A Priest Rape Survivor told to count his blessings…ok.

I was told by a few Christians that instead of being pissed off at God and Jesus for all the wrongs done to me by those claiming to be followers of theirs, to count my blessings. The gist goes…If I count my blessings and then count the wrongs…the blessings will far rise above the wrongs.

So I took a few days to ponder this weighty question. Here is my answer:

First let me quantify something here. Even though I hate God and Jesus….it is NOT the kind of God and Jesus I read about and believe in somewhere deep down inside of me…it is the ones those whom Jesus said of: “For many shall call themselves by my name, but their hearts and minds are far from my teachings.”…that I do NOT accept nor will I EVER bow my knee down to. I do love the teachings of Jesus Christ.as I do all great teachers of peace, love, hope, charity..though I do have a problem with some of them, I believe it is those teachings in the bible that ring wrong with me…that were changed by Constantine and the council of hackers whom produced the first bible for use. So I do not really pay attention to them.

But what gets me about this story of this guy named Jesus…without all the extraneous bullshit…like the virgin birth, etc…was his core principle teaching and commandments (with my own revision because I truly believe that the original Hebrew translation…which was in the first King James but subsequently taken out stated: We made them in our image, male and female we made them like unto us. This would mean that there HAS to be a male and a female God…for a male God cannot make a female…it is not in his likeness, nor can a female God make a male…it is not in her likeness):

Love the Lord your God and Goddess with all of your heart and soul, and the second is like it…love your neighbor as you do yourself. On these two commands should hang all the laws.

Yet I am going to combine in judging my list here of the blessings and wrongs by both standards…mine and what these Christians tell me their God and Jesus are all about. I am going to use the bible too as a guide and what it says to make my list.

So here goes.

BLESSINGS:
1. My two sons top this list. Joshua and Austin are my most important blessings. Even though they were taken away from me by their cruel mothers and an evil system designed to destroy fathers for the sake of a buck….the two biggest blessings in my life are Joshua Michael LaFerriere-Fifer and Austin LaFerriere. There is a LOT of things I would have changed…but the birth of my two beautiful sons….nope.

2. My loving and caring “family” and friends. I have a lot of brothers and sisters from other mothers. They are much more blood to me than my own blood relations. Most of them are also survivors of the evil that I too went through. Most of them were raped, beaten, abused, by either a religious person or a supposedly loving family member. We all have survived some of the worst horrors, some of the most brutal degradations done to a child or a teenager. Yet we have somehow survived without becoming the evil that has tried it’s hardest to destroy us. We are good, kind, loving souls with generous hearts. We love each other because we have experienced the same things in life. We survived through horrendous ordeals to come to the point we are today, and we offer each other things that NO ONE has EVER offered us in our lives before…true love, without exception or condition….not based on a perverted, evil concept of love…if you want to call what these people did to us love…..we offer each other support and acceptance….and we stand tall together…when one of us is falling into another Dark Night of the Soul…where we feel no hope.

My true friends and family are a blessing to me.

3. My love and my skills as a nature photographer are a blessing to me. The fact that I can wander around in a forest, taking pictures of all the beauty I see around me, and then able to share it…well that is a blessing to me. The reality to me, that I can go anywhere in a forest and not feel fear of it? That I have admired the stars far too long to be afraid of the dark? To be able to say that I am NOT an evil person because I have actually had wildlife come right up to me and let me pet them? Or take pics of them? Yeah if I were evil….then they would NOT come near me. One thing I have learned from tramping in the woods and being around peoples pets…animals can tell when someone is evil…VERY RARELY have I EVER had an animal react strangely around me…or in fear of me…and that was more dogs whom were abused and are afraid of EVERYONE.

But my photography also blesses me because it brings me incredible peace and joy. In the forest I have no real fear…except for humans…so through my photography and being outdoors…it is a blessing.

4.  Music. Next to my photography, music to me is a blessing.

5. That I am even alive is a blessing. I think about all the times I should be dead. From almost drowning because of my stupidity at Bow Lake when I was 16, to that murdering rapist whom picked me up and drugged me and I woke up to raping me in the back of his RV, to my dedicated drug overdoses, especially when I dissolved all those pills in that glass of vodka, drank it….if it were not for that girl showing up that night…and knowing what to do….I would be dead. Or the other suicide attempts where I should be dead? The fact that I am still even alive…is sort of a blessing one would say. They would say I am here for a reason…if I tried to kill myself like this or survived these things….but hey…..look into the curse section too lol.

Well that is about all I can really think of for blessings. I mean hey…I am really trying…you know…even though I do go starving at least I do eat….or even though I am homeless…I have a friend whom is letting me crash on her couch til next week…but I cannot stay any longer as it would NOT be fair to her….it is my responsibility and if I cannot afford to live in my own place…then I gotta go live in my tent until I do. The biggest problem is security deposits…and anyone whom knows me…thinks that Catholic Charities is going to help me? After what I say about their Pedophile Pimps? Not in this lifetime.

Now honestly lets look at the negatives:

CURSES:

1. Even though my sons are the greatest blessings in my life….their mothers have been the greatest curses of my life. To have done to me what was done to me at the hands of their mothers…should be illegal. To have done to me what was done to me by Holly Hepp of the CPS in Ohio…she should be in prison for the rest of her life so she can never harm another father or their children ever again. Yet I am made out to be the one whom is wrong, the one to blame, the evil one, the one whom would rape his own sons or abuse them as Holly Hepp said to me.

No one can seem to understand the Catch-22 I am in here with my soul over this..as well as my life. Sure with Josh I got to be with him maybe a total of two months after his birth, but with Austin, hell I haven’t even been able to tell him I love him. Not even kiss him. Nothing. So here it is…I think about them and it destroys me. So I try to put them out of my mind to retain my sanity and it is even more of a curse on me…because what kind of father am I to not want to think about my sons? I love looking at their pictures, they bring me joy, but they also bring me incredible pain, because of all the loss…and then I hide the pic for a while so I do not have to look at them and then again condemn myself for it because…what kind of loving, caring father does this?

2. I guess I am supposed to consider being raped by a priest, to have my soul destroyed and taken from me and all the living hell I went through and been through because of it…and because of now standing up about it and demanding the Pedophile Pimps…hell anyone whom participated in these evils against us…be put where they belong…in prison….is a BLESSING? OK about the ONLY blessing I can consider coming from this is the fact I made some beautiful friends and family from it. Otherwise ANYONE whom got raped by a priest…or by any pastor, minister or supposed Holy Person…..would consider it a curse and evil and a HUGE NEGATIVE.

3. How about that scumbag whom picked me up hitch-hiking and drugged and raped me? Nope…I sure would NOT consider that a blessing…even in disguise!! Why did you NOT just kill me that day and get it done and over with?

4. The last scumbag, whom picked me up hitch-hiking….showed me those gay books, would NOT take no for an answer…drove down the dirt road before the Gloucester bridge and in MY MIND I was about to be raped again when he pulled out his knife. Well I guess being arrested when I flagged down that cop car and told him what happened, and the scumbag jerk being in the back seat of that car, and then pressing charges against me for assault with a deadly weapon, attempted armed robbery etc…well that is supposed to be a blessing too?

5.  My blood family turning their backs on me. Ok let me get this straight. Was I a problem kid? Freaking right I was. Did I steal cigs from my parents to smoke? Yuppers. Did I steal a check from my dad, cash it, bought a carton of cigs? Yuppers. I believe those were really my worse crimes. Yeah I skipped school….but hey….ya know? Did I steal porn mags from the local book store and sell them to my friends? Guilty! I wonder how many of us actually did this as kids? I know at least my older brother used to steal cigs and drink and smoke dope…but hey that was him…..the freaking hypocrite…and oh yeah…he did have a chance to get his girlfriend knocked up at such a young age….but hey I don’t have all the facts to judge him…but even though he does not have all the facts…he can judge me.

Yet in my older brothers eyes….that made me Hitler…hell that made me worse than Hitler.

When my life fell apart after the priest rape, or anything else…it did not matter to any of them….I was the black sheep of the family…well the ONLY one whom it mattered to was my father and mother…..and I damn well know my father…loved me and so did my mother. But to my brothers and sister…I am still the evil black sheep of the family, without one redeeming quality, bound for hell….so I got that going for me.

I ALWAYS thought that family…blood family…though they could get pissed off at the wrongs you did….unless you truly were a rapist, a murderer, etc….but come on…for this shit????? They were supposed to at least never disown you for this kind of crap. So yeah…I would consider the loss of my family…though I did wrong…this was NOT deserving….and I consider it a major negative. Yeah my older self righteous brother thinks I am such a Hitler that I should be banned from any family reunions that he may be at….and have me arrested if I decide to come. Gotta love older brothers like that. Should I BELIEVE what my mother used to say about him to me…how he was such a defender and protector of me when I was sick, had all those operations and was blind for a while because I had to wear eye patches? Nah.

6. Donohue and the whole Catholic Church. THEY ARE A CURSE TO ME. Need I say more? Cardinals like Timothy Dolan, George Pell, Donald Wuerl, Justin Rigali, Bernard Law, Roger Mahony and the whole lot of them…they are a curse not only to me…but to all mankind. They preferred to protect their pedophile priests over us whom were being raped and abused by them….and became Pedophile Pimps. They then became LYING PEDOPHILE PIMPS. when they all signed those Promise to Protect Pledge to Heal charters, the Dallas Charter and all the Charters with the United Nations on children’s rights. They became LYING PEDOPHILE PIMPS when they PROMISED to help us victims…then attacked us at every chance they could, saying they wanted to beat us with baseball bats, or we were to blame for our own rapes, or we were the seducers of these disgusting scumbag rapists. Or we are liars, gold diggers out looking for a payday. Or how we are Anti-Catholic bigot scum for daring to challenge them. Yeah this whole thing is a curse to me, a double edged sword.

For if I walk away…I am no better, hell I am even worse than they are. See I have a soul, I have a conscious…something people like Dolan, Donohue, Law and the rest do not have…I feel real pain when a victim comes to me with their story, or I read their stories. I feel real pain when I see what the scumbag Pedophile Pimps and their buddies are doing to us…when all we want is justice and healing…all they give us is more pain and suffering. Well they are a curse…and they deserve to be cursed.

I could no sooner walk away from this, or helping others whom were harmed by these scumbags as I could live without breathing. But it is a curse, a double curse…because this is also destroying what is left of my soul…..for my soul cannot take this evil much longer.

7. Christianists. Always telling me what to do…be like them!!! What? A bigoted, self righteous, hate filled scumbag? Well thanks but no thanks…you people have instilled enough hate in my heart for you that you make it almost impossible to do what your own Jesus tells you to do….love thy neighbor as thyself….for if I do like these Christianists do…I could rape a child, cover it up and say….oh I did not know it was a crime…and even if it is…..you should just forgive and turn the other cheek.

I also love their hatred towards women, gays, etc….They demonstrate to me the truth when Jesus said…Many shall call themselves by my name but their hearts and minds are far from my teachings.

I seem to attract these psycho, freak Christianists in my life in droves…why am I such a magnet for these psychos? Oh…it is because I tell the truth about them and it pisses them off.

8. MY LIFE OF ABJECT POVERTY. Oh Jesus and God….I am supposed to count as a blessing the abject poverty I have lived through in my life eh? Now wait a minute….I thought you guys were supposed to bless good people and curse bad people. That you all slammed these religious holy people living off the fat of the land? That you were supposed to punish the bad and reward the good. Oh I haven’t been being good just for the reward….like most of those Christianists attempt to portray they do…but fail miserably….I’ve done good because it is the right thing to do. Besides…that Spirit that is inside of me? Each and every time I claim I must be evil because of all the evil things that happen to me……it says NO I AM GOOD AND NOT EVIL. Yet again…in the bible, it says…As you sow…so shall you reap.

So hey…not to brag….but I have sowed a lot of good things…some incredible things….so how come????

I tried and tried to sell my photography…I do not want a hand out…I want a hand up. Yet nada for 7 years. I bust my ass to work and I do not deserve any pay for it? While your religious leaders basically sit on their asses, raping children, covering up the rapes of children, murdering children and burying them in septic systems…..and do all kinds of other evils…then go to their church on Sunday and you forgive them for all their evil…but you still shit on us? Oh and how rich do they have to be? Before some of that trickles down to us? They do not earn their pay…but you sure give it to them in stacks of $100s!!!

I am supposed to bow down and worship this type of God and his Son? REALLY? I am supposed to be grateful? I am supposed to count abject poverty where at the end of the month…like the last two weeks…I am lucky to eat one meal a day? While those fat pigs whom raped us and covered up the rapes of us look like they have not missed a meal in decades? Oh and then if I bitch about it…not only does that mean I am an ungrateful little prick….I get shoved deeper into poverty to see what it is like to have even less? I am supposed to thank you and love you for this? When I see you barely lift a finger to help me? But you sure the HELL lift your big fat hands to make those whom did these evils to us…not want for ANYTHING?

Yeah abject poverty…now I consider that a real BLESSING….not!!!

7.  That I am even alive. I have suffered so damn much. Jesus and God must think I am Superman times two. They really must. Look at all the loss I have suffered…if I look at it…my life is the life of Job in a way. Trouble is….there is a saying in the bible that goes…Suffer the children that they may come unto me. REALLY?

Unrelenting suffering is a way to make someone come to you? Raping them is a way to make them come unto you? Forcing them to live in abject poverty is the way to make someone come to you? Taking away their children and giving them to their evil mothers…that too is how you make someone come to you?

Listen bozos…I’ve tried….oh how I’ve tried…to come to you. I have begged you, I have screamed at you, I have threatened you, I have cried to you, I have pleaded with you…to help me…to show me God and Jesus Christ that YOU are worthy…of my love and faith…but you have NOT SHOWN ME ANY OF THIS!!!! You keep saying to have faith? Faith in what? That one day you are going to find that I have suffered enough? That I have lived in abject poverty, loss and suffering enough? When will that be please? I sure would LOVE to pencil it in on my calender. That I have been denied justice for the crimes done to me? Your sure did punish the living shit out of me when I broke into that hotel room and stole the wallet from the car. You sure punished the living shit out of me with a five year prison term over that utter and complete bullshit over my son Josh. You are even punishing the shit outta me for standing up to Pig Face Donohue.

So which is it Bozos? Do you truly hate evil like you say? God…you say you cannot stand the sight of evil. Jesus…you say it would be better for you to tie a huge millstone around your neck and throw yourself into the deepest of lakes than to harm a single hair on the head of a child.

Seems though….you do the exact opposite. You punish the good and you reward the evil.

Again…I am supposed to love you, follow you, bend my knee to you? Be like those whom proclaim to follow you and then do all manners of evil against humanity…and then claim they are doing it in your names and then you do not punish them….like you promised to do…but you sure the FUCK punish us when we stand up and fight it…like you supposedly tell us to do. Do you not tell us to fight this evil? Oh wait…I guess there is a caviat to this rule eh?

Those whom do fight this evil will be destroyed…is that not what you said? We whom fight this evil will be murdered, thrown into prison, slaughtered and butchered????

Wow… now you are making me wonder….why should I not join the bad guys if this is what you are going to do and allow to be done to the good guys. I thought God and Jesus were supposed to defend the righteous, to fight on our side…but hey…look honestly and realistically at it…if they are real…man are you guys dropping the ball.

So I would say essentially though my life is a blessing…it is more of a curse. I have been made to suffer some of the most evil things that can be done to another…and still to this day…I am still suffering.

Put it bluntly there God and Jesus…do I want to be rich? Yeah…I do not want to ever worry about putting a roof over my head, or food in my stomach…or wait until my clothes totally disintegrate before I can spend 5 bucks on a used pair of pants. I want to give my sons some beautiful things. I want to help many others whom have been harmed by your followers. I want to set up a foundation that truly and honestly helps the religious abuse survivor with their needs….but I guess this is wrong to ask for in your eyes isn’t it?

Because God and Jesus….you would rather make those religious freaks all fat and sassy and rich….than the children you supposedly love…but I guess we are the ones whom are supposed to suffer for truly wanting to follow you. While the hypocrite Pharisee and Sadducee get all the help they need from you. Oh wait a minute…I forgot….

I am not supposed to blame you…I am not supposed to blame YOU God or YOU Jesus for turning your backs on us….I am supposed to blame Satan and his followers….I guess this then all goes to prove…that when it comes time to fighting Satan and his followers….you arm your combatants with nothing and expect them to do everything for you…but give them NOT one drop of help…because I guess that would be messing with our free will again…wouldn’t it? Our free will to be raped, destroyed and live in abject poverty……because you deem that more fit for us…than you do for the scum whom did this to us…in YOUR names.

SO IN CLOSING…I COULD POST MORE NEGATIVES…BUT HEY THIS IS MORE THAN ENOUGH…TO SAY TO THOSE CHRISTIANS WHOM SAY IF I COUNT MY BLESSINGS AND MY CURSES I WOULD FIND THAT MY LIFE IS MUCH MORE BLESSED THAN CURSED….YOU’RE WRONG.

THEN AGAIN…MAYBE YOU CHRISTIANISTS WHOM SAY THIS TO ME…CAN PROVIDE ME WITH WHAT I NEED….CAUSE YOUR GOD YOU WANT ME TO FOLLOW SURE ISN’T. AGAIN…..I DO NOT WANT A HAND OUT…I WANT A HAND UP.

 

Time has come for all good people to take a stand!!

We arrest, we try, we convict and we imprison and execute, people whom rape children and murder children. This is the supposed norm of what we do to those whom prey on children. Yet we allow one religious organization, to rape children, to murder children, to destroy children with impunity, without going after them, without arresting them, without prosecuting them, without imprisoning them or executing them in the most horrible and gruesome fashion we can think of, because when you rape or murder a child, this is exactly what you deserve….but hey…the

UNHOLY, ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH OF PEDOPHILE PIMP LEADERS, PEDOPHILE PRIESTS, PSYCHO ABUSIVE NUNS, AND FREAK PARISHIONERS WHOM LOVE THESE PEOPLE WHOM RAPE AND MURDER THEIR OWN CHILDREN ARE ABOVE THE FUCKING LAW.

We have overwhelming, concrete, irrefutable proof, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if this evidence was heard by a jury, these scumbags would be convicted of their crimes….that the leaders of the Unholy Roman Catholic Church of Pedophiles…have moved rapist priests from parish to parish, state to state, country to country and are STILL DOING THIS TO THIS VERY DAY.

We have overwhelming, concrete, irrefutable proof, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that if this evidence was heard by a jury, these scumbags would be convicted of their crimes, that these leaders and others of the Roman Catholic Church have in fact murdered children. We have the bodies and the graves to prove it. Yet again, the Unholy Roman Catholic Church seems to be above the law and not one of these evil leaders have every been arrested nor prosecuted for their crimes.

IT IS TIME, FOR ALL THE GOOD PEOPLE, THE GOOD, DECENT, HONEST, MORAL PEOPLE OF THE WORLD TO GATHER TOGETHER AND JUST LIKE IN THE MOVIE NETWORK….SAY WE ARE MAD AS HELL AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANY LONGER!!!

WE NEED REAL PEOPLE TO FINALLY SAY…ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, WE WILL NOT ALLOW ONE MORE OF OUR CHILDREN TO BE RAPED, TO BE ABUSED, TO BE MURDERED BY THESE SCUM OF THE UNHOLY ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.

WE AS A PEOPLE, NEED TO COME TOGETHER, TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN FROM THESE EVIL, SOULESS, MONSTERS WHOM HIDE BEHIND RELIGIOUS ROBES….AND WE MUST DESTROY THEM AS A PEOPLE. WE MUST TAKE A STAND.

WE MUST STAND UP FOR OUR CHILDREN…WE MUST PLACE THE LIVES OF OUR CHILDREN FIRST, ABOVE THESE RELIGIOUS, SADISTIC, PSYCHOTIC FREAKS. WE MUST DESTROY COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY THESE PEOPLE OF SATAN, WHOM DESTROY LIVES.

ONLY UNTIL WE HAVE CARDINALS SUCH AS TIMOTHY DOLAN, BERNARD LAW, JUSTIN RIGALI, ROGER MAHONY, DOLAND WUERL, POPE EMERITUS BENEDICT AND ALL THE OTHERS, THEIR BODIES ROTTING WHILE SWINGING ON ROPES, HANGED IN FRONT OF THEIR VATICAN AND IN ST PETERS SQUARE FOR ALL TO SEE….THAT WE WILL NO LONGER PUT UP WITH THEIR POPES, CARDINALS, BISHOPS, ARCHBISHOPS, PRIESTS AND NUNS…RAPING OUR CHILDREN, MURDERING OUR CHILDREN AND THINKING THEY ARE ABOVE THE LAW BECAUSE THEY ARE THE LEADERS OF THIS PSYCHOTIC RELIGIOUS SECT.

WE EXECUTE CHILD RAPISTS AND MURDERERS ALL THE TIME, WE IMPRISON FOR LIFE EVIL, SOULESS, MORALESS, SCUMBAGS LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME.

WELL IT IS TIME TO START DOING THE SAME THING WITH THE PEDOPHILE PIMPS, PRIESTS, NUNS AND THE SCUM OF THE UNHOLY ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH.

Unholy Silence – The book that launched a Royal Commission, even before it was published by Father Kevin Lee

Unholy Silence –
The book that launched a Royal Commission, even before it was published
by Father Kevin Lee

From the link: http://unholysilence.com/

A Catholic priest exposes systematic cover-ups of pedophilia and predatory homosexuality in his own Church

Father Kevin’s claim to have forced a Royal Commission into sexual abuse of children in Australia is not without foundation. He had been agitating about it for over  a decade. And if you analyse the chronology of events, Father Kevin’s admission on Channel 7’s 6pm news on April 31st was the catalyst that sparked media interest into why a successful priest would commit sacerdotal suicide by telling everyone he had been living a lie for over a year.

As Father Kevin told the journalists who were sent into a feeding frenzy over the discovery that a proclaimed celibate priest was actually married, he did it because of his frustration that his constant complaints of pedophilia and sexual abuse among members of the Church were being continually denied or concealed by both police and Church hierarchy. “It is not possible to live a double life” he was told by his Bishop, “there is too much scrutiny of priests”. So he set out to show how it is done.

He wanted to prove how priests can appear to be living celibately but can actually be living a total lie.

This book will explain how, after six years of preparation and twenty years of ordained ministry, Father Kevin Lee gradually came to realize that the Church he was born into, was not as it appeared.

It took him a while to recognise that the reason the church expects total loyalty and intellectual ascent to all its dogmas and practices is not entirely altruistic.

The justification for its demand of abstemious living was to keep the church cheap to run and its workers totally obedient.

For many years Fr Kevin was happy to make the total sacrifice of his sexuality “for the sake of the Kingdom” but events that he witnessed caused him to question the institution that he had blindly promised obedience to for all his adult life.

His decision to record these events and eventually allow their publication takes great courage and resulted in his expulsion from the Church he had served diligently for almost a quarter of a century.  The termination of his priestly ministry sparked a wave of allegations of abuses and cover ups that eventuated in Prime Minister Gillard issuing the call for a full Royal Commission into sexual abuse in Australia which began on 13th February 2012 and is expected to continue for at least three years.

Father Kevin had intimate knowledge of fellow priests who were living a celibate lie.
But everywhere he turned within the Church and outside it, he was being told to “keep quiet” and “don’t create a scandal”.

No one wanted to know.

Fr Kevin comes to appreciate that the unholy silence which muzzles the priests from revealing the depraved actions of fellow priests can have a detrimental effect on the whole church. The fear of ‘causing scandal’ is less damaging than the emotional and psychological destruction these abuses were causing in the lives of the trusting young people who oftentimes came to priests for help.

The Church would have you believe that the number of offending clerics is small and not out of proportion with other professions but these stories and Fr Kevin’s personal testimony will challenge that blanket statement and as a result, question the relevance of priestly celibacy.

This book will unsettle your own religious convictions as you read the painfully recorded details of the many incidents of abuse and attempts by the hierarchy to cover up or compensate the abused victims of pretend priests.

As the Catholic hierarchy flounders with diminishing numbers of priests and depleting income sources it wrestles to retain the respect and reverence that it once demanded of its adherents.

Fr Kevin Lee hopes this book will force the Catholic Church members to readdress the issue of mandatory priestly celibacy by calling the Church to greater accountability and openness into the secret lives of priests..

To buy the book Unholy Silence click on the following link:
http://shop.unholysilence.com/Unholy-Silence-downloadable-version-UHS1.htm

L.A. Priest Blamed for Legacy of Pain

Ten, including relatives, say the Jesuit molested them. He denies it and has not been charged.

December 14, 2002|Glenn F. Bunting | Times Staff Writer

During 16 years at Loyola High School, Father Jerold Lindner was admired as an energetic teacher exceptionally devoted to his students. Superiors lauded him as the model of “a Christian educator.” A colleague in the English department nominated him as “chairman for life.”

Others outside the school say they knew a different Lindner. Ten men and women portray the Jesuit as a molester who haunted their childhoods, abusing them on Sundays after Mass, during holiday gatherings and on Catholic family camping trips — nearly always while wearing his clerical collar.

These encounters allegedly began in the 1950s, continued through the 1970s, when Lindner was entering the priesthood, and persisted into the 1980s, while he was teaching at Loyola High, a private, all-boys prep school west of downtown Los Angeles.

Jesuit leaders say they first learned about Lindner’s past a decade ago, when his brother told them that the priest had sexually abused three nieces, a nephew and a younger sibling. After sending Lindner for a psychiatric evaluation, Jesuit superiors deemed the allegations not credible and put him back in the classroom.

Fresh charges surfaced in 1997, when two brothers asserted in a lawsuit that Lindner sodomized them years earlier during weekend retreats in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Jesuits then removed the priest from Loyola and negotiated a secret $625,000 settlement with the brothers. As before, Lindner’s superiors did not inform law enforcement authorities, parents or teachers about the allegations.

In a sworn deposition, Lindner denied ever abusing anyone. In a statement to The Times, he said: “I have devoted my life to helping people, and I insist that the accusations against me are not true.” He said the Catholic sex-abuse crisis has “created an atmosphere where people like me are presumed guilty until proven innocent.”

Lindner, 58, has never been criminally charged, and Loyola officials say they know of no allegations that he molested students or other members of the high school community. He is under investigation by L.A. County sheriff’s detectives and the district attorney’s office.

The priest’s accusers depict a man who began molesting when he was a child and continued to do so even as he soldiered through the rigorous Jesuit rituals of indoctrination. Family members and victims kept quiet and sometimes defended the priest, a Times investigation found.

Lindner’s superiors, when confronted with explosive accusations, tried to keep them “internal to the Society of Jesus,” as one Loyola administrator put it in a memo.

In interviews and legal documents, the 10 men and women have said they were molested while growing up in Los Angeles County, the San Francisco Bay Area and suburban Phoenix. Eight agreed to be identified by name in this article.

Several said Lindner ordered them to lie still while he sexually abused them. Afterward, they said, he called them “dirty” and threatened to harm them if they told anyone.

Four of Lindner’s accusers said they were so traumatized that they tried to commit suicide as teenagers. Others reported suffering failed marriages, depression, flashbacks and a loss of faith.

Many said they had remained silent until now because of a deep sense of shame and because they feared retaliation by Lindner. The alleged victims said they are angry — at the priest and at the Jesuits.

“We all want him behind bars, where he belongs,” said Tamara Roehm, 35, of Lancaster, one of Lindner’s nieces.

The priest’s mother, 80, said recently that the accounts of victims within her own family had persuaded her that Lindner preyed on young people.

“I know that Jerry needs help, and so do his victims,” Isabelle Lindner said in an interview at her Phoenix-area home. “If he wasn’t a priest and didn’t have the Jesuits standing behind him, I think he would be in jail.”

Lindner now lives in the Bay Area town of Los Gatos at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center, a picturesque retreat overlooking the Santa Clara Valley.

The Jesuits say they have barred him from teaching or ministering to the public, but he is free to travel and tutor seminarians and has collected a living allowance from the order.

In preparing this report, The Times reviewed internal Jesuit records, numerous letters Lindner wrote over two decades, and documents related to the lawsuit by the two brothers, including a sworn deposition of Lindner on June 10, 1998.

Loyola High administrators last month informed parents and alumni of the allegations against Lindner for the first time. They took the step after learning The Times was preparing an article on the priest.

In a Nov. 18 letter to parents and alumni, Father Robert T. Walsh, Loyola’s president, said administrators learned of sexual-abuse accusations against Lindner in 1997 and “immediately relieved him of his teaching and school duties.” The letter made no mention of the 1992 allegations. Walsh and other Loyola officials declined to answer questions about Lindner.

A top-ranking Jesuit said no one at the high school noticed any inappropriate behavior by the priest.

“We never had complaints at Loyola High,” said Father Thomas H. Smolich, who as head of the California Province oversees Jesuits in four Western states and Hawaii. “If you look at Jerry’s professional career there, it is very successful.”

Smolich, who began his six-year term as provincial in 1999, acknowledged that the Jesuits did not notify authorities of the accusations against Lindner in 1992 or in 1997. He said that he could provide no explanation and that Jesuit records shed no light on the matter.

“There are things I wish we had done differently,” Smolich said. “If the allegations were reported today, we would contact appropriate law enforcement authorities and respond pastorally to victims.”

Early Aspiration

Jerold William Lindner was born Nov. 16, 1944, in Columbus, Ohio, into a devout Catholic family. Priests and nuns were frequent visitors to the home.

Before entering elementary school, Jerold announced that he wanted to be a priest, his mother recalled. She said his interest in the clergy never waned.

The family moved to Arizona when Jerold was 6. He served as an altar boy, joined the Boy Scouts and became an avid chess player. A gifted student, he ranked in the top four of his 115-student class during several semesters at Brophy College Preparatory, the all-boys Jesuit high school in Phoenix. Years later, he scored in the “very superior” range on an IQ test.

Members of Lindner’s family said fellow students picked on him. As a freshman, he was forced to kneel on the hot asphalt at school for hours and suffered severe burns. He often came home with stains on his white school shirts, the result of classmates pelting him with oranges.

After graduating from Brophy in June 1962, Lindner applied to become a Jesuit. The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 by St. Ignatius Loyola and is the largest religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, with about 21,000 members worldwide. Candidates undergo years of rigorous training, and members of the society must observe strict vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.

Lindner’s application was rejected by the order, according to members of his family. They said the Jesuits told him he needed to broaden his life. So he took a job as a courier for a title company, became leader of a Boy Scout troop in Phoenix and dated for the first time.

He reapplied to the Jesuits a year later and was turned down again, this time with the suggestion that he move out of his parents’ home, family members said.

Lindner enrolled at Loyola University in Los Angeles, a Jesuit institution, in the fall of 1963. He was accepted for Jesuit training the following June and sent to the Sacred Heart Novitiate in Los Gatos for two years to study the order’s traditions, rules and expectations.

Early on, Jesuit leaders detected psychological problems.

After Lindner returned to Loyola University in 1968 to earn his bachelor’s degree in English, a routine evaluation found that he “needs emotional and psychological maturing and stabilizing.”

In the early 1970s, he sought therapy for “depression and poor self-image” on the advice of his Jesuit spiritual advisor and suffered “bouts of panic attacks,” say personnel records and psychiatric reports.

Lindner’s aberrant behavior dated to childhood, his mother said. She said she caught her son, at age 10, inappropriately touching his 5-year-old sister in bed. Over the years, she has defended her son and rejected allegations from relatives that he abused them. She now says she has come to believe the accusations.

The sister, Kathy McEntire, also once defended her brother, but now says he sexually abused her for years.

“It started with me,” said McEntire, 53, struggling to fight back tears at her kitchen table in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa.

She alleged that Lindner knelt beside her bed at night and molested her, a practice she said continued until she was about 9. “He got bolder and bolder over time, as he figured out what he could get away with,” she said.

Assigned to Teach

In 1969, the Jesuits sent Lindner to earn a master’s degree in English at St. Louis University in Missouri, where he was active in an urban Boy Scout troop. The next year, he was assigned to teach at St. Ignatius High School in San Francisco.

He stayed in the Bay Area more than a decade, enrolling at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley in 1973 and being ordained as a priest in 1976. He returned to St. Ignatius and taught English there from 1976 to 1982. He was also Scoutmaster for an Oakland troop and accompanied boys on weekend camping and ski trips.

During these years, Lindner allegedly molested six children, according to sworn testimony and interviews.

One of them was McEntire’s son, Trevor. He said Lindner molested him on about 20 occasions, beginning when he was 5, during family visits to the Jesuit residence in Berkeley and when the priest made holiday trips to Arizona. He said the abuse lasted until he was 9.

“He touched me a lot,” Trevor McEntire, now 32, said of his uncle. “I tolerated it, because I didn’t know any better. I kind of blame myself for not telling anybody.”

Kathy McEntire said her son told her only recently about the abuse. She said it was devastating to learn that the same man she accuses of molesting her more than 40 years ago had allegedly violated her son. “I’m just coming to grips with this,” she said. “I am so sick and disgusted I can’t stand it,” she said.

Lindner met other alleged victims while volunteering as a spiritual advisor for the Christian Family Movement, a worldwide lay organization of Catholic couples. Lindner said Mass in private homes, heard confessions, attended monthly parent meetings and accompanied families on weekend retreats.

The two brothers who sued the Jesuits said Lindner sexually assaulted them during Memorial Day and Labor Day weekend camp-outs in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1975, when they were 5 and 7.

The alleged assaults are detailed in reports by Lynn E. Ponton, a professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco and expert in sexual abuse who was retained by the brothers’ lawyer.

Ponton said the brothers told her that Lindner sodomized them and forced them to perform oral sex on four occasions in the woods. In one incident, the priest allegedly abused the two boys in a tent.

One of them, Will Lynch of San Francisco, now 35, said in an interview that Lindner coerced him to enter the tent by threatening to harm his younger brother. “Even at age 7, I knew it was wrong. I didn’t want to be there,” Lynch said. “When he grabbed me, I remember thinking, ‘I’m not getting out of this.’ ”

Lynch’s brother declined to be interviewed.

In the deposition, Lindner confirmed attending weekend camp-outs but said he had no recollection of meeting the brothers.

Will Lynch said the abuse had shattering effects. He had nightmares for years, suffered from depression and alcohol abuse, and twice attempted suicide, he said. “Many times I thought of driving down to L.A. and confronting Father Jerry,” he said. “I wanted to exorcise all of the rage and anger and bitterness he put into me…. You can’t put into words what this guy did to me. He stole my innocence and destroyed my life.”

Sworn Depositions

Two women who accuse Lindner of molesting them when they were girls in the Bay Area also said they have had difficulty recovering. Both described the alleged molestations in sworn depositions as part of the Lynches’ suit and in interviews with The Times.

Krista Nemechek, a 32-year-old special education teacher in the Bay Area, said she was 7 when Lindner grabbed her in a bedroom of an Oakland home during a 1977 social gathering.

“I was wearing a dress,” Nemechek said. “He put me in this almost vise-grip of a hug. He pulled me so I was facing him, then he rubbed his hands up and down me. I remember him kissing me really passionately [and] moaning a little bit…. It just didn’t feel right in any way.”

In his deposition, Lindner said he had no recollection of Nemechek or the alleged incident.

Nemechek said the episode haunted her through adolescence. “I know he hurt a lot of people,” she said. “More than anything that happened to me, the hardest part is realizing that I could have done something.”

Debbie Lukas, 36, recalled meeting Lindner when he said Mass at her parents’ house in Oakland. Then 8, she “lit up” at the attention the priest showered on her, she said.

When she was 10, Lukas said, Lindner began making suggestive remarks and forcing deep, full-mouth kisses on her. One evening after dinner, she said, Lindner caught her alone in the basement of her home. She recalled hearing her mother’s footsteps on the kitchen floor above while the priest sexually assaulted her.

“He pushed me down on the bed. I was struggling to get away from him…. He was a big guy,” Lukas said. “I remember him covering my mouth. I could hardly breathe.”

Asked about Lukas’ allegation, Lindner said in his deposition: “I don’t remember doing this. I don’t think I did it.”

Lukas said she was despondent for years and still feels uncomfortable in her parents’ house. “I’ve had this torture all my life,” said Lukas, who runs an herbal-products business in Oregon. “I don’t trust authority. I don’t believe in God anymore…. It has shaped the foundation of who I am.”

Another of Lindner’s nephews says the priest molested him over several nights at a family reunion in Arizona during the 1979 Christmas season. The boy was 11 years old at the time.

“He was French-kissing me,” said the nephew, who spoke on condition that he not be named. “He was holding me tight, and he fondled me. It happened every night.”

In 1982, after eight years at St. Ignatius High, Lindner transferred to Loyola High and was named chairman of the English department.

Founded in 1865, Loyola is L.A.’s oldest Catholic school, occupying ivy-covered buildings on Venice Boulevard near Koreatown. Among the most competitive prep schools in the area, it has 1,096 students and 84 faculty and staff members.

At Loyola, Lindner expressed a preference for working with younger students. An evaluation stated: “Fr. Lindner was quite honest about his wish to teach frosh rather than seniors.”

In 1983, he wrote an acquaintance: “I am tutoring frosh — I don’t teach them, but I know about 110 of them now. I have a ‘hit’ list with their names and photos (a way to get to know their names). They are fun.”

Lindner organized numerous after-school activities that gradually became known as “Lindner clubs.” They included archery, backgammon, chess, Knights of FRP (a fantasy role-playing group) and remote-control car racing.

Loyola administrators praised his devotion to students. “I want to point out particularly that many of the students in your clubs would have no other avenue into the mainstream of the Loyola community were it not for your energy, ingenuity and organization,” Father Gordon Bennett, then the principal, wrote in October 1984.

Lindner served as an assistant Scoutmaster for Troop 1193 at St. Thomas the Apostle Church, near the Loyola campus.

And he reached out to a boy and girl he had met years earlier through the Christian Family Movement.

One of them was Debbie Lukas. Lindner sent the teenager romantic letters, calling her “my California beauty” and “the flame tree of my life” and mentioning that the residence hall at Loyola had “a place to put people up … (even you).”

Lindner also contacted Lukas’ mother, Mary Louise Taylor, and suggested that her 12-year-old son spend a weekend with him on the campus.

“I was so shocked,” said Taylor, adding that she declined.

In his deposition, Lindner described the invitation as “a joke.”

Visiting His Brother

Lindner’s move to Loyola made it easier to visit his older brother, Larry, then an LAPD patrol officer who lived in Lancaster with his family. During these visits, Father Lindner allegedly molested three nieces.

“He would hold your face, stare at you and then stick his tongue in your mouth,” said one niece, Susan Edens, now 32, who still lives in Lancaster. “I used to hate him coming over to our house, because I hated that kiss. It was horrid.”

Her sister, Tamara Roehm, said Jerold Lindner did the same thing to her many times.

Larry Lindner’s youngest daughter, Tiffany Swindler, said the priest sodomized her on three occasions when she was between 5 and 7.

“He was meaner the second time,” said Swindler, now 27. “He yelled a lot. He grabbed my hair harder than normal.” Afterward, she said, Father Lindner called her “dirty” and told her: “Bad things happen to little girls who open their mouths.”

Swindler and her father said that the priest molested the girl for the final time around Easter 1984. In separate interviews, they said Larry Lindner walked into the living room to find the priest playing with Tiffany while sexually aroused.

“I threw him out of my house,” Larry Lindner said. He urged his brother to seek treatment but did not report him to authorities.

“I trusted him,” Larry Lindner said. “I told him, ‘I’m not going to ruin your life or ruin your career. Just go get help.’ … I should have had him arrested right there. But he’s still my brother, and I did what I thought a brother should do.”

Larry Lindner said that until recently he was not aware of Swindler’s allegations that the priest had sodomized her.

Swindler said the abuse ceased when she was 8 but never stopped haunting her. She said she became sexually active at 11 and endured three broken marriages. Recently, she began undergoing therapy for depression.

“I hate him,” Swindler said of her uncle. “I hate the way he ruined my life.”

Larry Lindner retired from the LAPD in 1986, and the family moved to Oregon. In January 1992, his wife found Tiffany crying on the floor of their home after suffering flashbacks about the priest.

Larry Lindner said his daughter’s anguish made him so angry that he called Jesuit superiors to report his brother’s history of alleged sexual misconduct. Loyola’s then-principal, Father Eugene Growney, posted a memo on Feb. 3, 1992, informing the high school faculty and staff that Jerold Lindner had been placed on leave “for reasons internal to the Society of Jesus.”

Psychiatric Center

The Jesuits sent Lindner to St. Luke Institute in Maryland, a psychiatric center where Catholic clergymen accused of sexual abuse are evaluated and treated. Before going, Lindner solicited letters of support from family members. His mother and two sisters submitted five letters on his behalf to Jesuit superiors.

Isabelle Linder wrote that Larry Lindner could not be believed. “Father, they are all lies!” she said.

Kathy McEntire also supported Father Lindner. “I have been informed that one of the lies being made against my brother is that he also molested me when I was in fourth or fifth grade,” she wrote. “I can assure you that in no way is this true.”

Both women said in separate interviews that they knowingly provided false information in the letters. The mother said she was trying to help her son. McEntire said she wrote her letters under duress. “Mom said if all of us did not come forward … his career would be destroyed and he would get kicked out of the church,” she said.

A confidential St. Luke report that cleared the way for Lindner to return to teaching made several references to the family letters. The report said an examination of Lindner, who told the St. Luke staff that he had never abused anyone, found no sexual disorders or “significant risk factors.”

“We see no reason why Father Lindner should not return to his usual activities,” the report said. The psychiatrists at St. Luke closed with a recommendation that Lindner go on a low-fat diet.

Richard Sipe — a former Benedictine monk and expert on sexuality in the clergy who has served as a St. Luke board member — reviewed the eight-page report at The Times’ request. He described it as “deficient and biased,” and said: “They did not provide any kind of sexual history. They did not do any investigation. They simply took his word.”

The president of St. Luke, Father Stephen J. Rossetti, said he could not comment on Lindner’s case but that in general it is difficult to determine through psychological evaluation if someone is a molester. “We are doing a clinical evaluation based on the information we have, and it’s not easy work,” he said.

Lindner returned to Loyola High in fall 1992. He said in his deposition that Jesuit superiors and Loyola administrators never discussed his brother’s accusations with him. He resumed his teaching duties and continued to receive plaudits.

“I cannot begin to thank you enough for your phenomenal generosity and commitment,” Father Walsh wrote on Nov. 8, 1992, weeks after Lindner’s return.

Students dedicated the 1993 yearbook to Lindner, lauding him as “one of the most active and popular teachers at Loyola.”

From 1992 through 1995, he escorted Loyola students on three summer trips to Europe. In late 1996, he boasted in letters to friends that 33 Loyola students had signed up for the 1997 European tour, making it the largest ever.

Lindner later wrote to say that “an unspecified illness” forced him to miss the 1997 trip because foreign travel was “not medically recommended.” In fact, he was barred from the trip because new allegations of sexual abuse had surfaced.

The Lynch brothers, breaking their silence after two decades, filed their suit against the Society of Jesus in April 1997.

Their lawyer, Michael D. Meadows, said he had to pressure the Jesuits to remove Lindner from the classroom. “There was still the same reflexive response of circle the wagons, protect the priest and the institution, and ignore the interests of the kids,” he said.

Lindner was relieved of his teaching duties in late May 1997 and sent back to St. Luke that September. He spent nearly nine months there, receiving medical and psychological treatment for depression and low self-esteem brought on by “the trauma of these allegations,” a Jesuit superior said in a deposition.

In May 1998, Lindner returned to the Jesuit residence at Loyola on condition that he no longer teach.

In the deposition, he said he agreed to the restriction to spare the school a controversy. “It could possibly put the school in a bad light with publicity if this went public,” he said.

Lindner continued to serve with the Boy Scouts at St. Thomas the Apostle Church, near Loyola, records show. Father Dennis P. O’Neil, then pastor of the church, said he was never told about Lindner’s past. “I never heard a thing,” said O’Neil, now auxiliary bishop in the Diocese of San Bernardino.

In October 1998, the Society of Jesus reached a confidential settlement with the Lynch brothers. Documents show that the Jesuits paid $625,000. Among the conditions was a prohibition against publicizing the allegations. “There was no admission to anything, no attempt to apologize,” Will Lynch said. “The Jesuits’ attitude was, ‘Let’s settle this out.’ The only issue was how much.”

At Christmas 1999, Lindner visited his family in Arizona. His younger sister, McEntire, said she confronted him about the pain he had inflicted on his victims, herself included.

According to McEntire, Lindner acknowledged that he “may have crossed the line” in his conduct with one niece and with one nephew. He expressed no regret and offered no apologies, she said.

Freedom to Travel

Since he stopped teaching at Loyola, Lindner has enjoyed the freedom to travel and work as a language tutor with few restrictions. He earned a master’s degree in linguistics at San Jose State and spent several months in Paris immersing himself in French culture. He moved to the Jesuit residence in Culver City last year, teaching English to seminarians from developing countries.

In the fall of 2001, Lindner began teaching English as a second language at Cal State Dominguez Hills. The director of the program, Tony Costanzo, said the Jesuits never informed him of Lindner’s background. “Had I known that, I definitely would not have hired him,” he said.

Lindner was transferred to Sacred Heart in Los Gatos this August. At least five registered sex offenders have resided at the Jesuit center in recent years, including a priest and brother who were recently convicted of sexually abusing two mentally retarded men. In September, the Jesuits agreed to a settlement that will pay the two victims $7.5 million each.

The center is within walking distance of downtown Los Gatos, an upscale village in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Last month, anonymously posted fliers bearing a photo of Lindner appeared in the shopping district. “Warning,” they said. “Pedophile in our community.

Lindner is living under a set of written restrictions laid down by the order, said Smolich, the Jesuit provincial superior. He said Lindner is barred from teaching or ministering to children and cannot say Mass or hear confession in church.

“The world has changed in the last nine months,” Smolich said. “For Jerry’s sake and the public’s sake, we can’t be too careful.”

 

Man acquitted of beating of priest he said sexually abused him

http://www.wlsam.com/Article.asp?id=2488363&spid=

SAN JOSE, Calif. (WLS) – William Lynch, the California man who admitted he pummeled a priest who he said abused him as a boy, has been found not guilty of felony assault and elder abuse charges.

The jury of nine men and three women could not reach a verdict on a lesser charge of misdemeanor assault for the 2010 attack at a retirement home.

The jury began deliberations late Monday after hearing impassioned closing arguments from both sides.

The defense’s strategy had long been to prove to the jury that the wrong man was on trial. However, prosecutor Vicki Gemetti urged jurors to focus on the assault.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” she said in her closing arguments on Monday.

Lynch’s crusade for his own form of personal justice against the priest, Jerry Lindner, drew supporters to the courthouse in San Jose, Calif., during his nearly three-week trial. They carried signs that read “stop clergy sex abuse” and condemned the “pedophile playground” retirement community that is home to Lindner, who has had previous allegations against him.

Lynch testified last Friday that he visited Lindner with the intention of having the aging Jesuit sign a confession, but when the priest “looked up and leered” at Lynch in the same manner he did more than 35 years ago when he sexually abused him, Lynch said he ordered the priest to take off his glasses and hit him.

Lynch passed up a plea deal of one year in jail and instead chose to go to trial to publicly shame the man who he said haunted his memories for 35 years.

On a family camping trip 35 years ago, Lynch said he was brutally raped at age 7 by Lindner and was then forced to perform sex acts on his 4-year-old brother.

The boys kept their painful secret for years, long past the six-year statute of limitations California had in place at the time of the alleged crimes.

Lynch got his wish to see the priest in court, even if the tables were turned. Lindner was forced to testify, but a short time later the Jesuit invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The judge struck his testimony from the record.

During his short time on the stand, Lindner, now 67, told the court he remembered Lynch, but only as the man who attacked him at a Los Gatos, Calif., Jesuit retirement community where the priest has resided since 2001.

Lindner denied molesting Lynch and his younger brother on a camping trip to the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1974.

Lynch’s attorney declared the priest had perjured himself and even prosecutor Vicki Gemetti said in her opening statement that she expected Lindner to lie on the stand or say he didn’t remember certain events.

“The evidence will show [Lindner] molested the defendant all those years ago,” she said, but urged the jury to focus on Lynch’s attack.

Lynch’s case of alleged vigilante justice has attracted support from around the world and has shed light on a justice system many view as flawed.

Lynch and his brother were awarded $625,000 after filing a civil suit against Lindner in 1997. The priest was removed from active ministry and was moved to the Jesuit retirement community in 2001.

Lindner was named in two other abuse lawsuits, according to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

ABC Radio News Contributed To This Report

8 Ugly Sins of the Catholic Church

If pedophile payouts weren’t enough to convince you the Catholic leadership is often anything but moral, take a look at some of their other sins.

Did the Catholic Bishops wince last week when their leader, anti-contraception Cardinal Timothy Dolan, was exposed for paying pedophiles to disappear? One can only hope. After all, these are men who claim to speak for God. They have direct access to the White House, where they regularly weigh in on issues ranging from military policy to bioethics, and they expect us all to listen – not because of relevant expertise or elected standing, but because of their moral authority.

Ahem.

If pedophile payouts weren’t enough to convince you that this “moral” authority is often anything but moral, take a look at some of their other sins against compassion and basic decency.

1. Excommunicating doctors and nuns for saving lives. In 2009, a 27-year-old mom, pregnant with her fifth child, was rushed to a Phoenix hospital, St. Josephs, where her doctors said she would almost certainly die unless her pregnancy was aborted immediately. The nun in charge approved the emergency procedure, and the woman survived. The local bishop promptly excommunicated the nun. “There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child. But — and this is the Catholic perspective — you can’t do evil to bring about good. The end does not justify the means,” said Rev. John Ehrich, the medical ethics director for the Diocese of Phoenix.

How far are the Church authorities willing to take this “moral” logic? In Brazil last year, with Vatican backing, the Church excommunicated a mother and doctor for saving the life of a 9-year-old rape victim who was pregnant with twins. (At four months pregnant, the girl weighed 80 pounds.) Cardinal Giovanni Batista Re, who heads the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, said “life must always be protected.” Perhaps Mr. Batista Re can explain the Vatican’s 1,500-year tradition of “just war.”

2. Protecting even non-Catholic sex-offenders against child victims. As we have seen, the moral priorities of the bishops are laid naked when they decide who to excommunicate and who not. The doctor and the mother of the pregnant 9-year-old got the boot for approving an abortion, but not the stepfather who had sexually assaulted the child, probably over a period of years. A similar contrast can be seen between the case of the Phoenix nun and hundreds of pedophile priests who were allowed to remain Catholic even after they finally were identified and removed from the Church payrolls.

It gets worse. In New York, a bill that would give child molestation victims more time to file charges has been blocked seven times by the Catholic hierarchy led by none other than Cardinal Dolan. Why? “We feel this is terribly unjust, we feel it singles out the church, and it would be devastating for the life of the church.” In other words, regardless of whether the abuse really happened or what the consequences were for victims, what matters is how much additional lawsuits might cost the Church.  Isn’t that the ends justifying the means?

3. Using churches to organize gay haters. When the Washington State legislature approved marriage equality this spring, fundamentalist Christians across the state organized to reverse the legislation. Even though three quarters of American Catholics think that gay marriage or civil unions should be legal, Archbishop Peter Sartain jumped to the front of the pack, decreeing that Western Washington parishes under his “moral authority” should gather signatures for an anti-equality initiative. To their credit, a number of priests refused, and a group called Catholics for Marriage Equality is raising money for ads. In contrast to the Catholic League, which has made the degrading argument that sex between priests and adolescent boys is consensual homosexuality, lay Catholics appear to know the difference.

4. Lying about contraceptives to poor Africans. Of all the mortal sins committed by the men of the cloth, the most devastatingly lethal in the last 30 years has been the Catholic hierarchy’s outspoken opposition to condom use in Africa. In 2003, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family publicly lied about the efficacy of condoms in preventing both pregnancy and HIV: “The AIDS virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the ‘net’ that is formed by the condom.” The archbishop of Nairobi told people that condoms were spreading HIV.  Some priests told parishioners that condoms were impregnated with the virus.

The motivation for such flagrant falsehoods? The Church has practiced competitive pro-natalism for centuries, but lately anti-contraceptive edicts have been ignored by most educated European and American Catholics, and Italy has the second lowest birthrate in the Western World, at 1.3 per woman. The bishops see this as a “catastrophe” and are looking to Africa as “a reservoir of life for the Church.” They wrap their opposition to contraception in lofty moral language such as that offered by Pope John Paul II: It seems profoundly damaging to the dignity of the human being, and for this reason morally illicit, to support a prevention of AIDS that is based on a recourse to means and remedies that violate an authentically human sense of sexuality. As late as 2009, John Paul’s successor, Benedict, continued to tell poor African Catholics that condoms were “wrong” and even suggested that they were making the epidemic worse. With god-knows –how-many lives lost and children orphaned, he finally softened his stance in 2010.

5. Obstructing patient access to accurate information and services in secular hospitals. In rural Arizona near the Mexican border, women delivering babies by cesarean section were refused tubal ligations because their independent hospital was negotiating a merger with a healthcare network run by Catholics. Worse, when a woman arrived at the same hospital in the middle of a miscarriage and need a surgical abortion to complete the process, she was forced to travel by ambulance to Tucson, 80 miles away, risking hemorrhage on the way. All over the U.S. secular and Catholic-run health systems are merging, and patients are quietly losing the right to make medical decisions based on the best scientific information available and the dictates of their own conscience.

Even when the Catholic-owned hospital is a small part of the merger, administrators insist that Catholic directives apply to the system as a whole. These directives prohibit not only abortions but also contraceptives, vasectomies and tubal ligations, some kinds of fertility treatment, and compliance with end-of-life patient directives. Ectopic pregnancies cannot be handled in keeping with the medical standard of care. As biotechnologies and treatments relevant to the beginning and end of life advance, we can expect the list to grow longer. Patients cannot trust that they will be told other options are available elsewhere.

One of the bitter ironies here is that even wholly “Catholic” hospitals and charities are staffed primarily by non-Catholics and largely provide services to people of other faiths or of none, paid for with tax dollars. In healthcare much of the money flows from Medicare and Medicaid. In 2010, non-medical affiliates of Catholic Charities received 62 percent of annual revenue from the taxpayers – nearly $2.9 billion. Only 3 percent came from church donations, with the remainder coming from investments, program fees, community donations and in-kind contributions. And yet all of those dollars get directed according to the dictates of bishop conscience rather than individual conscience.

6. Slapping down nuns. Catholic charities and hospitals are at some competitive advantage in part because of hard-working nuns, many of whom have skills and responsibilities that exceed their compensation. The bishops are the Catholic Church’s 1 percent; the nuns are managers and service workers –and many have taken the kind of poverty vows that America’s 1 percent is trying to impose on the rest. Because many nuns live in the real world, where suffering and morality are complex, they often make care-based decisions and take nuanced positions on moral questions that the Council of Bishops resolves by appealing to dogma and authority.

In April, the Vatican decided to remind the nuns who’s on top. Rome issued an 8-page assessment accusing the Leadership Conference of Women Religious of disagreeing with the bishops and of “radical feminism.” It appears that their labors on behalf of poor, vulnerable people had distracted them from a more Christian priority: controlling other people’s sex lives—oh, and standing up against the ordination of women. The Archbishop assigned by the Vatican to rein in unruly American nuns is none other than Peter Sartain of Seattle, the same moral authority who has declared a holy crusade against gay marriage.

7. Bullying girl scouts. Unlike the Boy Scouts, who recently earned media and public attention by booting out a gay den-mother, the Girl Scouts have been stubbornly inclusive and focused on preparing girls for leadership. For example, last year a Colorado troop included a trans-gender 7-year-old. That’s a problem for the Bishops, and since up to a quarter of American Girl Scouts are Catholic kids with troops housed in churches, they see it as their problem. To make matters worse, the American Girl Scouts refused to leave their international umbrella, the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, which has stated that young women “need an environment where they can freely and openly discuss issues of sex and sexuality.”  The World Association would appear to believe the data that girls who can’t manage their sexuality and fertility are more likely to end up in poverty than leadership positions.

Then again, maybe that’s what the church hierarchy is after. According to an article last month at the Huffington Post, “The new inquiry will be conducted by the bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. It will look into the Scouts’ ‘possible problematic relationships with other organizations’ and various ‘problematic’ program materials, according to a letter sent by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne, Ind., to his fellow bishops.” We’re talking about an organization run by women for girls facing an all-male inquisition. In today’s Catholic church, leadership still requires a y chromosome.

8. Purging popular and scholarly interfaith bridge builders. Lest some reader assert that the sins of the Bishops are all a consequence of sexual repression – some contorted pursuit of sexual purity that degrades both sex and compassion—it is important to note that the current cohort of Church authorities are as obsessed with doctrinal purity as sexual purity. It would take me many paragraphs to describe their tireless pursuit of purity as well as retired Anglican bishop, John Shelby Spong, does in one:

Hans Kung, probably the best read theologian of the 20th century, was removed from his position as a Catholic theologian at Tubingen because his mind could not be twisted into the medieval concepts required by his church. This action was carried out by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who at that time under Pope John Paul II held the office that in another time gave us the Inquisition. Matthew Fox, one of the most popular retreat and meditation leaders and an environmental activist, was then silenced by the same Cardinal Ratzinger. Professor Charles Curran, one of America’s best known ethicists, was removed from his tenured professorship at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., also by the same Cardinal Ratzinger. Father Leonardo Boff, the best known Latin American liberation theologian, was forced to renounce his ordination in order to continue his work for justice among the poor of Latin America by the same Cardinal Ratzinger. Next we learn that the Vatican, now headed by Cardinal Ratzinger under his new name Pope Benedict XVI, has ordered the removal of a book from all Catholic schools and universities written by a popular female theologian at Fordham University, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson. Now the nuns are to be investigated. Conformity trumps truth in every direction.

The Catholic tradition defines deadly or “cardinal” sins as those from which all other sins derive. In addition to lust, gluttony, wrath, sloth and envy, the traditional seven include pride and greed, which, to my mind, drive much of the appalling behavior in this list. If an attempt to assert autocratic control over the spiritual and physical lives of lay people isn’t pride, I don’t know what is. And if a willingness to silence child victims to protect church assets isn’t greed, I don’t know what greed is.  The BBC’s revelation last month of money laundering in the Vatican Bank pales by comparison.

To me, ultimately, the sins of the Catholic bishops are “deadly sins” because they kill people, whether pregnant mothers or depressed gay teens or African families, or simply desperate people who are forced into greater desperation by “moral” priorities that distract from real questions of well-being and harm.

What the Bishops will have to account for when they meet their maker, none of us can say. For some American Catholics, the process of holding them to account has already started. The Women Religious have pushed back against the condescending “assessment” issued by the Vatican. Small groups of lay Catholics have rallied to their support. Picketers meet monthly outside Sartain’s cathedral to protest his stance against equality. The Franciscan brothers issued a statement of solidarity with the nuns, many of whom have remained solidly focused on economic justice instead of sexual transgressions.

Given the arrogant cruelty of Church leaders, criticism to date has been remarkably tempered. As the Bishops flash their moral authority in the White House and media and pulpit, clothed in white robes and draped in crimson, they should be glad they aren’t eyeball to eyeball with Jesus himself. As the writer of Matthew tells it, he called out the corrupt religious leaders of his day in no uncertain terms: Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder of Wisdom Commons. She is the author of “Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light” and “Deas and Other Imaginings.” Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

 

 

Galway priest silenced by Vatican is set to return to public ministry

June 14, 2012 – 7:30am

Fr Tony Flannery to be one of preachers at Novena in Esker next week

By Bernie Ní Fhlatharta

A Galway Redemptorist priest who was silenced by the Vatican because of his criticisms of the Church in relation to their response to clerical sex abuse in Ireland will be returning to public ministry next week.

Fr Tony Flannery, who is based in the Redemptorist Monastery in Esker, will be welcomed back by his congregation and colleagues there on Tuesday with the start of the Order’s annual Novena.

Fr Flannery, along with two Redemptorist colleagues, Fr Brendan O’Rourke and Fr Patrick O’Keeffe, will be preaching at the Novena, which focuses on the virtues of living a good Christian life.

The Attymon native publicly supported Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s call in the Dáil for the Catholic Church to apologise for its handling of clerical sex abuse. Fr Flannery was a regular contributor to the Redemptorist magazine Reality, in which he aired his views and support of the Taoiseach.

Just before Easter, Fr Flannery was ordered to take time off for spiritual reflection, which he did. Part of that dictat was that he stop writing for Reality, after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith objected to some things he had written in various articles and on the Order’s website.

Following almost two months away from his ministry, negotiations with his Redemptorist superiors have led to his return.

This week, Fr Flannery told the Connacht Tribune that he was looking forward to returning to public ministry.

“I haven’t ministered since Easter but I will be returning next Tuesday on the first day of the Novena and I will be preaching at that every third day, alternating with my colleagues,” he said.

from the link: http://www.galwaynews.ie/26297-galway-priest-silenced-vatican-set-return-public-ministry

 

Church assisting paedophile priests

Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie

June 15, 2012

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/church-assisting-paedophile-priests-20120614-20d4x.html#ixzz1xmV5nGSq

The archdiocese has disclosed to The Age that it is providing significant financial support to four clergy released from jail after serving sentences for child sex abuse.

Victim support groups say more clergy found either by police or internal church investigations to have abused children are likely to be receiving financial support from different Catholic orders outside the Melbourne archdiocese’s control.

A spokesman for the Melbourne archdiocese said church law required the bishop to ”ensure appropriate financial support is provided to all priests”. ”The archdiocese contributes to rental support and health insurance for four priests who have had their faculties to function as a priest withdrawn, been convicted of child sex offences and completed any term of imprisonment imposed by the courts.”

A fifth paedophile priest within the Melbourne archdiocese, Victor Rubeo, was also receiving financial support until his death in December last year, on the day he was to face a committal hearing in the Melbourne Magistrates Court over 30 fresh child sex abuse charges.

Director of victims support group In Good Faith and Associates, Helen Last, said the generous financial support to paedophile priests was unjust compared with the financial, physical and emotional hardship endured by those who have been abused.

”This seems to be a weak response in terms of discipline and there should be an examination of the archdiocese’s relationship with clerical sexual offenders,” she said. ”The victims are often left out in the cold with no ongoing financial support and help. The money the [convicted] priests get from the church makes it a very unjust situation and demonstrates no awareness by the church of the seriousness of sexual crime.”

Ms Last called on the archdiocese to disclose how many clergy it had confirmed through its own internal investigations had abused children – but were not reported to police – were also receiving financial support.

A spokesman for the Broken Rites victim support group said: ”If abusive clergy receive ongoing support from the church, this shields the offenders from the harsh reality of the long-term harm that they have done to victims.”

The issue of the handling of child sexual abuse within religious organisations is to be investigated by a Victorian parliamentary inquiry. A state government source has confirmed the inquiry will have the power to override any confidentiality agreements abuse victims have signed to receive compensation from religious organisations.

 

Archbishop Timothy Dolan Offered $20,000 To Priests Suspected Of Child Abuse To Make Them Leave The Priesthood

Archbishop Timothy Dolan Offered $20,000 To Priests

Suspected Of Child Abuse To Make Them Leave The Priesthood

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/archbishop-timothy-dolan-offered-20000-to-priests-suspected-of-child-abuse-to-make-them-leave-the-priesthood-2012-5#ixzz1wSbPWDnK

Back when he was Archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy Dolan offered priests suspected of misconduct with children payments of $20,000 to induce them to leave the priesthood, according to the New York Times. 

 

Back when he was Archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy Dolan offered  priests suspected of misconduct with children payments of $20,000 to induce them to leave the priesthood, according to the New York Times.

The news came out of bankruptcy filings, and is being publicized by a group representing the interests of victims of child abuse. From the report:

A spokesman for the archdiocese confirmed on Wednesday that payments of as much as $20,000 were made to “a handful” of accused priests “as a motivation” not to contest being defrocked. The process, known as “laicization,” is a formal church juridical procedure that requires Vatican approval, and can take far longer if the priest objects.

“It was a way to provide an incentive to go the voluntary route and make it happen quickly, and ultimately cost less,” said Jerry Topczewski, the spokesman for the archdiocese. “Their cooperation made the process a lot more expeditious.”

This is brutal news for Dolan, who was previously praised very highly for his handling of abuse cases in Milwaukee after the reign of the notorious Archbishop Weakland, who stole from church coffers to pay for the lifestyle of his male lover.

Victims’ groups like Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) will counter that these were corrupt payoffs, or even “bonuses” given to suspected rapists.

The Archdiocese and Dolan will argue that this was a small price to pay. If these priests did not accept this payment they would likely remain on the diocesan payroll for much longer during the long process of defrocking them.

Cardinal Dolan has not offered comment to the press.

Wis archdiocese paid priests to leave ministry

From the link: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57444419/wis-archdiocese-paid-priests-to-leave-ministry/

MILWAUKEE — The Archdiocese of Milwaukee confirmed Wednesday that it had a policy to pay suspected pedophile priests to leave the ministry.

The acknowledgement was prompted by a document made public by abuse victims’ advocates from the archdiocese’s bankruptcy that references a 2003 proposal to pay $20,000 to “unassignable priests” who accepted a return to the laity. The policy was crafted under then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who is now a cardinal and head of the archdiocese in New York.

The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests characterizes the payments as a payoff and bonuses to priests who molested children. The archdiocese disputes that characterization, saying the payments were in part to more quickly move those men out of the priesthood.

The group is calling on the archdiocese to release all records involving the payments and its handling of clergy sex abuse cases.

“You don’t give a bonus to a man who rapes children,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel quoted SNAP Midwest director Peter Isely as saying Wednesday outside the federal courthouse in Milwaukee. “If they paid them anything it should have been for therapy and counseling.”

According to the Journal Sentinel, the 2003 bankruptcy document appears to be the first public acknowledgement of a formal policy to pay trouble priests to leave.

Disputing that, archdiocese spokeswoman Julie Wolf told The Associated Press late Wednesday that both the payments and the policy regarding them had long been acknowledged by the archdiocese.

“It’s not new news,” she said.

“SNAP sounds like they’re saying these were kind of payoffs to priests who had substantial allegations against them,” Wolf added. She said the payments were to help the men transition to lay life without completely losing access to needs such as health care.

The Journal Sentinel article noted that Dolan used similar language in 2006 when he defended a payment to one former priest. A phone message seeking comment from the Archdiocese of New York late Wednesday was not returned.

Wolf also called the payments “a cost-savings for the archdiocese” because the process to involuntarily remove a priest is lengthy and involves Vatican approval.

The bankruptcy document highlighted by SNAP references a meeting of the archdiocese’s Finance Council in 2003 that included Dolan, who was then archbishop in Milwaukee.

According to the document, members discussed offering “unassignable priests” $20,000 to accept the process known as laicization.

Associated Press writer M. David Nichols contributed to this report from Chicago.