Thursday, July 17, 2014

Hear No Evil, See No Evil ...

Jennifer Haselberger
Anonymous comments on my post The Nature of the Problem ...

Now it was a grave sin what those priests and Bishops did decades ago, but it is time to stop acting like what happened then is still happening now. The Church has taken many steps to prevent sexual abuse from happening.

 But these are steps that are not being followed, at least in St. Paul, Kansas City and St. Louis.  The enabling of sexual abuse by bishops is still going on.  The sexual abuse is still happening.

Read the recent affidavit by Jennifer Haselberger.  You can tell yourself that she's a flaming liberal in it for the money - but at one point she says she had high hopes for Archbishop Nienstedt because he was "doctrinally pure".  So that won't wash.

And most of what she describes is backed up by documentary evidence, and it rings very true.

A friend of mine says the bishops have been behaving with "knavish imbecility".  It's a great phrase, and it comes from Hilaire Belloc, who speaks of the Church as ...

... an institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You failed to address any of my other points. Which is sad and I expected more out of you.

The fact of the matter is it isn't about the children, organizations like SNAP are looking for the money(like everybody else). Let throw out all the priests and bishops, because they are guilty, right?

Kevin Tierney said...

The "steps" being taken are for the most part being ignored in reality. That was the lesson of the report from Minnesota. Even the "reforms" that were "implemented" were done so mostly on paper. Abuser priests were still being hidden and protected.

So in this instance it isn't about SNAP and their moral purity. (Besides, their foil in this are Bishops and priests EVERYONE admits were quite rotten themselves.)

The recent report shows this isn't a past event we look back on. And even if it was, we clearly haven't learned any of the right lessons from it.

If a Bishop lost his jurisdiction over failure to report something, or because he obstructed justice in a civil proceeding, then yes, we could start talking about how things have actually progressed.