On the part of both the police and the priests, disgusting. God have mercy on you.
F**king cowards. Go straight to hell.
Thank you for the article. I read it. The writing is horrible. Newspapers probably cannot afford good writers. From the article:
“We should have been arresting these people. True. Proper punishments decrease vice.
No more special favors to certain groups of people.” True. Everyone is equal under the law.
“Things were not being done properly. That is the status of most places, like the Vatican, the Post Office, higher education, California public schools, and NBA basketball.
The pastor screamed at us, called me a liar, and threatened to have me and my father excommunicated from the Catholic Church.” Wow. That is what happens when criminals think they are above the law.
There is a systematic cover-up by senior church officials.” Of course. Sadly, the senior officials are doing the same crimes.
In other news Buffalo is 52º. Wow. Sounds like winter is still in Buffalo.
More than 100 priests ??
I know Buffalo is a big city, but still, that seems like a huge number of problem clergy.
In many municipalities, government CPS workers got (and sometimes still get) the same deal.
My aunt, a highly respected nurse-practitioner in our very working-class Catholic community from roughly the 50's to the late 80's, says the same was true of doctors and nurses. They were highly respected: that sex crimes could be perpetrate by them was almost literally unthinkable.
She dealt with STD's, and came to know a good deal about who was spreading them. But she herself was very circumspect about who she told, knowing it would be almost impossible for her to be believed, even with considerable evidence.
That mean Buffalo cops and politicians were complicit in sex crimes. I wouldn’t want to be a taxpayer living in Buffalo when that judgement comes down!
Good way not to find any child trafficking in that space...
Just sayin’.
It's actually hard to know if a different attitude by law enforcement would have turned up a lot more cases before the 1990s. It would depend on the number of homosexual men actually in the priesthood at a given time. Before the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council ("Vatican II," 1961-65), seminaries would simply reject a man if he didn't seem masculine. Like the military.
But that began to change at seminaries after Vatican II, plus the influence of the western "Sexual Revolution." That didn't go well. Nowadays, many seminaries and orders have gone back to the old model, screening out poofters through psych and behavior evaluations. Meanwhile, other seminaries in liberal dioceses are still lax because they are afraid of the highly political "lavender mafia." They will reap the rewards of cowardice.
My disgust here is off the charts and my real response not appropriate for the Forum.
However, as a father what I truly cannot understand is the number of parents who apparently gave up. To be quite honest I would take a bullet for my kid, and if somebody had molested her and the law wouldn’t respond I would cripple them and gladly go to jail for it. I do not understand the parents who accept a corrupt legal system after things like this have been done to their children.
It really came home to me back with the Monica Lewinsky scandal that there are a lot of parents who are so despicable that they are not willing to defend their children from evil.
Had anyone done this to my child, priest or anyone else, and the legal system refused to respond, I would have taken a baseball bat and put them in a wheelchair for the rest of their lives. And gone to jail for it. Ditto for the corrupt church hierarchy that protected them. So many knees to cap and not enough time.
And no, they deserve no mercy on their souls.
What Would Jesus Do? Not what was done, for sure.
It would have been easy for me and anyone else not in awe of the Catholic hierarchy to say it back when this policy was implemented. Enablers like this perpetuate evil.
The Archdiocese of New Orleans paid $20M a few years ago to keep cases out of court. Like a fart in the wind. Gone.
Should have been easy at the time. You swore an oath to uphold the law, not give favors to one group or another.
Those who are credibly accused and now dead should have [PEDOPHILE] engraved their tombstones.
Those who are credibly accused and now dead should have [PEDOPHILE] engraved their tombstones.
Shameful.