PHILLY CRIMINAL TRIAL:
"For almost a decade now in Philadelphia, the
birthplace of American religious and civil liberties, government prosecutors
have been examining closely and carefully the Philadelphia Archdiocese's
medieval-style secret archives. The archives cover almost a half century of
"problem priest" personnel, at times including files for almost a quarter of all
Philly priests, who served under three Philly Princes of the Catholic Church,
Cardinals Rigali, Bevilacqua, and Krol. This long prosecutorial effort has
culminated in the just completed landmark multi-month criminal trial of a
former top hierarchical official, with more criminal trials and likely many
related civil lawsuits to follow. The trial has been well reported by
Philadelphia Inquirer journalists in a brief review here and over a
three month period in detail here.
The pope has just tried to soften the significant adverse publicity from the
trial and to preserve his Philly Catholic donor base by announcing a papal visit
to Philadelphia in 2015, which already has been poorly received by many outraged
Philly Catholics, as reported
here.
The Philly trial court heard dozens of
witnesses, including sexual abuse survivors, under oath. Prosecutors introduced
as evidence hundreds of previously undisclosed documents from the Cardinals'
secret priest personnel archives. The trial revelations ranged from graphic
details of nauseating and disgraceful assaults on children by priest predators,
who had been previously known to the Cardinals to present serious safety risks
for defenseless children, to shameless collusive document-shredding and almost
limitless lying by top officials, as the dark side of the Philly clerical child
sexual abuse scandal and its hierarchical cover-up was fully and relentlessly
exposed.
PHILLY CARDINALS:
Each of the three Philly Cardinals had similar
life experiences as they ambitiously climbed the hierarchical ladder. Each had
received a prestigious Roman Gregorian University graduate education. Each in
varying degrees for many years had been close to the current pope, Benedict XVI,
and to his immediate predecessor, John Paul II, as well as to other major Roman
curial Cardinals.
Cardinal Rigali, who was in charge in Philly
for almost a decade until last year, had also worked closely in Rome for over a
decade with Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Ratzinger, and with John Paul II.
Cardinal Rigali prior to Philly had headed the
St. Louis Archdiocese, where he sponsored and mentored New York's Cardinal
Dolan. Dolan is now head of the US bishops' national conference and is currently
facing major criticism for misleading statements about his role in "golden
parachute" payments beginning several years ago to suspected Milwaukee priest
sexual predators, as reported by the NY Times here and
also
discussed here.
Cardinal Dolan's current treasurer at the US
bishops' conference, Wheeling's Bishop Bransfield, was unexpectedly mentioned
for unseemly behavior in sworn testimony several times during the Philly trial.
Bransfield has broadly challenged this sworn testimony as reported in the NY
Times here.
Embarrassingly for the pope, Bransfield several weeks ago had been visiting the
pope with Washington DC's Cardinal Wuerl and members of the "$1 million a head"
elite U.S. donor group, The Papal Foundation, when the unxpected negative Philly
trial testimony allegations about Bransfield became public.
Cardinal Wuerl had even given some of the elite
donors as part of the visit a tour of the Vatican Bank during which Wuerl
indicated boldly that it was a safe and sound bank. Apparently, Wuerl's close
ally, Carl Anderson, a former Reagan right-wing staffer, current head of the
Knights of Columbus and a Vatican Bank supervisory board member, had overlooked
warning Wuerl that the Vatican Banks's CEO was about to be sacked due to
purported troubles at the Bank. The Vatican Bank's mess seems to just get worse
on a daily basis as
reported here.
Cardinal Rigali had also in St. Louis sponsored
and mentored Kansas City's Opus Dei Bishop Finn, who is currently awaiting a
criminal trial for failing to report timely a priest child pornographer. Finn
was recently stripped of much of his episcopal authority as
reported here.
Cardinal Bevilacqua prior to Philly had headed
the Pittsburgh Archdiocese, after serving as an influential auxiliary Bishop in
the large Diocese of Brooklyn, NY.
Cardinal Krol had prior to Philly been an
important auxiliary Bishop in Cleveland and, as a fluent Polish speaker, was an
important US confidante of John Paul II.
Each of these Cardinals also served for years
in key roles on, or as advisors to, major papal Roman curial committees, as well
as on major committees of the US bishops' conference, which Cardinal Krol headed
from 1971-1974 and Cardinal Dolan now heads.
PHILLY MANAGEMENT MODEL AND VATICAN:
The evident and significant conclusion can, and
must, be drawn that the priest personnel management practices of these three
Cardinals, which were consistently followed generally for over a half century as
the recent Philly trial has amply demonstrated, are fairly representative and
quite typical of the management practices not only of other US bishops, but of
worldwide Catholic bishops.
All worldwide Cardinals and Bishops and their
dioceses were, and remain, subject to the same Roman canon law and curial
oversight as have the Philly, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn and Cleveland
bishops and dioceses. The close connections and frequent interactions of the
Philly Cardinals with the Roman curia and Benedict XVI, and his predecessor,
John Paul II, strongly support the monumental inference that Philly's three
Cardinals were only following the Vatican hierarchy's worldwide standard
operating procedures. This is at the heart of the pending criminal complaint
alleging crimes against humanity against the pope and Cardinals Bertone, Levada,
and Sodano now at the International Criminal Court at the Hague. This complaint
may be a motivating factor for the Vatileaks hysteria.
It must also be acknowledged, sadly but
significantly, that it is not credible to assert the pope was unaware of what
was happening generally with the abuse cover-ups of these three Philly
Cardinals, as well as the alleged misdeeds of Cardinal Dolan and Bishop
Bransfield, both when the pope was as a Cardinal head of the curial Congregation
of the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 to 2005 and, after 2005, as pope. Given
the notoriety of the 2005 and 2011 Philly grand jury report and the related
replacement of Bevilacqua by Rigali, then Rigali by Archbishop Chaput, both
popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI must have been quite familiar with the
widespread and long-term Philly predator priest scandal.
The pope clearly has had close personal
contacts, as well as multiple administrative contacts, with each of these
Cardinals, especially with Rigali and Dolan, and with Bishop Bransfield. Yet the
only significant public papal action taken with respect to any of them appears
to have been (1) to appoint Rigali last year, after the Philly indictments were
issued, as an honored papal representative to a Czech Republic event, (2) to
make Dolan Archbishop of New York then a Cardinal, and (3) to fete Bransfield
annually at a Vatican ceremony for elite US donors, including one several weeks
ago. Now the pope plans to "reward" the beleaguered Philly Catholics with an
unwelcome visit in 2015!
Of course, given Cardinal Dolan's own widely
reported abuse cover-up baggage from Milwaukee and New York, Cardinal Dolan has
as head of the US bishops, unsurprisingly, failed to speak out publicly about
either his mentor, Cardinal Rigali's pathetic management of Philly priest
predators or about his treasurer, Bishop Bransfield's alleged long-term
association with the notorious and defrocked Philly priest, Stanley Gana.
PHILLY PRIEST ABUSE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES:
What were these priest personnel management
practices relating to sexual abuse allegations against suspected priests, as
revealed in detail at the Philly trial and/or in the Philadelphia Archdiocese's
secret records, and what do they tell us? These practices include:
(1) Maintenance of detailed records of priest
misconduct kept in secure secret archives with access limited to the Cardinal
and a handful of his chosen top assistants. In Philly, this included secret
files at one time on over 300 priests with problems warranting secrecy, almost
one quarter of the entire priest population at some times.
(2) Destruction of potentially incriminating
records, most significantly, the destruction of several copies of a list of
three dozen priests identified as serious sexual predator risks, some of whom
abused more children after the list was shredded.
(3) Suppression of potentially incriminating
records, most significantly, an unshredded copy of the list of three dozen
suspected priest predators which was never produced as was legally required for
either the 2005 or the 2011 Philly grand jury investigations.
(4) Lying to prosecutors, abuse victims, and
abuse victims' lawyers.
(5) Intimidating victims and their families
generally, demanding unreasonable confidentiality and legal claims-release
agreements as a condition to getting financial assistance for counseling, and
using heavy-handed and expensive legal tactics to deter and/or delay victims
from pursuing timely legal relief.
(6) Punishing potential whistleblowers, as well
as pastors who resisted the placement of suspected priests in their parishes, as
happened with one pastor at least.
(7) Accepting inadequate and/or incomplete
psychological reports from "captive" psychological counseling institutions of
predator priests' fitness to return to ministry.
(8) Assigning known predator priests to
unsuspecting parishes, without even informing the pastors of such parishes of
the risks the predators presented.
(9) Selecting pliable and conflicted Catholics
for review boards and agreeable "independent" auditors to review their
performance, and then as well to cherrypick the files to be submitted to these
biased review boards and auditors.
(10) Lobbying excessively and expensively to
keep child abuse statutes of limitation narrow and short, and delaying victims
by ruses and subterfuge until these short statutes of limitation legally barred
the victims' claims.
WORLDWIDE IMPLICATIONS OF PHILLY MANAGEMENT
PROCEDURES:
What do these practices indicate? They indicate
clearly that the Philly Archdiocesean leadership and, by clear implication and
fair inference, the Catholic Church's hierarchy worldwide is, and has been, for
decades engaged in a massive cover-up of widespread priest sexual abuse of
defenseless children.
They also suggest strongly that few U.S.
political leaders, prosecutors, judges, and even journalists and TV news
outlets have given the pervasive sexual assault by priests on minors the serious
attention it requires.
As a consequence, over 100,000 American
children have been sexually abused by priests with not one U.S. bishop tried and
convicted for complicity. This number of innocent and defenseless American
victims exceeds the combined total U.S. fatalities and casualties from the Iraq
and Afganistan wars, yet American political leaders and media have barely given
this outrageous epidemic any attention.
ROLE OF POPE:
As noted in the comments, "Our Opportunistic
Pope" here and
"Is the Pope Losing it?" here,
the current pope plays "hardball." The pope appears to be in a frantic race with
his own biological clock to downsize the Church to a controllable cultic empire
before the priest sexual abuse scandal bankrupts the bishops, who understandably
appear more focused on staying a step ahead of the prosecutors.
The pope put the fear of God into the entire
hierarchy last year by sacking an Australian bishop for raising the subject of
women priests, even though, as John Allen recently
reported, the pope in his own hand-written notes found that "...there was no
doubt about his (the bishop's) very good pastoral intentions...." John also
reported on a Cardinal who recently complained in a letter to the pope about
being "yelled at" by the pope's right-hand man, Msgr. Ganswein, for failing to
approve almost instantly a papal document.
Pastoral bishops are out and episcopal puppets
are in, it appears. For more on this blitzkreig approach, including a link to
John Allen's new papal report, please read here. For
the papal financial urgency underlying the pope's attack on American Sisters, please read
here. For the theological and other inconsistencies of the pope's position
against the Sisters, please
read here.
ROLE OF CATHOLICS:
The evil of child sexual abuse by priests
remains a major problem in the U.S., as indicated the recent talks by leading
experts, Tom Doyle, O.P., here and
by Richard Sipe here.
Many American Catholics continue to be very
concerned about the sexual abuse of children by priests and the hierarchy's
attacks on women, including American Sisters, and on all gay persons. Many are
planning on attending brief "counter" rallies at noon this Friday, June 8, in
133 US cities (A) to show their solidarity and support for (1) disrespected
women, including American Sisters, (2) defenseless children and victims of
sexual abuse by priest predators, and (3) insensitively maligned and innocent
gay persons, and (B) to object to the pope's contrived "religious liberty"
political crusade. The rally details, including nearby locations, are
available here.
The days of "Pay, Pray and Obey" Catholics are
growing shorter. Amen and Alleluia!!"
