Maybe not to AP, but from today's Boston Herald:
Yet Roderick MacLeish Jr., a lawyer handling several cases against the archdiocese and Shanley, said law neglected to explain a similar warning received shortly after theone from Gauvreau."He says nothing about the letter he got in 1985 from Wilma Higgs of Rochester, N.Y., where she says Paul Shanley gave a speech saying when children and men have sex it's the child who's the seducer," said MacLeish.
The attorney said Law avoided mentioning his endorsement of Shanley as head of New York's Leo House family hostel in 1997.
Cardinal Law does not remember, does not recall, and has no memory of ..... in his deposition.
Their behavior and complicity in these crimes is reprehensible and sacrilegious.
Even if they go to the point that they were prevented by Canon Law from revealing the sins heard in the confessional, that does not absolve individuals of their obligation to have acted upon their knowledge, however it may have been learned.
Additionally, these were not merely sins, they were crimes. In order for the penitent to receive absolution, he must first make restitution, then confess, then express contrition, and finally do penance.
One might reasonably ask how, precisely, one makes restitution to a child who has been sexually abused, and abused by a priest in his church, no less. And what penance could be considered sufficient, especially after a second incidence of the same crime.
For the Catholic Church, institutionally, to have intervened, and paid settlement money to the families of the victims, in an effort to hide the crimes is abhorrent. For them to have repeatedly returned these sexual predators to positions where they would be free to rape more children has to be among the gravest of sins.
What these “men of God” have visited upon the faithful of their Church is unspeakable.
I now view all priests, Monsignors, bishops and Cardinals as complicit in these crimes. I must, because the breadth of this conspiracy seems absolutely boundless. Who could honestly say that they did not, at the very least, suspect? And that outcome only begins to speak to the irresponsibility, sinfulness and criminality of the actions taken by these churchmen “in the name of God”.
It is nothing short of sacrilege and nothing can dissuade me from believing this. I believe that there will be a special place in hell in which these souls will endure their everlasting torment for their sins against these children and against God’s church on earth.
My belief in my Redeemer, Jesus Christ is unshaken. My belief in the teachings of the Catholic Church remains unshaken.
My faith in the hierarchy of the church…that has been broken, very possibly beyond any hope of repair.