-free,” he said.

The Diocese of Trenton declined to comment on any of the allegations made in “Purple Reign.”

“We have nothing to say about this book,” spokeswoman Rayanne Bennett said in a statement. “Regarding the overall issue, the diocese has been proactive and diligent in the steps we’ve taken to protect children and assist victims. Our efforts have been pastoral and transparent and we take our responsibilities in this matter very seriously.”
Novozinsky said parents, though, have ramped up efforts to protect children.

“People today are so aware that if one accusation was made, the school would be shut down,” Novozinsky said. “People are much more in tune and sensitive to it.”

The sex abuse scandal and the cover-up his book alleges hasn’t shaken Novozinsky’s faith at all, he said. His children even attend Catholic schools.

“My faith is my faith in God and the Roman Catholics. I will always be a Roman Catholic. (The research) has made my faith stronger for me,” Novozinsky said. “However, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, from Trenton to Rome — I have absolutely no confidence in them.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Seattle marchers show support for activist nuns

Over the years, Patricia Patterson thought about joining protest marches in support of women’s rights or against war. But the cause that finally got her to take to the streets was nuns.

“It baffles me that a group of women who are among the … most compassionate are being, frankly, picked on by the Vatican,” Patterson said Sunday. She joined a throng of nearly 500 people who marched in support of the nuns’ group recently rebuked by the Catholic Church for promoting “radical feminist themes” at odds with official doctrine.

Patterson carried a picture of her aunt, a nun who had a major influence on her life. Other marchers carried flowers and sang hymns as they walked from Volunteer Park on Capitol Hill to St. James Cathedral, seat of the Archdiocese of Seattle.

But Seattle Archbishop J. Peter Sartain wasn’t home. He was in St. Louis for meetings with the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group that includes about 80 percent of women’s religious orders in the United States.

The Vatican put Sartain in charge of revamping the Leadership Conference to bring its practices more in line with Catholic orthodoxy.

After a four-day conference that concluded Friday, the nuns agreed to talk with Sartain but said they would not “compromise the integrity” of their mission.

Sartain praised the nuns’ work and contributions in a statement issued Saturday. “They deserve our respect, our support, our thanks and our prayers,” he wrote. He said he is committed to working with the Leadership Council in “atmosphere of prayer and respectful dialogue.”

Sister Cathy Beckley, who was cheered as she dashed back and forth in her red baseball cap, said the Vatican’s attack was hurtful to women who have devoted their lives to caring for people on society’s fringes.

In a report issued in April, Catholic Church officials chided the nuns and sisters for resisting some church teachings, including those that prohibit birth control and same-sex relationships.

Beckley, a Seattle social worker and member of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, said that when she worked on the streets with the poor and homeless, she never asked about their private lives.

Sunday’s turnout gave her hope that many Catholics agree with the sisters’ approach and value their service. “Clearly, a very significant segment of the church here in the U.S. and around the world is more progressive.”

Among their causes, the sisters of the Leadership Conference mounted a “Nuns on the Bus” tour this summer opposing cuts in federal spending for social and health services proposed by Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan — now running mate to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Catholic bishops also echoed those concerns.

Beyond politics, the split between the sisters and the Vatican reflects the struggle between Catholics who want the church to adapt to modern realities — such as the fact that the vast majority of Catholic women in America use birth control — and those who seek a more traditional path, several marchers said.

Christy Higgins, of Seattle, was a youngster in Catholic school when the Vatican II changes were adopted in the 1960s. She recalls her teachers trading their habits for street clothes, and she embraced the more open and inclusive outlook.

“The church is all of us, not just the Vatican, the bishops and the cardinals,” Higgins said, her shirt pinned with more than a dozen “I Stand with the Sisters” buttons.

The slogan is also the name of the Seattle group that organized Sunday’s march. “We were so upset about how the church hierarchy is treating the sisters,” said Gretchen Gundrum, a co-founder.

It’s easy for ivory-tower leaders — all of whom are men — to discount the hard decisions people face in their day-to-day lives, Gundrum said. “The nuns see the complexity. Morality is not black-and-white, no matter what somebody says.”

The same tensions have always been present in the Catholic Church, Gundrum added. Church leaders denounced Galileo for claiming the Earth revolves around the sun. They finally admitted he was right — nearly 400 years later.

“Our group hopes to shorten the amount of time it takes for them to come around,” Gundrum said.

Complete Article HERE!

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Tom Rastrelli: Priests who lie; the dilemma of sexual orientation and the priesthood

People don’t expect their priests and bishops to lie, but as Michelangelo Signorile’s recent post illustrated, clerics do lie. Some even make a virtue of it. I know this from experience, for I was ordained a Catholic priest on a lie.

In spring 2002 I walked with my spiritual director along the blacktop road encircling the seminary. He’d been my confessor and guide for two years, helping me discern God’s presence in all aspects of my life, intimate and mundane. Over our heads, a canopy of newborn leaves rustled in a sunny breeze, a welcome relief from the bitter fog that had engulfed the church and my vocational surety.

For the previous two months an unprecedented number of bishops and priests, starting with Cardinal Law of Boston, had fallen from grace for participation in the sexual abuse of children and the ensuing cover-up. Their duplicity was palpable in my knotted back and abdomen. In a few months I’d be ordained a priest. I didn’t want to do so on a lie.

“I’m coming out of the closet,” I said.

My spiritual director loosened his clerical collar and lit a cigarette. “Where’s this coming from?” he asked. A couple of chattering wrens whooshed past.

I backtracked through six years of seminary formation. At events I had hobnobbed with supposedly holy men, some of whom had been harboring pedophiles. A few had done the deed themselves. By shaking their hands, mine were dirty. I knew the ecclesiology, how the bishops’ authority stemmed from a direct line to Jesus, but they were still criminals. Who were they to declare homosexuals “intrinsically depraved”?

When I’d applied for seminary, the director of seminarians — the priest who’d recruited me — explained that orientation didn’t matter, only celibacy. But on my intake interviews he’d told me to answer “yes” when the archdiocesan psychologist asked if I was attracted to women, and “no” when he asked if I was attracted to men. It was for the greater good, he said. Frightened of being cast out and ashamed of my true nature, I had lied as instructed.

In light of the sexual abuse scandal, lying about my orientation was no longer acceptable. I thought of what a gay friend who’d left seminary had said. His words became my own: “I don’t know if I can separate my private and public selves. Isn’t integration the goal of spiritual direction?”

“Of course it is,” my spiritual director said, more gravelly than usual. He stopped and turned to me. A tree cast a web of shadows over his face. His strawberry nose grew flushed, as he gestured with his hands. “Here’s the thing, Rastrelli. You have to ask yourself: Am I going to be a gay priest, or a priest” — he rolled his fingers and cigarette through the air like a barrel — “who happens to be gay?”

“What’s the difference?” I turned my head to inhale, trying to avoid his secondhand smoke. “Either way I’m gay. It’s a part of me.”

“But are you gay first, and then a priest? Or a priest first, and then gay?” He smiled, satisfied with the distinction.

“Both/and.” I’d hit him with what he’d taught me in class. “Both/and” was the paradoxical answer for every ultimate question in Catholic theology: Scripture or tradition? Faith or works? Is Jesus divine or human? Are we sinful or good? is faith a solo or communal experience?

“Touché,” he said. We walked. He sucked his cigarette. “You’re a smart guy, Rastrelli. Give it some thought.”

I kicked a pebble onto the grass. “I have. I don’t want to lie about my sexuality.”

“It’s not lying if those asking don’t have a right to the information.”

He hadn’t even flinched. I wanted to shake the nicotine from his bones, to scream, “It was that kind of thinking that landed the bishops in the papers!” Still, part of me wanted him to be right. Silence was simpler, easier, and maybe my need to come out was just pride at work. My promise of obedience demanded that I surrender my ego. My vocation was about God, not my orientation. But couldn’t we priests be honest with one another? I had to try.

“Gay Catholics don’t have positive role models,” I said. “I don’t know of a single gay priest that’s healthy. Do you?” I stopped. He kept walking. This was as close as I’d ever come to asking him if he was gay. I suspected he was. He’d lived with another priest for decades. They vacationed and picked out carpeting together. They spoke about their cat as if she were their child. Even if he and his housemate weren’t having sex, they were a couple. I stepped in stride with him. “How am I supposed to be an integrated gay priest when I have no one to look up to? How does celibacy actually work?” I stopped again. “I’m asking you.”

He turned to me. His face became whiter than a funeral pall. “I’m sorry, Rastrelli, but that’s not a conversation I’m comfortable having with a student.”

He resumed his pace. I followed silently.

The breeze picked up. The undulating trees sounded like the ocean breaking on the shore. I choked back the urge to ask, “Are you gay?” I felt like a sinking ship in a fleet that had wandered into a minefield. After laying the mines himself, the fleet commander had ordered radio silence.

I didn’t want to drown alone. I didn’t want to hear him lie. I wanted the truth, but the truth was dangerous. Were I to come out amid sexual-abuse headlines, homophobic Catholics wrongly blaming gay priests for the scandal would demand my dismissal.

My spiritual director was right. Who were they to judge, to put my orientation before my vocation? They had no right to that knowledge. It was safer to be a priest who happened to be gay. Perhaps it was God’s will. The fear accompanying us back to the seminary told me so.

That day, I learned the unspoken rule passed down through generations of priests: the doctrine of justification for lying by clergy. I went on to be ordained a priest. I preached that “the truth will set you free” while living in silence and shame. After a long journey and much pain, I came out. I left the priesthood, finally refusing to live the lies that I’d been taught to venerate.

Complete Article HERE!

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Bishop Patricia Fresen on Excommunication to Ordination

Imprisoned for breaking apartheid law, excommunicated for breaking Vatican law, Bishop Patricia Fresen looks more sweet grandma than warrior ​— ​especially carrying the stuffed black sheep she presents with a smile: “We’re the black sheep of the church,” she said.

She’s no stranger to working the outskirts.

Raised “a proper white South African,” Fresen was stunned upon entering her convent after matriculation (and years of segregation), greeted by 55 women ​— ​15 of them black. “I didn’t know it would be racially mixed,” she says now. “It never occurred to me. But I became colorblind.”

That journey would prove significant. After university, Fresen ​— ​in Santa Barbara last week to teach a workshop at La Casa de Maria ​—  worked in the city of Welkom as principal of a school for whites. But by the 1970s, Fresen remembered she and her fellow Dominicans began thinking, “Something’s wrong; we can’t go on like this.”

Apartheid was law by then, but a debate — ​that would prove a theme of Fresen’s life ​— ​ensued. On one side were those who said they couldn’t change apartheid: “The law must change first,” Fresen recounted. She said the others believed, “We mustn’t follow an unjust law; we must follow our conscience.” Their bishop, Denis Hurley, agreed with the latter group. It was risky and illegal, but he believed breaking the law was the only way it would change.

Essentially ignored by the police, they had some wiggle room to plot. Bishop Hurley challenged the principals to bring black students into their schools. They spent a year preparing ​— ​ensuring white students’ families were comfortable, reaching out to black families, teaching black children English ​— ​all while keeping it out of the papers to hold trouble at bay, relying instead on the African drum to spread the word.

On the first day of school, Fresen was overcome watching the children ​— ​black, white, all in the same uniform ​— ​streaming in. But before the goosebumps could dissolve, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up: She heard the stomping of police boots approaching her office. They gave her a week to get in line.

One week later, they took her to prison. Not one child was sent away; today the school is flourishing.

Years later, after receiving her doctorate in theology in Rome, Fresen began teaching seminary ​— ​teaching men to be priests ​— ​in Pretoria. And a longing to be a Catholic priest herself began to nag. She shushed it as best she could, telling herself, “Don’t be stupid.”

In 2002, while teaching at Johannesburg’s Catholic university, she heard about the Danube Seven ​— ​seven women who were ordained Catholic priests on Germany’s Danube river. Two months later, fate intervened: Fresen was sent to Germany for a weeklong course. She spent a day with two of those women; they asked if she felt called to the priesthood. She said yes. They rendezvoused in Barcelona on August 7, 2003 (nine years to the day of our interview); Fresen was ordained.

And then, all hell broke loose. Her parish phoned the Vatican; the cardinal ordered her to recant. Or, he said, leave.

Heartbroken and staggered, she left. She lost her job, her congregation, her family, and moved to Germany.

Since then, she’s found a home, a community. She’s been ordained bishop (by proper apostolic succession ​— ​which means sympathetic male bishops are ordaining women, at great personal risk), ordains women, performs sacraments, and leads workshops.

She’s also been excommunicated. While in St. Louis performing an ordination (in a borrowed sacred space where these clandestine events take place: this time a Jewish synagogue), Cardinal Raymond Burke sent a cadre of “spies,” with cameras. (He followed up, excommunicating any identifiable participants.) Someone handed Fresen an envelope (she thought it might be a check): inside, a summons. She ignored it. Three weeks later, the mail carrier delivered an official decree of excommunication, “with my name beautifully written,” she says, eyes shining.

Burke was promoted.

As for the big question ​— ​why stay? ​— ​Fresen says she believes there are two churches: the hierarchy and the people. She believes the people, the ones who want reform ​— ​the separation of celibacy and priesthood, the ordination of women ​— ​are reaching a critical mass. And this: “If I left, nothing would change. The hierarchy would take no more notice of us. We can only make change if we stay, so we are not going away.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Rainbow Sash Movement challenges San Francisco New Archbishop on Bigotry

Press Release

Rainbow Sash Movement challenges San Francisco New Archbishop on Bigotry

Bishop Cordileone has been appointed the next Archbishop elect of San Francisco. The sad situation at Most Holy Redeemer parish only emphasizes how deeply homophobia is ingrained in the culture of the Church. The Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption will be the stage for all the world to see how the Church celebrates in a public fashion this culture of homophobia on October 4, 2012. The Archbishop’s instillation will be used as another launching pad to promote hate directed at the San Francisco LGBT Community,the national LGBT Community and women. The sad reality about this appointment is how far you can get in the church by promoting a closet mentality and hate of women. Integrity will apparently have no place at Bishop Cordileone’s Cathedral Eucharistic table.

People of good will and reason will understand this liturgical service for what it is, and will respond appropriately and non violently. The Rainbow Sash Movement (LGBT Catholics) is inviting San Francisco’s Drag Community, and the Catholic women’s community to stand with us both outside and inside the Cathedral as we witness this betrayal of the Church’s Social Justice Ministry at the installation ceremony at the Cathedral. The dignity of the human person apparently has more to do the with clothing you wear, the medication you use for family planning, and what gender you are than your relationship with God.

As we approach the 50th anniversary of Vatican II the Cathedral clergy and staff should hang their heads in shame over the part they are playing in the demise of Catholic Social Justice. Because justice will not flow from this installation of bigotry at the Cathedral it will not be a valid liturgy, and therefore will not be bound by the norms that guide the liturgical celebration. We will come to witness this abuse of Christ love for all people.

Contact Person:

Bill O’Connor
Rainbow Sash Movement