Danneels and the Law

in Belgium, clergy sex abuse scandal 1 Comment Tags: ,

Catholic Church Conservation has the English translation of an article on the legal liability of

Cardinal Danneels: 

What is the situation of Danneels in criminal law? Can he be prosecuted? And when would that be? How can he defend himself? All at a glance:

 

* If Danneels was aware of a crime he had not reported to the court. Only officials have an obligation to report and even for them there is no penalty if they do not.

 

* Danneels has – in religious terms – a secret of confession. That means he can never disclose a confession even with the consent of the penitent, even after his death. He cannot even say whether there has been something confessed. Pope John Paul II said that again solemnly on April 30, 2001 in the motu proprio “Sacramentorum Sanctitatis tutela” with regard to the Sixth Commandment! The question whether a simple confession of sexual abuse by a priest to his bishop is considered a confession may arise. Some church lawyers say yes, others not because the sacramental rite was not fully respected. Danneels can rely on the secret of confession, but he will not have much success, because the confession secret is not recognized in common law.

 

* Danneels can rely on professional secrecy not to provide information about sexual abuse. This is partly broader, part narrower than the secret of confession . The Cardinal learning confidential information through his office is covered by this secret. That confidentiality is broader than the secret of confession because the information can be not only about perpetrators, but can be from everywhere. It is also limited because the secrecy is not absolute: the court can determine whether certain elements within the secrecy and in emergency can be lifted. This can be for example in the case of sexual abuse of minors. In such a case, Danneels can forego professional secrecy and give the facts reported to the court, but he does not have to.

 

* Can Danneels be prosecuted for gross negligence because he may not have reported sexual abuse to the court? That is only if he has not given “appropriate assistance” to someone who is in immediate and imminent danger. For example, the victim (or another victim of the same perpetrator) may be in immediate risk of sexually abused by a priest who has confessed. In this case, the cardinal should offer “appropriate assistance” . This can be a complaint to the court, but not necessarily so. If Danneels offered appropriate help in such a case, there is no gross negligence. Also: prosecution for gross negligence in respect of acts that have lapsed, or for cases where there is no immediate danger, it is not possible. The likelihood of prosecution for gross negligence of Danneels is very small.

 

* Have Cardinal Danneels then and Archbishop Leonard now – as the boss of their priests – civil liability for harm to victims harmed by sexual abuse by their priests? Under current law no- because the bishop-priest relationship in employment law is not an employer-employee relationship and thus there is no civil liability. This was confirmed on September 25, 1998 in the Case of Van der Lijn, the pedophile priest of Saint-Gilles.

 

* Cardinal Danneels as any citizen can be questioned. He may, from the first trial – according to the Salduz ruling of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg – be assisted by his lawyer. He was. Moreover the College of Procurators General recommends that this first interview is videoed. Danneels is heard as a witness, not as a suspect.The case file is run against strangers. If Danneels is under suspicion, he may discover the full case against him. As a witness he cannot. That gives the examining magistrate and his investigators a certain advantage. 

It is almost impossible to have a civil or criminal case against Danneels.

 

Contradictory reports are coming out of the Belgian press. Someone leaked to the press that a confidential Detroux file was hidden in the Danneels’ residence. Church spokesmen claim it was a cd rom sent to to Belgian bishops, journalists, and many others – which, if was confidential, is rather odd, but then the whole Detroux case was more than a little odd.

If the Detroux cd rom found in Danneels possession is meaningless, why did the police leak the information and why is the press so excited about it? It may simply be journalistic excess, or it may be a way of attracting attention to the Danneels case. Anything connected with the Detroux case is guaranteed to get the public’s attention, because Detroux’s sources of money were never revealed

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Belgium and the Worst Possible News for the Church

in Belgium, clergy sex abuse scandal, murder 6 Comments Tags: , ,

 

Marc Dutroux

 

Cardinal Godfried Daneels

 

When they searched retired Cardinal Danneels’ residence, Belgian police discovered confidential court records on the Dutroux murder-pedophile case. Church officials claim to be completely unaware of the existence of such files.The files contain hundreds of pictures of the corpses of the murdered girls and of the cells in which they were kept. It is hard to imagine why Cardinal Danneels had such files all, and in particular why he kept them in his home.

 

The Marc Dutroux case was one of the most explosive criminal cases in post-war Europe. It reads like the script from a horror movie.

 

Allegations, never totally answered, circulated that the pedophilia ring extended very high indeed in Belgian society, and that the Belgian government stymied the investigation  to protect higher-ups.

 

Wikepedia summarizes the case:

Born in Ixelles, Belgium on November 6, 1956, Dutroux was the oldest of five children. His parents, both teachers, emigrated to the Belgian Congo, but returned to Belgium when Dutroux was four. They separated in 1971 and Dutroux stayed with his mother. He worked briefly as a gigolo, serving men. He married at the age of 19 and fathered two children; the marriage ended in divorce in 1983. By then he already had an affair with Michelle Martin. They would eventually have three children together, and married in 1989 while both were in prison. They divorced in 2003, also while in prison.

 

An unemployed electrician, Dutroux had a long criminal history involving car theft, muggings and drug dealing.

 

In February 1986, Dutroux and Martin were arrested for abducting and raping five young girls. In April 1989, he was sentenced to thirteen and a half years in prison. Martin received a sentence of five years. Showing good behaviour in prison, Dutroux was released on parole in April 1992, having served only three years. On releasing him, the parole board received a letter written by Dutroux’s own mother to the prison director, and she stressed concern that he was keeping young girls in his house.

 

Following his release, Dutroux was able to convince a psychiatrist that he was disabled, resulting in a government pension. He also received sleeping pills and sedatives, which he would later use on the abducted girls.

 

Dutroux’s criminal career, involving the trade of stolen cars to Czechoslovakia and Hungary, drug dealing and also violent crimes such as mugging, gained him enough money to live in relative comfort in Charleroi, a city that had at the time high unemployment. He owned seven small houses, most of them vacant, and used three of them for the torture of the girls he kidnapped. He lived mainly in his house in Marcinelle near Charleroi (Hainaut), where he constructed a concealed dungeon in the basement. Hidden behind a massive concrete door disguised as a shelf, the cell was 2.15 metres (7 ft) long, less than 1 metre (3 ft) wide and 1.64 metres (5 ft) high.

 

Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo (both aged eight) were kidnapped together from Grâce-Hollogne on June 24, 1995, probably by Dutroux, and imprisoned in Dutroux’s cellar. Dutroux repeatedly sexually abused the girls and produced pornographic videos.

 

On August 22, 1995 Dutroux kidnapped 17-year-old An Marchal and 19-year-old Eefje Lambrecks who were on a camping trip in Ostend. He was probably assisted by his accomplice Michel Lelièvre, who was paid with drugs. Since the dungeon already contained Lejeune and Russo, Dutroux chained the girls to a bed in a room of his house. His wife was aware of all these activities. Dutroux killed the two girls several weeks later by drugging them and burying them alive at one of his properties in Jumet.

 

In late 1995, Dutroux was arrested by police for involvement in a stolen luxury car racket. He was held in custody for three months between December 6, 1995 and March 20, 1996. During this period, Lejeune and Russo starved to death in the dungeon.

 

Two months after his release, Dutroux, with help from Lelièvre, kidnapped 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne who was on her way to school on May 28, 1996. She was imprisoned in the dungeon. On August 9, 1996, the two men kidnapped 14-year-old Laetitia Delhez when she was walking home at night from a public swimming pool. But an eyewitness identified part of a license plate which matched a vehicle registered to Dutroux. He, his wife and Lelièvre were all arrested on August 13, 1996. An initial search of his houses proved inconclusive. But two days later, Dutroux and Lelièvre both made confessions. Dutroux led the police to the basement dungeon where Dardenne and Delhez were found alive on August 15, 1996. In an interview conducted several years later, Dardenne revealed that Dutroux had told her that she had been kidnapped by a gang but her parents did not want to pay the ransom and the gang was planning to kill her. Dutroux said he saved her, and that he wasn’t one of gang she should fear. He let her write letters to her family, which he read but never posted.

On August 17, 1996 Dutroux led police to another of his houses in Sars-la-Buissière (Hainaut). The bodies of Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo as well as another accomplice Bernard Weinstein were found in the garden. An autopsy found that the two girls had died from starvation. Dutroux said he had crushed Weinstein’s testicles until he gave him money, he then drugged him and buried him alive. Later Dutroux told the police where to find the bodies of An Marchal and Eefje Lambrecks. They were located on September 3, 1996 in Jumet (Hainaut), buried under a shack next to a house owned by Dutroux. Weinstein had lived in that house for three years.

 

During the several police, several hundred commercial adult pornographic along with a large amount of home-made sex films that Dutroux had made with his wife Michelle Martin were recovered from his properties. 

This spectacular failure of the Belgian criminal justice system may not have been caused by sheer incompetence: at least that was the opinion of the original judge in the case: 

Authorities were criticised for various aspects of the case. Perhaps most notably, police searched Dutroux’s house on December 13, 1995 and again six days later in relation to his car theft charge. During this time, Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo were still alive in the basement dungeon, but they were not found. Since the search was unrelated to kidnapping charges, police searching the house had no dogs or specialised equipment that may have discovered the girls’ presence, and they failed to notice the significance of the freshly plastered and painted wall that concealed the dungeon, in an otherwise decrepit and dirty basement. While in the basement, officers heard children’s cries, which they decided had come from the street outside. The lead officer in the search was Rene Michaux (now deceased) who is widely believed in Belgium to have been part of a cover up by the authorities.

Several incidents suggested that Dutroux’s intentions were not properly followed-up. Dutroux had offered money to a police informer for providing girls, and told him that he was constructing a cell in his basement. His mother also wrote a second letter to police, claiming that he held girls captive in his houses.

There was widespread anger and frustration among Belgians due to police errors and the general slowness of the investigation. This anger culminated when the popular investigative judge in charge of the case was dismissed after having participated in a fund-raising dinner by the girls’ parents. His dismissal resulted in a massive protest march (the “White March“) of 300,000 people on the capital, Brussels, in October 1996, two months after Dutroux’s arrest, in which demands were made for reforms of Belgium’s police and justice system.

On the witness stand, Jean-Marc Connerotte, the original judge of the case, broke down in tears when he described “the bullet-proof vehicles and armed guards needed to protect him against the shadowy figures determined to stop the full truth coming out. Never before in Belgium has an investigating judge at the service of the king been subjected to such pressure. We were told by police that [murder] contracts had been taken out against the magistrates.” Connerotte testified that the investigation was seriously hampered by protection of suspects by people in the government. “Rarely has so much energy been spent opposing an inquiry,” he said. He believed that the Mafia had taken control of the case.

A 17-month investigation by a parliamentary commission into the Dutroux affair produced a report in February 1998, which concluded that while Dutroux did not have accomplices in high positions of police and justice system, as he continued to claim, he profited from corruption, sloppiness and incompetence. 

The investigation exonerating everyone else, especially those in high positions, has not convinced everyone. Conspiracy theories have multiplied because, among other things,  Dutroux had unexplained sources of wealth:

“Within four years of being released early from jail, where he had served time for rape and kidnapping, Mr. Dutroux — whose only official income was a welfare check — was worth an estimated 6 million francs, suggesting to investigators that he was acting for others higher up in a pedophile and prostitution ring.”

 

 

 

 

 

I have the records of the Erickson murder case in Wisconsin. A young priest murdered two people to cover up his sexual abuse. The church does not come off well. It comes off even worse in the Irene Garza murder case. His supervisors protected a priest, John Feit, who, the police say, had murdered a young woman.

 

Why did Danneels have those records on the Dutroux case, and why did he hide them?

The White March Protesting the Handling of the Dutroux Case 

 Update: Investigators questioned Danneels for ten hours today. 

Update: The spokesman for the Belgian bishops claims that the Detroux dossiers were not paper dossiers but cd roms, which were sent to journalists and others, and that they had been given to Danneels by a person well known to the press. 

But why? – if the Church had no connection with the Detroux case.

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Principled Pedophilia and the German Left

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Germany 8 Comments Tags: , , ,

The Young Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Der Spiegel is often accused of being anti-clerical. The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Germany has given anti-clericals a vast amount of material to work with. But Der Spiegel is also willing to tell the truth about corruption in the liberal icons of society, in this case the revolutionaries of 1968 and their sexual abuse of children — of course abuse motivated by the purest ideological motives.

The 68ers wanted to get rid of all inhibition and repression, including the repression of sexual contact between adults and children. Sexual liberation was at the top of the agenda of the young revolutionaries who, in 1967, began turning society upside down. The control of sexual desire was seen as an instrument of domination, which bourgeois society used to uphold its power. Everything that the innovators perceived as wrong and harmful has its origins in this concept: man’s aggression, greed and desire to own things, as well as his willingness to submit to authority. The student radicals believed that only those who liberated themselves from sexual repression could be truly free.

To them, it seemed obvious that liberation should begin at an early age.

All bourgeois repression and prejudice had to be overcome:

“At the core of the movement of 1968, there was in fact a lack of respect for the necessary boundaries between children and adults. The extent to which this endangerment led to abuse cases is unclear,” Wolfgang Kraushaar, a political scientist and chronicler of the movement, writes in retrospect.

A lack of respect for boundaries is putting it mildly. One could also say that the boundaries were violently torn open.

In 1970 a kindergarten put leftist sexual enlightenment into practice.

The educators’ notes indicate that they placed a very strong emphasis on sex education. Almost every day, the students played games that involved taking off their clothes, reading porno magazines together and pantomiming intercourse.

According to the records, a “sex exercise” was conducted on Dec. 11 and a “fucking hour” on Jan. 14. An entry made on Nov. 26 reads: “In general, by lying there we repeatedly provoked, openly or in a hidden way, sexual innuendoes, which were then expressed in pantomimes, which Kurt and Rita performed together on the low table (as a stage) in front of us.”

Nor was this a fringe institution, but was sponsored and staffed by a university:

On April 7, 1970, the Berlin state parliament discussed the Rote Freiheit after-school center. As it turned out, the Psychology Institute at the Free University of Berlin was behind the center. In fact, the institute had established the facility and provided the educators who worked there.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit was a teacher during this time and described his sexual experiences with children.

In his 1975 autobiographical book “Der grosse Basar” (“The Great Bazaar”), Green Party politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit describes his experiences as a teacher in a Frankfurt Kinderladen. When the children entrusted to his care opened his fly and began stroking his penis, he writes, “I was usually quite taken aback. My reactions varied, depending on the circumstances.”

Danny the Red liked both little boys and little girls. He wrote:

«Mon flirt permanent avec tous les gosses prenait vite des formes d’érotisme. Je sentais vraiment que les petites filles, à 5 ans, avaient déjà appris comment m’emmener en bateau, me draguer [the lttle 5-year-old girls had already learned how to hit on me]. C’est incroyable. La plupart du temps, j’étais désarmé.» (L’Express)

In 1982 he continued enthusing about adult-child eroticism:

“At nine in the morning, I join my eight little toddlers between the ages of 16 months and 2 years. I wash their butts, I tickle them, they tickle me and we cuddle. … You know, a child’s sexuality is a fantastic thing. You have to be honest and sincere. With the very young kids, it isn’t the same as it is with the four-to-six-year-olds. When a little, five-year-old girl starts undressing, it’s great, because it’s a game. It’s an incredibly erotic game.”

The Leftists say it was all for the good of the children, unlike the nasty sexual activity that went on in the Catholic Church:

Does what happened in a number of the Kinderladen qualify as abuse? According to the criteria to which Catholic priests have been subjected, it clearly does, says Alexander Schuller, the sociologist. “Objectively speaking, it was abuse, but subjectively it wasn’t,” says author Dannenberg. As outlandish as it seems in retrospect, the parents apparently had the welfare of the children in mind, not their own. For the adherents to the new movement, the child did not serve as a sex object to provide the adults with a means of satisfying their sexual urges. This differentiates politically motivated abuse from pedophilia.

That of course is what pedophiles and pederasts say: it is for the good of the children.

Adult-child sex became part of the platform of the Green Party

At its convention in Lüdenscheid in 1985, the Greens’ state organization in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia argued that “nonviolent sexuality” between children and adults should generally be allowed, without any age restrictions. “Consensual sexual relations between adults and children must be decriminalized,” the “Children and Youth” task force of the Green Party in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg wrote in a position paper at about the same time.

Leftist newspapers celebrated pedophilia liberation.

During this time, no other newspaper offered pedophiles quite as much a forum as the alternative, left-leaning Tageszeitung, which shows how socially acceptable this violation of taboos had become in the leftist community. In several series, including one titled “I Love Boys,” and in lengthy interviews, men were given the opportunity to describe how beautiful and liberating sex with preadolescent boys supposedly was. “There was a great deal of uncertainty as to how far people could go,” says Gitti Hentschel, the co-founder and, from 1979 to 1985, editor of Tageszeitung. Those who, like Hentschel, were openly opposed to promoting pedophilia were described as “prudish” — as opposed to freedom of expression. “There is no such thing as censorship in the Tageszeitung,” was the response.

Now the Leftists claim that anyone who brings this part of their history up is an anti-Leftist tool of the reactionaries (sounds familiar?).

“Such accusations are also part of an attempt to denounce social progress,” sexologist and 1968 veteran Gunter Schmidt wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau. “On the whole, the social changes that are associated with the number 1968 were more likely to have led to the prevention of abuse.”

This is a very mild way of recalling the past. It is certainly not shared by everyone who was part of the leftist educational experiments of the day.

There were, as in the Catholic Church, a few brave, honest incorrupt people on the Left who were horrified by this sexualization of children.

One of the few leaders of the left who staunchly opposed the pedophile movement early on was social scientist Günter Amendt. “There is no equitable sexuality between children and adults,” Amendt said, expressing his outrage over the movement. Alice Schwarzer, the founder of the political women’s magazine Emma, also spoke out against the downplaying of sex with children and defined it as what it really was: outright abuse.

Amendt recalls how he was disparaged as a reactionary in flyers and articles. “There was an outright campaign against Alice and me at the time,” he says. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that this horrific episode came to an end. In 1994, the Pedos appeared in Tageszeitung for the last time, and even that publication recognized that intercourse with little boys was no different than with little girls, who, thanks to the women’s movement, have long been deemed worthy of protection.

They were, like Tom Doyle in the Catholic Church, ostracized.

Although Der Spiegel has given extensive coverage to clerical failings, it also keeps raising the uncomfortable question: Why is it so bad if priests have sex with minors and OK if Roman Polanski and Daniel Cohn-Bendit have sex with minors? Is the fuss about child molestation in the Church simply a cover for anti-clericalism or anti-Christianity? Shouldn’t sauce for the clerical goose also be sauce for the artistic and political ganders?

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Sauce for the Political Gander?

in clergy sex abuse scandal 4 Comments Tags: ,

Although the good people of Massachusetts were revolted by the behavior of Catholic priests with (mostly) teenage boys, and they sent Cardinal Law packing to a sinecure in Rome for having tolerated such an orgy, they seem to have had (perhaps not unreasonably) lower standards for congressmen.

 

In 1983 Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts took under his wing a young homosexual, Greg Davis (also known as Steve Gobie) who had been in trouble with the law. Davis responded to the Congressman’s generosity by running a prostitution business from Frank’s bed. Frank found out and kicked the bum out. So far, so good. If the Congressman wanted to play Pygmalion, it was his own business.

 

However, in researching an abusive priest, Fr. Gabriel Massaro, I came across newspaper stories about another Gabriel Massaro (I think that he is a different person, although in this demi-monde one can never be sure) who also had a connection with Davis and Frank.

 

Davis’s troubles with the law, it seems, were “four felony convictions in 1982: possession of obscene material, production of obscene items involving a juvenile, oral sodomy, and possession of cocaine.” Franks had met Davis through an ad in a gay paper, paid him for sex, and wrote letters on congressional stationery to Davis’ probation officer, all to help a convicted child pornographer.

 

Gabriel Massaro, a principal, of the Chevy Chase Elementary School, also met Davis through a friend and met Frank at a meeting at the congressman’s apartment with Davis’s probation officer.

 

While having a relationship with Frank, Davis was also having a relationship with Messaro. Messaro responded by letting Davis use school facilities to run his prostitution business, including servicing clients in the school’s offices.

 

When asked whether Davis had been involved with any children at the school, Messaro responded “Oh God no. He couldn’t have. I don’t think so. No.”  However, seeing the handwriting on the wall, Messaro resigned from his position as principal.

 

Frank brazened it out, and is still in Congress, representing the people of Massachusetts. But after all, Gerry Studds had been reelected by the people of Massachusetts after being censured by the House for a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old House page.  In fact, the Washington Post reported 

Rep. Gerry E. Studds (D-Mass.) was greeted in this secluded resort [Martha’s Vineyard] tonight with two standing ovations from several hundred residents and summer visitors who turned out for the congressman’s first town meeting since he was censured by his House colleagues for sexual misconduct with a 17-year-old male page. 

While I think that its right to hold priests to higher standards than politicians, (as Mark Twain remarked, our only native criminal class), I also think that the rather low standards of behavior to which Massachusetts voters held their officials perhaps led bishops to believe that the people of Massachusetts wouldn’t mind a little corruption in the Church as well.

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El Camino – The Way

in Camino, Camino de Santiago 3 Comments Tags: , ,

Martin Sheen (who is in fact Spanish – or rather Galician) has done a very moving movie on the Camino de Santiago – “The Way.” It will be released July 25 (the Feast of St James) in a Holy Year for the Camino, because this year the Feast of St. James falls on a Sunday.

I, Deo volente – Dios mediante, will begin the Camino on September 20, and arrive in Santiago on All Saints Day (La Fiesta de Todos los Santos).

Here is the trailer: http://www.theway-themovie.com/

The plot is heart-rending: a widower loses his son, who is killed as he begins the Camino. The father resolves to walk the Camino with the ashes of his son – and learns a lot along the way.

From the memoirs I have read, the story is all too probable. The very first day of the Camino, leaving from St. Jean Pied du Port and climbing over the Pyrenees, is in fact the most dangerous, and every year someone dies.(There is an alternative route I have promised my wife I will take if the weather looks threatening).

Sometimes people walk the Camino with a sick family member to pray for healing. The family member dies on the Camino, and the survivor comes back to complete it for him. And all along the way are the crucifixes, and the pilgrims kiss the bleeding feet of Jesus, as their feet (all too often) bleed too.

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BishopAccountability, Mexico, and Murders

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Mexico 3 Comments Tags: , ,

The archival project with which I am associated, BishopAccountability, is collecting all documents, articles, legal cases, and other material, associated with sexual abuse by clerics in the United States. We have close to a million pages of documents now, and will probaly end up with 3 to 5 million pages. 

No one else is collecting this material. No one else, as far as we know, has a list of the names of every priest accused of sexual abuse in the United States, much less the documentation of the abuse and how the bishops handled or, almost always, mishandled, the abuse. No one – not the American bishops, not the Vatican, not any governmental or law enforcement agency – has the documentation that is essential to understanding how abuse flourished so long among the Catholic clergy. 

The violence that drug cartels are inflicting on Mexico is also not documented. The government  in Mexico can scarcely be trusted to paint a realistic picture, and no governmental agency in the United States seems to be keeping track of what is happening on our southern border – except for one  librarian in Las Cruces, New Mexico. 

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Ms. Molloy, a 54-year-old librarian at New Mexico State University here, spends most mornings sifting reports in the Mexican press to create a tally of drug-cartel-related killings in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. She is striving to fill a widening information gap about these homicides in Juárez, some 50 miles southeast of Las Cruces, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.

There is no official count of the people killed in Mexico’s escalating drug wars—whether the victims are drug traffickers, police or civilians. A government estimate puts the total at about 22,000 in all of Mexico since late 2006.

For Juárez, Mexico’s deadliest city, state officials keep their own tally, but the swift pace of the killings, as well as distrust of authorities, has prompted reporters and such observers as Ms. Molloy to keep their own counts.

Some Americans who attempted to count the killings were overwhelmed by the carnage and gave up. But Ms. Molloy perseveres. The death toll has risen above a thousand in Juárez so far this year, according to her count.

“I don’t think there’s a phenomenon like that in the world unless it’s a declared war,” she said.

Mexican government officials say they aren’t deliberately withholding information on the killings. They say determining which homicides are linked to criminal gangs involves lengthy investigations and a level of coordination among various agencies that isn’t automatic.

The Mexican news media, however, distinguish drug-related killings from, say, domestic violence, by using information collected by reporters at crime scenes.

Ms. Molloy tallies their reports and makes her findings available for free to anyone who wants them. Her material is used in news accounts and scholarly studies in the U.S. and beyond, as universities and some U.S. newspapers curtail travel in Mexico because of concerns about the violence.

More than 300 people subscribe to Ms. Molloy’s daily news and analysis emails, including congressional staff, U.S. and Mexican human-rights watchdogs, local and international reporters, and border observers from as far away as Norway.

Like BishopAccountability, Ms. Molloy wants her work to be of permanent value:

Ms. Molloy said her long-term plan is to build a more comprehensive archive at her university’s library to document Juárez’s bloody years. She hopes future readers will be able to track, in the news clippings, longstanding problems she and other scholars believe are contributing to today’s violence: the migration of poor workers from Mexico’s interior searching for manufacturing jobs; the growth of shanty towns; and more recently, a generation of uneducated youth lured by the gangster lifestyle.

“Ten years from now, people are going to ask ‘What happened in Juárez?’ ” Ms. Molloy said.

And ten, twenty, a hundred years from now, people will be asking “What happened in the Catholic Church?” The BishopAccountability archive will have the clues, the documents, the records, without which it will be impossible to answer that question. 

(The costs are daunting. If you know anyone who has a lot of spare change, head them in our direction).

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To an Intemperate Critic

in Uncategorized 5 Comments

I have occasionally let anger blind me and have let myself become confused about the facts of a case, so I will not be too hard on a critic by posting his intemperate and inaccurate criticism (he should watch his language)

 

He claims that I called a leader of the Sancta Muerte cult a “Catholic Bishop.”

 

If he had read the post carefully, he would have noticed that it was not I but the usual confused newspaper reports who called him that, and I corrected the reports

 

The newspaper said:

 

“We are being persecuted,” said Catholic Bishop David Romo, who has become the black sheep of Mexico’s Catholic church for leading services to the bejeweled, scythe-wielding Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, in the rough Mexico City neighborhood of Tepito.

 

I corrected the newspaper by pointing out:

 

“However Romo, despite inaccurate news reports, is not a Catholic, but rather a self-styled bishop of a traditionalist church, whose traditionalism seems to include pagan worship.”

 

However, it is nice to know that someone is reading even older posts.

 

The Sancta Muerte cult needs close watching. Mexico I suspect has a death rate from violence in the same league as Iraq, and Mexico is a lot closer.

 

President Calderon of Mexico has correctly blamed the drug users of the United States for the crisis that threatens to tear México apart: without money from the U.S., the drug cartels would wither.

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Pope John Paul’s Policies on Child Molesters

in clergy sex abuse scandal 6 Comments Tags: ,

The diocese of Stockton, California bought convicted child molester Rev. Oliver O’Grady a pension (at the cost of 94,000) that would begin when O’Grady turned 65. Bishop Blaire of Stockton explained to his diocese: 

When Oliver O’Grady was in prison, he refused to apply for removal from the priesthood, also known as laicization or defrocking. Already in 1993 Bishop Donald Montrose had removed O’Grady’s authorization to exercise priestly ministry.

 

I came to the Diocese in March, 1999 and O’Grady was to be paroled in November, 2000. I was determined that he not leave prison as a priest. At the time, the church process for removal from the priesthood was lengthy and often uncertain. There was no guarantee that he would be laicized.

 

O’Grady’s Canon lawyer informed me that O’Grady would voluntarily seek laicization if some retirement funds were made available for his later years. I found this arrangement very distasteful, but I was adamant that he not walk out of prison as a priest even though he had been removed from exercising ministry. So I reluctantly agreed to the proposal.

 

I wanted to provide some measure of justice for his victims and some peace of mind that he would never again use his priesthood to damage families. 

The bishop seems to be telling the full truth.  

After Vatican II, a flood of priests left the priesthood. Paul VI was hurt but granted almost all the requests. When John Paul II was elected, he stopped the automatic granting of requests and made it especially difficult to to remove a priest against the priest’s will. 

This policy applied even to convicted, jailed child molesters like Oliver O’Grady. 

After Cardinal Ratzinger took over the abuse cases in 2002, he ensured that abusers were removed far more expeditiously, and when he became pope he speeded up the process even more (although he has not acted against the bishops who enabled abuse). 

John Paul’s blindness to the damage that he was doing by allowing convicted child molesters to remain in the priesthood is a severe stain on his papacy.

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Visible and Invisible Channels of Salvation

in Catholic Church, sacraments 3 Comments

Several people have raised the question of the effects of “invalid” sacraments. 

Underlying this question are two views of God’s offer of salvation:

1.     The existence of the Church and the sacraments narrows God’s offer of salvation (Augustine). That is, only those who are in the juridical boundaries of the Church and therefore receive valid sacraments have at least a chance at salvation – although few in fact will be saved.  Outside the Church there is no salvation, and very little within.

or

2.     The church is a sign and visible channel of God’s grace, but He is free to operate outside those channels. The Spirit came down on Cornelius and his household even before they were baptized. God loves all that He has created and wills to save all men.

The Augustinian view is full of contradictions. If baptism is necessary for salvation why is not reception of the Eucharist just as necessary (“Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man etc.”)? But the Western Church does not offer communion to infants. Moreover, anyone, even a pagan, can baptize, if he uses the proper words, pours the water, and intends to do what the Church does. Traditionally this was justified because baptism is necessary for salvation. But isn’t the Eucharist just as necessary? 

It is common Catholic teaching that a spiritual communion (that is, without the reception of the consecrated elements) has all the grace and fruits of a sacramental communion. Presumably Protestants, even if they are celebrating an “invalid” Eucharist because they lack orders, can and do make spiritual communions which are as efficacious as sacramental communions. 

Similarly, one can confess one’s sins to a fellow Christian, not just to a priest. Or if one by mistake confesses to a person who is not really a priest, or the penitent’s sins not forgiven?  

The sacraments are not ways to limit salvation, but to broaden it and make it visible. They establish a physical, historical continuity with the Incarnate Word, who is entirely free to operate outside them to achieve His saving purposes. 

Why bother with the visible Church then? Why did not God save men without their visible cooperation? 

The human race is not a collection of individuals but a communal project – there are no self-made men. Christ is the head and source of the regenerate human race, and the visible channels that bring his salvation are His will to establish His visible presence within history, although He also continues to work invisibly or in a half-hidden way to draw all men to Himself.

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Cultivating Narcissism

in clergy sex abuse scandal, clericalism, Narcissism 3 Comments Tags: ,

While I suspect that many priest sexual abusers and even some bishops may be true, congenital psychopaths with a different brain structure than the average person, most of their failure to feel the pain and damage that abuse was causing victims was brought about by the culture of clerical narcissism, Priests considered themselves other Christs, not just in the sense of ordained ministers of the word and sacraments, but in the sense that priests were the only really important people in the Church.

 

Narcissism which shades into psychopathy, can be learned, and, I hope, unlearned. Science Daily reports: 

The study, presented in Boston at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, analyzes data on empathy among almost 14,000 college students over the last 30 years.

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.” 

Nor is it just college students:

In a related but separate analysis, Konrath found that nationally representative samples of Americans see changes in other people’s kindness and helpfulness over a similar time period.

“Many people see the current group of college students — sometimes called ‘Generation Me’ — as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history,” said Konrath, who is also affiliated with the University of Rochester Department of Psychiatry.

“It’s not surprising that this growing emphasis on the self is accompanied by a corresponding devaluation of others,” O’Brien said. 

For centuries, in part in response to Protestantism, the Catholic Church developed a mystique of the priesthood that exalted priests above ordinary mortals. The sense of entitlement and self-importance that some priests developed tended to reduce the empathy they had for the sufferings of the mere laity

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Nullifying Ordinations

in clergy sex abuse scandal 7 Comments Tags:

The comments in the previous blog raise the interesting question of whether the ordination of an unbeliever is valid. That is, if I man was baptized, but has lost his faith and seeks ordination anyway, is he validly ordained a priest or consecrated a bishop? 

In two cases (including Rudy Kos) I have come across memos that indicated the chanceries in Dallas and Santa Fe considered asking the Vatican to nullify the ordination of priests. 

As far as I know this request was not carried through, nor were the grounds specified. I presume the grounds were fraud: Rudy Kos wanted to be ordained solely to get access to boys. The other priest has had a checkered career as a Jew and as Buddhist. One does wonder whether he was ever a Christian. 

A marriage can be declared null: that is, it never existed, on such grounds as insanity, fraud, or consanguinity. The grounds for nullifying the ordination of a priest would presumably include fraud or insanity. But nullifying the ordination of a priest would mean declaring that all the masses he celebrated were not masses and all the confessions he heard were not sacramental confession. This would create an enormous crisis of conscience for many of the laity. 

But I wonder whether at least some of the sexual abusers were not indeed frauds: that is, they either were not believers at all or sought ordination for evil purposes. Can such a man really be ordained? Was Maciel ever really a Christian? Can you become a priest without being a Christian?

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The Quality of Mercy

in clergy sex abuse scandal, guilt, Psychology 10 Comments Tags: , ,

In reading the cases of sexual abuse, I pity the victims, but I often pity the abusers, who are often psychopaths on a straight path to hell. They must be punished, both to affirm  justice and to waken them to the enormity of their acts. Punishment is necessary for justice, and justice is necessary if the universe is to be rational and life is to be worth living (see this blog). But only a psychopath can inflict pain, even necessary pain, without feeling anything. 

When I awake at three in the morning from troubled dreams after working on cases of sexual abuse, I turn to the sermons of John Chrysostom. In his Sermon 43 on Acts, he has these thoughts:  

Let us have a soul apt to sympathize, let us have a heart that knows how to feel with others in their sorrows; no unmerciful temper, no inhumanity. 

God punishes, and shall I grieve for those that He is punishing? Year, verily: for God Himself that punishes wishes this: since neither does He Himself wish to punish, nay, even Himself grieves when punishing.  

We see men–slayers, wicked men, suffering punishment, and we are distressed, and grieve for them. Let us not be philosophical beyond measure: let us show ourselves pitiful, that we may be pitied; there nothing equal to this beautiful trait: nothing so much marks us the stamp of human nature as the showing pity, as the being kind to our fellow-man. 

It is this sympathy, this empathy, this feeling for the sufferings of others that abusers (and bishops) almost universally lacked. Research is being done on whether brain structure affects the ability to feel empathy, and there is more and more evidence that it does. I wonder whether they psychology tests that are being given to prospective seminarians are misdirected: they should not be looking so much for sexual disorders as for signs of psychopathy. I wish prospective bishops also had to undergo such tests.

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Bliss Ninnies

in Uncategorized 2 Comments

When we were at my wife’s college mini-reunion in Sedona, my brother-in-law gathered up brochures from the visitors’ center. 

The first is from “Down to Earth Psychic Readings.”  These are “famous for being authentic, accurate, and fun” (I can’t abide inauthentic psychic readings). 

The Center for the New Age offers Aura Photo, 15 (count’m, 15) Certified Psychic Readers (no uncertified psychics here), personal vortex tours, past life regression and FREE aura Cleaning (nothing worse than a dusty aura). 

Sedona Healing and Hypnotherapy has Intuitive Reading, Chakra Healing, Sacred Contracts, Spiritual Hypnosis, and Spirit Releasement. 

Angel Lightfeather is Sedona’s Top Mystic. One satisfied customer testifies: “Angel, not only did you change my wife’s life to one of happiness, but when you healed our dog on the vortex, we watched a miracle before our very eyes!” 

Bariatric (?) Patient Coaching is also available. 

Zoe is an Energy Healer. As is well known, “illness is ultimately caused by a disruption in the Human Energy Field” and our “full chakra and hara system” need a lube job every now and then. 

Not all practitioners are female (although I notice most are). Gregory, a Clairvoyant, a Conscious  Channel, a Shamanic Healer, offers Vortex Experiences to Secret Spots (he knows that sometimes a guy just needs a good vortex). He also has these tools at hand: Inner-Child Exploration, Polarity and Velocity Energy Work, Quantum Physics (very scientific), 2500 year old Manifestation Techniques (very historic), Dowsing (useful in the desert) and best of all, Extraction of Entities based on the work of Dr. Bryon Gentry.  

And on and on: Psychic Tarot, Chakra Balancing, Karuna, pendulums, Organ Harmonization, Pet Whispering, Holistic Pedicures (and manicures) etc. etc. etc. 

Then my brother-in-law found a true source of healing: 

Oak Creek Micro Brewery with Hefewien, Lager, Nut Brown Ale, Winter Knicker Kicker, Nektar Oktoberfest, Earth Angel Belgian, and so on through the sweet names that prove that malt does more than Milton can (and definitely more than psychic chakra balancing pet whispering pedicures can) to justify the ways of God to man.

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No Babies, No Work = No Future

in demography 1 Comment

The recession has compounded Europe’s demographic problems. The riots in Greece are just the beginning. The French hate to work, and would probably have a revolution rather than work until 65. Not that a revolution would do any good, but that never seems to have stopped the French. 

The New York Times reports: 

With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle, at least not without a period of austerity and significant changes. The countries are trying to reassure investors by cutting salaries, raising legal retirement ages, increasing work hours and reducing health benefits and pensions.

(snip) 

According to the European Commission, by 2050 the percentage of Europeans older than 65 will nearly double. In the 1950s there were seven workers for every retiree in advanced economies. By 2050, the ratio in the European Union will drop to 1.3 to 1.

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Celibacy and Sexual Abuse

in Celibacy, clergy sex abuse scandal, Uncategorized 4 Comments Tags: ,

 Richard Cross at Catholic Culture has dose some thoughtful guessimating about the rates of sexual abuse among the clergy in the Catholic Church and the clergy in the Anglican Church. 

It has to be guess work because the Anglican churches are not very forthcoming with statistics. However, I have collected material on the Anglican Church in Australia and I know that that church has a major problem with clerics, including married clerics, abusing minors. 

How does it compare with the Catholic situation. Read the details of Cross’s estimates, but I think his conclusion is reasonable. Much depends on the ordination rate of Anglican clergy, data which is simply not available for Australia. Using two estimates of the ordination rate Cross concludes: 

Hence it would be useful to create a range of ordination estimates; cutting the rate in half, yields an abuser rate estimate of 4.4%, whereas doubling the ordination rate yields an abuser rate estimate of 3.0%. The range in values contains the Roman Catholic rate of 4.0%, and in either extreme is not far distant from it. 

But no one has gathered statistics for churches, so any claim that the rate of abuse by Catholic clergy is more, or less, or about the same as other churches, is almost entirely guess work. 

I suspect that sexual abuse is higher in churches in which the clergy have a lot of prestige and therefore a lot of control over the members of the church: Catholic, Anglican, and also Pentecostal and charismatic churches in which the minister is seen as “the Lord’s anointed.” 

However, no one has done any studies, which is odd in this environment. It would be nice to have some facts rather than emotional tirades against celibacy. 

BTW, Cross’s estimate of 4% of Catholic priests is too low. Even with the numbers the bishops have released, it is more like 5%, and in the dioceses in the attorney generals or lawyers have forced full revelation, the percentage is or like 9-10%.

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