Posted on 06/29/2002 4:05:17 PM PDT by Coleus
Just before Easter, Paterson's Roman Catholic bishop gave his flock some instructions on what to do about sexual abuse by priests.
Report it to the cops, said Bishop Frank Rodimer.
The bishop's letter stands in sad, ironic contrast to the fix he now finds himself in. Rodimer needs to tell us what he knows about a priest-friend who sexually abused a boy. Otherwise, the bishop looks like he's hiding something.
This story begins three decades ago. Two priests rented a beach house at the Jersey shore. Rodimer and his friend, the Rev. Peter Osinski, enjoyed each other's company so much that they rented other beach houses during other summers, even after Rodimer became a bishop and Osinski a principal of a Catholic high school in the Salem County community of Carneys Point. On some of those beach sojourns, Father Osinski was visited by a young boy.
In October 1997, Father Osinski was arrested for sexually abusing the boy for seven years, beginning when the boy was 6. Some of the abuse took place at a house on Long Beach Island that Father Osinski rented with Bishop Rodimer. In March 1998, Father Osinski pleaded guilty to sexual assault and endangering a child's welfare. He was given a 10-year prison term.
It needs to be said here that law enforcement authorities never considered Bishop Rodimer a suspect. The bishop claims he never noticed any sort of abuse at the beach house. Nevertheless, the bishop agreed in 1999 to settle a civil suit - and pay money - to the victim's family. The suit charged that Bishop Rodimer was negligent and should have noticed the abuse.
Bishop Rodimer kept this settlement a secret until last week. And even then, he was hardly forthcoming. He still won't say how much his diocese agreed to pay. A diocesan spokeswoman will reveal only that the payment was part of a settlement of $2.3 million to $2.5 million paid out to victims of a number of sexual abuse cases.
The bishop explains that he was bound by a legal agreement to keep the settlement terms confidential. Fine. But a far more important priority requires that he come forward now.
Bishop Rodimer is not just any obscure citizen. He is the spiritual leader of 377,000 Catholics in Passaic, Morris, and Sussex counties. He needs to answer this question: If he did nothing wrong, why did he agree to settle a lawsuit in a sexual abuse case - one authorities say he had nothing to do with?
Maybe he feared bad public relations, that to challenge such a lawsuit in court could be embarrassing to him and the Catholic Church. Maybe he worried about the toll a trial would take on the victim, now in his early 20s.
The problem is no one is quite sure what the bishop was thinking. For him to continue as a moral force, he needs to explain himself - especially when the nation is hearing new allegations of sexual abuse by priests and coverups by bishops almost every day.
"Hindsight is a brutal and humbling teacher," Bishop Rodimer said in a three-page statement released Saturday, amid news reports about the beach house he rented with Father Osinski.
The bishop's words seem pained, weighed down by the knowledge that Catholicism faces rough times ahead. He is a good man, it seems, with a record of never being afraid to speak out.
He needs to speak now. He needs to be clear and complete
Rodimer had to have known of the sexual abuse problem in his diocese for close to 20 years, as Pope Pius High School was closed in 1983 to pay a settlement in a sex-abuse case. You would think Rodimer would be a bit more aware of what was going on in his diocese after that happened.
ALL of the Catholic parents I know will never let their sons go to a movie or anywhere else with ours sons. It's horribly tragic and sad. But it's the priests and the hierarchy who have let this happen. We parents just want to protect our kids - and it's clear they're not safe with priests.
And from the article: Rodimer had no knowledge of their relationship, and never asked about it.
I contend it is not normal to not make small talk about relationships with people using a vacation home. This was not benign ignorance, this was conscious avoidance, because Rodimer knew what the answers would be (or should be if Osinski were truthful)
Rodimer knew Osinski for many, many years. I would be greatly surprised if Rodimer did not know Osinski was a homosexual. To then look the other way while this priest paraded around his young male teenage sidekick is hard to fathom. But clearly, in the Catholic Church today, where not only homosexuality has been totally accepted, but ACTIVE homosexuality as well, there has not been a drop of concern for having such men in close contact with teenage boys in general. The Church here has made the decision that it's perfectly all right for active homosexual men, many of whom have clear sexual attraction to teenage boys, to be in close contact with those boys. In the Boy Scouts, the welfare of children (a certain some of whom would be abused by active homosexuals) was a far greater concern than potentially offending homosexuals. In the Catholic Church, the welfare of kids has come dead last. But even now, priests get offended when parents are wary of letting their sons be in close quarters with them. I'm sorry. They lost their chance. Parents have no way of knowing anything about the (frequently bizarre) sexual practices of their priests, and clearly, vows mean NOTHING to many priests. Parents would be fools to allow their children close contact with priests. The Sodomite Church has greatly devalued its priests to satisfy the sexual urges of those priests. An incredibly selfish, devilish and self-centered policy that reeks with one of the worst kinds of sin (causing a child to sin).
But Long Beach Island is pretty pricey by New Jersey standards; I'd venture to guess that it's still more expensive than most of his parishoners can afford. I'm sorry, but considering how often Rodimer pleaded poverty and demanded that parishoners kick in more money, I find it a little much that he had a summer vacation home.
It also has towns like Paterson, Passaic, and Clifton, which are working-class towns. I went to Catholic school in that area, and I can't tell you how many times we kids had to sell candy or work at school fundraisers in order to try to keep our schools alive. Yet Rodimer, the bishop of this diocese, is spending his parishoners' money on lawsuit settlements for pervert priests, and vacation homes that the people I went to school with could never afford -- people there were lucky to get to go down the shore for the day, let alone have a beach house for the summer! And the area where I grew up has been the hardest-hit by the school closures. I'm sorry, but when your diocese is pleading poverty, your bishop shouldn't get to spend his summers down the shore.
I don't buy this. How could he have a devotion to prayer and the Mass, while sodomizing a boy in his spare time?
Exactly!
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