Category: Clergy Abuse Crisis

On April 5, The Wall Street Journal reported that:

As the church’s most powerful official in Argentina, [Pope Francis] didn’t comply with a Vatican call to create guidelines for handling sexual-abuse allegations in the country.

But then, in the next paragraph:

On Friday, Pope Francis met with Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who heads the office in charge of leading the Vatican’s global crackdown on abusive priests and instructed him to continue the Vatican’s strategy for fighting sex abuse. The pope urged him to “act decisively with regard to cases of sexual abuse, pushing above all the measures to protect minors,” the Vatican said. Swift detection, Vatican officials have said, is crucial to stopping abusive priests.

So I ask: Why is it so important for Pope Francis to crack down on abusive priests NOW, when it wasn’t such a big deal three weeks ago, when he was still Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires?

How can he possibly implement a program on a global level when he couldn’t even draw up simple guidelines to prevent abuse in his own country … on time?

Yesterday, he couldn’t do his homework. Today, he’s the principal of the school. Only one conclusion comes to mind – and it’s not terribly optimistic.

Here’s my take: All we have to go on with Francis is his record. Promises are nice. But as every election cycle (no matter the political system) shows us, most of those promises soon forgotten and ignored.

What really matters are concrete and transparent actions with outcomes that are tangible and measurable. And right now, we are not seeing that.

Instead, this is what we know:

• As Cardinal of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio “declined to meet” with victims of sexual abuse, as requested by the Vatican.
• Although the spokesman for the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires says that there have been no accusations of abuse in that Archdiocese in the past six years, there is at least one church-owned predator priest treatment facility in the immediate area: La Domus Mariae (the House of Mary), north of Buenos Aires. (If there have been no allegations in the past six years, wouldn’t this place be shuttered?)
• There is no tangible record of action on the part of Bergoglio or his priests to punish abusers and hold accountable the men and women who protected them.

I’m not good at predictions. If I were, I’d be in Vegas and this blog would be a money-generating machine. Despite this failing, I’ve been asked a lot by the media what I think of the new pope, his record, what I expect to see in the next few months.

So I made a “to-do list” for the pope’s first week. Then, if any of it comes true, it’ll be like Christmas in March.

Pope Francis I’s to-do list:

• Strip Cardinal Mahony of his title and force him to live a life of silence, poverty, prayer and penance in a mental health facility that treats victims of child sexual abuse,
• Require Pope Emeritus Benedict to sit in a video recorded deposition and tell what he knows about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church,
• Mandate that bishops worldwide cease legal and verbal (that means you, Cardinal Dolan) battles with survivors and survivors groups, 
• Turn over all secret personal files globally to law enforcement and the media, and
• Turn over to law enforcement all accused clerics currently in hiding in the Vatican and other countries.

Yep, I think that would be a great first week. And no, I’m not hopeful.

But a girl can dream, can’t she?

Statement by Joelle Casteix of Newport Beach, SNAP Western Regional Director

Read the news story here.

Once again, innocent children pay the price because Bishop Stephen Blaire refused to do a simple background check on one of his priests. What is even more tragic about this case is that the arrested priest abused in a parish that–not so long ago–was savaged by the crimes of Oliver O’Grady.

Unfortunately, the case of visiting priest Rev. Julio Guarin-Sosa is not unique. California’s bishops have a habit of accepting foreign priests with little to no investigation of their backgrounds. In Los Angeles, Cardinal Roger Mahony accepted two foreign priests–Fernando Lopez Lopez and Nicolas Aguilar-Rivera–with nothing more than a letter of recommendation from their bishops. Had Mahony done any investigation, he would have learned that Lopez Lopez had been convicted of “violent sexual abuse on a minor” in Italy. A few years earlier, Mahony was told that Aguilar Rivera had “homosexual problems” with youths, but accepted him anyway.

How many more of Stockton’s children will be sacrificed because of the lack of due diligence and care on the part of diocese officials? How many more children will be put at risk before Bishop Blaire adheres to his own promises of child protection and transparency?

No one can predict abuse. But it’s easy to prevent. Apparently, Bishop Blaire doesn’t seem to think that child safety is worth the extra effort.

The more he struggles, the deeper he sinks. And Cardinal Roger Mahony is taking you down with him.

Dare to publicly shame him? Be prepared for a “you didn’t think it was wrong last month” answer.

Criticize him? He’s gonna pray for God to forgive your righteous—yet apparently sinful—anger.

Dare say that he shouldn’t go to the Conclave? He’s gonna tell you that he’s full of the Holy Spirit and can’t wait to get to Rome.

You see, it’s not his fault. He’s been scapegoated. Outcast. He now knows what it’s like to “be among the excluded ones.”

If there was ever an example of why sex abuse and cover-up has thrived in the Catholic Church, it’s Mahony. But the more he struggles, the deeper he sinks into the quicksand of his own arrogance and sinfulness.

The scary part? Look at every bishop and cardinal in the US. They all follow the same script. We were just lucky enough to get some of Mahony’s documents. But what are we missing in other diocese across the Unites States and abroad? What other bishops and cardinals are carefully hovering over the quicksand pit, thankful that victims never got access to their secret sex abuse archives?

Since Mahony and his fellow bishops are so busy reading the Bible, maybe they should start at Proverbs 16:18:

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.

But that verse is terribly inconvenient, isn’t it?

Because if you can’t take a five-time credibly accused priest predator off of your website, how do we know you can follow child safety guidelines?

This weekend in Anaheim, more than 40,000 people are descending on the Convention Center for the Los Angeles Archdiocese RECongress, billed as “the largest annual gathering of its kind in the world.” The three-day conference, which started in the 1920s as a one-day gathering, has exploded into a three-day Catholic tent revival with entertainment, speakers, masses, events and teen dances. You can read the history for yourself here.

The problem? A founding organizer—who is prominently honored all over the website—is a predator. Leland Boyer is not just any priest perpetrator, he’s one of the priests whose file was a part of the LA Archdiocese “Document Dump” earlier this month.

And what a file it is.

Documents recount who how three victims came forward to church officials between 1990 and 2002 to say that Boyer molested them. Although Boyer denied the allegations, Cardinal Mahony and church officials deemed the kids “credible” and put the cleric on restricted ministry in 1995, explicitly keeping him away from the “phone boys” in the rectory. They went so far as to make sure that Boyer visited therapists who “were Catholic and not prone to litigation.” Parishioners were not notified of any of the allegations until 2002. After Boyer died, two more victims came forward.

You can read the whole file here.

But you certainly wouldn’t know that if you read the RECongress website. Boyer is honored as visionary leader who helped grow the conference annually. Maybe he worked so hard because he had run out of “phone boys” at the rectory. It’s disgusting.

By the way – Cardinal Mahony was also scheduled to speak at the conference, but he has another legal commitment and had to back out.  Besides, considering that we now know that he had no problem dumping child-molesting priests into poor, immigrant parishes, his speech on immigration entitled, “For I Was a Stranger, and You Welcomed Me!” is utterly laughable.