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Mexican Cardinal: Pedophile Priests’ Victims Should Think About Their Own Flaws

Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera

By Hemant Mehta

Given the magnitude of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal, you’d think Church leaders would be better at responding to the outrage. Say you’re sorry, say you’re working to make the Church more transparent, say that you’ll cooperate with law enforcement whenever there’s an accusation of wrongdoing in the future, etc.

Mexican Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera didn’t get that memo because his reaction was to blame the victims for speaking out.

Even though he acknowledged that some allegations are true, he went after the victims and avoided referring to the Pennsylvania grand jury report in the United States that found some 300 abusive priests in a span of seven decades in six dioceses.

Obeso Rivera’s words came last week, after the report was made public.

“I’m here happy to talk about nice things, not about problematic things, it’s an accusation that is made, and in some cases it’s true. But the evil of many is the consolation of fools, because sometimes those who accuse men of the Church should [be careful] because they have long tails that are easily stepped on.”

… Is that supposed to be a threat? You rat on us and we’ll come after you? This isn’t a parable about glass houses. Everyone’s a sinner in some way, but these people were abused by Church leaders, and their abuse was covered up by other Church leaders. When it comes to the people deserving criticism, victims aren’t on the list.

But don’t worry. Obeso Rivera wants you to know he takes the allegations very seriously.

… he did say that the accusations “make us feel bad and we want to improve.”

I’m glad more than 300 priests sexually violating more than 1,000 children over several decades gives him the feels. We wouldn’t want him shedding more than a couple of tears now, would we?

With Church leaders like these, how do Catholics expect anything to change?

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How dare the pope ask ordinary Catholics to atone for child abuse?

It was the church hierarchy’s desperation to protect itself that led to these horrors. It must reform – not us

Pope Francis. ‘The truth about the Catholic church is that it is not fit for purpose, and it has not been fit for purpose for many years.’

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The Catholic church is in meltdown: the appalling story emerged last week of clerical abuse stretching back decades in Pennsylvania, where at least 1,000 children were the victims of 300 priests.

In the UK, a report on the behaviour of the monks at two leading Catholic schools was released recently. That report, from the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, details (and believe me, the details are horrendous) abuse over 40 years, affecting perhaps hundreds of children – the true extent of the crimes will probably never be known. As in Pennsylvania, the church authorities tried to cover it up: so in both places, these are double crimes committed by ordained men. First, they abused the most vulnerable young people in their care; and then other ordained men – usually more senior figures – allowed the abuse to continue by seeking to protect, not the children they were responsible for, but themselves and their precious reputations.

And now, after an embarrassing interlude, Pope Francis has spoken out. He has issued a letter – an “unprecedented letter”, we are told. He acknowledges the church’s crimes, he promises zero tolerance (about time) and then he invites “the entire holy faithful people of God to a penitential exercise of prayer and fasting, following the Lord’s command”.

Now, I like Pope Francis. He is charismatic and warm, and seems genuine in his care for the causes a Christian leader should care about. But here, pontiff, I see cardinal red. Because how dare you ask ordinary Catholics like me to atone for the sins of these heinous clerics? How dare you call on us to repent for their sins?

The truth about the Catholic church is that it is not fit for purpose, and it has not been fit for purpose for many years. There was a brief attempt, in the 1960s during the second Vatican council, at reevaluation – and then slam! The door was closed. It’s been run by a self-serving group of misogynistic men for far too long, and now we know they have a shocking number of paedophiles in their ranks. Radical new thinking is called for: those priests in Rome need to look up to the heavens and take in a very big swathe of blue sky.

The biggest horror about asking “the people of God” to repent is this: the church has failed, and failed, and failed again to ask “the people of God” to help it run the institution. It has been all too ready and willing to issue orders to the rest of us – and the miracle is that there are still some Catholic lay people who actually continue to keep some of those orders. Many priests by contrast, as we now know, not only flout the rules but flout them in the worst way possible, by ruining the lives of the most precious people in their midst.

The Catholic church has failed, horribly, to include the very people who could have helped it be a better organisation: its “faithful”. Democracy is dismissed, frowned on, ignored: 50 years ago this year we had a document called Humanae Vitae, that forbade the use of contraception. When the vast majority of western Catholics, in a display of practical democracy, decided to ignore it (the moral position, in mine and many others’ view) it simply buried its head in the sand and said we were wrong. When people like me campaigned and argued for women to be admitted to the priesthood (I am talking about 30 years ago – there are no women who would want to join their ranks now) they told us to be quiet; indeed, debate on the subject was totally shut down by Pope John Paul II. Priests were told not to engage with us on it: I tried it out on a number of occasions, but conversations were brought to an abrupt end.

So it is rich indeed that the pope’s answer to the current troubles is to ask the people to atone for them. He needs to think hard and come up with something very different from all this talk, and indeed from all these meetings with the victims of abuse (we will see that happening again this coming weekend, when he visits Ireland).

Of course it’s good to say sorry: but he’s said sorry repeatedly. Now he needs to do something. The only good news is the miracle that there are still some lay people left in the Catholic church (for some reason all the institution seems to worry about is the lack of priests, when the lack of congregations is a far more critical issue). The proper response to the continuing avalanche of reports on the extent of the abuse is to reduce the power of the clergy – and to call in those who just might be able to give it some help to get back on the rails. In other words: the people of God. Try it, Francis.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Why the Roman Catholic Church still struggles with sexual abuse scandals

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In an internal diocese memo from Erie in northwestern Pennsylvania, a priest admitted to being “aroused” while tutoring a boy, hugging him and sharing sexually suggestive text messages with multiple boys.

The priest’s bishop admonished him to “cease and desist,” but Catholic Church leaders didn’t pass that information along to authorities until six years later — and only then in response to a grand jury subpoena.

The Rev. David Poulson resigned from the diocese this past February, three months before he was charged with sexually abusing two boys.

Poulson’s case is an example of how abuse and cover-up continue to plague the Catholic Church, even after the issue first exploded into the national consciousness some 16 years ago in Boston. Since then, the church has vowed to make improvements and paid out billions of dollars of parishioners’ tithes to victims.

In March, a Vatican tribunal found the archbishop of Guam, Anthony Apuron, guilty of “certain accusations” involving the sexual abuse of minors.

In July, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., who is alleged to have sexually abused a minor 47 years ago.

And in Pennsylvania, Poulson was one of the 301 predator priests identified in a sweeping grand jury report released Tuesday that detailed child sexual abuse in six Pennsylvania Catholic dioceses and religious leaders’ efforts to cover it up. The investigation identified more than 1,000 victims.

“There is an entrenched infrastructure of secrecy in the Catholic Church that continues to reward concealment rather than disclosure,” said Co-Director Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountablity.org, a group that collects data and researches sex abuse in the church.

Much remains hidden still about clergy sex abuse across the USA, she said. That is why the Catholic Church continues to struggle with it.

Most of Tuesday’s grand jury report, one of the most extensive public accountings of abuse within the Catholic Church to date, deals with events before the early 2000s. And the report points to promising signs in the past 16 years, saying victims “are no longer quite so invisible.”

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People in 2002. It set procedures for addressing allegations of clergy sexual abuse of minors and came in wake of The Boston Globe‘s investigation into priest abuse and the ensuing national crisis.

Still, the scandals and cover-ups have continued. In multiple states, the church has resisted efforts to reform statute-of-limitation laws to allow people abused as children, sometimes decades ago, to seek compensation through civil lawsuits.

“It prevents more victims if we get exposure,” said Florida lawyer Michael Dolce, who is a child-sex-abuse survivor and advocated for Florida to repeal its statute of limitations for such crimes. “It raises the information in the community as a whole by exposing the secrecy.”

The grand jury report and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro were critical of actions the church took since 2002:

• In 2002, a victim inspired by the revelation of abuse in the Boston Archdiocese reported that a priest in the Allentown Diocese abused her. The district attorney didn’t pursue a criminal case, citing the statute of limitations, and the diocese and its lawyer “attempted to undermine and discredit” the victim and her family, according to the grand jury report.

• In June 2002, the bishop in the Erie diocese wrote to a victim that he was shocked the victim would “go to the press directly rather than contact me regarding the past.”

• In 2013, the Greensburg diocese received email from a victim concerned after seeing photos of a priest on a parish website, even though the priest was dismissed from the church a decade earlier following multiple complaints of child sexual abuse.

• In 2014, Harrisburg Bishop Ronald Gainer wrote to the Vatican to recommend that one accused priest not be removed from the priesthood even though he was taken from active ministry. Gainer wrote that the priest should “be permitted to live out his remaining years in prayer and penance, without adding further anxiety or suffering to his situation, and without risking public knowledge of his crimes.”

In a statement after the grand jury report, the Harrisburg diocese said the letter didn’t accurately represent the action taken and was not part of a cover-up.

“Only when they’ve been forced again into a corner are they doing the right thing,” state Rep. Mark Rozzi, a Pennsylvania legislator who testified before the grand jury as an abuse victim, said Wednesday in a radio interview.

Without the grand juries, “they would still be doing exactly what they have always done,” he said.

Hilary J. Scarsella, who studies sexual violence and trauma as a doctoral candidate in theological studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, said the church needs to put concerted energy into an external, independent analysis of what has enabled this problem for so long and then systematically clean it up.

“I think at this point I think the Catholic Church has shown itself to be incapable and untrustworthy of managing this problem on its own,” Scarsella said. “They need outside folks to come in and they need to be accountable to victim-centered experts to help them deal with this.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Jake Tapper mocks the Catholic League for defending ‘widespread molestation and rape’ by priests

CNN’s Jake Tapper

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CNN anchor Jake Tapper mocked the Catholic League on Friday after a 884-page statewide investigative grand jury on “child sex abuse by Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses” was released by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro.

“It is interesting to note that the most irrational, indeed hysterical, reaction to PA grand jury report is coming from conservative Catholics. They are singularly incapable of making a cogent argument, so all they do is vent like little boys,” the Catholic League argued Friday. “They are a pitiful lot.”

“Yeah, can’t believe Hugh Hewitt Marc Thiessen and others object to credible & detailed allegations of widespread molestation and rape of up to a thousand minors by priests and other clergy, with the subsequent and systematic coverup by the Church,” Tapper replied, citing two conservative Catholics who were alarmed by the report.

Hewitt has pledged that he will not donate “one dime” until Cardinal Donald Wuerl is gone, because such tithing “is exactly like contributing to legal defense fund of accomplice to child rape.”

“If any CEO uncovered 19 child molesters/pornographers in his or her company, didn’t report 18 of them to law enforcement, kept them employed in new jobs where CEO thought ‘Probably won’t rape another child,’ would he/she still be CEO after reveal?” Hewitt asked, in a thought exercise for “the deniers.”

Thiessen has also tweeted calls for Cardinal Wuerl to go and said that, “The bishops not only failed the victims but have also scandalized the church, undermined its teaching authority and driven countless people away from Christ.”

Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, released an 11-page statement (PDF) claiming to “debunk” the grand jury report.

The Catholic League is not part of the Catholic Church.

While Donohue’s organization attempted to defend the sexual assault detailed in the grand jury report, the Vatican on Thursday expressed “shame and sorrow.”

“The Catholic League can’t possible embarrass and injure the Church as much as Wuerl and other prelates have, but every now and then they give it a try,” Hewitt responded.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Why Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Is So Hard to Stop

The latest horrific report came from Pennsylvania, but it won’t be the last one, thanks in part to an insane lobby standing in the way.

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former D.C. archbishop, waves to fellow bishops at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle on September 23, 2015 in Washington, D.C.

by Allie Conti

On Tuesday, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church that was nothing less than explosive. Although Americans have been reading similar horrific tales since at least 2002, when Spotlight reporters at the Boston Globe reported on priests there molesting kids and the Church systematically covering it up, the details in the new—nearly 900-page—document were particularly gut-wrenching. What’s more, the report suggested that the already jaw-dropping estimate of the number of victims was probably a conservative one.

“We subpoenaed, and reviewed, half a million pages of internal diocesan documents. They contained credible allegations against over three hundred predator priests,” the report reads. “Over one thousand child victims were identifiable, from the church’s own records. We believe that the real number—of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward—is in the thousands.”

To get a sense of what this very lengthy report means in the broader context of Catholic Church sex abuse, how rank-and-file adherents might be responding, and what can be done to punish offenders and prevent abuse in the future, I called up Michael Dolce. He’s a lawyer who represents survivors of clergy abuse and helped get Florida to repeal its statute of limitations on child sex crimes in 2010.

VICE: Like most people, I’m familiar with what happened in Boston, but less so everywhere else. I was hoping we could start off talking about the scope of this scandal so you could get me up to speed on where else there have been explosive reports at this point.
Michael Dolce: We’ve seen similar reports to the most recent one that’s come out of Pennsylvania in Los Angeles, Washington state, Milwaukee, and Minnesota. This is not the first time, but as I see it, the reports are becoming more and more specific and kind of confirming, if you will, the patterns we have seen are very much patterns in terms of the institutional mishandling of child abuse.

Can you elaborate on how the latest grand-jury report fits into the larger picture of what we know about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, though? For instance, have the alleged cover-up tactics been the same nationwide, or have they evolved over time?

I see them as being quite typical of what we’ve seen across the Catholic Church—and not just there, but in other institutions. But certainly the leadership in the Catholic institutions have been particularly purposeful in efforts to cover up reports of abuse and failing in particular to report abuse to law enforcement. What we also see in this report was the acknowledgement by the grand jury of what we’ve known for a long time, which is that when we see 1,000 victims, there’s knowledge that the numbers are much higher. If you look at underreporting rates, this is probably more like 10,000 victims. That was essentially one of the findings of the grand jury—the magnitude and scope of the problem.

One of the unique aspects of this grand-jury report is the recommendations for change. They emphasize more than I’ve seen before the importance of failure-to-report laws [for sex abuse]. They said close the loopholes and don’t give people a pass on this.

Have narrow statutes of limitations been the primary roadblock against criminal charges where there’ve been allegations against priests over the years?
No question about it. We know the average time for reporting is 15 years after the fact and in most states, the statute of limitations is set up that crimes had to be prosecuted in four or six years or something like that. We estimated here in Florida before we repealed the statute of limitations for child sex abuse in 2010 that they were barring 70 percent of all criminal prosecutions.

How does one go about removing the statute of limitations in any given state?
When I started the effort in 2004, I would not have believed you if you had said it would take six years. I knew my way around the legislature, I had worked there for years, I had assisted in passing a number of other laws. I knew what I was doing. I had worked for an influential senator—I knew how to get things done. But when I came back as a citizen it still took six years because I couldn’t find the political willpower to overcome the strength of the Catholic leadership lobby. And they of course were backed by an insurance industry that didn’t want further civil exposure. Then, of course, the criminal defense bar was fighting me tooth and nail.

What reasons do actual lawmakers give for opposing expanding the statute of limitations for civil or criminal action? And is this simply about the Church and other institutions’ lobbying power or is it more complicated?

The tactics that were employed in Florida are the same ones I see elsewhere. They try to kill the legislation quietly and behind the scenes, never letting it go to a vote. Most legislators understand that if you publicly fight against legislation that is specifically designed to protect children and work against the tactics of predators and those who give them safe harbor, you’re going to pay for that in the next election. So what they did in Florida was keep me off the Senate and the House floors for six years. They tied it up in committee and with amendments and excuses. When it got there, we won unanimously. It was the right thing to do—at least publicly.

But the resistance, when it’s spelled out at all, is largely argued on financial grounds?
The main tactic we saw in Florida was they said if the legislation passes, we would see liability insurance for running schools, daycare centers, and recreation leagues become unaffordable. Churches would shutter. Daycare centers would become non-existent.

Well, what have we seen in states where they’ve been repealed? Is that true?
We repealed the limitations in Florida, effective July 1, 2010. And I can tell you as I sit here today, I have not heard of a single daycare center, a single church, a single rec league, being closed as a result of this. And I would be the first person to lodge a complaint to, OK? What we see is the flip-side benefit, which is that insurance carriers are much more careful about the institutions that they insure, and that they come in and audit, and that the best practices are in place.

You mentioned not seeing any church doors close as a result of exposure to liability, but what about due to lack of membership? Why aren’t people leaving the Church despite what is now a decades-long scandal?
I got a note two nights ago from a dear, dear friend of mine, she and her husband are devote Catholics, about their struggle to distinguish the faith from the institution. I simply encouraged them that their faith is their faith and that the people who administer it can do the wrong thing. But I do know people who have been turned off by it.

But when—as in what year—might we have a nationwide accounting? When does this end?
I shudder to think how long it’s going to take. There’s an underlying problem here, and that’s the societal unwillingness to even confront these issues. People don’t wanna believe this will really happen. I can tell you about a case I just tried in Gainesville, Florida. My client’s pastor* said he didn’t believe it was even possible that her father could have behaved this way toward her. He was in disbelief the entire time—including when he testified at trial two years later. And he was willing to look past a lot of very compelling evidence. He said a bizarre theory that somehow my client had been brainwashed by a man who spent ten days around her.

Every time you open a newspaper and see an article about child sexual abuse, you always see quotes from friends, neighbors, family members saying, “I’m in shock.” At what point in time are we going to say, ‘We need to stop acting this way, and this is the reality of the danger we face?’

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!