‘Father, please stop’:

Parents horrified after priest used teen’s funeral to condemn suicide

When Maison Hullibarger died by suicide on Dec. 4, his parents — devout Catholics — began planning a funeral that would celebrate their 18-year-old son’s life.

He was a brother to five siblings, an athlete and teammate, a strong criminal justice student at the University of Toledo, and a passionate fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers. And because the priest at their Temperance, Mich., parish didn’t personally know their son, Jeffrey and Linda Hullibarger met with him before the funeral to discuss what they wanted in the homily.

The Hullibargers were detailed, they said, and Father Don LaCuesta took notes.

“We wanted him to celebrate how Maison lived,” Linda Hullibarger told the Detroit Free Press, “not how he died.”

Instead, during the funeral at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, the Hullibargers listened from the pews as the priest spoke the word “suicide” six times. He told mourners, local media reported, that Maison may be denied admittance to heaven because of the way he died. LaCuesta wondered aloud, the Hullibargers said, if Maison had repented enough in the eyes of God.

“He basically called our son a sinner,” Linda told the Toledo Blade.

“We looked at each other and said, ‘What is he doing?” Jeffrey said in an interview with the newspaper. “We didn’t ask for this.”

Eventually, Jeffrey decided to intervene and walked to the pulpit.

“Father,” he whispered, “Please stop.”

But LaCuesta kept going, the Hullibargers recounted in local news reports. When the service finally ended, they told the priest he was no longer welcome at Maison’s gravesite burial — where the teen’s family and friends decided to say everything LaCuesta hadn’t.

Now, the Hullibargers are calling for the priest’s removal, and generating enough discussion to warrant an apology from the Archdiocese of Detroit. In a statement to The Washington Post, archdiocese spokeswoman Holly Fournier said “an unbearable situation was made even more difficult, and we are sorry.”

LaCuesta will not be preaching at funerals “for the foreseeable future,” Fournier said, and he will have his other homilies reviewed by a priest mentor.

“We share the family’s grief at such a profound loss,” the archdiocese statement said. “Our hope is always to bring comfort into situations of great pain, through funeral services centered on the love and healing power of Christ. Unfortunately, that did not happen in this case.”

After “reflection,” according to the statement, the priest agreed that “the family was not served as they should have been served.”

Fournier said there are no current plans to remove or reassign LaCuesta from Our Lady of Mount Carmel, as the Hullibargers have requested. The statement did say that the priest was “willing to accept the assistance he needs in order to become a more effective minister in these difficult situations.”

“Father LaCuesta will be getting help from professionals to probe how and why he failed to effectively address the grief of the family in crisis,” Fournier said. “This will occur both on a human level (counseling) and a spiritual level (spiritual direction).”

For centuries, the Catholic Church has struggled with the religious implications, and societal stigma, of suicide. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the church began taking a more benign approach to suicide, allowing parishioners who had taken their own lives to receive a Catholic funeral and be buried on sacred ground in Catholic cemeteries. In the 1990s, Pope John Paul II approved the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which acknowledged — for the first time — that many people who die by suicide also suffer from mental illness

“Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide,” the catechism states. “We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance.”

LaCuesta spoke to these points in his homily but failed to do so with appropriate sensitivity, the archdiocese said.

Though it has been decades since the church adopted a more compassionate view of suicide, there remains a disconnect between some outlier priests and their parishes. The Rev. Charles T. Rubey said he has seen it within the Archdiocese of Chicago and during his 40 years as director and founder of the LOSS program, Loving Outreach to Survivors of Suicide.

“There are still some priests who view suicide as a mortal sin,” Rubey said. “That has been categorically denied by church leadership.”

His work involves establishing support group meetings within Chicago-area parishes for those who have lost a loved one to suicide. Rubey said he believes it is critical to the healing process for priests and church leaders to talk openly with parishioners and avoid fearmongering over the church’s view of suicide.

Priests “are in a position of power; people listen to them. They have a responsibility to give accurate information,” Rubey said. “Unfortunately, leaders in the church, they sometimes have very narrow and prejudiced views on suicide and mental illness. They don’t understand mental illness. That’s what we’re up against.”

Jeffrey Hullibarger told the Detroit Free Press that he feels removing LaCuesta is the only way to prevent the compounded grief at Maison’s funeral from happening to another family.

“We’re afraid that, like the Catholic church does, they’ll send him off and he’ll do it to somebody else,” Hullibarger told the newspaper.

At the end of the funeral, before their friends and family moved to the cemetery, Jeffrey and Linda Hullibarger stood before the church and spoke to those there to mourn their son — and remember his life.

“[Maison] has had great impact on the lives of many people,” Jeffrey said, according to the Toledo Blade. “He had a personality like no other, passionate and opinionated. That’s what we loved about him. Our family’s message today is please be kind to one another, reach out to those you care about, and show sincerity in your actions, and love forever unconditionally.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

December 14, 2018

Lists of Priests Accused of Sexual Abuse Are Spilling Out Across the Country

A letter from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse accompanying a list of priests credibly accused of sexual abuse.

By Campbell Robertson

It was a list Charles L. Bailey Jr. had wanted to see for years: the names of the priests in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Syracuse who had been credibly accused of sexual abuse.

Mr. Bailey, 67, a longtime local advocate for survivors of abuse by priests, had heard excuses for why such a list was impossible to release. The last bishop said naming accused priests would be a violation of the Ten Commandments. The current bishop said he would not disclose the names, citing the request of unnamed victims.

But then on Dec. 3, Mr. Bailey got a call from a local reporter. It was up, on the diocesan website. Fifty-seven priests. None were still in ministry and most were deceased, including, there on Page 4, the priest who had repeatedly raped Mr. Bailey when he was not yet a teenager.

As the Catholic Church faces a wave of federal and state attorney general investigations into its handling of sex abuse, bishops around the country have struggled with how to react. Some have locked down defensively. Others are waiting on guidance from the Vatican, which instructed American bishops last month to wait on taking any collective action until the new year.

But dozens of bishops have decided to take action by releasing lists of the priests in their dioceses who were credibly accused of abuse. And they are being released at an unprecedented pace.

The disclosures have trickled out week by week — 10 names in Gaylord, Mich.; 28 in Las Cruces, N.M.; 28 in Ogdensburg, N.Y.; 15 in Atlanta; 34 in San Bernardino, Calif., among many others. All 15 dioceses in Texas have agreed to release lists. Last week, the leaders of two major Jesuit provinces, covering nearly half of the states, released the names of more than 150 members of the order “with credible allegations of sexual abuse of a minor.”

“We’ve never seen this kind of outpouring before,” said Terry McKiernan, co-director and president of BishopAccountability.org, which tracks clergy sex abuse cases.

By his count, at least 35 dioceses have released lists or updates of previous lists since the beginning of August. That nearly doubles the number that had ever been released before, since the first one in 2002 by the Diocese of Tucson.

“It’s a dramatic change in how bishops are approaching this,” Mr. McKiernan said.

Many of the priests named on the lists are dead, but not all. Many had already been known as abusers, but scores of names are new, even to activists who have been closely following the church abuse scandals for years. Among the known allegations, many of the cases date back generations.

But few of the lists provide details about the allegations themselves, including when they occurred or how many victims were affected.

Some victims, as they comb through the lists, say there are names missing. Others see reason for distrust in the fact that the church had names to release at all, nearly two decades after claiming the sexual abuse scandals introduced a new era of transparency.

The lists are coming in the wake of an explosive grand jury report released in August by the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office, detailing at grim length the abuse of over 1,000 people by hundreds of priests. Investigations have followed in more than a dozen states.

“Names coming out this way,” Mr. McKiernan said of the voluntary releases, “is really different from the way they came out in the grand jury report.”

The scope of the federal investigation remains unclear. Last month, William M. McSwain, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, sent a request to every Roman Catholic diocese in the United States not to destroy documents related to the handling of child sexual abuse.

Still, if releasing the lists was meant to defuse the anger of the church’s critics, there is little evidence it has done that.
Sign Up for On Politics With Lisa Lerer

A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling you what you really need to know.

In Syracuse, Mr. Bailey said that he had already received calls from victims who said their abusers were not on the list. The name of the priest who had raped Mr. Bailey was listed in a section for clergy who “were deceased at the time of the reporting of the allegation,” a claim he said was contradicted by some of the priest’s abuse victims.

Bishop Christopher Coyne of the Diocese of Burlington, Vt., said the mistrust surrounding the handling of the sexual abuse scandal was earned.

“There’s no credibility,” said Mr. Bailey, head of the local chapter of S.N.A.P., the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “I thought it was going to be more gobbledygook and that’s just what it is.”

The Diocese of Syracuse said it had heard from people who were unhappy with the list’s release and others who were grateful.

“It is not surprising that there are mixed reactions to the list as it was and continues to be a divisive issue,” said Danielle Cummings, the chancellor and director of communications for the Syracuse diocese. She said the list was put together from a comprehensive review of allegations of abuse going back 70 years, but added: “If there is a name that individuals believe should be on the list, they can bring it forward to the diocese or the District Attorney.”

With no central reporting system and given the movement of priests around dioceses, it is hard to judge how comprehensive the lists may be, even by comparing them with previously disclosed numbers.

In Buffalo, a former assistant to the local bishop came forward to say that the list released by the diocese, with 42 names, was far shorter than the dioceses’ internal list, which had more than 100 names. Sexual abuse victims in Rockford, Ill., said the names of their abusers were nowhere on the list released there.

Among a laity distrustful of the church’s handling of sex abuse, there is a widespread sentiment that the only way to get the truth is through the subpoena power of law enforcement.

“The civil court system, that’s the new way the Holy Spirit moves,” said Patrick Wall, a former priest and canon lawyer who now works on behalf of abuse victims.

Advocacy groups suggest that bishops could invite the authorities to pore through all of a diocese’s files. Or the authorities could come in uninvited, as was the case when dozens of federal and local agents conducted a surprise search of the offices of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston last month.

Yet civil authorities have limits, too, as was made clear in a recent decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In a Dec. 3 opinion, the court agreed with a group of unnamed priests who argued that the grand jury report did not allow them their right of due process to submit evidence and arguments in their defense. Their names remain redacted in the report.

The bishops who are trying to compile their own lists are wrestling with some of the same issues.

At a meeting of bishops in Baltimore in November, Bishop Thomas Paprocki, of Springfield, Ill., told his fellow bishops it was not as simple as deciding that an allegation was credible, or not credible. He asked: What if a priest was accused 20 years ago, but the diocesan review board that was supposed to judge the case never came to a conclusion?

“If it was inconclusive 20 years ago, it’s still inconclusive,” he said, “and I hesitate to come down on one side of that.”

In an interview this week, Bishop Christopher Coyne of the Diocese of Burlington, Vt., said he had long considered the downsides of lists like these greater than their upsides. No one was ever satisfied with them.

“If you had asked me a year ago if I were going to publish a list, I would have said no,” Bishop Coyne said.

But the times have changed. In September, a joint state and local law enforcement task force began looking at allegations of severe abuse decades ago at a Catholic-run orphanage in the Burlington diocese. The diocese says it is cooperating; officials are in the offices every week.

Since early November, a board of lay people, chaired by a non-Catholic, has been coming to the diocesan offices to examine files relating to accused priests. The board is expected to produce a list of names by the end of the year.

The mistrust underlying all this was earned, Bishop Coyne said. The bishops had proven over the last two decades that they had not been able to police themselves. But given the current atmosphere, self-policing might not be an option any more.

“Now I have a reason,” Bishop Coyne said of pushing for the publication of a list. “The list is going to get published anyway.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

December 12, 2018

Third-Ranking Vatican Official Convicted of Sexually Abusing Choir Boys

Vatican Treasurer Cardinal George Pell is surrounded by Australian police as he leaves the Melbourne Magistrates Court in Australia, October 6, 2017.

By Jack Crowe

Cardinal George Pell, the third-ranking official in the Catholic Church, has been convicted in Australia on charges related to the sexual abuse of two choir boys in the 1990s, The Daily Beast reported Tuesday.

Pell, the Church’s finance chief and the highest-ranking Vatican official ever to be tried for sexual abuse, left Rome in June 2017 to stand trial in Melbourne. A judge granted the prosecutor’s request for a gag order ahead of the trial in order to “prevent a real and substantial risk of prejudice to the proper administration of justice.”

Two choir boys accused Pell of abusing them in a backroom at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where they sang, when he was the archbishop of Melbourne in the 1990s.

Pell is due to be tried again in the coming months for allegedly abusing two other boys at a swimming pool in Victoria in the 1970s, when he was a priest there, according to the Guardian.

The Australian Daily Telegraph hinted at the Tuesday verdict on its homepage while mocking that country’s censorship rules, which prevent the details of criminal proceedings from being made public.

The verdict comes at the end of a year rife with reports of widespread sexual misconduct by members of the Catholic clergy. A Pennsylvania grand-jury report released in August exposed the sexual abuse of more than 1,000 children by 301 priests in Pennsylvania churches over 70 years.

Following the release of the report, Pope Francis asked Catholics to forgive the Church’s failure to confront the “culture of death” fostered by predatory clergy.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

December 9, 2018

The other F word

By Angela Mary Griffin

When I taught in a Catholic secondary school in Ontario, some older colleagues who had come of age during the 1960s and who taught in the school’s Religion department lived in a Catholic commune of sorts in the poorer area of the downtown core.

In their cluster of small, East-end homes, they helped one another raise their children. Some of these families had no car, choosing public transport instead. They did not attend Mass in any of the churches in town. Rather, they invited female, Catholic priests into their homes to celebrate Mass. They also used female clergy, gay clergy, or married clergy, not recognized by the Catholic Church, to perform family wedding, baptismal, and death rituals.

Once their daughters became young women, they chose to no longer celebrate any aspect of their Catholic faith. My colleagues had raised their daughters to be feminists and activists. These young women told their parents that until the Catholic Church decided to no longer treat women as second class citizens, they could not participate in that religion. Their parents, Catholic Religious Studies’ teachers, fully supported that decision.

A writer of historical romantic novels interviewed on the CBC last summer said that she was not a feminist. The two writers on the panel with her assured her that she was. She simply didn’t know what a feminist was, they told her. They said they would define it for her after the panel discussion. Hopefully, they did so.

I’ll define it for everyone here: A feminist advocates for the social, political, educational, and financial equality of women and men. That’s it. We’re not lesbians, though some may be. We do not hate men, though some feminists might. Being a feminist doesn’t mandate that you be a lesbian or a man-hater. Those attributes are not characteristics necessary to define oneself as a feminist.

The word feminist is the other f-word. It gets a bad rap.

I always teach a lesson about feminism on December 6, the anniversary of the Montréal massacre. On December 6, 1989, a gunman (whom I choose not to name here) stormed into Montréal’s École Polytechnique (Engineering School) and ordered all of the men from a Christmas examination room. He then told all of the women that he hated them because they were feminists and opened fire murdering all fourteen young women. He killed them because they were women studying to become engineers, a traditionally male profession. The Montréal police later discovered a death list in the killer’s apartment that targeted prominent Montréal women holding down traditionally male occupations.

With the Me Too and Times Up movements, it is past time to accept that women are equal. We are equal in the eyes of God and we should be equal in the eyes of men and women everywhere. It is no longer acceptable for anyone, especially a learned women, to profess that she is not a feminist. I can assure you that she is. If she is educated, votes in elections, earns a wage equal to men, she is a feminist and she has all of the women who came before her who courageously fought for her right to be educated, employed, well-paid, and have an electoral voice to thank for her life, which in this great nation is one steeped in freedom and equality.

As for young women refusing to participate in the religion of their parents because of antiquated, misogynistic policies, who can blame these learned females? Time’s up for every faith to embrace women as equals, and to open its doors and windows to the winds of equality.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

December 4, 2018

Senator criticises pope’s ‘no room’ for gay clergy in church comment

‘Being gay is not transient, it’s not a phase,’ says former seminarian Jerry Buttimer

‘In our societies it even seems that homosexuality is fashionable,’ says Pope Francis.

By Barry Roche

Fine Gael Senator Jerry Buttimer has expressed disappointment at Pope Francis’ declaration that there is “no room” in the Catholic church for gay priests.

“The issue of homosexuality is a very serious issue that must be adequately discerned from the beginning with the candidates,” Pope Francis says in a book released in Italy on Saturday.

“In our societies it even seems that homosexuality is fashionable and that mentality, in some way, also influences the life of the church.”

Writing in The Strength of Vocation, Pope Francis says some priests did not exhibit any homosexual inclinations when they joined the priesthood only for it to emerge later but he reminded the faithful that the Catholic Church views homosexual acts as sinful.

“In consecrated and priestly life, there’s no room for that kind of affection. Therefore, the church recommends that people with that kind of ingrained tendency should not be accepted into the ministry or consecrated life

Mr Buttimer, who is gay and studied for five years as a seminarian in Maynooth in the 1980s, said the Pope seemed to be delivering a very traditional message with regard to people from the LGBT community which was at odds with some of his initial comments regarding gay people.

Pope Francis was now adopting “ a very hardline” approach to the LGBT community and to say that homosexuality was about being fashionable failed to recognize that people’s sexual orientation was a fundamental part of their being, he said.

‘In god’s image’

“Being gay is not transient, it’s not a phase, it’s not a passing stage of one’s life – I’ve always made the point that, as a Christian, as a Catholic, I was born and am born in the image of the god who created me and the god that I pray to and worship,” said Mr Buttimer.

“For me, this is disappointing from Pope Francis whom I thought, given his initial statements that he would not judge people, would have travelled a journey of being more open, and understanding and accepting of LGBT people but obviously I was wrong.”

Mr Buttimer said one of the fundamentals of the priesthood was that it was a celibate ministry but to say that applies to just homosexual priests without stressing that similar principles should apply to heterosexual priests was “wrong and deeply unfair”.

“The church would be a better church, a more enhanced church by having a ministry that is open to all and it just baffles that the Pope, on one level seems to be a welcoming man and then in the next breath shuts the door completely to members of the LGBT community,” Mr Buttimer said.

“There are many committed Christians and Catholics who are gay, some of them are afraid to come out but they make very fine contributions in the liturgy as lay readers and lay ministers of the Eucharist and they do a wonderful job in our churches, in our classrooms, in our choirs and as part of parish councils.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!