Sorry - the victims need to contact the local district attorney. The chancery is the LAST place victims or their families should contact.
Live! Now on RadioFR!
6pm/9pm - TULL's TAWKIN: Special guest, Ralph Sarchie, an eighteen-year NYPD veteran, works out of the 46th Precinct in New York's South Bronx. But it is his other job that he calls "the Work" that I find interestering. Ralph, under the direction of the Catholic Church, investigates cases of demonic possession.
7pm/10pm - INS WHISTLEBLOWER RICK RAMIREZ GUEST ON SPECIAL EDITION "BANANA REPUBLICAN RADIO HOUR"
Click HERE to listen LIVE! while you FReep!
When RCF first came out I fully supported the approach. The lay faithful gathering evidence on bad bishops and priests, and using it to remove the wolves. That is still a good idea, but the hatred and vitriol here show that RCF is not the group to do it. I can't support a man who acts like that. Challenge Cardinal George yes, call him names? Why?
patent
A GROUP OF PROMINENT Chicago priests has requested a meeting with Archbishop Francis George, telling the Roman Catholic leader that criticisms he has made during parish visits in his first few months on the job "left damage in your wake.''
George, according to their report, has been tagged by some with the unfortunate nickname "Francis the Corrector.'' The sobriquet refers to the archbishop's reported disapproval of some practices he has encountered, from the order in which lay ministers received communion at one parish to the absence of kneelers in a seminary chapel....
In addition to the communion practice and kneelers, specific concerns listed in the report include George's intervention in the debate in Oak Park over gay rights, his insistence that priests wear gray vestments at funerals and comments he supposedly made regarding foreign priests -- comments the archdiocese has since asserted were misreported....
"We will resist being treated as branch managers for some huge international corporation who simply take orders from headquarters, be that at the Vatican or at the Pastoral Center (which serves as archdiocesan headquarters),'' the report asserts.
Bet he amused himself with that one.
Comment by George stirs anger
April 26, 2002
BY ART GOLAB STAFF REPORTER
At the historic Vatican meetings earlier this week, Cardinal Francis George emerged as a spokesman for the American cardinals and bishops discussing the crisis of sexual abuse of minors by priests.
But one of his comments has a local feminist group and a sexual abuse survivors group seeing red.
While talking to reporters, George drew a distinction between serial pedophiles, such as defrocked Boston priest John Geoghan, and a priest who has sex with an underage girl.
''There is a difference between a moral monster like Geoghan, who preys upon little children and does so in a serial fashion, and to someone who, perhaps under the influence of alcohol, engages in an action with a 17- or 16-year-old young woman who returns his affection,'' George said Tuesday.
''That is still a crime in every instance, and so the civil law doesn't distinguish. In terms of the culpability and in terms of the possibility to reform one's life, they are two very different sets of circumstances.''
That prompted a call for his resignation from Catherine Caporusso Hartman, vice president of the Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Women.
"He's saying that there's a difference between sexual abuse of a young child and a priest getting a little drunk and having sex with a 16- or 17-year-old girl," Hartman said. "He's trying to minimize things when he should be showing that he takes all of this seriously. Now he's trying to make a subset of sexual abuse not as serious as another."
Hartman acknowledged she hadn't heard the second part of George's comment--where he noted that both acts are still a crime.
"I didn't get that part of the statement," she said. "But he still doesn't seem to understand the reason why there are stiffer penalties [for statutory rape] in the case of a person in authority like a priest."
On Thursday, George said he thought he made it plain that both types of behavior are bad.
"I can understand why they're upset with me. If I really did think that it didn't matter about abusing young women, I should resign. I don't think I said that, I know I didn't mean it,'' he told NBC-Channel 5 in a telephone interview from Philadelphia.
George told Channel 5 he'd like to meet with NOW and his other critics. He will be in Philadelphia with the other American cardinals until Saturday. Before leaving for the Vatican last week, George told Chicago reporters that while a pedophile cannot be reformed and should not be allowed to minister again, whether to forever bar a priest who had sex with a teenage girl is ''a somewhat open question.''
His comments at the Vatican also drew fire from the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests.
''It's ludicrous to think that a teenager has the freedom to make a choice,'' said Barbara Blaine, the group's Chicago-based president and founder, who was herself abused by a priest.
Contributing: AP
''There is a difference between a moral monster like Geoghan, who preys upon little children and does so in a serial fashion, and to someone who, perhaps under the influence of alcohol, engages in an action with a 17- or 16-year-old young woman who returns his affection,'' George said Tuesday.
Didn't Jesus teach that ALL sin is equally deadly? Isn't sex of any type outside of the bounds of Marrige a sin?
Tell me about it. Guess where I am.
If I could, I would move to the Diocese of Rockford, which is only a few miles away. God bless Archbishop Doran!
