The Scandal

VOTF’s hubris and infighting

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 |

Voice of the Faithful’s financial crisis

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 |

Court says victims can sue formators

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 |

Covering up for a sex offender

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 |

Italy TV to air already discredited anti-Church BBC story

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 |

Spokane parishes asked to pay for settlements

How much worse can it get? The Diocese of Spokane is asking parishes to raise $10 million toward legal settlements for clergy sex-abuse. That’s got to be a tough sell.

The diocese declared bankruptcy because of the lawsuits and now must pay $48 million to victims in 177 claims of abuse. Now $10 million falls on the the 95,000 parishioners and 82 parishes. That’s $105 per person or $121,951 per parish on average. That’s over and above what the diocese itself has to raise. The diocese needs to come up with $6 million; independent Catholic agencies like Catholic Charities and children’s homes need to give another $6.5 million. Insurance will cover the rest.

Think of all the corporal works of mercy that could be accomplished with that money, the children that could be served, the poor that could be helped. Think of all the capital improvements that could be made in parishes, the ministries that won’t happen.

Some parishioners are angry at Skylstad for taking the diocese into bankruptcy, while others balk at paying bankruptcy lawyer fees. Still others question why they should pay for priests who molested children decades ago in other parishes, Borchardt said. The pastor has evoked the parable of the good Samaritan, who stopped to help a man who had been beaten and robbed as others looked the other way.

If the Devil were looking for a way to seriously undermine the work of the Church in the world, he couldn’t have found a better way. In one fell swoop, he undermines the confidence in the priesthood and bishops and then strips parishes and charitable agencies of badly needed funds to do the good work of worshipping the Lord, forming the people in faith, and carrying out the corporal works of mercy.

It truly is the butcher’s bill.

Technorati Tags: Catholic | Spokane | sex-abuse | lawsuits | settlements |

Bishop Vasa writes his own “safe environment” program

Bishop Robert Vasa of the Diocese of Baker, Oregon, has gone on record as a critic of the current “safe environment” programs being offered by dioceses in response to the Scandal, such as “Talking about Touching” and “Good Touch, Bad Touch” and others. Rather than curse the darkness, the good bishop has decided to light a proverbial candle as described in his latest email sent out to various folks.

In brief, he is working with the Catholic Medical Association and others to craft a new program to address the shortcomings of what is available now, with the most basic goal of endeavoring to train the parents to teach their own kids, which is what the Church says we’re supposed to do in the first place.

It has been a while since I corresponded with you regarding the Safe Environment Programs which are being used throughout the Dioceses of the US. I write to give you an update, offer some hope and ask a favor.

UPDATE: In the Fall of 2006 the Catholic Medical Association issued a Report titled: To Protect and to Prevent: The Sexual Abuse of Children and its Prevention. This Report is available for purchase on the CMA website: Cathmed.org. One of the recommendations of the Report was: “We recommend that the energy and resources now directed to child and adolescent empowerment programs be refocused on the development of programs to assist parents in being the primary educators and protectors of their children.” As you can imagine this recommendation has not been accepted or acted upon by the producers of other Child Protection strategies.

HOPE: It does not appear that others will engage in the recommended work. Thus, I have been working with a small group of dedicated Healthcare Professionals and Priests to fulfill this recommendation. We have studied the issues more thoroughly and have been engaged in formulating the script and format for a 6 hour video series focusing on strengthening and reinforcing good parenting as a primary way to assure the safety of children. The proposed title of our effort might be something like: Strong Families: Safer Children. While it may be that our program will not be adopted by Bishops as the only mechanism for fulfilling the requirements of Article 12 of the Charter for the Protection of Children it is our hope that at least some Bishops will adopt this program as well as many priests in a variety of Parishes and that the families therein will be able to benefit from it.

The letter continued

Technorati Tags: Catholic | bishop | Talking about Touching | safe environment | pedophile | sex abuse |

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News flash: Not all abuse is by priests

The New York Times has just discovered that not all sex abuse in the Church is caused by priests.

Although hundreds of instances of sexual abuse by Catholic priests have come to light in the past several years, resulting in millions of dollars in lawsuit settlements and judgments, the problem is not limited to church clergy members.

“People don’t want to deal with the reality that it’s not just priests that abuse,” said Laura A. Ahearn, executive director of Parents for Megan’s Law, a national group that fights abuse. “Here on Long Island we’ve had a youth minister, a church choir director and even a church soup kitchen volunteer.”

Across the country, experts say, complaints of sexual abuse have been lodged against a variety of church employees and volunteers, including camp counselors, seminarians, parochial school teachers, day care and health care workers and catechism instructors.

There are also instances of nuns being accused of sexual abuse.

Again, none of this is new so, what is the point of the newspaper’s story? (On a related note: if people are surprised that it’s not just priests then who’s fault is that? Perhaps the sensationalist media who made it seem like all priests were potential pedophiles and that celibacy was responsible for repressed sexuality bursting forth in inappropriate ways.)

It sounds like to me that it’s an effort by professional victims’ advocates and plaintiffs’ lawyers are looking for ways to extend the horror we’ve been experiencing over the past five years.

There are no reliable statistics on the extent of the problem. In 2003, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops hired the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to survey the number of sexual abuse complaints but limited the scope to complaints against priests and deacons. That study, which included every diocese in the United States, found 10,667 people had lodged complaints against 4,392 priests from 1950 to 2002, although critics said many victims never filed complaints, and many complaints were not recorded by the church.

“There’s a paucity of hard data on this,” said David G. Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, known as Snap. “It’s a huge, gaping hole, and it’s troublesome. We have minimized the horror.”

Since priests make up a minority of a church’s staff, Mr. Clohessy said, “it’s at least plausible that as many or more nonordained people are abusers as there are priest abusers.”

In the absence of data he’s making a baseless assertion and because he wants to believe it to be so, then it will become truth for him in short order. Perhaps one reason such data for the nonordained has not been compiled is because of the difficulty in compiling it. Priests were reassigned by bishops and paper trails exist. But youth ministers would be fired. No paper trail within the bureaucracy. And then how do you characterize abuse by a church worker who abuses someone when they’re not at work?

It’s just more mission creep. While the clergy sex-abuse scandal is perceived to be winding down, in the best case, people who’ve made it a lifelong mission to either shed light on abuse, or in the worst case, people looking to make yet more quick bucks off the Church, have begun to shift their sights to what they see as untested ground.

Technorati Tags: Catholic | priest | sex-abuse | lawsuits |

Manchester diocese falls short, says atty gen’l

A few years ago the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, settled a criminal investigation by the state attorney general’s office by agreeing to a series of requirements, an unprecedented settlement. At the time, many observers wondered whether this agreement had an expiration date, or would such oversight go on forever, and whether Bishop John McCormack was giving up too much of the Church’s autonomy. But considering what he and his predecessors were alleged to have done, maybe he didn’t have a choice.

Now the attorney general says the diocese is not living up to its side of the agreement. An audit found that the diocese was not meeting “abuse-prevention guidelines” approved by the courts.

The audit noted there are “critical gaps” in programs to protect children from sexual abuse and said church leaders have been reticent in complying. The 117-parish diocese relies too heavily on self-reporting and self-policing, the audit said. Auditors criticized the “tone at the top,” particularly in regard to the Rev. Edward Arsenault, who heads efforts to prevent and report sexual abuse.

“In conducting this year’s audit, KPMG encountered resistance from certain corners of the diocese, most notable from … Father Edward Arsenault,” Attorney General Kelly Ayotte said. “Since Father Arsenault is the face of the program to many of the employees and volunteers within the diocese, his attitude to the program is very important in terms of the reflection of the diocese’s overall commitment to the process.”

The details of the “critical gaps” are not given, so I’m left wondering whether Catholics might find the attorney general’s idea of an adequate program to be moral. Is it just the reporting and oversight that’s the problem or programs of instruction?

Another good question, which arose when the agreement was signed, is that since the attorney general’s overall mission is different from the Catholic Church’s whether he might require the diocese to increase its sex-abuse prevention programs at the expense of, say, religious education.

It bears watching because this as a test case concerning the separation of Church and state and criminal investigation of the Scandal.

Technorati Tags: Catholic | bishop | Manchester | New Hampshire | sex abuse | clergy |

VOTF’s last gasps

Voice of the Faithful held its national meeting in Boston last week, specifically at its birthplace at Our Lady Help of Christians parish in Newton.

Reading the summary of the meeting I come away with the renewed conviction that this dissident group is dead and all we’re waiting for is the twitching to end.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of reading between the lines to find that (a) it sources of funding are drying up and (b) membership is declining.

On the fundraising, they try to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by noting that the number of individual donors if up while the amount of donations is down, leaving them with a $100,000 deficit in the next fiscal year. What that means is that the organization was relying on large donations from a few individuals, people motivated to ensure that VOTF was around to promote its heterodox vision. It doesn’t mean much to say that the number of individual donors has increased when there weren’t many to begin with.

And while they don’t come out and say that membership is declining, you have to understand that since VOTF counts as a member anyone who has ever attended a meeting or signed up for a mailing list, that number is deceptive. What they do say is that fewer and fewer people are bothering to participate in their activities.

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

Frankly the rest of the summary makes for dry reading. It reads like the transcript of a board meeting for a Fortune 500 (a badly declining Fortune 500), and not an evangelical apostolate of the Catholic Church.

Surest sign of a group in collapse

Technorati Tags: Catholic | Voice of the Faithful | dissent | doctrine |

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Slash-and-burn mentality squanders moral capital

The latest issue of Commonweal includes an article by Mark A. Sargent entitled “Vengeance Time: When Abuse Victims Squander Their Moral Authority.”

SNAP has taken it upon itself to conduct a campaign some might call vigilante harassment.

He examines the actions of groups like Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) who treat every allegation of sex abuse lodged against a priest as a mandate to pursue him wherever he goes and to never give him a moment’s peace. In this examination we encounter the gray area between civil law and Church discipline: How are we to deal with priests who are deemed to have “credible or substantial complaints of sexual abuse of minors” yet can’t or won’t be prosecuted by the legal authorities for criminal acts because of lack of evidence or expiration of the statute of limitations.

In November of last year, the Diocese of Wilmington, Delaware, released the names of twenty former priests about whom the diocese found “credible or substantial complaints of sexual abuse of minors.” Most of the twenty are dead. Edward M. Dudzinski, however, was still living-although he had not served as a priest since the 1980s-and resided in Herndon, Virginia.

When local members of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) discovered Dudzinski’s location, they went door-to-door in his neighborhood distributing a file of documents with the title “Community Notification: Protect your children from a credibly accused serial sex offender,” which they believed established Dudzinski’s identity as a sex offender. Dudzinski, however, has never been convicted of, or even charged with, a sexual-abuse crime.

Even in cases where the priest was never charged, even though the case fell within the statute of limitations and several law enforcement agencies investigated and did not file charges, SNAP has taken it upon itself to conduct a campaign against the priest, a campaign which some might call vigilante harassment.

Aiming at the bishops; hitting secondary targets

Technorati Tags: Catholic | bishops | sex-abuse | clergy | lawsuits | bankruptcy |

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San Diego legal shenanigans

A federal bankruptcy judge this week threatened attorneys for the Diocese of San Diego with contempt of court charges for attempting to hide the diocese’s assets during settlement negotiations with sex-abuse victims, but instead ordered an external audit of the diocese’s finances and property.

The diocese had filed for federal bankruptcy protection in February, the third Catholic diocese to do so in the US, just as civil trials on sex-abuse claims were to begin.

But on March 29, the judge called the attorneys on the carpet in her office when she found a memo sent to pastors that looked to her like they were trying to hide diocesan assets.

Adler cited a March 29 letter sent by a diocese parish organization to pastors urging them to get new taxpayer identification numbers and transfer funds to new accounts. The threat Monday came six weeks after the diocese sought bankruptcy protection amid lawsuits by more than 140 people who accuse priests of sexual abuse.

The judge said any post-bankruptcy transfers between the diocese and parishes outside of normal cash operations violate her ruling against shifting the diocese’s assets while the bankruptcy case is pending. She said any transfers require court approval.

In a sternly worded order, Adler said attorneys Susan Boswell, Jeffry Davis and Victor Vilaplana appear to have ”conspired with parishes” to create new bank accounts separate from the diocese.

Boswell wrote in court documents Tuesday that no intentional misrepresentations or misstatements had been made. She said the diocese has ”no access or control” over money in more than 770 bank accounts opened by parishes and parochial schools under the diocese’s taxpayer identification number.

Meanwhile one name remains mysteriously absent from this story and we’re left wondering who’s leading the Diocese of San Diego: the lawyers or Bishop Robert Brom?

Technorati Tags: Catholic | Bishop | San Diego | lawsuits | sex abuse | clergy | priest |

Scandal abuse claims drop

Speaking of the Scandal, the USCCB reports that the number of new claims for clergy sex-abuse have dropped for the second year in a row: 714 cases, down from 783 in 2005 and 1,092 in 2004. This isn’t exactly surprising since there was a lot of pent-up complaints in 2002 when the story first broke. It would take some time for those thousands of cases that took place over decades to be brought forth.

The report also says that the costs related to abuse cases has dropped by about 15 percent over the previous year, but I think that’s somewhat deceptive since the Los Angeles cases are being dragged out and when they are finally done—whether through settlement or litigation—it’s going to make all others pale by comparison.

Of course, the increasingly marginalized Voice of the Faithful has to weigh in:

John Moynihan, a spokesman for Voice of the Faithful, a lay reform group seeking more transparency from Catholic leaders, said he considers the 714 figure “huge” considering how long the crisis has dragged on. More than 13,000 molestation claims have been filed against clergy since 1950. Bishops say abuse-related costs have exceeded $1.5 billion since then.

Never enough

Technorati Tags: Catholic | bishops | clergy | sex abuse | priest | Voice of the Faithful | SNAP |

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A failure of clerical ascetical discipline

Over the past five years, a lot of “experts” have proposed causes for the Scandal of clergy sex-abuse that have —to use the cliche—rocked the Church. Predictably the mainstream media have seized on the causes most prejudicial to traditional Catholic morality: celibacy is unnatural, clergy are power-mongers, religion itself is unnatural.

Some in the Church—including some bishops— have taken the opposite tack, insisting that the Scandal is a media creation and that there’s nothing to all the hype.

Many orthodox conservatives—quite rightly, I think—have pointed to a laxity of moral discipline, the problem of gay priests, and a greater concern among some with preserving a facade of institutional perfection over dealing with sin.

Along those lines, the Lineacre Institute has published a new book called “After Asceticism: Sex, Prayer and Deviant Priests” that identifies the root cause as a failure of clerical discipline, not just in the past thirty years, but reaching back decades further.

Catholic World News has published the Introduction to the book on its site, giving us a taste of what the Institute, an arm of the Catholic Medical Association, has concluded. This is a report that should have received much more attention than it has.

In what follows, we will show that the crisis is only secondarily related to the personality disorders of individual priests and to the faulty personnel management by the chanceries. More importantly, we will demonstrate that the discipline of celibacy is most definitely not a cause of the sexual abuse crisis. The truth is that the deficiencies that caused the scandal were not merely rooted in a few disturbed individuals, but rather, were common deficiencies and aberrations in the religious purpose and intellectual formation of priests dating back to at least the 1950s. The following chapters contain an in-depth analysis of the sexual problems that go well beyond pedophilia or pederasty. What is more important, this book outlines key elements in the solution to the problem.

If you’re a CWN subscriber, read the whole intro and then buy the book. If you’re not a CWN subscriber … you should be. They offer a few trial subscription, so sign up for it.

Technorati Tags: Catholic | clergy | sex abuse | scandal | celibacy | ascetic | discipline |

Still lacking accountability

I’m not sure what the “Media Monitors Network” is but based on the articles they have posted on their web site, they appear to be left-wing nutroots 9/11-conspiracy pro-Islamic-terrorist anti-American moonbats. Which makes it doubly ironic that I find myself agreeing with an article that calls for the resignation and prosecution of bishops who facilitated the Scandal and participated in cover-ups.

Comparing the Scandal to the Enron disaster, Nicholas Vakkur says that the only way to restore the trust of the faithful is to ensure that the guilty are punished. He points out, quite accurately, that very few bishops who were complicit in shuffling about predatory priests and lied about it have suffered the loss of their episcopal sees and none have been prosecuted. You certainly haven’t heard their brother bishops calling them out in public. (According to a Dallas Morning News survey in 2002, while only a single-digit percentage of priests committed sexual-abuse, about two-thirds of then-serving bishops had enabled it in one way or another. You might dispute exact percentages or individual bishops, but I don’t think you can dispute the disparate ratios.)

One of the biggest disappointments in the whole Scandal has been the inability or lack of desire by bishops—even those we consider to be “good”, by which we mean orthodox and holy and personally admirable—to hold their brother bishops publicly accountable, even to call for them to resign.

The proximate cause for Vakkur’s article is the most recent signs that Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles may be “shading” the truth, depending on who he’s talking to at the moment.

That Vakkur’s analysis is flawed because of its overly secular approach to the Church does not mitigate the truth of his conclusion: It will be difficult to regain the trust of many pew-sitting Catholics until we’ve done more than institute new policies in the Church. We need accountability as well.

That even the purveyors of a tin-foil-hat conspiracy-minded web site that has no love for the Catholic Church can see it is evidence of the need.

Technorati Tags: Catholic | bishops | scandal | sex abuse | clergy | priest | accountability |