Posted on 03/22/2002 12:25:16 PM PST by Merovingian
ST. LOUIS (AP) - A man who says he was molested at a seminary in the 1980s filed suit in federal court Friday, accusing U.S. bishops of conspiracy to cover up abuse.
The suit was filed in Hannibal, Mo., site of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary. It names former West Palm Beach, Fla., Bishop Anthony O'Connell, a longtime rector at St. Thomas, along with the dioceses where he worked: Jefferson City, Mo.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and West Palm Beach.
The lawsuit also names all U.S. bishops, alleging a conspiracy to keep abuse claims secret, often through hushed financial settlements with victims. It cites the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was aimed primarily at organized crime but includes provisions for civil cases when someone is harmed by a "pattern" of illegal activity.
"In this case, we have the Catholic Church and the seminary that have been infiltrated by predators who prey on children, and they cover it up," attorney Patrick Noaker said.
The RICO statute has been used in at least two other church abuse cases, but not successfully.
The lawsuit does not specify financial damages.
O'Connell resigned as bishop in West Palm Beach on March 8 after admitting he sexually abused Christopher Dixon, 40, who was a seminarian at St. Thomas in the late 1970s. O'Connell has been in seclusion since then.
Friday's lawsuit was the second filed against O'Connell this week by a former St. Thomas student. The latest suit claims O'Connell began sexually abusing the man when he was a freshman in 1982 and continued for several years.
The abuse began with O'Connell pressing the boy to discuss sexual fantasies during counseling sessions, and it eventually led to physical contact, the lawsuit said.
Neither the man who brought the suit Monday, a 47-year-old Minnesotan, nor the 34-year-old Missouri man who brought Friday's suit was identified publicly. Dixon's name is known because he came forward with his story.
Asked March 8 whether he had been involved with other youngsters besides Dixon, O'Connell said there could be "one other person of a somewhat similar situation, in a somewhat similar time frame." He would not elaborate.
Besides Dixon and the two former students who filed lawsuits this week, five other former St. Thomas students have told Noaker and his associate that they were abused at St. Thomas.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been named in two similar suits. A judge dismissed racketeering charges in a case in New Jersey in 1995, while plaintiffs eventually abandoned a similar claim as part of a suit that led to a $30 million settlement against the Diocese of Dallas in 1998.
Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the conference of bishops, said Thursday she couldn't comment on the new suit until she sees it.
Is there we are supposed to be surprised?
Don't be too overly surprised. This has been brewing for a long time. Its cleansing time. I have numerous priest and seminarian friends. The problem is greater than we think. Let's pray for each other and rejoice that Good will overcome this evil!
I'd love to see a number of its bishops scattered as well. Replace them with REAL priests who cherish the sacrament of Holy Orders.
March 22, 2002
Alleged victim suing Knoxville diocese, ex-bishop O'Connell
The Associated Press
ST. LOUIS -- Federal laws aimed primarily at racketeering will be used to sue three dioceses and an ex-bishop on behalf of a child abuse victim, the plaintiff's attorney said.
Lawyer Jeff Anderson announced plans for the suit Thursday. Similar suits using racketeering laws against priests have failed.
The former bishop, Anthony O'Connell, resigned after admitting he sexually abused a teen-ager. He is the highest-ranking church official to resign or be removed so far because of the sex-abuse scandal that began in Boston. Anderson is handling at least one other case against O'Connell.
A statement from Anderson's law firm said the suit would be announced today. Defendants would include O'Connell and the dioceses where he worked: Jefferson City, Mo.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and West Palm Beach, Fla.
The lawyer's client is a former seminary student, according to the release. He was not identified.
Allegations against O'Connell in the planned suit were not specified, and Anderson did not return telephone calls Thursday for additional comment.
On Monday, Anderson announced a suit alleging sexual exploitation against O'Connell on behalf of a 47-year-old Minnesotan whose name has not been made public. He was 15 when the abuse began, Anderson said.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been named in two similar suits. A judge dismissed racketeering charges in a case in New Jersey in 1995, while plaintiffs eventually abandoned a similar claim as part of a suit that led to a $30 million settlement against the Diocese of Dallas in 1998.
Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the conference of bishops, said Thursday she couldn't comment on Anderson's planned suit until she sees it.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was aimed primarily at organized crime, but includes provisions for civil cases when someone is harmed by a "pattern" of illegal activity.
O'Connell resigned from the Palm Beach Diocese two weeks ago after admitting he sexually abused former seminarian Christopher Dixon, now 40, in the 1970s.
O'Connell has been in seclusion since his resignation.
THE BIG CITY Wrong Labels Inflame Fears of Catholics
By JOHN TIERNEY
Now that we in the press have so energetically contemplated "the sins of the fathers," as headline writers keep putting it, let us contemplate our own.
Thanks to coverage of the Roman Catholic Church's sex scandal, many people are afraid to let their children become altar boys or attend Catholic elementary schools. They have heard that the church is rife with sexual predators molesting children, and that church and law enforcement officials have allowed an epidemic of pedophilia to occur.
There has been serious sexual misconduct, but we have exaggerated it by mislabeling it. The image of "pedophile priests" is largely a myth, according to Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University and the author of "Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis" (Oxford University Press, 1996).
Dr. Jenkins is not an apologist for the Catholic Church or an advocate of clerical celibacy: he himself belongs to the Episcopal Church, which allows married priests of either sex. Nor does he minimize the problems of child abuse: he has published an exposé of child pornography on the Internet. But he says there is no evidence that the rate of pedophilia among Catholic priests is higher than among other clergy or other professions.
Most of the church's sexual abuse cases involve older teenagers above the legal age of consent, Dr. Jenkins said. "I don't want to excuse this behavior," he said. "Having sex with a 16- or 17-year-old boy or girl may be phenomenally stupid and wrong in many ways — immoral, sinful, an abuse of authority — but it's very different from pedophilia, which is the exploitation of prepubescent children. In most of these cases with older teenagers, there's some degree of consent, and in most jurisdictions they're legal." The age of consent is 17 in New York and 16 in many places.
Dr. Jenkins pointed to a study in Chicago a decade ago that concluded that about 40 of 2,200 priests, a little less than 2 percent, had committed sexual misconduct with a minor. But only one priest of the 2,200 was classified as a pedophile. Those statistics sound reasonable to me, although you wouldn't necessarily know it from my last column. In looking back on my days in Catholic schools, I wrote that we had all heard rumors about certain priests and brothers. But the rumors I had in mind were all about clerics interested in pubescent boys.
They were not pedophiles. You could call them pederasts, using a term that originally meant men attracted to boys up to adulthood, although it has come to be applied to homosexuals in general. The most precise term, Dr. Jenkins said, would be ephebophile — someone with a sexual preference for boys or girls beyond puberty — but don't expect to see that in many headlines soon.
THESE distinctions aren't merely semantic. "If you have a pedophile, the behavior is likely to be deeply obsessive and very hard to cure," Dr. Jenkins said. "The church is taking a suicidal risk in sending a pedophile to a parish. But when it's someone who had sex with an older teenager, then with treatment and proper supervision and restrictions, the priest might well not cause future problems."
There are plenty of heterosexual men teaching in public schools who find 17-year-old girls attractive, and some of them act on their impulses, but we don't talk about an epidemic of child molestation in the public schools. We don't usually express concerns that they will abuse third graders, as people in Washington Heights are saying about a priest there who is accused of having sex with a 17-year-old boy. (The priest denies the accusation.)
Dr. Jenkins attributes the current misconceptions partly to linguistic imprecision, partly to traditional anti-Catholic stereotypes and partly to the desire to avoid an awkward issue: homosexual priests. Although there is no evidence of disproportionate rates of pedophilia among priests, Dr. Jenkins said, surveys have found that an unusually high number of priests have homosexual inclinations.
"The issue of gay priests is very sensitive, and not just for the Catholic Church," Dr. Jenkins said. "It bears on controversies like allowing gay men in the Boy Scouts. I'm sure that most gay scoutmasters would be responsible, and I don't know that gay men are any more likely than heterosexual men to have sex with teenagers. But the experience of the Catholic Church suggests there will be problems if you send gay scoutmasters on camping trips with teenage boys."
I agree with the one who commented that this will purge sin from the church. Alas, the liberals, who insisted on allowing gays to become priests, are going to use it to destroy the church.
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