When I had lawyers review my book Sacrilege for libel issues, they were astonished at what bishops had done. Bishops came very close to being accessories before the facts to felonies. Bishops escaped because a prosecutor had to prove that a bishop assigned a known abuser to a parish with children with the intention of helping the crime be committed. Intention is very hard to prove, although when a bishop makes a known abuser a Boy Scout chaplain, circumstantial evidence is pretty strong.

Bishops repeatedly showed a total disregard for the safety of children, and as I understand it their legal culpability depends on the statues in each state about child endangerment. New Hampshire has a very strong statute; I do not know what Pennsylvania has. Lynn is no doubt guilty morally of endangering children, but whether his actions and failures are caught by the statute remains to be seen.

Certainly many homosexuals are narcissists, as are many heterosexuals.

Narcissism is the root of endless evils in the clergy, and I have long thought that having the priest face the people during mass concentrates attention on the priest and feeds narcissism.

Many people, as Father Michael points out, equate homosexuality and effeminacy. This is not true. As an investigator I encountered many non-effeminate homosexuals. One case I had led me to a gay biker bar (that was scary). In another case the gay was a star rugby player. And in another case someone insisted an entire college football team engaged in homosexual orgies (I had some doubts about that).

Many of the abuser of teenage boys were fairly macho, otherwise boys would have shied away from them. This was a good cover. No one could imagine that former military engineer, tall, cowboy- booted Ed Donelan was having sex with his wards at the Casa de los Muchachos.

When we are in Baltimore, we often go to the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Towson. The pastor, Father Joe Barr, is an energetic priest and the masses are more than tolerable. One of his assistants is (or was until this weekend) the Rev. Mark Bullock.

Alas, the Baltimore Sun had this story:

According to a police report of the incident, Mark Stewart Bullock, 47, was at Bush River Books & Movies, an Abingdon adult store on the 3900 block of Pulaski Highway, the night of Jan. 16, when two deputies, investigating complaints of indecent exposure, discovered him nude from the waist down in a movie theater inside the shop.

Bullock was sitting on a couch with “his pants completely off,” stated the report, which went on to state that “Bullock was not wearing any underwear and [was] exposing his penis.” He was sitting in a public area where store customers could see him, sheriff’s deputies said.

The “bookstore” had become very popular.

Monica Worrell, a spokeswoman for the Harford County Sheriff’s Office, said deputies routinely look in on adult bookstores to ensure they are complying with the law. This particular shop was drawing more traffic than normal, according to community members, who had voiced concerns at a council meeting, leading the sheriff’s office to investigate.

“Throughout the course of doing that, we found violations of law,” Worrell said. Several arrests were made, she said.

My knowledge of Bullock was limited to occasional Sunday masses that he celebrated.

The priests of the parish, aware of Catholics’ tendency to lapse into alpha sleep at the start of a sermon, have tried to make the homilies more interesting.

He was a good preacher. Bullock gave a Christmas sermon on the contrast between the hymn we has just sung, O Little Town of Bethlehem, and his visit to a military-occupied Bethlehem in which he had a submachine gun pointed at him. He has a good singing voice and sang the verses of the hymn as he commented on them. His point was that Shalom transcends earthly notions of peace.

But he, like many men, has problems with the virtue of chastity, and is totally lacking in the minor virtue of discretion. Pornography, a temptation to many men, including priests and pastors, is available on-line, and it is difficult to understand why he had to go to a “bookstore” to see it. Perhaps he was seeking the thrill of danger, of being caught. Perhaps, as the police seem to suspect, the “bookstore” was a front for other activities.

I am familiar through literature and through my former career as an investigator how sexual passion can distort a man’s judgment and cause him to do things out of character. Whether Bullock can be rehabilitated I do not know. The Archdiocese is short of priests, and apart from this personal vice he seemed to function as a good priest. The question is whether Bullock is a sinner, who can repent, or has such deep psychological compulsions that he cannot be trusted in a pastoral role. I suspect that the Archdiocese, having been badly burned by its mishandling of pedophilia (which this case is not), will permanently suspend Bullock.

Update

A few more pieces of information about Father Bullock:

He was a life long member of St. Clare’s in Essex, a working class area of Baltimore County. He studied at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. He is now 47, and was ordained in 2006. Before entering the seminary,  he was a floral designer.

St. Mary’s is known internationally as the Pink Palace.  The Archdiocese says it has ended the homosexual subculture as St Mary’s, which culture the Archdiocese it also insists never existed in the first place. Of course it did. I know people who went to St Mary’s, and many of the students there were actively gay in the 1960s and 970s.

When I went to hear a lecture by Raymond Brown in the seminary chapel I sat in front of a women Presbyterian minister and some St. Mary’s faculty. He told them that she wanted to take a course in Celtic Spirituality that Father X had give. They informed her that Father X was not teaching at the moment. He had been sleeping with the seminary students and insisted upon flaunting it too openly. His bishop had sent him to rural Pennsylvania to cool off.

Local opinion is that gay seminarians are sent to St. Mary’s in Baltimore and straight students to St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg.

Bullock was also conservative liturgically. He said a beautiful and reverent mass, and if I remember correctly, chanted the eucharistic prayer on several occasions. Older liberals claim that the new crop of priests are both more conservative and more homosexual than the older liberal generation.  There is some evidence to support that claim. There is High Anglican precedent for the phenomenon.

BTW, a long as a homosexual priest is 1. chaste 2.not effeminate, I think few people would ever care.

]]> http://www.podles.org/dialogue/there-goes-another-547.htm/feed http://www.podles.org/dialogue/a-cost-of-war-546.htm http://www.podles.org/dialogue/a-cost-of-war-546.htm#comments Sat, 14 Jan 2012 13:37:12 +0000 admin http://www.podles.org/dialogue/?p=546 Fighting and killing other human beings in a war does terrible things to the soldier, even if the war is a just, defensive, unavoidable war. Paul Fussell, who fought in the invasion of France from the south and was terribly wounded, tried to make that point in his books on war.

He said that in the Pacific theater soldiers used to send home Japanese skulls as souvenirs. His readers were outraged; they had lived through the war and had never heard of American soldiers doing such a thing. Fussell then produced a Life magazine cover with photograph of a young woman contemplating a Japanese skull that her boyfriend had sent to her.

Life Magazine, May 22, 1944

Wikipedia has an article on the practice:

A number of firsthand accounts, including those of American servicemen involved in or witness to the atrocities, attest to the taking of “trophies” from the corpses of Imperial Japanese troops in the Pacific Theater during World War II. Historians have attributed the phenomenon to a campaign of dehumanization of the Japanese in the U.S. media, to various racist tropes latent in American society, to the depravity of warfare under desperate circumstances, to the perceived inhuman cruelty of Imperial Japanese forces, lust for revenge, or any combination of those factors. The taking of so-called “trophies” was widespread enough that, by September 1942, the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet ordered that “No part of the enemy’s body may be used as a souvenir”, and any American servicemen violating that principle would face “stern disciplinary action”.^[6]

Trophy skulls are the most notorious of the so-called “souvenirs”. Teeth, ears and other such body parts were occasionally modified, for example by writing on them or fashioning them into utilities or other artifacts.^[7]

Eugene Sledge relates a few instances of fellow Marines extracting gold teeth from the Japanese, including one from an enemy soldier who was still alive.

But the Japanese wasn’t dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn’t move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath. The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.^[8]

US Marine veteran Donald Fall attributed the mutilation of enemy corpses to hatred and desire for vengeance:

On the second day of Guadalcanal we captured a big Jap bivouac with all kinds of beer and supplies… But they also found a lot of pictures of Marines that had been cut up and mutilatedon Wake Island. The next thing you know there are Marines walking around with Jap ears stuck on their belts with safety pins. They issued an order reminding Marines that mutilation was a court-martial offense… You get into a nasty frame of mind in combat. You see what’s been done to you. You’d find a dead Marine that the Japs had booby-trapped. We found dead Japs that were booby-trapped. And they mutilated the dead. We began to get down to their level.^[9]

Another example of mutilation was related by Ore Marion, a US Marine who suggested,

We learned about savagery from the Japanese… But those sixteen-to-nineteen-year old kids we had on the Canal were fast learners… At daybreak, a couple of our kids, bearded, dirty, skinny from hunger, slightly wounded by bayonets, clothes worn and torn, wack off three Jap heads and jam them on poles facing the ‘Jap side’ of the river… The colonel sees Jap heads on the poles and says, ‘Jesus men, what are you doing? You’re acting like animals.’ A dirty, stinking young kid says, ‘That’s right Colonel, we are animals. We live like animals, we eat and are treated like animals–what the fuck do you expect?’^[9]

On February 1, 1943, Life magazine published a photograph taken by Ralph Morse during the Guadalcanal campaign showing a decapitated Japanese head that US marines had propped up below the gun turret of a tank. Life received letters of protest from people “in disbelief that American soldiers were capable of such brutality toward the enemy.” The editors responded that “war is unpleasant, cruel, and inhuman. And it is more dangerous to forget this than to be shocked by reminders.” However, the image of the decapitated head generated less than half the amount of protest letters that an image of a mistreated cat in the very same issue received.^[10]

In October 1943, the U.S. High Command expressed alarm over recent newspaper articles, for example one where a soldier made a string of beads using Japanese teeth, and another about a soldier with pictures showing the steps in preparing a skull, involving cooking and scraping of the Japanese heads.^[5]

In 1944 the American poet Winfield Townley Scott was working as a reporter in Rhode Island when a sailor displayed his skull trophy in the newspaper office. This led to the poem The U.S. sailor with the Japanese skull, which described one method for preparation of skulls (the head is skinned, towed in a net behind a ship to clean and polish it, and in the end scrubbed with caustic soda).^[11]

The Marines who urinated on the bodies of dead Taliban, who had been trying to kill them and who had probably killed their friends and civilians, also paid the cost of war. That  is another reason to avoid war, if at all possible.

Accusations of sexual abuse often provoke disbelief and comments “How could he have done such a thing? He done so many good things.”

Parishioners still leap to the defense of priests accused of abuse. In New York:

A Marine Park Catholic church dedicated its Christmas display to a priest accused of sex abuse, drawing outrage from one of his his alleged victim’s family.

Msgr. Thomas Brady, 78, a retired pastor at Good Shepherd Church, was placed on administrative leave after he was charged in October with attempting a “criminal sex act” on two teenage boys - but officials at the church still dedicated their annual tree lighting to him and posted a sign in his honor in front of the church.

The sign, still posted Monday, says the tree lighting “is dedicated to Monsignor Thomas F. Brady for his Service to and Love for the People of Good Shepherd.”

The dad of a then 13-year-old boy who accused Brady of molesting him in the church rectory said he was furious to see the display at the church, where his family are longtime parishioners and his son attends the parish school.

“That’s a slap in the face,” he said. “Take it down. That’s hurtful. You’re gaining support for Brady, but what about the victims?”

Many parishioners have backed Brady, who was pastor at the church for more than 20 years before retiring in 2009 and was also a chaplain for the Fire Department, and insisted the accusations couldn’t be true. The priest has suffered several strokes and is battling lung cancer.

Family friend Mary Ann Moran, 54, said although Monsignor Brady performed her mother’s funeral and she appreciated his efforts to unite the neighborhood after Sept. 11, she was angry he would be honored after the accusations came to light. “I understand how we feel so connected to the priest,” she said. “In any other job or organization, someone who’s been arrested for sexually abusing a child would never be honored just for doing their job.”

This priest may or may not be guilty. The courts have to decide. But his good works do not mean he could not have committed a crime.

Abusers do many good things; they are seemingly altruistic and willing to go out of their way to help other people. But this altruism is in the service of narcissism. The narcissist wants others to have a good opinion of him, so he may do good things. But the purpose of these good actions is to feed his self-image of being a good person.

He wants to think of himself as a good person even though he may also do terrible things. He does so much good that he is entitled to whatever he wants, including sex with children. He may do some mental creative accounting: “The good I do far outweighs any bad things I may do,” or he may be grandiose and feel he is not bound by the rules to which ordinary mortals are subject.

Those around him often feed his narcissism and grandiosity; the clergy and parishioners in New York may be doing that to Thomas Brady. And if there are other victims, they see how the parish will respond to accusations.

(You will no doubt note that this in the Gheg dialect, in which the -t ending is not plural)

A traditional tree in Tirana:

And a different Christmas tree outside Tirana:

“A Christmas tree made of spaghetti sticks in the national park in Tirana December 28 2006. A local restaurant used roughly six million spaghetti sticks building the sixteen meter tree weighing 1 ton.”

Señor Rafael Cavero of Madrid is a collector, indeed the foremost collector of Papá Noel (Santa Claus) in all of Spain.

In the door which gives access to the garden of the house in which he has lived more than thirty years, a heap of little men with white beards receives visitors. They hide themselves, climb the balconies, go up the lanterns, laugh. And once you have crossed the threshold of the residence, the spectacle surpasses all expectations. “Lola, my wife, is a fan of the Three Kings, and what she hates most of all in the world, although you won’t believe it, is Santa Claus. At this time of year she is always annoyed and wants to leave the house. For this reason, and in revenge, she installs a nativity scene of gigantic size,” he explained.

A collector of many things, among which are music boxes and masks, his fondness for Santa Claus began by accident. He discovered the oldest piece of his collection at a fair and it pleased him so much that since then he looks for pieces here and there, everywhere in the world, on the internet, in catalogues, in shops…”The last ones which I acquired came from Denmark. And especially the best are those from there and from Norway. They are the most expensive; they cost almost as much as a car! Nevertheless, today many are made in China and the quality is evident. Of those which I possess, many have almost five movements. Others read stories and there are even  those who sing thirty Christmas carols with the voice of Ray Charles.”

The display in the Cavero house involves emptying the living room over three days of intense work (“I do it with two of my daughters, Ana and Piedy, with a guitarist and a carpenter”). Lola’s collection of boxes and porcelain dogs “disappears” in their place there is put up an incredible scene of crystal balls, gnomes, rabbits, and reindeer. And thousands of Santa Clauses in all postures and attitudes: playing the saxophone, getting on a motorcycle, with eyeglasses like Stevie Wonder, soaping up in  a bathtub, swinging, crossing the room at high speed, juggling on the swing, on the stairs…and all this in the middle of a great racket of songs, laughs, and train whistles.

And what does Señor Cavero want from Santa Claus? “That when in Spain almost everything is lost, that the hope in Santa Claus is not lost and to assure the whole world that the Three Kings exist. Ours (i.e., Spanish royalty] are in La Zarazuela [the royal palace], but they have some pages [Spanish politicians?] who leave much to be desired.”

You may remember the Christmas scene from Fanny and Alexander and here is a modern version.