Posted on 03/18/2006 5:38:42 AM PST by NYer
A former vice chancellor of the Boston Archdiocese and six other priests accused of molesting children have been defrocked by the Vatican, church officials announced Friday.
In a statement, Boston Archbishop Sean O'Malley expressed his "deepest sorrow for the grievous harm" done by Monsignor Frederick Ryan and the other Boston priests.
"The violations of childhood innocence, under the guise of priestly care, are a source of profound shame," O'Malley said.
Ryan was one of the highest-ranking church officials to be accused of child molestation since the Boston sex scandal broke in 2002. He resigned that year after being accused of abusing two boys in the 1970s and '80s at a Boston high school.
The scandal led O'Malley's predecessor, Cardinal Bernard Law, to resign, and the archdiocese agreed to pay $85 million to settle lawsuits by about 550 alleged victims.
A state investigation found that about 1,000 people had been molested by dozens of priests over about five decades. Some of the priests were shuffled from parish to parish to try to conceal the allegations.
I've been reading your posts, with no small measure of fascination. I don't recall running into you before. Anyway, welcome to the religious threads.
I wanted to hone in on one thing you said: "My own parish is a very poor, inner city, falling down, school closed ,barely hanging on church. The priest who says the Latin Mass is young and enthusiastic. He is leaving very soon."
It reminds me a bit of my own eastern Catholic parish. Tiny. Certainly not wealthy at all when it comes to material splendor. But wealthy when it comes to spirituality. And I consider myself lucky to only have to travel 40 minutes to get there.
We all decide what's important to us. A part of the universal Catholic church, like the larger society that it exists in, has decided that the pretty buildings, the social stature, and the material things are very important.
Another part of the universal church has decided that those things aren't as important. These are often the small parishes or inner city parishes with the leaking roofs that are always just barely squeaking by economically.
To a certain extent, I think it's all about the priorities that parishioners set for themselves. There's a lot of complaining about apostasy and such, and how there are problems in the clergy. But none of this happened in a vacuum.
Good they needed to be GONE!
Cardinal Law broke no laws. He left Boston so that Sean O'Malley could create a new atmosphere in the Diocese. The Attorney General of Massachusetts even announced in the press conference that the Cardinal had broken no laws, but made it clear that he wished he could put him in jail for something.
The Cardinal moved to Maryland, then when the Pope offered him the Parish in Rome, he took the opportunity. He didn't FLEE. He was free to go anywhere, and he simply moved on.
The Cardinal didn't molest any children, and most of the abuse took place long before he ever arrived in Boston. He was wrong in letting the priests stay in Parishes for as long as they did, and he admitted that. He was following the suggestions from the psychiatrists and counselors who said that the priests were 'cured'. I don't see anyone clamoring for any of the metal health professionals to be put in jail for their incorrect diagnoses.
An article in the Christian Science Monitor says that in the Protestant churches most of the alleged abusers are not clergy or staff, but church VOLUNTEERS."
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0405/p01s01-ussc.html
No, it is NOT all bad. Of course, if you read the Boston Globe, you'd never know that, because it is all anti-Catholic Church all the time. The Globe NEVER liked Cardinal Law, and from the moment he arrived in Boston wrote negative stories about him. The paper once intimated that because he was from Mississippi, he was racist, and because of that, he allowed the closure of a Catholic Hospital in a minority area of town. The Globe DIDN'T mention that there was still going to be a medical clinic that would still handle minor cases, with the more major ones going to the newer site. What the Boston Globe ALSO didn't mention was the Cardinal's work for Civil Rights when he was Chancellor of the Diocese of Jackson, Mississippi. In fact, he was one of only a few white people to attend the funeral of Medgar Evers. Another other was Bishop Brunini.
I'm convinced that the Globe, in concert with others in the Boston area, started this campaign in order to reduce the influence of the Church in the area of homosexual marriage. It couldn't have been the fact that some of the priests might have abused children. The Globe had been lauding Father Paul Shanley for his work with homeless teenagers, and for his support of the NAMBLA chapter in Boston. They needed to reduce the Church's influence, because they knew that Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Margaret Marshall was about to issue the homosexual marriage edict, and they were priming the public to reject any argument against it by the Church. They knew this because the editors of the Boston Globe and the New York Times were part of the group planning this move by Marshall.
"Someone else on this thread called me Law's judge and jury. So, yours is the second stone..."
It was not intended as a stone, but as an expression of perplexity. You're a Catholic, and you're divorced. I'm just wondering how that works out.
Priests get thrown into jail as well, some are even killed while there.
Not sure this response should go to you, but let's put it out there.
I worked for Cardinal Law and always found him very accessible and a very good boss.
My impression of him is that he has a vision as to what the responsibilities were and what the image of the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston should be and he worked very hard to meet those responsibilities and to adhere to that image.
Unfortunately that led to him making some pretty (for lack of a better word) dumb mistakes that I agree should have resulted in his resignation.
Whether his activities were criminal is open to debate, he clearly got some very bad advice from some folks (i.e. doctors at St. Luke center) that was criminal or at the very least incompetent.
You do need to remember that many of those guys who were advising Law are still in place advising O'Malley.
Good, bad or indifferent, Law has fallen on his sword and now holds a functionary position in Rome. Hardly a reward.
Not at the Vatican, at St. Mary Major. Cardinals are traditionally selected from among the pastors of churches of Rome. So when a foreign Cardinal (about 99% of them nowadays) is made Cardinal, they are made titular pastors of various churches in Rome. It's just that they are usually too busy serving as Archbishops to actually serve in their titular parishes. Not Cardinal Law. When he was stripped as Archbishop of Boston, he defaulted to his "day job", that of pastor of St. Mary Major, a position he was granted when he became cardinal archbishop of Boston. As chance would have it, it is the customary duty of the pastor of that church to deliver one of the eight eulogies of a Pope.
Cardinal Law is derelict in his duty of archbishop of Boston. If you would declare him a criminal, please say what crime he is guilty of. The myth that he "fled" to Rome to avoid prosecution is pure myth. He merely defaulted to a job he was given in 1982, but was too busy to attend to as archbishop of Boston.
Racketeering? That word doesn't mean "really really bad, nefarious stuff." Racketeering is a financial crime, including extortion, loansharking, bribery, and obstruction of justice in the furtherance of illegal trade. Bernard Law may have been extorted, bribed, etc., for all we know, but have you ever heard of him extorting or bribing someone? (Out-of-court settlements are not legally bribes, even if they seem to be morally equivalent.)
Aiding and abetting? Abetting involves material assistance and encouragement of known criminal behavior. If some guy runs into your home carrying sequentially ordered dollar bills, and asks you where the nearest bank is, you may suspect he is a criminal. One might figure you'd have to be an idiot NOT to suspect he was a bank robber, but if you give him directions to a bank, you are NOT guilty of aiding and abetting. On the other hand, if the police inform you that Joe Schmoe is wanted for a bank robbery, and you purchase airline tickets for him, that's aiding and abetting.
Now, suppose a priest actually even CONFESSED to sexually assaulting a child. The confessor doesn't have to hand the priest over to the police, and if he did, there'd be no admissable evidence for the police to do anything about it. The confessor is granted the same immunity as a lawyer or a psychiatrist, and for the same reason.
Unless the confessor has a moral certainty that the priest will commit the crime again, he CANNOT report what has been confessed to him. Furthermore, a part of the act of confession is a statement of a sincere commitment to NOT commit the act again.
But, in truth, the issue of confession is a red herring, mostly created by anti-Catholic Hollywood types. The truth is that most of these sickos didn't believe they did anything wrong and wouldn't confess. Even if the confessor SAID he was absolved, if the penitent priest didn't sincerely resolve to never commit the act again, no absolution occurs. Maybe some "Godfather: types may not know that, but you bet your keister priests do!"
I recall early on when the scandal was first breaking a psychologist,who was not Catholic had suggested that the Church could recoup a lot of money by suing the "professionals" who had sent many of the abusive priests back with a fit to work statement. I thought it was a good idea and when the Church did not respond with any discernible action I was disappointed. I am sure the lack of response was caused by many factors including failure to act because of personal reasons including known complicity and blackmail along with more innocuous reasons like timidity and fear of hurting the Church further.
But never did I think about using the "immunity" of other professionals as a means to point out to an irate public that this problem was simmering throughout this country. Well,I think I will be using it now.
It might be pretty effective dropping a "I wonder if the sexual abuse of children could have been stopped/or would stop,if lawyers and counsellors were forced to report these behaviors to the police?". Personally,I think reporting is a terrible idea for many reasons far too complicated to deal with here,nonetheless,it will serve as a launching point for some dialogue in the market place,so to speak,which in turn should get more people thinking. The truth is very compelling.
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