Mission & Justice

15/5/10

A Catholic diocese in the US has agreed to pay more than $US20 million ($22.3m) to victims of predator priests and says it will sell some of its real estate to foot the bill. The diocese of Burlington in the northeastern state of Vermont agreed to pay $US17.65m yesterday to 26 sex abuse victims and settled three appeals cases for undisclosed amounts, Bishop of Burlington Salvatore Matano said in a letter posted on the diocese’s website. Jerry O’Neill, from the legal firm that represented many of the victims, said the diocese’s total payout exceeded $US20m. The amounts awarded on appeal were withheld at the request of the victims, he said. To pay the bill, the diocese had put up for sale its administrative building in Burlington and its 10.5ha leisure facility, Camp Tara Holy Cross on Lake Champlain, and had secured a loan using other diocesan property as collateral, Bishop Matano said.

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Eugene Cullen Kennedy; 13/5/10

The beleaguered Pope Benedict XVI has dealt with the sex abuse crisis like a shy bachelor who holds back from stepping onto the dance floor at the parish social. A lifetime of dealing abstractly with men and women from the safe perch of a classroom podium did not exactly prepare him for the immersion in the human rhythms of intimacy that define the dance even on church property. He has shifted from one foot to the other, letting others call the tune while he hung back, turning ashen and turning away when he learned, as Paul did of his Corinthian community, that what he remembered as a fox trot had been taken over by a wolf pack. Yes, he promised, I’ll get involved in this soon and then woe betide the wolf pack.

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Maureen Paul Turlish; 5/5/10

Maureen Paul Turlish, a Sister of Notre Dame de Namur, is a victims’ advocate and writes from New Castle, Del.

The institutional Roman Catholic church can attack every newspaper in every country in the world but that will not change the fact that as an institution it has participated in an extremely well documented, egregious pattern of enabling and covering up for the sexual abuse of thousands of innocent children the world over during almost an entire century.  Today, members of the hierarchy are railing against The New York Times. Eight years ago the Boston Globe was the recipient of Archbishop Bernard Cardinal Law’s calling down of the wrath of God. It has been eight years since the U.S. Catholic church was rocked to its foundations by revelations of clergy sex abuse in the Boston archdiocese and five years since a Philadelphia grand jury released a report documenting in explicit detail decades of abuse by clergy and cover up by the Philadelphia archdiocese, where I was born and baptized, and still church leaders are spinning their wheels trying to place blame on the messengers rather than on themselves and on a system that has become so corrupted that it put the protection of individual sexual predators along with an institution’s reputation before the protection of the most vulnerable of its members, the children.

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Richard McBrien; 3/5/10

Richard P. McBrien. is the Crowley-O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

The situation in the Catholic church is similar to the situation we find today in U.S. politics. In both realms, there is a significant group that is disaffected. The difference is that seriously disaffected Catholics tend to be somewhere left of center, while seriously disaffected Americans tend to be on the right. What they have in common is a deep sense of alienation from those in power, whether in the church or in the nation. Catholics who had invested their hopes in the renewal and reforms brought about by the Second Vatican Council are discouraged and demoralised because those hopes seemed to have been dashed by two consecutive, aggressively conservative papacies and the bishops they have appointed and promoted.

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Richard Owen; 30/4/10

The Pope’s chosen replacement to investigate sex abuse cases in the Catholic Church has been accused of failing to take action against a Californian priest after learning that he had allegedly molested an altar boy 11 years earlier.  Cardinal William Levada, who at the time the alleged offence came to light in 1995 was Archbishop of San Francisco, said in testimony five years ago that he had not contacted police about Father Milton Walsh because he believed that his predecessor had dealt with the case adequately. He also said he had trusted that Father Walsh would not reoffend. Jeffrey Lena, the lawyer acting for the Vatican in US abuse cases, said that Cardinal Levada acted appropriately according to the standards of the time. There was no evidence that Father Walsh had gone on to commit any further sexual offences. Father Walsh was removed from active ministry in 2002 when police opened an investigation into his behaviour. In the same year the US Bishops Conference issued a “zero tolerance” policy on clerical sex abuse after being summoned to Rome.

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