Waiting for Godot to Leave

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...

Grant Gallicho concludes his excellent eight part series at Commonweal on the "Curious Case of Carlos Urrutigoity" here. The conclusion is a bit anti-climactic.  The only major player to suffer any kind of serious consequences for this long and tawdry affair seems to be Bishop Livieres of Ciudad del Este, who was asked to resign by Pope Francis back in September.  Meanwhile, Urrutigoity and his crew of followers and supporters are still out there, many of them are still functioning as priests, at least one of them  continues to fund raise despite his association with the Society of St. John - an organization whose founder allegedly engaged in sex abuse and financial fraud - and I am told that even though Urrutigoity's associate Eric Ensey has been "defrocked" he still continues to present himself as a priest.

There was a potential murder mystery client that I was hoping to land.  He had worked with every other murder mystery company around, and at that time there were three or four others in St. Louis.  They all told me the same thing, "The man is impossible to work for."  None of them lasted more than a few years performing at his venue. "But I can do it!" I said to myself.  "They can't work with him, but I can work with him!  After all, I'm more intelligent and sensitive than they are.  I do well with difficult people.  I'll win him over, get him to like me.  I can succeed where all others failed!" We lasted three months.  He was a monster.

Edward Pentin, Rome correspondent for the National Catholic Register It pains me to point out that National Catholic Register, once a fairly solid and trustworthy publication, has become the only mainstream journal (to my knowledge) to buy into the trad hysteria over the removal of one of the worst bishops in the world.

I continue to celebrate, in my own quiet way, 25 years of performing murder mystery dinner theater shows . This is from an email I wrote to a former actress in January of 2006 *** Tonight my actress Linda and I had two shows at a winery in Nashville, Illinois.  The winery only seats fifty people, so I talked them into doing two shows - a 5 pm show and an 8 pm show.  I am hiring a new guy and we had him meet us at the winery to see the early show. Well, the early show was magical, just a blast.  The guy was very impressed and really wants to work for me.  "Do they always go this well?" he asked.  "Oh, this is pretty typical," we answered, which is true.  "Do you ever have problems with drunks?" he asked.  "Not that we can't control," we replied - also true. Then he left (between shows) and I turned to Linda and said, "I think we've got this small-venue problem solved.  For wineries that can only seat fifty, we'll jus...

Bishop Livieres, looking like a kindly Lex Luthor. Below is the press release from SNAP on the Bishop Livieres issue.    It had appeared as if Livieres had been the first and only bishop removed from office since the Sex Scandal broke over ten years ago.  And even though his case was particularly egregious - making an accused child molester his vicar general, even after being warned by other bishops that the man was a danger to others, and then lashing out against the Vatican publicly - still this appeared to be good news.  It appeared as if Pope Francis was setting the bar very low, but at least he was setting the bar.  After all, if you won't sack a bishop for making an accused child molester and scam artist his vicar general and allowing him continued access to boys, then how serious are you about reforming the very worst element in the Church? And indeed for the first time since the crisis, the Vatican seemed to be getting serious about the problem,...

The Buenos Aires Herald reports ... Pope sacks Paraguayan bishop accused of protecting abuser priest Pope Francis has dismissed a conservative Paraguayan bishop who was accused of protecting a priest suspected of sexually abusing young people in the United States, the Vatican said today. The Argentinian-born pontiff has vowed zero tolerance against Roman Catholic clerics who sexually abuse minors after a series of scandals hit the Church in a number of countries around the world over many years. Last May, Francis called such abuse an "ugly crime" and likened it to "a Satanic mass". A statement said the pope had removed Bishop Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano from his post as head of the diocese of Ciudad del Este and named another bishop to run it as an administrator for the time being. The pope's sacking of the bishop came after a Vatican investigation of the bishop, the diocese and its seminaries, said the statement, which gave no details. Vatican sour...