The Scandal

I don’t mean to continually harp on Voice of the Faithful’s ongoing financial and membership problems, but they keep giving interviews and illustrating why they are so problematic.

The latest is in the UK’s The Guardian newspaper, which brings out not just VOTF’s money woes, but also the infighting plaguing it and the arrogant attitude.

Mary Pat Fox, the elected president of the group, tells the newspaper why Voice of the Faithful must succeed.

The group is poised to rebound, Fox said, but it needs to see some success in its initiatives, and it also needs to continually show Catholics why Voice of the Faithful is important.

“If the only voice that you heard on the Catholic church was from the hierarchy, that would be a problem,” she said.

That last sentence right there is exactly the problem with VOTF: the arrogance. As if, before VOTF came along, the only voice we ever heard about the Church, from within the Church, was that of bishops. Nevermind the long list of laymen, saints among them, who have contributed to the Church. Go to any parish and tell me where most of the initiative is coming from. Father is one man; he relies on the laity. And what’s wrong with hearing from the hierarchy? Our priests and bishops are our spiritual fathers. We need them to speak out on the matters important to our faith. That some bishops and priests have failed in their important duties in the past is no reason to set yourself up as if your were the opposition party in a newly parliamentary government. We are a family, not a series of factions in a democracy. Unfortunately too many of VOTF’s founding fathers and mothers don’t know that. That is perhaps the other reason the group is struggling so much, according VOTF’s board chairman William Casey.

The group is also facing what Casey called a “crisis in leadership” due to infighting, difficulty respecting each other’s positions and trouble reaching consensus on decisions, according to the notes of his remarks at a leadership conference in April.

Can’t say I’m surprised, given what I recall of their turbulent beginnings in 2002 when people walked out of their inaugural national convention after they were confronted with heterodoxy on a large scale and other well-meaning orthodox Catholics were effectively hounded from group chapters and online bulletin boards for daring to stand up for Church teaching.

Technorati Tags: Voice of the Faithful | Catholic |

What do you call an organization that spends nearly a third of its income just on raising that money in the first place? While I blogged about Voice of the Faithful’s ongoing membership and financial difficulties recently, a Catholic News Service article highlights some of the eyebrow-raising financial details.

Until 2006, the group reported relatively stable levels of contributions of around $600,000 each year. It rose to $661,774 for the year ending May 31, 2006.

Gifts to the group for the seven-month period from June to December 2006, the last period posted on the Internet, totaled $333,438.

During the past five years, Voice of the Faithful has spent rising amounts to solicit contributions. It reported $64,224 in fundraising expenses in 2003, $111,089 for 2004, $151,549 for 2005 and $143,603 in 2006.

It reported $133,261 in development expenses for the first seven months of its current fiscal year.

The Better Business Bureau’s guidelines on charitable giving state that no more than 35% of contributions should be spent on fundraising. For the first seven months of VOTF’s fiscal year 2007 (ending this week), the total was 39 percent. Not only that, but the total cost of development expenses is on track to be nearly double that of the previous year.

This is not a sign of a healthy organization. They are without a permanent executive director, they’ve laid off the two part-time office workers in their headquarters, and they’re facing a $100,000 budget deficit. As a national organization, VOTF is on the brink of collapse. Good riddance, I say.

While many individuals might have had noble intentions when joining the group in 2002, it quickly became apparent that the leadership had other ideas in mind. Almost from the beginning, it was clear to me and others that VOTF was just a pretty face on the same, old Call to Action heterodoxies and the only reason they lasted as long as they did was because certain media organizations held them up as the “faithful opposition” whenever writing about the troubles in the Church.

VOTF may go on as a shadow for some time, but it’s death knell has been sounded. Right about on track for what I originally predicted.

N.B.: I went back into my ancient archives and found this blog entry from October 3, 2002 in which I analyzed an email from one of the VOTF leaders on how the group should grow. He was predicting that in four years it would have 10 million members! On the other hand, I said that if they were still around in 2006, I’d be surprised. Not far off.

Technorati Tags: Voice of the Faithful | Catholic | Boston |

A Washington state appeals court has ruled that victims can sue the religious order that trained the priests who abused them. In this case, it was the Sulpicians who operated the now-closed seminary outside Seattle who are under the gun.

The crux of the lawsuit is that those charged with forming the seminarians should not have advanced them for ordination if they allegedly knew they were likely to abuse.

At the seminary, each student was assigned a “spiritual director,” a priest who oversaw the student’s development and acted as a confessor, court documents said.

O’Donnell has testified in depositions that he was open with his spiritual director about his interest in sexual contact with children and his struggle with his sexual orientation, the opinion said.

Lawyers for the seminary contended the spiritual director, identified in documents only as Father Basso, could not have shared with others what O’Donnell told him in confession. Thus there is no proof that seminary directors knew O’Donnell was a pedophile, they argued.

O’Donnell served as a priest from 1971 until 1985. At least 65 boys have accused him of abusing them, court records showed.

Are all meetings between the spiritual director and his charge covered under the sacrament of confession and its seal? Maybe some priests or seminarians can clarify, but my understanding is that they are not. In fact, I seem to recall that other court cases have determined that they are not all covered, but only those which are actual confessions. Correct me if I’m wrong.

On the other side, this is an interesting legal tactic, i.e. holding the formators responsible. I wonder how far the various lawyers will take this. After all, didn’t the several treatment centers to which the perverts were sent clear many of them for return to ministry, only to have them abuse again and again? It seems this might open the door to lawsuits against St. Luke’s in Maryland and the Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico and others like them. Wouldn’t those trials and depositions be interesting? I think we’re not done with the purge yet.

Technorati Tags: Catholic | sex abuse | scandal | lawsuits |

Is there a double standard in liberal Massachusetts regarding sex offenders? Imagine that a priest had been convicted—not just sued and settled—of sexual offenses including possession of child porn, sexual assault of a 19-year-old male, showing porn to children, and 10 counts of providing alcohol to minors. Now imagine that the priest was found to have been allowed to volunteer in a parish ministry and, further, that everyone from the parishioners to the bishop knew of his history and didn’t think it was a big deal.

What do you think would be the public reaction? The major newspapers would go into paroxysms of apoplexy. Victims’ groups would be out picketing alongside Voice of the Faithful and the usual suspects. There would be denunciations of hypocrisy and threats by government officials to conduct special investigations by blue-ribbon commissions and grand juries. Basically what many dioceses have experienced in the past five years.

Yet when a gay pride group allows a sex offender with the same record to volunteer as its chief fundraiser, critics are told that since he’s only working at 18+ events, then it’s okay.

Berggren’s history is clearly no secret in the volunteer circles in which he runs.

“He’s not really secretive about it. A lot of people know,” says Keri Aulita, vice president of the Boston Pride board. “Their competitive paper could have broken it a long time ago.”

“It is a concern, but it is a concern everybody is aware of and everybody has addressed,” says Joblin Younger, who serves on the board of directors of the Friends of the Commission on GLBT Youth and is a former member of the Boston Pride Committee. “And it’s very seriously taken into consideration what situations Bill is allowed to be in.”

[…]

Bay Windows [one of Boston’s “gay” newspapers] co-publisher Sue O’Connell recalls an incident several years ago, in which Berggren was taking photos for In Newsweekly [another “gay” paper] at a Youth Pride event (Youth Pride is a separate event that occurs the month before Boston Pride). At the time, O’Connell approached the Youth Pride committee to alert them to the issue—and, by all accounts, Berggren has not been to a youth event since. But Bay Windows (In Newsweekly’s main competitor) never reported on the incident or on Berggren’s role as a Pride volunteer.

Again, can you imagine one of the two newspapers in town not issuing a public warning or failing to give coverage to the transgression? I can’t.

Yet here we have the very same case, but because it happens within the gay community there’s not a peep from any major newspaper (this story was in a Boston alternative weekly) or from any politicians or any advocacy group. The hypocrisy is astounding.

Technorati Tags: homosexuality | sex abuse | scandal |

You may have heard about an uproar in Italy over a BBC documentary to be aired on TV about sex abuse in the Church. This is the same documentary aired last year that claimed to have a smoking gun evidence of a Vatican-organized cover-up abuse.

Unfortunately for the BBC, this “smoking gun” is old news. The document came out in 2001, we wrote about it at Catholic World News in 2002 and it’s even mentioned on the Vatican web site.

It’s not much of a secret document if it’s right there on the web and everybody knows about it. The original document was originally published in 1962 and discussed the canonical crime of solicitation. I wrote several blog entries about it in 2003 when some American lawyers wanted to use it in lawsuits against the Church. The relevant entries are here, here, here, and here.

From the CWN story:

Crimen Sollicitationis covers canonical discipline for priests accused of the sexual misconduct— including, but not limited to, the sexual abuse of minors. In 2001, Pope John Paul II (bio - news) gave the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith the exclusive jurisdiction for handling these disciplinary matters. Because the document emphasizes the confidentiality of canonical trials, the BBC report suggested that the Vatican policy, and its enforcement by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, was an effort to conceal evidence of abuse. Avvenire, in its editorial attack on the program, pointed out the distinction between canonical and civil trials, and noted that the Vatican document did not require victims of abuse to remain silent. In fact paragraph 15 of the document “obliged anyone knowledgeable of sexual abuse committed in the confessional to tell authorities or they would be excommunicated.”

The whole point of this slanted media was originally to try to connect Pope Benedict to the cover up of sexual abuse by priests when he was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Now with the Church in the news in Italy over efforts by homosexual activists to push through a gay-pseudo-marriage bill opposed by the Church, the same error-filled, sensationalistic program is being used as a cudgel against the Church again.

Technorati Tags: Catholic | Pope | Italy | BBC | RAI | sex-abuse |