Waiting for Godot to Leave

A scene from the Riot in the Cathedral, where protesters attempted to stop the appointment of Juan Barros as bishop of Osorno. Conservatives are rightly angry at liberal bias in the media.  There's a lot of it. But the game works both ways.  There's a huge conservative bias as well, and it follows a pattern. The pattern is typically this.  Someone in the Church does something horrifically awful and outrageously embarrassing, something that can't possibly be defending or excused.  For several days the truth is out there and none of my DC (Defensive Catholic) friends comment on it either here or on Facebook or elsewhere.  An awkward silence falls and the truth is simply ignored. Then (typically) the Catholic Defense League or an organization like Catholic News Agency pipes up with a defense of the situation that is a real stretch of the imagination, but that provides a handy template for the reactionaries to use, and suddenly comboxes are filled ev...

Protesters attempting to stop Juan Barros from being officially installed as their bishop. Click here to see a BBC video of the near riot that erupted at the cathedral at Osorno, Chile where protesters tried to stop the ordination of their new bishop, Juan Barros. Barros is implicated in a cover up of sexual abuse. The background is this.  In a situation that's very similar to that of Fr. Maciel of the Legion of Christ, a Chilean priest, Fernando Karadima, played up to the wealthy conservative elements in Chilean Catholic society and established a kind of parallel Church, cultivating a group of followers, some of whom became priests - and one of whom is now the bishop of Osorno.  And all the while this Fr. Karadima was sexually abusing boys and young men. He had trained five bishops and dozens of priests, acting as a spiritual leader and father figure for young men who later accused him of molesting them. ( The New York Times, Feb. 18, 2011 ) Complaints and red ...

Fr. Maurice Nutt, Redemptorist After my wife and I were received into the Catholic Church, back in 2000, our parish priest suggested that we prepare for Confirmation by attending RCIA, the "Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults".  Foolishly I agreed. It was nine months long and a total joke.  It was run by a liberal nun in a pants suit and her cadre of parish supporters, and it made sure that absolutely nothing Catholic was taught to any of us.  It was a shocking wake up call that the Church so lovingly described by Chesterton and Belloc had taken quite a few steps backward. One of the things Sister Liz (that was her name, God rest her rebellious soul) made us do was go to a Mass at "the Rock" church on the near North Side.  The only difference between what went on in RCIA at our parish and what was going on at the Rock church was, while the latter made me just as miserable, it didn't last nine months, but only for about two or three hours. That...

What has the sex abuse scandal cost the Catholic Church?  Not merely ruined lives.  Not merely $2.7 billion dollars.   Jo Renee Formicola argues that a price has been paid that we haven't even been noticing. What she points out is this: because of the perfidious negligence of the bishops, civil law now trumps canon law. The two millennial tradition of the separate and conflicting realms in the West - civil / temporal vs. spiritual - has now collapsed. Bishop Finn in Kansas City willingly gave oversight of his diocese to the county government - just to avoid a misdemeanor rap. But, in effect, every bishop has done the same. Protecting pedophiles has led to this. From the article ... “The legal system has stepped forward to do what the church itself would not do. It has challenged the church and demanded information on priests’ medical and psychiatric records,” Formicola said. “Things that were held ecclesiastically as being outside the law and protected by priv...

Rabbi David Kaye, from To Catch a Predator There's an episode of To Catch a Predator, the reality show in which men try to have sex with underage boys and girls, and are then recorded in a confrontation with the show's host who reveals that they've been caught on video and that the whole set up is a law enforcement sting - there's an episode where a Jewish Rabbi " essentially tried to rape a 13-year-old boy " and is caught red handed. Though clearly guilty, the rabbi blames the show's host and pulls a " how dare you suggest such a terrible thing about me!  I'm a religious leader! " pose.  The rabbi's attitude is exactly the sort of thing you see from people who not only abuse positions of power, but who feel entitled to positions of power.  I've been dealing with it in the Catholic Church, sometimes on a personal level, for all of my 14 years as a Catholic. In fact, a prominent bishop whose history shows a repeated tendency ...

Catholic World News reports that the Vatican has suspended all priestly ordinations in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. If this is true, it's an indication that something far more sinister has been brewing down there than just the elevation of an alleged child molesting homosexual cult leader to the position of Vicar General.  This, after Bishop Martino of Scranton, PA made it clear that this man (Fr. Carlos Urrutigoity), who had been operating in his diocese, was not fit for ministry.  The Diocese of Scranton states (my emphasis) ... Bishop Martino clearly expressed his reservations concerning Father Urrutigoity, who was identified as posing a serious threat to young people. Bishop Martino also carefully and consistently expressed his grave doubts about this cleric’s suitability for priestly ministry and cautioned the Bishop of the Diocese of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay to not allow Father Urrutigoity to incardinate into his diocese . Despite these serious cautions, Bishop Rogel...

Dick Cheney's stunt double, Bill Donohue of the Catholic Defense League. Refusing to address a single one of the facts whistle blower Jennifer Haselberger has revealed in her deposition, in her interviews, and in the abundant documentary evidence that supports Haseblberger's claims about the scandal in St. Paul, Catholic Defense League's Bill Donohue instead goes after Haselberger personally. And why not?  This is a tactic demagogues of all shapes and sizes have used throughout history.  Avoid the evidence, don't engage on the issues, instead use personal attacks to discredit your opponents.  It may not be the most Catholic or Christian thing to do - but hey, it's us vs. them , so anything goes, right? Now if Donohue wanted to come after me or pretty much any other Catholic I know, and if he did his digging, he could find a ton of embarrassing and incriminating details that would make it hard for any of us to show our faces in public again.  I have yet to...

One of the things revealed in the documents that have been released concerning the Fr. Kolar case in St. Paul is that after Kolar was sent away for treatment and it became obvious that he was both initiating sexual contact with adult women he was counseling, and also abusing a minors - and after the psychiatrists who evaluated him indicated the he had a serious personality disorder, the archbishop and his cronies decided that their options were either ... 1. Make Fr. Kolar DIRECTOR OF GUIDANCE at the seminary (where he could guide and form young men who were becoming priests) 2. Put him to work AT A PARISH (where he would be free to counsel more young women.  Note that the archdiocese made a point of not informing any laity of Fr. Kolar's abusive behavior, so women approaching Fr. Kolar for counseling at a parish would not know the risk they were taking.) And in neither case would any of the bishops around the country be informed of Kolar's previous work in NET Minist...

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, ...

A s reported yesterday by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch  (my emphasis in bold / my comments in italics) ...  On a morning when a historic sexual abuse trial was supposed to begin, the Archdiocese of St. Louis announced a settlement in a civil lawsuit against a defrocked priest. The first trial involving the archdiocese since the sexual abuse crisis broke in 2002 was set to begin Monday morning. [My Note: all the rest, 60 or more, have been settled out of court or dismissed]. The lawsuit involves a woman who claims she was abused by former priest Joseph D. Ross from 1997 to 2001 while attending St. Cronan Catholic Church. The woman, ... alleges the abuse began when she was 5 or 6 years old. The archdiocese maintains that the allegations made in the lawsuit are false and denies Jane Doe was ever abused by Ross.  ... At the request of the plaintiff, details of the settlement will remain confidential , Pesha said.  While the archdiocese denied Ross ...

Across the river from where I live, the neighboring diocese of Belleville, Illinois is a trend-setter.  They led the way with the sex abuse scandal in the Church long before the story broke nationally. NCR reports about Fr. Kownacki, a diocesan priest from the Belleville diocese ... Rev. Raymond Kownacki  In 1973, a 16-year-old girl, Gina Parks, contacted diocesan officials and claimed Kownacki, during a two-year period while he was pastor of a small parish in St. Francisville and later in a parish to which he was transferred in Washington Park, abused her sexually, had intercourse with her, even attempted to cause an abortion when she became pregnant. ... Parks said Kownacki gave her alcohol, promised to help her get into art school and assured her sex was OK because God "wanted people to love each other." The bishop, knowing this, and knowing that Fr. Kownacki had molested a girl from Guatemala and that "twin boys from Guatemala were living in the Wash...

Yesterday, on the road again, my actress and I attended a Vigil Mass somewhere in America.  It was definitely America, though it may not have been a Mass. The priest was a 70-something soft-spoken slow moving effeminate fellow, and the music was all the Bad Stuff, about a dozen of the worst "hymns" played over and over again on piano before Mass even started, kind of like an episode of The Twilight Zone where you're trapped in an elevator with horrible "muzak" and nobody else trapped with you seems to mind or even notice. The priest assured us in the homily that when Moses lifted his arms and God's staff before the Israelites battling Amalek ( Ex. 17:8-13 ), he was "giving them instructions on the battle," showing them where to attack and where to draw back, and so forth.  Far from being miraculous (which the text implies, the strength of Israel growing when the staff of God was raised and faltering when it was lowered), this was merely a n...

From an article at Religion News Service , Mark Silk writes ... A decade ago, I heard a Catholic lawyer who’d made a career of representing religious institutions in sex abuse cases describe the difference between reporting a wayward clergyman to a Methodist or Episcopal bishop versus “one of ours.” In the former case, he’d sit down in the Protestant leader’s living room, with the photos of children and grandchildren on the mantle, and the man’s sympathy would at once go to the abused. In the latter, the meeting would take place in a chancery conference room and the first words out of His Excellency’s mouth would be, “Poor Father.” And a seminarian comments ... Desmond Drummer   Oct 15, 2013 at 5:16 pm As a Catholic seminarian, I know well that the “poor father” (and “poor bishop”) syndrome is alive and well within the next generation of priests. It’s sad — VERY disturbing. Some seminarians feel that their pursuit of ordained ministry in the Catholic Church is some sor...

Not long ago I asked, "What would you do?" regarding a predator priest in the archdiocese of St. Paul, who had a long history of sexual misconduct with teen aged boys and who kept a camper on the parking lot of his parish, where he eventually molested two boys who were not yet teens.  Nobody told me what they would do, but Archbishop Nienstadt did nothing.   For this he was praised by conservative Catholics. Well, there's another scandal in St. Paul, and you can read about it in detail at the Minnesota Public Radio site ... but let me summarize it for you. While a transitional deacon waiting to be ordained to the priesthood, Jon Shelley caught the attention of counselors at a retreat center, who noted that he had trouble keeping proper boundaries with boys, and "wrestled" with some of them in a swimming pool. After being ordained, Fr. Shelley allowed an 18-year-old boy to live in the rectory with him at one point. Thousands of gay pornograp...

Rod Dreher  brings up some current sex scandals in the Church, some of which I've written about recently on this blog. One involves Fr. Riedlinger in New Jersey.  Riedlinger was a favorite of Msgr. Rossi, who is the rector of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC - enough of a favorite that Riedlinger claimed he would "vacation" with Rossi (who is a much older man).  Riedlinger would be introduced by Rossi to young seminarians, and Riedlinger would then proceed to hit on these guys and turn the talk around to gay sex.  Some of the young seminarians would complain about this, and their complaints would go unheeded. Eventually, two of them instituted a "sting" operation against Riedlinger .  Timothy Schmalz and his roommate Ryan posed as a 16-year-old boy on Facebook, and "friended" Fr. Riedlinger, who soon turned the conversation toward sex. The messages show Riedlinger needed little or no invitation to steer the conversa...