Voice from the Desert

The Voice from the Desert Blog Has Moved

2007-11-28T18:13:00.000-07:00

Good People,

The Voice from the Desert blog has a new home (address) on the Internet:

Click here to go to the new address.

Frank Douglas

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L.A. Archdiocese to Pay $600M for Claims

2007-07-14T14:50:00.000-06:00

L.A. Archdiocese to Pay $600M for Claims
July 14, 2007

From the MSNBC website, 7.14.2007.

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Archdiocese to pay $600M for claims

Settlement represents Church’s largest payout in sexual abuse scandal

BREAKING NEWS

The Associated Press

Updated: 12:36 p.m. MT July 14, 2007

LOS ANGELES - The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles will settle its clergy abuse cases for at least $600 million, by far the largest payout in the church’s sexual abuse scandal, The Associated Press learned Saturday.

Attorneys for the archdiocese and alleged victims are expected to announce the deal Monday, the day the first of more than 500 clergy abuse cases was scheduled for jury selection, according to two people with knowledge of the agreement. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because the settlement had not been made public.

The archdiocese and its insurers will pay between $600 million and $650 million to about 500 plaintiffs—an average of $1.2 million to $1.3 million per person. The settlement also calls for the release of confidential priest personnel files after review by a judge assigned to oversee the litigation, the sources said.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the payout would be split among the insurers, the archdiocese and several Roman Catholic religious orders. A judge must sign off on the agreement, and final details were being ironed out.

Lead plaintiff’s attorney Ray Boucher said negotiations would continue through the weekend and said there were still many unresolved aspects.

Tod Tamberg, an archdiocese spokesman, did not immediately return a call for comment.

A record settlement
The settlement would be the largest ever by a Roman Catholic archdiocese since the clergy sexual abuse scandal erupted in Boston in 2002.

Among the largest total payouts was $100 million in 2004 by the Diocese of Orange, Calif., to settle 90 claims. The Diocese of Boston agreed in 2003 to pay $84 million for 552 cases, the same figure the Diocese of Covington, Ky., agreed last year to pay to settle about 360 claims. Facing a flood of abuse claims, five dioceses—Tucson, Ariz.; Spokane, Wash.; Portland, Ore.; Davenport, Iowa, and San Diego—sought bankruptcy protection.

Last month, the Archdiocese of Portland agreed to pay about $52 million to 175 victims, while setting aside another $20 million for anyone who comes forward in the future.

The Diocese of Spokane, Wash., also recently emerged from bankruptcy protection after agreeing to pay $48 million to settle about 150 claims.

The Los Angeles archdiocese, its insurers and various Roman Catholic orders have paid more than $114 million to settle 86 claims so far.

The largest of those came in December, when the archdiocese reached a $60 million settlement with 45 people whose claims dated from before the mid-1950s and after 1987 — periods when it had little or no sexual abuse insurance. Several religious orders in California have also reached multimillion dollar settlements in recent months, including the Carmelites, the Franciscans and the Jesuits.

The resolution of more than 500 other lawsuits against the archdiocese, however, had remained elusive despite years of legal wrangling. Most of the outstanding lawsuits were generated by a 2002 state law that revoked for one year the statute of limitations for reporting sexual abuse.

Archdiocese to sell property
Cardinal Roger Mahony recently told parishioners in an open letter that the archdiocese was selling its high-rise administrative building and considering the sale of about 50 other nonessential church properties to raise funds for a settlement.

Still, church attorneys had been preparing for 15 trials involving 172 people, with jury selection in the first case to begin Monday.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge overseeing the cases recently ruled that Mahony could be called to testify in the second trial on schedule, and attorneys for plaintiffs wanted to call him in many more.

The same judge also cleared the way for four people to seek punitive damages from the archdiocese—something that could have opened the church to tens of millions of dollars in payouts if the ruling had been expanded to other cases.

Recent Postings

2007-07-12T10:10:00.000-06:00

Voice from the Desert has moved.

Click here to visit the new site.

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Here are the most recent postings as of 7.12.2007

* Must Read: Catholic Abuse Crisis Starts to Fade
* Sister Joan Chittister on the Latin Mass
* Delaware: Child Sex-Abuse Victims Cheer Law
* Voice of the Faithful Stops Claiming Doctrinal Fidelity
* NY Times: Pope Cites ‘Defects’ of Other Faiths
* Pope: Other Denominations Not True Churches

Voice from the Desert Has a New Home

2007-07-11T11:47:00.000-06:00

This Voice from the Desert blog has a new home (address) on the Internet:

Click here to go to the new address

To subscribe to all postings, first set up a My Yahoo! or Google/Google Reader home page and then go to

http://reform-network.net/?feed=rss2

and follow directions.

* * *

Here are some recent postings

* Voice of the Faithful Stops Claiming Doctrinal Fidelity
* NY Times: Pope Cites ‘Defects’ of Other Faiths
* Pope: Other Denominations Not True Churches
* Farewell to Vatican II
* Archdiocese Seeks a Settlement as 500 Sex Abuse Cases Head for Trial
* Mishandling of McCormack Case Shakes Faith

Voice of the Faithful Stops Claiming Doctrinal Fidelity
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

The following opinion piece is from the July 15-21 issue of the National Catholic Register (NOT the National Catholic Reporter).

Note that the Register is owned by the Legionaries of Christ. Capping a decade-long on-again, off-again investigation of accusations of sexual abuse, the Vatican has asked Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, to observe a series of restrictions on his ministry.

The Register is all wet. VOTF asked the Vatican for a review of celibacy as a requirement for priestly ministry in the Latin (Roman) rite. According to the Register and the Legionaries, asking for a review of a doctrine equates to doctrinal infidelity. What would they have said about those who asked for a review of slavery? What about usury? Would Jesus have been classified by these ninnies as a dissenter?

This elevation of “doctrine” to a status of worship is surely idolatry.

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‘Voice of the Faithful’ Stops Claiming Doctrinal Fidelity

BY TOM MCFEELY

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

July 15-21, 2007 Issue | Posted 7/10/07 at 3:54 PM

BOSTON — So much for Voice of the Faithful’s “neutrality.”

The Boston-based reform group, which formed in 2002 following revelations of clergy sexual misconduct in the Boston archdiocese, has been frequently accused of being a front group for Church dissenters.

And the organization — which by its own admission is currently facing both a “financial crisis” and a “crisis of leadership” — recently gave support to those accusations by breaking with its stated policy of “neutrality” between dissenting voices and the magisterium of the Catholic Church on issues like the ordination of married men.

On June 24, in an article titled “Catholic Lay Group Tests a Strategy Change,” The New York Times reported that Voice of the Faithful is lobbying for a Vatican “review” of the discipline of priestly celibacy.

“I take it to be a radical departure from what Voice of the Faithful has claimed was its policy and approach from the start,” Russell Shaw, a former spokesman for the U.S. bishops’ conference, said to the Register about the group’s decision to lobby about celibacy.

Since its inception, Voice of the Faithful has had a close association with prominent Church dissenters (see sidebar, page 12).

In response to criticism that it was using the abuse crisis as a pretext to push dissenting agendas, Voice of the Faithful formulated a “VOTF Policies and Positions” statement in 2002.

The document, which is posted on the VOTF website, states the group focuses on helping survivors of abuse — supporting faithful priests who uphold their vows, and seeking structural changes to prevent abuse — and that Voice of the Faithful takes no position “on the many other issues that divide Catholics.”

According to the document, “We do not advocate the end of priestly celibacy, the exclusion of homosexuals from the priesthood, the ordination of women, or any of the other remedies that have been proposed across the spectrum of Catholic thought.”

In an interview with the Register, Voice of the Faithful president Mary Pat Fox said her group does not believe celibacy directly causes abuse. She said the reason for calling for a Vatican review is because the celibate priesthood has been “one of the cornerstones of clericalism, which has created this culture of secrecy which is what really allowed the bishops to handle the sexual abuse crisis the way they did.”

Fox denied that asking for a review is a violation of Voice’s neutrality commitment.

“We’re not coming out with a statement that this is what we think the outcome of this review should be,” Fox said. “We’re saying that we don’t think the Vatican’s looked at it from this point of view before.”

Shaw accused Fox of “hairsplitting.” He said that although celibacy is a Church discipline, not a formal doctrine, and is therefore open to discussion among faithful Catholics, it’s improper to target the Vatican by asking it to review something that the Church has required for centuries and that was recently reaffirmed by Pope Benedict XVI.

Said Shaw, “If it isn’t dissent, it’s first cousin to dissent. I don’t see much difference.”

Regarding Fox’s assertion that celibacy contributed to clericalism, and indirectly to the cover-up of sexual abuse, Shaw said that he has extensively researched and written about the abuse of secrecy in the Church and will publish a book on the topic next year.

“But in all I’ve written about it and all I’ve read about it and all I’ve thought about it, I’ve never seen that point made,” Shaw said. “And I have no idea what the lady is talking about.”

Money ProblemsBecause of concerns that Voice of the Faithful promotes dissent and division, its activities have been banned or restricted in about 20 U.S. dioceses, Voice of the Faithful spokesman John Moynihan told the Register last year.

The decision to take a public stance on the priestly celibacy issue — and risk being banned by even more dioceses and alienating lay Catholics who believe the group’s claims of neutrality — may have been related to Voice of the Faithful’s financial problems.

The May 3 issue of the group’s newsletter, In the Vineyard, contains a report on an April 27-29 meeting in Boston of Voice of the Faithful’s national leaders.

At the meeting, Bill Casey, chairman of Voice of the Faithful’s Board of Trustees, and Mark Mullaney, its interim executive director, both warned that the group was facing a financial crisis.

“Although the number of individual contributors has increased, in the past year or so the number of major donors has declined,” said the newsletter article. “VOTF must reverse this trend to erase a projected $100,000 deficit in the next fiscal year.”

Fox attributed the financial problems to ineffective fundraising from major donors, and told the Register that the problem was being addressed by hiring a part-time development officer.

In the same issue of the newsletter, the organization acknowledged it faces other problems.

“In addition to the financial crisis facing VOTF, Bill Casey identified a crisis in leadership,” the newsletter said. “Evidence of this comes from the low response rates (a range of 1% to 5%) when members are asked for input on proposals.”

Former Voice of the Faithful President Jim Post acknowledged to The New York Times that there is an ongoing internal dispute about whether the group should openly push dissenting agendas like the ordination of women and married priests.

Said Post, “Even I, from time to time, wonder whether we shouldn’t just declare victory and say a lot’s been done in five years, the Church is doing better than it was, and then let the other organizations — Call to Action, Future Church and others that really want to deal with these issues — have the field.”

Asked about Post’s comments, current President Fox said that Post had told her that the Times quote wasn’t “totally complete.”

Said Fox, “I wouldn’t want you to think that we are leaving the centrist position.”

Voice of the Faithful’s actions have disappointed people who initially backed the group’s efforts to address the abuse problem.

One pastor in the Archdiocese of Boston originally supported Voice of the Faithful, as his heart went out to the numerous sexual abuse victims and their families. He allowed the group to meet on church property at first, but he became increasingly disillusioned as time went on.

“They switched hats,” said the priest, who did not want to be named. “Other groups with other agendas seemed to be involved.”

The Boston-area priest had encouraged people to work for reform within the Church structure, but he came to conclude that was not Voice’s goal.

The real eye-opener for this pastor came a few years ago when an auxiliary bishop came to visit his parish. He was greeted with hostility from Voice of the Faithful people outside the church on bullhorns, much to the pastor’s surprise.

“I went bonkers at that,” he said. “Their actions just didn’t seem fair.”

Since then, the group has no longer met at the church.

Russell Shaw is also dismayed by what has happened with Voice of the Faithful.

“All along, when they’ve spoken about the need for accountability, for openness, for the avoidance of excessive secrecy in the conduct of the Church’s affairs, my reaction has been they’re entirely right,” Shaw said. “But the problem all along has been this undercurrent of an excess of coziness with dissent.”

(Gail Besse contributed to this report.) Tom McFeely is based in Victoria, British Columbia.

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NY Times: Pope Cites ‘Defects’ of Other Faiths
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

This article from the 7.11.2007 edition of the New York Times demonstrates that Benedict XVI, a.k.a. Joseph Ratzinger, is a true medieval man, ignoring Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, and a host of other makers of the modern and/or post-modern world.

What a disaster this man is. And what a burden he is to many Catholics who believe in aggiornamento an Italian word meaning “updating,” of Vatican II.

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The New York Times

July 11, 2007

Pope, Restating 2000 Document, Cites ‘Defects’ of Other Faiths

By IAN FISHER

ROME, July 10 — Pope Benedict XVI restated Tuesday what he said were the “defects” of Christian faiths other than Roman Catholicism, prompting anger from Protestants who questioned the Vatican’s respect for other beliefs.

“It makes us question whether we are indeed praying together for Christian unity,” the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, which represents Protestants in more than 100 countries, said in a statement. The Vatican document repeated many of the contentious claims of a document issued in 2000 by the Vatican office on orthodoxy, which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed for more than two decades before being elected pope in 2005.

The document released Tuesday focused largely on the Vatican definition of what constitutes a church, which it defined as being traceable through its bishops to Christ’s original apostles. Thus, it said, the world’s Orthodox Christians make up a church because of shared history, if “separated” from the “proper” Catholic tradition, while Protestants split from Catholicism during the Reformation are considered only “Christian communities.”

The document repeated church teaching that the Roman Catholic Church alone is the mediator of salvation, though other beliefs can be its “instrument.”

“These separated churches and communities, though we believe they suffer from defects, are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation,” the document read. “In fact the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose value derives from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church.”

It was unclear why the Vatican issued the document now, especially since it largely restated earlier, if contentious, statements of church doctrine. The document from 2000, called “Dominus Iesus,” prompted angry reactions from other faiths, which accused the Vatican, and Cardinal Ratzinger specifically, of being unnecessarily divisive.

The stated purpose of the new document was as a “clarification” of doctrine amid disagreement among Catholics about the legacy of the Second Vatican Council, a three-year conference that ended in 1965 and changed church practice.

While liberals have seen the Second Vatican Council as a modernizing force, conservatives like Benedict argue — as did the document released Tuesday — that it represented not change but continuity.

Last week, Benedict made a similar argument in liberalizing the use of the old Latin Mass, largely set aside since the council endorsed holding Mass in the local languages of the world’s billion Catholics. Critics said the decision could further divide Catholics and raised questions about Benedict’s commitment to the changes made during the Second Vatican Council.

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Pope: Other Denominations Not True Churches
Tuesday, July 10, 2007

From the website of MSNBC, 7.10.2007.

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MSN Tracking Image
MSNBC.com

Pope: Jesus formed ‘only one church’

Benedict issues statement asserting that Jesus established ‘only one church’

MSNBC News Services

Updated: 6:52 a.m. MT July 10, 2007

LORENZAGO DI CADORE, Italy - Pope Benedict XVI has reasserted the universal primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, approving a document released Tuesday that says Orthodox churches were defective and that other Christian denominations were not true churches.

Benedict approved a document from his old offices at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that restates church teaching on relations with other Christians. It was the second time in a week the pope has corrected what he says are erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, the 1962-65 meetings that modernized the church.

On Saturday, Benedict revisited another key aspect of Vatican II by reviving the old Latin Mass. Traditional Catholics cheered the move, but more liberal ones called it a step back from Vatican II.

Benedict, who attended Vatican II as a young theologian, has long complained about what he considers the erroneous interpretation of the council by liberals, saying it was not a break from the past but rather a renewal of church tradition.

In the latest document — formulated as five questions and answers — the Vatican seeks to set the record straight on Vatican II’s ecumenical intent, saying some contemporary theological interpretation had been “erroneous or ambiguous” and had prompted confusion and doubt.

It restates key sections of a 2000 document the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, “Dominus Iesus,” which set off a firestorm of criticism among Protestant and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the “means of salvation.”

In the new document and an accompanying commentary, which were released as the pope vacations here in Italy’s Dolomite mountains, the Vatican repeated that position.

“Christ ‘established here on earth’ only one church,” the document said. The other communities “cannot be called ‘churches’ in the proper sense” because they do not have apostolic succession — the ability to trace their bishops back to Christ’s original apostles.

‘Identity of the Catholic faith’
The Rev. Sara MacVane of the Anglican Centre in Rome, said there was nothing new in the document.

“I don’t know what motivated it at this time,” she said. “But it’s important always to point out that there’s the official position and there’s the huge amount of friendship and fellowship and worshipping together that goes on at all levels, certainly between Anglican and Catholics and all the other groups and Catholics.”

The document said Orthodox churches were indeed “churches” because they have apostolic succession and that they enjoyed “many elements of sanctification and of truth.” But it said they lack something because they do not recognize the primacy of the pope — a defect, or a “wound” that harmed them, it said.

“This is obviously not compatible with the doctrine of primacy which, according to the Catholic faith, is an ‘internal constitutive principle’ of the very existence of a particular church,” the commentary said.

Despite the harsh tone of the document, it stresses that Benedict remains committed to ecumenical dialogue.

“However, if such dialogue is to be truly constructive, it must involve not just the mutual openness of the participants but also fidelity to the identity of the Catholic faith,” the commentary said.

‘Not backtracking on ecumenical commitment’
The document, signed by the congregation prefect, U.S. Cardinal William Levada, was approved by Benedict on June 29, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul — a major ecumenical feast day.

There was no indication about why the pope felt it necessary to release the document, particularly since his 2000 document summed up the same principles. Some analysts suggested it could be a question of internal church politics, or that it could simply be an indication of Benedict using his office as pope to again stress key doctrinal issues from his time at the congregation.

Father Augustine Di Noia, undersecretary for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said the document did not alter the commitment for ecumenical dialogue, but aimed to assert Catholic identity in those talks.

“The Church is not backtracking on ecumenical commitment,” Di Noia told Vatican radio.

“But, as you know, it is fundamental to any kind of dialogue that the participants are clear about their own identity. That is, dialogue cannot be an occasion to accommodate or soften what you actually understand yourself to be.”

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Farewell to Vatican II
Tuesday, July 10, 2007

From the Boston Globe, 7.10.2007.

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By Frank K. Flinn | July 10, 2007

CATHOLICS AROUND the world should now have no illusions. Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to encourage wider use of the traditional Tridentine Mass in Latin is the latest move in his long campaign to undo liberal reforms in church practices popular with Catholics since the 1960s.

The move may well trigger liturgical schisms in dioceses throughout the world.

The form of the Mass was promulgated by Pope Paul V in the Roman Missal in 1570. In this rite the priest stands on an elevated altar, facing away from the people and mumbling the most sacred parts of the liturgy in Latin.

The Tridentine Mass lasted until the new form promulgated in 1969 by Pope Paul VI at Vatican Council II (1962-65). While drawing on some of the most ancient Christian forms of worship, the new Eucharist was translated into local languages. The priest now faced the congregation. Around the world liturgical music expanded to include gospel music, African chants and drumming, Mexican mariachi bands, folk music, and even pop rhythms. Immediately conservative Catholics attacked the new rite, but Paul VI warned that the gospel would be lost to the modern world if it were not addressed to people in their language and their customs.

Criticism continued unabated by a traditionalist minority. In 1988 former French Archbishop Marcel LeFebvre led a small minority of Catholics into schism over what he and his followers labeled the heretical “Mass of Paul VI.” The Lefebvrists not only rejected the new liturgy, they rejected key doctrines of Vatican II on ecumenism, religious liberty, and collegiality. Collegiality was the central ecclesiastical concept that shaped Vatican II. The depth of the traditionalists’ hatred of Vatican II teachings was and remains astounding.

On the other edge of the church, progressives wanted to advance the openings begun at Vatican II, not only in the liturgy but also in ecumenism, lay involvement, Christian social action (liberation theology, feminism, ecology), and ethical theory (priestly celibacy, birth control). Paul VI started to apply the brakes, but Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, his new prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith , went in for a whole new brake job.

They set out to thwart the progressive side of the church. In the 1980s they silenced the liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, removed Swiss Hans Küng and American Charles Curran from their teaching posts, and unscrupulously oversaw the unlawful excommunication of the Indian Tissa Balasuriya. (That act was reversed.) Just this year the pope censured Salvadoran Jesuit liberation theologian Jon Sobrino by using the old Vatican tactic of stringing together quotations out of context.

In contrast, the papacy remained inexplicably lenient toward the schismatic Lefebvrists despite the scorn they continued to heap in the direction of the Vatican itself. Indeed, in the 1980s Cardinal Ratzinger gave them free ammunition. In the preface to a liturgical treatise he accused modern Masses of being faddish “showpieces” and “fabrications.” He went on to praise the Eastern Catholic and Orthodox Eucharist as exemplars of an “eternal liturgy.” One can detect a Eurocentric prejudice in his remarks.

The pope has not been evenhanded in his dealings with the many branches of the Catholic church. He has simply capitulated to the Lefebvrists, who continue to look down contemptuously on average Catholic parishioners who like to worship in their own tongue and see their priest face-to-face. The appeal to an “eternal liturgy” is false. The liturgies of the earliest churches were both multiform and multilingual within the first generation going from Aramaic to Greek and Syriac in short order. The earliest known church, recently excavated at Megiddo in Israel, has the altar not elevated and apart but at the very center of the worshiping community. A true traditionalist would gladly embrace the many languages and cultures of the world as did the early church.

Why do I say farewell to Vatican II? One of the roots of that council was the liturgical movement that preceded it by half a century. The liturgical reformers were convinced that the liturgy was of, by, and for the whole people of God, clergy, and lay alike. The very word liturgia in Greek means “the work of the people.” This notion embodies at its fullest the principle of collegiality, the key theological idea that shaped Vatican II. The Tridentine Mass is the work of the priest. By turning back the liturgical clock not to the creative multiplicity of the early Christian communities but to the heyday of the Inquisition and papal monarchism at Trent, Pope Benedict XVI is abandoning the principle of collegiality that embraces all bishops, all priests, all deacons, and all lay people as the worshiping community of the beloved faithful. That says to Vatican II, “Farewell!”

Frank K. Flinn, adjunct professor of religious studies at Washington University in St. Louis, is author of “Encyclopedia of Catholicism.”

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Archdiocese Seeks a Settlement as 500 Sex Abuse Cases Head for Trial
Monday, July 9, 2007

From the Los Angeles Times, 7.9.2007.

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History tells us to expect a settlement or a bankruptcy soon. That’s what bishops do when faced with the prospect of testifying in open court with all the world to see and hear.

* * *

Archdiocese seeks a settlement as 500 sex abuse cases head for trial

The payout could go as high as half a billion dollars, the largest in the country. ‘The day of reckoning is near,’ says a lawyer for plaintiffs.

By Joe Mozingo
Times Staff Writer

July 9, 2007

After more than four years of negotiation, pressure is mounting fast to settle some 500 claims that the Los Angeles Archdiocese failed to protect children from clergy abuse, before the first trial begins this month.

“We know it’s soon. We know it’s inevitable. The day of reckoning is drawing near,” said Jeffrey Anderson, a Minnesota lawyer who represents hundreds of alleged victims of clergy abuse in California and elsewhere.

The potential payout is staggering, at more than half a billon dollars by far the largest of any diocese in the country resulting from the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal.

Already, the archdiocese, insurers and several Catholic orders have agreed to pay more than $114 million to settle 86 claims.

If the remaining cases go to trial, jury awards could be much larger, particularly when claimants seek punitive damages.

A jury in New York, for instance, ordered the Diocese of Rockville Centre in May to pay $5.9 million to one victim and $5.5 million to another. If an agreement can be reached before trial in Los Angeles, victims are expected to garner an average of slightly more than $1 million each, based on the cases that have been settled so far.

Going to trial would also force top officials, including Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, to testify publicly about what they knew about the abuse and what, if anything, they did to stop it.

Mahony is expected to be called to the stand in the first trial, involving two decades of alleged abuse by the late Father Clinton Hagenbach, who died in 1987, two years after Mahony became archbishop in Los Angeles. Thirteen more trials are scheduled to begin by January.

“It’s still my goal to reach an agreement before the first trials begin, but many, many pieces have to come together before that can happen,” said J. Michael Hennigan, who represents Mahony and the Los Angeles Archdiocese.

Hennigan declined to give details or comment further about the case because it “might have an impact on the ongoing discussions.”

Mahony has waged a protracted court battle to keep church personnel documents from victims, their lawyers, prosecutors and the public. But the courts ruled in a Los Angeles case that grand juries investigating crimes and civil lawyers preparing for trial were entitled to the information.

Attorneys for the accusers say any settlement agreement would include a stipulation that the church release the files publicly. However, individual clergy could contest the disclosures on privacy grounds.

Settlement negotiations have been complex, with more than 60 attorneys seeking differing sums for more than 570 claims of abuse occurring over 70 years by 221 accused perpetrators.

The church has blamed its insurers for failing to pay the major share of the settlements. The insurers, in turn, have questioned whether Mahony willfully withheld information about the abuse from them and say they don’t have to pay if the church officials’ actions were criminal.

“This could be a Katrina moment for the insurers,” said Pamela D. Hayes, an attorney who served on the National Lay Review Board, established by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to study the abuse scandal. “They’re fighting to the very end.”

In Orange County, insurers and the Diocese of Orange ended a similar standoff in 2005 when they agreed to split a $100-million settlement for 90 victims roughly 50-50.

But in San Diego earlier this year, Bishop Robert H. Brom announced that his diocese would file for bankruptcy rather than go to trial, putting the cases there on hold while a judge examines diocesan finances.

A Times analysis published in December 2006 showed that the Los Angeles Archdiocese has vast wealth, owning at least 1,600 properties with an estimated value of $4 billion.

Victims groups blame the Los Angeles church for continuing to stonewall.

“The fact that this trial [Hagenbach] would be the first ever priest-pedophile abuse trial in Los Angeles is very telling,” said Mary Grant, Western regional director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP.

“I think if there is a way to delay this trial, we believe Cardinal Mahony will use whatever tactics he can to keep the crimes hidden to keep him from having to testify in open court about what he and church officials knew and what they failed to do to protect kids from predators,” Grant said.

Tod Tamberg, Mahony’s spokesman, said, “The vast majority of these cases predate Mahony, and many of them have nothing in their files.”

In the case of Hagenbach, he noted that Mahony moved from the Stockton Diocese to Los Angeles in 1985, less than two years before the priest died. “There were 2,000 priests back then,” Tamberg said. “He didn’t know any of these guys. And the first complaint about Hagenbach came in 2002.”

Tamberg said that the archdiocese has been working to settle the cases but that their sheer number and the complexity of the litigation in Los Angeles are far greater than in any other diocese in the nation.

He noted that it is not yet clear even what the exact number of claims against the church is.

“Complex negotiations do take time, yes, especially when you’re a Catholic church with limited resources,” he said.

Mahony wants to minimize any loss of services to parishioners, Tamberg added. “Our parishes and schools are not there to produce revenue for us. They’re there to educate children and provide spiritual welfare for the Catholic people.”

Many observers expect a settlement before or during the Hagenbach trial, either a so-called global settlement for all the cases or the first of a string of settlements. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Haley Fromholz last week pushed the trial back a week, saying there were not enough potential jurors after the Fourth of July holiday. But the delay prompted some observers to speculate that the parties were on the verge of a settlement and needed a few more days.

Jury selection is set to begin July 17.

Anderson, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said he doubted Mahony would want to wait for opening arguments.

“That’s an opportunity for us to lay out a long, sordid scenario,” said Anderson. “Their exposure is extraordinary.”

joe.mozingo@latimes.com

Well, let's not kill all the lawyers

2007-07-08T12:52:00.000-06:00

Anyone interested in the large sums awarded in clergy sex abuse cases should click here to read an interesting column from the Orange County Register.

Pope Elevates Latin Mass

2007-07-08T09:02:00.000-06:00

To read this 7.8.2007 story from the Los Angeles Times click here.

Chicago Archdiocese to pay $875,000 in allegation

2007-07-07T16:52:00.000-06:00

From the Chicago Sun Times, 7.7.2007.

* * *

Priest abuse case settled
(http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/religion/459265,cst-nws-priest07.article)

July 7, 2007

BY SHAMUS TOOMEY Staff Reporter

A Gulf War veteran who served as a North Side altar boy in the 1970s will receive $875,000 from the Archdiocese of Chicago to settle sexual abuse allegations against his former parish priest, the man’s attorney said Friday.

Robert Holomshek, now 37 and living in Joliet, was preparing to file a lawsuit against the archdiocese before reaching the settlement, attorney Gene Hollander said.

A spokeswoman for the archdiocese said it does not comment on settlements but did not deny Hollander’s claims.

Between the ages of 7 and 10, Holomshek was repeatedly molested by the Rev. Joseph L. Fitzharris at the former St. Francis Xavier school on Chicago’s North Side, where Holomshek served as an altar boy, Hollander alleged.

Fitzharris, who did not return a call for comment, resigned in 1995, according to the archdiocese. His name appears on the archdiocese’s online list of local priests with substantiated allegations of sexual misconduct with minors.

He was also among a dozen priests named in a sexual abuse lawsuit that the archdiocese settled in May for $6.65 million.

Hollander said Holomshek buried his memories for decades but they came flooding back in 1995 when he smelled burning incense while attending an Easter church function. At first, Holomshek could barely talk about the memories. But in the past two years, “like a door creaking open,” he has been able to reveal more, his attorney said.

Holomshek, who dropped out of college, served as a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilot in Operation Desert Storm.

He was once an improvisational actor but has been unable to hold down steady employment, Hollander said, adding that Holomshek remains in therapy.

“Every aspect of my client’s life has been affected,” he said. “He thinks all of his problems really stem from what happened to him as a little boy.”

Does celibacy still serve Catholicism?

2007-07-07T16:39:00.000-06:00

From the website of the Salt Lake Tribune, 7.6.2007.

* * *

Commentary
Does celibacy still serve Catholicism?
By Phyllis Zagano
Religion News Service

Article Last Updated:07/06/2007 08:54:57 PM MDT

Catholic priest pederasty may be on the wane, but it has not stopped. Voice of the Faithful, the Catholic lay group formed in response to the crisis, thinks celibacy is part of the problem. It's gearing up to ask the Vatican to restore an ancient church tradition: married priests.

Church tradition? Well, yes. Married men can be ordained - bear with me for a moment - as Catholic priests and as deacons. Laws have overlaid the tradition, but the early church's determination stands: Married men can be ordained, while ordained men cannot get married. Bishops must be unmarried, but widowers qualify.

The largest cadre of married Catholic priests serve in one of the 22 Eastern Catholic Churches. The next largest group comprises former Protestant and Anglican ministers who have converted - in some cases with their entire parishes - to Catholicism. Since the 1950s, the Vatican has approved priestly ordination for convert ministers, a process regularized by Pope John Paul II for members of the Anglican Communion. There are about 75 former Episcopal - now Catholic - married priests in the United States; more than 600 Anglican priests (about 150 married) have converted in Great Britain. There are even a few married convert priests in Spain.
Catholicism has plenty of good experience with happily married priests, and plenty of bad experience with unhappily celibate priests. Voice of the Faithful is not calling for an end to celibacy, just for a closer look at things.

VOTF President Mary Pat Fox says research supports the common-sense understanding that celibacy "plays a role in the abuse crisis." Fox told The New York Times that celibacy does not cause pederasty, but "it plays a role in creating this culture of secrecy that then caused the bishops to handle the crisis the way they did." The system closes ranks, and celibacy remains the be-all and end-all of priesthood.
Don't get me wrong. Celibacy is fine - for those who are called to it. But married priests are also part of the Catholic tradition.

The U.S. bishops' spokeswoman, Sister Mary Ann Walsh, argues the celibate system will not change: "Don't waste the bishops' time on it - they can't do anything about it. You might as well have a great discussion on what goes on on Mars."

Hello? Let's review. The Catholic Church can ordain married men. Most Eastern Catholic Churches ordain married men as deacons and priests. The Western (Roman) Catholic Church ordains married men as deacons and, with special Vatican permission, as priests. There remains a huge problem with priest pederasty in the U.S., fed by a culture of secrecy and supported by ordained celibate men who just don't get it.

Sometimes some of them really don't get it.

At a public session of the Catholic Theological Society of America in Los Angeles in June, Catholic priest-writer Donald Cozzens argued that zero tolerance for priestly sexual offenses should not apply to an otherwise good priest who was credibly accused of, say, once being a flasher, or of making one pornographic telephone call. I questioned him, and he restated his belief that once-a-flasher should not disqualify a Catholic priest forever.

That is just plain nuts. Would a one-time flasher physician keep his license? How about a teacher? Who else - besides a priest - gets a free pass for one pornographic phone call?

I know there are married oddballs out there, and there have been some sad situations with the married priests we have today. But the predominantly celibate clerical culture is not yet cleansed of concepts that are both silly and dangerous. What father of children would say a flasher can be a priest? What priest's wife would let her husband say it?

Walsh says talking to bishops about celibacy is the same as talking to bishops about life on Mars. I think she may be right. The celibate clerical culture remains in trouble. There are still some clerics out there who are not living on this planet.
---
* PHYLLIS ZAGANO is senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University and author of several books in Catholic studies.

Sr Joan Chittister Muzzled in New Zealand

2007-07-06T09:09:00.000-06:00

From CathNews.com, 7.5.2007.

No amnesty in NZ for outspoken US nun

Christchurch Bishop Barry Jones says that he cannot allow US Benedictine nun Sr Joan Chittister, who will also visit Australia this month, to speak in his diocese over concerns about her stance on women's ordination and life issues.

Stuff.co.nz reports that Bishop Jones has written to priests saying that next week's visit by Benedictine nun Sister Joan Chittister is unauthorised.

Permission for the event had not been sought or given, and Jones did not want it promoted through Catholic churches.

"The point is that silence generates the misunderstanding that this is all approved, when it's not. I have made my position clear to the priests," he said.

Chittister, from Eire, Pennsylvania, has clashed with church authorities internationally over her strong stance on issues such as women's ordination and contraception.

She attended the first Women's Ordination Worldwide Conference in 2000, defying an order by the Vatican.

An independent group of Catholic lay people, the Adult Education Trust, has invited Chittister to Christchurch.

She will speak about spirituality, culture, justice and "God, women and the world".

Jones opposed the visit because he said Chittister did not agree with the Catholic Church's teachings.

"I don't see how I, as a bishop, can advance the teachings of the Catholic Church by appearing to condone other views," he said.

High-profile Sister Pauline O'Regan, of the Sisters of Mercy, backs Chittister's visit and was surprised by Jones's stance.

"It sort of sounds like censorship, doesn't it?" O'Regan said. "I think she has a very loving attitude towards challenging the church in matters where it needs to look at itself. She should not be feared. She's a very, very spiritual woman."

O'Regan and her colleagues had studied Chittister's more than 30 books and knew her teachings well.

"Sure, she challenges various things within the church, but then so do a great number of other people. Jesus challenged the leaders of his religious era," said O'Regan.

"It makes me wonder if he (Jones) has read her books and articles that she has written. In my opinion, people have the capacity to judge for themselves."

However, a pro-life US news service, Lifesite, said that Sr Chittister had "garnered a well-earned reputation as a vociferous advocate of contraception, abortion, and homosexuality", and had "lambasted the Church's teachings on the latter as 'spiritual violence and abuse'".

Comments on Archdiocese's Statement About Rev. McCormack's Crimes

2007-07-06T07:54:00.000-06:00

From the Chicago Sun Times, 7.4.2007.

* * *

Archdiocesan spokeswoman Colleen Dolan said the public perception of the Rev. Daniel McCormack's sex crimes was worse than reality.

"There's a misconception that this was a case of assault," Dolan said. "He has not been accused of rape. Never."

"There's a big difference between abuse and assault," she said, adding that by assault, in this particular case, she meant rape.

"He has been accused and admitted that he abused children," she said. "That's what the judge's decision was based on. It wasn't assault, which is a more egregious crime."

"We're not making excuses for what he's done."

* * *

Letters to the Sun Times Editor on Ms. Dolan's comments.

'Betrayed again by church'
Three takes on Father Daniel McCormack's punishment

July 4, 2007

Readers react to comments by Archdiocese of Chicago spokeswoman Colleen Dolan on the Rev. Daniel McCormack's sexual abuse of children. McCormack pleaded guilty Monday. Dolan said the perception of his crimes was worse than the reality.

Comments appalling
The archdiocese's attempt to diminish the meaning of Daniel McCormack's crimes by differentiating them from "assault" (i.e. rape) is appalling.

His victims and their parents are unlikely to be relieved knowing that they were just "abused," rather than raped. Rather they will know that they have been betrayed again [by] the church.

Mary Gail

Shame on spokeswoman
I read with interest your article concerning Daniel McCormack's heinous deeds and his "punishment."

I also read the archdiocese's spokeswoman, Colleen Dolan, telling the public that his crimes were not as horrible as they sound. . . . I wonder if she would think that was a minimal offense if it happened to her. . . . For shame!

Gabrielle

Church is insensitive
Chicagoans should be outraged by the offensive comments . . . by archdiocesan public relations staffer Colleen Dolan. Dolan should be ashamed of herself and should immediately and publicly apologize to Fr. McCormack's victims and all clergy child molestation victims.

Her self-serving remarks are indicative of a pervasive archdiocesan insensitivity.

David Clohessy, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests

* * *

The SNAP website contains the following press release on the same subject.

SNAP Press Statement

For Immediate Release:
July 5, 2007

Outrage at comments by Chicago Archdiocesan staffer

Statement by David Clohessy, SNAP Executive Director 314-566-9790

Chicagoans should be outraged by the offensive comments today by Archdiocesan public relations staffer Colleen Dolan. Dolan should be ashamed of herself and should immediately and publicly apologize to Fr. McCormack’s victims and all clergy child molestation victims.

Her self-serving remarks are indicative of a pervasive archdiocesan insensitivity toward victims of childhood violence. Dolan’s remarks are reminiscent of George’s similarly insensitive comments in 2002 when he minimized the harm to teenaged female abuse victims, relative to younger male abuse victims.

Absolutely nothing positive comes from publicly minimizing the devastation cased by horrific, serial child sex crimes, especially when the victims are still young and when the hurtful, misguided remarks come from a church official. In fact, Dolan’s comments perpetuate old, painful myths about child sex abuse. Coming from a child predator’s defense lawyer, they would be bad enough. Coming from a Cardinal’s mouthpiece, however, they are absolutely inexcusable.

If church officials are so cold-hearted and hurtful in public, imagine what harmful things they say and do behind closed doors.

The violation of children’s boundaries and bodies are at the heart of child sexual abuse. The specifics of the actual physical violation are less relevant. An adult penetrating a child is terrible and damaging, whether with an object or a body part. And adult fondling a girl is severe and harmful, whether under her clothing or over her clothing. An adult kissing a boy on the lips is wrong and hurtful, whether it’s ‘normal’ kissing or French kissing.

When there’s a chance to educate, church officials often obfuscate. When there’s a chance for healing, church officials often cause more wounds.

Since Cardinal George only disciplines child predators when forced to do so, and virtually never disciplines any other wrongdoers (however egregious or inexcusable or hurtful their actions are), we doubt that he will discipline Dolan. But she should have the decency to apologize immediately and strongly for remarks that can only cause more harm where so much harm has already been done.

A Priest Who Flexed His Muscles

2007-07-05T08:51:00.000-06:00

* * *

McKenna Center resident Danny Felix gets lunch in the basement of St. Aloysius Catholic Church in Washington in April. A photo on the wall shows Jesuit Fr. Horace McKenna.

* * *

This Colman McCarthy column in the 7.6.2007 issue of the NCR pays tribute to Fr. Horace McKenna, a famous Jesuit who served in Washington, D.C.,

A priest who flexed his muscles

By COLMAN McCARTHY

There was rarely a time in his priestly life when Fr. Horace McKenna wasn’t defying either the play-it-safe customs of his fellow Jesuits or government apathy toward the poor.

Now, 25 years after Fr. McKenna died in Washington at age 84, his work and ideals were remembered with a conference and liturgy May 12 at St. Aloysius Church. A short walk from the U.S. Capitol but a universe away from its concerns, this is a parish where the destitute come every day for food, counseling, emergency financial assistance and kindness at the Father McKenna Center.

The street priest came to St. Aloysius in 1953. “There were plenty of poor people around in those days,” he told a biographer, “but of course there always are, if you keep your eyes open.” Plenty of black people were also around for the open-eyed to see, which is why Fr. McKenna lasted only five years -- 1953 to 1958 -- at the parish. He criticized his Jesuit superiors for excluding blacks from the church’s grade school.

For that insolence, the troublemaker was sent packing to an inner-city parish in Philadelphia more suited to his then-odd notion that blacks were full human beings. He set up food, housing and medical programs. After five years, it was back to St. Aloysius for what Fr. McKenna called his “second hitch in Washington.”

Along with fellow Washingtonians Edward and Kathleen Guinan at the Community for Creative Nonviolence, Pastor John Steinbruck of Luther Place Memorial Church and the Rev. Imagene Stewart, a dishwasher and founder of the Church of What’s Happening Now, Fr. McKenna would help make homelessness a national public policy issue. It twinned with his daily personal relations with the capital’s poor, a closeness brought to light when a homeless man in the depressed neighborhood gave his legal address as “the back seat of Fr. McKenna’s car,” a beat-up Renault.

Again, that didn’t go down well with the powers. In Horace: Priest of the Poor, author John Monaghan reports that the car’s dweller “vigorously resisted attempts by the parish to remove him when Fr. McKenna was absent from the scene.”

If the priest’s street flock was harassed, so was he. While in Philadelphia, the chancery of Cardinal John Krol forbade Fr. McKenna to attend the August 1963 civil rights march. Stay out of politics, the chancery said in effect. In 1968, he publicly revolted against Humanae Vitae, the birth control encyclical. Let Catholic couples be guided by their conscience, Fr. McKenna told Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, the Vatican’s Washington enforcer. The irate cardinal banned the priest from hearing confessions. It lasted almost three years, but not before Fr. McKenna joked about his punishment: “That’s what you get for trying to argue sex with an Irishman.”

During the Vietnam War years, Fr. McKenna, a pacifist, regularly protested the Johnson-Nixon policies. His Christ-centered pacifism was not stained with just-war murk: “We should strive not to hurt or kill anyone. Our motto should be the spiritual song, ‘We ain’t gonna study war no more.’ ” Mr. Monaghan writes that the priest regretted “the minimal participation [of Jesuits] in the Vietnam antiwar demonstrations.” They were “more cautious than he might have hoped.”

What would Fr. McKenna say today when Georgetown University, the Jesuit educational jewel, shames itself by putting on the professorial payroll such war-believers as George (“Slam-Dunk”) Tenet, Douglas Feith, Madeleine Albright and Anthony Lake?

Who’s next? Paul Wolfowitz.

A living memorial to a saintly priest and model citizen, the Father McKenna Center operates on a budget of $400,000, has a paid staff of seven and a large supply of spirited volunteers. Director Tom Howarth remembers that “Fr. McKenna used to talk about our having to perform ‘slow miracles.’ We have seen a few of those. We see it when a guy gets into a GED class or when he decides that he no longer wants to live in the streets and gets into a drug or alcohol program. It’s going to take a larger, more intense effort to help people overcome homelessness and it is going to take an effort by the homeless themselves to reconnect with society. Doing better by the homeless and asking the homeless to do better go hand in hand.”

I came to know Horace McKenna. He steered me to stories about the invisible Washington, that shadow city of heat grates, dumpsters and evictions. Slight of build, gray-haired with a crewcut and bouncy walk, he gave the appearance of being a benign gadabout, but his line of work, ranging from siding with the weak to standing up to church bullies, demanded emotional and spiritual muscles. The more he flexed, the stronger he became.

Colman McCarthy teaches peace studies in the Washington area.

National Catholic Reporter, July 6, 2007

Priests Resign from Board to Protest Belleville Bishop's Secrecy

2007-07-05T07:56:00.000-06:00

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 7.3.2007

* * *

Priests resign from board to protest Belleville bishop's secrecy
By Tim Townsend
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Tuesday, Jul. 03 2007

Three priests have resigned from an 11-member diocesan board citing Belleville
Bishop Edward Braxton's secrecy in assigning priests. Three other priests on the personnel board publicly voiced similar complaints about the bishop but did not resign.

The rift is the latest example of clerical dissent that has marred Braxton's
two years in Belleville. It was revealed in a letter to their fellow priests from the Revs. Andrew Knopik, Carl Scherrer and Dennis Voss.

The letter said that "nearly all" the assignments announced by the bishop's office over the last month "were made secretly by Bishop Braxton, with little or no input from the members of the personnel board." The letter was dated June 17, but most priests did not receive it until late last week.

The board is made up of the diocesan deans (the priests who head the six geographical areas that make up the diocese), the vicar general, the chancellor and three priests who are elected to the board by their fellow priests. Knopik, Scherrer and Voss are the three elected priests. None of the three responded to phone calls Monday.

Three of the six deans — the Revs. Robert Flannery, Mark Stec and Thomas Stout — wrote an accompanying note to "concur with the above letter and voice our dismay at the lack of full consultation by Bishop Braxton."

"The lack of trust displayed, and the lack of collective input denied to all the board members concerning the full slate of openings and appointments make the present mode of operation deceptive and in essence ineffectual," the deans wrote.

In an interview Monday, Flannery said members of the board thought Braxton failed to take them seriously as representatives of the wider body of priests in the diocese.

"There have been several recent appointments that we have not been made aware of at board meetings," said Flannery. "And we're concerned about not being able to represent the priests we've been asked to represent."

The Rev. Kenneth York, Belleville's chancellor, did not return a phone call Monday. A spokesman for the diocese said the Rev. John McEvilly, the diocese's vicar general, was on vacation. Braxton was at a retreat in Kentucky and also unavailable for comment.

Dioceses formed personnel boards after the Second Vatican Council as a way to ensure that priests could collaborate with a bishop in deciding assignments. In the Archdiocese of St. Louis, the personnel board is made up of nine members — six elected to the board by the entire body of St. Louis archdiocesan priests, the archdiocese's two vicars general and the vicar for priests.

Ultimately, it is always a bishop's decision as to which priest serves where in
his diocese.

Said Flannery: "We realize it's the bishop's final decision as to who goes where, but if we're not made aware of places he wants to move anyone, we can't give him suggestions of where we think best.

"Why be at the meetings if (Braxton's) already made up his mind or not looking
for input from us at all?"

The resignations are the latest in a series of clashes between Braxton and his priests that goes back to the days before the bishop's installation in June
2005. In the spring of 2005, a group of priests in the diocese complained to
Cardinal Francis George of Chicago that they had not been consulted before
Braxton was named bishop. They tried to block his installation.

That December and again in February 2006, nearly half the diocese's priests met
to discuss their concerns that Braxton was not listening to them. The next
month, Braxton held a meeting to discuss the problems his priests had with his
leadership.

Since then there have been fewer public complaints by priests, but in their
letter, the three priests leaving the personnel board made it clear that the
last year had not been smooth.

"Our experience this past year has been that Bishop Braxton does not value our
insight and experience and seems to be more concerned about what he has the
right to do than about what is the right thing to do."

ttownsend@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8221

Cardinal Egan Paints Himself an Unhappy Ending

2007-07-04T17:50:00.000-06:00

Bob Nunz from Los Alamos, New Mexico, an ex-New Yorker like myself, found this piece in the 7.1.2007 edition of the New York Observer

* * *

Cardinal Egan Paints Himself an Unhappy Ending
by Grant Gallicho Published: June 26, 2007
Tags: Politics, The City, Cardinal Edward Egan

Cardinal Edward Egan.

On the morning of Feb. 26, the Rev. Eugene Sawicki, parish priest of Our Lady of Vilnius on Broome Street, traveled uptown for a meeting he’d been summoned to by Cardinal Edward M. Egan. Father Sawicki had known for months that the archdiocese was planning to close his church—established in 1909 to serve the once-booming Lithuanian Catholic community—but he was never told when. Not long into the meeting, Cardinal Egan informed Father Sawicki that the parish was being padlocked as they spoke. Hours later, parishioners arriving at Vilnius for the noon Mass were turned away by security guards.

The quick strike seemed highly deliberate.

Never the most popular of New York archbishops, Cardinal Egan was in the midst of a difficult round of parish closings and he was still smarting from a nasty public row with his priests that left him looking more like a C.E.O. than a pastor to a flock of 2.5 million souls. Just two weeks earlier, parishioners of Our Lady Queen of Angels in Harlem staged a round-the-clock prayer vigil in the sanctuary to protest his decision to close the church. Six of them were arrested as local news cameras rolled.

His surprise closure of Vilnius was designed to save himself the headache of another public protest.

But the plan backfired, setting in motion a series of events that would eventually involve the New York Supreme Court, the U.S. government, the president of Lithuania and the Pope.

Now, as the archdiocese prepares for its bicentennial in 2008 and as Cardinal Egan enters the home stretch as archbishop, the controversy over Our Lady of Vilnius has become a symbol of the heavy-handed managerial style and poor public relations that have characterized Cardinal Egan’s tenure, which now threatens to end amid court proceedings and desperate diplomatic maneuverings.

He arrived in New York in May 2000 as the city was still mourning the death of Cardinal John O’Connor, and he inherited a sprawling archdiocese that was undergoing huge changes. The immigrants who once populated—and often built—New York’s Catholic churches were dispersing, leaving ever fewer warm bodies to keep up with the increasing costs of maintenance.

Yet some small congregations can keep afloat if parishioners are sufficiently generous and financially savvy. Our Lady of Vilnius didn’t have any big-money benefactor or quiet endowments, but it was self-sustaining.

“We didn’t owe the archdiocese one cent,” said Gertrude McAleer, former lay trustee of the parish and church secretary. “They haven’t given us anything for decades.”

So why shutter the church? And why do so with no warning?

On Jan. 19, the archdiocese held a press conference to announce the parishes that would be closed or merged as part of its “realignment” plan, as the process is euphemistically called. It had been known for several years that the realignment was in the works. Cardinal Egan studied the problem for a few years, allowing parishes on the chopping block to make their case—and he earned high marks for the process.

When the archdiocese announced the affected parishes, Our Lady of Vilnius was not on the list. Instead, reporters received a separate news release explaining that, while the church was not part of the realignment, it would be closed because of low attendance and a lack of services in Lithuanian.

Because discussions about Vilnius predated the realignment, the parish was “not part of the realignment process,” explained Joseph Zwilling, director of communications for the archdiocese. Yet the upshot of the sidebar announcement was that Vilnius was effectively ignored as reporters wrote about the much larger realignment story.

But the Lithuanian community took note, if few others did. A week after the press conference, Valdas Adamkus, the president of Lithuania, stepped in. He wrote to Cardinal Egan asking him to reconsider his decision. The cardinal’s Feb. 15 reply repeated the argument that the Lithuanian community wouldn’t be significantly affected, and added: “The Church of Our Lady of Vilnius was in serious disrepair long before I was appointed archbishop. It would cost more than five million dollars to restore it …. I have been advised by experts that the structure is not sound and that it is not safe to permit people to continue to use the building.”

(This account is disputed by parishioners. Gertrude McAleer, who has been involved in the parish for more than a decade, said that the parish hired its own engineers to inspect the roof and found that repairs would actually have cost $100,000.)

Cardinal Egan deployed the same language regarding structural damage and the cost of repair—word for word—in a March 5 letter responding to Warren L. Miller, who heads the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. Mr. Miller wrote Cardinal Egan on Feb. 23, lobbying him to overturn the decision to close the church.

Lacking compelling legal authority, the commission can only persuade, and in this case it failed. In rejecting Mr. Miller’s appeal, Cardinal Egan wrote: “While your letter mentions that the Parish Church is historic and beautiful, it is really not much more than a simple building with no especially attractive or historic elements.”

In fact, Vilnius’s stained-glass windows were crafted by the well-regarded Lithuanian artist V. K. Jonynas (1907-1997), and several of its works of art—especially the icon of the Virgin Mary and the apse fresco—were objects of devotion.

And that made Cardinal Egan’s next step that much more painful for the parishioners. On April 30, several of them were able to get inside the parish only to discover that many of the art works Cardinal Egan dismissed had in fact been removed. Worse, besides carting off the altar, pews, statues and several paintings, the archdiocese had the apse fresco covered in blue paint.

Mr. Zwilling said that the sacred objects were taken away for safekeeping. And the decision to paint over the fresco was taken on the advice of an art-preservation firm, he explained, to protect it from deterioration and vandalism and “because it is impossible to remove a fresco from plaster.”

(Frescoes are by definition applied to plaster, and Nathan Zakheim, of the Los Angeles–based art-restoration firm Nathan Zakheim Associates, has been removing them for 30 years. Painting over a fresco to “protect” it, Mr. Zakheim said, “is simply unethical from any standpoint.”)

In a last-ditch effort, the lay trustees of the parish—Ms. McAleer and Joseph Pantuliano—took the archdiocese to court, and won a temporary restraining order halting the removal or alteration of anything inside the church. But the archdiocese responded, producing church documents showing that the plaintiffs’ terms as trustees expired on March 31 and that Cardinal Egan had replaced them; therefore they had no legal standing. Finally, the archdiocese successfully argued that the state could not intervene in matters internal to church governance. A New York Supreme Court judge vacated the restraining order.

“At this point, I think it’s finished,” Ms. McAleer said, adding, “I handed the parish to the archdiocese on a silver platter the moment I called about the roof.”

While Mr. Zwilling has repeatedly denied that the archdiocese is planning to sell the parish, Ms. McAleer isn’t convinced. In the summer of 2004, after the scaffolding had been installed in the church, Cardinal Egan and a few other archdiocesan officials dropped by Vilnius unannounced. Ms. McAleer and Mr. Pantuliano gave them a tour of the facilities—the church interior, the basement and finally the backyard. According to Ms. McAleer, when the group reached the garden, Cardinal Egan turned to Mr. Pantuliano and asked, “Where is the property line?”

The cardinal never explained the purpose of the visit.

Ramutė Žukas, the president of Lithuanian American Community Inc., New York, remains hopeful of finding a way to stop the process: “We’re exploring our options. We’re not giving up.” Apart from civil proceedings, Ms. Žukas noted that the parish is still awaiting a ruling on its appeal to the Vatican under canon law.

Indeed, the president of Lithuania announced that at a recent meeting with Pope Benedict XVI the two discussed Our Lady of Vilnius. According to President Adamkus, the pontiff agreed to raise the issue with the U.S. bishops.

To date, the archdiocese of New York has not heard from the pope or the U.S. bishops’ conference.

In the meantime, Cardinal Egan faces rising discontent from disgruntled clergy and lay Catholics during what may well be his final year as archbishop. As mandated by church law, a bishop must submit his letter of resignation when he turns 75, as Cardinal Egan did in April. How long he stays is up to the Pope, but it’s expected that he’ll be here through the archdiocese’s bicentennial celebrations, which conclude next April.

If Gertrude McAleer had her druthers, he’d be gone well before then. “There are so many people not going to church because of him,” she said. “To me, that’s a scandal.”

Grant Gallicho is an associate editor of Commonweal magazine.
http://www.observer.com/2007/cardinal-egan-paints-himself-unhappy-ending

Copyright © 2007 The New York Observer. All rights reserved.

VOTF in Chicago: Cardinal George Morally Accountable

2007-07-04T11:02:00.000-06:00

The following press release from the local VOTF contingent in Chicago addresses Cardinal George's culpability in the Rev. McCormack abuse of young boys.

* * *

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Please contact Dale Duda at 847-272-6359 or dudamann@comcast.net or

Sandra Stilling Seehausen, President of Chicagoland VOTF at 847-462-
0016

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

VOTF Says Archdiocese Most Responsible for McCormack's Abuse of
Children

Chicagoland Voice of the Faithful is relieved that the Daniel
McCormack abuse case resulting in McCormack's guilty plea in court
July 2 and a five year sentence for the sexual abuse of 5 boys came
together sooner than most cases. This is particularly significant
because this is the first live national case and is not decades old
as are many cases.

"Is this sentence fair?" asks Sandy Stilling Seehausen, President of
Chicagoland Voice of the Faithful . "What sentence could be "fair"
for ravaging the lives of these 5 young boys? There is no optimal
sentence. VOTF contends that the only ones who could respond with
any logic or fairness would be the victims and their families."

Voice of the Faithful holds Cardinal George, one of the chief
architects of the Charter to Protect Children and Youth, morally
accountable and even more culpable than Daniel McCormack for failing
to protect these children from abuse. We are outraged over the
Archdiocese' s attempt to minimize the damage done these boys by
stating "the boys were only fondled, not raped"! This statement only
further indicates that the Cardinal "does not get" or fully
comprehend the full impact of abuse of children. This travesty
should never have happened!

The Cardinal continues to be duplicitous. On the one hand, Cardinal
George claims to be concerned about victims and yet he and his staff
lobby in Springfield to defeat Senate Bill 1733 which would open a
two year window for victims to come forward and have their day in
court for abuse that happened years ago. Voice of the Faithful
stands for justice and protection of children everywhere, but
especially in our churches.

Cardinal George Should Pay for His Sins

2007-07-03T17:09:00.000-06:00

From Voice of the People, a Chicago Tribune blog for letters to the editor, July 3, 2007.

* * *

Cardinal George should pay for his sins

If Cardinal George of Chicago is allowed to get away with not removing an abusive priest sooner than he did from ministry then George's behavior will again become the norm for the United States bishops. I do not understand why the laity of Chicago is not up in arms about this. All Chicago-area Catholics should be outraged by this and should be calling on Cardinal George to resign. How many more empty apologies are going to be accepted by Chicago Catholics? It's time for George to pay for his sins.

David Hubbell

Downers Grove

Chicago: Rev. McCormack Pleads Guilty to Abuse

2007-07-03T08:25:00.000-06:00

From The New York Times, July 3, 2007.

* * *

Illinois: Priest Pleads Guilty to Abuse
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

A priest accused of abusing young boys pleaded guilty to five counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse and was sentenced to five years in prison. The priest, the Rev. Daniel McCormack, was accused of abusing five boys ages 8 to 12 in the rectory of St. Agatha Roman Catholic Church in Chicago, where he was parish priest. The Archdiocese of Chicago had drawn intense criticism over its handling of the case. Father McCormack was not removed from the parish and school until after he was charged in January 2006, several months after an accusation was made against him. Cardinal Francis George has conceded that he failed to act soon enough.

Top Chicago Officials Kept Their Jobs

2007-07-02T08:27:00.000-06:00

From the Chicago Sun-Times, 7.2.2007.

* * *

Editoral comment is preceded by *** and uses bold italics.

* * *

Top officials kept their jobs

July 2, 2007

BY SUSAN HOGAN/ALBACH Religion Reporter shogan@suntimes.com

Top leaders in the Archdiocese of Chicago responsible for complaints about predatory priests kept their positions or rose in the church in the aftermath of the Rev. Daniel McCormack's 2006 arrest, according to archdiocesan reports and interviews.

Vicar General George Rassas was elevated to auxiliary bishop. Chancellor Jimmy Lago was named the primary point person on child abuse cases. Leaders from the offices of Vicar for Priests to Protection of Children and Youth stayed in key posts.

And Cardinal Francis George -- whose handling of the McCormack matter led to calls for his resignation -- appears poised to be elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Meanwhile, elementary school Principal Barbara Westrick, who reported McCormack to civil authorities, lost her job. The archdiocese said the two matters involving Westrick were unrelated.

Westrick complained publicly about the cardinal after being admonished by the archdiocese for not alerting authorities sooner about McCormack. The archdiocese said Sunday that other individuals were also disciplined but that details were "private personnel matters."

McCormack, 38, is expected to plead guilty today to sexually abusing five boys and receive a five-year prison term, sources told the Chicago Sun-Times. He could serve as little as 2• ½ years.

Looking for a job

The case has proved an embarrassment for George, who declined to heed a review board's recommendation to remove McCormack from ministry. McCormack served in St. Agatha's parish and coached and taught at Our Lady of the Westside School.

***An embarrassment? The people of Chicago should have demanded his resignation.

Misconduct complaints date back to McCormack's seminary days. Despite failing effectively to implement the abuse policies adopted by U.S. bishops in 2002, George's reputation among bishops has not suffered, church observers say.

***Of course not. He's just following de facto policy from Rome: (contain, i.e., cover up, as best you can)

"The clerical culture in the Catholic Church closes ranks to protect one another," said Paul Lakeland, a theologian at Fairfield College in Connecticut.

***You bet it does. Priests first, women and chidren, second or not at all. What a corrupt culture. And most Catholics enable it by their silence.

Here's what has happened with key figures in the case:

• McCormack has been free on bail and ordered not to have contact with minors. He's still on the archdiocese payroll but is banned from active ministry until his criminal case is resolved.

• Westrick, former principal of Our Lady of the Westside, will speak later this month at a conference of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. Her health insurance has expired, and she's looking for a job.

• Rassas, vicar general at the time of McCormack's first arrest, became an auxiliary bishop of Chicago after McCormack's second arrest.

• Lago was tapped by George to oversee child abuse investigations more directly.

Sunday, SNAP members protested McCormack's possible sentence as "too light."

Copyright 2006 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Beyond Fall/Redemption: The New Story

2007-07-02T07:56:00.000-06:00

The following column by Ted Schmidt can be found in the July 2007 issue of the Social Edge, a monthly web magazine (webzine) published from Canada by Gerry McCarthy and Peter Robson.

* * *

Columns
BEYOND FALL/REDEMPTION: THE NEW STORY
ted schmidt

To preserve the natural world as the primary revelation of the divine must be the basic concern of religion.
Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein

Contemporary atonement ideas have succeeded primarily in turning God into a child-abusing heavenly parent. They have also turned Jesus into being the ultimate, perhaps even the masochistic, victim of a sadistic father God.
John Spong

For "in him we live and move and have our being" as even some of your poets have said.
Acts 17:28

In 1969 the extraordinary Apollo space walk beamed back to earth the luminous and breathtaking shots of "the big blue marble," our planet in all its radiance. This stunned the human community and the words of British astronomer and cosmologist Fred Hoyle (d.2001) soon became true: "Once a photograph of the earth taken from the outside is available a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose." Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970 and proved a powerful stimulus to the global community. The first real shoots of green consciousness began to appear.

Theologians, stung by the criticism of a medieval historian named Lynn White Jr., began a serious engagement with the findings of cosmologists. Two years earlier, White had launched a laser beam at a somnolent theological academy. Writing in the journal Science, he stated the obvious: That the Industrial Revolution was a quantum leap in humanity's interaction with the natural environment. But White's essay "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" went much farther. For him Christianity bore "a great burden of guilt" for the crisis.

While White correctly was challenged by theologians about his simplistic analysis, there can be no doubt that his broadside stimulated much creative thinking. One of the first to leap into the breach was a brilliant Passionist priest named Thomas Berry (b.1914). Primarily a cultural historian who read Chinese and Sanskrit, Berry was radically influenced by the cosmic musings of Teilhard de Chardin (d.1955), the Jesuit paleontologist whose visionary work on the evolution of the cosmos brought him into conflict with the Vatican.

Berry is among the growing band of theologians who wish to refocus theology away from "the personal saviour orientation" of the last two thousand years. These thinkers are stating the obvious: God's intimacy with the earth has been there since the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago. God has never not been present. As this evolutionary thinking has advanced and become known to a growing educated community of believers, ecclesial leaders caught in static institutions and centrally controlled feudal structures, began to get very nervous. The Catholic Church which has always regarded itself as the primary arbiter of revealed truth seemed paralyzed. Ironically, through the ages, it had shown remarkable resilience adapting itself to new currents of thought and quietly abandoning outworn ideas.

As the people in the pews became more theologically sophisticated and biblically literate, they understood that Jesus never proclaimed the Church --or himself. For him the kingdom was ultimate. This reign of God, supremely embodied in his life and ministry, hinted at a transformed earth, relationships governed by radical equality, a world of peace and justice and obviously, ecological sustainability. The Church was to activate this, embody it and serve it. Over time sclerosis set in and like most institutions, the Church struggled with the inevitable: The temptation to serve itself and become self-perpetuating.

If the universe has been evolving for 14 billion years and if our planet broke away as an independent unit four-and-a-half billion years ago, and if we now understand that the Divine spirit has been moving through us for so long and we have only been here as a species since December 31 of a pro-rated equivalent year, what does this do to the Jesus myth? Where is Jesus or maybe more properly the "cosmic Christ" in all of this? What is the relationship of the divine energy of the original fireball and that which invaded the man Jesus? Was Pentecost reserved for those who followed Jesus or has Pentecost been always with us?

Beyond fall/redemption

For Berry this "personal saviour orientation" leads simply to an "interpersonal devotionalism" which basically dispenses with the earth. Salvation for him and like-minded thinkers is a cosmic matter, not simply personal. At a pastoral level, it is only an evolutionary worldview, a cosmology based on scientific findings of an expanding universe which has any remote possibility of connecting with modern Christians and fellow earthlings. The idea that somehow the world is redeemed by a personal saviour who is handed over to a transcendent God to buy back our salvation has no purchasing power for us today. Mel Gibson is fighting a losing battle. As well, to keep reciting the Nicene and Apostles Creed bereft of any references to creation will continue alienating all of us.

All our faith traditions are struggling for a new framework and a new language to speak ultimate truths. Scientists and cosmologists have led the way forward in this exciting evolutionary journey. Berry has attempted to place the science in the context of a sacred story. This he calls the new story. The potential to unite all humans, fellow earthlings is exciting and awe inspiring. It is now obvious that the old symbol system which served us well for centuries can no longer hold our new understanding of the universe. The old wineskins have simply become porous, dried up, and cracking under the strain. New wineskins are dramatically needed. Berry's thinking would appear to be a window into such needed thinking. So far Rome has treated him as a non-person.

Diarmuid O'Murchu, another evolutionary thinker the Vatican appears to have ignored, puts it this way: "At this cultural moment there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that that the boundaries of sacred space (Jerusalem, church, mosque, synagogue) and sacred word (Bible, Torah, Koran) cannot hold the spiritual energy embodied in religions"(Religion in Exile).

The Church, and in particular the Catholic Church with its highly centralized Roman theology seems incapable now of breaking out of the fall/redemption model so beloved by Gibson, and indeed the Vatican bureaucracy. Church documents today resemble the preacher who, when he could not convince his audience, wrote down in his notes, "At this point, shout louder." Examples are many but the following will have to suffice here. In Dominus Iesus (2000) this statement:

As an innocent lamb he merited life for us by his blood which he freely shed. In him God reconciled us to himself and to one another freeing us from the bondage of the devil and of sin.

And from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Adam and Eve are real people:

390 The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.

The Body of God

Sally McFague, on the other hand, is a theologian who has given the ecumenical ecological community new ways to look at God --as friend, lover, mother, and embodied in the world as God's body. This last metaphor is particularly apt for us today since it is creation-centred rather than redemption oriented. It is focused on the incarnational presence of God in nature. McFague states the obvious: How utterly holistic this way of thinking is when compared to say, God as king, judge or lord. Monarchical models like these connote distance, power, hierarchy, and patriarchy. They are out of tune with our age. They say nothing to the nonhuman, sensate world. "God's body" (and remember it is a metaphor) connotes intimacy, closeness, care, nurturance, and sustenance. Though not reduced solely to the Body (pantheism) God is absolutely present. This body may be poorly cared for, unattended, and suffering. Vulnerable to be sure. Here the metaphor hints at the suffering love of Jesus on the cross. This is a God at risk in the evolutionary process but again, not reduced to it. One major plus for this model would be that it suggests that God loves fleshy bodies, surely an antidote to the anti-sexual and negative anti-body teaching too long associated with a male celibate Catholic leadership.

Another plus might be the acceptance of evil in our world. The body is ravaged, in pain. Sin then is to ignore the body, to walk on by the pain, to refuse responsibility for caring for it. This speaks to our sense of sacrament, the divine is present in the world. Most of all, this model resonates with our contemporaries. There is a language here that communicates powerfully to fellow earthlings in ways which are much more dramatic and cogent than the "elsewhere" God. It links us in a compelling way with the earth.

All theologies in the end are metaphors, which serve in enabling us to understand the relationship of God to the world. None can exhaust God, but it should be obvious that the distant transcendent monarchical and patriarchal God has seen its day as a metaphor capable of energizing contemporary believers. Theologians like McFague, Thomas Berry, John B. Cobb, Matthew Fox, Rosemary Radford Reuther and others are tapping into a rich vein here. A massive paradigm shift is afoot, and is being fought tooth and nail by fundamentalists in all major religions. Readers of this essay might wish to familiarize themselves with their liberating thought.

The universe, our world then, is "in God" though God is not reduced to the world. But what we have seen, and understood only latterly, is that with the coming of the post war Industrial Age, God's body was being ravaged, scarred, and torn apart. Forests began disappearing along with topsoil; species vanished, water became polluted and ozone depleted. In the last few decades, we noticed that weather patterns have been disrupted with the incidence of destructive storms, hurricanes, and tidal waves increasing. Mother earth literally was dying while mothers' milk became polluted. Children with puffers are a common sight in our elementary schools. Radiation experts like Sr. Rosalie Bertell consistently have warned us of the damage to children in neurodevelopmental disorders, increasing congenital abnormalities, and an increase in certain childhood cancers.

Our Aboriginal peoples who kept this wisdom alive are barely surviving. The "free enterprise" turbocapitalism has left a world in ruins. The modern myth of Progress, in Berry's words, has created Wasteworld rather than Wonderworld. The market mania of ever expanding Gross National Product has produced a Gross Earth Deficit. Up until the past few years virtually no one could challenge this economic fundamentalism, this founding myth of capitalism. The Dow Jones Stock Exchange trumped the Tao and the venture capitalist and robber barons who brought us Worldcom, Enron and corporate megalomania became the saints of the modern world. The largest Canadian newspaper the Toronto Star contains two Wheels sections glorifying fossil fuel depletion. There is no Ecology section in the paper.

And then something happened. The Great Turning began. This phrase of Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy well describes the global awareness that a kairos was upon us. Almost in a relatively short span humanity seemed to shake itself from its trance, rise from its autism. All over the world people began to name the shadow side of modernity described above. A spiritual revolution began which linked the human being to each other, to the earth community, and to the cosmos.

As the Bard said, the readiness is all, and it seemed that the human community was finally ready to hear the cry of the earth. For years the eco-prophets had been drowned out by the humming of the technological world, submerged by the arrogance of the neo-conservative moment which had trumpeted corporate power, patriarchal control, and the economics of empire. Finally the damage done to every part of creation became abundantly clear to all, and the Holy Spirit of Resistance broke the global trance. No longer could global warming be denied with any seriousness. In 2006, a former Vice President, Al Gore, produced a film called An Inconvenient Truth, which was literally shown all over the world to great acclaim. A DVD was produced in November 2006, and is in constant use in schools. Governments at every level started to move, though predictably the Canadian government under neo-conservative Stephen Harper lagged behind others. Harper previously had described the Kyoto Accord which limits greenhouse gas emissions as "essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of Canadians." He then uttered a dire warning that such a priority was too expensive.

The Catholic Church and the ecological moment

In this final section, I would like to deal with the role of the Church in this new postmodern moment. In brief, one might quote the oft --heard remark that the Church always arrives a little bit late and a little bit out of breath. And this certainly is true about the issue of the environment. In some ways this is understandable. A huge structure like the Catholic Church moves slowly, and historically we know that it has always had an ability to move. Her great theologians have always served her well in adapting to new historical moments. Gregory Baum well expresses this in Amazing Church. "As the Church enters a new ethical horizon it rereads the scriptures and rethinks its teaching in a process that involves debates on all levels of the Catholic community and eventually leads to modification of the official position." Space does not allow me to elaborate on this but a brief mention of the issue of slavery, religious liberty and human rights should suffice. Baum quite rightly also points out that the present Church structure and hierarchical leadership today lags behind the faithful in responding to today's ethical horizons. He posits three areas: The Church's authoritarian centralism, the equality of men and women, and the meaning of sexuality.

In my judgment, we might also add the failure to understand and embrace the cry of the earth as an authentic "sign of the time." This is particularly strange in that sacramentality is at the heart of the Catholic enterprise. All of reality is sacred, created by God, sustained by a loving presence. The invisible God touches us through creation. We baptize with water. We commune through bread and wine. We sanctify with oils. And in the Incarnation we believe that God puts flesh on divinity. As the poet Yeats graphically phrased it, "God has pitched His tent in this place of excrement." We are on holy ground.

So why hasn't the Church been in the leadership of the environmental movement? Why has out an out resistance been so great? Why the demonization of over one hundred theologians who wish to place Jesus and the Bible in the new Universe story? Why has environmental degradation been coterminous with Christianity, particularly in North America?

First let me deal with Thomas Berry's reflections here. It is obvious from this essay that I hold Berry in the highest regard as a theologian or "ecologian" as he prefers to be called. Time magazine rightly has placed him among the top one hundred thinkers of the twentieth century.

Berry believes we have been in the stacks way too long. We have lost the second book of God, nature, and the cosmos. Living under polluted skies we no longer see the stars. The divine presence in all of history was always perceived in the natural order, but the Church obsessed with the transcendent "elsewhere" God (Morwood) forgot the immanent God reflected in nature. This amnesia began after the great Back Death ravaged Europe in 1347, and continued through the Enlightenment's embrace of instrumental reasoning. Only the mystics and the poets remained faithful to the goodness of creation which which Aquinas had insisted on. In a similar vein, a Platonic focus on another world, our heavenly destiny mitigated against taking this world seriously.

Although Vatican ll produced a "signs of the times" theology, one which suggested there was yet more truth to break forth the increasingly defensive leadership of the Church was reticent to cede any powers of discernment to the broad membership of the baptized, the sensus fidelium. In particular it chafed at eco-feminists who suggested that the oppression of women and the oppression of the earth were interconnected, and it might take feminine wisdom to solve the issue. The earth like the feminine is noted for fecundity and nourishment rather than dominance and power. The sacred feminine of this new "Magdalene moment" (Schaberg, Fox) a special time when the earth and the feminine have reappeared with a holy insistence, seems too much for the patriarchal leadership of the Church under the John Paul ll/Ratzinger restoration. These necessary "green" voices have been augmented by the rising tide of the highly educated baptized laity who have also been marginalized as a crucial component of the Church's teaching office. Catholic theology states that the Spirit has been given to the whole Church, not simply the clerical caste. And now the Spirit, the ever new is expressing itself in the dream of the earth and the entire cosmos.

Rome finally caught on in 1988 in the papal encyclical Solicitudo Rei Socialis. In 1990, Pope John Paul ll really turned up the jets and issued a document for World Peace Day entirely on the environment. "Christians," the pontiff proclaims,"realize that their responsibility within creation and their duty towards nature and the Creator are an essential part of their faith." However in the following years, the Pope never seemed to move beyond a philosophical understanding of human centredness. The Catholic Catechism improves a bit, but there seems no overriding urgency to address the growing catastrophe. Certainly not as much emphasis as on "pelvic orthodoxy."

As we look back in history from this 2007 perspective, one wonders if we can ever account for our unprecedented human destruction. It certainly ranks with the great crimes of human history. Although guilt will not do much for us at this point, we must accept the fact that this all happened on Christianity's watch. We must move on trusting in God's mercy and the Spirit's presence.

In the past number of years in Canada, we have watched with admiration some of the pastoral programs the Anglican Church and United Churches have developed for their congregations. Invariably when I ask in public addresses about the Catholic Church's response to the greatest crisis we have ever collectively seen, I get blank stares. Few recall any homily and certainly little pastoral planning on the issue. Letters to the government on same-sex unions, but no parish actions on the environment. Yes, there have been statements to sign the Kyoto Accord and individual parishes may have taken on some projects, but generally abysmal clerical leadership. We have paid a steep price for the Episcopal appointments of John Paul ll in this regard.

Many progressive Catholics have left the church in anger over the institutional Church's misplaced priorities. Many have found their way into secular groups who have been actively defending creation such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Sierra Club. As I was writing this, I heard a priest at Mass talk about the Serra Club (a group promoting male celibates for the priesthood). I chuckled at the thought that each parish might have a Serra Club but not a Sierra Club! As if the fundamental priestly vocation of all of us today is not to help save the earth. Prophets however are among us --men like the atheist David Suzuki and the amazing Thomas Berry. Let me close with the latter.

Berry maintains we have now moved from the Cenezoic to the Ecozoic age. A kairos is at hand --a mystique of the earth has grasped us. We have realized that the earth is a one-time endowment. If we lose it, it is all over. The earth, as he never tires of saying, is primary --we humans are secondary. Economics needs to be re-thought with the earth at the centre. This is beginning to happen in huge corporations, states, and provinces and in private homes. George W. Bush and Stephen Harper may not understand, but millions do get it. Evangelicals previously tied in to fall/redemption models are getting greener by the day. The apocalyptic endtimers are rapidly losing voice; the earth's voice is rising. Medicine, technology, and education are finally beginning to reinvent themselves. The Universe story in all its staggering wonder and beauty is gaining adherents. For Berry, women have had to endure the four patriarchal establishments which has brought the world to the brink of extinction: Ancient empires, the clerical establishment, the nation state and the corporation. Ecofeminism bearing the gifts of nurturance, relationship, and interdependence is the only way forward. Men must learn this. The Church must learn this.

Berry the Catholic ecologian suggests that a new exodus is at hand, but it involves the species-self and the entire planet leaving an old world behind. For certain, we are in the beginning stages and the resistance will still be great. Possibly this is "the new thing" (Isaiah 43) which is happening at this juncture in history. God has spoken to us through the universe. The role of religion today then is to join the holy nomads, the secular saints, and prophets like Berry who are leading the way. We are finally making an option for the earth, and with the earth we are moving into God's new future. In his exile in Babylon, Isaiah's role was to spread hope that the living God had not abandoned them.

His words (43:19) seemingly are addressing the entire Church today.

Do not remember the former things
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth: do you not perceive it?

Ted Schmidt is the former editor of Catholic New Times. He can be reached at jtschmidt@rogers.com. His blog is http://theologyinthevineyard.wordpress.com

"What's the Cardinal's Punishment?"

2007-07-01T09:58:00.000-06:00

From the Chicago Sun-Times, 7.1.2007.

* * *

'This isn't justice for those children'

July 1, 2007

BY SUSAN HOGAN/ALBACH AND ERIC HERMAN Staff Reporters

An expected guilty plea from the Rev. Daniel McCormack on child sexual abuse charges was met with silence from Cardinal Francis George on Saturday and mixed reactions from McCormack's former colleagues.

McCormack, 38, will plead guilty to five counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault Monday and likely receive a five-year prison term, sources told the Sun-Times.

McCormack, who is accused of molesting five boys at St. Agatha Parish and Our Lady of the Westside School, was eligible for seven years in prison. But with credit for good behavior, he could serve as little as 2½ years.

George would not comment on the reported plea agreement because it had not yet been approved by a judge.

"I have to have definitive information before I can respond," George said.

George has come under fierce criticism for his handling of the McCormack case.

One of his critics, former Our Lady of the Westside Principal Barbara Westrick, reacted angrily to news of the plea deal.

"This isn't justice for those children who are going to suffer the rest of their lives," Westrick said. "If the cardinal had taken action, some would never have been molested. What's the cardinal's punishment?"

McCormack was arrested in January 2006 after Westrick called civil authorities to report a student said he'd been molested by the priest.

Westrick was reprimanded by the archdiocese for allowing McCormack, then her boss, to teach and coach at the elementary school after allegations against him came to light. She lost her job as principal last month in what she says is retaliation for criticizing George.

Westrick first denounced the cardinal publicly last December, saying he was making her the scapegoat for his mishandling of the case. After the arrest, an outside audit revealed church authorities had knowledge of past child sexual misconduct allegations involving the priest.

Sam Parker, who works at Holy Family parish, where McCormack served from 1997 to 2000, said a plea arrangement involving prison time for McCormack was just.

"We all thought he was a great guy and pray for him," Parker said. "But this is a time to instill to these children that [they] did the right thing in speaking up. I'm proud of them."

Contributing: Monifa Thomas

Just to Be Sure, Diocese is Checking All Volunteers

2007-07-01T09:34:00.000-06:00

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 7.1.2007.

* * *

Sure, check the volunteers, but keep in office bishops who cover up and shield predators priests.

What BS!

No wonder so many good people have left and are leaving the not-so-holy, not-so-honest, not-so-smart Roman Catholic Church.

SNAP President Barbara Blaine is on target, as usual. She would rather see church's focus put on holding bishops accountable for the predators they allowed to stay in ministry. "Rather than looking at the heart of the problem, they create these diversions," she said.

* * *

Sunday, July 01, 2007
By Ann Rodgers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

When the 17 lectors at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Shadyside learned they would have to undergo national criminal background checks to continue reading the Bible aloud at Mass, two quit.

Dr. Mark Stehlik, the lector coordinator, says he doesn't think the two were hiding anything. They simply resented the intrusion into their privacy and were hurt by the church's lack of trust, he says.

In 2004 Dr. Stehlik cheerfully submitted to a state background check in order to coach at the parish school. But now he wonders whether expanding the requirement to volunteers with little official interaction with minors is wise or even helpful in preventing child sexual abuse.

"For a community, meaning the Catholic community, that has been built up on the backs of willing parish volunteers, there had better be a really good, verifiable return to justify putting anything onerous in the way of that volunteerism. In my mind, that return is just not there," said Dr. Stehlik, 49, a father of two and a lector since eighth grade.

"We are paying a huge price for a very small likelihood of something actually happening."

The screening is a response to a national mandate adopted five years ago by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. But to many volunteers it seems like a draconian response to the priest sex-abuse scandal.

The bishops' child-protection charter requires each diocese to do criminal background checks on church volunteers who have regular contact with children and to keep that information in a database.

Lawyers and insurance companies that work with non-Catholic churches have long recommended background checks. ChoicePoint, a leading industry provider, says that one in 18 of the 1.6 million screens it did for nonprofit organizations between 2002 and 2005 turned up undisclosed criminal convictions. Drunk driving and theft topped the list of convictions, while sex offenses ranked seventh. Among the latter were 506 registered sex offenders.

The diocese expects to screen up to 30,000 volunteers. So far, 11,325 have completed the application. The diocese will pay the $7 fee for a national criminal record check for applications submitted by July 31. Most parishes are paying the additional $10 for each child abuse history clearance, said Ron Ragan, director of the diocesan Office for the Protection of Children and Young People

Some volunteers resent the time required to fill out the application, others worry about confidentiality, he said. To protect privacy, the database will not be stored at the diocese, but at Austin Computing Solutions in Texas, which has high-level security, he said.

Mr. Ragan said he recognized that longtime volunteers feel hurt by the request, but said predators are often beloved members of their community.

"We need to ensure that those adults who are acting in the name of the church and have regular contact with children have nothing in their background to suggest that they may be a threat to children," he said.

He acknowledged that many volunteer tasks are "gray areas" for contact with youth, but that diocesan officials decided to err on the side of safety.

If a child often sees someone reading the Bible from the front of the church, for example, it affects how they view that person in the social hall or on the playground, he said. "They are seen as people who are trusted in the eyes of the church, and therefore children are inclined to view them as someone who is trustworthy," he said.

A diocesan committee will decide whether those with questionable pasts should be rejected or restricted in their ministry, Mr. Ragan said.

Not just sex crimes

"We're not interested in minor traffic violations. But if you're talking about someone who has been convicted of driving under the influence, and they are involved in transporting youth in the parish, yes, of course we would need to take a serious look at that," he said.

Mr. Ragan cited an anonymous letter of gratitude that the diocese received from a victim of sexual abuse. But the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests isn't backing the effort.

Barbara Blaine, SNAP's founder and president, would rather see church's focus put on holding bishops accountable for the predators they allowed to stay in ministry. "Rather than looking at the heart of the problem, they create these diversions," she said.

SNAP has heard from a few people molested by church volunteers, but says the number is nothing compared to the thousands who reported abuse by a priest, she said.

"If someone could point to 10,000 volunteers that have molested kids, then I would say that would make sense to use resources that way," she said.

Nationally, 1.6 million Catholic Church staff and volunteers have been screened, said Teresa Kettelkamp, executive director of the U.S. bishops' Office of Child and Youth Protection.

Still, Dr. Stehlik asks if the money spent on screening lectors and ushers could be better used elsewhere. A professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, he also believes the diocese is too confident about the security of its database in Texas.

"It's precisely because I'm a computer scientist that I find this troubling. Despite our best efforts, these databases cannot be safeguarded," he said.

"The world is a dangerous place. We'd like to protect everybody from everything, but we can't.."

David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, thinks Dr. Stehlik makes valid points, but says the Catholic Church has reason to go the extra mile.

He believes the church has done a good job of weeding predators from its clergy.

"Going forward it's likely that the patterns of misdeeds in the Catholic Church will probably parallel that of other youth-serving organizations. I do think that volunteers are a risk group," he said.

Screening no guarantee

But there is no data on whether screening protects children.

"Most of the people who abuse kids do not have records, so the vast majority of people are not going to be removed from the risk pool by those checks," he said.

He praised the church for also doing prevention training for staff, volunteers and children.

"My sense is that the Catholic Church, maybe because of its history, is doing a lot more of the comprehensive approach to prevention than a lot of other organizations do. A lot of organizations just do the background checks and think that keeps kids safe," he said.

Dr. Finkelhor, a Unitarian, agrees that checking lectors and others who don't work directly with youth "is going overboard." But he knows what he would say if he were a bishop responding to complaints about screening.

"I would say that I know this is an imposition, but we have to restore the good reputation of the church and the only way to do that is to show that we are bending over backward to protect kids. Maybe we are overdoing things here for a while, but it's important for the future of the church," he said.

Nicholas Cafardi, dean emeritus of the Duquesne University School of Law, served on the U.S. bishops' National Review Board, and said it was that lay group, not the bishops, who called for screening volunteers.

"When I was on the [review board], and we were insisting that the bishops adopt safe-environment programs, the question came up of who should be covered by this policy and there was no easy place to draw the line. We made the decision to include everybody," he said.

Church Mutual Insurance, the nation's largest insurer of places of worship, with 96,000 congregations, urges criminal background checks for volunteers. A video it produced on the topic says that 50 percent of sexual misconduct cases in places of worship involve volunteers.

ChoicePoint's Web site has letters from non-profit organizations that have used their background check services. Most are from churches. An unidentified church in Indianapolis wrote that it had "discovered child molestation charges for a volunteer who had applied to work around children."

The Valley Program for Aging Services in Waynesboro, Va., discovered that a longtime volunteer who was the leading candidate to become director of a center had a five-page rap sheet, including a conviction for theft from an 80-year-old in her care.

Richard Hammar, general counsel of the Assemblies of God and a national expert on church-related legal issues, also urges background screening. So far, its not about protection from lawsuits, but about protecting children, he said.

"No court has found a church liable for the molestation of a minor on the ground that it failed to conduct a criminal records check on the offender," he said.

However, screening is becoming common among other organizations that serve youth, which means that the "community standard" by which a court may determine negligence is rising, he said. He considers it only a matter of time before a court finds a church negligent for failure to screen.

His best guess is that 10 to 20 percent of churches now do some type of criminal record check.

If volunteers feel hurt that they aren't trusted, he said, "my response is to reply with Ronald Reagan's theory of negotiating with the Soviets: Trust, but verify."

Of the two lectors who dropped out at Sacred Heart, one believed the church was giving in to a culture of "security paranoia," Dr. Stehlik said. The other, a 22-year volunteer, appeared to object to "a presumption of guilt" and declared himself "on leave until the situation improves."

Dr. Stehlik has submitted his application for screening.

"Despite all of my reservations, I care more about my church than I do about the invasion of my privacy," he said.

(Ann Rodgers can be reached at arodgers@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416. )
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Copyright © PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Omaha Archdiocese Sues Nun, Family Over Missing Money

2007-07-01T09:23:00.000-06:00

From the Beatrice (NE) Daily Sun, 6.30.2007.

* * *

Omaha archdiocese sues nun, family over missing money

Saturday, June 30, 2007 3:51 PM CDT

OMAHA, Neb. - In addition to a lawsuit against a nun accused of stealing church money, the Omaha Archdiocese has filed more lawsuits against her and some family members.

In April the archdiocese sued Sister Barbara Markey in an effort to recover $820,000 the archdiocese says she stole as director of the archdiocese's Catholic Family Life Office.

Her criminal trial on a charge of theft by deception was tentatively set for Sept. 17.

She was initially sued in April. This week the archdiocese filed a lawsuit against 11 of her relatives for a total of $73,800. They were not accused of theft, but the lawsuit says they benefited from the money, gifts or other items from Markey.

Two lawsuits were filed in Douglas County District Court.

A third lawsuit was filed in Park County, Colo., seeking a lien against a house there that has a tax valuation of $262,000. The archdiocese says Markey spent some of its money on the vacation home owned by members of her family, under the incorporated name of Bally Markey.

Attempts to reach Markey on Saturday were unsuccessful. Calls to her lawyers were not immediately returned

Markey, a nationally and internationally known speaker, was fired in January after an audit turned up irregularities.

According to the audit, Markey spent $307,545 for her own use or without documentation between December 2003 and January 2006.

Prosecutors say nearly $900,000 hasn't been accounted for back to 1999, but the state won't be investigating further.

Criminal court documents say at least $67,656 of the total was spent at casinos.

She has denied any crime and has explained her spending as "complex accounting."

One of her attorneys says her accounting was a longtime practice that no archdiocesan official told her to stop.

Another of Markey's attorneys has characterized the allegations as a financial dispute that does not involve any breaking of laws.

Prosecutors say Markey misused secret bank accounts and a credit card the archdiocese didn't authorize.

The Rev. Greg Baxter took part in the archdiocese's investigation. He said it uncovered canceled checks that were written to and endorsed by relatives named in the lawsuit.

The amounts sought from the relatives range from $590 to $24,875.

Ed Hotz of Omaha, who is representing the archdiocese, said it wrote the relatives and sent documentation regarding the money the archdiocese says they received. The letters asked for the money to be returned and gave them 60 days.

None did, and the lawsuit was filed, Hotz said.

Markey co-wrote one of the Catholic Church's most widely used marriage preparation programs, FOCCUS, which stands for Facilitating Open Couple Communication, Understanding and Study. The marriage preparation program is used by most U.S. dioceses. According to the FOCCUS Web site, 400,000 to 500,000 couples in 14 countries use the tool each year.

On the Net:

FOCCUS: http://www.foccusinc.com

Omaha Archdiocese: http://www.archomaha.com/

Information from: Omaha World-Herald, http://www.omaha.com

A service of the Associated Press(AP)

Omaha Archdiocese and Marriage Center at Creighton University Split

2007-07-01T07:35:00.000-06:00

From www.catholicnewsagency.com, 6.29.2007.

* * *

Archbishop severs ties with Creighton University marriage center over immoral proposal

Omaha, Nebraska, Jun 29, 2007 / 10:24 am (CNA).- The Archdiocese of Omaha has severed ties with Creighton University's Center for Marriage and Family after two university researchers said the Catholic Church should allow engaged couples to live together and have sex before marriage.

The two researchers, Michael Lawler and Gail Risch, made their position known in the June issue of U.S. Catholic magazine.

Lawler is the director of the Creighton Center for Marriage and Family and professor emeritus of Catholic theology at Creighton. Risch is an instructor of ethics.

In the article, Lawler and Risch proposed a “modern-day betrothal” situation which they claim reflects Catholic tradition. They noted that in the 13th and 14th centuries couples were often first betrothed — a mutual consent to spend the rest of their lives together — before they were actually married.

"The first sexual intercourse between the spouses usually followed the betrothal — a fact of the Catholic tradition that has been obscured by the now-taken-for-granted sequence of wedding, marriage, sexual intercourse," Lawler and Risch wrote.

"Such a process would meet the legitimate Catholic and social requirement that the sex act must take place only within a stable relationship," they wrote.

Archbishop Elden F. Curtiss of Omaha responded to the proposal by vehemently opposing it. He denounced the article as contrary to Catholic doctrine and said neither Lawler nor Risch is a reliable theologian.

The archbishop asserted that the establishment of this sort of relationship would not respect marriage or the family. The issue is crystal clear, he said: "Couples who live together without marriage do in fact live in sin objectively."

The new position of the center led the archbishop to sever ties with the institute. "Because the position of the authors is contrary to church teaching about the intrinsic evil of fornication, I have disassociated the Omaha Archdiocese from the Center for Marriage and Family at Creighton University," Archbishop Curtiss wrote.

The separation of the Omaha Archdiocese and the Center for Marriage and Family is a particularly sharp one because the archdiocese is considered a national leader in premarital counseling. FOCCUS, a marriage preparation inventory developed by the archdiocese's Family Life Office, is widely used by Catholics and Protestants.

Copyright @ CNA
(http://www.catholicnewsagency.com)

San Diego Bankruptcy Settlement Deadline Set

2007-06-30T10:01:00.000-06:00

Bishop Robert Brom

From the San Diego Union-Tribune, 6.30.2007.

* * *

Note the costs to the diocese of the legal fees associated with the bankruptcy.

* * *

DIOCESE IN TURMOIL
Judge sets bankruptcy settlement deadline

By Mark Sauer and Sandi Dolbee
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITERS

June 30, 2007

Pressure to settle the bankruptcy filed by the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego is building as attorneys for Bishop Robert Brom and those representing about 150 victims of sexual abuse by priests have until mid-August to reach agreement or face the possibility that the now-suspended lawsuits will go to trial.

Federal bankruptcy Judge Louise DeCarl Adler set an Aug. 13 deadline for a mediation settlement. Should talks fail, Adler will decide on Aug. 23 whether to set trial dates in state court for an initial batch of abuse lawsuits, Adler ruled this week.

The two sides began mediation talks about three weeks ago.

“She cannot mandate settlement, but she can strongly urge it,” said Fred Naffziger, a business law professor at Indiana University who has studied the five bankruptcies filed by U.S. dioceses. “As an attorney, you don't disregard that, you give it a try.”

Brom's lawyers, meanwhile, are again challenging the constitutionality of a state law that lifted the statute of limitations and opened a one-year window in 2003 to file lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by clergy dating back decades.

At midnight on Feb. 27, hours before the first sexual-abuse trial was to begin, San Diego became the largest U.S. diocese to declare bankruptcy in the face of massive monetary claims.

The filing triggered an automatic stay of the four abuse cases scheduled for trial, ranging in nature from a teenager's allegation of sexual abuse to three cases accusing priests of being serial sexual predators.

Plaintiffs' attorneys claim that Brom and his lawyers sought shelter in bankruptcy court to avoid the emergence of horrific details of sexual abuse by clergy.

Church officials deny that claim and have expressed hope for a mediated settlement. In a letter to parishioners Sunday, the bishop wrote, “The diocese is committed to this mediation process with every hope that it will . . . balance our responsibility to compensate victims and our responsibility to continue the mission of the church.”

More than three years of mediation between the parties in state court failed, however, leading to the bankruptcy filing. Many of those claiming to have been abused by priests prefer a public forum.

“We wish these cases would go to trial,” said Irwin Zalkin, a San Diego attorney representing nearly one-third of local abuse plaintiffs. “I think it's important for the public to witness the events that occurred. These stories should come out.”

Attorney Micheal Webb, who represents Brom, said he does not believe public trials are “the way to resolve the valuation of these cases. But if we are told to go to trial, we will be ready.”

Mediation talks ordered by Adler have been proceeding in secret at a furious pace in recent weeks before U.S. Magistrate Judge Leo Papas, with sessions held in the evening and on weekends.

“Nobody has walked out yet; the process is continuing,” said Jim Stang, a bankruptcy attorney representing a committee of abuse victims. He said lawyers on both sides are barred from directly commenting on the federal mediation.

Two key issues were addressed in a hearing this week before Adler: the value of the approximately 150 abuse lawsuits and whether the 98 Catholic parishes in San Diego and Imperial counties are part of the diocese holdings or separate entities.

Barring a settlement, the question of whether parish churches, schools and other property and assets belong to the diocese is set to be decided in a trial this fall within the bankruptcy process.

Although it has yet to get appraisals that the bankruptcy court requires, the diocese – which says in court papers that it is not insolvent – estimates that its property and other assets are worth less than $150 million.

Should the 98 parishes' property and assets be deemed part of the diocese, plaintiffs lawyers say, its holdings would be worth hundreds of millions more.

In a “reorganization plan” filed early in its bankruptcy, the San Diego diocese offered to settle the roughly 150 cases for $95 million, an average of about $630,000 per case. The amount would be in line with church settlements nationally, according to the diocese, and half would be paid by insurance policies.

But plaintiffs' attorneys say settlements and jury verdicts in some 400 California abuse cases so far have ranged from $1.3 million to $1.6 million each. They insist that the diocese and its insurers can afford payouts totaling $200 million or more without having to sell any church, school or other asset connected to its core mission.

In court papers filed yesterday, diocese attorneys revived their challenge to the 2003 filing window approved by the California legislature and signed into law by former Gov. Gray Davis.

The law was “unjust and oppressive because it imposes massive litigation costs, and potentially monumental judgments, on Catholic institutions, including (the San Diego diocese), for cases which are so old that virtually no evidence remains,” the diocese asserted.

Church attorneys in Los Angeles and San Diego, whose dioceses together face more than 650 lawsuits, have lost challenges in both state and federal court over the law's constitutionality.

Federal law prevents issues that have already been settled from being litigated again, said attorney Andrea Leavitt, who represents 14 of the sexual abuse plaintiffs.

“It's a non-starter for Mr. Webb,” she said, referring to Brom's attorney.

In the four months since the diocese declared bankruptcy, bills for attorneys and accountants have exceeded $2.1 million. Under Chapter 11 rules, the diocese must foot the bill for nearly all bankruptcy costs.

Webb expects bankruptcy costs to be about $4 million by the end of August.

Sandi Dolbee: (619) 293-2082; sandi.dolbee@uniontrib.com

Mark Sauer: (619) 293-2227; mark.sauer@uniontrib.com

Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20070630-9999-1n30diocese.html

Rudy Giuliani and the Bishop of Providence

2007-06-30T08:52:00.000-06:00

From the Tablet, 6.30.2007.

* * *

Rudy’s rude awakening
Tablet USA - Independence Day 2007

Michael McGough

The question of whether Catholic politicians who support legalised abortion should be allowed to take Communion is threatening to become a major issue in the 2008 presidential election, writes Michael McGough

The question posed to Rudy Giuliani at a Republican presidential debate in New Hampshire was predictable: what was his reaction to a caustic complaint by the Catholic bishop of Providence, Rhode Island, that the former New York mayor's position on abortion - it's morally wrong but should remain legal - was reminiscent of Pontius Pilate? What wasn't predictable was the flash of lightning that struck as Giuliani began to answer, disrupting the audio and creating what a pro-life website called "an eerie instance of coincidence". Seventeen months before the 2008 presidential election, journalists were wondering if they would have to repeat the "wafer watch" of 2004, in which they kept track of which bishops would and would not be willing to offer the Eucharist to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, a "pro-choice" Catholic.

The question to Giuliani was prompted by an unusually abrasive article in a Catholic newspaper by the Rev. Thomas J. Tobin entitled, "My RSVP to Rudy Giuliani". Tobin noted that he had received an invitation to a Giuliani fundraiser, one he would ignore because "I would never support a candidate who supports legalised abortion". It got worse for the former mayor. "Rudy's public proclamations on abortion are pathetic and confusing," Tobin wrote. "Even worse, they're hypocritical."

Tobin's attack on Giuliani may not have caused lightning to strike, but it produced thunderous criticism. The executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Barry Lynn, sent a letter to the Internal Revenue Service calling for an investigation by the taxman into whether Tobin's attack on Giuliani in a diocesan newspaper violated federal law that prohibits Churches and other tax-exempt institutions from using "organisational resources to intervene in elections". The more lasting effect of the bishop's denunciation, however, may have been to launch the "wafer watch" of 2008.

Moreover, in this election there are several pro-choice Catholic candidates who will approach the rail at their peril: Giuliani in the Republican Party and, among the Democrats, Senators Joe Biden of Delaware and Chris Dodd of Connecticut and New Mexico's Governor, Bill Richardson. In fact, as in 2004, the drama may play out on two stages. One will feature criticism of "pro-choice" Catholic politicians by pugnacious prelates like Tobin and Raymond Burke of St Louis, who made it clear that John Kerry would not be welcome to take Communion in that archdiocese. The other will highlight differences among American bishops about whether pro-choice politicians are dishonouring their faith - and jeopardising their fitness to receive the Sacrament - by the way they vote on abortion.

Burke and Tobin are in one camp; the other one includes Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, DC (whom Tobin served as an auxiliary bishop in Pittsburgh).

Wuerl has angered some anti-abortion Catholics by refusing to declare the Eucharist off-limits to pro-choice politicians like Nancy Pelosi, the new speaker of the House. Ann Rodgers, the religion correspondent for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, described an encounter in a Washington chapel in which Wuerl described his approach. Asked how he would respond to Catholic politicians who support legalised abortion, Wuerl replied: "Teach. That is what Jesus did."

Perhaps so, but Catholic anti-abortion activists want their bishops to take a harder line. So might the Pope, given his comments during a flight to Brazil in May in which he seemed to justify not only the exclusion of "pro-choice" politicians from the Eucharist but their excommunication as well.

The problem for the American Church is that making a legislator's support for legal abortion the moral (let alone the canon-law) equivalent of "procuring" or assisting at an abortion rests uneasily with voters, Catholic or not, who believe that one acceptable approach to serving one's constituents is to give force to their views rather than one's own. (It's not the only view of a representative's duty. Some members of Congress subscribe to Edmund Burke's teaching that "your representative owes you, not his industry only, but judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.") The argument that representatives aren't necessarily enforcing their own views is similar to an argument made on behalf of Catholic judges who support legal abortion in their decisions. In both cases, the official is possibly doing something more than voting his conscience. This is a more coherent argument than the one Giuliani makes and Tobin mocks: that a politician can believe that abortion is immoral for the reasons the Church insists on and yet be unwilling to "impose" that view through legislation. That view may not be "weak-kneed" as Tobin suggested, but it is weak-headed.

Still, even cogent arguments against the public positions of pro-choice Catholic politicians are less effective when they are offered by bishops who can be criticised for forcing people like Giuliani and Pelosi to choose between their faith and their duty to the people who elected them. In 1960 American voters rejected the libel that electing "little John" (Kennedy) would place America under the sway of "Big John" (Pope John XXIII). But the price of Kennedy's election may have been his famous pronouncement that "I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute - where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote". Those words still resonate and are perhaps the best insurance policy for "pro-choice" politicians like Giuliani.

Chicago: Abuser Priest McCormack to Plead Guilty

2007-06-30T08:24:00.000-06:00

Tom Byrne of Shaker Heights, OH, spotted this Chicago Sun-Times 6.30.2007 story.

* * *

In deal, McCormack to plead guilty

June 30, 2007

BY ERIC HERMAN Staff Reporter/eherman@suntimes.com

The Rev. Daniel McCormack, whose alleged abuse of boys rocked the Archdiocese of Chicago, is expected to plead guilty to five felonies Monday, sources said.

Under the terms of the deal, McCormack, 38, will plead guilty to five counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse and likely receive a five-year prison term, the sources said. The plea agreement must be approved by Judge Thomas Sumner, who has indicated he will accept it, according to sources.

McCormack could have faced up to seven years in prison. With credit for good behavior, McCormack could serve as little as 2½ years.

"I don't think it's an overly harsh sentence, but I don't think it's a laydown," said Steve Greenberg, a defense lawyer not involved in the case. "Two years for this guy in jail is not going to be easy.

"They don't want to put the kids through the trauma of a trial."

An attorney for McCormack declined to comment, as did prosecutors handling the case. Negotiations have been going on since March.

McCormack was charged in January 2006 with abusing boys at St. Agatha Parish and Our Lady of the Westside School. The priest taught and coached basketball.

At first, the allegations concerned two victims, ages 8 and 9. Three more victims came forward, leading to additional charges. While the archdiocese said it was aware of a dozen or more allegations, prosecutors have not found sufficient evidence to bring further charges.

The case unleashed a barrage of criticism at Cardinal Francis George, including calls for his resignation. The scandal gained force after it emerged that the archdiocese knew of allegations against McCormack and had assigned a church official to monitor him. The abuse allegedly continued.

McCormack allegedly abused at least two of the victims inside the rectory of St. Agatha. The archdiocese removed him from the parish after he was charged.

Rudy Giuliani's Catholicism

2007-06-30T07:44:00.000-06:00

From the Village Voice, 6.26.2007.

* * *

This article addresses not only Rudy Giuliani's Catholicism but also accusations against Monsignor Alan Placa, Rudy's best friend and business associate. Placa is accused of sexual abuse of four minors and of being a key figure in the Rockville Centre Diocese's cover up of sex crimes of priests against minors.

* * *

No Wafer for Rudy
Giuliani campaigns as a Catholic, but he's on the outs with God
by Wayne Barrett
June 26th, 2007 5:24 PM

When Pope Benedict XVI attacked Catholic politicians in Mexico who supported abortion rights last month, Rudy Giuliani was asked for his opinion. The presidential candidate replied in the language of the church: "Issues like that are for me and my confessor. I'm a Catholic, and that's the way I resolve those issues, personally and privately."

Giuliani has invoked his Catholic heritage on Larry King; he's been described by The Washington Post as a "devout Catholic"; he's appeared on Fox News with the label "Catholic" floating on-screen; and he's handled a CNN debate question about a bishop who denounced him with a declaration unfamiliar to those who covered him as mayor. "I respect the opinion of Catholic and religious leaders of all kinds," he said. "Religion is very important to me. It's a very important part of my life."

The ex-mayor's newfound piety also includes a mantra about abortion that wasn't heard while he was in City Hall. "I hate abortion," he now says across America and, in a proposed 12-point plan, he declares that he's committed to decreasing the number of abortions. "I would encourage someone to not take that option," he says, though as a candidate for mayor he said he would pay for an abortion for his daughter. Today, he says it would be "OK to repeal" Roe v. Wade, though he hosted celebrations of its anniversary three times at City Hall. His wholesale reversal on Medicaid funding, late-term abortions, and parental consent are all part of a repackaging designed to soften not just his New York public record, but also the inconvenient details of his personal life.

Married three times, Giuliani simply isn't the Catholic candidate he claims to be. He can't have a confessor. He can't receive the sacraments of penance, the Eucharist, or marriage. While bishops disagree about whether or not a Catholic politician who supports abortion rights can receive the sacraments, there is no disagreement about the consequences of divorcing and remarrying outside the church, as Giuliani did a few years ago.

Young Rudy went through 16 years of Catholic education, flirted with the priesthood, and trekked to East New York to teach catechism lessons. The 803-page catechism—reissued in 1994 under the supervision of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who has since become pope—lays out the ways in which Giuliani's personal decisions have estranged him from the church. "Divorce brings grave harm to the deserted spouse. . . [and] to children traumatized by the separation of their parents and often torn between them," reads the catechism. But it is remarriage, not divorce, that's a deal-breaker for Catholics. "Contracting a new union, even if it is recognized by civil law, adds to the gravity of the rupture; the remarried spouse is then in a situation of public and permanent adultery."

This may sound harsh in a culture where half of Americans divorce. The question, however, is not whether this church teaching is fair, or whether it's compatible with American social standards. The question is: Can Giuliani run for president as a Catholic—identifying with the swing vote that has picked the winner in virtually every modern presidential race—when he is so out of step with the church's code of personal conduct? We're all familiar with Catholic politicians who defy the church with their positions on issues like abortion or contraception. But Giuliani is the first major national figure to run for high office as a Catholic even though he has defied church law in his personal life.

"Any Catholic who remarries without annulment" assumes an "irregular status" within the church, says Monsignor Joseph Giandurco, who until recently was the canon-law expert at the seminary run by the Archdiocese of New York. Also a judge on the appeals court of the archdiocese's marriage tribunal and a canon-law adviser to Cardinal Edward Egan, Giandurco declined to answer questions about Giuliani individually, but speaking in general terms about someone with Giuliani's marital history, Giandurco added: "The marriage is not recognized by the church, and the person cannot receive communion or confession. He's not supposed to play a public role in the church." While a baptized Catholic is "Catholic forever," says Giandurco, a remarriage "breaks the covenant and objectively contradicts what the marriage bond signifies."

Giuliani's own history shows how well he understands that. When he divorced Donna Hanover in 2002 and married Judith Nathan a year later, he was at precisely the same crossroads with the church as he was in 1982. It's his actions then, when he took drastic steps to preserve his Catholic credentials as he navigated the breakup of his first marriage, that belie the Catholic claims of his current campaign.

Twenty-five years ago, Giuliani, 38, the youngest associate attorney general in Justice Department history, was assiduously strategizing with his closest friend, Monsignor Alan Placa, about ways to annul his first marriage. He'd already divorced his wife, Regina Peruggi. But the politically ambitious Giuliani, who almost never went to Mass, was nonetheless determined to get the church to bless the dissolution of his 14-year marriage.

Placa had actually dated Peruggi himself in high school and was a seminarian when he served as best man at Giuliani's 1968 wedding. Now, in 1982, the well-connected monsignor with a law degree had come up with a way to cancel it. Since Peruggi and Giuliani were second cousins, Placa concluded, they were supposed to have obtained a dispensation from the church before marrying. Their failure to get one was grounds for a retroactive annulment.

This was ironic, because it was Placa himself who had advised the couple before the wedding that they didn't need a dispensation. At least that was the recollection of Giuliani's mother Helen in a taped interview. Helen says that Peruggi was offended by the annulment, and adds that her former daughter-in-law "went to diocesan headquarters to fight it."

Despite Peruggi's opposition, Placa—whose office was just doors away from the marriage tribunal that heard the case—secured the annulment. He also helped Giuliani by obtaining another annulment for Hanover, the TV newswoman that Rudy intended to make his second wife. Placa married the couple at St. Monica's on East 79th Street, just blocks away from where the two were living. Giuliani had taken over as U.S. Attorney in Manhattan a few months earlier, and the wedding attracted news items on the gossip pages.

Those who knew Giuliani—including his mother and Peruggi—saw the annulment as more of a political statement than a religious one. Giuliani knew that he would one day run for public office. Obtaining the annulment was as much a calculated move as his simultaneous decision to step down from his exalted (if obscure) Washington job to become the highly visible top federal prosecutor in Manhattan. Giuliani's college sweetheart, Kathy Livermore, remembers a "big discussion" with Rudy years earlier when he made the case for "political annulment," calling it "a very smart move."

Of course, there was no way to annul the Hanover marriage. So, once he ended that 18-year relationship, Giuliani married Nathan at Gracie Mansion in a civil ceremony officiated by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. A defrocked Alan Placa—stripped of his priestly powers because of allegations against him involving the sexual abuse of four minors—was just one of hundreds of high-powered guests. There was nothing Catholic about the marriage, and nothing that could be Catholic. The man who'd gone to such great lengths to retain his ties to the church decades earlier, propelled by early and remote ambitions, was willing to break them at a wedding engulfed by paparazzi and camera crews, even as he readied himself for a White House run.

If Giuliani had publicly acknowledged that he'd had to choose between his love for Nathan and obeisance to church law, he might well have found a receptive audience, especially among the many Catholics who have faced a similar quandary. But he's taken the opposite tack. No longer constrained by the rules of the game as he saw them in 1982, he apparently believes that, as "America's mayor," he can ignore the clash between his marital life and Catholic canon law, running on his Catholicism even as he has separated himself from the church.

So far, church leaders have been silent, with the only attack coming from the bishop of Rhode Island—and limited to a critique of his abortion position. Closer to home, Cardinal Egan isn't answering questions about Giuliani's status. Egan's predecessor, Cardinal John O'Connor, publicly assailed the 1984 Democratic vice presidential nominee, Geraldine Ferraro, then a congresswoman from Queens, over her pro-choice position, but Egan refers to all of the city's key politicians, including Giuliani, as his friends. Also unlike O'Connor, who was a registered Republican for nearly 40 years, Egan's registration card indicates that he's been unaffiliated with any party since at least 1985. With major events celebrating the 200th anniversary of the archdiocese coming up in April 2008, as well as the annual, nationally watched Al Smith dinner that Egan will host this fall, it may become impossible for him to avoid the elephant in his cathedral—a GOP candidate from his own archdiocese who's isolated himself from the church.

As quiet as Egan has been, Father Joseph Marabe, who oversees St. Patrick's, told the Daily News in May that if Giuliani "comes to my church, he would be refused communion." Marabe quickly qualified his statement, adding: "If the cardinal declares it, then if Giuliani is invited here, we would advise him before he comes not to take communion, to save him from public embarrassment." In fact, Giuliani has regularly attended midnight mass on Christmas at the cathedral, even bringing Nathan in 2005, though she was a member of Brick Presbyterian Church prior to their marriage. Regular attendees at St. Pat's say Giuliani did not go in 2006, though he was in the city, and sources close to Giuliani say his absence may be connected to a message he got from the church. The cardinal's office declined to say if any message was sent. The Times reported this week that he left Mass in Washington, D.C., before communion.

Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, went to the same Catholic school as Giuliani and "protected him on national television shows." But he says it's "certainly correct that a Catholic who doesn't get his marriage annulled and remarries is not to partake in the sacraments. He's smart enough not to go to communion." Donohue thinks it's "suicide" that Giuliani is projecting himself as a Catholic. "His confessor is his friend Placa," charges Donohue, noting that Placa is as ineligible to hear a confession as Giuliani is to make one. "Rudy doesn't even feel sorry about what he's done," says Donohue, who first criticized Giuliani about his marital mess in September 2000, after Donna Hanover told the Daily News that she found his increasingly public relationship with Nathan "very hurtful."

"The News called me up," Donohue says, "and asked me for my reaction, and at first I said I'd stay away from the personal stuff. But then I just said he ought to exercise greater discretion. I got a phone call from Sunny Mindel, the mayor's public relations person. She said maybe I should do what Cardinal Egan does, say I don't have anything to say. She said the mayor doesn't like it. That was the last time I ever heard from them." Donohue told the News that "the appearance is something that would make a number of Catholics uncomfortable, without pointing an accusatory finger," urging that "discretion would argue to take a different route, to make a behavioral change."

John Kerry, a Catholic whose prior marriage was annulled, was dogged by controversy about his abortion position during his 2004 run for president, with a dozen prelates publicly insisting that he could not receive communion. That led to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops adopting a position paper on "Catholics in Political Life" that left it up to individual bishops to make a determination in their diocese. What went largely unnoticed in the press, however, was an interim task force report written by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C., that June. McCarrick cited his exchanges with Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

"Cardinal Ratzinger outlines how a bishop might deal with these matters," said McCarrick, starting with efforts to inform such persons privately "that if they reject Catholic moral teaching in their public actions, they should not present themselves for Holy Communion until their situation has ended." Most significantly for Giuliani, Ratzinger used "the precedent of our teaching and practice in the case of a person in an invalid marriage" as his guide as to what should be done with a Catholic politician who is pro-choice. According to McCarrick, Ratzinger specifically characterized an invalid marriage as "circumstances in which Holy Communion may be denied" and likened it to abortion, making Giuliani a two-time target. Ratzinger said that "in these cases, a warning must be provided before the Eucharist can be denied." If the discreet Egan has sent a warning, he wouldn't discuss it.

Giuliani has only struck a public Catholic pose when it has suited him politically. The most infamous incident occurred in late 1999, when he was positioning himself for the 2000 Senate race against Hillary Clinton. At the same time that Giuliani was secretly squiring Nathan around town while still living with Donna Hanover at Gracie Mansion, he went ballistic over a painting of the Virgin Mary with an exposed breast made of elephant dung that was on display at the Brooklyn Museum. He cut all city funding to the museum, railing against the portrait as anti-Catholic, and was promptly saluted by Cardinal O'Connor and blocked by the federal courts. While Catholics are only one of several major voting blocs in the city, they constitute almost half of the state's voters, and Giuliani—running statewide for the first time—made a fairly naked appeal to them with his over-the-top response to pachyderm poop. The city had been connected to other equally abusive "art," including a public access station depicting a sex act on top of a Bible, without Giuliani making a stink.

Using direct-mail gurus like conservative kingmaker Richard Viguerie, Giuliani spent $5 million on a fundraising appeal to Christian conservatives that went on for two pages about the painting, denouncing Hillary Clinton's "hypocrisy" for her free-speech objections to his defunding actions. He accused Clinton of "hostility toward America's religious traditions," depicting her as a soldier in a "relentless 30-year war" against that "religious heritage." Not only had Giuliani never mentioned this "war" during the first six years of his mayoralty—or at any other time in a very public career—but for the first time he indicated that he favored posting the Ten Commandments in public schools and supported school prayer. "I think America needs more faith and more respect for religious traditions," he concluded, "not less"—one more reference to Clinton, and one more personal mission he'd never mentioned to New Yorkers.

Giuliani had taken a similar shot at his Democratic rival in 1997, Ruth Messinger, berating her for skipping the Mass that preceded the Columbus Day Parade. "This is a community she doesn't care much about," he said, alluding ostensibly to Italian Catholics (Messinger is Jewish). Ahead of her by 20 to 30 points, he went on to observe: "She wasn't at the Mass today. She drops out of the parade at 70th Street" —nine blocks short of the 35-block parade's terminus.

This blunt religious bloodletting was as inauthentic as it was chilling. A year before the Clinton letter, Giuliani was asked if he attended Mass regularly by two conservative journalists writing for The American Enterprise magazine. "You know, I really don't think you should ask me questions about my religious practices. No, I don't attend Mass regularly, but I go to Mass occasionally." When he ran for mayor in 1993, he told one city audience: "I am a Catholic, but I would not consider myself a strict Catholic." Hanover, meanwhile, adopted the description offered by many lapsed Catholics: "We were raised Catholic." Jack Tice, a retired NYPD detective and an usher at St. Monica's, the Giulianis' home parish, said in late 1999, just as Rudy's Christian Coalition letter was going out, that he'd only seen Rudy in church twice that year—once at Easter, and once at a June or July Mass.

Tax returns suggest that Tice is correct: The most Giuliani and Hanover ever gave to St. Monica's in any tax year in the 1980s and 1990s was $200, and that was the most they gave any church. The couple also gave $100 some years to Alan Placa's church in Long Island. They claimed no charitable deductions at all for most of the 1980s, when that annulment meant so much to Giuliani.

Alan Placa is not just a major figure in Giuliani's marital life: He baptized both of Giuliani's children, and though already stripped of his priestly powers, he was given special dispensation from his bishop in Long Island to preside at Helen Giuliani's September 2002 funeral. A month earlier—despite still-pending allegations that he'd groped four minors in Long Island's Diocese of Rockville Center—he was hired as a three-day-a-week consultant at Giuliani Partners, where he remains today. Michael Hess, the managing partner of Giuliani's firm and the city's former top lawyer, represents Placa in the ongoing cases. When first reached by a reporter at Giuliani Partners, Placa claimed that he was only visiting—a falsehood quickly reversed by a firm spokeswoman.

Giuliani's friends cite the awkward hiring as an example of his loyalty, though he has long been known to jettison people close to him. His best-selling memoir, Leadership, included his dog Goalie in the acknowledgement list of the major people in his life, but not the mother of his two children. He forced out Police Commissioner Bill Bratton for appearing on the cover of Time, and also his dear friend and schools chancellor, Rudy Crew, because Crew tried to hold him to his word to never fund a voucher program. And he trashed them on their way out the door, smearing Crew the day he eulogized his ex-wife. On the other hand, in Giuliani's categorical mind, Placa is forever a good guy, no matter the facts.

Indeed, even if one assumes that America won't be offended by the contradiction between Giuliani's marital choices and his professed Catholicism, that will almost certainly change as the country learns more about his best friend, business associate, and lifelong link to the church. New York papers have reported some devastating details, drawn largely from a Suffolk County grand jury report issued in 2003. One of his accusers, Richard Tollner, a mortgage broker who claims he was repeatedly groped by Placa while in high school, says the priest stopped only after Placa approached him at his father's funeral and Tollner threatened him. Tollner and two others testified against Placa before the grand jury, though the statute of limitations had run out on their decades-old allegations, making prosecution impossible. Placa was described in the report as "cautious but relentless in pursuing his victims," groping the boys under cover of a newspaper, book, or poster. One victim testified that he was fondled behind a banner made for a march protesting the Roe v. Wade decision.

But the grand jury found Placa's decade of systemic cover-up far more disturbing than his alleged abuse. Often the first person contacted by a victim because of his role as the bishop's top attorney and head of a three-member "intervention team," Placa wrote a memo to other diocesan officials asking them not to identify him as an attorney. "Priests who were civil attorneys," the report found, clearly referring to Placa, "portrayed themselves as interested in the concerns of victims and pretended to be acting for their benefit while they only acted to protect the diocese. These officials boldly bragged about their success." Victims were "ignored, belittled, and re-victimized," with Placa and his colleagues procrastinating "for the purpose of making sure that the civil and criminal statutes of limitation were no longer applicable."

Robert Fulton, an ex-priest who worked with Placa as the director of the diocese's priest health services, told the Times: "Placa tried to handle this all to the law of Placa. People didn't trust him; he's a snake." Suffolk DA Tom Spota said at a press conference: "This is a person who was directly involved in the so-called policy of the church to protect children, when in fact he was one of the abusers."

The darkest account of Placa's obfuscating machinations appears in a deposition from a priest, Michael Hands, who pled guilty to sexually assaulting 13-year-old Adam Hughes. Instead of going to the church, as most families do, Hughes's parents went straight to the police, and Hands was arrested. Placa rushed to Hands's cell and put him in touch with a private attorney, who Hands later came to believe had actually represented Placa in allegations involving his own conduct. Placa "was the man," Hands testified, "who had the authority to take $50,000—"which he could get from the diocese's insurance department"—and use that to pay off someone who had claimed that they were victimized." Hands said he "learned" that Placa arranged "sealed settlements" that "covered himself" at least twice. "The settlement would say that the issue did not involve sexual misconduct but involved a DWI claim, that Alan Placa was influenced by alcohol and hit his car, that's how it read . . . he very shrewdly covered that up."

Hands recounted how Placa tried to settle his case: "Normally, Placa would go and speak personally to the family. I was told that, in my case, because they learned about it after it had come to the attention of the authorities, that they couldn't keep it under wraps. Alan had tried to contact the Hugheses to try to make inroads with them, to see on what level they could resolve things. During that first six months, they had refused any contact with Alan Placa." Hands was away in a therapy institute for much of that time and talking to Francis Caldwell, the monsignor who worked closest with Placa. Caldwell "felt bad" that they couldn't "make some kind of settlement" and assured Hands he'd "remain a priest," though he would probably not be assigned to a parish again. But as the scandal exploded, with Hands pleading guilty and agreeing to cooperate, he left the priesthood—one of at least 35 priests who have been accused, many of whom have been drummed out of the diocese. "I told the grand jury about other priests that had been accused, and that Alan Placa had covered things up enough and that the priest had been moved, sometimes from state to state, to kind of lose the trail," Hands concluded.

David Clohessy, the national director of the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), calls it "a travesty" that a political leader like Giuliani "would pay Placa." Politicians often hire cronies who hope to make money from their associations, says Clohessy, "but Placa didn't connive to get an extra ten grand in his pocket—he connived to keep desperately wounded child sex victims trapped in silence and shame and self-blame. He is the worst of the worst. He's worse than other child abusers, because he molested and he covered up other investigations."

But it's not just the hiring of Placa that indicates Giuliani's tone-deaf response to sex-abuse issues. In his final year at City Hall, Giuliani momentarily backed a City Council bill, Local Law 933, that would have, among other things, forced public and private schools and affiliated religious institutions to report abuse complaints to law enforcement as soon as they received them. When the archdiocese and others objected, the Giuliani administration quickly reached an agreement with City Council Speaker Peter Vallone to pull the bill and redraft it as an amendment to the charter that would appear on the 2001 ballot with a collection of other last-minute Giuliani proposals. But private schools were suddenly deleted from the charter proposal, which passed. Vallone says he "agreed with Rudy to take the private schools out." Council education chair Eva Moskowitz, a sponsor of the bill, said that, "given the priest sex-abuse scandals, there was a sense that the bill would further tarnish their image, that there would be public relations scandal." Placa told one interviewer that he would never refer an abuse complaint to the police, and Giuliani was effectively installing the Placa modus operandi into the City Charter.

The Giuliani-appointed charter commission chair, Randy Mastro, a major adviser in the current presidential campaign and a former deputy mayor, explained only that his commission was "sympathetic" to private-school concerns. "Do we personally believe we should have gone further? Yes," he said.

But this bow to Catholic concerns by Giuliani was a rare exception to the cold shoulder that the church got on other issues critical to it, starting with abortion.

The Giuliani makeover for 2008 started with the end of the strand-by-strand comb-over that had become such a trademark of his mayoralty. But just as important as Giuliani's new look are his new views, with none more altered than those on abortion.

Giuliani says he still supports a woman's right to choose, but the Catholic League's Donohue reads his promise to appoint "strict constructionist" judges as "a wink and a nod" to conservatives who want to see Roe v. Wade overturned. Giuliani told Fox News that he supports "limitations on abortions," envisioning a day in which "we could get to no abortions," though he always achieved a 100 percent rating on the National Abortion Rights Action League's questionnaire, agreeing with the group on every nuance of the issue in 1993, 1997, and 2000. If he seems malleable about all of those nuances now—willing to leave access and funding up to the states—that's at least consistent with how malleable he was when he first adopted the positions that guided his government. He was searching for a point of view on the issue.

I was actually with him one night at Jack Newfield's house in the Village in 1989 when he was crafting out loud his views on abortion before his first mayoral run. He was an open book. Newfield and I backed off and turned him over to our wives, who gave him an earful. He thought then that abortion was a question of so many separable parts—from choice to Medicaid—that he could sit down with Conservative Party boss Mike Long and tell him some part of what he wanted to hear, and then sit down with Liberal Party brass Ray Harding and Fran Reiter and tell them some part of what they wanted to hear, thus securing the support of two parties that had never endorsed the same candidate for a major office.

Remarkably, a decade later, as Giuliani prepared to run against Hillary Clinton, he again courted Long and Harding with the same impossible dream. If everything is fungible to Giuliani, he assumes that it should also be so to the rest of the world. He expected Long, whose nine children are the best evidence of his rigidly Catholic proclivities, to endorse him, even though NARAL believed that Giuliani might actually be better than Clinton on one element of the abortion issue: the question of parental consent requirements. Long asked only that Rudy drop his support of what the pro-life community calls "partial-birth abortion," but Giuliani — who was one of the only elected Republicans anywhere to back the late-term procedure—would not blink. Now he's blinking, winking, stuttering, and somersaulting.

Reiter, who was his campaign manager, deputy mayor, and prime abortion adviser over the years, was with Giuliani when he made up his mind about the "partial-birth" abortion issue. She says it took him less than 15 minutes. He was scheduled to appear at a NARAL meeting of the organization's top leaders and donors at the Harvard Club during the 1997 re-election campaign, and Reiter, who was running the campaign, was scheduled to brief him in a side-room with beverages well before the session began. He got there late, so she had to rush the briefing. "You're going to be asked about 'partial-birth' abortions," she remembers telling him. The longtime chair of the Liberal Party and a committed pro-choice voice, Reiter added that it was "a widely accepted medical procedure used only when the life or health of the woman is in jeopardy."

Reiter remembers Giuliani quickly agreeing, saying, "I'm fine with that."

"Then you'll be fine with NARAL," Reiter said. He was so fine, in fact, that NARAL's Kelli Conlin recalls: "He was incredible with us. It was like he was talking to a group of his 30 closest friends. He was fully committed. He was talking about the life and health of the woman. He was a standard-bearer. It was exciting moments like that that sustained us in 2000, when we had to stand up to enormous pressure to endorse Hillary. He came across as such a principled person that we were saying in 2000, 'Oh, my—is he more pro-choice than she is?'"

Years later, Reiter found Giuliani's instant embrace of the controversial procedure perplexing, especially when he could have satisfied the group with a promise to study it and get back to them. "NARAL was thrilled with him," Reiter recalls, "but he was running away with the election anyway. If he had said, 'Sorry, Fran,' it wouldn't have mattered to his re-election. A lot of pro-choice Democrats were drawing the line on 'partial-birth.' He didn't have to go to that extreme." Reiter thought he did it "because he believed it," but thinks now that he's "betrayed" his previous positions, especially when he supported the recent Supreme Court decision barring the procedure except when the life of the woman is threatened. (He previously supported using the late-term procedure when the health of the mother might be affected if she gave birth.)

Giuliani made a similar last-minute pitch for the gay vote in 1997, agreeing to a domestic-partnership bill as far-reaching as San Francisco's on the eve of an election that he already had in the bag. Ethan Geto, a lobbyist for the Empire State Pride Agenda, recalls almost as quick and fulsome an embrace when this leading gay group flirted with the notion of endorsing Messinger just a couple of weeks before the election. The archdiocese denounced Giuliani's plan, calling it "contrary to moral natural law," but the mayor pushed it through the City Council soon after the election. Now Giuliani is also reversing himself on gay issues, rejecting any attempt to welcome gay men into the military until the war on terror endsa peculiar way for a man who was living with gay friends on September 11 to salute their worth as citizens. Though Reiter prefers to believe that Giuliani's former positions on reproductive rights and gay rights were expressions of the real Rudy, she acknowledges that he was fixated in 1997 on setting an all-time victory-margin record for a Republican in mayoral elections—a goal that Mike Bloomberg achieved, but Rudy Giuliani did not.

Conlin, who was named to Giuliani's transition committee and served for eight years on the Mayor's Advisory Committee on Appointments, says that "the church never, ever came up" in any of their discussions about abortion policies. Reiter has precisely the same memory, though she was with him in the 1989 campaign and helped him frame his multi-faceted position. "He didn't know what his view on choice was," she recalls, so she, Donna Hanover and a third adviser, Jennifer Raab, had many "thoughtful conversations" with him. Reiter says she wound up helping him draft a statement on abortion for the state Republican platform committee in 1990, which adopted the first pro-choice plank in the country, a pace-setter that was quickly mimicked by GOP platforms in a few other states. Conlin remembers going to City Hall to join Giuliani at a press conference celebrating the anniversary of Roe v. Wadeone of at least three times, press releases show, that he commemorated the decision.

Conlin also helped pick the first Giuliani health commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, whose department runs abortion counseling and family-planning centers, and says that Giuliani's transition team "would never have considered anyone who wasn't pro-choice." Hamburg was one of only three commissioners initially appointed by Giuliani's predecessor, David Dinkins, who was retained in the new administration. She served three years under Giuliani before taking an assistant secretary post in Bill Clinton's Health and Human Services agency. Hamburg says her pro-choice preferences were a given in the Giuliani administration, and that "the subject of abortion never came up" during or after the selection process. "The only question Giuliani asked me in my interview was whether I believed in the legalization of drugs," Hamburg says. "He was comfortable with our high-risk pregnancy and pregnancy-prevention programs, though he didn't engage much. There were no restrictions on abortion counseling. This was not an area where there was any signal of a policy change between Dinkins and Giuliani."

Shortly after taking office, Giuliani also reappointed Pam Maraldo, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), to the city's four-member Board of Health. Maraldo got to know Giuliani through her close friend, Maria Mitchell, another pro-choice activist that Giuliani named to chair the Health and Hospitals Corporation, whose 11 hospitals actually perform about 6,500 abortions a year. Maraldo says that Giuliani's campaign consultant, David Garth, arranged a dinner that included her, Giuliani, Hanover, and Mitchell during the 1993 campaign, and that Mitchell asked her in 1994 to allow Giuliani to speak at the organization's annual national event in Atlanta.

Gloria Feldt, who subsequently became PPFA president, remembered Giuliani's appearance: "That was my first encounter with him, and he spoke very eloquently about family planning. It's hard to be that eloquent if you're saying something you don't believe. He was very believable." Maraldo, who also went to Giuliani's periodic Roe v. Wade celebrations and supported his re-election in 1997, says that "in whatever way he could, he created the impression, whether it was in speeches or over dinner, that he was authentically pro-choice." City records indicate that Giuliani's health and youth agencies awarded more than $2 million in contracts to Planned Parenthood's New York City branch over the years.

Mitchell wasn't the only pro-choice activist installed at HHC. The first chief executive officer that Giuliani put there, Dr. Bruce Siegel, was another pro-choicer who, like Hamburg, says it was simply the default position within the Giuliani administration. "All Giuliani ever talked to me about was saving money or privatization," Siegel says. "I don't remember abortion ever coming up." The mayor also appointed Barbara Gimbel, a legendary leader of the leading statewide pro-choice group within the GOP, the Republican Family Committee, to the HHC board of directors. Gimbel had helped organize the Republican contingent from New York that joined a million other women in a 1992 march on Washington that included Donna Hanover. Announcing that Rudy was home baby-sitting the kids, Hanover said that day that the Bush administration needed to focus "on the fact that so many people in their own party, not just the Democrats, feel passionately" about the threat to abortion rights. Gimbel, who served on the board throughout the Giuliani administration, said the tens of thousands of abortions performed by the corporation over those years were "never an issue." Siegel's and Mitchell's successors, Luis Marcos and Rosa Gil, were also strongly pro-choice.

A 2000 NARAL study of abortion services at HHC facilities, coupled with other data acquired by the Voice, flies in the face of Giuliani's current posturing about hating abortion and doing everything he can to reduce it. Using 1999 data, the study found that HHC's 11 hospitals provided almost a thousand more abortions than the city's 35 private hospitals. It chronicled the doubling of the number of abortions at Bellevue, one of the corporation's flagship facilities, from 400 in 1997 to over 800. It boasted that Kings County Hospital "is possibly the largest hospital abortion provider in the country, performing over 2,000 abortions per year"—the largest number of surgeries the hospital does.

And Giuliani's 15-minute exchange with Reiter about partial-birth abortion was hardly an academic exchange. The hospitals he ran in 1997 were already performing large numbers of late-term abortions. In fact, the NARAL report attributed many of the hospitals' second-trimester abortions to the endless delays caused by the HHC bureaucracy, noting that women who sought abortions in the first trimester often had to wait critical weeks to get them. "HHC is often the last resort for women with later abortion needs or complications," the NARAL report concluded. It pointed to HHC's Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx and said it was "relied upon by the city's medical community—by private clinics and every other hospital—for its physician skill in late-term cases." Doctors at Jacobi train "many current second-trimester providers."

Cristina Page, the NARAL consultant who did the study, told the Voice that HHC "doesn't turn anyone away for anything," adding that, in the Giuliani years, some HHC facilities weren't "even billing or submitting forms" for reimbursement of abortion services. Her report speaks of "very high self-pay rates," meaning that the facility ate the cost in most cases. There were 2,928 "self-pay" abortions at HHC in 1999, compared to a mere 542 at the voluntary hospitals. Dr. Van Dunn, HHC's senior vice president for medical and professional affairs, says that "if someone clearly had insurance," HHC would seek reimbursement, but abortions went un-reimbursed "50 percent of the time." Lilliam Paoli, who ran HHC's Lincoln Hospital under Giuliani, said that it was "abortion on demand," even for those who could pay and didn't, and that "Rudy never changed that policy."

Giuliani even maintained an extraordinary abortion option unavailable in most American cities. Back in the 1980s, Mayor Ed Koch guaranteed that no woman who wanted an abortion would be denied one in New York. Koch decided, without any statutory mandate, that the city would pay for abortions even if they weren't medically necessarythe requirement under federal Medicaid laws. He also decided that the city would cover abortions, regardless of whether they were performed at HHC or a private facility, for women earning as much as 85 percent over the Medicaid eligibility standard. Paoli, who was also one of Giuliani's human-resources commissioners, says Giuliani never rescinded Koch's purely discretionary decision. "He was so gung ho on abortion," Paoli says, "we said to one another: 'Can't somebody tell him not to go so far?' " May Del Rio, the Planned Parenthood spokeswoman at the time, recalls: "Rudy Giuliani continued that very humane policy, and discontinuing it was never even discussed."

It's impossible to reconcile that record with Giuliani's presidential pose on abortion, just as it's impossible to match his Catholic candidacy with his marital history. One of his prime claims to the presidency, emphasized on the stump, is his slashing of the city's welfare rolls. But even as he found brutal new ways to cut the poor off the dole, he was using millions in city funds to subsidize abortions for women whose incomes were too high to meet eligibility standards.

His support of abortion rights gave Giuliani a certain liberal cachet in New York, just as his tabloid sex life added to his macho profile. These images are less helpful to him now, and he is counting on the fog of 9/11 to obscure these personal and policy reversals. It's a stretch, and even someone as politically flexible as Rudy Giuliani may not be quite that elastic.

Some Seasonal Quotations

2007-06-29T10:29:00.000-06:00

…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...

From the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

* * *

…This church is in essence an unequal society, that is to say a society comprising two categories of persons, the shepherd and the flock....These categories are so distinct that the right and authority necessary for promoting and guiding all the members toward the goal of society reside only in the pastoral body; as to the multitude, its sole duty is that of allowing itself to be led and of following its pastors as a docile flock...

From Vehementer Nos, an encyclical of Pope Pius X, November 2, 1906.

* * *

…Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world...

From the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, December 10, 1948.

* * *

…The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures...

From paragraph 3 of Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations, December 10, 1948.

Wider Use of Latin Mass Likely

2007-06-29T07:11:00.000-06:00

From The New York Times, June 28, 2007.

* * *

Wider Use of Latin Mass Likely, Vatican Officials Say
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and IAN FISHER

Pope Benedict XVI has signed a document that would allow more churches to adopt the old Latin Mass that largely faded from use during the 1960s, when the groundbreaking Second Vatican Council opened the door to worship in the local vernacular, Vatican officials say.

The revival of what is known as the Tridentine Mass has long been promoted by Roman Catholic traditionalists, who say it is more moving, contemplative and historically authentic than the modern Mass.

But Pope Benedict has been hearing resistance from cardinals and bishops, many of them in Europe, who argue that the change would divide the church by promulgating two very different official rites.

They say that it could create rifts in smaller parishes that cannot agree which Mass to use, and that it would burden already overburdened members of the clergy, many of whom do not know Latin and were never trained to perform the older rite’s more complex choreography.

In the Tridentine Mass, the priest faces away from the congregation and prays, sometimes in a whisper, in Latin, a language unfamiliar to most of the world’s one billion Roman Catholics. The Vatican II reformers intended the modern Mass to be more accessible by allowing the priest to face the congregation and to involve the worshipers in prayer and song, mostly in their native language but including some passages in Latin.

The issue is not a compulsory return to the Tridentine rite, which is named for the 16th-century Council of Trent that codified it. While it is increasingly popular in small pockets of the church, there seems to be no widespread demand for it. The document being discussed, church officials say, would allow priests to celebrate the Tridentine Mass without asking for permission from their bishops.

Under the current rules, priests must get permission. And while many bishops have granted it, some have not, frustrating priests who wish to make the Tridentine Mass more widely available.

Catholic experts agree that the debate is not merely about ritual, but about the legacy of the Second Vatican Council, which met from 1962 to 1965.

Some Catholic traditionalists regard the introduction of the modern liturgy as the start of what they see as the church’s slide since Vatican II and hope that the Tridentine Mass will rejuvenate the faith. Church liberals fear that if the pope undermines the modern Mass, it may lead to the reversal of other Vatican II reforms, like more open relationships with other faiths.

Bishop Kieran Conry of Arundel and Brighton in England said he had freely and happily given permission for the Tridentine Mass to be celebrated in his diocese but opposed a change in the rules.

“It might be taken by some to infer that Benedict himself is not entirely behind the reforms of the Vatican Council,” Bishop Conry said. “For many it’s a symbol and a flag.”

Although this change has been rumored to be in the works for years, even under Pope John Paul II, who died two years ago, the church has only recently signaled impending action.

In recent weeks several top officials, including the No. 2 at the Vatican, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state, were quoted in news reports as saying that the document would be issued shortly. Vatican officials say that the pope has already signed it and that it will be released and go into effect before the pope starts vacation on July 9.

Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos told a meeting of Latin American bishops in Brazil in May that Pope Benedict was motivated in part by his desire to bring back into the fold the members of the Society of St. Pius X, a schismatic group opposed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The society’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, was excommunicated in 1988 after consecrating four bishops without Vatican consent. He died in 1991. Cardinal Castrillón leads a Vatican commission created to try to reconcile the archbishop’s followers, who reportedly number about one million, with the church.

In recent months some bishops in Germany, Belgium, Britain and France have strongly urged the pope not to issue the document, arguing that it would undermine their authority and cement the perception of a church out of line with modernity. The main bloc of opposition, church officials say, has come from France, where the Society of St. Pius X is strongest.

In addition, Jews and Catholics involved in interfaith relations have expressed concerns to Vatican officials that the Tridentine liturgy still includes passages offensive to Jews. The liturgy for Good Friday, for instance, contains a prayer “for the conversion of the Jews.”

The Rev. Keith Pecklers, a Jesuit liturgical scholar at the Gregorian University in Rome, said: “We’ve made tremendous progress in 40 years of Jewish-Christian relations since Vatican II. What will that mean now to return to a liturgy that prays for the conversion of the Jews on Good Friday?

“I don’t think they’re considering all of the potential pitfalls.”

It is possible that the document will be further delayed or even derailed, but those who know the pope say they doubt it.

The Rev. Joseph Fessio, an American Jesuit priest who has published the pope’s books, said: “Because he is such a deliberate person, it is hard for me to think that he will have done all these drafts and spent all this time and not publish it. If he really believes it would help the church and doesn’t do it because some bishops complain, then all he does is strengthen the position of those bishops who want to oppose him.”

The Tridentine Mass has loyal fans who will travel great distances to churches where it is still celebrated. In Rome last Sunday, about 30 people, many of them young foreigners, attended the 10:30 a.m. Mass at San Gregorio dei Muratori church.

“It feels alien when you first start doing it,” said Leah Whittington, 27, an American graduate student. But, she said, “I just love Latin and feeling that 2,000-year connection to the church, and I find it easier to pray, because there is not a lot of conversation between the priest and the congregation.”

Peter Kiefer contributed reporting from Rome.

Boston Caritas Hospital Deal Is Off

2007-06-29T06:10:00.000-06:00

From the website of Boston.com, 6.28.2007.

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Caritas hospital deal is off

The Archdiocese of Boston's tentative deal to hand over its troubled Caritas Christi Health Care System to Ascension Health of St. Louis collapsed today after six months of research by Ascension showed the six-hospital chain was in worse financial shape than it expected.

Ascension, a Catholic chain that is the nation's largest nonprofit healthcare system, found large unfunded pension liabilities, rapid erosion in patient referrals, and continuing problems even after a Caritas Christi internal audit found the chain's physicians' group overstated revenue, according to hospital officials briefed on the situation.

Caritas Christi officials also wanted seats on Ascension's board of trustees, according to someone with knowledge of the situation. Ascension rejected the request.

In addition, Ascension unsuccessfully sought an agreement under which Archdiocese officials -- including Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley -- could have been held liable for any potential future problems related to the hospitals, such as financial shortfalls or environmental problems, according to a source close to the discussion.

"While we hoped to reach a definitive agreement, regrettably, after months of good faith efforts, we have collectively determined that is not possible and we have agreed not to pursue an affiliation," said the Archdiocese of Boston and Ascension Health in a statement.

The collapse of the deal leaves Caritas Christi in a vulnerable position.

"This is a blow to Caritas," said Ellen Lutch Bender, who runs a healthcare consultant firm in Boston. "With the history and issues Caritas has faced, they need to align themselves with a partner. Caritas' ability to stabilize itself long-term in the absence of a merger or affiliation will be a struggle."

Ascension, formed in 1999, has 65 hospitals and other facilities in 20 states. The Caritas Christi system -- Massachusetts' second largest hospital chain -- has struggled in recent years in Eastern Massachusetts' increasingly competitive hospital environment. For example, St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton, an academic hospital affiliated with Tufts Medical School, is overshadowed by Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals in Boston.

The system also includes Carney Hospital in Dorchester, which has suffered significant losses in recent years despite receiving multi-million-dollar subsidies from the state. Other Caritas Christi hospitals include Caritas Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton; Caritas Holy Family Hospital in Methuen; Saint Anne's Hospital of Fall River; and Caritas Norwood Hospital.

St. Elizabeth's, Carney and Holy Family are among the worst-performing hospitals in the Boston area, according to statistics compiled by the Division of Health Care Finance and Policy. For the six months of the 2007 fiscal year ended March 31, St. Elizabeth's patient volume, measured by inpatient discharges, dropped by 5.5 percent. That follows a 7.5 percent drop, to 15,723 discharges, for fiscal year 2006.

Caritas Holy Family's inpatient volume dropped 5 percent during the first six months of 2007, after a drop 5.1 percent in the previous fiscal year. Carney Hospital's inpatient volume fell by 5.9 percent in the first half of 2007 after a drop of 2.9 percent in the previous fiscal year.

All of Caritas Christi's hospitals had fewer inpatients last year.

(By Jeffrey Krasner, Globe staff)
Posted by Boston Globe Business Team at 02:13 PM

Excellent Article on San Diego Diocese Bankruptcy

2007-06-28T21:42:00.000-06:00

Denver SNAP Leader Jeb Barrett sent me the following excellent article on the bankruptcy proceedings of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego, from San Diego Magazine.

* * *

Federal Bankruptcy Court is the place where five Roman Catholic Church dioceses have chosen to slug it out legally with victim/survivors of clergy sexual abuse and their lawyers about restitution for past crimes and sins of the fathers. This article demonstrates for all to see how Robert Brom, Bishop of San Diego, the latest of five bankrupt Roman Catholic bishops, self-proclaimed successors of the apostles, is following the example of four of his bankrupt brother bishops in hiding assets from creditors, using United States bankruptcy law to halt trials and the concomitant disclosures of the discovery process, limiting therapy to victim/survivors, and attempting to place diocesan assets out of the reach of victim/survivors (under which shell is the diocesan pea?).

Read and weep.

* * *

God, Incorporated
Ron Donoho

The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego stared into the face of big payouts——for the sins of pedophile priests it long harbored——and declared bankruptcy. The diocese has clearly erred in reporting its finances. But how does it fairly compensate victims and not break the bank at local parishes?

IT'S AN UNUSUALLY gloomy April afternoon. A stiff breeze shoots rain pellets into your cold face. You step into the vast jury-pool room at the Federal Court Building on Front Street, after passing through the metal detector and handing over a tape recorder and camera-equipped cell phone. No recording devices are permitted inside. But there is plenty to see and hear, and there are heart-wrenching stories to consider.

An ungodly battle is buffeting through this bankruptcy court. The debtor is the San Diego Roman Catholic Diocese. Back on February 27—the day before the first of a slew of pedophile-priest cases was going to state court—the diocese filed for Chapter 11. That halted the trials. Now alleged victims—grown men and women who say their youthful innocence was tainted or stolen—are here by the dozens. In this 341 hearing, often referred to as a “first meeting of the creditors,” the people who say priests fondled, abused and raped them are not technically “victims.” They are “creditors.”

After a lengthy hail of legal questions and answers from diocese officials, here comes a creditor to sit at the U-shaped table at the front of the jury-pool room. Dianna Williams trembles as she slips on reading glasses. Directly across the table is Bishop Robert Brom. His hair is white, and he wears a clerical collar and black robe. A foot-tall cross hangs on a chain around his neck. He sits flanked by lawyers and a small coterie of church officials. In church hierarchy, Bishop Brom reports only to the Vatican. He is the highest-ranking Roman Catholic in San Diego. He is also the sole proprietor of the corporation that is the local diocese.

As she begins to speak, Williams is already crying. But she won’t be deterred by tears. Her voice is loud and impassioned, even though her words are choked by an unseen pain.

“Bishop Brom, in 2004 you sent word you would help us with therapy,” she begins. “I needed it. I’m plagued with panic attacks. I couldn’t take my children to school. I had suicidal thoughts. I wanted to put the Nazareth House boarding school behind me. I live my rape 24 hours a day. I started therapy, and you stopped it.

“I’ve lost my faith and my sister and my virginity and the rest of my life. Could you make good on that therapy promise? If you’re honorable, reinstate my doctor.”

You’re sure most first meetings of the creditors don’t engender this sort of emotional drama. Officiating the hearing is United States Department of Justice trustee Steven Katzman. In a firm but compassionate manner, he informs the room that questions must be directed at the church’s financial situation. Katzman starts to ask Williams if she has such a question.

But Brom speaks up. “I can’t respond in this forum,” he says, and his manner of speaking—the measured enunciation —reminds you of Mr. Rogers, the late children’s TV host.

“How can you not reinstate my doctor?” cries Williams. “How can you not publicly list my perpetrator’s name? There were a lot of us there in Nazareth House.”

“I want to do what’s right for you,” says Brom, leaning forward. “It may be more therapy. I don’t know you . . .”

Katzman intercedes. “There have been some horrific crimes done here,” he says. “But we have to focus on financial affairs so the lawyers can proceed.”

Williams’ attorney steps forward and reaches for a microphone. “This is about lives, too,” says Irwin Zalkin. “Not just schedules and disclosures, but people’s lives.”

Diocesan lawyer Susan Boswell pipes in. “This diocese has great sympathy for the victims . . .” She barely gets the words out of her mouth before the crowd erupts in derisive laughter.

To you, new to this drama, it appears many people in this gray, antiseptic room have been battling this monolithic religious entity for restitution far too long—in court since 2003; in minds and hearts for most of their troubled adult lives.

This is how you watch the modernday morality play unfold. In your head, you hear the song by U2—”Bullet the Blue Sky”—in which Bono yells: “Well, the God I believe in isn’t short of cash, mister!” Sure, but how do you do the right thing when the rosary of religion is so entwined with the gold chain of capitalism? Lead the flock. But don’t forget to collect the alms. Comfort the sick and ailing. But don’t spend too much money doing it.

Welcome to Enron-by-the-Cross at God, Inc.

BISHOP BROM SAYS the diocese’s reason for declaring bankruptcy is twofold. “It’s the best way available to compensate all the victims of sexual abuse as fairly and equitably as our resources will allow without crippling our ability to accomplish the mission of the church,” he says.

You know Catholic education is at the heart of that mission. Since the founding of the San Diego Diocese, it has done many good deeds. Today, it provides financial assistance to parishes and schools with special needs. You’ve seen or heard of countless acts of benevolence and good ministry from Roman Catholic dioceses the world over. And you know the sins of the wicked should not be draped on the shoulders of all who wear the cloth and serve their God with faith and devotion.

The San Diego Diocese made an unsuccessful settlement attempt with a mega-group of lawyers from 23 firms representing more than 160 men and women with abuse claims. (Originally, 143 lawsuits were filed; more cases have been added.) But victims’ lawyers say the diocese has been deceptive on all financial fronts.

“This diocese has provided us with scant and misleading information,” says Zalkin, a partner at San Diego’s Zalkin & Zimmer. His firm is representing 63 victims, including Diana Williams. “I have not seen good faith displayed by them.”

Paperwork signed by Brom claims the diocese is worth $165 million. The settlement offer was $95 million. San Diego is the fifth—and largest—diocese to file bankruptcy in the face of hefty settlements, following those in Tucson, Portland, Spokane and Davenport, Iowa. The Diocese of Orange (County) recently settled with 90 victims for $100 million. One Orange County man who alleged he was molested (for three years by a priest who died of AIDS) received $3.7 million alone.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers—the group of 23 aligned firms—believe the San Diego settlement should be in the $200 million range. They further believe the diocese is severely and strategically underreporting its assets.

There is little doubt there has been underreporting. The diocese twice had to amend its financial disclosure statements. Presiding federal Judge Louise DeCarl Adler calls the bookkeeping “Byzantine.” She is “mystified” as to why original statements don’t include 770 bank accounts held by the diocese’s 98 parishes. A core argument here is whether parish assets belong to the diocese or to the parishes themselves. (On May 10, Adler ruled the issue would be resolved in a fall trial.)

Under questioning by federal trustee Katzman, the diocese’s head financial officer, Richard Mirando, concedes that current market appraisals are not being used for 32 diocese properties. Rather, assessed or book values are listed. Many of these assessments were last done in the 1960s, some as far back as the ’40s.

The Holy Cross Cemetery is listed at an assessed value of $11 million. But Newport Beach–based lawyer John Manly—part of the plaintiffs’ team— notes the general manager of the cemetery testified in court two years ago that the property was worth roughly $40 million.

Asked if he thinks current San Diego real estate values might be substantially higher than old assessments, Mirando replies, “I expect it would be higher, but I don’t know what it would be.”

During the hearing, Katzman brings up two financial investments—for $21 million and $17 million—that are not on initial schedules filed by the diocese. Officials again say it was a mistake to leave them off, but call it clerical error.

You’re not keeping count, but Bishop Brom rivals Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez for the number of times he can’t recall or doesn’t know key facts about the organization he is running. At one point during the 341 hearing, Brom concedes: “I don’t know who might know what the net worth of the diocese is.”

Zalkin thinks it’s worth “hundreds of millions of dollars.” Attorney Andrea Leavitt believes the diocese might be worth a billion. Leavitt points out the diocese left a significant pending land sale off its statements. Two years ago, church-affiliated University of San Diego High School moved to Carmel Valley. It’s now become the state-of-the-art Cathedral Catholic High School. The “Uni” High land was sold to William Lyon Homes for at least $65 million. The deal is currently on hold pending the diocese’s bankruptcy proceedings.

Diocesan lawyer Boswell says the Uni land is owned by Catholic Secondary Education, a separate corporation that has several high-ranking diocesan officials as officers. That’s one of the morass of matters Judge Adler will have to sort out.

Boswell, who has been involved on both sides of bankruptcy cases for 30 years, says the notion the diocese is hiding assets is ridiculous. “Look, prior to this filing, the diocese didn’t do reports on a consolidated basis,” she says. “Separate divisions had their own accounting and reporting. It’s not a small task to combine all this. Also, it’s not uncommon for ‘unknown’ to be put next to property, or for you to give the best information you have.”

ANDREA LEAVITT’S stylish downtown office is in Emerald Plaza, blocks from San Diego’s bankruptcy court. She strikes you as a pleasant woman who can be a lioness in court. Leavitt has 14 clients who allege abuse at the hands of the clergy. That caseload includes eight victims with claims against Reverend Franz Robier. Now deceased, Robier is on the list made public by Bishop Brom of “Priests of Dioceses of San Diego and San Bernardino with Credible Allegations Against Them.” (This is the list Dianna Williams’ alleged perpetrator has been left off.)

San Bernardino was part of the San Diego Diocese until 1978. A large majority of the abuse connected with these claims occurred in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s.

In the 1990s, Leavitt worked on a committee to change the state’s civil statute on how and when victims could report childhood sexual abuse. “The age limit was 18, and then it was raised to 21,” she says. “In 1997, we got that statute amended. Now it’s 26—or within three years [of the time] you realize you were psychologically harmed by sexual abuse.”

A lot of victims don’t realize what has happened to them, says Leavitt. “They know they’ve been raped, or . . . forced to orally copulate someone . . . but they don’t realize they’ve been damaged psychologically,” she says. “They turn to alcohol, or they just can’t deal with it. It takes so much energy to keep trying not to think of it. But it haunts them. They have nightmares. Flashbacks.

“One of my clients is a darling, cute lady and bright as a tack. She doesn’t ever want to get married. Her perpetrator psychologically sterilized her. She was molested at a young age. She doesn’t want children, because she doesn’t think she could ever protect them—be with them 24/7—and she couldn’t ever live with herself if that child had to go through what she did.

“We are essentially representing children who had nobody to represent them while they were being brutally raped. They may be in adult bodies now. But when you do these cases, you hear the screams and the anguish and the tears of the children.”

Leavitt explains it wasn’t until January 1, 2003, that third parties could be included in childhood sexual abuse lawsuits. That’s when California’s statute was broadened— and the statute of limitations was waived for one year. That’s why there are so many cases all being brought at the same time against the San Diego Diocese.

You’re wondering how it’s possible to put a monetary value on the pain at issue here. This part feels surreal. The plaintiffs’ attorneys believe each victim’s case should be valued between $1.1 and $1.6 million. The diocese settlement offer of $95 million calls for payments ranging from $10,000 to $800,000.

“In California law, a rape constitutes penetration of any orifice—any,” says Leavitt. “Not just with a penis—it can be with a finger [digital penetration] or with an object. And there are other factors to consider: The age of the victim. How many times abuse occurred. Over what length of time. Was the victim threatened? The fragility of the child—was the father away at war, or had he just died? And proximity to the child—when a child is molested, they live in fear of the next time. The angst of seeing the perpetrator creates so much horror. It’s like waiting for the next bomb to go off in a war. It’s like waiting for the boogie man to come. It’s a living hell on earth.”

You try your best to imagine the pain and suffering, and you shudder. But wait. Aren’t some of the plaintiffs’ lawyers going to pocket 40 percent of the settlement? Is paying lawyer fees a good reason to disrupt the charitable works of the San Diego Diocese?

“Lawyers on this case have been working around the clock for five years with no pay,” says Leavitt. “Forty percent is in line with a contingency fee. We may never recover anything. We’ve had no compensation—some of us have dipped into our own savings on this. When you hear that the lawyers are greedy in this case, that’s propaganda driven by the defendants and their insurance company. How come you never hear about a frivolous defense fund?

“But stop and think about it and answer this question: Would you accept $1.5 million for being raped for two years—as a child—and living in a state of fear where you never know when it’s going to happen again? Not to mention that it will affect you for the rest of your life. Is that a fair exchange?”
"The bishop has to understand there is a face behind each creditor, and a voice for each creditor—who was a child who was a sexual abuse victim"

BEFORE THE START of the emotional 341 hearing, several lawyers and alleged victims had met to prepare in boardrooms at Leavitt’s office. One victim, who asks that his real name not be used, consents to talk. “Don” is 47 years old, with salt-and-pepper hair and mustache. His black sports jacket is loose, and the white shirt under it is neatly pressed. Don has smiling blue eyes. He doesn’t appear to be troubled or hurting.

“I try to keep my personal emotions intact,” he says. “I want to be respectful to the 10-year-old child inside me—to give that child a voice. It’s something each person deals with in a different manner.”

Don isn’t going to speak at the hearing. He’ll cede his time to his lawyer. But he needs to be there. “The bishop has to understand there is a face behind each creditor, and a voice for each creditor—who was a child who was a sexual abuse victim,” he says. “Even though many of us are adults now, we’re still the voice of that unsettled child.”

When the diocese declared bankruptcy, Don felt victimized all over again. “On a personal level, it felt like another tactic of hiding the truth,” he says. “We were going into the state court system, and now they’ve chosen another venue—the federal court system. All the victims, all we’ve ever wanted is to get the truth heard. It’s a search for truth and justice for us.”

Now a nonpracticing Roman Catholic, Don says he lost his faith long ago. “There’s just a distinct level of mistrust with the diocese,” he says. “They talk incessantly about transparency, but actions speak louder than words . . . I was really interested to see how connected the bishop would be to the financial situations of his company. I wanted to see how in tune he is with the conditions of his company.”

And that brings you back to creditor Dianna Williams. Her attorney has a letter from Monsignor Steve Callahan, vicar general for the diocese and victim assistance coordinator. The letter states the diocese’s position on therapy—it says 52 weeks is the limit.

“Diana clearly needs more therapy,” says attorney Zalkin. “But you heard them in the hearing say this letter—that says 52 weeks was the limit—was a ‘misstatement of policy,’ right?”

Indeed, that is what Callahan comes around to say at the 341 hearing. Brom also states: “We’ve taken every request for counseling very seriously.”

Creditor Dianna Williams is quite anxious to get word about reinstating her therapy. While the Chapter 11 proceedings drag on, she continues to wait. And you can’t help wonder why, in God’s name, it has to be this way.

One Man's Brutal Encounter With Sexual Abuse In the Mormon Church

2007-06-28T07:32:00.000-06:00

From the Seattle Weekly as referenced on the SNAP website, June 27, 2007.

* * *

One Man's Brutal Encounter With Sexual Abuse In the Mormon Church
Transgressions involving Mormons, Scouts, and children remain a well-kept secret.
By John Metcalfe
Joseph Heidecker

Shortly after Robert Rinde was born in 1969, his father, Robert Larry Leroy Pitsor Sr., decided that the infant would grow up as a Mormon. It struck him as a fashionable religion to be part of.

"It was part of the Western machismo," says Anne Rinde, the mother. "He had it in his mind that all Western men were Mormons and he was going to be one, too. It's cowboy crap." It hardly mattered that Larry—the name Pitsor went by—initially wasn't a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. "He told me he was," adds Anne, now 63 years old. "It turned out he wasn't, but he became one later. Larry was not the most honest of human beings."

Nevertheless, young Robert thrived as a Mormon. Growing up in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood as part of the local church's First Ward, Robert spent many happy days as a boy engaged in church-related games and activities. On weekends, he helped can foodstuffs in the warehouse of the church's Relief Society, and joined a Mormon-sponsored Boy Scout troop. "He was just Mr. Sunshine," says Anne. "He was the kid everybody wanted. He was willing to do anything for anybody."

Robert's three brothers seemed to enjoy being in the church as well, says Anne. But his sister, Kimi Kai, didn't. Robert and his lone biological sibling had a special bond—Robert's first word was his sister's name—but they differed in a critical respect: Religion didn't stick to Kimi Kai. "She made the proper noises," says Anne, "but she wasn't interested." Kimi Kai eventually ran away from home.

It seemed like she made the right choice by getting out early: In a deposition given last July, Anne said her husband was a drunk with a mean streak. "He'd pound the crap out of me given any available chance," she said. Robert described his father, who's now dead, as "sadistic" during a 2005 psychological evaluation at a Missouri psychiatric hospital. He also aired issues about his mother, saying she "is emotionally needy and is addicted to food. She weighs 600 pounds."

There was also a poverty issue: The Rindes were on welfare, and when they left Magnolia for Bellevue in the early '80s, they settled into subsidized housing. If young Robert was given presents, "he only had them a few days, and then they got taken away from him, to be returned for the money," Robert's therapist wrote during a 2003 session. "He hated getting gifts and still does not know how to accept them gracefully."

The church did what it could to bring harmony to the Rinde family through home teachers, or Mormons who are assigned to attend to certain families' spiritual and physical needs. Robert's home teacher for a time was Gordon Conger, a bright young man who would later become president of the church's Seattle Washington Temple in Bellevue, as well as a partner at a prominent law firm and a KIRO-TV executive.

Conger referred questions for this story to a lawyer for the church. In a deposition given this February, though, he recalled the Rindes requiring more commitment than the average family on his list. "[Anne] unfortunately, because of obesity and other health issues, was very minimally functional. She could barely walk around, and so that household needed a lot of help," he said. Every so often, a group of Mormon women would gather "to clean the place up and to give her a lift with household needs." Conger recalls being struck by "all of the sadness, of which there was way, way, way too much in the [Rinde] household."

In 1983, the Rindes learned the whereabouts of Kimi Kai, who had fallen out of contact for almost a year. A coroner brought the news: The 16-year-old girl's skull had been found near a cemetery in Auburn. She had incurred "homicidal violence of an undetermined nature," according to a report in the Associated Press. A decade later, her name reappeared on the long list of victims claimed by the Green River killer, Gary Ridgway.

The death hit the family hard. Later, they would change their name to Anne's mother's maiden name, Rinde, to avoid reporters. Robert was especially devastated, but didn't have much time to dwell on his sister's demise, as soon he was wrapped in his own tragedy.

Robert, who was maybe 13, went out one day to baby-sit the children of his Boy Scout troop leader. He returned wearing a mask of shock. "Robert looked like he had been shot," says Anne. "He had no color in his face—none." For the next couple of weeks, he remained unusually reserved, ignoring his mother's questions about what had happened.

Later, while rummaging around the house, Anne found some pants stashed in a closet that Robert had been wearing the day of his baby-sitting trip. They were a pair of white jeans, or at least they used to be white. "These white jeans were so soaked with blood," Anne later told lawyers, "that they could have stood on their own."

Confronted with the bloody pants, recalls his mom, Robert opened up. He told her that his Scoutmaster had assaulted him. This was quite a trip for Anne: The Scoutmaster directed the local Mormon choir and had kids of his own.

"He was a very good organist," recalls Anne of the "very short, very dark, very persnickety" Scoutmaster, who, because he could not be located for comment, will be referred to in this piece by the pseudonym "Joe." Anne says she remembers Joe publicly spanking one of his children after they wouldn't sit still at church. And now, it appeared he'd used his authority to rape her son.

A lawsuit Robert recently filed against the Utah-based Mormon church in Washington federal court alleges that Joe violated him in an apartment room, a swimming pool, a steam bath at Sand Point Naval Air Station (the Scoutmaster was in the Navy), and a Motel 6 in Issaquah. That last locale was the setting for the most sadistic attack, according to the language of the suit: "[Joe] used physical violence against Rinde, sodomizing him and forcing Rinde to orally copulate [him]. [Joe] then took a wire coat hanger and forced it into Rinde's urethra causing him to hemorrhage and causing chronic and irreparable injury to his penis and urogenital system."

Robert is now one of roughly 1,314 people residing in Starbuck, Minn. Through his live-in platonic girlfriend, he declined to comment about Joe or the church.

Speaking from a nursing home in Graceville, Minn., Anne says, "[Joe] knew what kind of a basket case Rob was—everybody did." Kimi Kai's death had received some press coverage, and the story was well known in the local Mormon community. "Robert was emotionally needy at that time, and [Joe] took advantage of it, bottom line."

After the motel attack, Anne filed a police report. She also contacted her longtime support group, the Mormon church. She informed her bishop, who was in charge of overseeing her ward, as well as Conger, who by that time had become something of a father figure to Robert. Conger had legal training—he'd go on to become a partner at the firm now known as K&L Gates—and Anne figured he'd know better than anyone how to handle her son's case. So that's what she had him do: take Robert to King County Superior Court so he could tell his story to a government lawyer.

On the morning of Robert's court date, Conger, the bishop, and another church member pulled up outside of the Rinde household. In her deposition, Anne recalls Conger saying something along the lines of, "[It] didn't seem like it was going to be too—just a minute—too difficult to handle, too painful, that we would be able to manage it, take care of it." The men drove to court, but when they came back, they had little news to report, according to Anne. And when she asked her son what had happened, he "sat down and he looked a little puzzled and not quite with the program. And he said, 'I'm not sure what is going on exactly, but they told me not to talk about it, not to you, not to anybody,'" with "they" being "Gordon Conger and the other ones."

Anne waited for Robert's case to move through the legal system. She didn't bug the court clerks or the cops; but when nothing happened, she got worried. Then she says she got a letter from the county saying it hadn't found any direct evidence of an attack at the motel.

Robert later informed his mother that he never spoke with the government lawyer. "Robert told me that Gordon said that he would not allow Robert to be talked to alone, that he stood in the place of a parent. . . . And that he would stay with him while he was being questioned," said Anne in her deposition. The meeting then dissolved, according to Robert's federal suit, which claims that Conger and his companions "shielded [Joe] from the law" with the consequence that the Scoutmaster was able to "evade criminal prosecution and to move to another state." The Mormon church has since excommunicated Joe for unspecified reasons.

The church's lawyers claim the church isn't responsible for Robert's trauma. "The alleged abuse was not by a member of the clergy of the church," says Charles Gordon, a partner with Gordon Tilden Thomas & Cordell, who's defending the church in the Rinde case. As for Conger, he's "a very well-respected member of both the community at large and the legal community." In his deposition, Conger said that after taking Robert to the court, he and the bishop waited on uncomfortable wooden benches while the boy talked with the prosecutor. "I would never tamper with a witness," Conger said.

In the early '90s, Conger left his law firm to become editorial director for KIRO-TV, which was then owned by a fiduciary arm of the Mormon church. The Seattle Times quoted a source claiming Conger was hired "to restore the conservative corporate image KIRO once had." In 2001, Conger assumed the presidency of the Seattle Washington Temple, a position he held until 2004. He's now retired from the legal profession and living in Bellevue, where he acts as a local public-affairs director for the church.

Robert, however, struggled to recapture any sense of normalcy. Around the time he was being abused by Joe, Robert was caught naked in a bathtub with children he was baby-sitting. The incident earned him some "aversion therapy" with a Mormon doctor hired by the church, according to Anne, who drove him to his weekly appointments for nearly two years.

This therapy, as Robert described it to another therapist in 2003, consisted of talking "about sex and how bad and dirty it was, how terrible you are, and associating the whole thing with puking in the toilet with shit and every bad thing you could imagine and having rats crawl all over, forcing yourself to throw up." Robert was given a tape recorder with instructions to describe such vile mental scenes in his free time, and his doctor reviewed the tapes each week to make sure he was doing his "homework."

"They sent him to a doctor that screwed him up so bad mentally that he's just now beginning to come to grips with the stuff that was done to him there," says Anne, who also underwent an unconventional form of therapy. Around the time Kimi Kai died, she made an agreement with a psychologist to use an unoccupied room at his office, she said in her deposition, where she "could go in there and he'd close the doors and he'd go away for 15 minutes, and I could scream myself sick."

The Mormon church hasn't received the flogging that Roman Catholics have over the abuse of children. That could be because of the church's efforts to identify and quash predators in its ranks. In 1989, the church created an educational program about child abuse for its elders. It also established a 1-800 "abuse help line" in 1995 that connected Mormon congregation leaders with professional therapists and lawyers. The church also began tracking Mormon sex offenders by flagging their records, ostensibly to keep them away from children.

"Cases involving child abuse brought against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are far lower than other religious denominations," says church spokesperson Kim Farah in an e-mail. "The programs and protections the Church has put into place to combat child abuse has reduced this number even further." (Farah neglected to provide the specific number of lawsuits.)

No less a personage than the national Mormon church president, Gordon Hinckley, has expounded on the danger of church child predators. In 2002, the 96-year-old president, whom Mormons consider to be God's prophet, had this to say to his roughly 13 million–member world congregation: "I regret to say that there has been some very limited expression of this monstrous evil among us. It is something that cannot be countenanced or tolerated."

Apparently, juries in the Northwest agree: Since 2002, eight lawsuits have been filed against the church in Washington and Oregon, some yielding striking judgments. Two sisters from Federal Way received more than $4 million in 2005; and last year, a federal jury awarded $1.4 million to a Kent man abused as a child by his Mormon Scoutmaster (although it decided the church was only responsible for paying a minimal portion of that amount). The Scoutmaster had molested several boys, reportedly making plaster casts of their genitals; church officials who heard of his travails reportedly suggested that he merely repent and pray. Three other former Scouts also recently settled with the church for an undisclosed amount.

Becoming a Scout is a right of passage for nearly every Mormon boy. "The Mormon church has accepted the Boy Scouts as a program within the church," says Gregg Shields, national spokesperson for the Boy Scouts of America. The Mormons are one of the largest chartering organizations of Scout troops in the States, says Shields, approached in number only by the United Methodist Church.

But it isn't just Mormons who love the Scouts: Pedophiles have also been drawn to the organization's focus on children. And a lack of criminal background checks for Scout volunteers until 2003 gave scores of so-inclined Scoutmasters face-to-face access to young men. Timothy Kosnoff, an attorney for Robert Rinde, declined to comment on record about the Scouts, but Kosnoff made some pretty harsh accusations in a 2004 lawsuit involving three former Scouts who claimed they were molested by a Scoutmaster in King County about 30 years ago. (The case was settled for an undisclosed amount.)

The Scouts provide molesters "access to boys alone and away from their parents in secluded settings like camp-outs and overnight hikes," the suit alleged. There's a culture of "strict obedience to the Scout Leader and a bonding mechanism that pedophiles crave," as well as the promotion of "the idea of secret ceremonies, rituals and loyalty oaths, all of which help facilitate the pedophile's efforts to keep his victims silent and compliant." Moreover, San Francisco lawyer Diane Josephs, who has tried roughly a dozen child sex-abuse cases against the Scouts, reports that many incidents have involved "a lot of alcohol, let alone marijuana."

"One of the most striking things I found [was] that [the children's] first exposure to alcohol was through the Boy Scouts," says Josephs.

Mark Honeywell, a lawyer at Seattle firm Gordon Thomas, which is working with Kosnoff on Robert's case, has 40 boxes of internal Scouts documents that show the organization was well aware of its allure to pedophiles. "There was a time in the '70s and '80s when they were kicking guys out for sex abuse at a rate of three a week," says Honeywell. (Spokesperson Shields wouldn't "confirm or deny" that statistic.) Court documents from this era show Mormon Scout leaders enticing children into homemade "sweat lodges," crawling into the sleeping bags of boys, and fondling children after supposedly hypnotizing them with the code phrase "aliza may daikonoshi."

In one of the most bizarre cases, a Mormon Scoutmaster in Sierra Vista, Ariz., David James Borg, invented a Dungeons & Dragons game to entice at least five prepubescent boys into having sex during spelunking expeditions. "His characters used enlarged penises as weapons, and sometimes the boys' characters had to cut off the penis of opposing characters, eat it, etc," wrote a Scouts official in a 1988 internal report. "In other words, what other pedophiles do with pornography, in tearing down inhibitions, Borg did with D&D." The official noted that Borg had previously been caught in bed with an underage boy in New Jersey, but because at the time "the church apparently [had] no 'Confidential File' it was easy for him to move to Sierra Vista and become involved with the youth program in that new ward."

The days when men like Borg could get wholesale access to Boy Scouts seem to be dwindling, according to Honeywell and Josephs, who acknowledge that the organization has been getting better at keeping its charges safe. "In the 1980s, they hired people to do studies and developed a Scout-protection program," says Honeywell. Kids entering the Scouts now read a guide about child abuse, watch movies with titles such as It Happened to Me, and theoretically have two adults hovering around them at all times.

"We promise to take swift action and remove people we suspect of being child abusers," says Shields. "We don't need a criminal conviction; we can act on suspicion or a report."

To hear it from those who have gone to the trouble of suing the Mormons, the reason the church has garnered so little negative publicity is not because it's purged itself of the sin of pedophilia but because it's extremely good at repressing its victims.

Sisters Jessica and Ashley Cavalieri won a $4.2 million award from the church in 2005 for abuse inflicted by their Mormon stepfather in the early '90s in Federal Way. Theirs is a case example of why we haven't heard much about pedophilia in the church: The amount of hurdles the girls had to clear to get their voices heard is staggering.

Because living in modern society while also obeying the church dictums is so hard to do—drinking and premarital sex are strongly discouraged, as are caffeine, violent music and movies, and an unbalanced diet—Mormon culture is necessarily insular. "They're trying to live so differently from the rest of the world, almost like the Amish," says Jessica, now a 26-year-old student at Idaho's Brigham Young University. That means, she says, the first move when it comes to child abuse isn't always to involve the cops. "The police are outsiders. They don't have the 'true gospel,' so they don't understand things like we do."

The Mormon bishop does understand, however. He's presumed to be competent enough to oversee a ward, a land division much like a political district. The church acknowledged its bishops' roles as proper receptacles of child-abuse information when it created its 1-800 help line, which only church officials can use. If the bishop decides a victim's tale of woe is compelling enough to pick up the phone, he can talk with "professional counselors" (according to the church's Web site) who will rattle off a list of protocol questions and perhaps refer the case to a church lawyer.

Jessica, who's seen the questionnaire, describes it as containing a lot of "risk-management" inquiries—"Did the abuse happen on church property? Did it happen during a church-sponsored activity?"—which made her feel as if the church was already preparing a defense against her claims that her stepfather was touching her at night and offering her money for sex.

The bishop can also do nothing, as was the case for Jessica. When she was 12, she told her bishop about the abuse. He sent her out of the room so he could chat in private with her parents and then dismissed the family, who went home without a word on the subject. Jessica took it for granted that the bishop had told her mother about the molestation and that her mother didn't care. Only after her stepfather confessed, five mentally hellish years later, did Jessica learn the truth: The bishop just told her mom that the two weren't "getting along" and suggested they needed to spend more time together in spiritual study. "He didn't have very much psychological training," says Jessica, "and didn't really understand that child molesters aren't something that can just be treated and cured with prayer."

When the Cavalieris finally decided to pursue their case on a nonspiritual plane, the Washington state judiciary, Jessica says two bishops she had told about the abuse denied ever hearing her tale of woe. Her best friend testified that she was "a complete psycho," while her Mormon neighbors, outside of court, called her "evil" and told her she needed to repent.

Since Jessica's story appeared in the papers, she says she's heard from approximately 50 Mormons with similar horror stories. "I think it's an epidemic," she speculates.

One winter day in 2005, Robert Rinde sat down to talk with Francis Manley, a psychologist at Two Rivers Psychiatric Hospital in Kansas City, Mo. He had been admitted to the institution three days prior after experiencing symptoms of dissociative identity disorder.

In his notes, Manley found the middle-aged man to be "quite bright" but "detached and watchful," writing that he wore an "unamused smile" throughout the interview. Robert complained that food and clothes turned up around his house that he couldn't remember purchasing. Other strange things were happening, as well. When he looked into a mirror, he saw "many different people" looking back, which Manley assumed to be a reference to his shattered personality. Manley presented a Rorschach test, and Robert looked into one inkblot to find "someone screaming, with their mouth wide open and their eyes wide."

Wrote Manley: "He feels that there is an intense struggle inside of him to block the negative memories from childhood."

Outwardly, Robert wasn't always so off-kilter. After Kimi Kai's murder, the family decided to move to Spokane. Robert worked for the state's workers' compensation department and found a nice Mormon girl—"Molly Mormon," as Anne Rinde called her— to marry and raise three kids with. He rose in the church ranks to become a stake-president counselor, according to Anne. His old home teacher, Gordon Conger, talked with Robert at this time and recalled in his deposition that he seemed happy.

In 1997, Robert got divorced. He told Dr. Manley his wife had left him for "someone better" and that he considered himself to be gay. He moved to Minnesota in 2002 to be near his mother, who was ill, and opened up his own business, Serendipity Books and Antiques. It was then that his life began to crumble, as chronicled in notes from various psychologists.

One wrote that Robert was sexually abused by a friend in late 2002, triggering flashbacks of the attack in the motel. He checked into Douglas County Hospital in Alexandria, Minn., where he explained that he couldn't sleep because of his nightmares. He tried to stay awake with a ration of coffee that on certain days exceeded nine pots. He wasn't able to pass the time like most people by watching TV because he was afraid of encountering violent images. Robert also experienced auditory hallucinations, once telling his doctor that he heard a man's voice emanating from somewhere within his bedroom saying, "The room is quiet." This made him "curious," but not distressed.

Robert eventually closed down his bookstore. He questioned his decision to have kids and sank into deep bouts of depression. "Rob has been puking for the last 4 days, uncontrollably, whether he eats or not. He has been extremely down and wants to die," wrote one therapist. "He said no one has ever believed him in his life, that he was made to tell himself that he was a piece of shit and no good and deserved the treatment he got. He believes it."

It's not so uncommon for a person who went through sexual trauma to experience the worst aftereffects decades later. It's also not uncommon for the Mormon church to bungle the handling of such personal crises, at least according to Julie Lank, who blocked out years of abuse as a child by her Mormon truck-driver father in eastern Oregon. Lank, now 44 and living in Santa Fe, says it wasn't until shortly after she gave birth in 1990 that she began to remember the things done to her. "I woke up screaming at the top of my lungs, remembering that my father used to rape me," she says.

Following a 1979 conviction for the sexual abuse of her stepsister, Lank's father had some of his church privileges revoked, says Lank, but then was accepted back into the Mormon fold. Lank wanted to level her own accusations, so she got in touch with Rinde's old confidant, Gordon Conger, who, she says, advised her to hold a meeting in a church setting and drove her to meet her dad in Vancouver, Wash. There, she says her father didn't deny or admit to the charges. And that was the end of that.

"The meeting had nothing to do with helping me, had nothing to do [with] taking appropriate action against my father," says Lank. Later, as a student at the University of Utah, she tried taking her grievances to the national level by visiting the Mormon church's director of social services, telling him about her experiences and how frustrated she was. "He proceeded to tell me he didn't want his job and turned down the offer two or three times before he accepted it," she says. "He was pathetic."

Lank has since asked the Mormon church to expunge her name and records from its files. She notes with some humor that the letter announcing her erasure from the church came back mistakenly addressed to "Dear Sister Lank." Her mental health, she says, has improved greatly. "It enabled me to get my life back fully," she says.

Meanwhile, when Robert informed the church of his history a couple of years ago, the church responded by providing him with more mental counseling, which has had spotty efficacy. "He just spent a month in psychiatric care in a special facility for adults who were abused as children," says Anne Rinde. "He gets a little better, and then it seems he gets worse."

Robert now spends most of his time at home with his son and his platonic partner. He sometimes talks with his mother over the phone late at night about his court case. As one of his legion of therapists noted, he no longer considers himself Mormon, but his "religious commitment is rated as important to him."

And it is to the church, too. A few years ago, Anne received a letter from a Mormon bishop in California. The bishop wrote to tell her that Joe was reapplying to be a member of the church. Would the family forgive him?

"You don't want to know what I said," says Anne.

jmetcalfe@seattleweekly.com
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* Accused Cop-Assaulter DV One Is Still Waiting for His Day in Court - His attorney wants to put a racially imbalanced system on trial. By Huan Hsu
* Both Sides Agree: Dino Rossi Needs to Start Raising Money or Get Off the Gubernatorial Fence - The almost-governor hasn't raised a dime for a rematch against Gregoire. By Aimee Curl
* One Man's Brutal Encounter With Sexual Abuse In the Mormon Church - Transgressions involving Mormons, Scouts, and children remain a well-kept secret. By John Metcalfe
* Was Nickels Trying, or Just Well Washed? -

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Follow Up Stories on Vermont Clergy Sex Abuse Trial

2007-06-28T07:06:00.000-06:00

Here are two stories following up on the Vermont Catholic Diocese clergy sex abuse trial.

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From WCAX Channel 3 News in Burlington, June 26, 2007.

Jurors Wanted To Finish Diocese Negligence Trial

Burlington, Vermont -- June 26, 2007

It looks like a mistrial MAY have been a big break for the Vermont Catholic Diocese. Jurors in the Church Sex abuse trial said Tuesday that the evidence indicated the Diocese was negligent in failing to protect a teenager from a predatory priest.

Channel 3 spoke by phone with six of the jurors on condition we would not identify them.

But one day after Judge Ben Joseph declared a mistrial, they all agreed the plaintiff was winning.

There was stunned silence when Vermont's first priest abuse trial ended abruptly in a mistrial Monday afternoon. During some testimony the Diocese lawyers zeroed in on some evidence that the judge had prohibited, specifically, questioning about a possible homosexual relationship involving the brother of the plaintiff, James Turner., 46, and the priest accused of molesting Turner 30 years ago.

Turner's lawyers requested a mistrial. The judge granted it

Channel 3 contacted six members of the jury Tuesday. They say they were disappointed with the mistrial because they wanted to hear all the evidence and deliver a verdict.

They say they found James Turner's testimony credible, they believed that former priest Alfred Willis molested Turner, and they were shocked by the evidence indicating the Diocese had protected pedophile priests for decades.

The jurors told us that, by about a three to one margin, they were leaning in favor of Turner when the trial ended. But they stressed they had not yet heard the church's evidence.

Attorneys from both sides said they were not surprised by the jury's comments.

"I'm very happy that the jurors were able to absorb the information we were giving them," said Jerry O'Neill, Turner's lawyer.

"Some of that information is just horrid information as to what was going on and I'm very pleased that the jury was able to understand it and be able to put it in perspective and hopefully would have had the chance to make use of it if the case had gone all the way through to a verdict," O'Neill added.

"I'm not surprised that midway through the plaintiff's case or near the end of the plaintiff's case, that they would be leaning toward the plaintiff," said Tom McCormick, an attorney for the Diocese.

"That's human nature. That's why we asked them at the beginning to wait 'til we told our story before they made up their minds. And I'm sure they would have done that," McCormick added.

Now this case is not really over. Turner's lawyer wants Vermont's supreme court to order the Diocese to pay his legal costs... and the Catholic church wants to make sure that if there is another trial, some of Judge Joseph's rulings are overturned. The Diocese felt he was unfair and biased and they tried twice to remove him from the case.

Brian Joyce - WCAX News
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From the Burlington Free Press, 6.27.2007.

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Abbreviated trial revealed details on inner workings of diocese

By Sam Hemingway
Free Press Staff Writer

June 27, 2007

Leaders for two national groups monitoring clergy abuse cases said Tuesday that the lawsuit filed by James Turner against Vermont's Roman Catholic diocese helped shed light on the church's inner workings, even if the case ended in a mistrial.

"Without a trial, it is so tempting to view claims like Turner's as isolated crimes by isolated criminals," said David Clohessy of St. Louis, national director of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.

Terrence McKiernan of the Waltham, Mass.-based group BishopAccountability.org, agreed. "This trial opened another door on the Vermont situation," McKiernan said.

Turner, 46, of Virginia Beach, Va., sued the diocese, claiming it was responsible for his alleged 1977 molestation at the hands of Alfred Willis, then a Vermont diocesan priest, at a Latham, N.Y., motel.

Turner also claimed that three months later Willis tried to molest him again at his family's home in Derby. The only defendant in the case was the diocese; Willis settled out of court with Turner last year.

The trial in the diocese case was halted Monday in its fourth day when Judge Ben Joseph, responding to a complaint by Turner's lawyers, declared a mistrial.

Joseph made the ruling after agreeing that a diocesan lawyer violated a pre-trial court order banning questions about the nature of the relationship between Willis and the Rev. Bernard Turner, James Turner's older brother.

Efforts to reach diocesan attorneys David Cleary and Tom McCormick for comment Tuesday afternoon were unsuccessful.

McKiernan said the fact the Turner case reached the trial stage is rare. According to research done by his group, of all the abuse cases filed in civil court against priests or dioceses in the United States since 1986, only 31 made it to a trial.

"Lawsuit settlements are kind of like a television news story, short and simple," Clohessy said. "A trial is like a book, an in-depth look at the big picture. It's exceedingly rare."

During the abbreviated Vermont trial, Turner's lawyers made public a detailed accounting of child molestation allegations involving Willis when he was a parish priest in Montpelier, Burlington and Milton, and a 47-page report of a secret church trial that led to Willis' departure from the priesthood.

Other diocesan records made public during the trial revealed repeated molestation of boys by two other priests, identified in redacted church documents by their initials. Both priests were said to be retired and no longer permitted to perform priestly duties.

"Until the Willis case, the only publicly available information we had about the Vermont diocese was the Paquette case," McKiernan said, referring to the 19 cases filed in Chittenden County Superior Court alleging that the former Rev. Ed Paquette molested altar boys in three Vermont parishes in the late 1970s.

The first of the 19 Paquette cases was settled for $965,000 last year the night before the trial was scheduled to begin. As part of the settlement, lawyers for the alleged victim, Michael Gay of South Burlington, were allowed to detail Paquette's sexual misconduct with children in Massachusetts, Indiana and Vermont and the diocese's efforts to contain the allegations.

Turner, who left Burlington on Tuesday for his home in Virginia, was unavailable for comment. He said after the mistrial announcement Monday that he wants to keep pursuing his case against the diocese.

"This is really tough for Mr. Turner," McKiernan said. "It's really hard for survivors of this type of abuse to get to the point where they are willing to come forward with their stories in such a public forum."

Contact Sam Hemingway at 660-1850 or e-mail at shemingway@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com

Americans' Confidence in the Church Reaching All-Time Low

2007-06-28T06:54:00.000-06:00

From The Christian Post, June 27, 2007.

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Americans' confidence in organized religion and other institutions is down across the board compared to last year, a recent Gallup poll found.

Related
* Released Figures Offer Glimpse into Protestant Sex Abuse Problems
* Resolution Passed to Prevent Clergy Sex Abuse in SBC Churches

Only 46 percent of Americans have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in church/organized religion which is one percentage point of being the lowest in Gallup's history since 1973.

Confidence in the church dropped in the wake of the television evangelism scandals of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It then fell significantly in the wake of revelations surrounding the Catholic priest abuse scandal in 2002.

The Gallup poll found that Protestants are more likely to express confidence in the church compared to Catholics. Confidence in the church or organized religion has dropped from 53 percent in 2004 to 39 percent today among Catholics. Among Protestants, confidence increased from 60 percent in 2004 to 63 percent in 2006 and then dropped to 57 percent today.

Americans express the most confidence in the military with 69 percent saying they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence. Americans are also more likely to have confidence in small business (59 percent) and the police (54 percent) than the church.

The largest drops in confidence between 2006 and 2007 are seen in ratings for banks (41 percent), the presidency (25 percent), television news (23 percent) and newspapers (22 percent). Americans show the least confidence in Congress with only 14 percent – the lowest in Gallup's history – expressing confidence.

"These low ratings reflect the generally sour mood of the public at this time," stated the Gallup report.

Results from the Gallup poll are based on interviews with 1,007 national adults, aged 18 and older, conducted June 11-14.

U.S. Bishops Issue Vatican-approved Norms for Fundraising

2007-06-27T17:55:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Tom Byrne from Shaker Heights, OH, for finding this story on Catholic Online, June 18, 2007.

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U.S. bishops issue Vatican-approved norms for Catholic fundraising
By Jerry Filteau
6/18/2007

Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) – With Vatican approval, the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued national norms governing all church-related fundraising appeals.

"Fundraising appeals are to be truthful and forthright," says the opening line of the norms.

The norms spell out rules of transparency, accountability, procedures to be followed and oversight over fundraising campaigns by appropriate church authorities.

Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., USCCB president, sent out a decree promulgating the fundraising norms June 8. The same day he issued another decree establishing new national norms for the leasing of church-owned properties. Both decrees take effect Aug. 15.

The bishops adopted both sets of norms in November 2002. Msgr. Ronny Jenkins, USCCB associate general secretary, said that the long delay between the bishops' vote and the Vatican's approval was "to allow time to introduce and discuss the two norms with religious organizations ... who would be affected."

Both sets of norms include rules affecting how religious orders do business, so the conference worked with the national organizations of men's and women's religious superiors, he said.

The fundraising norms could affect the way appeals are conducted and funds are handled for everything from parish capital campaigns to annual diocesan appeals to local or national fundraising efforts by Catholic monasteries, shrines or any other church agencies or institutions that fit the definition in church law of a "public juridic person."

"Fundraising efforts are to be for defined needs," the new legislation says.

It adds: "The relationship of trust between donor and fundraiser requires that a) funds collected be used for their intended purposes; b) funds collected are not absorbed by excessive fundraising costs."

One norm flatly forbids any agreement by which the fees of a commercial firm or religious fundraiser are set "directly or indirectly ... on a percentage basis."

Under the norms, communities of men or women religious must have the approval of their major superior and the diocesan bishop to solicit funds; diocesan entities and other Catholic entities and organizations under the diocesan bishop's jurisdiction need his approval.

The approval by the appropriate church authority or authorities "is to be given in writing with reference to the purpose for which the funds are being raised, the time frame and the methods to be used in raising them," the document says.

It says the church authority is to maintain oversight "through periodic review."

"Annual fundraising reports are to provide both financial information and a review of the apostolic work for which the funds were raised," the document says.

The fundraising norms were drawn up as complementary legislation to Canon 1262 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, which says: "The faithful are to give support to the church by responding to appeals and according to the norms issued by the conference of bishops."

Since 1977 the U.S. bishops have had fundraising guidelines similar to the new legislation, but the new norms mark the first time those principles have been set into law in the U.S. church.

The new norms for the leasing of church property were also drawn up as complementary legislation to the code -- in this case Canon 1297, which calls for bishops' conferences to "establish norms for the leasing of church goods."

The new legislation says a bishop must "hear the (diocesan) finance council and the college of consultors" before leasing church-owned property worth more than $400,000; he must "obtain the consent" of those two bodies before leasing property worth more than $1 million or when the lease is for three or more years.

It says a parish or other ecclesiastical entity under the bishop's jurisdiction must obtain the bishop's consent to lease property worth more than $100,000 or if the lease is one year or longer.

Communities of religious must have the consent of the major superior and his or her council and the "nihil obstat" of the diocesan bishop to lease property worth more than $1 million or for three years or more, the new legislation says. "Nihil obstat," Latin for "nothing stands in the way," means more "I don't object" than "I consent."

Finally, Vatican consent is needed for a parish, diocese, religious community or any other Catholic institution that fits the definition of public juridic person in church law to lease out property with a market value in excess of $5 million.

In 1986 the U.S. bishops sought to cover supplementary legislation to Canon 1297 by simply cross-referencing it to norms they established under another canon dealing with extraordinary administrative acts by a bishop, including the leasing of diocesan property. However, that approach did not cover the lease of property owned by other public juridic persons in the church. The new legislation closes that former gap in U.S. church law.

The gap was noted quite critically in the commentary on the code published in 2000 by the Canon Law Society of America. The 2000 commentary also noted the existence of guidelines but lack of legislation governing fundraising.

Chimera Embryos Have Right to Life, Say Bishops

2007-06-27T17:46:00.000-06:00

When I first read this article, I thought it was a spoof or a hoax, but I guess it's for real. From the website of the Telegraph in the UK, 6.27.2007.

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I suggest that you take a look at readers' comments that follow.

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Chimera embryos have right to life, say bishops

By Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent
Last Updated: 2:03am BST 27/06/2007

Human-animal hybrid embryos conceived in the laboratory - so-called “chimeras” - should be regarded as human and their mothers should be allowed to give birth to them, the Roman Catholic Church said yesterday.

Under draft Government legislation to be debated by Parliament later this year, scientists will be given permission for the first time to create such embryos for research as long as they destroy them within two weeks.

But the Catholic bishops of England and Wales, in a submission to the Parliamentary joint committee scrutinising the draft legislation, said that the genetic mothers of “chimeras” should be able to raise them as their own children if they wished.

The bishops said that they did not see why these “interspecies” embryos should be treated any differently than others.

The wide-ranging draft Human Tissue and Embryo Bill, which aims to overhaul the laws on fertility treatment, will include sections on test tube babies, embryo research and abortion. Ministers say that the creation of animal-human embryos - created by injecting animal cells or DNA into human embryos or human cells into animal eggs - will be heavily regulated.

They insist that it will be against the law to implant “chimeras” - named after the mythical creature that was half man and half animal - into a woman’s womb.

The bishops, who believe that life begins at conception, said that they opposed the creation of any embryo solely for research, but they were also anxious to limit the destruction of such life once it had been brought into existence.

In their submission to the committee, they said: “At the very least, embryos with a preponderance of human genes should be assumed to be embryonic human beings, and should be treated accordingly.

“In particular, it should not be a crime to transfer them, or other human embryos, to the body of the woman providing the ovum, in cases where a human ovum has been used to create them.

“Such a woman is the genetic mother, or partial mother, of the embryo; should she have a change of heart and wish to carry her child to term, she should not be prevented from doing so.”

The draft Bill will also allow the screening of embryos for genetic or chromosomal abnormalities that might lead to serious medical conditions, disabilities, or miscarriage. It will permit doctors to check whether an embryo could provide a suitable tissue match for a sibling suffering from a life-threatening illness.

The Bill would abolish the requirement for fertility clinics to consider the need for a father when deciding on treatment. This means clinics will no longer be able to deny treatment to lesbians and single mothers.

The Catholic bishops said that most of the procedures covered by the Bill “should not be licensed under any circumstances”, principally on the grounds that they violate human rights.

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1 March 2007: Embryonic stem cells explained
18 May 2007: Scientists allowed to experiment on hybrid embryos
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Are you aware that the Edgar Casey
material said that the downfall of Man was inserting themselves into animal matter? Not such a seemingly odd statement given what we are trying to do now.

Posted by Lois Freeman on June 26, 2007 9:28 PM
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I absolutely cannot believe this article! This makes me sick to my stomach!!!!
Posted by Eileen Neulman on June 26, 2007 7:17 PM
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This must be a hoax.
Posted by Rachel on June 26, 2007 7:17 PM
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Typical hypocrisy from the Church and its blind followers!

If science can create a chimera that helps in the study of human diseases, by all means go a head. But to let, no insist that the embryo goes the full term – to whatever end is utterly stupid unless it is going to be used as a source of genetic/biological material eg. artificial skin for burns victims, replacement organs and limbs, etc.

If the Church has its way, I can see that in a 100 years time a law will be passed whereby it is illegal to discriminate against 4 legged humanoids!

Posted by Democratic Bob on June 26, 2007 6:44 PM
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I believe this may be what the Bible warns: "Beware the sign of the beast".
Posted by Fran on June 26, 2007 6:33 PM
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HAVE WE GONE TOTALLY MAD ?
Posted by max bernstein on June 26, 2007 5:52 PM
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We can no longer assume that Bishops and Cardinals are on the same page with us. We need to follow what we know to be true and ethical. As a nurse for 44 years, I never thought I would live to see this day. The world is in deep trouble, and so are these misguided people. They will have much expaining to do to our good Lord. Keep the faith as you know it. Pray for them, for the "children" who will have the "mark of the beast", and we need to keep our own hearts and souls clean. Things that are "legal" are not always right. Be heard. Protest such nonsense as peacefully as you can. I'm in there with you. I'm 65 and still fighting for respect for all human life and will do so until I croak.
Posted by Judy Dobson on June 26, 2007 5:22 PM
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This appears to be the result of the old maxim, an error in the beginning is an error in the end. The best light you can put on this is that the bishops are pretty certain that the chimera will not be able to grow to term and that the body of the mother will naturally reject it. The consequences of this are that there is no "human" life killed and there is a "mother" that will think twice before giving up the dignity of the human species for the sake of King Science. The "baby" dies, but is not killed. Like I said this is the best that can be said for the bishop's statement. The problem is that the bishops should not have made a statement, but rather they should have reiterrated official Church teachings on the sanctity of human life and leave it at that. Those who knowingly transgress this teaching (which is based on natural law) commit a grave sin and as with a first little lie...this first sin is compounded when its unnatural results lead to an unnatural situation and decision that is oftimes also a sin.

We need to continue holding the line with Yes and No answers and leave the rest to God's divine judgment.

No, do not create chimeras...
No, do not destroy human life...

If you want to move the world closer to a severe chastisment, then keep thumbing your nose to our Almighty God who might be growing a bit impatient with human hubris...

YES, Sodom and Gomorrah is an historic fact.

YES, it could happen again.

Posted by Michael Rizzio on June 26, 2007 4:32 PM
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20 years ago,if we had read that nazi concentration camp doctors were :experimenting with human embryos and 'chimeras' and then destroying them after they had served their purpose in a laboratory,we would all have been justifiably horrified! Now all sorts horrors are mooted or perpetrated in the name of science and no-one bats an eyelid.If God destroys the earth because of the sinfulness of its inhabitants,it will not come a moment too soon!!Man has elevated himself (in his arrogance) to the status of our Creator and is now saying that he can make the decisions about life and death that have always been God's province alone
Posted by karl r on June 26, 2007 3:43 PM
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The Bischops of England, nor any other bischops have been granted such an authority to go beyond the current Church's teachings that, so far as I know are strictly forbidding in-vitro fertilizations.
That's staggering: These innocent bischops are speaking about the mother's rights. OK fine. And what about those of the "father"?
These Chimeras are an abomination: One day such monsters will be developped by mad scientists with the aim to overcome the human race created by God according to His plans, and destroy us either by their muscular strength or by their higher intelligence.
The one question to ask the Church (not silly bischops) is: Have such human creatures a Soul? That I doubt since they have been created by men against God's laws.

Posted by jacques Dumon on June 26, 2007 3:25 PM
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I guess, profecy is unfolding in front of our eyes. Strongly recommend to read Michael Brown's TOWER OF LIGHT. Absolutely phenomenal. There you will find the answer to any question related to this "abomination of desolation", as well as what to do about it. Let us pray, fast and do penance. Through the intercesion of the Blessed Virgin Mary and our cooperation, we shall see the mercy of God.
Posted by Olga Lucia Manrique on June 26, 2007 3:18 PM
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Open the doors to hell, All you leaders promoting this evil, start marching in.
Posted by M. Y. Carey on June 26, 2007 2:10 PM
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Stop the world I want to get off. Did bishops say this?? Really. ??? We are in deep trouble. There are no normal leaders left.
Posted by M. Y. Carey on June 26, 2007 2:05 PM
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20 years ago,if we had read that nazi concentration camp doctors were :experimenting with human embryos and 'chimeras' and then destroying them after they had served their purpose in a laboratory,we would all have been justifiably horrified! Now all sorts horrors are mooted or perpetrated in the name of science and no-one bats an eyelid.If God destroys the earth because of the sinfulness of its inhabitants,it will not come a moment too soon!!Man has elevated himself (in his arrogance) to the status of our Creator and is now saying that he can make the decisions about life and death that have always been God's province alone
Posted by karl r on June 26, 2007 2:00 PM
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What is happening to the world?
Why are these experiments being allowed have scientists not learned anything from history.
My God mankind has spent an eternity getting up on two legs and losing body hair - we're now going to create a generation that reverses the process. God help us all.
Posted by tanya rudk

Parishioners Lose Battle to Buy Church Building

2007-06-27T17:20:00.000-06:00

From the Baltimore Sun, June 27, 2007

* * *

Parishioners lose battle to buy church building
Friars retain right to sell to developers, court rules

By Jill Rosen
sun reporter

Maryland's Court of Special Appeals has ended a lengthy effort by former parishioners of a Fells Point church to spare their old sanctuary from redevelopment and turn it into a Slavic heritage museum.

Early last year, a grass-roots group - members of the closed St. Stanislaus Kostka Roman Catholic Church - sued the Franciscan friars who own the South Ann Street building. The group claimed that the friars reneged on a deal to sell the building to them, giving it instead to developers with plans to expand a nearby parochial school and build townhouses.

The Court of Special Appeals ruled in a 15-page opinion that the parishioners do not have grounds to contest the friars' contract with the developers. The judge who wrote the opinion did, however, sympathize with the group's desire to preserve St. Stanislaus, the first Roman Catholic parish in Baltimore and once the heart of the city's robust Polish community.

"The Circuit Court reflected its sorrow in disappointing the Parishioners of St. Stanislaus," Judge J. Frederick Sharer wrote. "We share that compassion but though we may sympathize with the Parishioners in their attempt to preserve the heritage of the St. Stanislaus Koska parish, we, too, must apply the law."

The Archdiocese Of Baltimore closed the church in 2000 because of dwindling attendance. In 2004, the parishioners thought they had persuaded the Franciscans to sell it to them for $400,000, even though the friars worried the parishioners were trying to reopen the church and had the group promise that no religious observances would take place in the building.

After months of heated negotiations, parishioners raised enough money for a down payment and sent the friars a contract, but the Franciscans never signed it.

The Rev. Robert A. Twele, treasurer of the Franciscans' St. Anthony of Padua Province, said yesterday he is pleased with the court's decision.

"The court applied the law as we always understood it to be," he said. "For there to be a contract, there has to be a real meeting of the minds."

Michael Sarnecki, a leader of the parishioners' group, said yesterday that there probably will not be any more appeals, even though he believes his side had a valid claim on the church.

"We did everything that they said, and they reneged," he said. "They lied. Yet they came up as winner."

While the case was in litigation, the friars could not go ahead with plans to sell the St. Stanislaus complex, valuable Fells Point real estate that, in addition to the church, includes a former school and a social hall. There was a rectory, but the friars demolished it last year to make way for the development.

Twele said the friars will now resume talks with the Hampton Co., developers associated with Mother Seton Academy, a free Catholic school for low-income children that has operated since 1991 at the St. Stanislaus complex.

In addition to building 23 luxury condos, the developers have promised to renovate the old church and turn it into a better home for the academy.

Twele said he hopes the deal can go through. "[The developer] expressed concerns about changes in the economy," he said. "That was the unfortunate piece of waiting for the courts."

jill.rosen@baltsun.com

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SNAP Conference Speakers Announced

2007-06-27T08:57:00.000-06:00

Speakers for the 2007 SNAP National Conference, July 20 - 22, 2007, in Washington, DC have been announced:

Walter Robinson, editor of the Pulitzer Prize winning Boston Globe Spotlight Team whose January 2002 series prompted hundreds of articles about clergy sex crimes and cover ups. His work led to an extensive, nationwide examination of the issue and encouraged hundreds of survivors to come forward, speak up, and get help.

Barbara Westrick, a veteran Catholic school principal and teacher who was fired this month for exposing duplicity by Cardinal Francis George. She called the police about her boss, Fr Dan McCormack, for sexually abusing one of her students in 2006 which led to a massive scandal in the Chicago archdiocese.

Thomas Roberts, a former CNN anchor and a survivor who courageously and eloquently testified before the Maryland legislature on statute of limitations reform. He told his story to the nation on the Anderson Cooper Show and elsewhere.

Tom Doyle, a whistle-blower priest and canon lawyer who once worked in the Vatican embassy and warned America's bishops in 1985 about the enormity of the problem of sexually abusive clergy. He has been repeatedly ostracized by the church hierarchy for his steadfast, decades-long support of survivors

Jeff Dion, a survivor who directs the National Crime Victim Bar Association, which links survivors to services. He also works to eliminate and extend statutes of limitations for victims of child sexual abuse.

For more information, click here.

Pope Changes Rules for Papal Elections

2007-06-27T08:08:00.000-06:00

Pope changes rules for papal elections

The End of an Era at Bellevue and a Nearby Church

2007-06-27T07:37:00.000-06:00

From The New York Times, June 27, 2007.

A great story about a great hospital, a great tradition of service, and more on the ham-handed workings of Cardinal Edward Egan and the Archdiocese of New York.

* * *

About New York
The End of an Era at Bellevue and a Nearby Church
By JIM DWYER

For 17 years, his feet have hit the sidewalk at 5 a.m., always ahead of the first dash of daylight. Then Philip Marani walks the few blocks from his home on East 28th Street to First Avenue, into Bellevue Hospital Center.

The city is filled with invisible tribes that control hidden, vital trades, and Philip Marani belongs to one of them: an order of Catholic priests known as the Carmelites, who have been chaplains at Bellevue in an unbroken chain since 1889.

Like the Mohawk Indian ironworkers who, far from public view, swung high steel to build skyscrapers, the Carmelites at Bellevue have walked jagged peaks of mortality.

That line slams to a stop this week. The Carmelites have, politely but firmly, been kicked out of their home in the rectory of Our Lady of the Scapular and St. Stephen’s on 28th Street as of the end of June.

Their eviction is the result of shifting economics in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York that will actually make their old parish quite wealthy. Cardinal Edward Egan has installed a new pastor at Our Lady of the Scapular who is unaffiliated with a religious order and will be directly answerable to the archdiocese, unlike the Carmelites.

Besides the end of their work at Bellevue, their departure brings to a close a rich and rarely told chapter of the city’s history. In the early 20th century, the Carmelite friars in Manhattan sheltered Irish revolutionaries on the run from British authorities, including Eamon de Valera, who became the first prime minister of the Irish republic. In the basement of the priory — then at 338 East 29th Street — the Carmelites stashed part of a cache of 600 Thompson submachine guns, wrapped in burlap sacks and bound for Ireland during the war for independence, according to Alfred Isacsson, a Carmelite priest and historian. In June 1921, the guns were brought by launch to a steamship, the East Side, that was docked in Hoboken, N.J., but were seized by federal authorities.

For Father Marani, 68, the escapades of Irish partisans held only passing interest. An Italian-American who was born and raised on 28th Street, he attended the parish school run by the Carmelites, found his religious calling on that street, and fully expected to live out his years there. “I thought I would retire here in four years,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about a car, you just get on a subway, go where you want.”

All this week, he has been traipsing across 28th Street for the last few times, unsure who will take up the work at Bellevue that he and other Carmelites have done for 118 years.

“One of my big fears is that whoever comes in after me will eliminate the Sunday Mass in Psychiatry,” he said. “Lots of guys are afraid to go up there. One thing, you can’t ask rhetorical questions in your homily — they’re going to give you an answer.”

The news of his departure raced across the hospital grapevine. As the sole Catholic chaplain, he has worked 13-hour days since another Carmelite priest retired, and so is known in every corner. In the intensive-care unit, a nurse approached him earlier this week, eyes brimming.

“I don’t know who I’ll turn to now,” she said. “I’ll never forget how you helped.”

Father Marani tried to soothe her.

Later, he noted: “I’m thinking to myself, ‘What did I do for her?’ Statistics, on the books, show there’s a lot of stress on hospital workers. Whatever that means. Many of them are certainly stressed out.”

He says daily Mass at 6:30 and at noon. Time is at a premium for hospital workers. “I try to bring it in at 22 minutes,” he said.

Father Marani visits the intensive-care floor, the neonatal unit, the surgical ward. “Some people say, ‘Get the hell out,’ but that’s life,” he said. Many others want to talk or pray or be anointed. The Bellevue emergency room sees 100,000 patients a year; 26,000 people are admitted to beds. It is the oldest public hospital in the country, a cornerstone of New York life, a teeming empire all its own.

The chaplain who broke in Father Marani in 1990 had already been at Bellevue for 12 years. His predecessor had been there for 30 years, and it is only a few more Carmelite chaplains back to the 19th century.

Father Marani visits with families struggling to decide about continuing life support for gravely ill relatives who have no hope of recovery and no ability to survive without mechanical aid like ventilators. “Vents are a very big issue,” he said.

After a patient has died, he will sit with relatives, say a prayer, then suggest that they make their goodbyes.

“I’d see some people throw themselves screaming on the floor, or on top of the body,” he said. “I thought I had to save everybody from that. Now I let them grieve whatever way they want.”

In the emergency room, another nurse spots him.

“I have that for you,” she said.

“You really don’t need to,” Father Marani said.

The nurse made a face, dashed into another room and handed him a bottle wrapped up in a bag.

He shook his head, gave his thanks. The nurse scooted back into the emergency room.

“Sangria,” he explained. “From Spain.”

The end of the Carmelites at Bellevue has a few parallels to the beginning. The order was brought to New York from Ireland in 1889 after a brutal public schism in which one of the city’s most popular priests, the Rev. Dr. Edward McGlynn, rector of St. Stephen’s Church, was excommunicated. He had supported Henry George, a Socialist candidate for mayor. The archbishop sent for the Carmelites, in large measure to calm the Irish immigrants who were devoted to McGlynn. His old parish, St. Stephen’s, was eventually incorporated into Our Lady of the Scapular, run by the Carmelites.

During the last two years, the archdiocese has shut churches where attendance has dwindled. By canon law, when those properties are sold, the proceeds follow the parishioners to their new home. With other nearby churches being closed, “there is no question that the archdiocese will be putting a good deal of money into St. Stephen’s,” said Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese. “We would also like to have one of our priests, one of our most respected pastors, oversee that. I believe this was an amicable change.”

The Carmelites do not seem to agree. The five who live on 28th Street will be dispersed to other parishes in the region, with two being assigned to a church on the Upper East Side. At a recent Mass to mark the departure of the Carmelites, the Rev. Michael Kissane, the provincial general of the Carmelites in the New York area, gave no sign that it had been a friendly decision.

“What can I tell you when our anger shakes us to the core and tempts us to despise some of our brothers in Christ?” he asked, going on to urge the parishioners to support the new pastor.

The archdiocese will assign another priest to serve as Bellevue’s chaplain, Mr. Zwilling said. As for Father Marani, he will be moving to a Carmelite parish in Tarrytown, N.Y. He already knows that an express train will get him into Midtown in less than 40 minutes. He still has Bellevue on the brain and frets over the success of any priest who will follow him and a century-long line of Carmelites along life’s jagged peaks at the hospital.

“This can’t be seen as a job,” he said.

E-mail: Dwyer@nytimes.com

4th of July Call for Essential Catholic Church Reform

2007-06-27T07:11:00.000-06:00

Over the next week, many Americans will be reflecting on the meaning of the July 4th holiday, Independence Day.

Three years ago, in late June 2004, compelled by the clergy sex abuse crisis, I put together a "4th of July Call for Essential Catholic Church Reform," in the form of a petition on the Internet. Here is that petition. If you would like to sign it click here.

* * *

The course of recent events compels us to change our relationship with the authority structure of our church in Rome, and to assume the equal station to which the Creator calls us. We declare here the principles and reasons that oblige us to transform our church, and we outline our vision and timetable for a church more aligned with Gospel values.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all women and men are created equal, and that our Creator has endowed us with certain inalienable rights. These rights include life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of conscience, and freedom of speech. To secure these rights, men and women institute governments, which derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, not from a small group who are unaccountable to the larger community. Whenever any form of government, secular or religious, tramples on these rights, it is the right and the duty of the people to transform it. Recent events, especially the worldwide sexual abuse of minors by priests and the cover-up and inaction by many bishops and the Pope, have demonstrated that our church has in effect become a government of the hierarchy, by the hierarchy, and for the hierarchy. This government has relegated us, God’s people, to second-class status—a condition that cries out for essential reform. We are not serfs in a feudal system; we are citizens of the City of God.

We take these actions compelled by the commandments of Jesus to love God and neighbor, by the belief that the Holy Spirit inspires the entire people of God, and by the principles of equality, freedom, and solidarity embodied in the Gospels, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the documents of Vatican II. The long list of significant and systemic episcopal and papal abuses—to which many of us have, through our own submissiveness, been complicit—amounts to an unacceptable authoritarianism that we must change. There are numerous examples of this tyranny:

• Coverup of the sexual abuse of minors by priests and secret reassignment of abusers to new posts, posing potentially grave risk to our children
• Failure by the Pope to call for the resignations of fellow bishops who knowingly transferred sexually abusive clergy
• Appointment by the Pope of Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law, a symbol of the worst of the sex abuse scandal, to a position of honor in Rome
• Failure to minister as Jesus would to the survivors/victims of clergy sexual abuse
• Continuation of a church culture of control, fear, secrecy, deceit, and denial
• Denial of Holy Communion to those who, following their conscience, disagree with particular church positions
• Disregard of civil law (for example, stonewalling civil authorities who investigate sexual abuse crimes committed by clergy)
• Silencing of qualified theologians who dissent from Vatican teachings
• Control of church assets by the hierarchy—in effect “taxation without representation”
• Disregard of the community’s collective conscience that some of the church’s teachings on sexuality are not in accord with the compassion of Jesus

Therefore, we the undersigned, secure that our cause is rooted in the compassion and justice of Jesus and appealing to God for strength and courage, solemnly publish and declare that we shall, based on the sacred principles declared above, transform our church.

We call for the immediate removal or resignation of all bishops who were complicit in the sexual abuse scandal.

We shall, in partnership with like-minded Catholics of all kinds—laity, religious, clergy, hierarchy—work toward full implementation by 2014 of the following changes in church positions:

• Open the priesthood to married men and to women
• Provide equal access of all qualified people to all positions in the Church
• Make priestly celibacy optional
• Realign our church’s positions on sexual ethics (e.g., contraception, homosexuality) to conform with the compassion of Jesus expressed in the Gospels
• Honor the right of freedom of speech and freedom of conscience of all people
• Promote full lay partnership in all aspects of church life at all levels
• Increase ecumenical efforts to all Christians and non-Christians

We shall, in partnership with all the people of God, work toward full implementation by 2024 of the following changes in church governance:

• Selection, by the people’s duly elected representatives, of bishops and the Pope, to limited terms in office, with the right of recall
• Selection of pastors by the people whom they will serve and lead
• Separation of church legislative, executive, and judicial powers through a series of checks and balances documented in a ratified constitution
• Formation of trusts to provide for the control of church assets by the people of God who supplied them

In solidarity, we pledge to each other our time, talent, and support.

Dated the 4th of July 2004

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

* * *

The 4th of July Call for Essential Catholic Church Reform Petition to All Catholics Worldwide was created by Lost Dog, Tall Weeds, LLC and written by Frank Douglas. This petition is hosted at www.PetitionOnline.com as a public service. There is no endorsement of this petition, express or implied, by Artifice, Inc. or our sponsors. For technical support please use our simple Petition Help form.

Science of the Soul? ‘I Think, Therefore I Am’ Is Losing Force

2007-06-26T19:27:00.000-06:00

From The New York Times, June 26, 2007

* * *

Science of the Soul? ‘I Think, Therefore I Am’ Is Losing Force

By CORNELIA DEAN

In 1950, in a letter to bishops, Pope Pius XII took up the issue of evolution. The Roman Catholic Church does not necessarily object to the study of evolution as far as it relates to physical traits, he wrote in the encyclical, Humani Generis.” But he added, “Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God.”

Pope John Paul II made much the same point in 1996, in a message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, an advisory group to the Vatican. Although he noted that in the intervening years evolution had become “more than a hypothesis,” he added that considering the mind as emerging merely from physical phenomena was “incompatible with the truth about man.”

But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges — not just in people but in other animals as well.

The result is perhaps the strongest challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” loses its force.

For many scientists, the evidence that moral reasoning is a result of physical traits that evolve along with everything else is just more evidence against the existence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with souls. For many believers, particularly in the United States, the findings show the error, even wickedness, of viewing the world in strictly material terms. And they provide for theologians a growing impetus to reconcile the existence of the soul with the growing evidence that humans are not, physically or even mentally, in a class by themselves.

The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is “unassailable fact,” the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.”

Or as V. S. Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it in an interview, there may be soul in the sense of “the universal spirit of the cosmos,” but the soul as it is usually spoken of, “an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans — all that is complete nonsense.” Belief in that kind of soul “is basically superstition,” he said.

For people like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, talk of the soul is of a piece with the rest of the palaver of religious faith, which he has likened to a disease. And among evolutionary psychologists, religious faith is nothing but an evolutionary artifact, a predilection that evolved because shared belief increased group solidarity and other traits that contribute to survival and reproduction.

Nevertheless, the idea of a divinely inspired soul will not be put aside. To cite just one example, when 10 Republican presidential candidates were asked at a debate last month if there was anyone among them who did not believe in evolution, 3 raised their hands. One of them, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, explained later in an op-ed article in this newspaper that he did not reject all evolutionary theory. But he added, “Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.”

That is the nub of the issue, according to Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary who has written widely on science, religion and the soul. Challenges to the uniqueness of humanity in creation are just as alarming as the Copernican assertion that Earth is not the center of the universe, she writes in her book “Bodies and Souls or Spirited Bodies?” (Cambridge, 2006). Just as Copernicus knocked Earth off its celestial pedestal, she said, the new findings on cognition have displaced people from their “strategic location” in creation.

Another theologian who has written widely on the issue, John F. Haught of Georgetown University, said in an interview that “for many Americans the only way to preserve the discontinuity that’s implied in the notion of a soul, a distinct soul, is to deny evolution,” which he said was “unfortunate.”

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth.

For Dr. Murphy and Dr. Haught, though, people make a mistake when they assume that people can be “ensouled” only if other creatures are soulless.

“Evolutionary biology shows the transition from animal to human to be too gradual to make sense of the idea that we humans have souls while animals do not,” wrote Dr. Murphy, an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. “All the human capacities once attributed to the mind or soul are now being fruitfully studied as brain processes — or, more accurately, I should say, processes involving the brain, the rest of the nervous system and other bodily systems, all interacting with the socio-cultural world.”

Therefore, she writes, it is “faulty” reasoning to want to distinguish people from the rest of creation. She and Dr. Haught cite the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century philosopher and theologian who, Dr. Haught said, “spoke of a vegetative and animal soul along with the human soul.”

Dr. Haught, who testified for the American Civil Liberties Union when it successfully challenged the teaching of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, in the science classrooms of Dover, Pa., said, “The way I look at it, instead of eliminating the notion of a human soul in order to make us humans fit seamlessly into the rest of nature, it’s wiser to recognize that there is something analogous to soul in all living beings.”

Does this mean, say, that Australopithecus afarensis, the proto-human famously exemplified by the fossil skeleton known as Lucy, had a soul? He paused and then said: “I think so, yes. I think all of our hominid ancestors were ensouled in some way, but that does not rule out the possibility that as evolution continues, the shape of the soul can vary just as it does from individual to individual.”

Will this idea catch on? “It’s not something you hear in the suburban pulpit,” said Dr. Haught, a Roman Catholic whose book “God After Darwin” (Westview Press, 2000) is being reissued this year. “This is out of vogue in the modern world because the philosopher Descartes made such a distinction between mind and matter. He placed the whole animal world on the side of matter, which is essentially mindless.”

Dr. Haught said it could be difficult to discuss the soul and evolution because it was one of many issues in which philosophical thinking was not keeping up with fast-moving science. “The theology itself is still in process,” he said.

For scientists who are people of faith, like Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, asking about the science of the soul is pointless, in a way, because it is not a subject science can address. “It is not physical and investigateable in the world of science,” he said.

“Everything we know about the biological sciences says that life is a phenomenon of physics and chemistry, and therefore the notion of some sort of spirit to animate it and give the flesh a life really doesn’t fit with modern science,” said Dr. Miller, a Roman Catholic whose book, “Finding Darwin’s God” (Harper, 1999) explains his reconciliation of the theory of evolution with religious faith. “However, if you regard the soul as something else, as you might, say, the spiritual reflection of your individuality as a human being, then the theology of the soul it seems to me is on firm ground.”

Dr. Miller, who also testified in the Dover case, said he spoke often at college campuses and elsewhere and was regularly asked, “What do you say as a scientist about the soul?” His answer, he said, is always the same: “As a scientist, I have nothing to say about the soul. It’s not a scientific idea.”

VT Church Abuse Case Ends in a Mistrial

2007-06-26T08:02:00.000-06:00

The following story is from the Rutland (VT) Herald, 6.26.2007.

It is followed by a statement from SNAP--the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

* * *

Church abuse case ends in a mistrial

BURLINGTON — A judge declared a mistrial Monday in the first of a recent series of priest sexual misconduct cases to reach a Vermont jury.

Chittenden Superior Judge Ben Joseph stunned a full courtroom gathered to hear the fourth day of testimony in a civil lawsuit brought by James Turner against the statewide Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington.

Turner, a 46-year-old Northeast Kingdom native, tearfully testified Monday that the former Rev. Alfred Willis performed oral sex on him when he was 16 and staying at a Latham, N.Y., hotel the night Turner's brother, Bernard, became a deacon in 1977.

In pretrial paperwork, the judge had ruled that the diocese couldn't tell the jury about a reported sexual affair between Willis — a priest in Burlington, Montpelier and Milton before being defrocked in 1985 — and Turner's brother, noting "Defense's questions about this subject are barred as being irrelevant to the case before the court."

But that didn't stop diocesan lawyer David Cleary from repeatedly asking Turner to describe the relationship between the two men. Turner's lawyers objected before calling for a mistrial. At 1:43 p.m., the judge agreed.

"I think there was a clear violation," Joseph said. "It is my obligation to see things are conducted according to the rules. We're back to the very beginning."

As Turner fled to a side room to sob in the arms of his wife, lawyers on both sides expressed outrage.

Cleary said he wasn't exposing the sexual affair but simply asking Turner a question about the two men.

"I think it was unfounded, unfair and precipitous," the church lawyer said of the judge's call for mistrial. "I think as counsel I followed his instructions explicitly."

But Cleary acknowledged the diocese has disagreed with many of the judge's past rulings, having gone so far as to ask the state to bar Joseph from presiding over its cases.

"Perhaps now on retrial we will have a different judge with a different perspective," Cleary said. "We certainly welcome that."

Lawyer Jerome O'Neill, speaking for Turner, blasted Cleary and said he would sue the diocese to recoup his client's trial costs.

"I have never seen anyone so explicitly violate the order of the court," O'Neill said. "The diocese could care less about these victims. What we see here is a horrid tragedy. The only message this diocese will listen to is from a jury that holds it accountable for past and present misconduct."

Turner's lawyer anticipated it could take months for his client's case, filed three years ago, to come back before a judge. Chittenden Superior Court is juggling 24 other civil misconduct lawsuits against the Vermont Catholic Church and eight of its retired or deceased priests.

Turner, now living in Virginia Beach, Va., was asking the jury for damages of more than $1 million. The diocese, in response, argued it wasn't liable because the allegations, if proven true, resulted from an out-of-state family event and not a Vermont church function.

On the witness stand Monday, Turner recalled the night in June 1977 he alleges Willis abused him while the two were staying in a roomful of family and friends at the Latham, N.Y., Holiday Inn.

"Sometime during the morning I was awakened by Father Willis," he began.

Turner paused in his testimony.

"Performing oral sex on me," he mumbled in almost a whisper.

"I told him to stop. He told me to relax and enjoy it."

Turner paused again.

"The next thing I remember was waking up. I just felt so dirty, filthy. I took a shower, a long shower."

Another of Turner's lawyers, John Evers, asked if that helped.

"No," the plaintiff said.

Evers then asked if Turner immediately told anyone of the incident.

"There was no way anyone was going to believe that happened to me," the plaintiff replied. "Here's this man who's a priest. He was a friend of the family. I'm a 16-year-old kid trying to understand what happened. I just felt there was no way anyone was going to believe me."

Turner said he next saw Willis some six months later at the end of 1977, when the priest, while staying at the teenager's home in Derby, woke and tried to abuse him again.

"I told him to stop. He told me again something like I was going to enjoy it. I got angry. I jumped up. I got Mr. Willis up on the wall. I pulled back because I was going to punch him. I realized if I did anything more, I was going to wake up my parents."

And so Turner said he left his bedroom and slept on the sofa. He said he last saw Willis when the priest returned to the family's home a few months later.

"He handed me a gray sweatshirt and a basketball. I said, 'Thank you.' I went in my room and shut the door."

Turner said he never wore the sweatshirt. As for the basketball: "The next day I popped it."

Willis, now 62 and living in Leesburg, Va., has denied the charges but has settled with Turner for an undisclosed "minimal" sum, lawyers said.

Turner's appearance Monday drew supporters including Robert Douglas II, who settled his own child abuse lawsuit against Willis in 2004 for $20,000 and related charges against the diocese for $150,000.

Turner testified that he had suffered two failed marriages and a string of job losses because of psychological problems related to the abuse. He said, because of continuing counseling, he had met his current wife exactly two years ago Monday and had married her exactly a year ago the same day.

"This is another milestone for me to get past," he said on the witness stand. "To let people know and make the diocese accountable for what they allowed to happen to me."

After the mistrial, Turner said: "This is just another example of them continuing to revictimize me."

The diocese has spent more than $1.5 million to settle at least six priest misconduct cases out of court since news of a national sex abuse scandal hit the Catholic Church five years ago. Officials stress they aren't paying settlements with regular collection money or the diocesan Bishop's Fund but from loans and other sources. As a result, the diocese reported a deficit of $1.3 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2006.

Vermont Catholic Bishop Salvatore Matano, who attended the entire trial, listened Monday as Turner's lawyers lashed out to a gaggle of newspaper and television reporters.

"This whole thing is extremely painful," Matano said. "It's certainly not the work of the church to inflict pain on others."

Contact Kevin O'Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.

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SNAP Press Statement

For immediate release:
June 25, 2007

Mistrial declared in Va. man's claim against diocese

Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, national director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (314 566 9790 cell, 314 645 5915 home)

We are deeply saddened that James' brave efforts to expose the Vermont Catholic hierarchy's corruption has been delayed and deeply outraged that, once again, church defense lawyers bend and break the rules to protect unscrupulous church officials.

Time and time again, all across the country, the same pattern emerges: Catholic figures will do almost anything to prevent being questioned in open court about clergy sex crimes cover ups. Today's travesty proves again that church authorities care only about themselves, their reputations and their comfort, not about victims, Catholics, or the truth.

We believe what the Bible said, that 'the truth will set you free' and what Martin Luther King said, that 'no lie lives forever.' So we are confident that James' couragous struggle to shed light on decades of duplicity will prevail.

(SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the nation’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. We’ve been around for 17 years and have more than 7,000 members across the country. Despite the word “priest” in our title, we have members who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Our website is SNAPnetwork.org)

Contact information:
David Clohessy (314-566-9790 cell, 314-645-5915 home), Barbara Blaine (312-399-4747), Barbara Dorris (314-862-7688), Mary Grant (626-419-2930), Mark Serrano (703-727-4940)

Excellent Video Debate on Clergy Sexual Abuse

2007-06-25T07:12:00.000-06:00

A tip of the hat to Bob Schwiderski, of VOTF's National Representative Council and Director of SNAP-GreatPlains who found the following video clip of a Today show debate on clergy sexual abuse.

Click here to see the video clip (you'll have to sit through a commercial first.)

CTA, SNAP Ask Skylstad and George to Act on Bruskewitz

2007-06-25T05:16:00.000-06:00

Here's a joint press release from Call to Action and SNAP issued Wednesday, June 20, 2007.

* * *

Dear Bishop Skylstad and Cardinal George:

As leaders of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, you have the ability; one might say the moral duty, to speak out on issues concerning the common good. It is in this capacity that you have spoken out on serious matters such as immigration policy, elimination of the death penalty, and peace in Iraq . Today, we ask you to use this same capacity for moral rectitude to speak out for the protection of children.

This month marks the 5-year anniversary of the National Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. Your national Catholic Conference of Bishops penned this document and with its publication, promised American Catholics that you would protect our Catholic children from clergy sexual abuse.

Approximately six months after the charter was adopted, the US bishops added to the policy a demand for bishops to “fraternally correct” peers who violate the National Charter. You have not done so. We believe that wrong doing that is ignored is wrong doing that is encouraged.

However, as you know, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of the Lincoln Diocese is the only Catholic diocesan bishop who has repeatedly refused to participate in the audits that would ensure his compliance with the National Charter. Earlier this month, Catholics in Lincoln , Nebraska who are members of CTA (Call To Action), attempted to deliver to Bishop Bruskewitz petitions signed by 1,000 Catholics concerned about his failure to comply with the audits. In response, he threatened to arrest them for trespassing on church property.

Therefore, we come to you today seeking your support to ensure that the safety of the children in the Lincoln Diocese is secured and that justice is brought about for victims of clergy sexual abuse. We call on you, at your meeting this week in New Mexico , to either persuade Bishop Bruskewitz to comply with the sex abuse policy or to publicly censure him for his reckless and obstinate behavior.

For the sake of all concerned, including vulnerable children, concerned and confused Catholics and those wounded by clergy sexual abuse, we implore you to take action promptly and have confidence that you will consider this violation by Bruskewitz as seriously as we do.

Sincerely,

Peggy Hough, Chicago Leader of SNAP, http://www.snapnetwork.org/
Nicole Sotelo, National Leader of CTA, www.cta-usa.org

Deputy D.A., Catholic Priest, Mother

2007-06-25T03:29:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times Magazine, June 24, 2007.

* * *

June 24, 2007

Encounter

A Place at the Altar

By JAN JARBOE RUSSELL

On a late winter Sunday in San Diego, Jane Via, dressed in the traditional garb of a Roman Catholic priest — a white alb, a gold stole draped over her narrow shoulders and a green, flowing robe called a chasuble — led the 100 or so congregants of the Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Community in a forbidden Mass.

Via is 59, and if it were not for the accident of her sex and the fact that she is married with two sons, she would be an ideal candidate for the priesthood. Via converted to Catholicism as a freshman in college and has a Ph.D. in religious studies and a law degree. A deputy district attorney in San Diego, she has worked as a prosecutor for 17 years, putting thieves, murderers and child abusers behind bars. In her other job as a Catholic priest, however, she is purposefully breaking canon law 1024. That law says that only baptized men can be ordained as priests. “I have long believed in the legal principle of civil disobedience,” Via said. “The canon law that bans women from the priesthood is unjust. We have to break it in order to change it.”

Since 2002 about 40 Catholic women have been ordained as priests in defiance of Vatican law. While a small number of renegade female priests may seem like more of an irritant to the Vatican than a threat, their numbers are growing. More than 120 women, many with long ties to the church as nuns, college professors, chaplains and lay leaders, are currently in training for ordination. Eleven North American women are expected to be ordained by the end of the summer.

Church leaders view the women as heretics or, perhaps worse, as mere impersonators. “For an analogy in the secular sphere you might imagine that I could get a friend to swear me in as governor of New York,” said Cardinal Avery Dulles, a professor at Fordham University in New York City. “Would that make me governor?”

As a graduate student in the early 1970s, Via was influenced by feminist theologians like Rosemary Ruether and Mary Daly. In 1977, she joined the faculty of the University of San Diego to teach New Testament studies. A year earlier, the Pontifical Biblical Commission determined that there were no scriptural impediments to women priests, and Via was one of many Catholic women who thought a female priesthood was only a matter of time. But for more than 30 years, the Vatican has held firm: priests must be male in order to symbolically represent Jesus.

Then on June 29, 2002, frustrated with the lack of progress, six European and one American woman were ordained as priests by Romulo Braschi, a controversial former priest, who claimed to have been ordained a bishop. In the women’s view, Braschi’s presence secured their standing in “apostolic succession,” which links them to the original apostles. They placed a notarized copy of Braschi’s ordination in a safe deposit box in a European bank. To the Vatican, the attempt to scrupulously document episcopal status was irrelevant. Within eight months, all seven were excommunicated in a document signed by Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. Since that first ordination, however, no other female priests have been formally excommunicated.

Via, who had left academia for the law but never lost her strong religious feeling, wrote to one of the original seven women and, after undertaking preparatory study, was ordained on June 24, 2006. She rented space from a Methodist Church and started holding Catholic Mass every Sunday evening. On Aug. 8, 2006, Via was informed by Robert Brom, the current bishop of San Diego, that because of her illegal ordination she had incurred “interdiction” — a formal censure that prohibits her from receiving the sacraments of the church. He also said he would report her case to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith for review. Via will not renounce her actions and understands that excommunication, the church’s most severe penalty, is now a real possibility. “The church is not a democracy,” said Jerry Coughlan, Via’s lawyer. “Short of a sex-change operation, it’s clear. Jane has no defense.”

Via doesn’t know when — or if — Rome will act. “I accept the consequences,” she said. “If it happens, it will be painful.” The pain is a consequence of her conflicting desires to stay Catholic and to change what she sees as a profound flaw in the church’s orthodoxy.

As a child in St. Louis, Via was mesmerized by a large statue of St. Joan of Arc. It was Joan’s demeanor, head and sword held high, that captivated the young Via. Now she sees the story as a parable of a different sort: Joan was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1431 only to later be canonized a saint. The church, after all, can change.

Jan Jarboe Russell, a writer at large for Texas Monthly, writes frequently about religion.

"Stop the Vatican Cover-Up"

2007-06-25T03:05:00.000-06:00

From the website of National Public Radio, 6.24.2007.

* * *

Critics Press Italy, Church on Clergy Abuse

by Sylvia Poggioli

Enlarge

Sylvia Poggioli, NPR

Protesters at St. Peter's Square face an uphill battle against the church's dominance of Italian life.

Weekend Edition Sunday, June 24, 2007 · In the last decade, clerical abuse scandals involving Roman Catholic priests erupted in the United States and several European and Latin American countries.

Yet in Italy — a bastion of Catholicism — the issue never came to the surface and never made headlines.

Now, in the Vatican's backyard, the veil of secrecy is beginning to lift.

Friday, in St. Peter's Square, outside Pope Benedict XVI's apartments, about 30 people gathered to demand justice for victims of clerical sex abuse. Some held a banner proclaiming "Stop the Vatican Cover-Up."

This was the final event of a day-long symposium on clerical sex abuse organized by the Radical Party on the premises of the Italian parliament.

The day began with the screening of an American documentary, broadcast in January on PBS, by filmmaker Joe Cultrera about his brother Paul, a victim of clerical sex abuse.

The story of Paul Cultrera, who kept silent for 30 years, resonated with the participants in the symposium.

Marco Marchese, a 26-year-old from Agrigento in Sicily, says he was absued by a priest for four years, starting when he was 12.

He says the American story is "the story of all of us."

"At first we think we're the guilty ones," he says. "It takes years, and only if you're lucky enough to find someone who believes you, can you heal. I just wanted to stop this man from hurting others and hoped the church would embrace me, but that embrace never came."

In fact, the local bishop filed charges against Marchese for slandering the church. Ultimately, Marchese prevailed and his abuser was convicted. He now helps other victims, but says it's very difficult for them to come out into the open.

"Were not just in Italy, we're in the land of the Vatican," Marchese says. "In small towns, it happens that when a priest is under investigation or in jail, people march through the streets with torches in his defense — not in defense of the victims."

Domenico Del Gaudio came to Friday's gathering from the southern region of Luciana. He said his 6-year-old daughter was sexually abused by a nun, but the tables have been turned against his family.

"We are told we're hysterical, we're crazy, we've been brainwashed," Del Gaudio says. "Our mayor says we have dishonored our town."

There are no statistics on the number of clerical sex abuse victims in Italy. Radical Party MP Maurizio Turco, the symposium organizer, says Italian legislation is murky.

"We have a state-church treaty that guarantees areas of impunity to Vatican officials, including bishops and priests," Turco says. "The average citizen who learns of a crime has to report it. Bishops and priests have a broader margin of movement."

One sign that clerical sex abuse is a taboo subject in Italy was last month's controversy over the broadcast of a BBC documentary on state-run TV. The broadcast was authorized only if it was followed by rebuttal from church officials.

Bishop Rino Fisichella, rector of Rome's pontifical Lateran University, rejected accusations that the Vatican protects pedophile priests at the expense of their victims.

"Children are well protected by the Catholic church and nobody has the right to give us lessons on this," the bishop said.

Little is known about Catholic church investigations and canonical trials. Until six years ago, cases were handled in their dioceses.

But in a 2001 letter to all bishops, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict XVI, ordered that all sex-abuse cases be transferred to the Vatican.

As theological watchdog, he also imposed total secrecy on the proceedings, with the threat of excommunication for any violations.

Daniel Shea, an American lawyer who has defended many sex-abuse victims in U.S. courts, accuses the Vatican — and the former Cardinal Ratzinger — of obstruction of justice.

"This gives them the opportunity to silence the victim, threaten the victim with hellfire for all eternity if they ever reveal what is going on in this transaction," Shea says.

One Italian magazine says 1,000 sex-abuse cases have been reported to the Vatican, but only 10 have been investigated.

But Paul Cultrera says silence kills.

"I stayed silent for 30 years because they did such a good job at convincing me that it was all my fault, and this could not be something a holy man had done to me," he says.

Boston Archdiocese Financials: An Example of Transparency or a Hoax?

2007-06-24T08:22:00.000-06:00

Voice of the Faithful was quick to praise the 2006 financial reports of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston when they were published on April 25, 2007. Here is a copy of the VOTF press release:

* * *

VOTF Praises Boston Financial Report

April 25, 2007 - Voice of the Faithful (VOTF) is heartened to see that the Archdiocese of Boston has continued in its commitment to greater financial transparency. We encourage other dioceses and parishes around the United States to follow their example.

“The improved financial condition of the Archdiocese of Boston demonstrates that accountability and transparency are just good business practices”, said Mary Pat Fox, VOTF President. “We call on bishops and priests across the country to follow the leadership of Cardinal O’Malley. A recent study has shone that 85% of the participating dioceses in the country have suffered from some sort of embezzlement in the past five years. Improved accounting practices and transparency with its members is the antidote to this systemic disease. Such transparency at both the diocesan and parish level would help restore the confidence of a badly shaken laity.”

"Voice of the Faithful continues to be distressed by the unfunded liability of the Clergy Benefit Trust. We hope that the Archdiocese of Boston will make this a top priority. Our loyal priests deserve a dignified and worry free retirement."

* * *

That sanguine assessment is not shared by the Boston Council of Parishes.

The Council of Parishes is a group of committed and concerned Boston-area Catholics formed to support parishes subject to closure; who seek options other than the closure of vibrant parishes as solutions to the shortage of priests and the financial distress in the Boston archdiocese and who provide a forum for parishes and laity to communicate with the archdiocese about issues of concern.

Results of the Council of Parishes' analysis of the 2006 RCAB financial reports include:

* The sale of property from closed parishes raised $40 M in the reporting year.
* Of those proceeds, $4.77 M was used to "support ongoing operations" of the central fund. The "improved" operating deficit highlighted by the RCAB is a hoax. Without this non-recurring revenue transfer, the RCAB's operating deficit grew from the previous year!
* $12.7 M was used to help fund the lay pension plan and trust.
* $16.9 M was used to pay Jubilee Year Debt Forgiveness. These were debts forgiven by Cardinal Bernard Law in the spirit of the Jubilee year. It was an action for which he received much favorable publicity in the Boston Globe and elsewhere. The debts were apparently "unforgiven" by his successor.
* These assets from closed parishes obviously were not used for the benefit of receiving parishes but for the benefit of the corporation sole (the diocese) and its associated entities. This use of assets of closed parishes would seem to be a blatant violation of the Vatican directive that the archbishop cannot take parish assets.
* These items are detailed in the Parish Reconfiguration Fund report and are confirmed in the detailed Central Fund accounting report.

The Council of Parishes goes on to say that there continues to be a need at the RCAB for large infusions of cash, as we have seen with the sale of property to Boston College . Funding the clergy retirement and medical care trusts remains an obvious need. Is there cash available now in the RCAB that could be used to cover some of the more urgent needs?

The analysis of the Council of Parishes further points out and asks:

* Boston Catholic TV has net assets of $31.9 M. $25.9 M are unrestricted. What has BCTV accomplished to justify this level of investment? A portion of those funds could reduce pressure on the clergy pension trust to take care of those doing the heavy lifting in this diocese.
* The Catholic Cemetery Association has net assets of $40.2 M, of which $31.0 M are unrestricted. An unstated portion of the unrestricted funds is apparently reserved for perpetual care of cemetery properties, but a significant amounts might be utilized for the care of clergy before they become customers of the CCA.
* St. John's seminary has net assets totaling $72.5 M, of which $49 M are unrestricted and $23 M is classified as land and buildings. Some of the land has now been sold. Recruiting seminarians might become more successful if potential priests had confidence they would be cared for properly after their years of service.
* The Catholic Foundation is responsible for raising funds for various purposes. Its financial relationship to other RCAB entities is complex, but it has substantial net assets this year of $45.8 M, some of which is restricted.

* * *

Who is correct here? Are the financial reports of the Boston archdiocese really models of transparency as VOTF says, or is the "improved" operating deficit highlighted by the RCAB a hoax, as the Council of Churches says?

VOTF Changes Strategy, Calls for Celibacy Review

2007-06-24T07:52:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times, June 24, 2007.

* * *

Catholic Lay Group Tests a Strategy Change

By PAM BELLUCK

BOSTON, June 23 — Voice of the Faithful, the lay group formed in response to the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, is calling for the Vatican to review the requirement that priests be celibate, saying the policy may have played a role in the scandal.

The position represents a shift in the approach of the organization, which has avoided raising such controversial issues. It comes as Voice of the Faithful faces a budget deficit from a drop-off in large donations and finds itself at a crossroads in direction.

“It’s tough to keep momentum going over a long period of time,” said Bill Casey, the group’s chairman, “and I think what we need to do is to refocus our organization’s leadership and energy. What we have to do is convince the average Catholic that there is a strong continuing need for an independent lay voice in the governance of the Catholic Church.”

Formed five years ago when two dozen suburban Boston parishioners gathered in anguish over the emerging abuse crisis, its message — “Keep the Faith, Change the Church” — and nonconfrontational approach to church leaders attracted 35,000 worldwide members, according to the group.

Voice of the Faithful helped press some dioceses into being more transparent in dealing with abuse cases and finances, joined fights to extend statutes of limitation for sexual abuse, and persuaded some parish leaders to allow greater lay involvement.

Now, it faces a $100,000 deficit in a budget of about $700,000, and Mr. Casey said at an April meeting that the group was in a “stuck position,” with arguments over leadership and decision-making.

Some members have long urged embrace of confrontational subjects they consider critical to church problems and priest shortages, like clerical celibacy or ordination of women.

“We’ve repeatedly rejected that argument, saying that those are not our issues,” said James E. Post, the group’s first president, who remains on its board. “Even I, from time to time, wonder whether we shouldn’t just declare victory and say a lot’s been done in five years, the church is doing better than it was, and then let the other organizations — Call to Action, Future Church and others that really want to deal with these issues — have the field.”

Instead, this summer, Voice of the Faithful will “be calling for the Vatican to do an ecclesiastical review of the celibacy issue,” said the group’s president, Mary Pat Fox. Ms. Fox said a review was not the same as seeking to end mandatory celibacy and was consistent with the group’s principles because research showed “it plays a role in the abuse crisis.”

“It’s not that celibacy drives someone to be an abuser,” she said. “It plays a role in creating this culture of secrecy that then caused the bishops to handle the crisis the way they did” because “you’re calling for a group to be celibate, and any deviations from that is something that you have to keep quiet.”

The group’s leaders are bracing for reaction.

“The minute the word celibacy is in anything, it’s going to be: ‘There they go — they’ve lost their center,’ and other people will be saying ‘finally,’ ” Mr. Casey said.

The struggle confronting Voice of the Faithful comes as publicity about the scandal has waned and the church’s image has improved. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University found that in October 2005, 74 percent of Catholics surveyed were “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with American bishops’ leadership, up from 53 percent in mid-2002.

“None of us can stay mad forever,” said Thomas Groome, director of Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College. “Certainly the sentiment or emotions that initially drove Voice of the Faithful wouldn’t sustain them.”

Some members wonder “how much time do we want to spend working collaboratively with bishops who aren’t interested in being worked with collaboratively,” Mr. Casey said. “I don’t think there’s any example across the country where what we would desire to have is in place, but in some places there has been an openness to conversation.”

Then again, quiet relations with some bishops have lowered the group’s profile. In Boston, where the scandal erupted and forced the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law, Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley and aides have met with the group but still ban many chapters from meeting in churches.

“O’Malley has mastered what Muhammad Ali calls the rope-a-dope,” Dr. Post said, referring to when a boxer leans back on the ropes and lets his opponent punch him until the opponent tires out.

“What people really want to do,” Dr. Post added, “is see two people slugging it out. In those places where we’ve had a public conflict we’ve been able to rally people.”

Asked to comment, the Boston Archdiocese said only that it “welcomes all people to assist us in building up the Catholic Church,” adding that it had its own vehicles for lay participation.

Experts say Voice of the Faithful, like many young nonprofits, must retool for long-term survival.

To reinvigorate itself, the group recently hired a part-time development director to raise money and issued a strengthened “statement of identity” that “the patterns that led to abuse and cover up, and to increasing instances of clerical financial misconduct, still prevail.”

Raising the issue of celibacy is not likely to ingratiate the group with more bishops, said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“There are lots of other groups that are talking about celibacy,” Sister Walsh said. “Don’t waste the bishops’ time on it — they can’t do anything about it. You might as well have a great discussion on what goes on on Mars.”

But R. Scott Appleby, a Notre Dame history professor, said the group’s longevity depended on changing its approach.

“They outlived what some skeptics would have said their shelf life was,” Professor Appleby said. “But if they choose to be a status quo organization, trying not to make waves and not to be confrontational, it’s exceedingly likely that they won’t attract attention and won’t recruit new members. And that they won’t change anything.”

Tom Doyle on Fallout of Passage of Delaware Senate Bill 29

2007-06-23T13:42:00.000-06:00

Tom Doyle provides the following commentary on the fallout from the passage of Senate Bill 29 in Delaware.

* * *

THE FALLOUT FROM THE PASSAGE OF SB 29 IN DELAWARE

“You will know they are Christians by their love.”

Within hours of the passage of SB 29 by the House of Representatives of the State of Delaware, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights issued a statement highly critical of the Delaware legislature. In this statement, William Donohue, its author, accused the legislators of the State of Delaware of being corrupt and intentionally misstated the content of the bill.

Senator Karen Peterson, senate sponsor of the bill, has since received over 300 critical emails, many of which have been in the genre of “hate mail.”

The Catholic Diocese of Wilmington repudiated Donohue as did a leading opponent of the bill, Representative Greg Lavelle. In spite of these repudiations, Donohue appears to be deeply entrenched in his commitment to the intentional dissemination of slander and toxicity grounded in error. In his statement on June 21 he turned on Rep. Lavelle and on a lobbyist representing the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington.

Rep. Lavelle responded to the vote in the assembly and to Donohue’s slanderous attack on his fellow representatives in a gracious manner. Donohue has responded to the justifiable criticism of his statements in an irrational and venomous manner.

The full texts of the statements, of two pertinent emails and a story from the Delaware News Journal are attached.

* * *

1. Statements issued by the CATHOLIC LEAGUE FOR RELIGIOUS AND CIVIL RIGHTS on June 20 and June 21.

June 20, 2007

CHILD RAPE IN DELAWARE:
PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS GET A PASS

House lawmakers in Delaware approved a bill yesterday that eliminated the two-year statute of limitations for victims of child sex abuse, but it does not apply to public school teachers. An attempt by Rep. Greg Lavelle to pass an amendment waiving immunity for government workers failed (he will try again). The bill now goes back to the Senate. Leading the charge to protect the teachers is Sen. Karen Peterson.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue commented as follows:

“The degree of corruption in the Delaware legislature is matched only by the selective indignation its lawmakers have for child rape. The legislators are owned—lock, stock and barrel—by the teachers unions. Teachers can grope all they want. They can rape little kids. And now they will be protected by making it harder to prosecute them. Yet the most reliable data on this subject, presented by Dr. Carol Shakeshaft of Hofstra University, show that public school employees have the highest rate of child sexual abuse in the nation.

“This sick game was tried last year in Colorado. Three bills were introduced trying to stick it to private institutions while giving public ones a pass; thanks to public pressure, they did not succeed. When a bill was introduced that would blanket all institutions equally, one of the lawmakers owned by the teachers unions called the Catholic Church’s bluff and said the bishops wouldn’t support it. He was wrong. And so why did the bills fail? Not because of resistance from the Catholic Church, but because of the teachers unions.

“If there were a law that said Catholic teachers should get immunity from a bill that makes it easier to sue them for child sex abuse cases, there would be screaming and yelling the likes of which we’ve never heard before. But when public school teachers get the green light, all is well in the bowels of the legislature. We are contacting the lawmakers today.”
Support Rep. Lavelle: Greg.Lavelle@state.de.us. This is a national issue. And let his chief opponent know what you think: Karen.Peterson@state.de.us

* * *

June 21, 2007

Catholic League president Bill Donohue commented today as follows:

“In Delaware, a bill was passed yesterday that eliminates the two-year statute of limitations in cases involving the sexual molestation of minors. But the law does not apply equally to the public sector. Sen. Karen Peterson, the principal sponsor of the bill, took umbrage at our charge that unequal justice is at work. Yet today she is quoted as saying that the bill allows victims to sue the state if they can meet the high standard of ‘gross negligence.’ How sweet. She further admits that the state has the right to claim sovereign immunity, and that it is up to the courts to decide whether it should apply. Thus did she verify our charge that there are two standards in play.

“Yesterday, Rep. Greg Lavelle, who is sponsoring a bill that would mandate an equal playing field, called our office requesting data on public school teachers who abuse kids. Today he is quoted as saying our response ‘offended’ him. Indeed, he even went so far as to commend his colleagues for taking ‘all necessary steps to be sure that all children in Delaware are protected regardless of where they go to school….’ Really? That being the case, he should withdraw his bill. To top it off, a lobbyist for the Diocese of Wilmington chimed in by criticizing the Catholic League. It remains to be seen how Catholic officials will react when the lawsuits start coming and the public school teachers get to walk. Must be a tight-knit club in Delaware.

“Meanwhile, as we pointed out on June 5, Michigan taxpayers are being forced to pay $25,000 for footbaths so that Muslim students can exercise their religious right to wash their feet. Not only is the ACLU defending this, so is Fox News regular Geraldo Rivera. He conceded last night that there are church and state problems, but then waxed sentimental over the allegedly besieged Muslims. In the end, he could not bring himself to criticize the privileged position afforded Muslims vis-à-vis others.

“The elites have shown their real colors and it’s not a pretty sight. Dishonesty, cowardice and bigotry make for a really sick stew.”

* * *

2. Senator Karen Peterson reported that she had received 116 critical emails by the morning of June 21, the day after bill passage. These were based on the erroneous information in the Catholic League statement. Senator Peterson’s response to these is below:

“The only "sick game" of which I am aware is the Catholic Church's attempts to
gut Senate Bill 29 while pretending to support it.

For the record, public school teachers are in fact covered by SB 29 -- but
please don't let the truth get in the way of your campaign to protect the
church's assets and records of abuse.

Now I know what Gandhi meant when he said, "I like your Christ but I dislike
your Christians -- they are so unlike your Christ."

Senator Karen Peterson”

* * *

3. On June 21, 2007 the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington issued a statement which repudiated the Catholic League (from the website of the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington

Diocese repudiates remarks by Catholic League president

Bill Donohue attacked Delaware legislature, teachers' union after passage of SB 29

The Diocese of Wilmington has repudiated remarks by Bill Donohue, president of the independent Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, who attacked the Delaware legislature and the state teachers' union in response to the June 19 passage of SB 29.

The Delaware House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that eliminates the state's statute of limitations for civil suits in sexual abuse claims and opens a two-year window for courts to hear old claims previously barred by the time limit. Senate Bill 29, known as the Child Victims Act, passed 41-0 and was awaiting the expected final approval by the state Senate and Gov. Ruth Ann Minner's signature before it becomes law. The Senate passed the bill in April, 19-0; a minor amendment was attached in the House this week.

Donohue, head of the New York-based Catholic League, responded to SB 29's passage June 20.

"The degree of corruption in the Delaware legislature is matched only by the selective indignation its lawmakers have for child rape," Donahue said. "The legislators are owned - lock, stock and barrel - by the teachers unions. Teachers can grope all they want. They can rape little kids. And now they will be protected by making it harder to prosecute them."

The diocese, in a statement the same day, said it was "surprised and chagrined" by Donahue's remarks. "The Diocese did not authorize the statement nor did it request the statement. The Diocese of Wilmington does not endorse either the substance or the tenor of the statement. We consider Mr. Donohue's remarks about the Delaware legislature and the state teachers' union to be irresponsible and regrettable."

SB 29 passed largely as written despite attempts by the diocese to have it amended. The diocese supported the bill's intent to change the current two-year statute of limitations but argued strongly that the bill should be amended "to make it clear that public school children and those served by state agencies" are protected the same as private school children. The diocese also objected to the two-year look back at previous claims because it places no time limit on the age of the claims that can be revisited.

The diocese had not commented on SB 29's passage as of June 20.

An amendment to SB 29 that would have eliminated the state's sovereign immunity from sex abuse lawsuits failed June 19 by a 24-17 vote. In introducing the amendment Rep. Greg Lavelle, R- Sharpley, called for "no special treatment for the state," saying that the law should be amended to make it clear that it applies equally to all children, not just those in private schools and other non-public institutions.

After the amendment failed and SB 29 passed unanimously, Lavelle said he would introduce a new bill that would waive the state's immunity in sex abuse cases.

The diocese supported such an amendment in a June 7 statement in The Dialog in which it noted that SB 29 failed to waive the sovereign and statutory immunity that shields state agencies and school districts from lawsuits.

As for the two-year look-back period, the diocese suggested that old claims be directed to "mandatory mediation with specific rules regulating the proceedings."

"Reviving old claims with no time limit whatsoever does not provide due process," the diocese said. "The older the case, the less likely it will be that witnesses, including the alleged abuser, will still be alive and that important evidence will still be available."

That opinion was echoed during the House debate June 19 by Mark Sargent, the dean of Villanova Law School at Villanova University, who told lawmakers that while well-intentioned, the two-year window to consider old claims would "undermine" justice and constitute "bad public policy."

Witnesses who spoke in favor of SB 29 included Robert Quill, 52, of Marathon, Fla., who said he was abused for years starting at age 13 at St. Elizabeth Parish in Wilmington by Father Francis G. DeLuca, a priest of the Diocese of Wilmington who retired to Syracuse, N.Y., in 1993.

DeLuca, 77, was arrested in Syracuse last year for sexually abusing a child. He now faces five years' probation and six months in jail, if he pleads guilty, according to a report published in the Post-Standard newspaper on Syracuse.com. His case is due back in court June 28.

Father Thomas Doyle, a Dominican priest who first warned of a sex abuse crisis in the church more than 20 years ago, also testified June 19 in support of SB 29.

* * *

4. By June 22, 2007 Senator Peterson reported that she had received about 300 “hate” emails from people, all based on the information obtained from the Donohue statement. She included the following with permission to reprint it or circulate it.

From: Brett Blair [mailto:brett@clergy.net]
Sent: Thu 6/21/2007 9:47 PM
To: Peterson Karen (LegHall)
Subject: Teacher Go Ahead Molest The Children!

You are a sick woman. You sacrificed little children for the sake of union
votes (the Teacher's Union). Donohue was correct when he said: "The degree
of corruption in the Delaware legislature is matched only by the selective
indignation its lawmakers have for child rape."

I hope you go down as one of the most reviled politicians in Delaware
history.

Brett C. Blair
Cell: 901-550-0744
Fax: 901-234-0016
Email: brett@clergy.net

* * *

5. The Delaware News Journal carried the following story this morning which mentioned that both the Catholic Diocese and Representative Lavelle had repudiated Donohue’s statement.

Senate OKs amended child sexual abuse bill
Diocese criticizes Catholic League's 'irresponsible' reaction
By BETH MILLER, The News Journal
June 21, 2007

DOVER -- The Delaware Senate gave its unanimous approval Wednesday to a slightly amended bill that eliminates the two-year civil statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse. Gov. Ruth Ann Minner said she would sign the bill when it reaches her desk.

The vote was 15-0 (with six senators absent) for Senate Bill 29, which has been described as the strongest in the nation, providing a two-year period during which victims of abuse whose cases had been previously barred by the time limit would be able to revive their claims. Institutions that allowed the abuse to occur through gross negligence also could be sued.

"It means our children are very lucky to be protected," Minner said. "Some states have practically no law at all."

The House passed the bill 41-0 on Tuesday night after amending it to note that it would take effect when money was appropriated for it.

A maximum fiscal note of $200,000 was attached to the bill to cover supplemental insurance, if the state chooses to buy it. The prime sponsor of the bill, state Sen. Karen Peterson, D-Stanton, said the state usually insures itself and opts not to buy additional insurance, but the provision ensures the bill will be covered by a line in the budget bill or, perhaps, its epilogue language.

"It will be with small items," said co-sponsor state Rep. Deborah Hudson, R-Fairthorne. "Between Karen and I, we'll stalk them on that to be sure it's there."
The Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, meanwhile, distanced itself Wednesday from an e-mail disseminated broadly by the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which said: "Child Rape in Delaware: Public School Teachers Get A Pass." The League also posted the message to its Web site.

The message referred to state Rep. Greg F. Lavelle's failed effort to amend the bill so that the state would not be protected from lawsuits by its sovereign immunity. Lavelle, R-Sharpley, has said he will introduce a bill today to address state institutions. The Catholic League urged support of that effort.
"The degree of corruption in the Delaware Legislature is matched only by the selective indignation its lawmakers have for child rape," League President Bill Donohue said. "The legislators are owned -- lock, stock and barrel -- by the teachers unions. Teachers can grope all they want. They can rape little kids. And now they will be protected by making it harder to prosecute them."

Joe Fitzgerald, lobbyist for the Wilmington diocese, distributed a statement from diocese officials saying they had not authorized or requested the League's statement. "We consider Mr. Donohue's remarks about the Delaware Legislature and the state teachers union to be irresponsible and regrettable," the diocese statement said.

Jack Polidori, of the Delaware State Education Association, called the League's message "absolutely outrageous, unfounded, and an insult to the 11,000 men and women that work in our public schools in Delaware. We thank the Catholic Church for its statement."

Lavelle, too, issued a statement denouncing the League's message, saying it "offended and saddened" him.

"My colleagues are not corrupt, and I know that they will take all necessary steps to be sure that all children in Delaware are protected regardless of where they go to school, recreate or pray."

German Theologians Demand Doctrinal Office Restructuring

2007-06-23T13:36:00.000-06:00

From the National Catholic Reporter, Issue Date: June 22, 2007.

* * *

German theologians demand doctrinal office restructuring

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

More than 100 German theologians have expressed support for a call from an emeritus professor of dogmatic theology from the University of Tübingen who called for an “intelligent restructuring” of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal agency.

Peter Hünermann published his proposal in a German theological journal titled Herder Korrispondenz, in response to the recent critical notification from the congregation on two works by the Jesuit liberation theologian Fr. Jon Sobrino.

Among those who have backed Hünermann’s position are prominent German theologians such as Johann Baptist Metz, Dietmar Mieth, Bernd Jochen Hilberath and Otmar Fuchs. The response from German theologians was reported by the Italian news agency Adista. In terms of church politics, many of these theologians would broadly be considered left of center.

After criticizing the notification on Sobrino, Hünermann offered a set of general observations about the congregation, arguing that since the middle of the 19th century it has been responsible for a series of “serious conflicts that are damaging to the image of the church and to its journey of faith.”

For one thing, Hünermann asserted, deficiencies in the theological preparation of personnel in the doctrinal congregation sometimes “aggravate the conflicts.”

More deeply, however, Hünermann said the real problem lies with the congregation’s mentality.

“At bottom, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- the successor to the Holy Office -- has preserved the structure of a censor’s office, which it had at the beginning of the modern era.” By way of contrast, Hünermann said, “the guarantee of quality in the scientific field today is structured differently: Essentially, it’s a matter of collaboration with the sciences, and possibly includes scientific authorities in the decision-making procedures relative to the politics of scientific research, and in the administration of scientific discoveries.”

For that reason, Hünermann said, the time has come for an “intelligent restructuring” of the doctrinal congregation.

“Today, it’s necessary to elaborate the ratio fidei [reason of faith] in a very complex culture, with its grave social, scientific and human problems,” Hünermann wrote. “This presents a degree of complexity that a censor’s office according to old models is absolutely not capable of handling, even on an organizational and technical level.”

This is not the first time a group of German theologians has demanded reform in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 1989, an international group of 163 Catholic theologians, including a large contingent of Germans, signed a document known as the “Cologne Declaration,” sparked by the decision of Pope John Paul II to appoint the conservative Joachim Meisner as archbishop of Cologne.

The heart of that statement was a defense of the right of free and open discussion in the church. It decried a “new Roman centralism,” and argued that “the church exists for the service of Jesus Christ. It must resist the permanent temptation to abuse its gospel of God’s justice, mercy and faithfulness for its own power by making use of questionable forms of control.” With respect to theologians being banned from teaching in seminaries and theological faculties, the signers rejected what they called “intolerable” interference. Among the signatories were famed Swiss theologian Hans Küng, and the Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx.

At the time, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger rejected the Cologne Declaration, stating that “there is no right of dissent” in the church and suggesting that the theologians who signed the declaration were engaged in a “political power ploy.”

Critics of Ratzinger viewed those statements as ironic, given that in 1968, another group of predominantly German-speaking theologians had issued a similar call for reform, known as the “Nijmegen Declaration.” Among the signatories at the time was Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, then a member of the faculty at the University of Tübingen.

The Nijmegen document asserted that “the freedom of theologians, and theology in the service of the church, regained by Vatican II, must not be jeopardized again.” The signatories pledged their loyalty to the pope, but argued that the teaching office of pope and bishops “cannot and must not supersede, hamper and impede the teaching task of theologians as scholars.”

John Allen is NCR senior correspondent. His e-mail address is jallen@ncronline.org.

* * *

Ratzinger joined 1968 call for reform

In 1968, a group of predominantly German-speaking theologians produced the “Nijmegen Declaration,” which called for the freedom of theologians to be protected.

“Any form of inquisition, however subtle, not only harms the development of a sound theology, it also causes irreparable damage to the credibility of the church as a community in the modern world,” the statement asserted.

Among its signatories was Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, later the head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and now Pope Benedict XVI.

The document offered seven concrete proposals for reform:

* The Roman curia, especially the doctrinal congregation, must take into account and express in the composition of its members “the legitimate pluriformity of modern theological schools and forms of mental outlook.”
* This should apply first of all to the decision-making organ of the doctrinal congregation, the plenary assembly of cardinals, where an age limit of 75 should be imposed.
* Only those acknowledged as outstanding professional theologians should be consultors to the congregation, with a fixed term of office and no one appointed who is more than 75.
* The members of the International Theological Commission, set up to advise the congregation, must be representative of the different theological schools; and the authority of the doctrinal congregation, and of doctrinal committees within national bishops’ conferences, must be clearly circumscribed and limited.
* When the congregation feels obliged to disapprove of a theologian, this must be done in a legal fashion, with the proceedings published.
* The defendant should have certain rights, such as to have his thinking judged solely on the basis of his actual published works in the original language; to have counsel; to get all relevant documents; to refer any dispute to two more professional theologians (one appointed by the defendant); to be accompanied by a professional theologian and to speak whatever language he or she chooses in the event of a personal interview; and to not be bound by secrecy.
* Concern for truth in the church “must be carried out and fulfilled in accordance with the tenets of Christian charity.”

Ratzinger has argued that many of these proposals were, in fact, adopted during his term as prefect of the doctrinal congregation, such as the publication of a ratio agenda, or method of procedure, for doctrinal investigations, issued in 1997. Critics, however, contend that the spirit of the Nijmegen reforms has not been embraced.

-- John L. Allen Jr.

Vermont Church Official Acknowledges Secrecy Policy

2007-06-23T10:40:00.000-06:00

A tip of the hat to Bob Nunz of Los Alamos, New Mexico, for finding this story and bringing it to our attention.

From the Burlington (VT) Free Press, 6.23.2007.

Bold font has been added for emphasis.

* * *

Church official acknowledges secrecy policy

Published: Saturday, June 23, 2007
By Sam Hemingway
Free Press Staff Writer

An official for the state's Roman Catholic diocese admitted Friday the diocese hid information about priests who had molested children until a national bishops' group mandated it end such secrecy.

"Did this diocese find it difficult to comply with those mandates?" attorney Jerome O'Neill asked Monsignor Wendell Searles, a longtime diocesan official and its onetime vicar general, in a tense exchange during the third day of a priest-child molestation trial.

"In some areas, yes," Searles answered. The mandates were issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in the 1990s.

Searles, under questioning by O'Neill, also acknowledged the diocese chose to protect the Rev. Alfred Willis' privacy, rather than report him to the police, after it had received multiple claims that he had molested boys in Milton and Burlington in the late 1970s.

"Yes, we wanted to protect the priest's privacy," Searles said after a long pause.

The disclosures by Searles came during the third day of the trial involving claims by O'Neill's client, James Turner, that as a teenager he was molested by Willis in 1977.

Willis, defrocked by the diocese in 1985, made an out-of-court settlement with Turner in 2006; the diocese is defending itself in the current trial against claims it ignored early warning signals about Willis that led to the alleged abuse of Turner.

According to a 2002 letter from Turner to Searles made public in court Friday, Turner initially turned to the diocese for help in addressing problems he said were caused by the long-ago alleged molestation by Willis.

"I would like the diocese to provide me the financial means for me to get the help," he wrote. "I want to keep this out of legal hands if at all possible."

He also detailed what Willis alleged did to him at a Latham, N.Y., motel and later at the family home in Derby. As Searles, under instructions by diocesan attorney Thomas McCormick, read the letter out loud, Turner sobbed and held a handkerchief over his eyes.

Searles' 2002 letter responding to Turner's request expressed regret about the "experience" with Willis and recommended that, because Turner lived in Virginia, he contact the Roman Catholic diocese in Richmond and "ask about counseling possibilities."

"We would like to have a preliminary assessment and a plan for therapy along with estimated cost," Searles wrote back. On the witness stand Friday, Searles said he didn't hear about Turner again until Turner sued the diocese in 2004.

The surprise disclosure of the letters and the admission by Searles about the diocese's secrecy policy occurred after McCormick began asking Searles about the diocese's stepped-up efforts in recent years to deal with claims about pedophile priests.

O'Neill objected and questioned the relevancy of the exchange. After the jury was excused from the courtroom, McCormick explained to Judge Ben Joseph the information was needed to show O'Neill's request for punitive damages -- money demanded to assure the defendant would not repeat a misdeed -- was unnecessary.

Joseph overruled O'Neill's objection but, moments later, McCormick announced that he had decided not to pursue the line of questioning with Searles after all. O'Neill, however, quickly accepted the ruling and then used it to extract the admissions from Searles about the diocese's secrecy policies after the jury returned to the courtroom.

Asked later outside the courtroom if he felt Joseph's ruling had created an "even playing field" at the trial, diocesan lawyer David Cleary said he didn't think so.

"No, but I'm still in hopes," Cleary said.

Diocesan lawyers have long been critical of Joseph's handling of the 28 priest child-molestation cases on file at Chittenden County Superior Court. In 2006, The diocese twice asked to have Joseph step down as the presiding judge in one of the cases. Both times, an administrative judge rejected the request.

Among the other admissions by Searles was an acknowledgement that the diocese continued until 2002 to require molestation victims seeking out-of-court settlements to sign confidentiality agreements promising not to disclose details of the settlements.

Under questioning from O'Neill, Searles also told the jury the Vermont diocese is one of only two dioceses in the country that still has not fully implemented a program required by the national bishops' group to train church workers about detecting and preventing child abuse.

Later Friday afternoon, the jury was shown portions of two 2005 videotaped depositions of former Bishop Kenneth Angell, who was said to be too ill to attend the trial personally.

In one of the depositions, Angell was asked repeatedly by O'Neill if the late Bishop John Marshall should have reported another priest, Ed Paquette, to the police based on evidence the diocese had that Paquette had molested boys in three states, including Vermont.

"I don't believe he had an obligation to report," Angell said after a long pause.

Asked if the diocese would have called police if the same kind of molestation had been carried out by a janitor or teacher at a Catholic school, Angell said, "I presume so."

Turner is expected to testify Monday when the trial resumes.

Contact Sam Hemingway at 660-1850 or e-mail at shemingway@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com

* * *

Here are a couple of reader comments following the story.

* * *

IMO this conspiricy goes all the way to the Holy See in Vatican City.....Deny, Deny, Deny and protect the reputation of the Church at all costs....

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 4:56 am

The catholic church has, for nearly 2000 years, held itself as the one and only representative of god on earth. In doing so they have sponsored mass murder, oppression of women, sought to quash intellectual growth, and many many more crimes against humanity, including this latest. For Angel to say that the crime didn't need to be reported if perpetrated by a priest, but it would need to be reported if perpetrated by a janitor, says it all. These priests really do think they are not accountable. I'd like to see the catholic church held accountable. They should be taxed. They should be accountable to the law of the land. Angel himself should be imprisoned for obstruction of justice. Vermont law enforcement...go to it!

Posted: Sat Jun 23, 2007 2:54 am

Davenport Diocese Wants PI to Investigate Abuse

2007-06-23T09:07:00.000-06:00

From the website of the Des Moines Register, 6.22.2007.

* * *

Davenport diocese wants PI to investigate abuse

ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Davenport wants to hire a private investigator to check into claims of sexual abuse by priests.

The diocese filed bankruptcy last fall after facing a growing number of sex abuse lawsuits and losing a decision in a jury trial. Since then, more complaints of abuse have been reported and the diocese is seeking permission from the bankruptcy court to hire a private investigator to look into them.

In the motion, the diocese said it doesn't have staff trained to handle the complaints.

"In order to provide prompt protection of minors, it is necessary for the diocese to employ private investigators in order to undertake these investigations," the motion states.

In the motion, the diocese said it would pay the investigator $110 per hour.

Craig Levien, a Davenport attorney who represents some of the creditors, said his clients favor the investigations.

"We always think it's good to investigate, but it's the secrecy of the investigations we object to," he said. "We want access to the investigations in the past and the present."

All fees and expenses paid to the investigator will be subject to court approval.

VT Priest Abuse Trial Takes a Lurid Twist

2007-06-23T09:03:00.000-06:00

From the Rutland (VT) Herald, 6.23.2007.

* * *

Priest abuse trial takes a lurid twist

June 23, 2007

By KEVIN O'CONNOR Herald Staff

BURLINGTON — Everyone associated with it assumed the priest sexual misconduct trial would be explicit. But spectators in Chittenden Superior Court on Friday were surprised when a Vermont Catholic official stopped reading aloud personnel records as instructed because he felt they were too lurid.

The Rev. Wendell Searles, former second-in-command at the diocese, sat on the witness stand in the case of James Turner, a 46-year-old Derby native who charges the Rev. Alfred Willis performed oral sex on him when he was 16 and staying at a Latham, N.Y., hotel in 1977.

Turner's lawyer, Jerome O'Neill, alleges the diocese knew Willis was just one of several priests who had questionable sexual histories but were still assigned to Vermont churches where they went on to molest children. To prove his point, O'Neill asked the 78-year-old Searles to read aloud confidential church paperwork.

O'Neill began by having the priest read a document about how Willis fondled an unnamed 14-year-old boy in front of a 13-year-old friend on a camping trip in 1977.

"The effect on both boys was obviously traumatic," the letter said. "The agony experienced by these two families is amply documented."

O'Neill then asked Searles to read 1981 secret church trial testimony about "defendant's constant preoccupation with sex as evident in his unabashed double-meaning language which often embarrassed hearers, his ready hugging and kissing of practically anyone (his habit of 'grab-assing,' i.e., placing his hand beneath or pinching the buttocks of others), his defense of pornography, his apparent use of alcohol to lower the inhibitions of minors, his insensitivity to the wonderment he was causing, his ability to lie and to 'con.'"

Searles began reading another paragraph before pausing.

"I'm sorry," the priest said. "I have to read this aloud? Do I have to?

Judge Ben Joseph apologized but said yes, only to have O'Neill offer to read the paragraph himself. The lawyer then read about someone else testifying of Willis: "'On Good Friday,' he said, 'I just love to see the people come up and kiss the Cross and I put the crotch ... where they can kiss the ... Lord's crotch.' Now, if that isn't sick, I ... I ... I said, 'There's something wrong with you, Al.'"

The lawyer stopped.

"Is that what it says, Father?"

"Yes," Searles replied.

But the diocese didn't defrock Willis until four years later in 1985, O'Neill said, after finally ruling the priest broke the sixth commandment.

"What's the sixth commandment?" O'Neill asked Searles.

"Thou shall not commit adultery," the priest said.

"That assumes various forms of sexual misbehavior?" O'Neill asked.

"Yes," the priest said.

After Searles read aloud one last letter, O'Neill pointed out most of the paperwork came under the tenure of former Vermont Bishop John Marshall, who served from 1972 to 1992 and died in 1994.

O'Neill asked Searles: "Of all that you read here, can you point to anything in there where Bishop Marshall at any point at any time ever expressed any concern for the welfare of who had been abused or might have been abused by Father Willis?"

"I do not see that stated in these documents," Searles said.

Later, upon questioning by diocesan lawyer Thomas McCormick, Searles explained his uneasiness with having to read the letters aloud: "I was shocked by the content — many of them were marked 'personal' and 'confidential' and here we were opening them to public scrutiny."

Searles, a Vermont priest for more than 50 years, added of many of the names blacked out on the letters: "They were people that I knew."

Searles added at another point: "I have to say again I was in no way involved."

Later in the day, O'Neill offered videotaped testimony from the Rev. Kenneth Angell, former Vermont bishop from 1992 to 2005. The lawyer, citing another priest who molested dozens of boys during Marshall's tenure, asked Angell if his predecessor should have contacted authorities rather than deal with the abuse internally.

Angell paused before saying, "I certainly would get some advice. I would talk to my legal counsel."

O'Neill asked the question again. Angell paused again before saying, "I still don't know if (Marshall) would believe he had this obligation or not."

Asked two more times, Angell paused before saying, "It's apparent (the priest) did a great deal of harm and all. I'm still having problems how Bishop Marshall could justify not putting him out immediately. But I don't know about this question of calling the authorities. I certainly would talk with my attorneys."

Turner, now living in Virginia Beach, Va., is asking the jury for damages of more than $1 million. That led lawyers for both sides to argue whether the diocese could afford such a payment.

Arthur Woolf, a former state economist who now teaches at the University of Vermont, reviewed insurance and municipal records to place a "market value" of all Vermont Catholic Church-related property at between $270 million to $500 million, he testified Friday.

But the diocese views its assets differently. In May 2006, fearing the potential costs of priest misconduct lawsuits, it placed each of its more than 120 Vermont parishes and missions in individual charitable trusts.

The diocese still owns its headquarters on North Avenue in Burlington, which its insurer has valued at $11.5 million. But in terms of cash holdings, the diocese reported a deficit of $1.3 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2006. That shortfall came after the church spent more than $1.5 million in the past five years to settle at least six other civil misconduct lawsuits out of court.

Church leaders say they aren't paying settlements with regular collection money or the diocesan Bishop's Fund but from loans and other sources. The church also is suing its former insurer in U.S. District Court in Burlington in hopes of recovering legal fees and settlement costs for alleged abuse that took place in the 1970s.

The diocese currently doesn't have insurance for priest misconduct, but says it held a comprehensive liability policy with the United States Fidelity and Guaranty Co. from 1973 to 1978. The church can't find its copy of the policy, however, so it has taken the insurer to court in hopes the company will unearth the paperwork and pay for the church's legal fees and settlement costs.

The former insurer, known as USF&G, is now part of the St. Paul Travelers Companies of St. Paul, Minn. It is talking with the diocese about the possibility of paying legal fees for defending cases whose allegations took place during the policy period. But the insurer says it shouldn't have to cover settlement costs if it can prove the church knew of past misconduct but continued to employ an offending priest.

Willis, now 62 and living in Leesburg, Va., has called the charges "unfounded" but has settled with Turner for an undisclosed sum.

Turner is expected to testify when the trial resumes Monday.

Contact Kevin O'Connor at kevin.oconnor@rutlandherald.com.

Catholics Protest 'Silencing' of Edwina Gateley

2007-06-23T08:43:00.000-06:00

From the National Catholic Reporter, June 22, 2007

* * *

Catholics protest 'silencing' of Gateley

By DENNIS CODAY

Catholics in Phoenix took out a paid advertisement in The Arizona Republic June 8 headlined “Catholic Women Will Not Be Silenced” to protest the treatment of popular Catholic speaker and writer Edwina Gateley by the Phoenix diocese, which is led by Bishop Thomas Olmsted.

They also gathered 2,000 signatures on a petition they said they would give to Olmsted.

Gateley was contracted to give a weeklong retreat to religious women at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, Ariz., June 1-8, but in March diocesan officials informed her they would be taping her presentations to monitor whether her talks conformed to Catholic teaching.

Diocesan spokesman Jim Dywer said June 13 that the purpose of the taping was to avoid prejudging Gateley. “We had heard that she had a reputation for giving statements that are antithetical to Catholic teaching. ... [But] we didn’t want to prejudge it. So we just figured we would tape it ... to see if she really does what other people claim she does.”

Dwyer said, “She balked at that, which is her right, but she decided to withdraw. Nobody here silenced her.”

“That is what they say,” Gateley said in a June 13 interview from her Chicago home, “but that is a real twist, because I was backed into a corner.” She said that she raised three objections, which included protection of her copyrighted material. She said she had a signed contract with the retreat center that forbade taping without her permission.

But she said her main objection was that the taping would be intrusive. “Can you imagine giving an eight-day retreat with a tape recorder running? [Participants] might even be afraid of asking questions,” she said.

“I would like to ask if the bishops would like somebody to put a tape recorder in a bishops’ synod meeting so that a group of women could listen to them when they finish talking. It was just not appropriate,” she said.

Gateley said she tried to work around the issue. “I am already on tape. I offered the bishop copies of all my taped material, which is available to the public. But it had to be a private taping for the bishop alone.

“And when I said no, then the bishop said, ‘Well, you cannot speak.’ Now their reading of it is that I said no and therefore I canceled myself. I mean, there’s a real nasty twist there.”

Nicole Sotelo, acting codirector of Call to Action USA, said in a statement, “The bishop’s threat of taping suggests censorship and silencing, but Catholic women refuse to be silent any longer.”

The retreat went on with new leaders.

The Catholic reform group Call to Action paid for the newspaper ad and organized the petition drive. A group of Catholics paid Gateley to come to Phoenix in early June to give four public lectures. The largest event, June 10 at Crossroads United Methodist Church, attracted more than 300 people.

Gateley founded the lay Volunteer Missionary Movement in 1969 and opened Genesis House, a residential program for prostitutes in Chicago in 1984. She has a master’s degree in theology from Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union and has written 10 books, including Soul Sisters: Women in Scripture Speak to Women Today, Psalms of a Laywoman and, with Robert Lentz, Christ in the Margins.

Dwyer said the diocese doesn’t have a set policy regarding outside speakers, except that “it doesn’t make sense to invite speakers to Catholic institutions who are opposed to Catholic teaching.”

Because the diocese didn’t know what Gateley was going to say, he said, “we wanted to tape it and find out for ourselves. Despite some of the publicity to the contrary, we did not censor her.”

Gateley said she found a certain irony in this experience. “I have a whole file of responses to my retreats to women. Quite a number of them actually say, ‘Because of your retreat, I am going to stay in the church.’

“There is no way that these women are charging out of the church, knocking down the bishop, because of my retreats. They are wonderful religious women, whose lives have been a witness to faithfulness, who never should have been barred from hearing another woman speak.”

Dennis Coday is an NCR staff writer. His e-mail address is dcoday@ncronline.org.

National Catholic Reporter, June 22, 2007
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Britain: Blair Turning Catholic?

2007-06-23T08:35:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times, 6.23.2007.

* * *

Britain: Blair Turning Catholic?
By REUTERS

Two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, reported that Prime Minister Tony Blair would meet Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican today to prepare to convert to Roman Catholicism. Mr. Blair’s spokesman said Mr. Blair wished “to talk to the pope, as he has done in the past,” but declined to comment on the reports. The Guardian said a conversion announcement might be made either before or after Mr. Blair, an Anglican, steps down as prime minister on Wednesday. The Telegraph said it understood that Mr. Blair would begin formal moves to become a Catholic as soon as possible after leaving office. Mr. Blair’s wife, Cherie, and their four children are Catholics.

"Constantine's Sword," a Documentary Premiering at L.A. Film Festival

2007-06-23T08:20:00.000-06:00

This story from the Los Angeles Times, 6.22.2007. caught my eye because Constantine's Sword is one of the best books I've read in the past 5 years.

* * *
Devout Catholic answers a call to challenge church
James Carroll, a former priest, uses his personal spiritual journey to drive 'Constantine's Sword.'

By Gina Piccalo
Times Staff Writer

June 22, 2007

Author James Carroll is an idiosyncratic Catholic, a former priest who still celebrates his faith yet rejects the very roots of its doctrine, viewing Christianity's promise of eternal life as "destructive" and the cross as a symbol of Roman Emperor Constantine's lust for power.

This unorthodox perspective drives "Constantine's Sword," a documentary premiering Sunday at the Los Angeles Film Festival about Carroll's personal discovery of anti-Semitism in the Catholic church and its influence in today's evangelical Christian movement.

The film, based on Carroll's 2001 book, uses his spiritual journey as a guide and his naivete as a cautionary tale, detailing the violence committed by the church over the centuries in Christ's name. In the end, Carroll warns ominously that the same brand of us-versus-them Christian dogma that dominates America today also led to the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust.

"If you think of religion as a great lake," Carroll says in the film, "it's a lake of gasoline and all it's going to take is someone to drop a match into it for a terrible conflagration … that's what the world of weapons of mass destruction means. And when you put religion into that context, as a source of hatred and violence, the worst catastrophe of all is possible. Every religious person has to be responsible for every way their religion encourages intolerance, suspicion, hate and envy of each other. We have some very clear reckoning to do."

Carroll's interest in turning his book into a documentary came shortly after the 2004 release of Mel Gibson's film "The Passion of the Christ," which was criticized for what some saw as its depiction of Jews as Christ killers. The film set box office records and demonstrated the enormous cultural influence of conservative Christians, convincing Carroll that he urgently needed to reach a broader audience with his research.

He sought out director Oren Jacoby just as Jacoby began filming "Sister Rose's Passion," a short documentary nominated last year for an Oscar, about a nun who helps remove anti-Semitism from Catholic teaching materials.

Jacoby said he was moved by Carroll's "special kind of intelligence and sensitivity."

"He was passionate," Jacoby said. " 'Tortured' is too strong a word, but it's close. He was someone who was in a real crisis because of his concerns about this religion he cares so deeply about. But more importantly, he was concerned about America and the line that was being crossed between church and state."

"Constantine's Sword" tries to link the errors of the past with the religious movements of today, moving fluidly from stories of the Crusades and clips of Hitler Youth rallies to scenes of Catholic youth cheering Pope Benedict XVI and ecstatic kids at evangelical Christian revivals. President Bush is heard in news footage describing the war on terrorism as a "crusade," a conflict of "good and evil," and saying, "we have received our rights from God. And we know God is not neutral."

In the film, Carroll demystifies the church without condescending to it, dispassionately recounting the terrible fate Jews have faced at the hands of Christians.

In person, however, Carroll is far more charged with activist spirit.

At a lecture last week at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Carroll gripped the podium, blaming the "sadism of Christian piety" for glorifying violence and the doctrine of eternal life for keeping the poor and enslaved from resisting their situations.

"Even in its foundation," he told a rapt crowd, "the church was getting it wrong. That's why Christians go to church as much to be forgiven as to be fed."

In "Constantine's Sword," Carroll visits the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. There, he finds "The Passion of the Christ" movie posters in the cafeteria and students tell him that movie fliers featuring the blood-streaked face of Jesus lined the cafeteria trays of 4,000 cadets for several days.

A 2004 Yale University Divinity School study cited in the film found that academy chaplains urged nonevangelical Christians to convert or "burn in the fires of hell."

Jewish Air Force cadet Casey Weinstein tells Carroll that he's treated as an outsider, relentlessly hounded by peers to convert. In 2005, his father and academy alum, Mikey Weinstein, sued the Air Force for encouraging evangelical Christians to proselytize to cadets at the school. (The case never made it to trial.)

From there, Carroll revisits the origins of Christian anti-Semitism, traveling to Trier, Germany, Constantine's birthplace, where in the 11th century, Crusader mobs wiped out Jewish communities. Back then, the film states, when Jews begged the pope to protect them, he refused to help those who didn't convert.

In the 20th century, Carroll finds, Trier hosted a celebration of the agreement the pope signed with Adolf Hitler. In it, the pope promised to defend Jews who converted but to do nothing for those who didn't.

In Rome, Carroll meets the Limentanis, descendants of the hundreds of Jews who — by order of a 16th century pope — were rounded up, forced to relinquish their property and their rights and ordered to live in a four-square-mile ghetto that was locked each night and maintained as such for 300 years.

There, Carroll learned that during World War II, Roman Jews were again stripped of their rights, rounded up and killed. The pope remained silent. The Limentanis survived because a priest claimed their young son as his student.

"I was totally blown away by these revelations in the last few years," said Carroll a day after his Pasadena lecture. "I never saw it. I never heard about it."

Carroll, 64, was born into a devout Irish Catholic family. His father was an FBI agent who helped establish the U.S. Air Force after World War II and as a three-star general in 1962 warned the Kennedy administration of Cuba's missiles.

Carroll and his family were often treated as dignitaries during their travels and once were granted a private audience with the pope. That meeting helped lead Carroll to the priesthood.

"The seminary gave me the ability to challenge some of the things I'd never questioned about my church and about America," Carroll said in the film.

As a priest from 1969 to 1974, Carroll protested the Vietnam War at the same time his father was defending it. He left the priesthood to write and over the years has published nearly two dozen books, novels and nonfiction. He's become a well-regarded op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe and his 1996 book about the rift with his father, "An American Requiem: God, My Father and the War That Came Between Us," won the National Book Award.

Last week, Carroll stopped in L.A. as part of a tour for the paperback edition of his 2006 book "House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power," which traces the history of the Pentagon and his own experience with it.

"I love my country," he said. "But I'm fully attuned to the ways in which America is a danger to the world today. I'm a firm critic of a whole aspect of American life. [But] I think someone's love for an institution is directly proportioned to their readiness to criticism of it."

Carroll hopes that by sharing his troubling discoveries, he'll motivate Americans and Christians to think more critically of the institutions that dominate their lives and help generate reform. In "Constantine's Sword," as in much of his writing, Carroll struggles to understand the root of the world's violence in the hope that he might find the answer to peace.

"Human beings can never kill each other," he wrote in his June 18 column for the Boston Globe, "without killing God."

gina.piccalo@latimes.com