US Bishops and the S Word

FYI

Troubled by what they perceive as the bishops plan to be more liberal—as indicated by the presence of Appleby and Steinfels-- some Catholics have even whispered the “S” word. While schism from the “AmChurch” is not an option, the fact that it is mentioned, even in frustration, is indicative of the magnitude of the crisis in the Church in the United States.

Seems to be talked about here. But the general sheeple? What do all of you think?

Schism Alert?

Schism? I don't think so. I hope they're not talking about schism from the Holy See.That's completely unacceptable!The best thing for all of us to do is to pray,pray,pray and get our families united and faithful to the Catholic Church.

Thanks for continuing pings to Catholic-related threads Salvation. I really appreciate them.

The words and actions of (many of) the American bishops have not been representative of much of what the Church teaches for a long time. I just finished a recently printed biography of the great conservative intellectual of the 20th Century, Frank S. Meyer (who converted to Catholicism on his deathbed), and it mentioned how Buckley, Bozell (the father), and other conservative Catholic intellectuals were critical of the bishops' leftist bent during this time.

I really hope that a schism does not occur, but if it does, the more "traditional" and "orthodox" Catholics will be the ones who will be still in union with the rest of the Church. I pray for the future of the American Church. Pray to the Blessed Virgin, and Saints Michael, Thomas Aquinas, Jude, Francis de Sales, and whatever patron saint (or anyone in heaven) you prefer to pray for us on behalf of the American Church to Jesus, and God the Father Almighty. May the Holy Spirit decend to reconcecrate the Catholic Church in the United States.

Another infamous dissident, self-professed lesbian and witch Mary Hunt, was also smug,

They forgot to add the rest of her tag line.

Thank you for the ping and post.

I really liked the article and I really liked this:

And last, as the history of the Church amply reveals, we have faced each internal crisis and survived not be cause we are a faithful people but because God is faithful.

Amen!

Perhaps the "S word."

But this here:

…far from being the authoritarian institution of black legend, the Catholic Church, in America in particular, has tolerated dissent to the point of criminality. When a Catholic priest can publicly embrace the agenda of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, as the now notorious Father Shanley in Boston did, and have his superiors treat this as a tolerable eccentricity, something is seriously wrong.

is trite. As we know know, Shanley was only able to stay around because he was blackmailing a Cardinal. Less authority, or, my preference, more oversight, would have been the answer.

Another infamous dissident, self-professed lesbian Mary Hunt, was also smug, “The bishops have met alone for the last time.” Hunt is the director of a women’s group that openly performs parody masses where women preside as “priests.” Hunt said there will be “..a shift from bishops setting the agenda to the people setting it.” Of course, “the people” Hunt has in mind are not orthodox Catholics.

Freaks. They're abnormal in a lot of other ways as well.

Here is what I think is an interesting column printed in The Wanderer on Shanley (I can't call him "Father"), and the blackmail question. I'd like to add that for some reason, Paul Likoudis chose to use Eileen MacNamara's and Derek Jackson's columns to flesh out his own column. Both of these columnists are unbelievable liberals, and even the moderate liberals in Boston don't really like them. Howie Carr is fairly conservative. Also, Likoudis chose to mention Cardinal Cushing in this column and in doing so, he smeared a dead man. Keep in mind, that you have to believe that Shanley was truthful in his letters - and we know what Shanley is.

Out Of Control In Boston . . .

New DocumentsOn “Street Priest” Raise Blackmail Suspicions
By PAUL LIKOUDIS
BOSTON — The April 8 release of 818 pages of documents pertaining to Boston’s famed “street priest,” Fr. Paul Shanley, now a defendant charged with committing numerous acts of sexual abuse against minor males, not only provoked new demands for Bernard Cardinal Law’s resignation and for indictment on criminal charges, but dozens of troubling questions, including suspicions that Law and his predecessor, Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, may have been blackmailed.
Shanley, ordained in 1960, a founding member of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, the documents show, was known by archdiocesan officials as a sexual molester as early as 1967, and claimed — though he didn’t say by whom — that he was sexually abused as a teenager, and one of his abusers was a cardinal archbishop of Boston.
Two days after the documents’ release, The Boston Globe’s Eileen McNamara posed “An Obvious Question”:
“Was the Rev. Paul R. Shanley blackmailing the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston?
“It is not a frivolous question; it’s the most obvious one to arise from the personnel file that Cardinal Bernard F. Law and his high-priced legal team tried so hard to suppress.
“As striking as the revelations of the hierarchy’s coverup of Shanley’s crimes is the light that more than 800 pages of documents shed on the lengths to which his supervisors went to emotionally appease and financially accommodate a renegade priest they knew to be a serial child molester. Why?”
After displaying some of the most damning evidence that the famed street priest was indeed a very “sick” man who was protected and promoted by his superiors, McNamara answers her question:
“Buried in Shanley’s personnel file might be a hint. ‘I have abided by my promise not to mention to anyone the fact that I too had been sexually abused as a teenager, and, later, as a seminarian by a priest, a faculty member, a pastor, and, ironically, by the predecessor of one of two cardinals who now debate my fate,’ Shanley wrote to the Rev. Brian M. Flatley in an appeal for Law’s support for his efforts to be appointed director of a church-sponsored youth hostel in New York City.
“Absent blackmail, why would Law recommend to dioceses in New York and California a ‘street priest’ whose public advocacy of sex between men and boys contradicted Church teaching and whose private behavior violated criminal and canon law?. . .
“No yardstick can measure the trust betrayed by this cardinal and by the sycophants in clerical collars who have done his bidding during his tenure as archbishop of Boston,” McNamara continued. “But if a criminal prosecution of Law and his minions becomes the sole focus of our anger, we will have missed an opportunity to understand the modern history of the Catholic Church in Boston. What we need to know is locked in the files that Law is trying so hard to shield. We should not have to win access to them one plaintiff at a time. Unless Attorney General Thomas Reilly can find a way to subpoena every last piece of paper in the mansion on Lake Street, we will never know the answer to the question that haunts this community: Why?”
If, indeed, Shanley, who was born in 1931, is telling the truth, his abuser would appear to have been the late Richard Cardinal Cushing, the prelate who promoted the election of John F. Kennedy, supported the dissident theologian Fr. Charles Curran (cf. The Boston Pilot, April 29, 1969), and who reigned in Boston from 1944-1970.
Whatever the case, according to Roderick MacLeish Jr., attorney for one of Shanley’s — at least — 28 alleged victims, archdiocesan officials were told by Shanley’s pastor in 1967, the same year Shanley was elected by his peers for the new archdiocesan Senate of Priests, that he was a molester.
Ten years later, in a letter dated October 4, 1977, archdiocesan officials learned that Shanley, while addressing a meeting of Dignity/Integrity at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Rochester, declared that “homosexuality is a gift of God and should be celebrated.”
He also said, wrote Dolores Stevens in a letter to Jeanne D. Sweeney — one of the 818 documents released by the Boston chancery — that “it would be a good idea if people thought clergy were gay because it would have a radicalizing effect.” He claimed there was no sexual activity that could cause psychic damage, “not even incest or bestiality,” and that in most cases where a person is accused of pedophilia, it is the child, not the adult, who is the initiator.
Shanley also revealed that he had been appointed by Cardinal Medeiros to represent sexual minorities on the United States Catholic Conference’s Young Adult Ministry board.
The documents also show Cardinal Law and his auxiliary bishops, wrote the Globe’s Walter V. Robinson and Thomas Farragher on April 9, “ignored allegations of sexual misconduct against Rev. Paul R. Shanley and reacted casually to complaints that Shanley endorsed sexual relations between men and boys. . . .
“As recently as 1997 — after the Boston Archdiocese had paid monetary settlements to several of Shanley’s victims — Law did not object to Shanley’s application to be director of a church-run New York City guest house frequented by student travelers.
“Like a priest clad in a Teflon cassock, Shanley received an extraordinary tribute from Law when he retired in 1996, not two decades after Shanley asserted in public remarks that there was no psychic harm from engaging in taboo practices like incest or bestiality.”
A Zealous Guy
The Globe report continues: “In the February 29, 1996, letter, the cardinal declared, ‘Without doubt over all of these years of generous and zealous care, the lives and hearts of many people have been touched by your sharing of the Lord’s Spirit. You are truly appreciated for all that you have done’.”
After the April 8 press conference where attorney MacLeish released the documents, one of the participants and Shanley victims, Arthur Austin, commented: “If the Catholic Church in America does not fit the definition of organized crime, then Americans seriously need to examine their concept of justice.”
“Yesterday’s documents on the sexual misbehavior of a second priest is likely to increase public suspicion that the archdiocese holds embarrassing files on others among the nearly 100 diocesan priests whose names have been turned over to prosecutors since January,” the Globe’s reporters darkly suggested.
Attorney MacLeish, the reporters said, “called the documents astonishing for what they say about the depth of the archdiocese’s knowledge of Shanley’s sexual habits and for the disdain they show for his victims, many of them allegedly abused during the 1970s, when Shanley was a controversial ‘street priest’ in Boston.
“ ‘This man was a monster in the Archdiocese of Boston for many, many years,’ MacLeish said. ‘He had beliefs that no rational human being could defend. . . . All of the suffering that has taken place at the hands of Paul Shanley — a serial child molester for four decades, three of them in Boston — none of it had to happen’. . . .
“MacLeish argued that Law, his predecessor, Cardinal Humberto S. Medeiros, and their top aides were complicit in covering up the Church’s knowledge of a molester in their midst. Letter after letter was projected onto a large screen in a Boston hotel conference room, with warnings from people who recoiled at Shanley’s casual attitude about sex between men and boys, or who reported that he had masturbated one boy and identified other possible victims with names, telephone numbers, and addresses.
“In rebutting a 1967 complaint that he had molested three boys, a letter from Shanley to Msgr. Francis J. Sexton denied that he had touched any of the boys. ‘. . . It is indeed a comforting prospect to realize that any allegations which might in the future be made against me involving women will be given far less credence than ordinary in the light of my presumed predilection for pederasty,’ Shanley wrote.
“But when Shanley was finally sent for treatment in late 1993 to the Institute of Living in Hartford, after some of his victims pressed claims against the archdiocese, he admitted that he had molested boys and had also had sexual relationships with men and women. . . .
“Indeed, the records in Shanley’s personnel files disclose that Medeiros wrote to the Vatican in February 1979 about Shanley’s comments about sexual practices. In the letter, Medeiros called Shanley a ‘troubled priest.’ Two months later, Medeiros was alerted by a New York City lawyer that Shanley had been quoted as making similar remarks in an interview about man-boy love with a publication called Gaysweek.”
The February 12, 1979 issue of the publication contained an article, “Men & Boys,” which reported on a meeting held in Boston which, attorney MacLeish said, led to the formation of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. According to an Associated Press report, April 9, many of the speakers at the conference, “representing various religions endorsed such relationships, including Shanley, who was there as a representative of then-Cardinal Humberto Medeiros’ program for outreach to sexual minorities.
“The article described an anecdote Shanley shared at the conference about a boy ‘who was rejected by family and society but helped by a boy-lover.’ The relationship ended when it was discovered by the boy’s parents, and the man was sent to prison. ‘And there began the psychic demise of that child,’ Shanley reportedly said. ‘He had loved that man. It was only a brief and passing thing as far as the sex was concerned, but the love was deep and the gratitude to the man was deep. . . .
“ ‘We have our convictions upside down if we are truly concerned with boys,’ he said, apparently referring to the punishment meted out to the man. ‘The cure does far more damage.’ The North American Man-Boy Love Association apparently was formed at the end of the conference by 32 men and two teenagers.”
After that meeting, Medeiros merely asked Shanley to end his “street priest” work and assigned him to a parish — to which he was appointed pastor by Medeiros’ successor, Cardinal Law, six years later.
Shortly thereafter, the chancery received another letter, stating that Shanley was in Rochester again, promoting “sexual relations between men and boys.” When Boston Auxiliary Bishop John McCormack, now bishop of Manchester, N.H., asked Shanley to explain himself, Shanley didn’t bother responding — at least in writing. Over the years, allegations of sexual abuse continued to be made against Shanley, but Bishop Robert Banks, Law’s top aide, wrote in a memo, reported the Globe, “nothing could be done” because Shanley denied the incidents.
“It was Banks,” the Globe continued, “who cleared the way in 1990 for Shanley to take an assignment in a California diocese with a letter asserting that Shanley had had no problems during his years in Boston.
“Banks, who is now bishop of Green Bay, Wis., said in a brief statement from his spokesman: ‘Obviously, I was not aware of any allegations against Fr. Shanley before I sent the letter’.”
When he went to California, to work in the Diocese of San Bernardino, Shanley and another Boston priest, Fr. John J. White, co-owned and operated a Palm Springs motel that “catered to gay clients.”
“It was during that period,” the Globe continued, “that McCormack, who visited with both men,
corresponded warmly with Shanley over Shanley’s regular complaints that the archdiocese was not giving him enough financial support. He accompanied one plea to McCormack with what appeared to be a warning that reporters were calling him and there might be a ‘media whirlwind’.”
Five years later, in 1995, Shanley was working in Manhattan at a guest house for youth, Leo House, and Law tried to assist him in becoming its permanent director; but that was vetoed by the late John Cardinal O’Connor.
Run Or Hide
The explosive effect of the Shanley documents on an already-stunned and deeply demoralized Boston is reflected in the renewed calls for Law’s resignation and for prosecution by law enforcement agencies.
The Boston Globe’s Derrick Z. Jackson articulated what many Catholics and non-Catholics in Boston and nationwide are saying and thinking in his column of April 10, “Law & Disorder,” which opened:
“There is no longer any doubt that Cardinal Bernard Law himself is a sick man. In his gushing 1996 letter to the retiring Rev. Paul Shanley, Law wrote: ‘For 30 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. This is an impressive record and all of us are truly grateful for your priestly care and ministry to all whom you have served during those years. . . .’ This is what Law wrote, despite accusations against Shanley of child molestation that went back three decades. . . .
“Law’s direct role in fanning the hellfire has turned a catastrophe into an apocalypse. If he had resigned, as he should have, three months ago, his place might merely be the unemployment line or a kick upstairs into the Vatican. Now that he has been exposed as promoting a depraved priest to pastor and exposing countless youths to Shanley’s alleged stalking and preying, the question is whether the cardinal should be forced to trade in his red vestments for an orange jumpsuit.”
The acerbic curmudgeon of the airwaves, Howie Carr, the most popular radio talk-show host in Boston and a columnist for The Boston Herald, advised Law to flee:
“Cardinal Law, the time is now long past for you to resign,” he opened.
“Now is the moment to consider fleeing. . . . 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 Fr. 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. . . .
“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. . . .
“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. . . .
“What impressed you more about Fr. Shanley, his cofounding 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 impaneled 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. . . .
“Now it turns out that Fr. 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 Fr. 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.”

The Village Voice sez: "The most likely outcome of such a process is a change in the character of the American church. Some power will devolve to local bishops...."

Brilliant! After they show less judgment in management than the guy who runs a McDonald's, we're supposed to invest them with even more power.

God raises up His people to do His work. Placid, timid Catholics now know they are in a battle for the life of the Church in this nation—Dallas should be understood as a call to arms! To the degree that Catholic laity fail to defend authentic Catholic teaching, they are themselves complicit. To the degree that Catholics fail to become involved at the schools, university, parish and diocesan levels, they are equally to blame for the state of the Church in the US in the coming years.

Amen to that! Halleluia, sistah!

Secondly, the Vatican will, however slowly and with deliberative care, take a stronger hand behind the scenes.... The Vatican II understanding of collegiality is still developing

Frankly, I think there's been way too much going on "behind the scenes" -- isn't that how these priests got away with it in the first place!? I say everything should be done out in the open from this point on! And I think I've got a good, fully developed understanding of what they mean by "collegiality" -- and I'm agin' it!

Hunt is the director of a women’s group that openly performs parody masses where women preside as “priests.”

With the recent "ordination" of several women to the priesthood, Hunt can now move from parody to "live action" drama! (/scarcasm)

I agree that prayer is a big part of the solution but we are in unofficial schism already and this needs to be pointed out to the dumbed down faithful. There has been too much confusion in catechesis. The Church situation in this country is downright sinister when those Bishops who reflect the Magisterial teachings are considered to be othodox and conservative instead of middle of the road. The middle of the Catholic road used to be faithful to the Pope but it isn't now.

I don't think oversight was the problem. There was oversight but it wasn't done with honesty at the root. To any pastoral Bishop, the two most dreaded things to occur are financial failure and scandal. Most will try to keep these from surfacing, they will do "damage control" as modus operandi and consider that for the good of the Church. The irony is that the impending financial disaster might be the force that cleans up the scandals.

At this point, I think talk of schism is a good thing as it will clarify official Church teaching for the confused little guy in the pew. Time to clean house!

Collegiality..."I'm agin'it" too! This is how the lavender mob got away with this for so long as they used the collegiality to smooth over dissenting views. Get "schism" on the front burner and get the scrubbers to work. Tell all who don't want to walk the walk and talk the talk according to the Magisterium that they are in schism!

De Facto schism has existed in America for decades. Long ago, in "Culture Wars," Cardinal Gagnon was quoted as saying that schism exists but the Pope saw no benefit in formalising it.

America is Sardis and Laodicea (Apocalypse 3). THe Bishop has the duties to Teach, Rule and Sanctify. When was the last time you saw your Bishop fulfill his duties?

The Laity has other duties. Christian Mothers and Fathers had the duty to teach the Faith to their children. That is how the Faith will be preserved in America - via the Domestic Church. The Institutional Church has been wearing a toe-tag for decades.

Nevertheless, Love among the ruins (great book by Walker Percy, BTW) is not only possible it is a requirement. We have an historic opportunity to be martyrs in the ordinary sense of the word. Keep the Faith; Teach your children; Tithe in your area to fellow Christians who, in Justice, deserve our Tithes; Love and laugh and drink some decent wine.

Our family's motto is "It is always darkest before the storm," and I think what we have seen so far hasn't been the worst. The worst is yet to come and yet I have never been happier.

Thanks for the ping.

Do the degree that Catholics laity fail to defend authentic Catholic teaching, they are themselves complicit. To the degree that Catholics fail to become involved at the schools, university, parish and diocesan levels, they are equally to blame for the state of the Church in the US in the coming years. That is a sober charge, but it is point made by a great Father of the Church, St. John Chrysostom:

“He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but even the good to do wrong.”

As far as I am concerned this is the most pertinent fact of the article (a good one, I must say). The laity must pray, pray, pray with strong Faith that He will answer, but I believe that there is something very profound about "Faith without works ...", is there not?

The time for respectful demands for accountability is upon us. I contacted persons from FR who expressed a wish to be a part of addressing our Hierarchy in this regard and received no answer. So I will proceed to reword a document that FReepers have written, to reflect my own persona, and send it to my own Archbishop sans the volunteers who might have felt it to be disrespectful or beyond our scope as His Sheep.

I already feel that I have delayed to long in waiting for a response from fellow persons of the laity in my diocese.

I only received responses in FReepmail from you two and we are not in the same diocese ... so sad. I think we are trapped in fear of speaking up.

Very off-topic, but this is as good a place as any for this question ... Does anyone have a reference to the history of religions that was posted here in response to someone of another "branch" of Christianity several weeks ago.

My memory seems to say that it was nick, or Romulus or Renatus who wrote the post ... and I cannot find it in my own list of posts to me. Thanks in advance!

If you are speaking the truth in love - well, may God bless your efforts.