NATIONAL SURVIVOR ADVOCATES COALITION NEWS April 29, 2010 Vol. 2, No. 71
| | Op-Ed
This section of NSAC News is designed to permit Survivor Advocates to express their opinions and ideas relevant to the subject matter of this newsletter. Your participation is invited and encouraged. Letters to the Editor addressing a particular article should be sent to the Editor of the publication. in which the article originally appeared. This Op-Ed section provides a forum for our readers to express their independent views. _____________________________________________________________________________________
Received from A. W. Richard Sipe
Pope Benedict XVI is a good man. He has served the Church long and well. It takes nothing away from his goodness to suggest that he should resign his office. Nine of his predecessors have resigned, most for the good of the Church.[1] The clerical sex abuse crisis that now exposes a corrupt pattern and practice of a system has escaped and confused many good, brilliant people and left generations paralyzed. There is no need to point fingers.
However, the Roman Catholic Church is in a period of Reformation as profound (and breathtaking) as any its history has ever recorded. The voluntary resignation of Pope Benedict XVI would be a gesture that would match the epic challenge that faces Catholicism today. Such leadership would break the pattern and practice that holds the church hostage to a past that no longer serves the Christian message. The monarchy that rules the church has outlived its service in the evangelization of peoples, an evangelization that Paul the apostle taught and that Pope John Paul II championed. The People of God, hierarchy included, are shackled by a secret system designed to control rather than free them.
Richard Sipe, 4/26/2010 | |
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Click on the headline to read the whole story. _______________________________________________________________________________________ AUSTRALIA
The Herald Jeff Corbett In the light of news reports this week by Herald reporter Joanne McCarthy I examine in my column today some of Bishop Michael Malone's statements about the Newcastle-Maitland Catholic diocese response to priestly pedophilia. Joanne's reports are based on documents that lift a heavy veil on dealings by Bishop Malone and his predecessor, Bishop Leo Clarke, with a priest who was then the subject of serious allegations of sexual assault of children. The priest was Denis McAlinden, who died in 2005 and who was, the church has admitted, a serial sexual predator of children over many years. The documents referred to by Joanne show that Bishop Clarke then Bishop Malone tried to have McAlinden defrocked after two allegations were made at the same time in 1995 that Vince Ryan, another of the diocese's serial pedophiles, was charged by police. Bishop Clarke had assured McAlinden that the confidentiality of the defrocking process would protect "your good name". Until then Bishop Clarke had been urging McAlinden, who was known to be a pedophile and who had moved to The Philippines, to live as a retired priest in "a climate that would be acceptable". **************************************************************************************************************************** BRAZIL
News.com.au (Australia) BRAZILIAN authorities overnight charged a 74-year-old Catholic priest with pedophilia after eight children in his church choir accused him of sexual abuse. Father Jose Afonso De is being prosecuted for allegedly assaulting children aged 12 to 16, Sao Paulo state's public prosecutor's office said. He has denied the allegations but has been suspended by his diocese. **************************************************************************************************************************** CALIFORNIA
The Associated Press By GILLIAN FLACCUS (AP) The pope's hand-picked replacement to oversee abuse cases at the Vatican did nothing to restrict a California priest after learning in 1995 that the priest had molested a 13-year-old boy a decade earlier. Cardinal William Levada, then archbishop of San Francisco, said in a 2005 deposition obtained by The Associated Press that he did nothing and didn't contact police because he trusted the Rev. Milton Walsh would not re-offend and his predecessor handled the case adequately. There were no known allegations of later abuse by the priest and a Vatican attorney says Levada acted appropriately under standards of the time. *************************************************************************************************************************** BOONVILLE (MO)
Boonville Daily News By Nate Birt
Boonville Daily News
Wed Apr 28, 2010 Boonville -
An ex-Boonville priest suspected of sexually assaulting three mid-Missouri men in the 1980s has been taken into custody in New Jersey, Cooper County Prosecutor Doug Abele said today. The suspect, Gerald Howard, was arrested with the help of the Bloomfield Police Department in New Jersey and the Boonville Police Department, Abele said. **************************************************************************************************************************** UNITED STATES
St. Louis Beacon [2002 letter to Bishop Gregory] By Patricia Rice, Special to the Beacon Posted 4 p.m. Tues., 04.27.10 - The resignation of three European bishops last week -- two over their initial indifference to disclosures of criminal sex abuse by Catholic priests, one over abusing a relative -- catapults many American Catholics directly back to 2002. That year, the Boston Globe reported on the sexual abuse of minors by priests. Other newspapers followed, telling stories of abuse going back half a century. American bishops had to explain to Catholics, civil authorities and the public why they had not reported the crimes and removed abusers from ministry. From November 2001, when Bishop Wilton Gregory was elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, he was known as a good listener. At the time, he was the shepherd of the small 107,425-member Belleville Catholic diocese. He had served in Belleville since 1994 when Pope John Paul II had dispatched him to clean up a sex abuse cesspool involving 10 percent of the Belleville diocese's priests. *************************************************************************************************************************** VATICAN CITY
Washington Post By NICOLE WINFIELD
The Associated Press
Wednesday, April 28, 2010 VATICAN CITY -- Pope Benedict XVI may issue a mea culpa for the church's handling of clerical sexual abuse cases when he attends a meeting of the world's clergy in June, the Vatican official in charge of handling abuse cases said. Cardinal William Levada also said he intended to hold up the U.S. policy dealing with abuse as a model for bishops around the word. Levada, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made the comments in an interview broadcast late Tuesday on U.S. public broadcaster PBS, his first interview since the scandal erupted several weeks ago. *************************************************************************************************************************** FAIRFIELD (CT)
Fairfield Mirror April 28, 2010
By: Chris Simmons When Fairfield graduate Doug Perlitz first went to Haiti in 1991, it was one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. This country with a rich heritage, second only to the United States as an independent nation in the new world and the first free black nation, had fallen into a cycle of poverty and turmoil. The allegations against Perlitz, a 1992 Fairfield graduate and later commencement speaker, over sex abuse involving homeless boys in the Haitian town of Cap-Haitien have only added to the problems. Perlitz is currently housed in the Wyatt Federal Detention Center in Rhode Island awaiting his Oct. 2010 trial while his accusers are now back on the streets, begging, facing threats and guilt over exposing the alleged abuse. Cyrus Sibert, a Haitian journalist and talk show host who first broke the story in 2007, said that there is a big campaign to show the children are lying. *************************************************************************************************************************** NETHERLANDS
Radio Netherlands By Marijke Peters Oliver O'Grady, the ex-Irish priest convicted of paedophile offences who was living under a false identity in the Netherlands until February this year, receives a monthly pension from the Roman Catholic church, it has been revealed. A US lawyer who represented O'Grady's victims says the former cleric brokered a "sinister deal" in which he refused to testify against senior church officials at his child sex abuse trial in return for cash. Lawyer Jeff Anderson told Radio Netherlands Worldwide that Oliver O'Grady was offered the money by senior members of his diocese the night before his trial. As a result, he never testified in court against bishop Roger Mahony - now the Archbishop of Los Angeles - who was later found by the jury to have known all along about O'Grady's abuse, but did nothing about it. ***************************************************************************************************************************** UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter by A.W. Richard Sipe on Apr. 28, 2010
Examining the crisis Sexual behavior has a long and well-documented history. Even the current problem of sexual abuse of minors is neither new nor limited to clerics. It is a practice that crosses ethnic, cultural, religious and economic strata and custom. Incest (familial contact) is the most common. However, the sexual abuse of minors by declared celibate clerics poses special issues. There are three factors that draw special attention to the sexual practices of Roman Catholic clerics today. The moral teaching concerning human sexuality, promulgated by the church, is clear and unequivocal. Catholic bishops and priests under the aegis of the pope hold themselves up as the teachers and arbiters of human sexual morality. Human failure is more remarkable in commanders and not as easily forgiven as transgressions among the troops. The history of sexual violations of Roman Catholic clergy and church response has been well preserved in church documents from the Council of Ancyra in 315 to the 2001 document, De delictis gravioribus, authored by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. *************************************************************************************************************************** Note: If you know someone who would be interested in receiving these daily news compilations from NSAC, forward their name and email address to me. I'll ask their permission and add them to the mailing list.
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