Posted on 04/28/2008 5:40:44 AM PDT by ninonitti
Artist's flair makes names of victims hard to forget Email|Print|Single Page| Text size – + Globe Staff / The book has no title, no author, no explanatory words - just a few quotes from The Bible, and page after page of first names.
Keith Robert Jeffrey Michael Michael Kim Curtis
Richard Scott John Steven Peter Michael
Jackie Robert Wayne Stephen Paul Linda
Much ink has been spilled over the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the last six years, but this work is different: a hand-painted list of 1,476 men and women who have reported being sexually abused by a Catholic priest, deacon, or nun in the Archdiocese of Boston.
Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the book of names the Archdiocese of Boston gave to Pope Benedict XVI was an unusual effort to humanize a crisis of unimaginable scale, in this case for a pontiff who had once minimized the scope of abuse within the church. Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley of Boston presented the book at the historic Washington meeting between the pontiff and five abuse victims from Boston on April 17, midway through a papal trip to the United States during which Benedict spoke out four times about the pain and damage caused by clergy sexual abuse.
O'Malley later described the book as "a symbolic way of helping the Holy Father to experience the dimensions of the problem."
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
What stands out for me is how two men going by their first names only accused Cardinal Bernadin of sexually abusing them when they were teens.
And then, when they were identified and deposed as witnesses, their stories turned out to be entirely manufactured.
When there is a wealthy defendant, the plaintiffs magically multiply.
You mean that the Catholic Church isn't as broke as they claim?
The Catholic Church in the USA receives millions in donations every year - all of which is spent pretty much immediately on the upkeep and maintenance of church buildings, foreign missions, free healthcare for the needy at Catholic hospitals, scholarships for children, various forms of charitable relief for the poor and homeless, etc.
Of course, if you're an experienced trial lawyer and you've got a good lawsuit going, you can divert all that cash from those greedy poor and ill people into your own deserving pockets.
So then it's the trial lawyers who are responsible for all the woes - not the behavior of the clergy and hierarchy that covered it for so many years?
Trust me I'm no fan of trial lawyers but last I heard they do actually share the damages awarded with their clients.
There were undoubtedly clergy who committed horrible acts and undoubtedly prelates who covered up for them.
That does not mean that every clergyman who was anonymously accused was guilty.
It also does not mean that every prelate who was advised of such accusations used bad judgment in not taking an accusation seriously.
I am reminded of when Steven Cook accused the late Cardinal Bernardin of abusing him as a teen, and when local prosecutors deposed Cook in aid of pursuing possible criminal charges against the Cardinal, the prosecutors found that nothing in his stories checked out and that his tales were completely fabricated.
It is the job of a trial lawyer to add as many complainants to a case as he feasibly can in order to multiply the eventual size of an award.
He knows that it is extremely expensive for a defendant to launch a separate investigation into each specific charge and that the cost of a settlement is often lower than the cost of successfully refuting false charges - especially when there are substantial real charges mixed in with the false ones.
If someone ever cares to embark on an exhaustive analysis of this scandal, several findings will likely come out of it:
(1) There was a hard core of several dozen clergymen who are implicated in 90% of the authenticated cases.
(2) These vermin often knew each other and covered for one another by deceiving superiors.
(3) There were several prelates who were aware of the behavior and papered it over while there were plenty of others who were lied to by their fellow prelates and made unwitting harborers of these vermin.
(4) The USCCB, which supposedly is a national organization capable of coordinating diocesan policy, completely failed to notice or act upon the allegations. Dioceses act quite independently - and sometimes antagonistically - toward one another.
In other words a handful of prelates and clergymen took advantage of a shocking failure of administrative oversight to prey on the faithful.
The Church manifestly failed to provide any kind of meaningful oversight of the movement of clergy from diocese to diocese, let alone any coordinated inquiry into the reasons for the movement.
The correct answer would be to get rid of the USCCB and replace it with a competent administration.
This string is about the names of victims of clerical abuse not their attorneys. If you'd like to attack trial lawyers feel free to on a trial lawyer string.
The USCCB and all the other national bishops’ conferences were de facto installed by the Council (that is, there was a suggestion of this, but I doubt that the intention was to create national churches, which is what it has done). Bishops’ conferences should go bye-bye: the bishop is responsible to Rome, and each individual bishop should have to answer for his acts, not hide behind a bureaucracy somewhere.
As for Bernardin, I think he was pretty much a known quantity. Probably a lot of pressure and threats were exerted on those men to make them “recant”; the reason they didn’t give their last names at the very beginning is that they were afraid. If you want to look for the root of corruption, look to Bernardin. Virtually every bad bishop in the US was somehow associated with him, and this began long before he made it all the way to the top.
Bernardin was a terrible cardinal who did a lot of harm to the Catholic Church in America.
However, Steven Cook was neither "pressured" nor "threatened."
He told the police a story that was completely fabricated as to times, dates, places, etc.
Steven Cook was a liar looking for money.
Stephen Cook, like a lot of boys who were abused, was a dysfunctional flake.
When the things came out about Fr. Bruce Ritter in New York, Cardinal O’Connor himself came out to say it was a fabrication by an unstable young man - and incidentally, many people, including Harry Connick’s father, an important New Orleans attorney, came out to trash the guy - until the tape recording surfaced. Poor Cardinal O’Connor then had to go out and admit that a priest had lied to him (he staked his denial on having asked Bruce Ritter if it was true, and of course Ritter denied it). I have always felt this hastened the death of the good and holy Cdl O’ Connor. He was really heartbroken by this incident.
Predators always go for the vulnerable; it’s a pity that Stephen Cook didn’t have a tape recorder at hand.
Ritter's accuser did not lie to the police. The details of time and place in his accounts squared with Ritter's actual whereabouts and movements.
Cook's did not.
Were you in Chicago when Bernadin died? He got the most loving media coverage I’ve ever seen a public figure get around here before or since.
If so then why did you feel it necessary to spring to the defense of the lawyers sharing of their windfall. "they do actually share the damages awarded with their clients."
You wouldn't happen to be one of those ambulance chasers would you?
No, I'd moved back to NYC by that point.
He got the most loving media coverage I’ve ever seen a public figure get around here before or since.
I believe it. He was a liberal journalist's dream of a prelate. Full of buzzwords, and fuzzy platitudes and almost no references to legitimate Church doctrine.
That’s interesting. So he wasn’t held in high regard by the Catholic community in general going back before he became ill?
If you bother to read the post I responded to, you would notice that I was attempting to clarify the point that trial lawyers go to trial on behalf of clients and share awards with them. They do not go off on their own.
I've been asked about my occupation by trial attorneys in deposition and I can tell you what I told them: "I'm not an attorney but I can read"
But again making judgements about trial lawyers is just attemtpting to change the subject from what this thread is about...clergy abuse and it's victims.
Ping to read later
“Bernardin was a terrible cardinal who did a lot of harm to the Catholic Church in America.”
How so? I’m quite curious because, as I said, he never got any negative press in Chicago.
(1) He was the premier promoter of the "seamless garment" theory of Catholic teaching on life - a theory which puts the death penalty and abortion on the same moral level and which was designed to create an excuse for Catholic machine Democrats in Chicago and Catholic politicians nationwide to plead opposition to the death penalty as a tradeoff for their support of abortion.
Of course, Catholic doctrine actually permits the death penalty but does not permit abortion.
(2) His promotion of "pastorality" as an essential characteristic for the priesthood. In other words, as long as a candidate for the priesthood was a garrulous and gladhanding type - a kind of TV presenter in the pulpit - and very easygoing with his parishioners on matters of doctrine, then he was "pastoral" and a good choice.
If a candidate for the priesthood was reserved, circumspect and insisted upon both liturgical and doctrinal clarity, he was not "pastoral" but "doctrinaire" and should be denied ordination.
He helped create a generation of priests in the Catholic Church in America that want people to call them "Father Billy", who fill their lengthy sermons with personal anecdotes and reminscences rather than doctrinal instruction or Scriptural exposition, who rarely wear their clerical garb or hold hours for confessions and who studiously avoid taking any moral stands on issues of the day.
A priest who wants to be your buddy is a sad character: the loser who can't quite fit in.
(3) Bernardin was instrumental in the drafting of a number of "pastoral letters" issued by the USCCB which muddied the waters on any number of very clear issues: divorce, homosexuality, liturgical abuses, etc. to the confusion and disedification of the faithful.
All in all, he was a complete disgrace.
Thanks for the info! I’m guessing Francis George has been a considerable improvement?
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