Our moral betters:
Sealed documents filed in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee bankruptcy identify at least 8,000 instances of child sexual abuse and 100 alleged offenders – 75 of them priests – who have not previously been named by the archdiocese, a victims’ attorney said Thursday.
Archdiocese spokeswoman Julie Wolf said she did not have enough information to respond to the assertion, made by attorney Jeffrey Anderson during a pivotal hearing before U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Susan V. Kelley. Anderson represents about 350 of the 570 victim-survivors who have filed claims in the case.
But Peter Isely of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests speculated that some are likely members of religious orders, such as Capuchins or Franciscans. Order officials do not typically make public the names of their accused members, and the archdiocese claims it is not responsible for them, though they have historically helped to staff its parishes and schools.
“This is a public safety crisis, a child safety crisis that needs to be investigated,” Isely said at a news conference on the federal courthouse steps, surrounded by fellow survivors and reporters.
“We need to know who they are and where they are. How can there be 8,000 crimes committed by over 100 offenders and there be no accountability?” he said.
Sure glad we spent the week hearing about their feelings and conscience.
(via)
jlow
Nothing inconsistent here. Avoiding pregnancy is why they started doing little boys in the first place.
slag
How long before the Church applies for a child safety waiver?
R-Jud
An aunt of mine is visiting London and I went down and saw her today. She is a SRS BZNS Catholic wingnut, and she asked why I hadn’t baptized our daughter.
I think I will just send her this story.
General Stuck
Why the catholic priesthood is still allowed to operate in this country is beyond me. The above systematic boy buggering covered up for decades, can only be described as a crime against humanity, and a top crime of the century, and should have been treated as such.
What a bunch of robed freaks now turned moral scolds over contraception, something 90 plus percent of the catholic flock has used. Dump the priests and replace them with Candy Stip
pers. I might start going to church again, but won’t tell them I’m Reformed Druid.Soonergrunt
So when Mike Huckabee declared that “we’re all Catholics now” I really do believe that he meant this as well. Because NOTHING goes with ‘right-wing culture-scold’ quite as well as ‘sex pervert’.
The thing to remember here with respect to this and the contraception thing is that the Bishops have been looking for something, ANYTHING to change the subject from boy-buggering priests and to re-establish their moral authority. Their allies for the moment are the right wing of the right wing.
harlana
Hi, Brietbart on CPAC Live right now! :)
aw, he thinks he’s Hitchens with the wild hair, cute
Suffern ACE
@harlana: Wasn’t he one of the guys last year who made it into a GOProud sponsored event? I’m surprised they invited him back.
Maude
These are the same people who are telling the rest of us how to lead our lives, especially what we can and what we cannot do.
Do I have that right?
MattF
And, you know, I was actually surprised by this:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/cardinal-egan-criticized-for-retracting-apology-on-sex-abuse-crisis/
Silly me.
joeyess
As Cole said earlier in the week….
All of you that had the vapors and struggled while looking for a fainting couch to fall on over the use of the term “American Taliban” need to call up Kos at the GOS and apologize toot sweet.
MikeJ
Since the Church is tax exempt that means that everybody else is picking up the tab for them. Isn’t that infringing on the religious liberty of people who think raping children is bad?
gex
These people hate everything about me. I have lady parts. I like lady parts. I’m darker than khaki. I have no God.
And that makes me think I’m doing something right.
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
@ General Stuck – you worship bushes?
Samara Morgan
So what?
you still give glibertarian grifters like EDK frontpage status for their eumemes.
c’mon Cole.
cowboy up and do the Right Thing for once.
gex
I’m not sure if you can fully appreciate how intensely it makes my head want to explode that these guys are campaigning against gays and birth control, getting $3 bn from the Feds annually, and basically running a NAMBLA cult. Why can we not stop this? It seriously makes me feel like I don’t understand anything at all. I feel like I must be the one that is insane.
Also too: RICO time.
slag
Can I just say (since I’ve been gripey griperson lately and why stop now?)…what a misuse of perfectly good art and architecture so many Catholic churches are.
I mean, you walk into Cologne Cathedral and you want to give yourself over to the awe that is typically inspired by such detail and craftsmanship. And instead, you end up praying that the sticky stuff you just stepped in was only candle wax. It’s just not right.
gex
@MikeJ: We give them $3 billion a year. We are paying them to rape children and we are paying for the settlements. Money’s fungible, motherfuckers!
Slag:
Spit take.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Seventy-five of the abusers were priests? Eight thousand kids, just at this one place?! Multiply that by??? Lock the fucking leaders up for not cooperating until they divulge the names and whereabouts of these pedo priests so we can get them off of the streets (and out of the churches) and into the prison cells they so richly deserve.
The Catholic church needs to be held accountable for these crimes, as do the criminals within it.
Punchy
Really, SNTAP? They couldn’t come up with something jazzier, like Revenge Against Priests Engaging in Diddling? Or go mainstream with Altar Boys Anonymous?
General Stuck
@Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water:
Earth Mother. Which includes bushes, trees, all that kind of shit. This is our Year of the Salamander, ripped from headlines of current events.
gex
Oh, shit. This totally explains why the RCC in WI was campaigning so hard against an increase in the statute of limitations recently.
ETA: I loved reading in the article that they are arguing that the clock started ticking when they posted the list. In a filing cabinet at the bottom of a stairway whose light had gone out behind a door marked “Warning! Cheetah” (rough approximation of Douglas Adams)
Soonergrunt
@Punchy: The T isn’t pronounced in the acronym, so it’s the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests, pronounced SNAP.
slag
@gex: Admit it. There’s something liberating about being damned to hell by people such as these. It’s like being scoffed at by Bond villains. You just know that, by the end of the show, they’ll be wishing they hadn’t said that. Assholes.
dmbeaster
@MattF: MattF’s link is definitely worth the read – shorter version – NY’s former cardinal Egan defiantly retracts apology for past abuse: “I never should have said that,” and added, “I don’t think we did anything wrong.”. Its part of the larger “counter-reformation” to the child abuse scandal, led right from the top by Ratzinger.
It is more important to Catholic hierarchy that they retain control (rather than admitting the obligation to report priests to the authorities for these crimes). It is more important to blame the outside culture for these failings (it was the product of loose morals of the 60s and 70s!), rather than the inner culture which is the real source of failure.
All religions as well as mental health professionals suffer from members sexually exploiting the vulnerable that they attend to. It is not a syndrome unique to the Catholic Church. Was is unique is the institutional defense of the criminals by the church, which is the far more damning sin. That sin is being reinforced even now by the very highest leadership.
I used to have some sensitivity to the unfairness of priests all being smeared by the implication of sexual abuse – its become cliche. Not any more, since I don’t expect meaningful change given the entrenched heinous bullshit from the leadership.
floridafrog
@ Punchy – its SNAP – jazzy enough under the circumstances
kindness
And NO Birth Control for those pedophile priests damnit!
joeyess
@gex:
oh yeah.
gex
@dmbeaster: It’s the same fight as the birth control. They don’t answer to secular government. They have a conduit to God. They literally don’t want to be part of America, they want America to be part of it.
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
@ gex, @joeyess. – Exactly this. The church is the very definition of corrupt organization
Calouste
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
8000 instances of abuse, “only” 570 victims.
cathyx
I heard an interview on my public radio station last weekend, I started listening in the middle so I’m not sure who was speaking, but it was probably Isely. He said that the abuse problem has not ended, in fact, nothing has changed. The clergy are still abusing, they are still shuffling the abusers around, they are telling the abused to keep quiet about it, and the church is doing nothing to stop it.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Calouste:
Eight thousand incidents and “only” 570 victims? Ahhh, that makes it so much… better? Maybe the pedo hierarchy in the church needs to emphasize that this could have been sooo much worse except for their timely intervention and the safe redistribution the church pedos all over the world.
RICO their asses, yesterday. If this isn’t the definition of a large corrupt criminal organization then I don’t know what is.
Aqualad08
Fun fact: the current head of the Conference of American Bishops, the spokesman for the Vatican’s pearl clutching over the pill, is Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York. The Archbishop of Milwaukee who sat on this information between 2002 and 2009? ALSO Archbishop Timothy Dolan…small world, huh?
shortstop
@slag: That made me laugh heartily.
“VERY clevair RUSE, Ms. GEX!”
pseudonymous in nc
IIRC, the cops in and around Milwaukee were also part of the cover-up, partly because many of them couldn’t believe that their own parish priests were abusers, partly because they were leaned on by the hierarchy.
The pep rallies that a lot of American bishops have had at the Vatican over the past few months — including the Michigan and Ohio bishops last week — seem to have had a particular purpose.
John N.
Considering how little respect these people have shown for me, or my beliefs, I wonder why exactly I’m supposed to respect theirs. For one, theirs are a LOT more stupid, and also, I didn’t molest anyone. So, you know, why do they deserve more respect than I do?
Fuck them all. This shit is incompatible with modern society and it’s about time we started calling it out, loudly and often. Magical thinking is not acceptable in any other endeavor; it’s a symptom of mental illness in any other arena. Fuck this.
TenguPhule
Let’s face it, Bush II and Wall Street cribbed notes from the Catholic Church.
Villago Delenda Est
Yup, long since time to RICO these assholes.
Time to start tossing red beanies into orange jumpsuits, and too bad if they clash.
gex
@shortstop: If only Tunch were a long hair…
Svensker
Can someone ‘splain me please why there aren’t criminal charges here? How are they getting away with this?
A Sunday school teacher at one of my neighborhood Protestant churches in NJ turned out to be a pedophile, but he ended up in jail. (He was also the uncle of a family friend – made get togethers a little awkward.) How come the Catholics get away with it?
gex
@Svensker: Pope answers to God, not man. They really don’t want to fight in defense of child rape. What they are fighting is that they fall under the umbrella of secular law. Terrible choice of battlefields though.
Svensker
@gex:
Well, the Pope might answer to God, not man, but Fr. Tom in the parish in Peoria can’t drive 100 mph in a 60 mph zone without getting a ticket, nor shoot a parishioner for not meeting his tithe without going to jail. Both things would bring reaction from the secular legal system. Why doesn’t raping young boys?
John N.
The funny thing about it is that, if they’re even close to being right about all the God stuff, they’re all going to hell. Imagine their surprise when St. Peter the bouncer says “no!”
makewi
Because Catholic priests molested boys then Catholic employers must submit to the government requiring them to provide for contraception, or at least everyone needs to shut up about it. It’s fucking genius really.
Admit it, you started doing a lot of drugs a while back.
Mnemosyne
@makewi:
That’s what happens when a supposed moral arbiter turns out to have been facilitating the rape of children: they lose their moral authority. I’m not sure what moral leg you think the RCC has to stand on when it tries to tell us that private adult behavior (contraception) is worse than child molestation.
gex
@Svensker: Well, I for sure don’t know the answer to that, but that seems to be the most charitable explanation for taking such a big stand in favor of child rapists.
makewi
@Mnemosyne:
There so much wrong there that it’s hard to know where to begin. So why don’t we just start with “contraception is worse than child molestation.”
eemom
@Svensker:
Some of them do go to jail. Some are dead. Some may do plea deals. I don’t think it’s any different from any other massive crime ring that gets busted; it just takes time for prosecutors to work through it all.
Mnemosyne
@makewi:
Egan says he was wrong to apologize for child molestation, because it wasn’t that bad, really, but using birth control is a SIN!
Kind of like the bishops in Brazil who excommunicated the mother of a 9-year-old rape victim who got an abortion for her daughter but didn’t excommunicate the rapist because repeatedly raping his stepdaughter wasn’t nearly as sinful as abortion.
I can continue on with examples, if you like. The Catholic Church’s stance is that raping children is fine, but preventing pregnancy is a mortal sin. And they expect people not to laugh in their faces.
Mnemosyne
@makewi:
Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who led this charge against making Catholic institutions cover birth control for their employees, covered up for sexual abusers in Milwaukee. Clearly the man is qualified to dictate morality to all Americans by showing such unambiguous moral leadership, amirite?
johio
I swear to all the gods I don’t believe in that the Catholic Church is evil from top to bottom and has no excuse to exist. If Jesus were here today, these are the evil bastards he would drive from the temple. ARGH!!!
SFAW
Fixed for the clue-impaired.
SFAW
Outside of Wall Street and the RNC (and their ilk), running a business is not “an establishment of religion”, nor is a business a “free exercise” of a religion. (And, just to be clear, whether the word “establishment” is seen as a noun or a quasi-verb, it doesn’t cover a business.)
Oh, and while you’re playing Mickey-the-Dunce, why not expand your half-witticism: “contraception and masturbation are worse than child molestation”?
Lee
Jesus fucking Christ.