Posted on 02/07/2006 1:13:07 PM PST by NYer
Dear Nihil Obstat,
I'm pretty sure that there were multiple lawyers from her firm that were billing hours.
Then again, there is the old joke about the lawyer, when asked how he could be billing 24 hours a day, answered, "I'm only working one shift."
;-)
sitetest
Lighten up. It was a joke.
The article states that she was paid $770 dollars per hour for her services. It also states that she received a grand total of $2.2 million dollars for a four month investigation.
Another poster did the math which showed that to receive $2.2 million dollars, at $770 per hour, she would have to have worked 2,857 hours. In other words, more hours than there is in a four month period.
My quip was a light-hearted jest to explain this glaring discrepancy.
Um, isn't that the entire basis of his lawsuit?
From article:
what Hoatson claims is that, as leaders of a church requiring celibacy and condemning homosexuality, actively gay bishops are too afraid of being exposed themselves to turn in pedophile priests. The bishops' closeted homosexuality, as the lawsuit states, "has compromised defendants' ability to supervise and control predators, and has served as a reason for the retaliation."
We all need to open our eyes and understand that there are not two tracks -- heterosexual and homosexual -- in the Catholic hierarchy. If there were, the hetero bishops would have stopped it. Instead, we have low-level heroes like the Springfield priest who brought down his bishop, or the pastor of Our Lady's in Newton, Mass., who was without a church for a long time until he was given the chaplaincy at Brandeis after a sufficient period of keeping his mouth shut.
The entire upper hierarchy is homo or supportive of it.
This attack on homo priests and bishops and cardinals and likely, popes, is just that, an attack on perverts, and not on our religion.
As someone put it here a while back, just another organization screwed up by middle management.
I sympathize with you in your confusion and your denial but sticking our heads in the sand won't correct the situation.
You need to read Jason Berry's Lead Us Not Into Temptation.
He was a New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter assigned to what appeared to be a small molestation case in Lafayette, La., in the 1980s.
Instead, he "discovered" the nationwide cabal and unified defense strategy. The horse was out of the nationwide barn after that. The Globe had nothing to do with it. Law wasn't hounded, he was assisted in fleeing the scene by the Pope!
After reading the book, I covered a trial of a molester priest and heard the exact same defense I'd read in the book. I approached the diocese's attorney and told him he was much more effective when advancing his own arguments rather than parroting a national strategy.
He was fuming and went off the deep end when the plaintiff's attorney said he agreed with me and asked him what was it worth to gain the whole world ...
Hitting the fan? No?
They "claim" it was paid from other funds :-). Ultimately, however, Mary Jo White was hired for $2.2 million to clear Bishop Hubbard's name. They say that "money can buy anything". She was limited to clearing his name on earth.
Like you, I pray for these bishops gone astray. May they have a change of heart and bring the lost sheep back into the fold.
He doesn't go so far as to attached the abuse to the homosexuality of the predators.
"Hoatson's suit could well get quashed before it ever reaches an open courtroom. Yet in the court of public opinion, he may already be winning."
If Hoatson has the goods on these Bishops, he should spill them now for all to see. Hubbard wouldn't surprise me, but Myers? There needs to be proof.
Additionally, all the supporting quotes come from groups and persons not exactly amicable to orthodox Catholic teaching. Richard Sipe, Voice of the Faithful, etc.
Hoatson himself:
"As a 22-year-old seminarian in the Christian Brothers, he says, another brother repeatedly molested him over a four-year period. Several years later, he confided in his superior, who Hoatson says assaulted him as well. "I knew it was abuse," he says, but he never identified it as such until years later."
Huh? A man in his mid-twenties cannot identify that he has been sexually abused until years later?
I'm all for cleaning out the lavender mafia from the Church including those in the Priesthood - meaning Bishops as well - guilty of these deadly sins. Hoatson and Aretakis, if they are honest and truthful about their accusations, need to back them up with the incontestable proof they claim to have so that the Church can move forward, otherwise I have to consider them to be slanderous attacks against the Bishops and the Church with their lawsuits a shill attempt at gaining notoriety.
(my younger brother is 57 years old)
One of the men who stepped forward in the Diocese of Albany, was a 65 year old man (that predates VCII). He claimed he had been molested by a certain priest when he was an adolescent; that priest is now dead and the diocese could not address his claim. This problem has been around for a long time. It got worse, though, under the leadership of certain bishops who actively recruited homosexuals to ordination in their dioceses. This is true in the Diocese of Albany, where I reside. For several years I agonized over this situation wondering how someone who advocated ordaining homosexual men to the priesthood, could have been elevated to the position of bishop. And then I found the answer.
Still Proud Of Bishops He Gave U.S.
I am sorry for your younger brother and hope he will seek professional guidance. Too often, these men blame themselves. My prayers for both of you.
Now we're hitting closer to home :-)
That is the reason for most of them having a blind eye on child molesters, because they too have vulnerable skeletons in their closet!
They are out there! You need to pray and ask our Lord for guidance. In total despair, I pleaded with Him to deliver me from weekly agony of watching Him demeaned at Mass. Oh how He responded! He guided my path to a small Maronite Catholic Church with a very orthodox priest and a community in need. Over the past two years, we have worked at building up the parish and eventually moving it into a 150 year old, boarded up Methodist/Episcopal Church. We applied to the state for landmark status and the building is now on the National Register of Historical Landmarks.
Tomorrow, Father and I will meet with our state grants representative. As a small community, we have limited funds but now that the future church has been declared a landmark, we qualify for matching state grants to do the restoration work. It's a long process but if we are approved, it will expedite the process of converting the church into a Catholic Church. Ironically the community in which this church is located houses 6 Catholic Churches. Last summer, Bishop Hubbard closed 5 of them, consolidating everyone into one Church. Each time Father goes over to work on the future church, people ask him when it will open. There is a tremendous need for another Catholic Church. In our case, since our pairsh is Maronite Catholic, Bishop Hubbard can't touch it. Father is bi-ritual (Maronite and Latin Rite) and he plans to offer both liturgies in the future parish.
Please remember him in your prayers. It is not unusual to find Father up on the roof of the future church, repairing leaks. Our Maronite bishop is worried, as are all of us. If we can obtain the state grants, Father will be able to repair the roof and finish the interior, thus providing another parish for Catholics in that community. Thank you for your prayers!
From all that I've ever read about her, Mary Jo White is an upstanding, honest attorney who would not whitewash an investigation. You are suggesting that this is not true. Do you have any evidence of that?
Evidence has a way of disappearing.
" ALBANY, N.Y. — Fr. John Minkler, 57, was found dead Sunday, February 15 (2004). This was 48 hours after he was directed by the Diocese of Albany, N.Y. — according to what he told this reporter — to sign a statement denying he ever wrote a letter nearly nine years ago to the late John Cardinal O’Connor. That letter, in part, mentioned "a ring of homosexual Albany priests which also included Bishop Howard Hubbard."
Ping to post #33.
Stop deluding yourself into thinking that the Lavendar Mafia does not exist within the Church. They do, and it has cost the AmChurch alot of credibility.
NYer, I wish you'd keep all of us better informed on the progress of your small Maronite parish. It really is "good news" to hear about it!
"I pray to the Lord that these allegations are not true, for the sake of the Catholic faithful of said dioceses."
But if they are true (and they appear to be from my pew unfortunately), I pray for Truth to win and cleansing to begin to give us hope.
Let's see, there is also the priest at my former parish. My son did his Eagle Scout project for the parish: he made a bedding around a the Church Sign and put in a great deal of landscaping which he had procured. When he first laid out the basic framework of the bed, he invited the priest to come over and look at this design. Well, right in front of me, the priest starts batting his eyes at my son, mincing around and saying, "oh, the bed's too bid! oh, the bed's too big!" wink, wink, nod, nod, and so on. I couldn't believe it! But I should not have been surprised. I left my previous parish because THAT priest asked my son in his Catholic school eighth grade class to step to the board and draw a picture of an adult circumsised male-including, yes, you guessed it, his penis. In my outrage I contacted then Cardinal O'Connor. Well, after the hubub ensued and other parents came forth with similar stories, this priest was not removed from the parish or priesthood, but told to refrain from entering the school. The assistant to Catherine Hickey, Superintendent of Schools, spoke with me and asked me if this measure was satisfactory. I said, no! of course not. Would the Foreman of a Ford Motor plant be restricted from running and overseeing the assembly line for heaven's sake? I have since learned that this same assistant (whose authority as a School Administrator, btw, was nil-only a Priest in an Administrative position could truly mete out a punishment, a fact not lost on me) has left his position: why? Seems he told the people downtown (at the Chancery in NY) that HE had been abused by a priest as a boy and HE couldn't bear these confrontations any longer.
On another note: when I moved my kids to a new Catholic School, soon, I learned the sex ed program would be "Growing in Love". I fought a hard battle there and had it removed, but not before earning the disdain of many who did not like my outspokeness regarding this tripe passed off as catechetical fare. It openly endorses teaching fourth graders about anal sex and many other perversions and has been explicated from many diocese by activists.
In spite of it all, I remain a religious education teacher. What do I teach? I subvert the catechism book in my care for dissemination by teaching mixture of Father John Hardin's series: Faith and Life. This I mix in with the Baltimore Catechism. Since the DRE doesn't ever bother really overseeing my classroom, she's none the wiser. V's wife.
bump
I'm not denying any "evidence." Thing is, *I* haven't seen any such evidence other than the accusations I see hurled in these articles. They may be based on unimpeachable sources, but *I* don't know them!
Look, going after a bishop is no small affair. This is not Watergate, "Deep Throat" doesn't work in this business. A bishop, regardless of where he's a bishop, is an extraordinary man and to bring one down requires extraordinary proof.
The proofs must be open, transparent, trustable, capable of sustaining any kind of juridical scrutiny and able to convince an skeptic without doubt.
Sub-rosa campaings of hints and allegations do not constitute "proof." Clear statements of witnesses and material proof, as well as when, where, who, how, what, is what's needed here.
If the evidence proves the guilt of the parties in question, let the ax fall where it may--the Lord will take care of the Church. But if the evidence is not strong enough to convict an skeptic beyond a reasonable doubt, better be ready to apologize and do penance.
Bishops are the immediate Successors to the Apostles, in spite of their personal faults--and these may be bad bad BAD, but no matter. Be careful how you bring one down.
-Theo
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