Posted on 06/30/2008 8:35:09 AM PDT by tcg
The Roman Catholic bishop of Richmond was told that a diocesan charity planned to help a teenage foster child get an abortion in January and did not try to prevent the procedure.
Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo "was told erroneously that everything was in place and there was nothing he could do to stop it," said Steve Neill, Bishop DiLorenzo's communications officer. "He is very apologetic about the whole episode.
"It is very awkward, it is very embarrassing. A human life was taken. He certainly has not taken it lightly in any way. He is clearly opposed to abortion."
Mr. Neill said the bishop was informed Jan. 17, the day before an abortion was performed on the 16-year-old Guatemalan girl, who was a foster care client of Commonwealth Catholic Charities of Richmond (CCR), a group incorporated under the diocese.
CCR Executive Director Joanne Nattrass also knew about the planned abortion, Mr. Neill said.
"The director was very upset about it and it clearly went against all she stood for as a director of Catholic Charities," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholic.org ...
Unbelievable. This man needs to be REMOVED from his position. He knew the day before? He could have stopped it if it meant going down there and standing in front of the door himself. In addition, the girl was a minor and she wasn’t even supposed to be getting the abortion without her parents’ consent, so he had every legal resource available to him.
I noticed that this morning, the passive voice of “he was told” rather than so and so “told him.” Who told him the lie? Also, from the link, why Catholic Charities long ago ceased to get money from me: “An investigation of this unfortunate event revealed that some members of CCC staff assisted the minor in preparations leading up to the abortion, and that one member of staff signed the consent form necessary for the minor to have the abortion. The minor was taken to and from the abortion facility by a person associated with CCC.” To sum up: Catholic Charities is pro-abortion and pro-illegal immigration. They are about as Catholic as Fidel Castro. The Bishop really needs to do something about Catholic Charities in Virginia, for many, many reasons. Finally, if the Bishop knew about it the day before it happened, he COULD have stopped it. Why didn’t he?
Another great bishop.
I’ll wait for the details to confirm, but if his agents arranged this thing, he knew in advance, and did nothing to stop it, I’d say he’s excommunicated (past tense).
Our Bishop is quite orthodox. He booted Bishop Sullivan’s GLBT outreach group that became a GLBT affirmation session, replaced our “priest” of the Cafeteria Catholic Association with orthodox priests, has overseen the growth of seminarians, and is all round pretty good for the times.
There is something that isn’t being said in all the stories going around. What is it, I wonder?
No wonder the response has been so half hearted...the bishop knew. Good Grief!
Is DiLorenzo your bishop?
If so, I can’t imagine what’s not being said; he’s been grudgingly letting this come out bit by bit. The fact that he knew about it in advance is probably the worst piece of information so far. I can’t imagine what made him think this was ok.
He should have gotten on the phone with everybody, threatened to fire every last one of them if it wasn’t stopped, called law enforcement because of the illegal “consent” form, and finally gone to the “clinic” to stop it physically if need be. I can’t imagine any other untold aspect to the story that might have prevented him from doing these things.
Has he been there a long time?
Yes, I’d think he’s excommunicated himself, too. There was a recent case in northern Spain where a priest was found to be arranging and paying for abortions in his parish, and the bishop made a few noises but then just told the priest not to do it any more (the bishop had obviously known about it long before it was revealed by a conservative Catholic group). I think getting enforcement of these things is the real challenge.
I wish once, just once, the Pope would remove one of these faithless servants. Send him packing and let him go work at Burger King for the rest of his life. The others would get the message fast enough.
So he had 24 hours to sit on his butt and twiddle his thumbs... Give me a Big Honkin Break.
Time for the Bishop to resign/ retire
I am outraged! This so-called bishop has made himself a tool of Satan, a destroyer of the innocent unborn, a killer of a human baby.
Why is he not in public sackcloth and ashes? Is this imp from hell still pretending to perform the holy mass every day? Why should we believe that this is the only time he’s looked the other way?
He is my Bishop, and One day is to long.
Yes he is better than Sullivan, just like Barak is "better" Than Shrillary.
OK, that says it all...
I think one of the problems with some of the new bishops is that the pool of people they are drawn from is pretty corrupted, and therefore some of them aren't a whole lot better than what they're replacing. I guess he's one.
Here’s a good editorial on it in Rorate Caeli:
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2008/06/overseer-of-murder-he-must-resign.html
Their opinion? The Bishop must resign. I certainly think he should.
"He was told it could not be stopped," Mr. Etherington [diocesan spokesman] said. "It was erroneous information. He didn't have to sign off on it. He was not personally involved."
Update (1500 GMT): The Bishop "apologizes" for the "loss of life" (no mention of the word abortion here...)...
Exactly. He should have been standing in the doorway blocking the entrace.
Well if he thought he could do NOTHING TO STOP IT, I’d say he is in the clear.
If not he should be reassignmed as a parish priest in China.
I was wondering about that....it seems like he would be excommunicated, if things played out as described.
There’s never “nothing” you can do about something you know about a day in advance. He’s the bishop and he’s the boss of all these people at Catholic Charities, for one thing. He has now said, himself, that it wasn’t exactly “nothing,” but simply that the “plans were already in place.” So?
He had many options.
Plus he lied about it when first questioned. Obviously, he’s only telling the truth now because a lot of other people know the real story and because there will probably be a criminal investigation.
“Not fired, not excommunicated, not sued just ‘disciplined’. What did they do? Give them a friggin’ verbal warning????”
Sorry that information involves personal information and cannot be released. /sarc
Listen to the rationale of the diocesan spokesman, a Mr. Neill:
"They were so caught up with the plight of the young girl who already had a child," Mr. Neill said. "She was not a Catholic. She got pregnant by her boyfriend, and she was determined not to have the baby."
The unnamed girl had been implanted with a contraceptive device provided by CCR two months earlier...
This goes from bad to worse. That bishop needs to do the right thing and resign - not only for his personal lies and evasions and responsibility for the abortion, but for his horrible mismanagement of Catholic Charities, which appears to have turned into a subsidiary of Planned Parenthood.
He's been here about 2 years now...maybe longer, time flies when you're having fun. He replaced Walter Sullivan, aruably the most liberal bishop in the US until his retirement. DiLorenzo seemed ok at first but this is VERY disturbing. He should have been at that aborrtion clininc to physically block taht child's access to the clinic!! He should have been THUNDERING against this crime against humanity! He should retire to a monestary as soon as possible. This is a complete and utter failure of the responsibilitiues of his office.
Catholic Charities in this diocese ought to be completely disbanded! I hope the Holy Father steps in and demands the bishop’s resignation...ASAP. This is horrible. Catholic Charities is out of control and the bishop is completely incompetent.
He’s been our Bishop for a few years, since Bishop Sullivan retired.
This is from his pastoral letter in the Catholic Viginian, from the first paragraph, last sentence:
” Because of the issues of privacy of those involved, and the ongoing legal investigations, there was, and is a need to be prudent in making any public statement.”
I am very willing to give Bishop DiLorenzo the benefit of a doubt. I am very orthodox, but saw that the changes he made when he came to Virginia were in line with the Holy See.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d kind of like to have the trail BEFORE the verdict, and definitely before the sentencing hearing.
“I am very willing to give Bishop DiLorenzo the benefit of a doubt. I am very orthodox, but saw that the changes he made when he came to Virginia were in line with the Holy See.”
I have to agree. R. diocese is going to take a long while to recover from the lack of teaching of the previous bishop and the Vatican’s lack of discipline. It’s a shame, generations of Catholics who don’t know enough about their faith to be anything but Catholic in name only.
This bishop has started correcting some of the abuses, or at least that was the impression I had. I have heard he was considered a lib in Honolulu, but anything would have been better than the bishop before him in R. diocese. But if this is as bad as it seems...
Freegards
And the trial too.
Sorry, the only person whose “privacy” he’s worried about is his own, and that’s because he’s saying what his lawyer tells him to say. He’s handling this exactly the way the bishops handled the pedophilia cases. Stonewall, appeal to “privacy,” say they’re going to handle it, they were completely unaware, etc., etc. He obviously was not completely unaware or even slightly unaware, as he himself has had to admit, and there is simply no excuse for him to have let this go ahead.
He may be more orthodox than your last bishop, but it doesn’t sound like that’s saying much. Permitting Catholic Charities - with his prior knowledge - to carry out a homicide goes way beyond any good he may have done by cancelling the GLBT activities. This stuff was probably going on before he got there, but if he’s so inattentive that he doesn’t give any oversight to his own diocesan organizations, he has no business being a bishop. Also, my experience is that bishops get more lax after a few years in a lax diocese, regardless of how they may have started off; some of them may clean house and make big changes, but most of them adapt, since bishops almost by definition are go-along-to-get-along guys.
I always thought that even the bad bishops would at least pretend to be opposed to abortion - even though their sly “seamless garment” stuff was meant to undermine the focus on abortion and essentially make it seem less important than a host of left-wing causes they supported - and I certainly never thought that one would knowingly permit a abortion to be carried out through a Catholic organization under his supervision. I just thought simple prudence and concern for keeping his job would have prevented this, even if morality and Catholic teaching did not.
I assume you’ve read his letter where he “laments this tragedy.” Sort of like it was a natural disaster that happened on another continent. He made no effort to stop it, even though he was the boss of this agency and all its workers, he made no attempt to deal with the fact that this was a minor having his employees fraudulently sign off on her abortion, he seems not concerned about the fact that his agency had already had an IUD implanted in her, and he didn’t call for help or go down there or do anything - so he’s complicit. That’s how it is.
Of course, nothing will happen to him, so I’m sure you all will be able to enjoy his moral guidance for years to come. Nothing ever happens to bishops. They destroy the faith of their people, bankrupt their dioceses, and mock the Catholic faith and its teachings - and nothing ever happens to them. I am completely disgusted.
I’m still going to await all the information before I made a judgment.
Too much is missing from the accounts in the newspapers. I made my living from listening to people and know that while many things are said, it is the spaces inbetween that contain the most useful information. That is the information that is withheld for one reason or another.
I ask because if a volunteer at Catholic Charities uses money NOT belonging to Catholic Charities to do something regrettably legal (except for the signing that consent form) with someone she met at Catholic Charities, I'm not sure what the bishop can do.
It's all very well to talk about a "take no prisoners" approach to disclosure after the fact, but it seems to me to make sense that somebody might want to make entirely sure of his facts before going public precisely because the kind of person who would procure this abortion is the kind of person to attract lawyers who would be happy to eat up the money I gave to the diocese.
The perps have been fired. I believe there is secular legal action because of the fraudulent consent form thing, it just isn't over yet.
Hitler didn't sign off on the orders to exterminate the Jews. He wasn't at the meeting, and he wasn't personally involved.
So, in defense of the Bishop, he's no more guilty than was Hitler.
The source is the Washington Times, including the earlier articles that have come out on this. This is all public information, and there is so much evidence the bishop doesn’t even dispute it. The only volunteer was a woman who drove the girl to the clinic; the others were all employees of the Catholic Charities agency. The bishop even discussed it with the head of the agency the day before.
It’s no excuse that the girl wasn’t Catholic (the bishop’s spokesman actually offered that excuse!) or that she “really wanted” the abortion (also from the spokesman).
She was a foster child in the care of a Catholic agency (both when she got the IUD and when she got the abortion) and she did not just “meet someone” at Catholic Charities who incidentally convinced her to do something “regrettably legal.” (Actually, it wasn’t even legal, in this situation, since she needed her parents’ consent.) These are professionals hired by Catholic charities to work with children, and surely they know all this. Personally, I would suspect that this is not the first abortion this group has handled, but just the first time they got caught. Possibly the bishop didn’t know about the earlier cases, but he certainly knew about this one.
And blaming the victim is not a good strategy. That’s exactly what the bishops did in the pedophilia cases. “Well, maybe the boy led him on...” Er, no.
If I had given money to them, I’d be on the phone to their national headquarters, I’d be calling the Bishop’s office and leaving an outraged message, and I’d be writing to Rome. I’d be furious.
And yes, I suspect the diocese is going to end up losing money over this. I suspect that Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services is also going to see a plunge in their income, which is unfortunate because I’m sure there are some local agencies that are okay and do good work. I always thought that losing money would teach the bishops a lesson, but obviously they’ve learned nothing.
Yeah. I guess we've sort of lowered the bar for bishops...
I think you mean the Trial. If this was the first incident I would agree with you, but this is just the latest in a pattern for the people of the area I live in. We have a Priest and a Monsignor that after a year are still unassigned. Both of them because the people of their parishes complained that they were to Conservative.
Mind you I am glad they are living in our parish, but this is the same clown that is complaining that we don't have enough Priests to go around.
Last year he allowed our Catholic School to close, a school that had twice the population of two schools in Richmond that had half the number of students and are still open.
Now he is talking about a consolidation of three parishes into two parishes. He wanted to make one of them a Hispanic parish, when there is not enough of Hispanic population to even support 1 Mass, much less an entire parish.
If you like I can keep adding to the pile of evidence
It appears that the current Pope is trying to turn things around, but he isn’t always getting trustworthy advice. And the mess that he has to clean up is huge.
I'm with you entirely. To me this is worse than the homo priest...at the very least it's just as bad. I am heart broken.
There may not be justice in this world, but, if it is any consolation, there will definitely be justice in the next. And I wouldn't want to be anywhere near the bad bishops when their particular judgment happens, if you know what I mean.
Does Catholic Charities answer to the Bishop? I really don't know.IS anybody trying to excuse it on the grounds of the girl's religion"
So much for my "negative". Now for my positive, which will mostly be "mitigation". Our diocese was incredibly liberal. Incredibly. The worst kind. I can't go into details but I was freaked out to the point of suppressing laughter when I made a confession at a Confess-a-thon (you know what I mean?) and the confessor was trying to go all psycho-babble on me.
Fortunately my wife and I are pretty good students, which makes up for our being admitted into the Church with ZERO RCIA. But our then pastor, in many respects a really good guy, was a pinko politically and very relaced on matters of discipline. He INSISTED that Humanae Witae was "pastoral" in tone, by which he meant, "It's okay to use artificial birth control whatever Paul VI said."
Our next pastor was one of those guys who likes to make up the service, or at least amend the text so that it conforms to his high standards. Gag me.
Our deacon taught "fundamental option" to his RCIA class. Many of our members thought it terrible that in some churches you actually have to KNEEL (the hugh manatee!) for the prayer of consecration, if kneelers were available.
IN my Dominican Parish (Thomas Aquinas, Charlottesville) our current pastor has taken ungodly amounts of grief over having a statue of our Lady and a tabernacle that doesn't look like a small gun safe, but which actually has some beauty to it.
YES I think the life of a child is something to go to the mat for. But I am not getting the grief that diLorenzo is getting for trying to have a diocese which is recognizably Catholic. I happened to let slip to a priest that one reason I hadn't even tried to become a deacon was that I couldn't see myself under special obedience to Sullivan. The guy was shocked, I could tell.
So there are a chunk of priests and lay-leaders whose idea of serious theology AND sublime hymnody all wrapped up into one is "Kumbaya".
This is a guy under the gun. I've been under the gun, both as an Episcopal priest and as a deputy sheriff. I know one doesn't make the best decisions when the battle flag goes up. So I'm inclined to cut diLorenzo a break. Being Bishop has got to be a lousy job in any case. Being a faithful bishop coming in after a severe case of "The Spirit of Vatican II" is unimaginable.
What we have to watch to form a good, calm, dispassionate judgment is the clean-up. He now has an opportunity to make his opinion known and, if it is in anyway under his control, to restructure Catholic Charities.
How we can help: Instead of calling up the Office and sounding like Chernobyl, I'd recommend writing to tell him that we understand a little the stresses of his office and the shock that such an incident must be to him. Then assure him that we will back him up if he acts in accordance with the teachings of the Church, and suggest that now is the time for him to make a clear statement on Human Life AND to clean up Catholic Charities.
My experience with the Red Cross in Louisiana taught me that some charitable outfits get a kind of delusional megalomania. Until a crisis hits, one may not notice that they've gone and confused themselves with God. As a former deputy I happen to know something about securing an area. One thing I learned was that the Rex Cross doesn't know much about that AND that they SURE don't want to hear that they don't know much about it.
So maybe diLorenzo was blindsided by this. Let's see how he cleans up. Let's HELP him clean up. And then if he blows that, we can kick his behind.
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