On The Nones - And Bishop Zubik

Yesterday the P-G published this opinion piece by Most Rev. David A. Zubik, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.

In it he addresses some of "the nones" - the 14 percent or so of people, according to this study by the Pew Research Center, who say they have no religious affiliation - though they may believe in a God and pray.

The good Bishop is troubled:

Every generation -- every human being -- at some point has to answer a fundamental series of questions: Who am I? Why am I alive? What does my life mean and how am I supposed to live my life? But barely half of the "nones" report any reflection on these sorts of questions.

That said, the lack of religious identity in a growing number of people is of great concern to me. But I have found that many people, now in their 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s or 30s, who were lost to faith in their late tweens and 20s, have too often made a decision -- without much thought -- that lasts a lifetime. They create a life mired in consumerism.

I have to face up to the fact that some of the "nones" were created in our own churches and temples. They were the children of believers -- possibly marginal believers, but believers nonetheless -- who never caught it, or caught it and dropped it by the wayside as they entered their young adult years. The Pew Research notes that 74 percent of the "nones" were raised with some religious affiliation.

While he never actually gets around to discussing perhaps why the "nones" are growing more unaffiliated by the generation.

Luckily the Pew report gives us an answer (and this would be something the Bishop decided we didn't need to know):

Overwhelmingly, [the "nones"] think that religious organizations are too concerned with money and power, too focused on rules and too involved in politics.

Hmm...I'd hazard a guess that perhaps the collective faith in the Bishop's Church might well have been weakened over the years by the dissonance between the rules on sexual morality (pro-life, anti-contraception, anti-equality) it seeks to impose (by way of the political process, doncha know) on everyone and it's own disastrous handling of its own predatory priests:

Prosecutors who have been stymied for years in their attempts to build a criminal conspiracy case against retired Los Angeles Archdiocese Cardinal Roger Mahony and other church leaders said Tuesday they will review newly released priest files for additional evidence.

Thousands of pages from the internal disciplinary files of 14 priests made public Monday show Mahony and other top aides maneuvered behind the scenes to shield molester priests and provide damage control for the church.

How often did things like this happen while the country was being sternly lectured on the civilization-crushing moral evils of condom use or masturbation or Ellen Degeneres?

On The Dignity Of The Family

From the NY Daily News:

Pope Benedict XVI denounced gay marriage in his annual “State of the World” address Monday, going so far as to say the same-sex nuptials threaten the future of humanity.

In the speech, the pope, 84, unleashed what some consider being his strongest tirade against gay marriage, saying it is among conventions that “undermine the family” and “threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself,” Reuters reported.

“Pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and woman,” the pontiff said.

“This is not a simple convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society,” he continued. “Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”

You can read the entire document here.

It's curious to me how he can, on the one hand, defend the "pride of place" for "the family" and condemn "policies which undermine the family" while at the same time undermine the criminal investigations into the rape and torture of children.

For background on that, I turn to Christopher Hitchens:

In 2002, I happened to be on Hardball With Chris Matthews, discussing what the then attorney general of Massachusetts, Thomas Reilly, had termed a massive cover-up by the church of crimes against children by more than a thousand priests. I asked, why is the man who is prima facie responsible, Cardinal Bernard Law, not being questioned by the forces of law and order? Why is the church allowed to be judge in its own case and enabled in effect to run private courts where gross and evil offenders end up being "forgiven"? This point must have hung in the air a bit, and perhaps lodged in Cardinal Law's own mind, because in December of that year he left Boston just hours before state troopers arrived with a subpoena seeking his grand-jury testimony. Where did he go? To Rome, where he later voted in the election of Pope Benedict XVI and now presides over the beautiful church of Santa Maria Maggiore, as well as several Vatican subcommittees.

In my submission, the current scandal passed the point of no return when the Vatican officially became a hideout for a man who was little better than a fugitive from justice. By sheltering such a salient offender at its very heart, the Vatican had invited the metastasis of the horror into its bosom and thence to its very head. It is obvious that Cardinal Law could not have made his escape or been given asylum without the approval of the then pontiff and of his most trusted deputy in the matter of child-rape damage control, then cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Developments since that time have appalled even the most diehard papal apologists by their rapidity and scale. Not only do we have the letter that Cardinal Ratzinger sent to all Catholic bishops, enjoining them sternly to refer rape and molestation cases exclusively to his office. That would be bad enough in itself, since any person having knowledge of such a crime is legally obliged to report it to the police.

I will say it again.  Given the atrocious behavior over the past few decades of the Vatican regarding its own sexually abusive priests, why should anyone treat any statement of sexual morality coming out of the Vatican with any credibility whatsoever?

I would think not raping the young boys and not sheltering those who looked the other way should be a bigger concern for the self appointed guardians of the family.

Fact Checking Bill Donohue

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League defends the indefensible:

When the New York Times published a series of stories last year on child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church, one of the Church's chief exorcists charged that the paper was possessed by the Devil himself, working diligently to smear the Vatican and tear the Church down. So perhaps it stands to reason that the Catholic League would choose to run a full-page ad in defense of its clergy in the paper's pages--a shot essentially fired from the belly of the beast, if the whole demonic possession thing is to be believed.

In a fiery letter titled "Straight Talk on the Catholic Church," Catholic League President Bill Donohue charges that the spread of homosexuality, not pedophilia, is the problem within the Church. He insists that the scores of victims to come forward in recent years were not children but young men when they were abused, nor were they always unwilling participants.

"The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let's get it straight—they weren't children and they weren't raped," Donahue writes. "The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that 'more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.' In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia."

Since the full page ad is called "Straight Talk..." I'm guessing Donohue is making a pun. He defends the indefensible by saying a number of things:

• The allegations aren't new.
• The abuse wasn't rape.
• The abused weren't children.
• Everyone else does it.

While all these points may be true - in the strictest sense, what difference does that make? The allegations of sexual abuse date back decades. That's still sexual abuse, right? The abused weren't pre-adolescents (ie "children") so it's not technically "child rape". But it's still sexual abuse of a minor, right?

Nice to know the Catholic League still understands the use of a straw man argument. Too bad they don't understand how useless it is.

As a rebuttal of sorts, I wanted to focus on one paragraphs of Bill's. The one the news article quoted:

The refrain that child rape is a reality in the Church is twice wrong: let’s get it straight—they weren’t children and they weren’t raped. We know from the John Jay study that most of the victims have been adolescents, and that the most common abuse has been inappropriate touching (inexcusable though this is, it is not rape). The Boston Globe correctly said of the John Jay report that “more than three-quarters of the victims were post pubescent, meaning the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.” In other words, the issue is homosexuality, not pedophilia.

Oo, again with the pun ("let's get it straight - the problem's with teh gays") Looking at the numbers from the John Jay report one easily sees Donohue's strawman. In the executive summary we find:

The largest group of alleged victims (50.9%) was between the ages of 11 and 14, 27.3% were 15-17, 16% were 8-10 and nearly 6% were under age 7. Overall, 81% of victims were male and 19% female. Male victims tended to be older than female victims. Over 40% of all victims were males between the ages of 11 and 14.

And:

Priests allegedly committed acts which were classified into more than 20 categories. The most frequent acts allegedly committed were: touching over the victim’s clothing (52.6%), touching under the victim's clothes (44.9%), cleric performing oral sex (26%), victim disrobed (25.7%), and penile penetration or attempted penile penetration (22.4%). Many of the abusers were alleged to have committed multiple types of abuse against individual victims, and relatively few priests committed only the most minor acts. Of the 90% of the reported incidents for which we had specific offense details, 141 incidents, or one and one half percent, were reported that included only verbal abuse and/or the use of pornography.

See what Donohue did? 72% of the victims were 14 and under and yet because most adolescents the sexual abuse didn't involve children - to Donohue.

Then there's the abuse itself. Since most was "touching over the victim's clothing" the sexual abuse wasn't rape - to Donohue. He, of course, fails to mention the rate of the cleric performing oral sex (26%)or the rate of "penile penetration" - attempted or otherwise - (22.4%).

Of course it's not child rape. Of course it's not sexual abuse. The Catholic Church is a victim of teh gay!

To quote Christopher Hitchens, "I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to."

No Aspersions, No Allegations

There are times when I have to tip my hat to the editorial board at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. There are days when they get it right.

Like today:

Grand jury accusations that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia failed to stop the sexual abuse of children more than five years after another grand jury documented the abuse by more than 50 priests begs another question:

Did the same thing happen in Pittsburgh?

We are forced to ask this most difficult question given that the Philly grand jury directly implicates Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, who stepped down as the prelate of the Philadelphia archdiocese in 2003 and is the former bishop of Pittsburgh.

The grand jury said it "reluctantly" decided to not file charges against Cardinal Bevilacqua because it did not have enough evidence. But he is accused of transferring problem priests to new parishes without divulging prior sexual-abuse allegations.

Did the same thing happen under Bevilacqua's watch in the Diocese of Pittsburgh between 1983 and 1987? It is an eminently fair question given the alleged audacity of the inaction in the Philadelphia cases.

Bevilacqua now is 87 and said to be suffering from cancer and dementia. But that should not preclude an independent and outside review of all allegations of sexual abuse against priests during his Pittsburgh tenure.

We cast no aspersions. We make no allegations. But given the facts as the Philadelphia grand jury has presented them, those in the Pittsburgh diocese deserve no less.K

Minor quibble: I would spend less time with the "Pittsburgh Connection" and more time on the bigger picture (the allegation that The Church in the State of Pennsylvania covered up the rape and torture of children). Unfortunately the local news media just generally spends too much time looking for the "Pittsburgh Connection" in too many stories, not just this one. Minor quibble. Moving on.

The AP has some details:

Nearly a decade after the scandal over sexual abuse by priests erupted, Philadelphia's district attorney has taken a step no prosecutor in the United States had taken before: filing criminal charges against a high-ranking Roman Catholic official for allegedly failing to protect children.

And:

[District Attorney Seth] Williams announced charges Thursday against three priests, a parochial school teacher and Monsignor William J. Lynn, who, as secretary of the clergy, was one of the top officials in the Philadelphia Archdiocese from 1992 to 2004.

The three priests and the teacher were charged with raping boys. Monsignor Lynn, 60, was accused not of molesting children, but instead of endangering them. A damning grand jury report said at least two boys were sexually assaulted because he installed two known pedophiles in posts where they had contact with youngsters.

And Reuters has news of a lawsuit:

The Archbishop of Philadelphia and his predecessor were accused on Monday in a civil lawsuit of endangering children by concealing the identity and sexual abuse of predatory priests from law enforcement to save the church from a costly scandal.

Among the seven people and three institutions named in the lawsuit filed in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia were the current Archbishop Cardinal Justin Rigali, his predecessor Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, Monsignor William Lynn, the Rev. Richard Cochrane and Martin Satchell, who has left the priesthood.

"John Doe 10," an anonymous 28-year-old man who allegedly suffered two periods of abuse by clergymen, filed the lawsuit and is seeking more than $50,000, which would trigger a jury trial. The victim alleges that as a young Catholic school student he was abused during second or third grade and again during his high school freshman year, when he sought counseling about the earlier abuse. The lawsuit names Satchell and Cochrane as his abusers.

The lawsuit accuses the Archdiocese, the sixth largest in the United States with 1.5 million Catholics, of implementing "programs and procedures that were misrepresented to the public as providing help to victims of childhood sexual abuse by clergy, but were instead maliciously used to develop information to protect the Archdiocese."

These are still only allegations, of course. But it's not like the Church hasn't already committed similar atrocities elsewhere across the planet.

So I'll say it again. Given the Church's atrocious behavior protecting it's priesthood, why should we spend pay any attention to any statement of sexual morality from the Roman Catholic Church?

WWJD?

I'm not sure, of course, but I would guess that He wouldn't cover up the rape and torture of children.

Just a guess.

From RTE in Ireland:

Just when the Irish bishops were beginning to come to grips with how to deal with the clerical sexual abuse problem, Rome intervened and tried to enforce Vatican policy which put the interests of the priest, not the victim, first.

In a strictly confidential letter seen by WYB, the Vatican threatens the Irish bishops that if they follow their new child protection guidelines it would support the accused priest if he were to appeal to its authority.

The letter tells the Irish bishops that the Vatican has moral reservations about their policy of mandatory reporting and that their guidelines are contrary to canon law.

In 1999 the Irish bishops were called to a meeting at the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome and told by the Cardinal Prefect, Castrillon Hoyos, to be "fathers to your priests, not policemen!"

The AP has more:

A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims' groups described as "the smoking gun" needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests.

The newly revealed letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican's rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland's first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.

The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church's right to handle all child-abuse allegations and determine punishments in house rather than give that power to civil authorities.

And:

The 1997 letter, signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature."

Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, "must be meticulously followed." Any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the "highly embarrassing" position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome, he wrote.

In a response:

The Vatican says a letter warning Irish bishops against reporting sexual abuse of children to police has been misunderstood.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that with its 1997 letter, the Vatican wanted to ensure that Irish bishops follow church law precisely so that pedophile priests would not have any technical grounds to escape church punishment.

Sure, ok. That explains it.

Tell me again why The Church is given any credibility when it comes to matters of sexual morality. Given its atrocious history in dealing with the rape and torture of those in its care (like this story), why should any (ANY) pronouncement about sex about coming out of The Vatican (or any Catholic church, for that matter) be given any weight whatsoever?

Jesus would never allow a priest to continue to rape boys. Would He?

someone is owed an apology

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For the all the crap she suffered for this.
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For all the Cardinals out there

I created this back in 2005 and you can still pick some up cheap. Just saying...


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(I mean, it was a secret vote, right? Who would know?)
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Suffer the little children

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Why Was Nothing Done?

From the NYTimes:

They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people.

This week, they learned that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, received letters about Father Murphy in 1996 from Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, who said that the deaf community needed “a healing response from the Church.” The Vatican sat on the case, then equivocated, and when Father Murphy died in 1998, he died a priest.

In answer to the question at top:

Among the supervisors was John Conway, now the deputy administrator of workers’ compensation for the State of Wisconsin. Mr. Conway, the students and others collected affidavits from 15 to 20 former students about Father Murphy’s violations. They were granted a meeting with Archbishop William E. Cousins.

“In my extreme naïveté,” said Mr. Conway in an interview on Friday, “I told them the archbishop would take care of this.”

He said they were surprised to find the room packed with people, including several nuns and teachers from the school, two priests who said they were representing the apostolic delegate in Chicago, and Father Murphy himself.

Arthur Budzinski and Gary Smith, two more victims of Father Murphy, said in an interview last week that they remember seeing Archbishop Cousins yell, and Father Murphy staring at the floor. The deaf men and their advocates were told that Father Murphy, the school’s director and top fund-raiser, was too valuable to be let go, so he would be given only administrative duties.

They were outraged. They distributed “Wanted” posters with Father Murphy’s face outside the cathedral in Milwaukee. They went to the police departments in Milwaukee, where they were told it was not the correct jurisdiction, and in St. Francis, where the school was located, Mr. Conway said. They also went to the office of E. Michael McCann, the district attorney of Milwaukee County, and spoke with his assistant, William Gardner.

“A criminal priest was an oxymoron to them,” Mr. Conway said. “They said they’ll refer it to the archdiocese.” [emphasis added.]

The archdiocese and the Church as a whole did little if anything about Father Murphy. And as many as 200 boys were abused. By just one priest.

I'll give Christopher Hitchens the last word here.

It's the rape and torture of children.

More Trouble For The Pope

From the NYTimes:

Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.

The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal. [emphasis added.]

Deaf boys???

To be clear, this is not about Catholicism. It's about the abuse of power. It's about the hypocrisy of an institution that seeks to impose its own brand of sexual morality while covering up the rapes of deaf children for the sake of protecting itself from scandal.

Tell me again why we should treat any statement on sex from the Catholic Church with any credibility?

No really I want to know.