Cardinals and bishops involved in the LCWR investigation have suffered no
discipline for their blunders in their handling of clergy pedophiles, according
to news reports and legal documents.
Cardinal Bernard Law was the prime mover behind the “apostolic visitation”
of all American nun communities, other than monastic ones, and the subsequent
CDF investigation of the LCWR, according to sources in Rome, including Cardinal Franc Rodé, the retired prefect of
the congregation that oversees religious orders.
Law, who refused to comment for this article, has not spoken to the press
in 10 years. He resigned as Boston archbishop in December 2002 and spent 18
months living at a convent of nuns in Maryland, with periodic trips to Rome. In
2004, the Vatican rewarded him with a position as prefect of Santa Maria
Maggiore, a historic basilica; he took an active role in several Roman Curia
boards, and became a fixture on the social circuit of embassies in Rome. Boston
was a staggering mess.
Abuse settlements there have cost $175 million. Mass attendance since 2002
has dropped from 45 percent to 16 percent. Declining financial support has
caused a storm of church closings, from 400 parishes in 2002 to 135 today.
Six years after Law found redemption in Rome, clergy abuse cases exploded
in Europe.
“You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry,” Pope Benedict XVI wrote to Catholics of Ireland in a letter on March 19, 2010,
as the Irish reeled from a government report on a history of bishops
concealing clergy predators. “Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has
been violated,” the pope continued. “You find it hard to forgive or be
reconciled with the Church. In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse
that we all feel. At the same time, I ask you not to lose hope.”
Despite the uncommon tone of contrition, the pope’s letter offered no
procedures to remove complicit bishops or genuine institutional reform.
On April 4, 2010, as cases of clergy abuse in other countries shook the
European heartland, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel criticized Benedict for
“reluctance to take a firm stance ... [on] a crisis for the entire Catholic
Church, a crisis that is now descending upon the Vatican with a vengeance and
hitting its spiritual leader hard.”
Two years later, the drumbeat of criticism has subsided; but the core
problem is unchanged. Under the logic of apostolic succession, in which each
bishops stands as a descendant of Jesus’s apostles, the power structure gives de
facto immunity to cardinals and bishops for gross violations of moral trust,
much less the law.
Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, Missouri, remains in his office despite
his conviction in civil court, which did not draw a prison sentence, for
concealing a perpetrator. Pope Benedict has not punished any of the hierarchs
who recycled so many sex offenders by sending them to other parishes.
The double standard in church governance — men of the hierarchy immune from
church justice — has become a glaring issue to leaders of missionary orders
in Rome as the CDF probes the Leadership Conference of Women
Religious in America.
In 2005, shortly after Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger emerged from the conclave
as Pope Benedict XVI, he appointed San Francisco Archbishop William Levada to
succeed him as prefect of the CDF. Levada became a cardinal soon
thereafter.
Levada was caught in a swamp in 2002 amidst news reports on abuse cases
under his watch. He formed an Independent Review Board of primarily lay people
to advise him and review personnel files on questionable priests. Psychologist
James Jenkins chaired the board. Father Greg Ingels, a canon lawyer, helped set
it up. Jenkins grew suspicious when Levada would not release the names of
priests under scrutiny.
In May of 2003, board members were stunned on reading news reports that
Ingels had been indicted for allegedly having oral sex with a 15-year-old boy at
a local high school in the 1970s. Levada, the board learned, had known about the
allegations since 1996, yet kept Ingels in ministry and as an adviser. Ingels
helped fashion the church's 2002 zero-tolerance policy and wrote a bishops’
guidebook on how to handle abuse cases. Ingels stepped down.
Jenkins quit his post, denouncing Levada for “an elaborate public relations
scheme.”
Robert Mickens reported in The Tablet in May that Baltimore Archbishop
William Lori, a protege of Law’s, asked the CDF to investigate LCWR.
Lori established several communities of traditionalist nuns as bishop of
Bridgeport, Conn. between 2001 and 2012.
As a canon lawyer, Lori helped write the US bishops’ 2002 youth protection
charter. It has no oversight over bishops. In 2003, Lori approved a $21 million
abuse victims’ settlement involving several priests. Voice of the Faithful
criticized him for allowing an accused monsignor to stay in his parish. In 2011
the priest resigned after a female church worker made sexual harassment
allegations.
In a Jan. 12, 2011 Connecticut Post op-ed piece, VOTF leader John Marshall
Lee cited a priest who had been suspended for sex abuse yet appeared in clerical
attire at public gatherings.
“Does this behavior contradict Bishop Lori's assumed supervisory orders
suspending priestly public activities?” Lee asked. “How does a bishop enforce
his instructions in this regard? Where does a whistleblower report this
behavior, or determine if the priest in question was suspended in the first
place?”
Lee cited another cleric who had been removed after “credible allegations
of sexual abuse” but with no indication that he was defrocked.
“There is no current address for this man who might have been labeled ‘sex
offender’ (had the church acted responsibly when leaders first heard of adult
criminal behavior perpetrated on Catholic children) and who may continue to be a
potential threat to children," Lee continued. "Is the church saying that such
men are no longer a public threat to children?”
Bishop Leonard Blair of Toledo, who wrote the secret report on LCWR for
Levada, has said he got most of his information from LCWR literature. Writing in
his diocesan paper, Blair made the accurate point that several speakers at LCWR
conferences have taken positions, like ordaining women, that are contrary to
church teaching.
Does this mean that the ordination of women is a new form of heresy? Can
religious conferences function with academic freedom? If the truth of the church
is defined by men who have violated basic moral standards of Christian life in
disregarding the rights of children and their families, how does their behavior
meet the sensus fidelium, or mind of the faithful, extolled by Vatican II?
Blair’s own background spotlights a double standard that rewards bishops
who scandalize lay people.
In 2004, the priest in charge of Toledo’s $60 million capital campaign was
accused by two men of having abused them as boys many years before. Blair kept
Father Robert Yaeger in his fundraising job while an attorney negotiated
settlements for the victims. The bishop removed Yaeger after eighteen months, as
the fundraising campaign drew to a close, but before the settlements made
news.
“A priest who was publicly critical of Blair's handling of the sexual abuse
crisis has been silenced from speaking to the media,” says David Yonke, an
author and former Toledo Blade reporter who covered religion for years. ”Father
Stephen Stanbery used to call me regularly but stopped about two years ago. He
could not acknowledge that he was silenced by the bishop but it is clear that’s
what happened,” says Yonke, now with Religion News Service.
Blair forcibly retired a veteran pastor who criticized the bishop’s parish
closures as “high-handed decisions with almost no collaboration with anyone.” In
one parish he installed a priest who had had a long relationship with a woman.
When the parishioners found out, Blair reassigned the priest. A spokesperson
said the bishop had to keep quiet as the priest told him in confession.
In 2005, parishioners in the farm belt town of Kansas, Ohio, filed a
Vatican appeal when Blair closed St. James parish. It failed. They filed suit to
save the parish in county court, arguing that the bishop was only one trustee
but parishioners owned the property. The state sided with the bishop. “We spent
$100,000 in legal fees,” said parishioner Virginia Hull. “Bishop Blair paid his
lawyers with $77,957 from our parish account.” Blair had the church
demolished.
Blair, Lori and Levada became bishops with help from Law, whose influence
at the Vatican as a member of Congregation for Bishops was pivotal in selecting
new American priests for the hierarchy.
The second member of the three-man committee now supervising LCWR is Bishop
Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill. In a 2007 homily in Grand Rapids for the
Red Mass, an annual liturgy for lawyers and judges, Paprocki, who has degrees in
civil and canon law, declared that “the law is being used as an instrument of
attack on the Church. This was true from the earliest times when the earliest
Christians were, in effect, outlaws in the Roman empire for refusing to worship
the official state gods.”
He saw clergy abuse lawsuits were undermining the church’s religious
freedom. “This attack is particularly directed against bishops and priests,
since the most effective way to scatter the flock is to attack the shepherd,” he
insisted. “The principal force behind these attacks is none other than the
devil.”
Equating the devil with lawyers seeking financial compensation for victims
of child sexual abuse drew heavy criticism for Paprocki.
In a 2011 homily the bishop took a rhetorical backstep, saying, "Apparently
I did not make myself clear that it is the sins of priests and bishops who
succumbed to the temptations of the devil that have put their victims and the
Catholic community in this horrible situation in the first place.”
In a column for his diocesan newspaper before the November election,
Paprocki attacked the Democrats’ party platform supporting abortion.
Without endorsing Mitt Romney outright, he wrote that “a vote for a
candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and
gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of
your soul in serious jeopardy.”
Did bishops who sent child molesters from parish to parish, on to fresh
victims, without warning parishioners, promote “actions or behaviors that are
intrinsically evil?” Does apostolic succession absolve them of all
wrongdoing?
Bishops gain stature in the estimation of cardinals and popes by proving
their loyalty. A chief way to do that is by serving as an investigator of
priests or nuns who run afoul of the hierarchy as threats to the moral teaching
upheld by bishops, regardless of what the bishops have done.
Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle is delegated by the CDF to ensure that
the nuns’ leadership group conforms to changes the Vatican wants.
Sartain was previously the bishop of Joliet, Ill., a diocese that was
wracked with abuse cover-ups and lawsuits under his predecessor.
In spring of 2009, a Joliet seminarian, Alejandro Flores, was caught with
pornographic pictures of youths, some of which appeared to be of underage boys.
No criminal charges were filed.
Bishop Sartain ordained Flores a priest six months later, in June 2009.
Then in January 2010, Flores was arrested for molesting a boy. He pled guilty in
September 2010, the same month that Pope Benedict promoted Sartain to archbishop
of Seattle."
