Tag: Avoiding Corporate Responsibility

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Why Penn State is (and isn’t) like the Catholic Church

Penn State coaching legend Joe Paterno is out in the university’s burgeoning sex abuse scandal, and comparisons to the Roman Catholic Church’s own abuse scandals are in.

“The parallels are too striking to ignore. A suspected predator who exploits his position to take advantage of his young charges. The trusting colleagues who don’t want to believe it — and so don’t,” author Jonathan Mahler wrote in The New York Times.

“This was the dynamic that pervaded the Catholic clerical culture during its sexual abuse scandals, and it seems to have been no less pervasive at Penn State.”

The analogy is popular. But does it hold up to scrutiny? Yes, and no. Here are three ways in which the twin abuse scandals are similar, and three ways they are different.

SIMILARITIES

1. Sports is like a religion, with its rituals and incantations, rules and traditions, collective devotion and uniforms. Indeed, anthropologists say that like religion, athletic competition is one of the oldest communal impulses in human history, and today sports and religion mirror each other almost as much as they did in classical Greece.

To wit: a sign held by one Paterno supporter at a rally for the disgraced coach: “Two of my favorite ‘J’s’ in life: Jesus and Joe Pa.”

2. Whatever their bona fides as religions, Penn State and the Catholic Church are big, self-protective institutions. The cover-up is always as bad (or worse) as the crime, and Penn State leaders feared scandal — and probably harm to their own reputations — so much that they didn’t think about the welfare of the children. Same with so many bishops. And Boy Scout leaders. And teachers unions, and so on.

“The sort of instinct to protect the institution is very similar. And of course, in both cases, it backfires horribly. If your idea was to avoid a scandal, you sure failed,” Phil Lawler, a Catholic journalist in Boston, told The Associated Press.

That is why the public blamed bishops more than the predatory priests, and why so much anger has focused on Paterno rather than on alleged abuser Jerry Sandusky.

3. It took a grand jury to bring the Penn State abuse to light, just as it did (and continues to do) in the Catholic Church. Look at last month’s indictment of Bishop Robert Finn in Kansas City, Mo., for failing to report a priest suspected of child abuse, or the indictment last February of Monsignor William Lynn, a former top official in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia who is charged with covering up for abusive priests.

Institutions are not good at policing themselves. It is unclear how far the problem extends in college sports, and the church.

DIFFERENCES

1. Penn State has a system of accountability, however imperfect, because like any university, the school is governed by a board of trustees. In this case, the board took relatively swift action (albeit under severe pressure from the public and authorities) in part because if Penn State loses customers, it goes kaput.

The Catholic Church, meanwhile, believes that even the “gates of hell will not prevail” against it, and many church leaders embrace the “mustard seed” view of a smaller but more devout “saving remnant” that would be purified by suffering. In a reprise of the lesson of the Cross, they would “win by losing.” Needless to say, that’s not how universities, not to mention football teams, tend to see things. What’s more, the pope is answerable to no one — except God.

2. Sports is not an actual religion. Sports does not have divine sanction, nor can its leaders make use of divine symbols and power to exploit children — and potentially turn them against the eternal salvation that those leaders say is the point of a religion’s existence. That is a higher order of bad. Sports consists of games in the first instance, and the last.

If anything, sports is more like a cult — closed in on itself, exalting personalities more than a system or institution. Catholicism is actually a very decentralized community, and Catholics can hold their leaders in the same low regard that they have for politicians. That’s why you saw Catholics in Boston protesting to have Cardinal Bernard Law fired in 2002, while thousands of Penn State students rallied to let Paterno keep his job.

3. Penn State, and collegiate athletics as a whole, have not done as much as the Catholic Church to establish systematic safeguards for protecting children and educating students and staff about warning signs and best practices.

Of course, the Catholic Church has had a 10-year head start, and many safeguards were put in place after the fact. But sports experts note that there have been periodic sex scandals involving college coaches for years, and that bad behavior by college athletes — from sexual assault to bar brawls — is rampant. Yet there has been little focus on changing a culture that enables such behavior because college sports are, well, sacrosanct.

An ESPN investigation found that between 2002 and 2008, some 46 Penn State football players faced 163 criminal charges, and 27 players were convicted of or pleaded guilty to a combined 45 counts.

In the end, it may be the sensationalism of the sexual abuse of boys by men that has driven coverage of both the Penn State story and the Catholic crisis. And that may reveal as much about American attitudes as it does about the abuse itself.

Complete Article HERE!

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People power – a stranger at the Catholic church’s door

COMMENTARY

Hear this, bishops and priests: Catholics’ version of the Arab spring has started, and this week has seen important milestones

People power is all around: think the Arab spring, the protesters outside St Paul’s Cathedral, the national outpouring of outrage over phone hacking and, before that, MPs’ expenses. This week, popular democracy came crashing in on yet another institution in desperate need of reform – the Catholic church, which has been a bastion of power for one of the most tightly-knit, elderly male oligarchies of all time.

What has happened over the past few days might not have looked particularly dramatic, but it has shaken the powers that be in the Catholic church in this country to their core. And although ordinary people didn’t seem to be in the vanguard in the same way they were in the Arab spring, they have played a key role.

What’s happened is this: First, Lord Carlile’s report into a Catholic school in west London, St Benedict’s, has concluded that the monks who run it have been guilty of a “lengthy and cumulative failure” to protect the children in their care from abuse, and that the school’s organisational structure lacks “independence, transparency, accountability and diversity, and is drawn from too narrow a group of people”. It recommends that the Benedictine monks who set the school up should forfeit control of it, and two trusts are now being set up to remove “all power from the abbey”. The new body, says Carlile, should have policies and procedures that are clearly understandable to outsiders, and should have monitoring safeguards in place.

Second, a high court judge has ruled that the church is responsible as an organisation for crimes committed by its priests. This follows a case in which a former resident of a Catholic children’s home in Hampshire alleged that she was raped and assaulted by a priest. Lawyers for the diocese involved, who are arguing that the relationship between a priest and a bishop is different from a normal employee/employer situation, have said they will appeal.

That case is likely to drag on for some years (and will do the church no end of PR disaster along the way); but both it and the Carlile report have something important in common, which they share with other popular movements of recent times. It is this: ordinary people, long repressed and silent, but with great power when they do choose to act, have spoken out. If former pupils from St Benedict’s School in Ealing had not come forward; if the woman from the children’s home (and she is not alone; others are alleging similar abuse) had not spoken out, the changes we have seen this week would never have happened.

And they are enormously significant, because power sharing is an entirely novel concept for those at the top of the Catholic church. Transparent, Lord Carlile? Independent? Accountable? Diverse? Oh, dear me: the bishops may need some explanation as to the very meaning of these concepts. And as to the idea that policies and procedures should be put in place at St Benedict’s that are understandable to outsiders: well, I imagine there are a few splutterings over breakfast cereal at bishops’ residences around the Catholic dioceses of the country this week.

I have been a member of the Catholic church all my life (albeit, sometimes, hanging on by my fingernails); and for me, as for many other Catholics, the problem is that the men who control the church do not see democracy as containing any inherent value. As far as they are concerned, power isn’t devolved from the people, it is imposed from above – from God himself. They believe in a God who makes his wishes known to a small and select group of individuals, individuals who happen to be exclusively male, and rather elderly.

I don’t believe in that God any more, and I suspect and hope that many of my fellow Catholics feel the same. I don’t believe in a God who would not merely allow, but actively want power to be concentrated in the hands of a tiny (male) minority, while the majority had to do as they were told until they discover that what they are being told has been shot through for decades and even centuries with lies, cover-ups, smokescreens and an inability to grasp nettles. I believe in a God whose truths and goodness are located, not in the minds and hearts of a small number of men, but in the minds and hearts of a large number of women and men who care about one another and the wider community and the church itself, and whose views have for too long been ignored.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and its untenable power structures won’t be dismantled in one either. The Catholic church’s Arab spring will take many years, probably decades, to achieve. But hear this, bishops and priests: our spring has started, and this week’s developments were important milestones. And know this too: the church that will emerge from the ashes of the old guard will be better, and bigger, and kinder, and more honest; it will be transparent, and accountable, and independent, and diverse. But best of all, it will be more Christ-like, too.

Complete Article HERE!

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Catholic church can be held responsible for wrongdoing by priests

High court ruling will make it easier for victims of clerical sex abuse to bring compensation claims against the church.

Victims of clerical sexual abuse will find it easier to bring compensation claims against the Catholic church after a judge ruled it can be held responsible for the wrongdoings of its priests.

In a test case heard at the high court, Mr Justice Macduff gave a decision in favour of a woman, known as JGE, who claims she was sexually assaulted by a Portsmouth priest at a children’s home in Hampshire.

The judge said although there had been no formal contract between the church and the priest, the late Father Baldwin, there were “crucial features” that should be recognised.

He said: “He [Baldwin] was provided with the premises, the pulpit and the clerical robes. He was directed into the community with that full authority and was given free rein to act as a representative of the church. He had been trained and ordained for the purpose. He had immense power handed to him by the defendants [the trustees of the Roman Catholic diocesan trust]. It was they who appointed him to the position of trust, which (if the allegations be proved) he so abused.”

It is the first time a court has ruled that the relationship between a Catholic priest and his bishop is akin to an employment relationship. It sets a precedent for similar cases, by providing further guidance for such trials in the future, while also putting the church in uncharted territory. The church has been granted extended leave to appeal the decision.

Lord Faulks QC, on behalf of the defendants, said the church was not seeking to evade responsibility for paedophile priests. “My clients take sexual abuse extremely seriously and are very concerned to eradicate and investigate it,” he said. “This case has been brought as a point of law that has never been decided.”

JGE told the Guardian she was pleased with the judgment but angry about the church getting leave to appeal. She said: “I’m fuming. I’ve had no support from the church whatsoever. Nobody has contacted me. They are ignoring victims. It feels like being on a rack, turning the screws tighter and tighter, over hot coals.”

A victory for the the church would have meant it could avoid paying any compensation to victims of clerical sexual abuse.

Complete Article HERE!

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Vatican moved quickly to punish Gumbleton

Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, a retired auxiliary bishop of Detroit, revealed for the first time yesterday details about his removal as a parish pastor in 2007. NCR published a report of the talk Gumbleton delivered at pre-conference meeting of Call to Action in Milwaukee.

Gumbleton had followed the sex abuse crisis in the press, especially the church’s response. “I thought they were starting to move along.”
The bishops had developed the Dallas Charter in 2002, outlining policies for dealing with sexual abuse cases.

“I can remember actually being at the press conference when they announced the charter and they said ‘and now the whole problem is behind us,'” Gumbleton said. “They really talked like they had settled this whole thing.”
“It’s not over and it won’t be over until we within the church deal with it in a very open, honest and thorough way,” he said. “And that’s going to take much change within the church.”

After being lied to in the past by a fellow bishop who said he had taken care of an abusive priest when in fact he hadn’t, Gumbleton “was totally upset, disillusioned even when I discovered how easily he could put me off, tell me ‘I’ll take care of it’ and then do nothing.”

Barbara Blaine of SNAP, a longtime friend of Gumbleton, asked him if he would testify on behalf of SNAP for a statute of limitations case. A date in January 2006 worked for Gumbleton. The hearing would be in Ohio.

“My testimony made the points on why we need to make this change,” he said at the Call to Action conference session Nov. 4. “I also, I thought about this, and thought maybe the most persuasive thing I can tell you people is that I’m a victim.”

He couldn’t talk about that for more than 50 years, he said. “There was one time [after 2002] and I almost got up at the bishop’s meeting to tell my own story and to try to convince the bishops that we had to approach this whole thing differently. But I had my hand up but I didn’t get recognized right away and pretty soon that session was over. So I never did it at the bishops’ meeting. But this time I wrote it into my testimony.”

After giving his testimony in Ohio, the bishops in Ohio reacted so quickly, Gumbleton said, that they must have called the papal nuncio that night.
“And here’s the thing that’s strange: By that time, I’m a bishop already — 30 years at least — and I know all these people. And I’ve met with them many times — you know, the regional meetings, the national meetings. Not one of them called me up to talk to me about it. Now if they were angry they could call me up and holler at me, scream at me if they wanted. Or [ask] ‘why did you do it?’ Not one. And not one bishop across the whole country ever said a word to me about it in any kind of personal way.

Within a matter of days Maida called him about a letter from the papal nuncio that he was to share with Gumbleton.

The bishops had contacted the Papal Nuncio, Gumbleton said, and the Nuncio had contacted Cardinal Giovanni Re from the Congregation for Bishops in Rome. A letter for Gumbleton came from the Nuncio to Maida and then was shared with Gumbleton.

He corresponded with the congregation in Rome before over various issues when he was a bishop, he said, and the correspondence always takes a long time. But in this case, everything happened within 10 days. Cardinal Giovanni Re of the Congregation for Bishops wrote a two and a half page letter outlining the canons of canon law Gumbleton had violated.

“I don’t remember what all they were because I wouldn’t even read the letter,” Gumbleton said. “In fact, Maida didn’t even give it to me at first. The main thing was I had broken a canon which they said I violated what in the canon is called the “communio episcaporum”: the communion of bishops.

“We’re all supposed to be together, think together, talk together, you know, one voice. You know, how can that be? You’re a church of human beings; you can’t be.” But because he had left the Detroit archdiocese and gone to another diocese to give testimony in support of something the bishops in that region were against, he had been in violation, he said.

“And so this was, from their point of view, a major crime that I had committed,” he said. “So they demanded that I resign immediately as bishop and also resign my parish where I had been a pastor.”

He didn’t have to be a pastor, but he wanted to be a pastor and “really loved being” at St. Leo, he said.

“I couldn’t understand why I had to resign as pastor,” he said. He had no problem resigning as bishop, he said (“Because this was 2006 and by canon law I should have already retired a whole year ago, but when my date came up to retire, I decided — I knew there was no chance, but I just thought ‘I’ll test this and see what happens'”).

He sent in his resignation letter, and “immediately, my resignation was accepted,” he said. But he didn’t want to resign as pastor.
“In the archdiocese of Detroit, we have a policy at age 70, every pastor will write a letter resigning from his parish but if he’s in good health and wants to continue to work” he can be appointed as a year-by-year administrator, he said.

Other priests and classmates Gumbleton knew had done this, he said.
“And that makes sense, because when you’re pastor, as I said before, it’s hard to remove a person even if the person has become senile and is not functioning well at all,” he said. “You can’t remove him. Rome will defend the pastor.”
But an administrator can be moved anytime. “So I wrote a letter in which I said I’m requesting to resign from St. Leo Parish but with the understanding that I would be appointed administrator on a year-by-year basis for as long as it’s feasible for me to be the pastor.”

Within a few days, Maida sent him a letter, he said, telling him that request was unacceptable and that he had to resign. Gumbleton went to talk with Maida, and Maida repeated what Re had written in the letter, that Gumbleton had to resign as bishop and from the parish.

“That astounded me, partly because what does Cardinal Re know what’s good for a parish in Detroit, who should or should not be pastor?” Gumbleton said. “And why would the archbishop accept Cardinal Re’s demands? I mean, after all, he’s the archbishop. ”

The archbishop (or the pope) is the only one who can assign or remove a pastor in his diocese. “A cardinal who’s the head of a congregation doesn’t have any kind of jurisdiction or authority like that at all,” Gumbleton said. “So why would Maida — well, it’s part of the whole club system with the cardinals: you’re not going to stand up against another cardinal. And so he would not appoint me as administrator, so I had to leave the parish.”

Within a few days, one of the auxiliary bishops went to Gumbleton’s home and told him he had to leave. He asked if he had a couple of weeks to make arrangements but was told no: he had to leave. When he talked to Cardinal Maida, he asked for time to prepare the people of the parish for the change.
Gumbleton said he saw a letter that stated he was resigning the day before it was to be handed to parishioners. “So Sunday morning I have to pass this out at church, that says I’m gone right now. Well that was a terrible shock to the people and to me.”

“As I looked at it, though, it was all so irrational, because I’m removed from the parish, I not allowed to say Mass there … I could say Mass any other place in the diocese. So it was really against the people.” He continued to say Mass in the diocese, do confirmations, and be engaged in the other activities he did, such as Pax Christi.

“Yet the one thing that seemed to me that I should have been allowed to do is continue be the pastor of the parish for the benefit of the people, because we have a shortage of priests and nobody’s ever been appointed there as pastor since,” he said. “That’s really hurtful especially to a small parish. So it seemed like it was just vindictive. It wasn’t helping anything and wasn’t appropriate for the people of the parish to be punished for what I had done.”
He apologized to the parishioners at St. Leo and they were understanding, he said. He has been back to St. Leo since to celebrate Mass.

Gumbleton was also told not to go into another diocese without getting explicit permission from the bishop of that diocese, he said. “And that was an attempt, I guess, to prohibit my public speaking.”

Once, he was to speak in a diocese for a major Catholic organization but had to cancel at the last minute, but his name was still on the flyer. He got a voicemail from the bishop of that diocese, saying “I don’t want you to ever come to this diocese for any reason ever” and Gumbleton was surprised at how angry he was, because he was not a bishop to which he had violated “communio episcaporum.”

“I really have a sense that they [the Vatican] weren’t trying to silence me giving presentations on other topics which I do quite frequently,” he said. “I think they really were all upset about this one issue and that’s because it really does” put the focus, in a sense, on “a very important part of the church, and that’s the ordained priests, bishops and popes. ”

With that restriction, Gumbleton said, “It doesn’t feel very pleasant to go into a diocese to speak and know the bishop of the diocese would rather you not be there. And yet I don’t let that inhibit me, so I find ways to speak throughout the country,” he said.

“I don’t have any great anger against the bishops, Gumbleton said. “I feel bad for our church basically. I just feel we’re missing an opportunity to be healed because we don’t want to look at the deep problems that exist. And sooner or later we’re going to be forced to do that.”

Complete Article HERE!