Posted on 04/02/2008 6:38:47 AM PDT by Gamecock
....the record of abuse in the Diocese of Oakland has never been fully disclosed.
...Vigneron had been making the rounds of 20 Diocese of Oakland parishes to apologize for 12 priests accused of abuse.
At least two accused diocesan priests and 19 members of religious orders still serve at church facilities...
in the scandal-plagued Archdiocese of Boston and other dioceses around the country.
In 1952, the year Oakland's Bishop O'Dowd High School opened, the Rev. James Prindeville began molesting a 16-year-old girl at the school,
Those victims who have come forward ranged in age from 2 to 17. At least 42 of them were girls.
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
For example, are you seriously suggesting that an ecumenical council be called or an infallible declaration be made to say what is already established, that such things are an abomination? There's no need to anathematize those who teach that it's okay to abuse children sexually, because there are not enough Catholics saying that.
Currently "zero tolerance" is so strictly practiced in the Church that publications like "First Things" are beginning to suggest that that's not fair either. A local priest was accused, and instantly removed from his church and, in essence, was disappeared into the St. Luke's program where, as one of my friends said, he was told that his could either admit that he'd done what he was charged with (to initiate 'treatment') or be deposed out of hand. Whatever that is, and my gut tells me the guys was guilty, it's not anything like due process. And your own posts could be construed as suggesting that an accusation is sufficient to show guilt. Should the bishops proceed on that basis?
And: are you saying that jogging nekkid (which, as far as I'm concerned sounds REALLY uncomfortable -- can you imagine? I hope he had a nice smooth stride ...) - while obviously crazy as can be, is the same family of wackiness or evil as the molestation of children? Should Chaput punish the guy before a trial? What's the current psychiatric doctrine on self-exposure, in terms of whether or not it's treatable" and what the outcomes if treatment might be? I think the nekkid jogging jiggling dangling priest muddies up the issue.
I've said this before, but, here goes: Note that this article reaches back more than 50 years ago for some of its cases. Consider that the theories of what constitutes paedophilia, what causes it, whether treatment can be effective or cure possible are not matters of theology but of psychology and psychiatry. And the teaching has changed, and continues to change.
Suppose the Pshrinks all said that paedophilia cannot be cured or amended and his bishop said, "I don't care what they say, I think it can be cured, I think it's cured in Fr. Groper here, and I'm sending him back into the field." We'd all howl with outrage.
How different -- and clearly it's somewhat different -- is it when the pshrinks are saying (as they were not so many years ago if our range is over a half-century), 'It CAN be cured; just 'treat' 'em, don't make a big deal, and turn 'em lose again," and the bishops said, "NO way! I'll depose them and have done with it." Would that be right?
IOW, the bishops took advice on an area outside their competence. Unfortunately it seems to have been crappy advice.
(If it's at all relevant, the area - and the related area of lady parishioners hitting on their priests, or vice versa - was not even mentioned when I was in Episcopal seminary between 1972 and 1976. Not MENTIONED! I was so naive it totally caught me by surprise.)
In related news, I suspect that heterosexual and homosexual monkeying around with pubescent and adolescent personnel is a different problem and may have a different prognosis than any kind of sexual monkeying around with prepubescent children. I think it clouds the issue to lump them all together.The DSM-IV certainly distinguishes them.
AND I say again, I succeeded (if that's the word) an Episcopal priest who had numerous dalliances with the "ladies" in his congregation. I, pardon the expression, laid the matter before my then bishop. The priest had moved, of his own accord, to another diocese. My bishop, a man of considerable heroism in the days when James Meredith was trying to enter U. Miss., completely buried the whole thing. Amazing!
SO, to sum up all this blather so far, I think that the US Catholic Bishops did very poorly indeed, though I think maybe not quite so badly as some say. I think they were completely unprepared and most of them panicked.
I also think that most people don't get the ties of affection and quasi-familial loyalty between bishops and priests. In that context I think we can see that a lot of Bishops fell into a kind of co-dependent and "enabling" pattern of response, complete with the characteristic denial.
(And from my experience, when your superiors "deny", you feel very abandoned and it's hard to come up with an effective and moral response.)
Five will get you ten than Whipkey gets reassigned to an even smaller parish (as if Frederick, Colorado isn't small enough), or to an administrative position out of public sight.
Define the bet a little more precisely and I'll take it. My guess is he'll never be in the parish again. I guess I don't think that it's SO terrible if he becomes secretary in charge of supervising trash removal in parishes.
However, the Catholic Church is deafeningly silent on the issue of clergy sexual abuse of children.
How many published letters and papers and procedures would, in your opinion, serve to show that the Church has NOT been deafeningly silent?
No one connected with the church that I know of has addressed that issue with the laity.
I say again, this guy must only read church statements if they're tied to a rock and thrown at his head. I don't look for this stuff and it seems to be all over the place.The only periodicals I read about Church stuff are First Things - which isn't even a Church publication, and our diocesan newspaper. and I read a lot o' stuff on FR. As far as I'm concerned, I've heard plenty about the issue. I'd say this guy's ignorance is culpable. If you stop your ears and shut your eyes, you can't complain that you haven't seen or heard anything.
Is it a sin to knowingly assign pedophiles to a round of parishes?
It depends on when and why it was done. I think if psychiatric professionals give as their professional opinion that this is a best practice, there's a strong exculpatory element of invincible ignorance. Nowadays, the ignorance would be culpable and the whole thing would be culpable. To me, at least, that's obvious. No special study involved.
Is it a sin to pay victims to keep their mouths shut and then have them sign a statement that if they ever tell about their abuse to repay the money with interest?
Personally I hate settlements of that kind, I have since I became aware of them in non-ecclesiastical matters. For one thing they lead to that kind of characterization. But if one goes to civil law against one's Diocese, I think one has to expect that kind of stuff.
Sorry for the ramble. This is one of those deals where a vague mass of unclear accusations about matters taking place over a wide area and for fifty years first needs to be sorted out before it can be discussed with enough coherence to be useful, IMHO.
I thought you should know that drstevej saw your post, and personally wrote me to tell you that he says "hi", and that he is "so pleased" that you still remember him!
***If one screws up, then you can claim a 10% rate.***
Correct, but the independent mega-churches balance the equation.
I'm suggesting something along those lines, yes. IMO the church has not made (or at least restated strongly enough) any statement that "such things are an abomination" that Catholics and non-Catholics can equally point to, that categorically applies the condemnation to guilty Catholic priests, bishops, etc. The Catholic Church needs to publicly excommunicate and make examples of the guilty, as a witness to any priest who's even considering preying on his parishioners. And it should go up as high as needed (Roger Mahony, anyone?) until every sympathiser and enabler is rooted out, and purity restored to the priesthood. IOW "put the fear of God in them!"
Currently "zero tolerance" is so strictly practiced in the Church that publications like "First Things" are beginning to suggest that that's not fair either....your own posts could be construed as suggesting that an accusation is sufficient to show guilt.
I would hope not - I'll have to reconsider how I phrase the matter in the future. I wasn't aware of any "zero tolerance" policy in the Catholic Church today. I'm a strong advocate of the Old Testament case law (Deut. 19:15) that states "One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established." Yes, there ought to be some sort of "due process" but IMO due process has been (is being?) abused within the American Catholic Church, within certain archdioceses certainly, towards protecting the guilty.
And: are you saying that jogging nekkid...is the same family of wackiness or evil as the molestation of children? Should Chaput punish the guy before a trial?
Yes, I'm saying exactly that. Consider that Whipkey was jogging around a public high school. Consider also, which hasn't been reported in the press, is that there's a public elementary school and a public middle school to the south of the parish, both of which border the high school property. Unless Whipkey stayed on the public streets the entire time, he would have passed through the grounds of at least one public school (if not all three) during his naked jogging sessions at the high school's track. One account mentions that Whipkey went into an alley behind the rectory, which exits onto one of the school properties. Considering that Whipkey has a prior history of public nudity, if I were Chaput I'd ditch him immediately. But the archdiocese delayed sending documents to the court, Whipkey's lawyers had him plead innocent after Whipkey confessed to the cops, and Chaput sent him off for "some treatment" (which his superiors have done once before) which delayed the trial. Said behaviors on Whipkey's behalf trouble me more than anything.
...the bishops took advice on an area outside their competence. Unfortunately it seems to have been crappy advice.
I disagree. Sin, confession, and church displine of the same is (or should be) an area inside of their competence. What's telling isn't that the bishops' received bad advice on how to act. What's telling is what authority the bishops recognized and sought out, when looking for advice.
SO, to sum up all this blather so far, I think that the US Catholic Bishops did very poorly indeed, though I think maybe not quite so badly as some say. I think they were completely unprepared and most of them panicked.
On that point I would agree. Moreso, I would accuse that the bishops have rejected scriptural authority in favor of (to modify your term) modern pshrinkology. They didn't define the issue (and it's treatment) as a sin problem to be repented of. They treated it as behavior modification.
How many published letters and papers and procedures would, in your opinion, serve to show that the Church has NOT been deafeningly silent?
IMO letters, papers, and procedures aren't enough, but yes the Catholic Church has taken numerous actions to root this out (although the coloring books are IMO a really bad and tasteless idea). This more-or-less speaks to the first point that I responded to at the top of this post. I'll readily admit one thing, however - the dispute over "proper response" is more of a cultural difference between how Catholics and Protestants address sin than anything else. We like our religious leaders to make public confessions and positional statements re good and evil. I'd daresay that Protestants (at least the pro-creedal kind) place higher value on such public statements than on any actual behaviors towards those same ends. It's hard to judge true repentence when you don't have a matching statement of confession, showing a change of mind to go with the change of action, IMO.
It mainly is a homosexual issue. That does not mean it is only a homosexual issue. Plus I believe a very small minority are making invalid claims. But sadly I am sure most of them are telling the truth.
Where the statues of limitations has not been met those who are accused should be charged and brought to justice by the civil as well as church authorities. Where the statue of limitations does apply those priests should be defrocked. Which I believe is the standard response these days. Unfortunately this response is all too recent.
It is sadly too true that “ the road to hell is paved with the skull of bishops”
I agree completely with your proposal, but I'm not convinced this is the direction the Catholic Church is taking (see my post #24 re Father Robert Whipkey). I had hoped that Archbishop Chaput would have taken a stand re Whipkey, but it appears he's stalling for time.
I think Archbishop Chaput will do the right thing. He is a strong defender of Christian morality.
Six hundred and sixty million dollars in one day.
Any parent who sends his child to a Catholic school had better keep bodyguards on retainer.
As I said...
Over $660 million paid out by the L.A. Archdiocese in one day last year alone.
Six hundred and sixty million dollars in one day.
Any parent who sends his child to a Catholic school had better keep bodyguards on retainer.
No apology is needed. Of course most Catholic school teachers are lay teachers. But considering the amount of abuse documented in the US Department of Education’s report on sexual abuse in the public schools
your advice is very timely for all parents of all students.
I heard an excellent sermon recently that used this (in part) as their text:
The reason we are to fear Him is simply so we don't sin. I believe this message has become lost.
The 660 million was just the public acknowledgement. I understand that well over a billion has been paid.
They didn’t give that up because they like paying bills.
That's because they have been 'reformed'. Either that or Reformed chaplins were taught that all sex is sinful.
Who is this drstevej person? Did a search for his home page and it says he doesn’t exist.
What these guys did were mortal sins, to the extent that they were competent. Mortal sins make it a FURTHER mortal sin to receive the Sacrament. By the time these guys were caught, they were in a pile of trouble.
But very few things are permanent excommunication offenses. We think God can forgive anything. And He has entrusted to His Church the ministry of reconciliation. It's a big job and sometimes ministers mess up.
I wonder if I could tentatively suggest that you have the benefit of hind-sight on this. I am not inclined to go easy on child-molesters. But I am deeply aware of how denial works in the face of some grotesque crimes:
At my "growing up" church, maybe 8-12 years after I went through confirmation class - so in the late 60's early 70's the class was entrusted to an alcoholic lawyer who was mostly a coupon-clipper/remittance man. He was a notorious groper of the pubescent girls in his class. Notorious. My mother used to comment on it. I knew some of the girls. THEY used to comment about it. No adult thought it was a sufficiently serious issue to warrant action or to, say, find another teacher for next year's class.
This was in a "vibrant" (gag me) Episcopal parish. His wife was "a saint", who after his death married another highly messed-up dude. My mom used to make excuses for Mr. Y on the grounds that it must be trying to married to someone as saintly as Mrs. Y. This was an upper class, Social Register, titans of industry or Ph. D. group of folks. It was easier to allow the girls who were being challenged, supposedly, to take up the responsibilities of an "adult" commitment to Christ to see that the adults did absolutely ZIP in the face of this predation, that not making a fuss was more important than doing the right thing and protecting them.
These are people for whom, some of us think, Jesus was content to die. I think they lived in a world of denial and self-inflicted illusion and preferred that to dealing with what was going on.
I thought then and think now that this was a sort of parish-wide pathology. EVERYONE was "enabling" Mr. Y. They had no clue whatsoever. I, myself, really didn't get much of a clue until I ended up doing clinical pastoral work with chemically dependent folks in the mid 70's. And even then, though I knew something was up at the church I mentioned in the previous post, I was really quite blown away by my bishop's denial and by the way those in t he Parish who know what was going on protected Fr. So-and_so. (How's this for pathology? I can't remember his name. I guess he's probably dead now.)
I will yield heartily on the naked jogger since he already had been convicted of indecent exposure. That just sounds as sick as can be to me, though. If I were his bishop, my inclination would be to permanently "inhibit" or "depose" (or whatever Catholics call it when you say a priest can't function as a priest any more - I don't know the Catholic law as well as I do the Episcopal law) this guy. He's a wacko. I'd also avoid getting in the way of the law in any way on him.
On the question of pshrinkology, I would venture to say there is a good reason and a bad reason for calling in the pshrinks. The good reason is that I think these guys present like sickoes, so the medical model comes to mind early. Who of our parents' generation -- the generation that knew about the groping confirmation class teacher -- had any idea, had ever spent any time studying or thinking about sexual perversion and what to do with such egregious and vicious behavior?
And that leads to the bad reason, which is that they threw up their hands in cowardice. It may still be the wry joke that the "operation" of the Holy Spirit which makes a bishop is "removal of the spine". But one of my favorite guys in the priesthood, now in his late 70's, reported that when he was in seminary the pseudo-Jansenist vogue was so much in control that seminarians were issued a kind of paddle device with which to tuck their shirts in their pants so they wouldn't end up, ah, stimulating themselves!
Yes. I'll give you out-there WEIRD on that. And that's probably a good indicator of the amount of thoughtful discussion that was given to sexual perversion in the clergy. Remember, in the laid-back Episcopal Church of the 70's we did not discuss clergy sexual misbehavior except to say,"Don't." A little practicum or some case studies would have been a great help, but as I later learned, all this was swept under the rug.
A member of the faculty for attempted (I THINK without success, but I don't know) predation among the women seminarians was later elected bishop -- and for the record he was Calvinist squared - HIGHLY, vocally, sneeringly anti-Arminian.
NEVER, NEVER, NEVER underestimate the ability of humans to deny. (and in people with "personality disorders" I often see what I call "malleable memory." They're not lying, not consciously, not any more. They seem to be able to reprogram their memory automatically. So they're VERY persuasive!) I KNOW that at least one of the bishops who consented to this guy's election knew about his activities.
As to the role of pshrinkology in dealing with bad guys, I kind of agree and kind of disagree. But I've probably had more practical training in "pastoral psychology" than most of these guys.
I guess an important thing I bring to the table in these matters is that I expect the vast majority of bishops to be incompetent -- at least to the extent that I am not surprised when they mess up. I don't see how anybody could do that job. And when I see how crappily run the Red Cross shelter where I worked after Katrina was, though of course that doesn't rise to this level-- or wht I consider the Byszantine power-struggles and ego-games I saw in a Sheriff's Office of about 20 deputies, well, I lower my expectations even more and more.
I guess this is a sort of miasma of background on what I bring to the table. Clearly you know more about the facts of many cases than I do (and I'm grateful for your knowledge.) But I think I "get" what happened (in the past -- why any of it continues baffles me, but why Mahoney is archbishop also baffles me) pretty well. They messed up and wussed out bigtime. That's what people do. Very few people have a clue.
The percentages you offer would be for reported abuse. Is it possible that sex abuse by Protestant pastors is just not reported as often? The breaking of the scandal in the Catholic Church brought forth many previously unreported charges against priests. I ask this because a friend who was molested as a teen in a Methodist church never reported it, and that is probably often the case.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
