Category: Legal Shenanigans

Posted on

Legion of Christ’s deception, unearthed in new documents, indicates wider cover-up

By Jason Berry

Newly released documents in a Rhode Island lawsuit show that the scandal-tarred Legion of Christ shielded information on their founder’s sex life from a wealthy widow who donated $30 million over two decades.

In 2009, the widow’s niece, Mary Lou Dauray, sued the Legion and the bank that facilitated key transactions, alleging fraud. At Dauray’s request, backed by a motion from NCR and three other media outlets, Superior Court Judge Michael Silverstein revoked a protective order the Legionaries had secured and released discovery findings Friday.

The thousands of pages of testimony, financial and religious records open a rare view into the Legion culture shaped by its Mexican-born founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado.

 

Maciel built a power base in Rome as the greatest fundraiser of the modern church. He won the undying support of Pope John Paul II, who called him an “efficacious guide to youth” and praised Maciel in lavish ceremonies even after a 1998 canon law case at the Vatican in which the cleric was accused of sexually abusing Legion seminarians.

The Vatican is not a defendant in Rhode Island, but decisions by John Paul and Pope Benedict XVI permeate a larger story rising from the files.

A key strand in the new material aligns with an admission by Cardinal Franc Rodé, who told NCR and Global Post in a recent interview that “in late 2004 or early 2005” he saw a videotape of Maciel “with a mother and child represented as his.” A Legionary, whom Rodé did not identify, showed him a tape of Maciel with a girl identified as his daughter.

The cardinal did not confront Maciel about paternity, but says he told a Vatican canon lawyer who was under orders from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to investigate the pedophilia accusations. On that front, Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, dismissed Maciel from ministry in May 2006, but the Vatican communiqué did not specify why or acknowledge the victims. Those explanations only came in 2010, after a Vatican investigation of the Legion prompted by news reports of the order’s disclosure that Maciel had a daughter, a fact the Vatican had known since 2005.

Two sons by a second woman, with whom Maciel had a longstanding relationship, came forward later.

The Rhode Island documents, coming less than a week after Benedict announced his resignation from the papacy, add another chapter to the scandals that apparently were on his mind when, in his final public Mass as pope, he spoke of the face of the church that “is, at times, disfigured.”

Fluent in French, Gabrielle Mee was conservative and refined; she felt she had found a spiritual home with the ultra-orthodox Legionaries for her twilight years. She became a consecrated woman in the order’s lay group, Regnum Christi, living in a religious home while steadily ceding her enormous wealth to the Legion by giving power of attorney to Fr. Anthony Bannon, an Irish-born Legionary who divided his time between Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Like everyone else in the order’s closed environment, Mee was taught that Nuestro Padre, as Maciel was called, had his enemies, but that he was a living saint for his leadership as an evangelist, drawing the church back from liberal abuses of the Second Vatican Council and attracting young men to a strict religious life. That was the Legion message.

By all accounts, she believed that message until her death at 96 in May 2008, just four months after Maciel’s funeral in Mexico. She never knew Maciel had sired three children, two of whom, as previously reported in NCR, he secreted into private papal Masses celebrated by an apparently clueless John Paul.

At his death, the Legion website announced that Maciel had gone to heaven. Yet at that very time, Fr. Luis Garza and other top Legionaries were scrambling to decide how, and when, to reveal that Maciel had a grown daughter — a fact the Vatican had known for three years.

Mee had long embraced the Legion’s public campaign against nine men who in 1997 accused Maciel of abusing them as seminarians. This is referenced in a bank document.

Mee’s husband, Timothy, was on the board of trustees of Fleet Bank. By the time he died in 1985, he had established a charitable trust in his name and a separate trust for Gabrielle. Three years later, she gave her first donation of $1 million to the Legion after her close friend Marguerite Garrahy, a former first lady of Rhode Island, spoke favorably of the Legion. Mee and Garrahy attended daily Mass together.

Bannon immediately notified Maciel in Rome of the million-dollar gift. But, he insisted in a deposition, “I did not control her checkbook.”

Maciel made a practice in Mexico of cultivating wealthy widows and the wives of wealthy men. The Legion prep schools catered to affluent families, recruiting parents to Regnum Christi. The schools fed young men into the Legion. Bannon, referring to Mee, also testified on how Regnum Christi and Legion members donate their own assets to the order:

She would assign the management of those assets to somebody she trusts, and then before taking her final commitment would decide what is to be done with those assets. When there are assets that come as an inheritance, the same. … It’s my belief in the premise, and the way I’ve always acted is a person’s assets is something God has given to him through family or through their own good work, and they are the owners and managers of that, and it’s up to them to see what God wants them to do with the money.

I always speak to them about the needs that we have, but always respect their decision.

Troubles emerge

A bank memo suggests Bannon acted with greater self-interest when the order was threatened.

On Feb. 23, 1997, Gerald Renner and this writer published an investigative report in the Hartford Courant detailing a long history of sexual abuse by Maciel based on lengthy on-the-record accounts by nine former seminarians or ex-Legion priests. Maciel refused to be interviewed but claimed innocence. The Vatican refused any comment.

The Legion at the time had several major accounts with Fleet Bank and a mortgage on a former IBM complex in Thornwood, N.Y. It had plans to establish a college that involved zoning issues that were drawing strong resistance from Westchester County residents. The Legion purchased the property for $33 million in January 1997 with major help from Mee and carried a mortgage balance at the time of almost $25 million.

Prior to the Courant publication, the Legion sent affidavits of Maciel supporters to the newspaper, purporting to show Maciel’s innocence in the face of a conspiratorial effort by the men to defame him.

Meanwhile, Garza, the order’s vicar general, traveled to Legion houses in several countries to warn of the forthcoming article, claiming it would be based on lies and telling Legionaries and Regnum Christi members not to read the report should they see a copy.

Legionaries took a special vow never to criticize the founder, or superiors, and to report on anyone who did. This “special vow” — which Benedict abolished many years later — protected Maciel from criticism and rewarded spying as an act of faith.

In this environment, five days after the article was published, Bannon and another Legionary met with two Fleet officials at the bank. A summary memo from a bank official explains:

We discussed the Legion’s public relations strategy and we will all follow any further developments in the news media.

We determined the most effective way to measure the health of the Legion’s fundraising stream and cash flow on a real time basis was to monitor monthly cash flows to determine whether there has been any fall-off in revenues.

The memo states that Bannon asked Fleet to write a letter to the Courant “to complain about the story.” The bank never did.

The memo continues:

In terms of additional credit concerns the Legion was concerned about the impact of the surprise on Fleet. Father Bannon offered to pledge the cash flow stream from the Mee trust funds in order to provide additional security in this uncertain period. I thanked him, but communicated that it would be a significant conflict of interest if we were to seek a perfected security interest in the Mee funds because we are also a trustee [for Gabrielle Mee and for the Timothy Mee Charitable Trust].

“There is no evidence that Mrs. Mee knew of the detailed allegations against Maciel nor the existence of the Hartford Courant article,” plaintiff attorney Bernard Jackvony told NCR. “Rather, it shows that she was in the dark.”

Regnum Christi posted a notice in its residences saying that Nuestro Padre was under attack in a false article. But that, it appears, is the extent of what Mee knew.

“She was totally unaware that the Legion was using her wealth as a negotiating tool with the bank,” Jackvony said. “It shows how the Legion at that point essentially treated her money as theirs. They took such liberties with her funds without her even knowing, and treating [it] like they were entitled to it.”

In 2001, Bannon obtained sweeping power of attorney, drafted by the Legion’s lawyers, for Mee’s affairs. The Legion sued Fleet to obtain greater access to the combined Mee funds, with Gabrielle testifying for the Legion. The two sides settled out of court. Fleet later merged with Bank of America. Because of the 2001 agreement, Dauray’s lawsuit includes the bank as a defendant with the Legion on allegations of fraud.

Just how many Legionaries knew of Maciel’s secret life — or how Maciel funded it through the coffers of a religious charity — is unclear from an initial review of the documents. But Maciel was drawing $20,000 a month from the Legion in his later years, according to the transcript of a speech by Garza, the longtime vicar general, to a Regnum Christi group in Monterrey, Mexico, after the Legion divulged existence of the daughter in 2009.

Garza’s speech was not evidence in the lawsuit, nor was he questioned about it. A Legion spokesman told NCR he could not respond to questions.

Garza’s testimony is a pivotal part of the legal action. As vicar general, he was Maciel’s second in command and “responsible for overseeing key areas of logistical governance,” according a Regnum Christi profile, “involving constant analysis of numbers and personnel, structures and organizations, risks and opportunities.”

Garza grew up with five siblings in Monterrey, a scion of one of Latin America’s wealthiest families, often compared to the Rockefellers.

Maciel cultivated the Garza family for years, ingratiating himself with the parents. Three of the siblings became immersed in Regnum Christi; the other half reacted against Maciel’s tactics.

“Our family is hopelessly split to this day,” said Roberta Garza, the youngest sibling. “One of my aunts gave Maciel a house.”

A 1978 graduate of Stanford with a degree in engineering, Luis Garza joined the Legion after a period in Regnum Christi. The family made huge donations over the years, with Luis reported by one former Legionary as donating several million of his own. He earned a canon law degree from the Jesuits’ Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Maciel named him vicar general as a sign of his rising authority.

In 1989, Mee went to Rome and met with Maciel to see the progress of the Legion seminary being built with her generous help.

Jackvony, a former Republican lieutenant governor of Rhode Island, asked Garza in deposition: “Were you aware of a gift [Mee] made to the Legion in 1989 of a million dollars?”

“No, I was not aware.”

“Did you ever become aware of that in your official duties?”

“No.”

“Did you become aware of it later?”

“I don’t remember.”

Jackvony bore down: “In 2002, there were a total of four million dollars in gifts, including a condominium in Narragansett?”

“The only thing I know about this is it’s a condominium.”

“In 2003,” Jackvony continued, “there were gifts totaling about $3,600,000. Are you aware of any of those gifts?”

“No.”

In contrast, Fr. Stephen Fichter, chief financial officer for the Legion in the late 1990s, gave often detailed answers despite 11 years’ distance. Fichter left the order in 2000, uneasy with the internal rigidity, yet believing then Maciel was innocent of the seminarians’ accusations. In 1997, before the Hartford Courant investigation profiled nine ex-Legionaries recounting how Maciel abused them as boys, Garza had traveled to Legion houses in three continents, telling Legionaries and Regnum Christi members that certain accusations soon to be published were lies and none of them should read the media account if they came across it. Computer access was tightly limited in those years.

Fichter joined the Newark, N.J., archdiocese and earned a doctorate in sociology. He divides his time as a New Jersey pastor and in a research position at Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate in Washington.

“While I firmly believe that God can write straight with crooked lines, and that he brought some good into my personal life through the Legion,” Fichter testified, “I personally feel deceived, defrauded, lied to” by the scope of information on Maciel that surfaced by 2011.

Fichter recalled reviewing Gabrielle Mee’s bank investment files in Rome and storing her donation records “in paper form in some filing cabinet.”

Maciel drew money in a manner “totally inconsistent” with ordinary Legionaries. “I would always have to give him $10,000 in cash; 5,000 in American dollars and 5,000 equivalent in currency to the country he was traveling,” Fichter said. “I do not know what he used that money for. He never gave an accounting of that money.”

“Rhode Island’s attorney general [Peter Kilmartin] has the right to intervene in our case because it involves a charitable trust,” Jackvony said. “The fraud by Maciel and the Legion of Christ demonstrated in these documents also deserves immediate attention to determine whether laws against financial abuse of the elderly have been violated.”

Maciel hid his pathological sex life behind a wall of wealth and an image of militant orthodoxy, charming John Paul II. He capitalized on footage of a beaming pope, celebrating Maciel and his cheering Legionaries at a public audience. A 30-person fundraising office at the Legion’s U.S. headquarters in Cheshire, Conn., marketed cassettes of the event as a pivotal item in the Legion fundraising. A scene of John Paul embracing Maciel at the altar dramatized his standing for wealthy benefactors, like Mee.

By 2004, the Legion had a $650 million budget and $1 billion in assets for the prep schools, seminaries and universities in Latin America, Europe and North America. In 2005, with John Paul’s death, Ratzinger broke with the pope’s resistance to prosecuting Maciel and ordered Vatican canon lawyer Msgr. Charles Scicluna to investigate. Scicluna worked at Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which is housed in the majestic palazzo called the Holy Office where Galileo was convicted of heresy. The upper floors house certain Roman Curia officials, including Rodé, 78, now retired as the prefect of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

A secret safe

In 2004, Rodé became prefect of the congregation that governs religious orders. His predecessor, Cardinal Eduardo Martínez Somalo, took a $90,000 gift from Maciel, according to the priest who carried the envelope. Martínez Somalo refused interview requests.

Rodé said he took no cash gifts from the Legion.

“I esteem the charism of the Legionaries,” Rodé told NCR in a Nov. 29 interview at his apartment at the Vatican. He saw young men of rock-solid orthodoxy, their numbers rising in Latin America as vocations sank in Europe and North America. Rodé gave celebratory speeches for the Legion in Brazil and Chile and praised the founder after Maciel’s ouster.

Asked whether that was a mistake, he couched his answer in the context of papal loyalty. “It is difficult to say it was a mistake by the pope,” he said, referencing John Paul’s praise of Maciel long after the 1998 case filed in the doctrinal congregation. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there” to know what John Paul knew, or would not consider, about Maciel.

Rodé defends the Legionaries as a phenomenon apart from Maciel, a position Benedict took in the Vatican takeover to reform the order.

A former Legion priest, speaking on background, said he met with Rodé after Maciel’s death and the cardinal told him of a VHS he had seen when Maciel was superior general of Maciel and his young daughter.

Asked about this, Rodé gave a somber nod, saying it was “late 2004, or early 2005.” The Legionary who showed it wanted him to have the information before the order’s election for superior general, the position Maciel held for decades. Rodé says he persuaded the 84-year-old Maciel, by then under investigation, to step down. Maciel was re-elected and then retired.

What did Rodé do about the videotape showing Maciel’s daughter?

“I told Msgr. Scicluna all about the problem,” the cardinal said.

Scicluna reported directly to Ratzinger.

As the prefect over religious orders, why did Rodé not punish Maciel?

“It was not for me to pronounce the penalty,” he said. “But he was, in the end, corrected” — by Benedict’s 2006 Vatican order sending Maciel to a “life of prayer and penitence.”

Did the cardinal confront Maciel about his child?

“It was not my obligation.”

Why not?

“I was not his confessor.” Rodé paused. “It was my obligation as prefect for religious to get him to step down, and I did.”

The cardinal’s interview lends validity to another dimension of Garza’s testimony: his mounting suspicions about Maciel having a child and what it took for him to confirm it. This occurred almost two years after another Legionary showed Rodé the videotape.

By 2005, Maciel was showing “basic evidence of dementia, like forgetting things, repeating things in a conversation,” Garza stated in his Rhode Island testimony.

After he stepped down as superior general, Maciel left Rome and began traveling. He spent time that spring in his birthplace, Cotija de la Paz, Mexico, where the Legion has a religious house. Photographs of a reunion with his former paramour, Norma Hilda Baños, and their daughter, Normita, 23, later appeared in a Mexican gossip magazine.

Maciel’s final months

Yet even as he battled dementia, Maciel was a domineering figure. Who oversees an ex-superior general long revered as a living saint? But the Legion high command worried about Scicluna’s investigation as well as Maciel’s stability following a visit he made to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. Garza’s testimony reveals his concern that Maciel, in a slow mental decline, was still traveling whenever and wherever he pleased. After the visit to Mayo Clinic, Maciel in the spring of 2006 checked into Sawgrass, a five-star hotel in Jacksonville, Fla. The Legion, as always, paid his expenses. The evidence suggests he was in Jacksonville that May when the Vatican announced his dismissal to “a life of prayer and penitence.”

There is no indication from the lawsuit that Garza, born 1958, had knowledge of Maciel abusing seminarians a generation before. The Legion’s counterattack on the original accusers insisted that those men in their late 50s from Mexico and Spain hatched a conspiracy to bring Nuestro Padre down. The motives were never explained, but Maciel’s charismatic personality and the many financial gifts he dispensed to curial officials and others over many years were among the reasons a chorus of defenders spoke out in the late 1990s. Among those who echoed John Paul’s admiration for Maciel were Fr. Richard John Neuhaus; William Bennett; George Weigel, a biographer of John Paul II; and Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, who later became the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

The Vatican order of dismissal threw Garza into an awkward situation. The Legion’s response contained contradictory elements. The order proclaimed its loyalty to Benedict while comparing Maciel to Christ as falsely accused, facing his new life with “tranquility of conscience.” In this bizarre fandango of language — the Vatican ordering Maciel into penitential life while praising the Legion, and the Legion comparing their founder to Christ — Maciel was running up charges in a Florida luxury hotel.

And so the Legion bought a house in a Jacksonville gated complex and installed several priests to live with Nuestro Padre.

“And what was the purpose of them being there?” Jackvony asked in the deposition.

Garza replied, “To create a community.”

“Why?” Jackvony asked.

“For Father Maciel to live a life of penance and absence from public ministry,” Garza said.

Yet even with his new home, Maciel pined for Rome. He flew back in September 2006, hoping to attend the canonization ceremony of one of his uncles, a bishop in Mexico. The timing of Benedict’s dismissal order was undoubtedly tied to that canonization. Vatican officials did not want a beaming Maciel at the ceremony knowing, as one official later told NCR, that he had molested “more than 20 but less than 100” victims.

Garza does not specify how they persuaded Maciel that he could not attend the canonization, but he returned to Jacksonville.

Garza by then was suspicious of Normita, 23, and her mother, Norma Hilda Baños, in her late 40s, who had been at the Sawgrass Hotel and were spending time with Maciel in his life of penance at the Legion house with the pool.

Among the group at the house was Javier Maciel, Nuestro Padre’s brother. The priests and Javier, Garza testified, “knew the women” but would not say who they were. As Garza’s suspicions grew, he stayed at a less-expensive hotel on his trips to Jacksonville, not at the “community” in the newly purchased house. In October 2006, Garza asked Norma “if the girl was the daughter of Father Maciel,” he testified. “She confirmed that.”

Garza tracked down her birth certificate and determined that Normita had studied at a Legion college in Mexico.

Garza was, like all Legionaries, beholden to the “private vows” never to speak ill of Maciel or superiors, never to seek higher office in the Legion, and to report to the superiors any criticism overheard about the founder. Maciel had imposed the vows to safeguard his sexual secrets. Benedict would later order the vows abolished. But at that time, Garza had only one person in whom to confide: the new superior general, Fr. Alvaro Corcuera.

By early 2007 the Legion was in an existential drama with the Vatican. Maciel was gone, sort of. Corcuera and Garza, who had long defended him of the pedophilia accusations, faced a huge internal issue: how to tell Legionaries, Regnum Christi members and the donor base about Maciel’s shadow family.

Garza was also concerned about the impact on the women. Normita, he testified, said “she had this father that was very caring for her but in many instances very absent.” Norma supported herself by “property that she leases,” raising further questions of fraud in the legal action. How did she gain title to rental real estate when she apparently did not work?

Maciel met Norma in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1980. Normita was born three years later. In 1997, he moved them to Madrid, providing support in an upscale apartment, according to Spanish reports.

Through the year 2007, Maciel’s paternity stayed hidden. The Vatican made no disclosure, nor did the Legion. How much each side knew about the other is not clear from the available evidence.

Maciel’s dementia was getting worse by the end of that year, according to Garza’s testimony. He sank into his final illness in late January 2008. According to a report in Madrid’s El Mundo, as Norma and Normita joined the priests closest to Maciel in the Jacksonville house, Corcuera, his successor as superior general, tried to anoint him, to which he reportedly yelled, “I said no!”

The body went back to Cotija de la Paz for burial in a family tomb. The Legion announced that he had gone to heaven. Garza and Corcuera were trying to decide how to reveal the truth as Vatican officials looked on.

Gabrielle Mee died four months later in Rhode Island.

In July 2008, the Legion’s American communications director, Jim Fair, traveled to Rome to discuss ongoing media strategy. Fair gave a deposition in the litigation too. In the Rome meeting, he stated, Corcuera revealed that Maciel had a daughter: They had to prepare for news coverage when it was disclosed. “We were very emotional in our response to this,” Fair testified. “I think the only question any of us asked is, are you sure, and [Corcuera] said yeah.”

In a telephone interview with NCR on Sunday, Fair said no Vatican official attended the meeting, nor did they discuss Vatican involvement.

Why did the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which had investigated Maciel and then the Legion, not release the information or prod the Legion to do so when Benedict dismissed Maciel in 2006?

Why did the Vatican sit on the information all those years?

José Barba, the retired Mexico City college professor who filed the 1998 recourse against Maciel in the doctrinal congregation tribunal, argues that the paramount issue for Benedict was protecting John Paul II’s reputation.

“Ratzinger wanted to elevate John Paul to beatification,” said Barba, coauthor of La Voluntad de No Saber (“The Will Not to Know”), an analysis of Vatican documents on Maciel. The book’s publication last March and Benedict’s refusal to meet with Maciel victims on a trip to Mexico ignited an onslaught of bad press for the pope. Benedict had to reckon with the embarrassment of John Paul’s praise of Maciel after the 1998 case, in essence scoffing at allegations against one of the most notorious sexual criminals in church history. By keeping a lid on Maciel’s secret life, Barba said, Benedict hoped “to defend the sainthood case against the accusations that John Paul protected predators.”

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

The sins of Cardinal Mahony

ELEVEN AMERICANS will be among the 117 cardinals of the Catholic Church heading soon to Rome to select the next pope. One of them, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, for a quarter-century the archbishop of Los Angeles, is lucky not to be in prison, for there is no dispute that he orchestrated what amounted to a cover-up of clerical sexual abuse in Los Angeles.

 

 

By now it is familiar news, though no less stomach-turning, that top officials in the Catholic Church protected pedophile priests for decades — impeding criminal investigations, shuffling offenders to new parishes or abroad, and resisting disclosure. In so doing, they exhibited little concern for victims of sex abuse, usually boys.

Still, the scale of the misdeeds in Los Angeles, the largest archdiocese in the United States, counts as a particular disgrace. And it is Cardinal Mahony, who resigned as archbishop two years ago, who oversaw the whole dirty business. For that he has been publicly censured by his successor.

In a highly unusual rebuke, Archbishop José H. Gomez, who took over the church’s top position in Los Angeles in 2011, announced this month that Cardinal Mahony would be stripped of his public duties for having swept under the rug hundreds of allegations of clerical abuse in the 1980s.

Though nearly unprecedented, the reprimand was also largely symbolic. While Cardinal Mahony may have to curtail speaking engagements and other appearances, he is still, as Archbishop Gomez said, a “bishop in good standing.” Translation: Cardinal Mahony remains one of the most powerful figures in the church hierarchy, a member of a tiny elite empowered to guide its finances and vote on the next pope.

His continued prominence reflects the culture of impunity in the Catholic Church a decade after its tolerance and complicity in the abuse of children was exposed. The church has adopted policies intended to avoid fresh outrages, but it also has fought to protect supervisors who shielded criminal molesters.

Cardinal Mahony is a prime example. Even after his archdiocese reached a $660 million civil settlement with more than 500 victims of abuse in 2007, he and the hierarchy did everything in their power to avoid individual accountability. As recently as last week, church lawyers tried to keep secret the names of top officials and parish priests implicated in abuse cases. Fortunately, a California judge ordered disclosure of the relevant church personnel files.

That triggered publication of some 14,000 pages, including notes between Cardinal Mahony and a top aide showing that they repeatedly transferred abusive priests out of the country and the state to evade investigators and publicity. The cardinal also cautioned against exposing abusive priests to therapists who might be legally obligated to report their crimes.

In response to his public rebuke, Cardinal Mahony, who has a master’s degree in social work, wrote that nothing in his training had alerted him to the risks involved in the sexual abuse of minors. How about common sense, respect for the law and a basic understanding of human beings?

The statute of limitations may have expired for Cardinal Mahony and others in Los Angeles who sought to shield wrongdoers from the law. But their actions will not be soon forgotten.

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

Santa Barbara Bishop Apologizes In Catholic Church Cover Up

File under: When an apology is not an apology. Jesus, these men simply can’t stop the prevarication. They couldn’t take responsibility for their actions if their life depended on it. Shame, shame, shame!

By Liberty Zabala
Dark days fall upon the Catholic Church as files upon files of alleged child sex abuse finally come to light.

Letters between Archdiocese of Los Angeles – Santa Barbara Region Bishop Thomas J. Curry and Cardinal Roger Mahony show they knew about alleged child sex abuse but choose to cover it up.

“You can imagine what the church has to lose,” says Child Sex Abuse Therapist Nancy Gutfreund. “You’re supposed to be an organization that completely protects its people and when there’s damage done nobody wants to admit it.”

curry:mahoneyBut Bishop Curry was forced to, releasing this statement saying:

“I wish to apologize for those instances when I made decisions regarding the treatment and disposition of clergy accused of sexual abuse that in retrospect appear inadequate or mistaken.”

A mistake the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s Office is now investigating.

“We have some very serious allegations of obstruction of justice at the very least by individuals, I think the community has trusted throughout for a number of decades,” says Santa Barbara City Chief Deputy District Attorney Hilary Dozer. “And that’s a disturbing fact.”

And prosecutors face another challenge. Most of the files happened in the 1980’s far beyond the statute of limitations.

“If an individual has actively hidden information from law enforcement, there are some ways and situations where that statute of limitations is tolled,” says Dozer. “Meaning it does not preclude us from going forward.”

Senior Deputy District Attorney Ron Zonnen to lead the investigation against the church.

Last year, prosecutors in Philadelphia were able to convict a monsignor and in Missouri, a judge found a bishop guilty for failing to report child sex abuse.

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

Church Official in Philadelphia Gets Prison in Abuse Case

By JON HURDLE and ERIK ECKHOLM

Msgr. William J. Lynn, the first Roman Catholic Church official in the United States to be convicted of covering up sexual abuses by priests under his supervision, was sentenced Tuesday to three to six years in prison.

“You knew full well what was right, Monsignor Lynn, but you chose wrong,” Judge M. Teresa Sarmina of Common Pleas Court said as she imposed the sentence, which was just short of the maximum of three and a half to seven years. Monsignor Lynn must serve at least three years before he is eligible for parole.

Monsignor Lynn, 61, was found guilty on June 22 of child endangerment after a three-month trial that revealed efforts over decades by the Philadelphia archdiocese to play down accusations of child sexual abuse and avoid scandal. He was acquitted of conspiracy and a second child endangerment charge.

Monsignor Lynn served as secretary for clergy for the 1.5 million-member archdiocese from 1992 to 2004, recommending priest assignments and investigating abuse complaints. During the trial, prosecutors presented evidence that he had shielded predatory priests, sometimes transferring them to unwary parishes, and lied to the public to avoid bad publicity and lawsuits.

The conviction of a senior official, followed by a prison sentence, has reverberated among Catholic officials around the country, church experts said.

“I think this is going to send a very strong signal to every bishop and everybody who worked for a bishop that if they don’t do the right thing, they may go to jail,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. “They can’t just say ‘the bishop made me do it.’ That’s not going to be an excuse that holds up in court.”

In a three-minute statement before sentencing, Monsignor Lynn, dressed in a black clerical shirt and white collar, said: “I have been a priest for 36 years, and I have done the best I can. I have always tried to help people.”

Turning toward relatives of an abuse victim in the courtroom, he said, “I hope someday that you will accept my apology.”

But he did not comment on the broader accusations that he put children at risk by repeatedly protecting “monsters in clerical garb,” as Judge Sarmina described it at the hearing.

The sentence was a victory for the Philadelphia district attorney, R. Seth Williams, who said outside the courtroom, “Many people say that the maximum still would not have been enough.”

Monsignor Lynn’s lawyer, Thomas Bergstrom, called the sentence “unbalanced.” Last week, the defense argued that a long prison sentence would be “merely cruel and unusual.”

Prosecutors argued that the gravity of Monsignor Lynn’s crime — giving known sexual predators continued access to children, causing lifelong anguish and damage to some — was “off the charts.”

Monsignor Lynn’s lawyers said they would appeal the conviction, saying that the child endangerment law at the time did not apply to supervisors and that the judge erred in allowing testimony about accusations that were beyond the statute of limitations.

In a statement Tuesday, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia said that its procedures for protecting children had improved significantly since “the events some 10 years ago that were at the center of this trial.”

It acknowledged “legitimate anger in the broad community toward any incident or enabling of sexual abuse.” But it also described the sentence as overly harsh, saying “fair-minded people will question the severity.”

“We hope that when this punishment is objectively reviewed, it will be adjusted,” it said.

After the sentencing, Ann Casey, a friend of Monsignor Lynn for 36 years, said she believed he was a scapegoat and a victim of his intense faith in the archdiocese’s leaders. “It was his vow of obedience to the church that landed him this morning in jail,” she said.

During the trial, Monsignor Lynn’s lawyers argued that he had followed the instructions of Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua, who was the archbishop of Philadelphia from 1988 to 2003 and who died in January.

Monsignor Lynn’s conviction was for lax oversight of one former priest, Edward V. Avery, who spent six months in a church psychiatric center in 1993 after an abuse episode. Doctors said he should be kept away from children. But Monsignor Lynn sent him to live in a rectory and did not warn parish officials.

In 1999, Mr. Avery engaged in oral sex with a 10-year-old altar boy. He pleaded guilty to the assault just before Monsignor Lynn’s trial and was sentenced to two and a half to five years in prison.

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

Lawyer who foretold church scandals writes his story

By Angus MacSwan

Ray Mouton was a successful young lawyer in Lafayette, Louisiana, respected in the community and blessed with a loving family, when he received a call from a vicar in the Roman Catholic diocese for a lunch meeting on a fateful day in 1984.

The diocese asked him to defend an errant priest, accused of abusing dozens of children in a rural community. Mouton reluctantly agreed to take on the task.

What followed over the next few years was the uncovering of an institution riddled with pedophile priests on a national scale and efforts at high levels in the Catholic Church to hide the problem away.

For Mouton, it meant the end of his law career, health problems, and anger, depression and guilt.

After many years of writing from his self-imposed exile in France, he finally tells his story in the novel “In God’s House“. It is a harrowing read laden with sickening detail, but also for Mouton, a work of atonement.

“There’s not a day I don’t think about the children. When I was writing the book, whenever I wanted to quit, I thought about the victims and their families,” he told Reuters.

In person, Mouton, now aged 65, looks like a southern lawyer from central casting, with a head of thick white hair and a sonorous Louisiana drawl.

He chose to tell the story in novel form although the characters, from the lawyer to a senior Vatican official who proves an obstacle to addressing the scandal – are based on real figures.

“The novel is a dramatic experience. My experience was a traumatic one. Every day there were revelations. I didn’t want to believe, the country didn’t want to believe,” he said.

Mouton and his family – Cajuns whose ancestors came to Louisiana as part of the Acadian diaspora – were strongly Catholic. His family had donated land for the cathedral in Lafayette and built schools, churches and a seminary.

When he first agreed to defend the priest, Father Gilbert Gauthe, he believed he was dealing with an isolated case.

“I believed priests were somehow superior. I had never heard of a priest having sex with a child. I could not believe a Catholic priest could do this. I thought he was just one then it all unraveled. In that diocese alone there were a dozen more.”

The church preferred to deal with the problem by paying off victims’ families. But one family wanted to see justice done.

As a lawyer, Mouton believed Gauthe had the right to a fair trial. He soon realized the church was deeply compromised. It had known about Gauthe’s crimes since his days in seminary but had moved him around various parishes, where the abuses continued.

The church was in effect harboring criminals, Mouton said.

“I did start out on the side of the church. I couldn’t imagine they had foreknowledge,” he said.

Mouton joined forces with Father Tom Doyle, a canon lawyer in the Vatican Embassy in Washington, and Father Michael Peterson, a psychiatrist priest who treated sexually deviant clergymen. The two had heard many other cases across Louisiana and the United States – and attempts to bury the problem.Ray Mouton

Believing they had the support of the church hierarchy, they set out on a crusade to bring it into the open and seek justice for the victims.

They spent a year working on a document detailing the scale of the abuse, the steps the church should take to address it and the consequences if it did not. It stated that there was a national crisis involving dozens, if not hundreds, of priests.

“It told them what the deal was – you’ll lose 1,000 priests and a billion dollars.”

They hoped to present the document to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for debate. But after a meeting in a Chicago hotel in 1985 with a cardinal, they were told to kill it.

“They put the reputation of the church above the value of the little children. They did all they could to avoid scandal.”

FALL FROM GRACE

“In God’s House” details a powerful apparatus at work involving local politicians, expensive lawyers, insurance companies and bishops. It also reached into the Vatican, which Mouton says considered the institution above the law.

It also shows the devastation of the victims and their families – shame, anger and frustration as well as physical damage. Many were told that to seek redress would be disloyal to the church, adding further conflict to their emotions.

Mouton himself suffered verbal abuse and even death threats in the community for defending Gauthe. He was accused of trying to extort the church for exorbitant fees.

He put up an insanity plea for Gauthe but the priest himself insisted he was sane. He was sentenced to 20 years.

However, a senior jurist in Louisiana involved himself personally in Gauthe’s case. Instead of going to a prison that was a treatment facility for pedophiles, the priest was sent to a prison where juveniles were held. He was released after serving only half of his sentence.

Gauthe was picked up in Texas soon after his release for molesting a 3-year-old boy, but put on probation rather than being sent back to prison.

Mouton’s marriage broke up and he became an alcoholic.

“It was a cataclysmic event. It broke me in half. I did fall from grace,” he said.

It took many years but subsequent events have vindicated Mouton as widespread sexual abuse by priests came to light across the United States and the world, from Ireland to Australia.

The church and its insurance companies have paid out more than $2 billion dollars in the United States, bishops have been disgraced, and its reputation has suffered to the point that the faithful have deserted in droves.

Mouton now lives in southern France close to the Pyrenees with his second wife Melony and travels frequently to Spain, Mexico and other countries.

He is still bitter about the cover-ups and that many of those responsible have never been brought to justice. Nor has the problem been eradicated, he believes.

“I don’t think we’ve reached critical mass on it yet. The question is what can the church do? The church needs to release all the documents and demand the resignations of those involved.”

The novel is dedicated to Scott Anthony Gastal, the first child to testify in court against a bishop, and to the victims and their families, who, he says, “were abandoned not by their God, but by their Church”.

“I was haunted by my experience. I felt I had to do something,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

UnHoly Communion

Some months ago a fellow contacted out of the blue and identified himself as Hank Estrada. Apparently he found me through the Gay Catholic Priests Facebook page. Hank went on to introduce himself and tell me about his latest book, UnHoly Communion-Lessons Learned from Life among Pedophiles, Predators, and Priests. This immediately piqued my interest. His book was published just weeks before my book, Secrecy, Sophistry and Gay Sex In The Catholic Church: The Systematic Destruction of an Oblate Priest in the summer of 2011. After a short conversation on Skype we decided to exchange books and read each other’s story. Hank was way better than me in getting this job done. In record time he plowed through my rather ponderous book and we spoke again on Skype in the earl fall.

Hank complimented me on my work and we spoke for nearly an hour about the many church related experiences we had in common. You see, Hank was a Claretian seminarian in Los Angeles, California around the same time I was Ordained and Oblate priest in Oakland California.

UnHoly CommunionI told Hank that I had yet to get to his book. I apologized for being so slow and promised that I’d get to it as soon as possible. Well it took me way longer than I thought. It’s astonishing how life seems to get in the way of of my best intentions. At any rate, I finished Hank’s book yesterday, Christmas Day. Curiously enough, Hank had some time to spend yesterday afternoon so we met on Skype once again to discuss his book.

UnHoly Communion-Lessons Learned from Life among Pedophiles, Predators, and Priests is primarily a story of the indomitable human spirit. Hank’s story is harrowing — years of childhood incest with his pedophile uncle while his alcoholic family lived in denial.  His escape to what he believed to be a safe haven, the Church, only to be sexually abused by a trusted superior.   And how the leadership of his religious community added insult to injury by ignoring his story and shamefully protecting the sexual predator in their midst permitting him  to move from one victim to another.

Despite all of the abuse, deception and betrayal, Hank triumphs. He is now a nationally recognized spokesman and tireless advocate for male victims and adult survivors of sexual assaults. In 1986, he founded the first national nonprofit organization to support non-offending adult male survivors. His book, despite the difficult subject matter and candid recollections of his ordeal, is really a testament to all of us who have been through similar experiences. It is a message, presented in a very accessible, matter of fact style, of hope, support, and encouragement.

I was particularly touched by his perception, as a seminarian, of the Catholic priesthood that he aspired to join. He perfectly captures the moral and ethical minefield that each priest and religious faces. And how easily it is for any one of us to succumb to the dark side. I quote…

While living in a community of Catholic priests and brothers, I quickly learned about the many personal benefits a religious clergyman receives throughout his priesthood, among them prestige, privilege, protection and often unchallenged influential power over parishioners. Could these questionable benefits lead to arrogance, self-righteousness, and a false sense of invincibility on the part of the priest? What about the sense of accountability, respect, adherence to faith, protection of the innocent and being true examples of Christ’s presence in the world? I witnessed as these men who wore a traditional black suit with white “Roman” collar, undeniably the most recognizable symbol of the Catholic priesthood, were frequently sought out, pampered, given unlimited trust and attention, and had people constantly offering to do things for them. Internally, I questioned some priests I saw take the spiritual “gift” of priesthood and turn it into something they bartered with, a way to control parishioners, as saying “If you treat me special, I will pray and give you blessing from our Lord.”

Hank’s book, UnHoly Communion-Lessons Learned from Life among Pedophiles, Predators, and Priests is a must read for anyone interested in knowing the truth about life in the Catholic Church. His thoughtful and reflective presentation is not about grinding an ax, although he has every right to do so. It’s all about being honest, primarily with himself, then with his family, his religious community, and us. Because it is precisely this honesty that will help him, them and us from shirking our responsibility to be more vigilant in terms of protecting the most vulnerable among us.

Thank you, Hank, for your witness. And thank you for calling us to uncover our eyes and see things, not as we would like them to be, but as they really are.

Posted on

Vatican disciplines Austrian dissident priest

File under … “Oh Snap!”
Apparently someone’s got his white cassock in a twist. The pettiness of these “holy” men is absolutely astounding.

By Philip Pullella

The Vatican has cracked down on a prominent Austrian Roman Catholic priest who has been leading a disobedience campaign to openly challenge Roman Catholic teachings on celibacy and women priests.

The Vatican said on Thursday it had stripped Father Helmut Schueller of the right to use title monsignor and said he also was no longer a “Chaplain of His Holiness”. Schueller remains a priest.

Schueller, a former deputy to Vienna’s archbishop, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, had been given the honorary title in his capacity as head of the Austrian branch of the Catholic charity group Caritas.

Schueller is head of the group “Call to Disobedience”, which has broad public backing in opinion polls and says it represents about 10 percent of the Austrian clergy.

Nearly 150,000 Austrians left the Church in 2011-2012, many in reaction to sexual abuse scandals.

The group wants Church rules changed so that priests can marry and women can become priests. It has said it will break Church rules by giving communion to Protestants and divorced Catholics who remarry.

Schueller told Austrian media that the Vatican decision had not shaken his principles.

Reformist Austrian Catholics have for decades challenged the conservative policies of Benedict and his predecessor John Paul, creating protest movements and advocating changes the Vatican refuses to make.

Schueller has met like-minded clergy in Austria and abroad since launching the “Call to Disobedience” group. Catholic reform groups in Germany, Ireland and the United States have made similar demands from the Church.

The Catholic Church does not allow priests to marry and teaches that it has no authority to allow women to become priests because Jesus willingly chose only men as his apostles when he instituted the priesthood at the Last Supper.

Proponents of a female priesthood say Jesus was only adhering to the social norms of his times.

Last week, the Vatican disciplined another priest who advocated women’s ordination.

Father Ray Bourgeois, an American of the Maryknoll religious order, was kicked out of the priesthood and the order by the Vatican’s doctrinal department, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Last year, Bourgeois, who had been a priest for 40 years, was among a group of Roman Catholic activists detained by Italian police after they tried to deliver a petition to the Vatican in favor of a female priesthood.

Benedict, who for decades before his 2005 election as pope was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer, directly denounced disobedient priests last April, saying it was not the right path to renewal in the Church.

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

Vilification of abusers won’t contribute to solution

Review by — John C. Seitz

If we want to understand sexual violence, we have to get to know its perpetrators and the worlds in which they were formed. In the particular context in which Marie Keenan is interested — clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up in the U.S. and Ireland since the middle of the 20th century — such an adage goes from truism to nonstarter. Pressure not to get to know clerical abusers and the institutional, educational and social worlds of their formation comes from many angles of varying validity.

A posture of attentiveness to abusers may strike some abuse victims and their advocates as excusing the abuse and losing sight of the harm it may have inflicted. For their part, media outlets have helped uncover abuse, but they have also contributed to the vilification of clerical offenders, fixating on the category of pedophilia (at the expense of other abusive scenarios), and fomenting moral panic.

Church officials, on the other hand, want to isolate abusers and officials complicit in cover-up. They would have us pay attention to abusers only as aberrant pathological individuals. The theological or institutional context for their production as clergy is more or less off-limits.

Keenan, a researcher and lecturer in applied social science at University College Dublin and a registered psychotherapist, plunges into these taboo waters, taking her readers into the theological, moral and institutional contexts for abuse and cover-up. Working with the ever-present caution that to “understand all is never to forgive it all,” Keenan makes this journey in part through analysis of extensive conversations with nine Catholic men — all retired or laicized Irish priests and brothers — who admitted to having sexually abused minors in the past.

The premise for such a move is simple: Vilification of abusers prohibits thick understandings of their lives. Content to turn “them” into monsters, we avoid their (and our) implication in wider contexts that helped produce the abuse. Humanizing abusers offers significant new angles on the problem. Listening to these men’s stories allows Keenan to see that they “were not in themselves ‘bad’ men, rather, they were trying to be ‘perfect’ priests.” Description of what it meant to be “perfect” — to practice the priesthood in the officially celebrated manner — goes a long way toward explaining how these men could “rationalize” their behavior and the secrecy that surrounded it.

Keenan does not rush into a presentation of the perpetrators’ stories, as if they alone were enough. Instead, the first half of the book includes a review of the existing literature on clerical sexual abuse, the culture of seminaries, and psychologies of abusive behavior. This first half of the book also includes an insightful reading of the complexities of “power” as theorized by contemporary scholars of gender. She interprets these sources clearly and cautiously. These chapters alone make Keenan’s work immensely useful. But the book’s real contribution comes from its exploration of the stories of nine abusive clergymen in Ireland.

This latter section of the book develops several themes relevant to the rise of abuse in Roman Catholic settings. Her focus is on seminary culture and education (in the period before the 1990s) and the kind of living it enabled and disabled. In these spaces priests learned to fear sexuality, disavow their bodies and emotions, bury non-priestly components of themselves, and adapt to emotionally isolated and lonely lives.

Two additional themes enhance her critique of clerical formation. The first is a paradox of clerical life, a condition she describes as simultaneously powerful and powerless. Valorized as special beings with unique ritual powers and heightened virtue, priests and brothers were also demeaned and devalued by expectations of humility and deference to their clerical superiors. Often unsupported and unsupervised and yet conditioned toward obedience to those above, many clerics experienced frustration in a church that demanded so much of them.

These conditions, along with sexual immaturity fostered by lifelong silence surrounding sexuality, helped produce priests who had an “emotional congruence” with children. Keenan sees perpetrators of abuse tragically seeking to navigate their emotional tempests in the presence and with the bodies of young people, whom abusers saw as equal, if easily silenced, partners.

The other most compelling theme concerns moral education. The church, Keenan argues, has offered poor tools for making judgments. Instead of judging out of a context of relationships with particular others and dynamic processes of introspection and empathy, seminarians were instructed in the technical and intellectual application of fixed, universal and external rules. Impersonal and abstract, this moral theology enabled abusers to treat their behavior as a matter of sin against God and purity and not as a matter of harm for others. Moreover, the confessional, with its seal of secrecy, further enabled the abuse by providing a context for expiation of this sin. Regular confession helped convince the priests that they were at least trying to meet God’s standards. All of the nine priests confessed their abuse in confession — according to their reports, only once did a confessor alert the abuser to the criminal nature of the offense. The system advanced a purity ethic at the expense of a relational ethic.

If all or most priests and brothers were trained amid these conditions until very recently, why did some abuse while others did not? Keenan argues that abusers were more likely to be those inclined to be rule followers rather than rule breakers. Many clergy had the ability or cunning to know which rules they needed to bend or break in order to make seminary and clerical life humane. Others, those aspiring to the most strict and idealized version of the priesthood (what Keenan calls “Perfect Celibate Clerical Masculinity”) were essentially harmed by the church in the process. Buying into the impossible standards of this idealized clerical identity stifled opportunity for these men to openly explore their humanity and sexuality, develop intimate and satisfying adult relationships, account morally for their impact on others, and see themselves outside their duties to powerful superiors.

The stunning conclusion of this work is that for those who embraced the idealized model of perfect celibate clerical masculinity, seminary and priestly life were in themselves abusive contexts. Overly credulous or unsavvy, they accepted standards that led to “soul death.” Eventually, children were the “sacrificial lambs” on the altar of this image of clerical perfection. Until recently, victims’ silence allowed Catholics to ignore their complicity in the institutional secrecy and hypocrisy that helped these sacrifices continue.

For Keenan, it remains a question whether these voices speaking up will result in real change. Vilification or dismissal of abusers won’t contribute to the solution. Apologies, shame and even strict “zero tolerance” policies will not constitute the kind of structural reform that will begin to solve the problem in the Roman Catholic church. Only a “new model of the church” will do. Keenan’s hard-nosed and sophisticated book is a step in that direction.

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

Film defrocks church hierarchy over handling of sex abuse

By Andrea Burzynski

Four deaf Wisconsin men were some of the first to seek justice after suffering childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a priest, and a new documentary about the Catholic Church’s poor handling of such cases stemming from the Vatican seeks to make their voices heard.

“Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God” explores the impact of the Roman Catholic Church’s protocol as dictated from the Vatican for dealing with pedophile priests. It opens in U.S. cinemas on November 16, and will air on cable channel HBO in February.

Though American media coverage about child sex abuse by clergy has been extensive since a slew of cases came to light in Boston in 2002, Oscar-winning documentary director Alex Gibney wanted to connect individual stories with what he sees as systemic failures stemming from the top of the church.

“A lot of individual stories had been done about clerical sex abuse, but I hadn’t seen one that really connected the individual stories with the larger cover-up by the Vatican, so that was important,” Gibney told Reuters in an interview.

The film centers on the group of deaf men and their experiences as young boys attending St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin.

In a letter to the Vatican in 1998, the late Rev. Father Lawrence Murphy admitted abusing some 200 deaf boys over two decades beginning in the 1950s.

Murphy claimed he had repented, and asked to live out his last years as a priest, and was never defrocked or punished by civil authorities. He died in 1998.

In the film, the men communicate their frustrating attempts to bring their experiences to the attention of religious and civil authorities with effusive sign language and facial expressions, paired with voiceovers by actors such as Ethan Hawke.

The film also traces a convoluted bureaucracy – right up to the cardinal who is now Pope Benedict – to reveal a set of policies that the film portrays as often seeming more interested in preserving the Church’s image.

STRUGGLING TO BE HEARD

“These were deaf men whose voices literally couldn’t be heard, so there was a silence from them, and there was also this silence coming from the church, a refusal to confront this obvious crime, in part because they were covering it up,” said Gibney.

The Vatican has denied any cover-up in the Murphy case and in 2010 issued a statement condemning his abuse. It has criticized media reports about the Church’s handling of the cases as anti-Catholic.

Contrasting that, the film shows interviews with former church officials who talk openly of church policies to handle cases by “rehabilitating” abusive clergymen and snuffing out scandal.

Gibney said that all of the Vatican officials he contacted declined his interview requests.

Raised Catholic himself, Gibney no longer practices organized religion, but empathizes with Catholics who feel a sense of loyalty to the religion’s institutions and acknowledges that criticism of the church can feel like a personal attack.

“Mea Maxima Culpa,” a Latin phrase meaning “my most grievous fault” focuses on the failures of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy. But Gibney – who won an Oscar for “Taxi to the Dark Side” – said the film’s theme transcends religion and is also relevant for secular institutions.

“This is obviously about the church, but it’s also a crime film,” he said. “It’s about abuse of power and it’s about how institutions instead of reckoning with problems try to cover them up. It’s always the cover-up that creates the problem.”

He cited the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal that rocked Penn State University recently, and the BBC’s poor handling of abuse allegations against the late British TV personality Jimmy Savile as examples of secular institutions brought low by similar issues.

“The thing about predators is that they tend to hide in plain sight,” Gibney said. “You’re seeing it now with Sandusky, you’re seeing it now with Jimmy Savile in Great Britain, and you saw it with Father Murphy in the film.”

Gibney thinks that the public’s stubbornly rosy perceptions of charismatic authority figures, including priests, is a major factor in such scandals.

“They’re often involved in charity or good works,” he said of high-profile abusers. “That seems to give you license to do unbelievable things because people cut you all sorts of slack that they wouldn’t normally do for other people.”

Complete Article HERE!