Author: Richard Wagner

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NY cardinal’s new compensation program for victims will keep sex abuse hidden

By Anne Barrett Doyle  

Archbishop Timothy Dolan

Cardinal Timothy Dolan is trying something new. After years of successfully opposing legislation that would give New York abuse victims more time to sue, he has launched a victims’ compensation program — a first for the New York archdiocese.

This is the Year of Mercy, and the cardinal said he was inspired by the “grace and challenge” of this fact.

“I just finally thought: ‘Darn it, let’s do it,’ ” he told The New York Times.

The surprise move is winning the cardinal praise. The often critical New York Daily News commended him, citing his “remarkable moral courage.”

As a researcher of the Catholic abuse crisis, I see his plan differently. While the fund certainly will help some victims, its biggest beneficiary will be Dolan and his management team. This is a legal strategy in pastoral garb, a tactic by the powerful archbishop to control victims and protect the church’s assets and its secrets.

On its face, the plan is reasonable. A victim submits a claim form with documentation about rape or molestation by a priest or deacon. If deemed credible, the victim receives an award, which the archdiocese promises to disburse quickly — within 60 days.

The program is being administered by Kenneth Feinberg, who oversaw the 9/11 fund and mediated the settlements between Jerry Sandusky’s victims and Penn State.

But there’s a catch — two catches, actually. Victims must sign a legal agreement to abide by “all requirements pertaining to privacy and confidentiality,” and they must release the archdiocese from future liability — i.e., never sue it. (See section III, paragraph G of the IRCP’s Protocol webpage.)

So the fund implements a strategy. If the Child Victims Act ever passes in New York — and Gov. Andrew Cuomo promises it will be a priority in 2017 — Dolan will have already flushed out and shackled many of the victims who might have filed suit.

And unlike the Penn State claimants, the victims in Dolan’s program will be signing releases without the benefit of any information about how their perpetrators were managed. Did archdiocesan officials know or suspect that the priest was a risk to children before the victim suffered abuse? Did the priest have other victims? What happened to him after the archdiocese learned of his crimes? Are children protected from him now? Under Dolan’s plan, all of this stays hidden.

Of course, agreeing not to sue is an easy concession right now for child sex abuse victims in New York. Thanks in part to lobbying by Dolan and his brother bishops, victims remain effectively powerless: the state’s restrictive civil statute of limitations gives them only until age 21 to sue complicit employers. For the vast majority of victims, this is not enough time.

In terms of its statute of limitations for child sex crimes, New York state is an outlier: only Alabama and Michigan limit victims as severely.

This is bound to change. While the Child Victims Act was defeated yet again last year, it generated tremendous public support.

When it passes, the Act will give future victims more time to take action, and it will include a “look-back” clause: for a limited period, it will revive the currently expired civil claims of all abuse victims in New York.

This retroactivity is what worries Dolan. Lawsuits by victims will result not only in payouts by the church, but the disclosure of its secret abuse files, revealing what archdiocesan managers knew and when.

To date, because of New York’s predator-friendly statute of limitations, the massive archdiocese’s abuse problem has appeared tiny. Its only tally of accused priests occurred in 2004, when Cardinal Edward Egan claimed an implausible total of 49 accused priests since 1950 — one percent of its active priests for that time period.

Consider that in Boston, with far fewer total priests, Cardinal Sean O’Malley conceded in 2011 that 250 priests since 1950 had been accused. In Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony counted 244 accused clergy. Even the small rural diocese of Manchester, N.H., concedes more accused priests than Dolan has acknowledged in New York.

Obviously, Dolan knows that his potential exposure is enormous, and one victim at a time, his new program will chip away at this perceived threat. Every participant will represent a case that will never be brought to light; a perpetrator’s name that may never be made public; and perhaps, a story of archdiocesan mismanagement that will never be revealed.

Inevitably, his plan will exploit those who are desperate: I’ll give you quick money, but you must keep my secrets.

Dolan has pre-empted victims before. In his prior post in Milwaukee, shortly before an expected state Supreme Court decision that would allow victims to sue for fraud, the archbishop quietly transferred $57 million in church funds into a special cemetery trust that would be off-limits to plaintiffs.

In this year of “grace and challenge,” the cardinal should do things differently. Mercy cannot come with chains. Dolan should eliminate requirements for the victim to stay silent about any aspect of the mediation. And he should accompany the fund with radical transparency.

After all, there is the promise of his fund’s title: the Independent Reconciliation and Compensation Program. The cardinal is using our church’s language to sacramentalize his scheme, so let him follow through. As every First Communicant knows, “reconciliation” occurs only with disclosure and confession. Dolan should come clean, before the courts force him to do so. He should publish a list of accused clerics, as more than 30 other U.S. bishops have done. He should release the archdiocese’s secret files on all of its abusers. And he should tell his lobbyist in Albany to cease and desist.

Without transparency and honesty, Dolan’s fund becomes just another tactic to make sure the New York archdiocese doesn’t answer for its actions — an accountability dodge that ultimately hurts children, victims, parishioners, and the church’s own chance for redemption.

[Anne Barrett Doyle is co-director of BishopAccountability.org, an independent non-profit based in Waltham, Mass., founded in 2003, to research child abuse by priests and religious and on the management of those cases by bishops, religious orders and the Holy See.]

Complete Article HERE!

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Doctor takes stand against Catholic hospital’s assisted dying policy

By Mike Hager

assisted-dying

A Vancouver Island doctor is resigning from the ethics committee at a local Catholic hospital because it refuses to offer assisted dying on site, a stand that he says is unnecessarily causing critically ill patients more suffering as they are transferred to facilities dozens of kilometres away.

Jonathan Reggler, a general physician who makes daily patient visits to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Comox, said he knew the facility, like other faith-based hospitals across the country, had developed a “strict” policy of transferring patients asking for assisted deaths.

But it wasn’t until recently, he says, that such patients began streaming into St. Joseph’s – and transferring out – after a federal law came into force June 17 that legalized medically assisted dying for patients whose suffering is intolerable and whose deaths are reasonably foreseeable.

“We’re talking about very sick patients having to be transferred – people who are close to death – and it’s wrong,” Dr. Reggler said.

Patients at St. Joseph’s seeking this treatment must be driven 45 minutes north to Campbell River or an hour and a half south to Nanaimo, Dr. Reggler said.

Jane Murphy, president and chief executive of the hospital, released a statement Tuesday praising Dr. Reggler as a respected and long-standing member of the committee, but she said her institution will continue to refuse to offer assisted dying.

“The B.C. health sector’s response to [assisted dying] allows for individuals and faith-based hospitals to conscientiously object to the provision of [an assisted death], while providing safe and timely transfers for patients for further assessment and discussion of care options, if required,” her e-mailed statement said. “B.C. has effective processes for transferring patients to other hospitals for numerous medical needs, and minimizing patient discomfort and pain is always the highest priority.

“We will respond to any patient who may request [an assisted death] with respect, support, compassion and kindness and will do so without discrimination or coercion.”

After seeing his first of these patients at the hospital recently, Dr. Reggler sent the hospital’s CEO a letter Tuesday notifying her of his resignation from the ethics committee, which reviews ethical issues and research trials at the facility.

He says most of his patients are elderly and – like the staff at the hospital – only a fraction identify as Catholic.

“Unfortunately, policy is made by the bishop, and by the hospital board, and they simply will not change from the stance that the Catholic church has on this issue,” Dr. Reggler said.

Across Canada, Catholic hospitals are, as promised, transferring out critically ill patients who want assisted deaths. Some patients have had trouble finding independent witnesses to their written requests, leading the advocacy group Dying with Dignity Canada to round up volunteers to sign the paperwork; and some doctors are struggling to balance relieving patients’ pain near the end of their lives with the need to keep them lucid enough to consent at the moment of death.

Daphne Gilbert, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, said governments must soon take a stand on whether they will continue funding faith-based hospitals that deny patients a service that the Supreme Court of Canada has defined as their constitutional right

“The Catholic hospitals have put themselves in a tricky position,” she said.

B.C. Health Minister Terry Lake was unavailable for an interview Tuesday, but a spokeswoman sent a statement saying the government is working with faith-based facilities to ensure that “medical assistance in dying is provided in a patient-centred manner.” The ministry is monitoring how different hospitals deliver the service to make sure patients’ wishes are respected, the statement said.

Dr. Reggler said he wants many more doctors to begin going public with their opposition to publicly funded hospitals refusing to offer assisted dying.

“What I’m expecting and hoping is that other physicians will themselves say, ‘No, this is wrong,’ and will start to make their voices heard in other cities and other provinces across Canada.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Pope’s words create confusion for Catholics on same-sex relationships

By MICHELLE R. SMITH

Michael Templeton
Michael Templeton

An ideological tug of war over the firing of a Rhode Island church music director for marrying his same-sex partner illustrates the confusion that permeates some U.S. Roman Catholic parishes over Pope Francis’s words on homosexuality.

Francis’s famous declaration “Who am I to judge?” in 2013 energized Catholics who had pushed the church to accept gays and lesbians. Now, some gay Catholics and supporters who hoped for rapid acceptance find themselves stymied by many bishops and pastors.

Francis is being cited by both the music director, Michael Templeton, and by Providence Bishop Thomas Tobin, known for taking a hard line on church teaching about marriage and abortion. Tobin has criticized Francis, writing after the pope’s summit on the family two years ago that “Francis is fond of ‘creating a mess.’ Mission accomplished.”

The pope has upheld Catholic teaching on homosexuality, reiterating the church’s opposition to same-sex relationships. But his shift in tone and broad statements about mercy have left a trail of comments that amount to a Rorschach test open to interpretation, say those who have closely followed Francis.

“Pope Francis has not said, ‘Here’s what you should do in a parish where you have a music director who has married his partner of the same sex,’ ” said Rev. James T. Bretzke, a professor of moral theology at Boston College. “Pope Francis is articulating general principles: forgiveness and mercy and not harsh judgment. But how you handle a particular case like this, he has been very reluctant to weigh in on it.”

That means a gay Catholic’s fate depends on his diocese or individual pastor. Templeton, 38, says he was called in last month and fired from the job he held for five years at the Church of St. Mary. The pastor, appointed in July, told him someone had sent him a 2015 Associated Press article that included details about Templeton’s wedding. A representative from the Providence Diocese also attended. At the end of the meeting, disappointed and hurt, Templeton cited Francis.

Thomas Tobin“This seems truly inconsistent with the teachings of Pope Francis,” Templeton said he told them.

The firing caused an outcry in the parish. A fellow employee resigned minutes after Templeton’s firing. Several lay leaders also resigned and dozens of parishioners have left, including most of the church’s 20 to 30 gay members, according to people interviewed by the Associated Press.

Many cited Francis’s example, saying the firing was in conflict with his declaration that 2016 be a “Year of Mercy.”

The pastor, Rev. Francesco Francese, referred comment to Tobin’s office, and Tobin declined a request for an interview.

Tobin issued a statement to The Providence Journal saying church employees and volunteers are “expected to live in a way that is fully consistent” with church teachings. If a person engages in activity that contradicts those teachings, “that individual leaves the Church no choice but to respond,” Tobin said.

In a later Facebook posting, Tobin defended his approach, citing Francis.

“When church leaders have to respond to situations involving persons living an openly ‘gay lifestyle’ these days, we’re often scolded and told that we should be ‘more like Pope Francis,’ presumably the ‘Who-am-I-to judge’ Pope Francis,” Tobin wrote.

He listed several examples that “critics should also remember,” including that Francis fired a priest who was working in the Vatican upon learning the priest was gay and in a relationship.

In the past few months alone, Francis has made statements or taken actions that give fuel to both sides.

Francis underscored his emphasis on mercy over defending orthodoxy with his first U.S. picks for cardinals, announced Sunday, choosing bishops who have taken a more welcoming approach to gays and others who have felt alienated from the church.

Asked this month about how he would minister to transgender Catholics, Francis responded: “When someone who has this condition comes before Jesus, Jesus would surely never say, ‘Go away because you’re gay.’ ” At the same time, he recently supported Mexican bishops working against a push to legalize same-sex marriage. New Ways Ministry, which advocates for gay Catholics, has documented around four dozen cases during Francis’s tenure where people have been forced from positions in Catholic institutions or faced other negative consequences for reasons such as being in gay relationships or advocating for gay rights.

Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways, said gay Catholics continue to see problems in places with conservative bishops, such as Providence. Tobin, he said, was interpreting Francis too narrowly.

Before Francis, “people were afraid to even say the words gay or lesbian,” DeBernardo said. “I do think he’s taken an important step that could lead to further steps. I’m not certain, I don’t think he will make a change in church doctrine, but I think he is laying the groundwork for future changes.”

Complete Article HERE!

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High stakes for Canada’s Bishops in euthanasia row

by Michael Higgins

assisted-dying

While having dinner recently with my former producer, Bernie Lucht, the Montreal Jewish intellectual and onetime head of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship intellectual affairs programme, Ideas, he looked across the table at me and asked plaintively why the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops was being so callous with the dying.

Bernie had confused the Catholic Bishops of Alberta and the Northwest Territories with the national episcopal conference. Easy enough to do. What bothered him was the seeming disjunction between Pope Francis’ call for mercy and non-judgmental attitudes toward the marginalised and the position taken by the bishops.

In their 34-page document, Guidelines for the Celebration of the Sacraments with Persons and Families Considering or Opting for Death by Assisted Suicide or Euthanasia, the Alberta and Northwest Territories bishops made it clear that their clergy should not engage in the “truly scandalous” behaviour of granting a request for funeral rites or the sacraments by people who have, for whatever reason, chosen to die by physician-assisted protocols.

Nervous public
Physician-assisted dying is now a legal right in Canada following the passage of Bill C-14 in June of this year. As I have outlined in an article in New York’s Commonweal magazine following Royal Assent for the Bill: “Although benign euphemisms were deployed regularly in an effort to make the legislation more palatable to a nervous public, Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, was refreshingly blunt in its editorial position when it observed prior to the bill’s convoluted passing through both chambers that ‘once the new law is adopted, we will be a country whose legislation allows the state to kill its citizens, pure and simple.

People often warn against slippery slopes, but this is no slope. This is a precipice from which there is no return.’”

To be clear, The Globe and Mail was not opposed to the legislation per se as it recognised that Parliament was responding to polls that indicated that the Canadian public was in favour of some form of doctor-induced death with rigorous constraints put in place.

But, not unreasonably and predictably, the Catholic bishops were opposed to the legislation as they considered it “an affront to human dignity, an erosion of human solidarity, and a danger to all vulnerable persons”.

But once the bill was passed and became the law of the land, the Canadian episcopate moved to ensure that Catholic health care facilities were protected from providing services that contradicted their mandate.

To date, they have been successful in achieving that but the Alberta bishops document may have ignited unnecessary controversy, prompting the considerable lobby opposed to exemptions for religiously-affiliated and publicly-funded health care institutions to move toward litigation seeking to revoke that exemption and could well end up in the Supreme Court.

Senior Quebec prelates, like the country’s Primate, Cardinal Gerald Lacroix of Quebec City, and Archbishop Christian Lepine of Montreal, have dissociated themselves from their Western brothers by insisting that their priests will provide funerals for those who choose the now legal medically-assisted dying option and will “accompany people in every step of their life”. By electing a pastoral over a canonical approach, the Quebec clerics have aligned more closely with the Franciscan papacy.

The last time the national episcopate was in very public disagreement was in the early 1980s when a social justice document highly critical of Canada’s fiscal policies and commitment to ‘trickle down economics’ was, in turn, repudiated by then Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto, Gerald Emmett Carter, a close friend of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and several of his Cabinet.

This time the stakes are higher.

Complete Article HERE!

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Struggle of compassion versus doctrine for Catholics who choose assisted death

by Geordon Omand

Cardinal Thomas Collins, the Archbishop of Toronto, delivers a statement on physician-assisted death while presiding over mass at St. Paul's Basilica in Toronto in a March 6, 2016, file photo. For the faithful questioning whether the final sacrament of a funeral is available to a loved one who has chosen a medically assisted death, the answer may depend on whom in the church they ask.
Cardinal Thomas Collins, the Archbishop of Toronto, delivers a statement on physician-assisted death while presiding over mass at St. Paul’s Basilica in Toronto in a March 6, 2016, file photo. For the faithful questioning whether the final sacrament of a funeral is available to a loved one who has chosen a medically assisted death, the answer may depend on whom in the church they ask.

VANCOUVER – A proper funeral is far more than an end-of-life celebration for practising Catholics, who believe last rites cleanse the soul of sin in preparation for eternal life in heaven.

But for the faithful questioning whether those final sacraments are available to a loved one who has chosen a medically assisted death, the answer may depend on whom in the church they ask.

Catholic doctrine is unequivocal in its opposition to any form of suicide, but Canadian bishops have taken different positions on whether churchgoers who choose an assisted death should be absolutely barred from having an official funeral.

Some religious experts say the schism is the product of Pope Francis’s arrival at the helm of the Catholic Church in 2013, and his emphasis on tolerance and compassion.

Wayne Sumner, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Toronto, said a more flexible approach to the granting of funeral rites is in line with Pope Francis’s similarly softened tone on homosexuality, divorce and the ordination of women.

“I think you’ve got some hardliners here who want to follow the doctrine and you’ve got some others who feel a compassion for people who have chosen this route and don’t want to punish them or their families any more or unnecessarily,” he said.

In the wake of assisted dying becoming legal in Canada earlier this year, six bishops in Alberta and Northwest Territories released guidelines last month instructing priests to refuse funerals for people who choose assisted dying. The document describes how physician-assisted death is a “grave sin” and contradicts the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Death by assisted suicide and euthanasia are grave violations of the law of God, the document says.

“These grievous affronts to the dignity of human life from beginning to natural end are never morally justified,” it says.

Other church leaders since then have said they would not encourage the absolute prohibition of funerals for everyone who chooses assisted dying.

Emma Anderson, a scholar of Canadian Catholicism at the University of Ottawa, said the division among Catholic bishops follows from Pope Francis’s move to empower lower levels of leadership to make decisions based on local circumstances.

The sometimes contradictory results of such delegation of authority risks confusing church members, Anderson said.

“It can be profoundly disturbing if you’re a devout Catholic to be getting really different messages in Quebec, in Ottawa, in Alberta, in the Northwest Territories,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be a national stance on this issue.”

Not everyone sees the bishops’ views as contradictory, said Michael Agnew, a post-doctoral fellow in the religious studies department at McMaster University in Hamilton.

“It’s not necessarily that there’s a schism over the church teaching, at least in the hierarchy or the leadership of the church,” Agnew said.

“The difference is probably in the tone that’s being used at times and individual bishops’ or priests’ flexibility around access to these services.”

Rev. Marc Pelchat, vicar general of the Archdiocese of Quebec, said the variation among bishops across Canada has less to do with church doctrine on assisted death and more to do with a difference in approach.

Pelchat said bishops in Quebec encourage a more case-by-case treatment for physician-assisted deaths and are reluctant to establish a hard-and-fast rule that ignores individual circumstances.

But the church ultimately opposes assisted death and prefers palliative care, he added.

Douglas Farrow, a professor of Christian thought at McGill University in Montreal, said the difference in direction between bishops is no great surprise.

“Some of them are more theologically astute than others and some of them are more faithful to the church’s teaching than others,” Farrow said.

Church law gives priests considerable leeway to exercise their judgment on a case-by-case basis, he said.

The difference in approach appears to follow some rough geographic patterns as well, noted Arthur Schafer, an ethics scholar at the University of Manitoba.

The strong opposition in Alberta follows the province’s traditional conservatism, whereas the more permissive attitudes in Quebec and British Columbia are in line with the provinces more progressive approaches, he said.

Complete Article HERE!