Posted on 04/10/2002 12:23:04 PM PDT by Mike Fieschko
Cardinal Law, the time is now long past for you to resign.
Now is the moment to consider fleeing.
A few years ago, a mob guy named Angelo ``Sonny'' Mercurio took the witness stand and said, ``Me, I advocate da lam.''
For you, Your Eminence, I advocate da lam.
It's time to do a Dixie. You got to be a midnight mover, as Wilson Pickett would say. Follow in the footsteps of Whitey Bulger, Paul Shanley and Father White - be missing.
The next time you need to be seen around here is on a milk carton. Don't wait for the post office wall. Better John Walsh should be looking for you than John Ashcroft.
It's getting close to TV movie time, Your Eminence. Too bad Charles Laughton is no longer with us - he would be perfect in the role of you, for so many reasons.
Maybe it's not too late for you to arrange to be ``recalled'' to the Vatican. Is there an extradition treaty with the U.S.? Surely you can continue to do God's work in Rome. Perhaps there's an opening in the Vatican gift shop - he also serves who reorders the postcards of Sistine Chapel, after all.
You must vanish, immediately if not sooner, because you cannot allow yourself to be deposed by the altar boys' attorneys. You already know this, because by my count you have now ducked the Geoghan deposition by Mitchell Garabedian at least five times, most recently just last week.
And now you have Eric MacLeish repeatedly mentioning how he plans to grill you. I don't think he likes you very much, Your Eminence.
Compared to MacLeish, Mitchell Garabedian is your pal.
Bernie, you're not stupid. You know what brought Bill Clinton down. It was lying under oath, in a sexual- harassment civil suit. It's still perjury, as we all found out, and in 1998 anyway, more than 100 people were in prison for perjury in civil cases.
Do you feel lucky, Your Eminence? Well, do you?
Why the archdiocese didn't bring in Arthur Andersen to shred the documents, we'll never know. But it's too late now.
After Monday, Jane Swift has a better chance of mounting a comeback than you do. Bad enough your mash notes to jailbird John Geoghan, but it's hard to explain how you penned these fawning words to the sodomite Shanley:
``Thank you in my name . . . for the close to 30 years you have been in the service of God and His people. That is an impressive record.''
What impressed you more about Father Shanley, his co-founding of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, or his advocacy of bestiality?
What you have to explain is why you seem to be connected to all of these pervert priests and their protectors. There was a lavender mob operating at the highest levels of the Catholic Church, and you apparently knew them all.
Bishop O'Connell, the pervert bishop in Palm Beach - you knew him in Missouri, visited his seminary. Bishop O'Connell succeeded a guy named Symons who molested five altar boys, who succeeded Bishop Daily, who was recruited to Florida out of . . . Lake Street.
Now Daily's in Brooklyn, which is crawling with perverts, and is next to Long Island, home of Bishop Murphy, another Boston boy. A grand jury is being empaneled in Rockville Centre. In Green Bay you have Bishop Banks, another alumnus of the Cardinal Law crew who enabled Shanley to continue what one of his victims so aptly called his ``30-year reign of terror.''
Then there's John McCormack, now the bishop of Manchester, N.H. He and Shanley were plotting to set up a ``safe house'' for clerical sodomites. And he was apparently passing messages back and forth between Shanley and Msgr. Ryan, of Garry Garland fame.
And it gets even worse. Now it turns out that Father Shanley got his job at the Leo House through Dr. Frank Pilecki, the gay president of Westfield State who settled out of court with two male students he molested. Pilecki was a good buddy of Father Bruce Ritter, another ``street priest'' who was molesting young boys before it became fashionable.
Cardinal Law, you can run but you can't hide. It's over. I advocate da lam.
Howie Carr's radio show can be heard every weekday afternoon on WRKO AM 680, WHYN AM 560, WGAN AM 560, WXTK 95.1 FM or online at howiecarr.org.
Host of Americas Most Wanted on Fox.
BRIAN MCGRORY
The cardinal must go
By Brian McGrory, 4/9/2002
Enough, cardinal, enough. Enough of the brazen disregard for the believers in your midst. Enough of the tens of thousands of dollars you're throwing at public relations companies. Enough of the self-centered hope that you can salvage your reputation before you ride off to retirement in Rome.
No longer are you part of the problem. No longer have you contributed to the problem. You are now, as one disgusting revelation after another tumbles out, the core of the problem. There is no criminal act committed by any pedophilic priest that's worse than your practice of repeatedly and knowingly putting children in harm's way.
And now there is no possibility of reform, no measure of organizational penance, no ability for the thousands of victims to reconcile the past until you are finally done and gone. So please, cardinal, for the sake of a city and the church that in many ways dominates it, pack up and get out of our town.
You should have done this two months ago. You should have done it after this paper made it stunningly clear for the world to see that you knowingly, insidiously transferred a predatory priest, John Geoghan, from one parish to another, endangering a new community of children.
It was obvious that you cared not for the flock as much as you cared for the shepherds, though your main concern, then and always, seems to be about yourself. Pass off the problem. Demand silence. Pay whatever it takes to lawyers and victims to keep the crimes out of the public eye.
Still, Geoghan was one priest, your treatment by no means excusable, but possibly aberrant. Since then, though, we're seeing a tawdry routine, with you at the front and center.
After Geoghan came word of the Rev. Joseph Birmingham, transferred from one place to another with full knowledge of his criminal ways. Then accusations broke of the Rev. Frederick Ryan molesting teenaged boys right in the chancery.
And most recently, yesterday's allegations - that you allowed a predatory priest to feed his habit of boys - were so graphic and emotional that reporters in the room were shedding tears. Do you have any idea what it takes to make a veteran reporter cry?
You knew the Rev. Paul Shanley was a criminal. He was there when that freak-show of a group, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, was founded. Yet you kept him in a Newton parish, then shipped him off to a California church with a letter of assurance and a heavy dose of relief, someone else's problem, no longer yours.
In a 1996 letter, you commended his ''impressive record.'' You said you were ''truly grateful.'' You wrote, ''For thirty years in assigned ministry you brought God's Word and His Love to His people and I know that that continues to be your goal despite some difficult limitations.''
Difficult limitations?
Now what? The problem in Boston isn't about selling off property to pay the victims. It's not yet about the church's failed call for celibacy and its dreadful treatment of women. For now, the core of the problem is you, and not until you've resigned or retired will this Catholic community make its first small steps toward recovery.
There are still priests out there who feed the hungry, who clothe the poor, who wash the sick, and who house the homeless. But even as they do God's work, they're relegated, for now, to a quiet world of unnecessary shame, tarnished by their association with a church led by someone as misguided as you.
You are the problem, cardinal. And for that reason, you will never be the solution. Every day you insist on hanging onto your job is another day of negative revelation, another day of heartbreak, another day of elusive reform.
Think of of someone other than yourself. Think of all the people who need a religion that is good, if not pure. And step aside in a Christian act toward a church you're no longer qualified to lead. Enough, cardinal. Enough.
Brian McGrory's can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.
This story ran on page B1 of the Boston Globe on 4/9/2002. © Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
Cardinal Law will resign; but I don't think it is enough.
This LAVENDAR MOB must be excised.
Father Cozzens of Notre Dame and Father McBrien say 30-50% of priests are Homosexual. People refuse to believe this.
ALL homosexual priests must be purged from the ranks. Not tomorrow, but yesterday. ALL of them!
Ireland on Sunday, Wed Apr 10 16:16:17 2002
Embattled Bishop Brendan Comiskey is facing growing demands that he be charged over the Fr Sean Fortune scandal.
About three months after their meeting with Dr Comiskey, the Colfers received a letter from him saying that he had come up with nothing to substantiate their allegations. Several other families wrote to the bishop but were not satisfied with the response.
Relatives of young men who committed suicide after being sexually abused by the disgraced curate allege the Wexford prelate sheltered the paedophile priest.
Now they want the controversial Bishop of Ferns to face the threat of a prison sentence, they told Ireland on Sunday. Dr Comiskey failed to stop Fortune from raping and molesting young boys in two Wexford villages in the 1980s and '90s, they say.
But yesterday the bishop refused to explain his actions when contacted by Ireland on Sunday.
Dr Comiskey has admitted knowing that there were a number of allegations of child abuse surrounding several priests in his diocese when he was first appointed in 1984.
But before now, that is the only statement he uttered on the shameful episode where, during two decades, one of his curates preyed on young boys and manipulated and bullied parishoners who resisted his domineering ways. Dr Comiskey has never explained why, despite desperate appeals by heartbroken parishoners, he was unable to halt Fortune's brutal regime.
Charged
Nor has he ever offered an acceptable apology to the community that was torn apart by the tyrannical curate who, in 1995, was charged with 66 counts of indecent sexual assault and buggery.Yesterday, Dr Comiskey again avoided the media - a tactic which has allowed him survive the dishonour of having presided over what is arguably one of the worst episodes of clerical abuse in the Irish church. He refused to come to the door of his impressive bishop's palace in Summerhill, overlooking Wexford town - just as he refused to talk to Sarah McDonald, the writer/producer of Suing the Pope, the explosive BBC Two documentary screened last week on the affair.
His spokesman, Fr John Carroll, told Ireland on Sunday that the bishop was home but declined to answer our questions. Fr Carroll then closed the door. It was not opened when we called again later.
It was daytime but all the curtains were drawn in the bishop's mansion, perhaps an attempt to keep at bay a world growing increasingly insistent that justice be served not only on perpetrators of child abuse but on those who were in authority at the time.
Last year, the French courts convicted the bishop of Bayeux-Lisieux for harbouring a paedophile priest. The news would have had disturbing implications for Dr Comiskey who fled his diocese in 1995 when Fortune was eventually arrested. It later emerged that he had gone to the US for an alcohol-dependence treatment programme.
Now relatives of sex abuse victims from Fethard-on-Sea, Co. Wexford, are demanding that the bishop is also put in the dock to answer questions.
Small farmer Michael Colfer, whose brother, Noel, committed suicide after being abused by Fr Fortune, declared that it is "proper order that Bishop Comiskey is charged".
He was speaking in an exclusive interview with Ireland on Sunday, the first time a member of the Colfer family has spoken publicly about Noel's death.
Mother-of-four Mrs Monica Fitzpatrick, whose son, Peter, shot himself after suffering horrific sexual molestation by Fortune, also believes that Bishop Comiskey should face charges.
"He must be brought to court. We can't afford to mount a civil case but the gardaí must charge Bishop Comiskey over that monster who killed our children. Every time there is a suicide around here, we wonder is it another victim of Fr Fortune."
Local people believe that by not contacting the gardaí, Bishop Comiskey allowed the paedophile cleric remain in the powerful position where he could prey on impressionable and defenceless young boys.
Pat Jackman, who was abused by Fortune, wants to see the bishop and the other senior Catholic clerics, take responsibility for Fortune's activities.
"I know of 25 victims from personal experience. So you are talking about hundreds of victims. Fr Fortune was an incredibly powerful and an incredibly evil man," he said.
Fortune, from Gorey, committed suicide in March 1999 in the first week of his trial. He cheated justice with a lethal cocktail of drugs and alcohol as he was facing 66 charges of sexual abuse stretching back to the early 1980s.
His victims from the quiet backwaters of Poulfur in Fethard-on-Sea and Belfast were denied their day in court.Their continued suffering and pain was recalled last Tuesday when the BBC's Correspondent programme reported details of Fortune's vicious regime.
BAFTA-winning journalist Sarah McDonald showed horrific pictures of young boys sexually assaulted by Fortune.
Blatantly
"Charges should be brought against Brendan Comiskey for harbouring a criminal. I would call for Bishop Comiskey to be investigated by the gardaí and be brought to court. He should face the prospect of jail as did the French bishop in Normandy who recently got a three-month suspended sentence for failing to report one of his priests who admitted to him that he was a paedophile. This is the way the civil authorities should go. Why is the Irish Government remaining silent on the matter when the country is crying out about it?" she asks.
"The Catholic Church's excuse, that they didn't know what was going on, is not acceptable."
Following McDonald's BAFTA-winning investigations into child sex abuse in Britain, three paedophiles were jailed. She now hopes Dr Comiskey will face the law so that clerical child sex abuse will finally be ended in Ireland.
Such a move would oblige the clergy in the future to act against known paedophile priests - but it will take more than that to rebuild the trust and dissolve the anger many Catholics feel towards the church over its handling of the litany of sex abuse scandals that have emerged in recent years.The delegation which reported Fortune to Dr Comiskey and his predecessor, Bishop Herlihy, came up against a wall of inaction. Frustrated by the lack of results, they then appealed to the Papal Nuncio. He said that the Holy See had been made aware of their concerns and was looking into it.
So loyal were these parishoners to their church 20 years ago that they never considered calling in the gardaí. Rather naively, they hoped the issue could be dealt with discreetly and that Fortune would be dispatched out of harm's way.
But over the years of ecclesiastical silence and inaction, their confidence that the church would intervene was shattered. In the end, one of Fortune's victims, Colm O'Gorman, who had been abused at the age of 14, alerted the gardaí and Fortune was arrested.
Last Thursday, Pope John Paul spoke for the first time against pervert priests and described child sex abuse as "the most grievous form of evil". He said he had been profoundly hurt by the scandals.But these words came too late for the six brothers and two sisters in the polite and soft-spoken Colfer family who live one mile outside Fethard.
Michael Colfer claims Bishop Comiskey fobbed off his family when they visited the prelate to complain about the suicide of their younger brother following his abuse by Fortune.
Noel Colfer dreamed since childhood of becoming a priest. As a teenager, he travelled regularly the 115 miles to Dublin to speak with friars about his deepening vocation.
At school, Noel was attentive and studious. It was obvious to everyone that he was a pious, clean- living soul, always ready to help those less well off.
But it was his joining of the local Night Watch group where local kids cycled at night around their neighbourhood's picture postcard lanes and village streets, keeping an eye on senior citizens, that brought him in contact with the deviant priest.
Fortune was a curate based in Poulfur, Fethard-on-Sea, from 1981 to '87. His behaviour was unpredictable and involved sexual abuse and placing curses on children. Complaints against him included bullying, showing teenagers unsuitable videos, doubts over the financial administration of FÁS schemes, cash being sought from parishioners for the administration of sacraments and Fortune asking for money for "healing" people.
Noel Colfer was 17 when he met Fr Fortune and within two years he had committed suicide. For 14 years afterwards, his loving family painfully pondered why he had taken his own life. Then the shocking truth of Fortune's sexual abuse of the innocent boy emerged.
"Noel went downhill after he met Fortune, he started to get depressed," explains Michael Colfer's wife, Antoinette. She accompanied Michael and his brother, Tom, to meet Bishop Comiskey last August when they complained that Fr Fortune's sexual abuse was the cause of Noel's suicide.
"Bishop Comiskey fobbed us off," says Antoinette. "It was a waste of time going in to him. We didn't get any good out of the bishop. Bishop Comiskey should be charged."
Michael recalls: "He said he would look into it and would send a letter to us but nothing was done about it. I think Bishop Comiskey was plamásing us.
"We said a lot of complaints had gone in to him and there was nothing done about it. He said the reports he was getting were that they were playing games. He said he didn't think the games were sexual abuse. I was surprised by that."
Other victims have told how Fortune ordered them to have a game - patting each other in the groin area. The priest would then rub the children up before forcing them to perform oral sex on him.
About three months after their meeting with Dr Comiskey, the Colfers received a letter from him saying that he had come up with nothing to substantiate their allegations. Several other families wrote to the bishop but were not satisfied with the response.
"Fr Fortune would say he was a healer and my father, Matthew, who only had the old age pension would give £20 or £30 to him because he said he would cure him of his cancer," said Michael.
"One day he called and my father said he had no money. Fr Fortune said: 'Show me your wallet anyway.' There was £10 in it which my father didn't know he had. Fr Fortune said 'it's a miracle' and put the £10 in his pocket.
"I think Bishop Comiskey should be charged if he knew about Fr Fortune's abuse but he is denying that, isn't he?"
From her seaside home outside Fethard, Mrs Fitzpatrick looks across at the cemetery where her son, Peter, is buried after he committed suicide following sexual abuse by Fortune's.
Another son, Martin, comforts her as she recalls Peter's death. But she also encourages other people who were abused to come forward in order to prevent more suicides in the area. "It's nothing to be ashamed of," she says.
This year, Mrs Fitzpatrick's grandchildren will be taken to another diocese to be confirmed. This is to avoid Bishop Comiskey "putting his hands on their heads", she says.
"There are hundreds of victims of Fr Fortune. He would bully children saying that if they said anything, he would bring the child's family to court and who would believe a child against a priest?"
Her son, Martin, called for a tribunal to look into "everything and everyone".
"Fr Fortune saw a boy he was abusing at a disco in the village dancing with a girl and kissing her. He stopped the disco in a rage and chased the boy around.
"In New Ross, he used an elderly woman's phone at night to access a sex line. And she didn't know until she got the massive bill.
"He would abuse a boy and then go say first Mass. He would return to his house and abuse the child again. Then he would force the child to go with him and sit in church while he said second Mass.
"It not just sex abuse at night but he would force youngster into doing oral sex on him in his car in broad daylight."
This week, Bishop Comiskey issued a statement through the Diocese of Ferns Communications Office in which he spoke out against paedophile clerics.
In the statement he admitted: "I know that in responding in the past to complaints of abuse, I have not always got it right. I have however endeavoured always to act justly and appropriately.
"I continue to maintain an open-door policy to survivors of child sexual abuse. Some have already found themselves able to accept this invitation, and healing and reconciliation - however modest in some cases - continue to be achieved. It is here that I think I can make the best contribution.
Abuse
"My foremost wish now is that survivors of child sexual abuse within this diocese would feel able to come forward to me confident of an appropriate and caring response.
"The sexual abuse of a child is deeply abhorrent to me as it is to any right-minded person. When the perpetrator of such evil is an ordained priest, the violation of a child, both psychologically and spiritually, is all the greater. I have publicly apologised already and do so again now to any person in the diocese of Ferns who has been sexually abused by a priest."
Why does it NOT surprise me that this happened in Massachusetts?? I'll just bet that this Cardinal treated the Kennedy family like Royalty and bent EVERY RULE for them.....Sickening.
Do you know for sure that Father Bruce Ritter was guilty of the charges. I don't know if I missed it but the last I heard there was only one boy,and his father said he was a sociopathic liar. As I remember Ritter went to Asia proclaiming his innocence. I certainly know he is always listed as an abuser but I would like some more data. Often a priest who is holy and successful is the perfect target for those who want to destroy the Church.I just don't have enough facts to take a position.Help,anyone!!!
I like your discription.
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