http://www.austin360.com/statesman/editions/tuesday/news_3.html BOSTON -- <B>Cardinal Bernard Law, firing back in an increasingly contentious clerical sex scandal, has declared in court papers that unspecified "negligence" of a then-6-year-old boy and his parents contributed to the alleged abuse. </B> The nation's senior Catholic prelate made the assertion in response to a lawsuit filed against him and the archdiocese by Gregory Ford and his parents. Now 24, Ford claims he was molested for six years by the Rev. Paul Shanley, a priest in the Boston archdiocese. Law is scheduled to be deposed June 5 in the Fords' civil lawsuit, which charges that the cardinal and the archdiocese failed to protect young Gregory. More than 1,600 pages of documents turned over by the archdiocese have produced sordid allegations against Shanley, who was reassigned by Law to a parish in Southern California in the early 1990s. Shanley, now 71, recently was let go from his volunteer job with the San Diego Police Department. Although his whereabouts have been unknown, Shanley is expected to be deposed as scheduled Thursday, according to a lawyer for the Fords. "I think we have located him," lawyer Roderick MacLeish said Monday. He would not say where the deposition would take place. Calls to the Rogers Law Firm, which represents the cardinal, and to the archdiocese were not returned. As one of the defenses against the lawsuit, Law declares: "The defendant says that the Plaintiffs were not in the exercise of due care, but rather the negligence of the Plaintiffs contributed to cause the injury or damage complained of." The response adds that any damages assessed against Law "should be reduced in proportion to the said negligence of the Plaintiffs." The cardinal's six-page response to the Fords' complaint was filed in a Middlesex, Mass., superior court this month. At a press conference Monday, MacLeish blasted the cardinal's claim as "appalling." "What is the conceivable evidence to support the idea that Ford (and his parents) were somehow responsible for what Paul Shanley did to them?" The family's lawyer said he saw a "common theme" in the church's response: "One, blame the priests. Two, blame the victims. Three, gag the lawyers. Four, don't turn over documents -- and when you do, turn them over in incomplete portions." He also called the latest action by the archdiocese "bad legal strategy," because anything contained in the new filing can be questioned at the cardinal's deposition. MacLeish said he will be in court Wednesday to force the church to turn over records of Shanley's psychiatric evaluations. A lawyer familiar with the church's legal strategy told The Boston Globe that the cardinal would likely not have been consulted about the negligence claim against the plaintiffs. The attorney, who asked that he not be identified, said Law's lawyer, Wilson Rogers, would have been "derelict" had he not included every possible legal defense in his response. Carmen Durso, a Boston lawyer who represents others who say they are victims of abuse, said he found no legal fault with the language. But for Law to make use of it, Durso said, "is dumb beyond belief. It is a stupid argument to make when you know that Catholics are already angry at you." Added Durso: "From the start, the archdiocese has been incredibly stupid in the way they have handled this crisis. And as hard as it was to do, they have managed to make things worse." A.W. Richard Sipe, a former priest and a psychotherapist who has treated both pedophile priests and their victims, said the language chosen by Law's attorney "is absolutely reprehensible, as reprehensible as any defense I have ever seen in one of these cases." Sipe said the message that Catholics will take from Law's claim is that "the cardinal is saying that every Catholic child and every Catholic parent should have been watching out for every Catholic priest." Rodney Ford, Gregory's father, said Monday that the motion filed by the cardinal was hard for his son to stomach. Celebrating Mass on Sunday, Law said: "These are not easy days to serve in the pastoral role that is mine. All of us are wounded healers. And when we remember that, we are able to be the people that we should be. . . . When we are not that, we degenerate into anger and division. And that's not who we are. That's not who God calls us to be."
Apparently this isn't the first time they've used this defense tactic. This whole episode, and the Church's behavior in response to this crisis (blaming homosexuals in particular), has been utterly disguisting. Here's an excerpt from the Boston Globe : The same issue has arisen before in recent months, though it received little public attention. Mitchell Garabedian, the attorney who represented scores of victims of former priest John J. Geoghan, pointed out that Rogers, the cardinal's attorney, used the same claim, that the victims were negligent, in responding to lawsuits that charged Law with negligence for Geoghan's serial molestations. In a response in the July 27, 2001, edition of the Pilot, the archdiocesan newspaper, Rogers argued that the use of that defense is ''standard, even universal practice'' in defending civil lawsuits. Whether or not Rogers was legally justified in using the defense again, Sipe, the psychotherapist, said it is a nonsensical argument to make now that the extent of the abuse, and the awareness of it by church leaders, is so clear to the public. Even in technical legal papers, Sipe said, ''this is not the time for the church to be blaming the victims and their families.''
I've heard stories of this stuff going on long before the current scandal broke, but it still makes me sick how the church is responding to this. Why is everything not their fault? Why do these particular priests deserve one more chance in that kind of position? How come, every Sunday when they address this in church, they just try to get us to focus on the positive and start into their usual community-service type message instead of facing themselves and taking a stand? Well, if it's the "family's fault" (yeah, and I suppose the kid was dressed like he wanted it, too) then I guess we can all do something by keeping our kids away from Catholic churches and priests. I hate to say this... I'm married to a Catholic and we have to at least give our kids some upbringing in the Catholic church. A church that I didn't have any major problems with - except for this. I can just hope the problem is not as endemic as it looks like. Oh well, looks like I won't be going through RCIA anytime soon... until they respond better, it's a good reason to stay Protestant, since I already was. (other Christians or Catholics - your views?)
I do not blame the church, only the individuals who commit the heinous acts. As for why the church gives them a second chance, well that is pretty much the foundation of Christianity, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves?
As for why the church gives them a second chance, well that is pretty much the foundation of Christianity, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves? Is the foundation of Christianity about hiding the truth from people so more kids can get abused? And then covering things up when you know they are going on? I'm sorry, but transferring priests from church to church everytime they get in trouble so they can make the story disappear and allow the priest to hurt someone else is NOT, in any way, defendable by the "forgiveness" idea.
1 Corinthians 5 From this verse, the church should expel the unrepentant guy who engages in sexual immorality so that his sinful nature may be destroyed (in repentance).
My faith revolves around Jesus Christ. My faith is not in priests. They are human, some of them made some bad mistakes. very very bad mistakes. But im not going to stop being a Catholic. we are all sinners to some degree. some of the first popes did awful terrible things, ive heard. but i mean i try not to concern myself with that. im not going to judge. all i know is i believe Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of mankind. and i believe he exists in the Eucharist. i mean its simple thinking, but thats all i have to concern myself with in my religion. when i hear things about priests and other terrrible things people do, all i can do is pray for them, and continue to believe what i believe. it doesnt change any of that. the priest at my church at home apparently gave a great talk about all of this and he got a standing ovation. i wasnt around to hear any of it.. but i dont know man...... im terrified of this world
Dear Cardinal Law, Shut. The. ****. Up. Everything you say makes me cringe, and I'm sick and tired of you giving Catholics a bad name. I owe you a kick in the balls.
great post, major! i couldn't agree more these are men who are holding themselves out as leaders in the church...they're called to a higher standard...and yet they're not acting in that way. AS FOR EVERYONE WHO TALKS ABOUT -- "it's not my place to judge." --- this logic is not at all in line with what Christ is talking about. He doesn't ask you to throw your brain out the door when following him. The Bible talks specifically about the use and validity of discernment...it talks about surrounding yourself with people who will encourage your walk with God. It does not say, "hey, that guy who raped your kid...don't sweat it!" There is a difference between forgiveness and not holding people accountable for their actions.
I've been hesitant to post on this, because it hits a little close to home. I'm not even Catholic, but most people around me are. And most of them know some of the priests in question. A good friend of mine reacted with horror to one of the people named: he was her teacher at BC High... and she was like, "that's not possible... he was such a good man, he couldn'tve have done this." It's very difficult for her to reconcile the image of a person she trusted so much and taught her so much with a pedophile rapist. This is doing terrible things for religion, in general. If the people who are the most intimate practitioners of a faith cannot be trusted, then what does this say about the faith in general? Who can you trust? I think that American families are already becoming overly isolated... but how can a parent trust anybody, anymore? If institutions like the church can't be trusted, can anything? I think the Vatican has to revise its celibacy problem. True story: my fiancee has a gay uncle. When he first "came out," his mother told him (paraphrased): "Well, it's not a problem, you just have to become a Priest. God will stop your unnatural urges." Anyone notice a problem? The guy's terrific... he's in med school at Michigan... but anytime you get a lot of people with heavily repressed sexual urges... you're begging for disaster.
Forgive Them The Church hierarchy still resists real change Andrew Sullivan, April 28, 2002, TIME Magazine I had to read the sentence twice to make sure I wasn't imagining it. In the text of the American Cardinals' statement issued last week in Rome, the hierarchs specified which statutory rapists among their clergy would be subject to being defrocked. Such a punishment would be meted out to "a priest who has become notorious and is guilty of the serial, predatory, sexual abuse of minors." Excuse me? Why on earth is the "notoriety" of a child abuser in any way relevant to punishment for his crime (except as an excuse for the church to avoid sifting through past allegations that remain unpublicized)? Then there were these loopholes: the abuse also had to be "serial" and "predatory." Occasional or one-off child-abuse violations could perhaps be forgiven. And even serial abuse might be overlooked if it had not been "predatory." A simple question: How is an adult's exploitation of a minor ever anything but predatory? We have learned one simple thing from last week: the highest officials of the largest Christian denomination on earth have lower standards with regard to the protection of children and minors than secular criminal law does. The endorsement of "zero tolerance" by Philadelphia's Anthony Cardinal Bevilacq last Saturday (good post-Rome spin) is still not official policy. I can't believe I'm writing this - but they still don't get it. And if they cannot get the enormity of the crimes their clergy have committed, they are even further from acknowledging their own role in enabling them. No one has resigned. No one has taken responsibility. And on the two central issues behind this scandal, there is no movement. The first is the authoritarian governing structure of the church, whereby a self-selected elite makes every decision for hundreds of millions of people. When you have a structure like this - immune from outside input - it is bound to create crises like this one. It has no real means of self-correction. The system creates incentives for secrecy and cover-ups that are often just as bad as the crime. But none of that is on the table. In fact, a critical element for recovery - boards of inquiry composed of lay people, not just clergy - was not even mentioned in the text. As for a frank discussion of sexual morality, celibacy, women priests or homosexuality, it's not likely to happen anytime soon. The usual diversions designed to avoid these subjects were thrown about with abandon. This is a purely American problem, some church spokesmen argued, as if scandals weren't exploding elsewhere: an ABC News report charged the Vatican itself with covering up abuse claims against a priest previously praised by the Pope. Then there was the scapegoating of gays. Equating homosexuality with child abuse is one of the oldest slanders there is Ñ but this church didn't hesitate to invoke it to deflect attention from its own culpability. Besides, now we know that perhaps as many as half of America's priests are believed to be gay. A church that still preaches that homosexuals are "intrinsically disordered" relies on these allegedly sick people to run its dioceses, churches and schools. Talk about cognitive dissonance. As a Catholic struggling to keep the faith through all this, I find myself asking: Why? Why can these men not get the enormity of what has happened? The best I can come up with is that they are well-intentioned men who somehow cannot see that what they have enabled is systematic child rape. They resist deep change by claiming that celibacy isn't the issue. But the hierarchy's cover-up of this evil surely has something to do with celibacy. Today's church leaders see sex primarily as an act, fraught with moral danger, not as a relationship, imbued with moral good. And how could they think otherwise? They have never known sexual relations - only sexual fantasy, masturbation and struggle. So perhaps it never occurred to them, as the writer Michael Sean Winters has pointed out, to see this abuse from the child's point of view. That is why this crisis is of profound importance. One of Jesus' main teachings was the dignity of the vulnerable - children central among them. Unless you are like a child, Jesus taught, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. When Jesus' own church, far from protecting children, molests them and shields their abusers, the sin goes to the heart of what the church is about. And when its leaders cannot take full responsibility, the sin can only metastasize. Bernard Cardinal Law didn't even attend the press conference last week to explain the Cardinals' statement to the people he serves and the families he betrayed. "[It] was rather late, you know," he told reporters. "I had other things to do." Forgive him, for he knows not what he does. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,233969,00.html
