Category: Priests In Trouble

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Father Bob ‘pressured to quit’ post

VICTORIAN of the Year Father Bob Maguire says he is being made to quit his post as parish priest against his will, and that his ejection could unravel his community work.

Father Maguire is due to step down as parish priest at South Melbourne’s Church of St Peter and St Paul on February 1 next year, as he agreed in a letter to the Archbishop of Melbourne, Denis Hart, in 2009.

But the celebrity Catholic priest said yesterday that he was ”pressured” into writing the letter and in fact wants to remain in the job beyond that date, as his position as parish priest is integral to the church’s work in the community.

”Why would you go to the trouble of breaking up the relationship when in fact everybody seems to be agreeing that it’s a bloody good thing?” he said.

Father Maguire resisted an attempt by Archbishop Hart two years ago to nudge him into retirement upon his 75th birthday, winning an extension in the role until February 1, 2012.

”In 2009 I was pressured into signing a letter of resignation,” he said. ”I turned 75 and [Archbishop Hart] said ‘look, the custom now is to offer your resignation and if you offer it, I’ll take it’. So I said, ‘I don’t know that I’ll offer it’.”

Father Maguire – best known for his appearances on TV and radio alongside comedian John Safran, but also for his work with the homeless and the poor – said he could not understand why he was being singled out for retirement when many Catholic priests continue to work well beyond the age of 75.

But Archbishop Hart said the move was ”consistent with canon law, which asks a priest who turns 75 to offer his resignation”.

”While there may be older parish priests in Victoria their appointment is dependent on the assessment by the local bishop of the circumstances of the priest, parish and diocese,” the archbishop added.

Now 77 but still committed to his church and community work, Father Maguire questioned whether it was his attention-grabbing style, rather than his age, behind the move.

”Maybe the Roman style currently prevailing in the Catholic Church thinks that I’m a bogan,” he said.

Father Maguire was named Victorian of the Year last week for his community service work.

He dedicated the award to his parishioners, saying they had joined him in reaching out to the local community, especially those living in South Melbourne’s public housing estate.

Archbishop Hart also praised Father Maguire’s community work, saying he had ”thoroughly deserved the Victorian of the Year award”.

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US bishop resigns after alleged paedophile flees

Pope Benedict XVI on Thursday accepted the resignation of a US bishop accused of allowing an alleged paedophile priest from his diocese to flee to Mexico, as the Vatican takes action on abuses.

Bishop Daniel Walsh of the diocese of Santa Rosa in California resigned under an article in Catholic Church law invoking a “grave cause”, which can include a failure by the prelate in question to denounce a case of paedophilia.

Walsh, 74, is one year younger than the minimum retirement age for bishops.

Benedict last year called for a zero tolerance approach to child abuse by clergymen and called on bishops to work together with local law enforcement, following thousands of paedophile scandals across Europe and the United States.

Father Xavier Ochoa admitted to the bishop in April 2006 that he had abused young boys but the police were only told three days later by a diocesan lawyer.

By that time, Ochoa had fled to Mexico where he is still at large.

The diocese was ordered to pay five million dollars (3.5 million euros) to the three victims, as well as 20,000 dollars from Walsh personally.

The alleged acts committed by Ochoa included rape and forced oral sex.

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Priest apologises for abusing parishioner

A 79-year-old Catholic priest has apologised in court to a former parishioner for the ‘torture’ of sexual abuse he subjected her to over a number of years.

Paul McGennis had pleaded guilty to eight sample counts of sexual abuse against the young girl in the 1980s.

The abuse began when she was aged ten and continued for a number of years.

The victim said she lived in fear of the priest who threatened that her family would be expelled from the church if she told anyone.

The abuse took place in the priest’s house at a Dublin City Centre parish and continued after he moved to another parish in Dublin.

The victim said he would give her sweets and toys in the early days of the abuse.

In later years, he gave her money after having sex. In statements to gardaí, she said the abuse continued because she was a child and was scared.

She said she would run errands for the priest and the abuse began one day when she was late returning from an errand and he ‘gave out’ to her. It then took place almost every fortnight in the bedroom of the parish house and in a waiting room.

She said she would be admitted to the house by a housekeeper who was often present in the house, although not in the room, while the abuse took place.

Throughout the abuse she would cry and ask him to stop but he continued, she said. She did not tell her family because she thought she would be ‘battered’ and was afraid to bring shame on them.

She complained to gardaí a number of years ago after receiving counselling following a suicide attempt.

When interviewed by gardaí in 2009, McGennis denied the allegations. He pleaded guilty earlier this year.

At the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court last Friday, McGennis apologised to the victim and her family for the ‘stress and torture I have put them through and for the fact that my initial denials must have made it worse’.

In her victim impact statement, the victim said she would serve a sentence until the day she dies because of the abuse.

She said she lived in fear of seeing her abuser who had ‘taken away my innocence, my childhood memories, my chance of an education and my prospects for the future.’

It continued to threaten her marriage and denied her the chance to have children, she said. It left her without self esteem or the ability to form and maintain relationships. As a teenager she engaged in destructive behaviour.

Lawyers for Paul McGennis said his remorse and apology were genuine and said he was at low risk of reoffending. They asked the judge to take into account his age and medical condition when considering sentence.

The court was told he now lives at a diocesan centre at Clonliffe College and is living under a direction from the archbishop which governs his ministry and his contact with young people.

He has previous convictions for indecent assault and has served a prison sentence.

He is also co-operating with garda investigation launched as a result of the Murphy Report but Judge Desmond Hogan said that was not related to the current charges.

Judge Desmond Hogan said he needed time to consider the victim impact statement, along with medical and psychological reports submitted by the defence, and adjourned sentence to 29 July next.

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Despite priest’s dark past, he was given ample time to find new victims

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Early in 2001, a young priest arrived in Southern California after being asked to leave his diocese near Rome.

The Rev. Fernando Lopez Lopez first went to the San Bernardino diocese, where a monsignor found it odd that he would show up unannounced, with no letter of explanation from his bishop.

The monsignor checked with church officials in Italy and was told Lopez Lopez had been asked to leave his post. When the monsignor confronted Lopez Lopez with this information, the priest admitted he had been asked to leave because of complaints from parishioners in Tivoli that he was involved in drug activity with young men in the church. There were also reports the priest was “homosexually involved with some of the young men of the youth group.” Lopez Lopez denied the allegations and also said the youths in question were over 18.

The monsignor in San Bernardino refused to assign the priest to duties in the diocese and suggested he go back to Italy. Instead, Rev. Lopez Lopez headed farther west and decided to try his luck with the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

This time, even as L.A. church officials were trying to stem a spreading sexual abuse scandal, he wasn’t met with the same level of suspicion and didn’t admit to his past. And for unknown reasons, the same Italian bishop who told San Bernardino that Lopez Lopez had been asked to leave, this time signed a form for the L.A. Archdiocese indicating there were no problems in the priest’s past.

Rev. Lopez Lopez got the job and was assigned to St. Thomas the Apostle near Koreatown, where he was routinely in contact with minors. It was there, over the next three years, that he repeatedly molested three teenagers, including two minors. He was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to prison, then deported upon his release to his home country of Colombia.

All this bubbles back up now for two reasons. First, a lawsuit against the priest, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony and the archdiocese is scheduled to be heard in October. And second, “Dan Rather Reports” aired an investigative piece Tuesday night claiming that Lopez Lopez had an even darker past than was previously known.

Rather reported that according to an Italian court official, Lopez Lopez pleaded guilty in 2000 to “repeated sexual violence on a minor.”

If true, it’s morally shocking that such a priest would have been allowed to stay in ministry, but not surprising. If anything has been more reprehensible than the decades of sexual abuse by priests, it has been the attempts by the Catholic church to shuffle pedophiles to new parishes and cover up as much of the mess as possible.

So Rev. Lopez Lopez ends up in California, where he seemed to have no trouble finding new victims.

Attorney J. Michael Hennigan, speaking for Mahony and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, argues that his clients did no wrong and said they tried to check on Lopez Lopez’s past. But even if you give them a pass for not being as suspicious as the monsignor in San Bernardino, there’s another little bombshell in this story.

The San Bernardino monsignor, Gerard Lopez, sent a letter to one of Mahony’s key deputies on Jan. 8, 2004, after learning that the same priest he turned away in 2001 had been working in Los Angeles. The monsignor warned L.A.’s vicar of clergy about what he had learned of the priest’s background.

But it wasn’t until nine weeks after the letter was sent to Los Angeles that Mahony’s staff sent a letter to the bishop in Tivoli, asking about Lopez Lopez.

“If your Excellency would be so disposed, may we inquire as to whether there are any issues … that would cast any shadow of doubt upon Father Lopez’s priestly integrity and ministry while serving in the Diocese of Tivoli?”

Would his Excellency be so disposed?

Why are church officials so sickeningly polite with each other about the business of children being abused?

How about picking up the phone, instead of sending a letter to Italy, and demanding an immediate explanation?

How about calling the pope?

And how about yanking Lopez Lopez out of the ministry immediately when a warning letter arrives from San Bernardino, until the entire matter is settled?

Hennigan tells me there was nothing to go on but unsubstantiated allegations involving people 18 or over. He said church officials questioned the principal at St. Thomas and also Lopez Lopez, who suggested the monsignor in San Bernardino had misunderstood him regarding what happened in Tivoli. Hennigan also said the church immediately removed Lopez Lopez from ministry when it received an allegation that the priest had molested a kid, and church officials called the police too. That was on July 13, 2004.

The half a year between the arrival of the letter from San Bernardino and the removal of Lopez Lopez is when “some of the worst of the abuse took place,” said Vince Finaldi, the attorney who represents the unnamed victim who has sued the church.

When Lopez Lopez was convicted in 2005 of four felony counts of lewd acts with a child and one felony count of sexual battery, among other counts, Cardinal Mahony wrote a letter to the Vatican suggesting it might be a good idea to dismiss him from the priesthood.

Mahony, never shy about polishing his own image, specified in the letter that Lopez Lopez certainly wouldn’t have been hired in Los Angeles if Tivoli had mentioned his past. Mahony told the Vatican the church’s investigation of Lopez Lopez “began promptly following the initial accusation” of abuse.

Yes, and it took only six months after the letter from San Bernardino to get him away from children.

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Poland Complains to Vatican Over Priest’s Remarks

By VANESSA GERA Associated Press
WARSAW, Poland June 27, 2011 (AP)
A Polish priest and media mogul has sparked uproar in Poland by calling the country a totalitarian state that “hasn’t been ruled by Poles since 1939” — a statement many interpret as code for saying Jews are secretly running the country.

The Rev. Tadeusz Rydzyk, who has previously been accused of fomenting anti-Semitism through his politically influential, ultra-Catholic radio station Radio Maryja, made the comments at the European Parliament last week.

Poland’s Foreign Ministry sent a diplomatic note to the Vatican on Saturday accusing Rydzyk of “harming the image of Poland abroad,” the first-ever such complaint by the Polish government to the Holy See. The Vatican is the supreme authority for Rydzyk’s Redemptorist order.

Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told Polish news agency PAP on Monday that Rydzyk speaks in his own name and his statements do not involve the Holy See or Poland’s Church.

He did not say if the Vatican will offer a formal reply, according to PAP.

Jerzy Buzek, the head of the EU Parliament and former prime minister of Poland, has called Rydzyk’s remarks “scandalous and unacceptable.”

Rydzyk spoke during a seminar on renewable energy last Tuesday. His remarks went largely unnoticed in Brussels but have since sparked days of debate in Poland, with weekend talk shows and newspaper opinion columns devoted to analyzing the powerful priest’s words.

Poland is preparing to take over the rotating presidency of the European Union on Friday — which Warsaw sees as a chance to improve its image on the European stage.

“The tragedy of Poland is that Poland hasn’t been ruled by Poles since 1939,” Rydzyk said, according to Polish media reports on the speech. He added that, “this isn’t an issue of blood or affiliation,” but that those who rule Poland today “do not love in a Polish way, do not have a Polish heart.”

He also said Poland today is a totalitarian and “uncivilized country.”

Though he did not mention Jews by name, his language echoed that of anti-Semites who claim that Jews hold excessive power in Poland and that Polish Jews are not “real Poles” with Polish interests at heart.

The number of Jews in Poland today is tiny. There were 3.5 million Jews in Poland before World War II, but most were murdered by Germany during the Holocaust and many of those who survived fled anti-Semitic violence and prejudice after the war.

Michael Levi, the president of Beit Warszawa, a Jewish Reform community in Warsaw, said he considered Rydzyk’s language to be anti-Semitic since it comes in the context of his support for far-right politicians and anti-Jewish remarks his radio station has aired. It is “pure hate propaganda” that encourages extremists, Levi said.

Poland also is far from being a totalitarian state. After throwing off communism 22 years ago, Poland has joined NATO and the EU and stands as a model of democratic transition that has even advised the new Tunisian leadership following the recent revolution there.

Rydzyk runs a conservative media empire that includes the Catholic station Radio Maryja and the television station Trwam, both popular among some conservative, nationalist Poles.

He was at the center of a scandal in 2007 when he was allegedly caught on tape suggesting that Jews are greedy and that then-Polish President Lech Kaczynski was subservient to Jewish lobbies.

International Jewish organizations protested his comments at the time, and were also angered when Pope Benedict XVI held a private meeting with Rydzyk that year.

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