Posted on 08/28/2018 7:03:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
PITTSBURGH -- Last Sunday, a city parish on the top of a steep hill overlooking the neighborhood aptly named Observatory Hill waited for her faithful to arrive for Sunday Mass, as it has every Sunday for over 102 years.
It was 9:00 a.m., just a handful of days after a report was released by the Pennsylvania state grand jury on alleged sexual abuse in 54 of the state's 67 counties, a report that has rocked this tight-knit community.
Some came to Mass. Some did not. Those who did had difficulty holding back tears.
The somber music played by the organist reflected the silent despair in the pews.
The parish had been hit hard in the 884-page report. The report identified over 1,000 children who became victims of more than 300 abusive priests in parishes large and small across the state.
This compounded the losses the parish has suffered as the neighborhood's population has become more secular and transient -- a big change from the working-class Catholic population who walked to Mass there in the 1960s and 1970s.
That's when I attended Nativity of Our Lord, over on Pittsburgh's North Side. I adored father John Maloney, a young priest who came to our church when I was 5 years old, and going to church at 5 meant different things than it does to an adult. For me it was the honor of wearing a lace covering my head the way the grown-up women did. (Before Vatican II, it was mandatory for women.)
But it was also the mysterious rhythms of the Latin Mass that seemed to be telling sacred secrets. Mass meant being with my parents, sometimes my entire extended family of aunts and uncles and grandparents -- all warm, comfortable, safe feelings that helped draw me into what faith would mean for me as an adult.
As I entered first grade, father Maloney was the parochial vicar (vice pastor). He said Mass every Tuesday for the entire student body of a parish that was at its peak, absorbing the blue-collar baby-boom children in the 1960s.
Before school and during recess, we would play on the asphalt playground that was attached to the parish school. It was sloped at an odd angle and littered with loose rocks, but we didn't ever seem to notice.
Sometimes, if we were lucky, father Maloney, who was just 22 years old, would come out and watch us play, as we jumped rope, picked teams for dodgeball or played a vigorous game of tag.
We were taught to respect and revere his station. It wasn't hard; he was young, handsome and charismatic. When he talked about the Scripture or Jesus, he made you feel as though he knew Jesus personally and he was simply sharing the stories that his close friend wanted you to know.
It was he who administered my first two sacraments outside of my baptism: He heard my first confession (I do not remember what sins I committed, but I do remember they did not require me to be sent to the principal's office) and did my first Holy Communion, which is a monumental moment for a young Catholic child.
When father Maloney was transferred to another parish when I was 11, I was sad.
When father Maloney's name appeared on the list of deviant offenders last week, I was devastated.
How could someone who had our complete trust abuse it in such a heinous way? How could he have robbed children of their childhood?
The report named 99 priests in the Diocese of Pittsburgh. Three of them served in my parish when I or one of my siblings attended the school: father Maloney, father Ray Rhoden and father James Somma.
How can we trust the bishops that allowed this to happen?
Simply, we cannot. All of those responsible must be held accountable.
The actions of those priests and those in charge cannot take our faith away, but they have made it impossible for me to trust this church.
I've always held a deep fondness for that asphalt playground that strained to hold my boundless energy, along with that of hundreds of other children. For eight years, it was a place of carefree joy, where the only thing I dreaded when I stepped out of the school and onto the grounds was whether I would be picked last for dodgeball.
Now I cannot erase from my mind the knowledge that some children were deeply hurting on that playground. Some children were holding in a secret so dark and so humiliating that their souls burned with the shame and the fear they felt every day.
And I cannot forgive.
I have stood by my church in past crisis, thinking surely it will get it right somehow. This time, that feels impossible.
I will stand by my faith -- a faith that has guided and shaped me at my core and is difficult to square with the corrupt institution that allowed sick men to steal my classmates' lives and then facilitated them to do the same elsewhere.
The only thing that is uncertain now is how I will find forgiveness.
Every time I search in my mind's eye and scan the faces of my classmates on that playground, looking for signs of who needed help, I find it difficult to imagine that forgiveness coming anytime soon.
Western Culture is breaking down. In the short run it benefits corrupt ‘elites’... in the long run it dooms us all.
Churches have thrown away their their place in the human heart.
So have many of the institutions we once revered - - from our political institutions to our faith in education to our trust in our legal systems.
It’s not just the Catholic Church, or Christian Churches in general - you’re right about that Jay. The signpost have been washed away... cultural signpost - all being washed away.
Claim: Priest’s molestation’bent’ me into homosexual
Posted By -NO AUTHOR- On 10/13/2005 @ 1:00 am InFront Page | Comments Disabled
J. David Enright IV (photo: New York Post)
A wealthy Manhattan socialite is planning a $5 million lawsuit against the Catholic Church, claiming his being molested by a priest at age 7 turned him into a homosexual.
J. David Enright IV, now 51, alleges he was molested as a boy at Camp Tekawitha on Lake Luzerne in upstate New York by by Father Joseph Romano, a seminarian counselor at the camp run by the Diocese of Albany.
“I believe that my life would be very different now,” Enright told the New York Post. “I’d probably be married, living in Greenwich, with four children in boarding school. Romano bent my life.”
Enright says Romano, who was 21 in 1961, took him behind a cabin after dinner and evening prayers to molest him. He says the sexual contact occurred up to seven more times, lasting into the following summer.
He’d “explain to me that this was a rite of passage,” Enright told the paper, noting he recalls the “devastating” abuse every day of his life.
Enright, a descendant of Albany’s aristocratic Van Rensselaer and de la Grange families, made millions in 1982 as an advertising executive for the Broadway production of “42nd Street.”
“I had a completely straight life in business, socially on Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue,” he said, adding he did date women in the 1980s. “Then there was the other world, which was slinking around in Greenwich Village gay bars, finding mates.”
In addition to Romano, Bishop Howard Hubbard and the Albany Diocese have been named as as defendants in the planned suit.
For years, Enright was under the impression he might have been the sole molestation victim of Romano, but he was angered last month when he learned two other children are possible abuse victims of the 65-year-old retired priest who now lives in Florida, denying the allegations.
Some 20 priests have been removed from ministering in the Albany diocese since 1950 for allegedly abusing minors, and Romano is among four clerics now challenging his ouster through a secretive tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church.
The trials have no face-to-face confrontations between priests and their accusers, and are often conducted with paper submissions.
Rev. Tom Reese, former editor of the Jesuit magazine America, says the sex-abuse scandal involving hundreds of priests across the U.S. is forcing forced church officials to rethink how accused priests are dealt with.
“Cases are solved quickly on ‘Law and Order,’ where you have police, lawyers and judges,” Reese told the Albany Times Union. “We don’t have those things in the Catholic Church. And then the American justice system washed its hands and said, ‘We aren’t doing anything.’ So, with no experience, the church had to step in and build a system from scratch.”
“You can either line (priests) up and shoot them, or try to establish a system that’s just,” Reese said. “It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Of all the articles I have about the horrible sexual abuse scandals in my church this is the most heartbreaking.
May God have mercy on these monsters because I have a hard time being merciful myself.
IMO if you are unwilling to walk away when others cross your uncrossable lines, then you really have no principles.
God is no respecter of persons or institutions. He destroyed the Jewish priestly system, the temple and the sacrificial system just as he said he would...……………………… Why would the Catholic Church be exempt?
But, what I’m curious about, is how prevalent is it? 1%? 10%? 50%?
Now having said that, there is a remnant in the Catholic Church that God will use for his purposes but they will suffer the sins of others as we all do at times.
Our former pastor, Father David, told one of his victims that 80% of all priests were homosexual. He did not say what percentage were pedophilic.
Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church
Thanks for the book recommendation. I appreciate it. Having spend nearly 7 years in minor seminary beginning in the mid '70's, I've seen first-hand the way some of this works. Evil. Heartbreaking. Discouraging. God's Justice will prevail. His Mercy is unfathomable toward those who love and trust in Him.
It's not just your opinion. Bella Dodd, former communist party member, wrote about it and testified about it to Congress. This all started not long after the Soviet revolution a century ago—so it's very entrenched.
Communists Secretly Infiltrated Roman Catholic Church Seminaries
“always on vacation Laura Ingraham”
“that theatre fop Arroyo”
Good stuff
Morphing, he was not Spiritually inclined and was not fit to be a Cardinal, any more than those that moved priests and nuns around that did make it to Cardinal and perhaps Pope as well. It was not a ‘waste’ for him; he choose to do evil upon those under his stewardship in vile manner and would have allowed others to continue to commit vile acts.
I think it does.
Forget for the moment that we are talking about the Church. Did I keep an eye (not a very close one, but an eye) out to see if there was anything hinky about my boy's middle-school sports coaches? I wasn't real worried, but I was aware of the possibility of pedophilic interest. I would have been far more careful of scouting overnights (which they didn't do). It's a question of access, authority, and probability of misbehavior.
The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, which is the orthodox, apostolic branch of Lutheranism. Luther was not trying to make "progress" nor trying to start a new religion; he was trying to strip away corruption and return the Catholic Church to holiness and the apostolic faith as taught to the disciples by Jesus. The LCMS regards the Word of God as contained in the Bible as the source of inerrant authority, not popes or priests.
Bookmark
I'm not an advocate of bringing it back wholesale, as inevitably happens when a society devolves into lawlessness, but I think would be criminals should be fearful of basic societal norms.
An old Italian friend of mine told me that even the New York mafia had standards in the 1950s and early 1960s. For example, it was well know if you peddled hard drugs, especially to youth, you might expect to be found swinging from a lamp post on some dark and stormy night.
Are you beginning to understand why our ancestors would burn them at the stake or hang them high? At the beginning of this short century, it was still “just let us do our thing between consenting adults in private.” Now, it is “celebrate Sodomy with us or we will destroy you financially.” Just 18 years.
Thank you, but the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod teaches in contradiction to some things I believe.
To this day I don’t know what happened in that house.
I’m guessing some promises were made by both parties.
Yes, funny how there was honor among thieves.
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