The news that Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is unvaccinated just cost him a visit to a church in San Francisco.
“Because Cordileone is not vaccinated and we’ve had breakthrough vaccinations in the church, I’m not comfortable. I’m not comfortable with him coming unvaccinated,” said Rita Clunies-Ross, St. Agnes Catholic Church parishioner.
December 19 was the day Archbishop Cordileone was scheduled to visit Saint Agnes Church. Several weeks before his visit, churchgoers like Rita Clunies-Ross voiced concerns. Now this church is taking a stance.
“I called him and spoke with him and asked him to re-schedule his visit for a later time because many people in the parish had expressed concern about this. I feel it is important that everyone feel safe, and we all do our part to prevent the spread of COVID-19, especially now with the new Omicron Variant. These are stressful times enough and I felt his pastoral visit to us would be overshadowed by concerns about the pandemic,” said a bulletin Pastor George Williams posted on the church’s website, letting the parishioners know Archbishop Cordileone won’t be visiting them for now.
The San Francisco Archdiocese has been outspoken about the COVID vaccine, encouraging San Franciscans to get vaccinated.
Meanwhile, the archbishop is unvaccinated.
“It’s not that he is saying we don’t want you. We would more than welcome you here if you came vaccinated, if you respect the community you are visiting,” said Clunies-Ross.
In a statement the Archdiocese responded, “Health care decisions are a very personal matter. Archbishop Cordileone has every confident in Father Williams’ ability to know his people well, and respond to their sensitivities with compassion.”
In August, Pope Francis urged people to get vaccinated, calling it an act of love.
During an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Cordileone said his personal doctor told him, “it’s probably not necessary for him to be vaccinated,” citing his “immune system is strong.”
“If there was some health reason I could see it. There is not religious reason from the Catholic Church that would stop you from being vaccinated. I can’t see another reason,” said Clunies-Ross.
Pastor Williams said to ABC7 news, “It’s our policy here that all the priests who celebrate Mass need to be vaccinated out of concern for our parishioners. When I explained this to his Excellency, he graciously understood. We look forward to his visit when circumstances permit.”
Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate operated 48 residential schools in Canada
Evelyn Korkmaz, a survivor of abuse at St. Anne’s Indian Residential School, has long been calling on the Oblates to release records in Canada and Rome.
A Catholic order that ran residential schools across Canada now says it will open up its archives in Rome to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR).
This is welcome news for survivors, many of whom have long called for the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and other Catholic entities to make their records available.
Survivor Evelyn Korkmaz says she remains skeptical, though.
“The devil is in the details. We have to know the details before anybody agrees to releasing these documents,” said Korkmaz, a survivor of abuse at St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in Fort Albany, Ont.
She wants access to her own student records, as well as journals and other archives, so she can trace her experience at the school.
“We’ve been disappointed in the past. So I don’t want to get my hopes up and get these documents and find out that they were redacted,” said Korkmaz.
A joint statement between the NCTR and the Oblates, released on Tuesday, said the religious order will grant “full access to critical residential school records.”
Stephanie Scott is the executive director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
The centre’s executive director, Stephanie Scott, said she’s had recent discussions with Oblate Father Ken Thorson about access to the records and he offered an opportunity to “investigate their archives, find some research, see what’s available.”
“There could have been letters written that ended up in Rome that are there, so we’re going to find out what truly exists,” said Scott.
Those records belong to Canada. They belong to the people first and foremost.
– Brenda Macdougall, University of Ottawa
The Oblate leadership is now seeking the most appropriate way to figure out what documents may exist, and to ensure documents related to Oblate involvement in residential schools might be made available, Thorson told CBC in an email.
He said documents will not be redacted and “any records from residential schools found in this process would be returned to Canada.”
“We are looking to the [centre] for guidance in the development of an appropriate third-party process to facilitate this preliminary work. We anticipate being able to share more about this in the near future,” said Thorson.
“The records that we had looked at here are no longer in this country,” said Brenda Macdougall, a professor and research chair in Métisfamily and community traditions at the University of Ottawa.
She and a research colleague made the discovery when updating an academic article.
“Those records belong to Canada. They belong to the people first and foremost. … They have to come back through subpoena or the Church. The Pope himself can suspend canonical law and return them,” Macdougall told CBC in November.
The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation already holds close to 7,000 survivor statements and more than five million records, said Scott.
She said there’s a commitment to finding all residential school records “no matter where they are located or how long it takes.”
Color me unsurprised. San Francisco’s homophobic gem of a Catholic Archbishop, who’s more concerned with making abortion and gay marriage illegal again than with a silly pandemic, claims that his personal physician has told him he doesn’t need a COVID vaccine.
Maybe the Catholic Church in San Francisco employs physicians who practice Christian Science-style faith healing, but Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone says that his doctor has, bizarrely, advised against him getting vaccinated because, and we quote, “my immune system is strong” and it’s “probably not necessary” for him to get vaccinated. This is odd but hardly surprising given what we know about the man — and all this came out during an interview this week with the Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast in which Cordileone was glad to discuss the conservative-leaning Supreme Court’s likely upcoming overturning of Roe v. Wade.
“The problem is… that too many women have no choice,” Cordileone says, making a circular argument about why women get abortions instead of being pro-life. He argues that many women are lied to in abortion clinics and when they change their minds at the last minute, they’re pushed by clinicians to go ahead and abort their pregnancies.
As for why he’s not vaccinated, Cordileone says, “There are a number of reasons, and from what I’ve been able to learn about the vaccines, and about the dangers of COVID, and talking with my own primary health care physician, I do have a good immune system, and he told me that it’s probably not necessary for me to be vaccinated. He didn’t dissuade me from being vaccinated, but he said it was fine if I didn’t get vaccinated.”
He then goes on to parrot various conservative-pundit talking points, spouting some pseudo-science about how these “aren’t really vaccines in the traditional sense” because they don’t offer long-term immunity from the virus, only temporary protection. And he says something that no scientist has asserted, which is that booster shots will likely be needed “every six months” going forward.
And then he blathers on about how he’s been in multiple situations in which he probably would have been infected if he didn’t have this blessed-by-God immune system, including being in an enclosed space with someone who later turned out to be COVID-positive.
He’s also not concerned about spreading the virus to others unknowingly, because, again, he’s a self-appointed expert and he says that asymptomatic people “very rarely” spread the virus, and he would stay home if he were feeling sick.
Anyway, he’s an asshole! We knew this already.
As ABC 7 notes, after the Pope told all Catholics that getting vaccinated was an “act of love” to our fellow humans, Cordileone issued a statement saying, “I join Pope Francis and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in advising you to get vaccinated if your doctor recommends it.”
But, he’s still a political animal who’s at odds with most of the residents in the city in which he lives. And he’d rather go with Joe Rogan and Fox News on this.
When young nuns at a convent in Eastern Europe told their Mother Superior that a priest had tried to molest them, she retorted that it was probably their fault for “provoking him.”
When African nuns in Minnesota asked why it was always they who had to shovel snow they were told it was because they were young and strong, even though white sisters of the same age lived there too.
As the Roman Catholic Church pays more attention to the closed world of convents, where women spend much of their time in prayer and household work, more episodes of psychological, emotional and physical abuse are coming to light.
A new book, “Veil of Silence” by Salvatore Cernuzio, a journalist for the Vatican’s online outlet, Vatican News, is the latest expose to come from within and approved by authorities.
Cernuzio recounts experiences of 11 women and their struggles with an age-old system where the Mother Superior and older nuns demand total obedience, in some cases resulting in acts of cruelty and humiliation.
Marcela, a South American woman who joined an order of cloistered nuns in Italy 20 years ago when she was 19, recounts how the indoctrination was so strict that younger sisters needed permission to go to the bathroom and ask for sanitary products during their menstrual periods.
“You are always complaining! Do you want to be a saint or not?” Marcela, who later left the convent, quotes the Mother Superior as shouting when she suggested changes in the daily routine.
Therese, a French woman, was told “you have to suffer for Jesus” when she asked to be spared physically demanding chores because of a back condition.
“I understood that we were all like dogs,” recounted Elizabeth, an Australian. “They tell us to sit and we sit, to get up and we get up, to roll over and we roll over.”
BURNOUT SYNDROME
Last year, Father Giovanni Cucci wrote a landmark article about abuse in convents in the Jesuit journal Civilta Cattolica, whose texts are approved by the Vatican.
He found that most of it was abuse of power, including episodes of racism such as in the Minnesota convent. Cucci said the problem needed more attention because it had been overshadowed by the sexual abuse of children by priests.
In 2018, the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano exposed the plight of foreign nuns sent by their orders to work as housekeepers for cardinals and bishops in Rome with little or no remuneration.
It later chronicled a “burnout” syndrome, where younger women with good educations were held back by older superiors reluctant to relinquish a boot camp-style tradition of assigning them menial tasks, ostensibly to instill discipline and obedience.
“Whatever may have worked in a pyramidal, authoritarian context of relationships before is no longer desirable or liveable,” wrote Sister Nathalie Becquart, a French member of the Xaviere Missionary Sisters and one of the highest-ranking women in the Vatican.
Becquart wrote in the book’s preface of the “cries and sufferings” of women who entered convents because they felt a calling from God but later left because their complaints too often fell on deaf ears.
Some were stigmatized as “traitors” by their orders and had great difficultly getting jobs in the outside world.
Last year, Cardinal Joao Braz de Aviz, who heads the Vatican department that oversees religious congregations, revealed that Pope Francis had opened a home in Rome for former nuns abandoned by their orders.
The cardinal, who has launched investigations into a number of convents, told the Vatican newspaper he was shocked to discover that there were a few cases where former nuns had to resort to prostitution to live.
In December 1992, Phil Saviano was at the lowest point of his life. He was 40 years old, out of work and dying of AIDS. Leafing through the Boston Globe, looking for some last-minute Christmas gifts, he saw a small item that contained a familiar name.
He read that a Catholic priest, David A. Holley, had been arrested for abusing boys in the 1970s at a church in New Mexico.
“It was a life-changing moment,” Mr. Saviano later told the British newspaper the Daily Mail. “It was the day all the bells went off for me. I suddenly saw how naive I had been in assuming he had only done this to me.”
Almost three decades earlier, beginning when Mr. Saviano was 11, he had been repeatedly molested by Holley at St. Denis Catholic Church in Douglas, Mass. The abuse went on for a year and a half, until Holley left the parish.
With a strength born of desperation, Mr. Saviano found his voice and told his story to the Globe, becoming one of the first victims of sexual abuse by a priest to go public. In 1995, he reached a financial settlement with the diocese of Worcester, Mass., that amounted to $5,700 after attorney fees. He turned down a larger payout that would have required him to keep silent about his childhood trauma. He believed the only reason he didn’t have to sign a confidentiality agreement was that no one expected him to live.
“If I had not been dying of AIDS, I would not have had the courage to come forward,” Mr. Saviano told the Globe in 2009, “but at that point my career was over, I was on my way out physically, my reputation was shot in the eyes of many people, and I didn’t have a lot to lose. This was a final opportunity to effect some change and address this thing that happened to me when I was a kid.”
Soon afterward, he received a new HIV/AIDS treatment that helped him regain his health. He found a new sense of purpose as an activist and whistleblower and began to research sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. In 1997, he founded a New England chapter of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP).
With a background in public relations, Mr. Saviano approached the Globe with his evidence in 1998, but the paper passed on the story. But beginning in 2002, under a new editor, Martin Baron (later the executive editor of The Washington Post), a group of Globe investigative reporters called the Spotlight team published a series of stories detailing predatory behavior by dozens of Boston-area priests, coupled with a concerted effort by top church officials to conceal their misdeeds.
The Globe won the Pulitzer Prize for its articles, which formed the basis of the 2015 film “Spotlight,” in which Mr. Saviano was portrayed by actor Neal Huff, who became a close friend. Mr. Saviano advised writers on the screenplay and was onstage at the Oscars, along with the film’s director, producers and actors, when “Spotlight” won the Academy Award for best picture. (It also won for best original screenplay.) Executive producer and co-writer Josh Singer called him a “true hero.”
Mr. Saviano was 69 when he died Nov. 28 at a brother’s home in Douglas. He had announced on his Facebook page in October that doctors could no longer treat his gallbladder cancer. In the preceding months, he had also had heart surgery and a stroke. The death was confirmed in a statement by his brother Jim Saviano.
After speaking out, Mr. Saviano channeled his harrowing childhood experience into an effort to address wrongdoing in the church. By the time the Globe began its investigation, he had already identified 13 predator priests and hundreds of victims in the Boston area. When he examined church documents, he learned that many of the priests had been transferred to other parishes around the country without being punished. (The number of priests accused of sexual assault in New England eventually grew into the hundreds.)
Initially, as a gay man challenging the authority of the Catholic Church in the early 1990s, Mr. Saviano faced a backlash from church loyalists and even from members of his own family. His father “was angry and accused me of bringing the scandal to our hometown,” Mr. Saviano later said.
During his childhood in Douglas, a small town about 55 miles from Boston, Mr. Saviano enjoyed fishing and hiking. He also delivered newspapers, and one of the stops on his paper route was the rectory of St. Denis Church, where Holley had been newly installed as a priest.
Then in his 40s, Holley was popular with boys in the church, showing them card tricks and making faces behind the backs of nuns teaching Sunday school. When the priest asked Mr. Saviano and another boy to help move boxes of hymnals or do other odd jobs at the church, they felt honored. They received 50 cents apiece.
“He was grooming us,” Mr. Saviano told the Daily Mail in 2015. “The priest figures out ways to get closer to either the child or the parents. That gives him an opportunity to know what is going on in our family and in school. I felt pretty lucky that this guy was taking an interest in me. For us, he was God’s representative on earth, who could perform magic like turning wine into the blood of Christ and forgiving sins.”
Then one day when Holley was doing card tricks, the deck of cards contained pornographic images of people engaged in sex acts. When the 11-year-old Mr. Saviano tried to run away, the priest grabbed his wrist and held him back. Years later, Mr. Saviano could still recall “the coolness of the dark church basement, the smell of his sickly, sweet cologne” and “the sense of being completely trapped.”
Over the next 18 months, Mr. Saviano was repeatedly coerced into performing sexual acts on Holley. The priest once assaulted him behind a door as parishioners walked past, just feet away. Another time, Mr. Saviano saw the priest forcing himself on another boy at the church altar.
“How do you say no to God?” Mr. Saviano’s character says in “Spotlight.”
Mr. Saviano did not speak of his experiences until he was 40. Holley, in the meantime, went on to work at churches in New Mexico, Texas and Colorado before receiving a 275-year sentence in 1993 for the sexual assault of eight boys in New Mexico. He died in prison in 2008.
The Globe’s revelations, made possible in part by Mr. Saviano’s research, shocked people around the world and reverberated throughout the Catholic Church. One of the church’s most powerful figures, Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston, admitted that he had reassigned priests accused of child abuse and did little to stop the scourge. He resigned in 2002.
“Finally, victims are being first of all believed,” Mr. Saviano told the Globe that year. “And they’re being respected instead of ridiculed and criticized. Most of all, they’re seeing there is power in joining together and speaking out, and you can have results. Laws are being changed, [attorneys general] have perked up their ears around the country. These are changes that victims, myself included, could only have dreamed of.”
Philip James Saviano was born in Douglas on June 23, 1952. His father was an electrician, and his mother was a homemaker.
Mr. Saviano majored in zoology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, from which he graduated in 1975. He settled in Boston and received a master’s degree in communications from Boston University in 1980. He worked in public relations and fundraising for a Boston hospital and later had a concert production company from 1982 to 1991. He also collected and sold Mexican folk art.
His survivors include three brothers.
In addition to forming a New England chapter of SNAP, Mr. Saviano ran the organization’s national website for several years and served on its board of directors. He was also on the board of BishopAccountability.org, which documents sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. He traveled widely to give speeches and counsel other survivors. He appeared at the 2019 Vatican summit on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
“Every step they’ve taken,” he said of church leaders, “they’ve done it begrudgingly.”
Mr. Saviano’s experiences with the church caused him to lose all religious faith, and he considered himself an agnostic.
“I find myself envious sometimes of people who do have a strong faith,” he said in 2002. “And I don’t know what that’s like. There are days when I can’t do this on my own.”
Mr. Saviano received a diagnosis of AIDS in 1984, then in 2009 learned that he needed a kidney transplant. When no one in his family was a proper match, he asked for help from the network of survivors of clergy abuse. Several people volunteered, and he ultimately received a kidney from a Minnesota woman who said she had been sexually abused in high school by a former nun.
Among people who had been victimized by priests and church leaders, Mr. Saviano was seen as a valiant, eloquent and courageous champion who refused to be silenced. He also found respect closer to home and, at long last, had a warm reconciliation with his father.
“All those years ago,” his father told him, “you were right. Give them hell.”
Saviano, right, with actor Neal Huff, who portrayed him in the 2015 Oscar-winning film “Spotlight.”
