News Reports Say Cardinal Protected An Abuser

Editor: More dreck from the New York Times.  "Never mind the homosexual side of this, let's get the Catholic Church by continuing to cash in on the abuse-hoax."  Remember, it's all about manufacturing moral panic and diversion.

By STEPHEN CASTLE

[Brussels] Reports in three news media outlets increased the pressure on the cardinal, Adrianus Simonis, the retired archbishop of Utrecht, who testified last month as a witness in a legal action taken by one of almost 2,000 people who have said they were victims of abuse.

The crisis in the Netherlands is another setback for the Roman Catholic Church, which has been struggling with sexual abuse allegations from Ireland and Belgium to the United States.

H/t: Seismo

Yes, Another Deceptive New York Times Story

Once again, Pinch Sulzberger's often inaccurate, thoroughly discredited, leftists scandal rag steps in to try and keep the flames of the abuse-hoax alive.

Andrew Madden is one of a relatively new breed of Irish celebrities who would just as soon be less well known. He was among the first people in Ireland to go public about being sexually abused by Catholic clergy — one of those who set off the intense bout of soul-searching that has racked the country lately. When I met Madden last fall in Dublin, the early rumbles of the collapse of Ireland’s economy were shaking the country, and throughout much of a pub lunch he talked about the failures of the government and the banks. It was only later, once we were driving around his old neighborhood, past the pebbledash house where he grew up and where his parents still live, that he began to talk about his childhood. As we sat in his car in front of Christ the King Church, where he spent much of his youth as an altar boy and a choir member, he outlined the four years of torment he suffered in the late 1970s at the hands of the Rev. Ivan Payne, one of the infamous serial sex offenders among the Irish Catholic clergy whose stories have transfixed the country over the past year and a half.

Read further...

H/t: wrigleys

Profile on the Author of the Milwaukee Schmear Against Pope Benedict

What you have here is a man who has unseen loyalties to powers and principalities, to organizations that have the destruction of the Catholic Church as their fundamental aim. This is the motive force behind the current orchestrated scandal, perhaps it's a part of what Fr. Malachi Martin termed, the "Superforce".

Jeffry Anderson is described as a man, ironically, on a "Crusade" against the Catholic Church. It's not just Jeffrey Anderson who is liable to be described in this way. Certain individuals, indeed, entire nations and political movements in history, have enjoyed and benefitted from their enmity with the Catholic Church, entities like Stalin's Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. Like the aforementioned regimes, Jeff Anderson has a certain affiliation and kinship to powers of such malevolence, that their hatred of Christ was the scene of mass starvation and some of the greatest untold crimes of the last two centuries. What shouldn't be so startling to anyone is the fact that Communists do use the tactics being employed by Jeff Anderson, here. The erstwhile graduate from the provincial William Mitchel School of Law,  has come to do battle with the Catholic Church, as a member of the American and Minnesota Civil Liberties Unions and also claims a certain spiritual connection with a vague and ambient spirituality reminiscent of Gnosticism, which is fitting since his claims must certainly rely and on occult knowledge of a diabolical nature.

Now, we've mentioned that he is a member of the culturally Marxist, ACLU and Minnesota Civil Liberties Union. Their hostility to Catholicism in particular and religion in general is well-established, so then it follows logically that Mr. Anderson is acting according to his principles in attacking the Catholic Church, since we can hopefully assume that he shares the views and tactics of those antagonists of Religion.

But what of the Pedophile Connection?

Well, Jeff claims to be attacking the Catholic Church on behalf of the victims. Perhaps they are more of a utility than a heartfelt aspiration on his part to see Justice done. Indeed, he had been taking these cases for 10 years prior to the event of his daughter's alleged molestation, which he maintains was what began his "Crusade" in earnest, at the hands of an ex-priest who was acting as a therapist to deal with emotional issues related to his divorce. Catholicism rejects divorce, but surely, he bears some responsibility for that and sending your daughter to an ex-priest: isn't that res ipse loquitur that the negligence belongs to the nature of the act of sending one's 8 year old daughter to an ex-priest as a result of one's own inability to hold together one's own family?

Lest you think we're being unfair, it has to be said that Mr. Anderson wasn't being terribly fair when he failed to contact any of the key figures in the case beforehand for their account, indeed, when you compare the two stories alongside, Mr. Anderson's suffers from a profound lack of coherence and, well, just plain old truth. Mr. Anderson maintains that the Catholic Church had covered up the abuse and had not done anything about it, and is clumsily attempting to portray Pope Benedict as engaging in a cover up, when the details of the case indicate plainly otherwise, that it was in fact the Vatican that stepped in and dealt with the case in 2005 as Father Thomas Brandage indicates, here calling Jeff Anderson's and the New York Times' work, "sloppy and inaccurate".

Is Archbishop Weakland a Good Source?

Well, he's been caught lying so many times that it's strange that the New York Times would rely on him as a source, as Father Raymond de Souza points out here as he lays out his own timeline of events related to the case, in defense of the Papacy, here.

Father de Souza maintains that +Weakland isn't a good source because he himself is an abuser who stole $450,000 to pay an extortionist, but what of our ACLU and MCLU member and "Crusder" Jeff Anderson whose supposed concern for the poor is far more interwoven with an international effort to discredit the Church, by any means necessary, even resorting to libel.

The Democratic Connection

We made a moment out of Jeff Anderson's supposed concern for the victims of clergy abuse, but what about the potential future victims of Democratic Party Politician abuse as the Democratic party intends on decriminalizing sex with children and wants to count pederasts as a protected class in Hate Crimes Legislation, here, and the vote count, here.

Never mind that, in a strange parallel, it is the German politician, Sabina Leuthesser, who is attacking the Catholic Church in Germany, like the Democratic Party in the United States, a party for the normalization of sex with children. Now you might not think that Jeff Anderson would have anything to do with this, but it was, after all, his party and co-religionists in Germany who are promoting the normalization of sex with children. We say this because Mr. Anderson has given a portion of the millions (according to Bill Donahue), to the various extremely liberal candidates and committees of the Democratic Party, here, as his contributions approach $60,000 in the year 2008.

Mr. Anderson professes a love for "spiritual" things and as a baptized Lutheran who was once married to a Catholic, indeed, he sits amidst what looks like a religious arts and furnishings shop (or pirate's trove) at his St. Paul office, it probably serves him well to soften his image by an appeal to the vague spiritual confessions held by so many people who'll be susceptible to his misleading and frankly mendacious account of the Pope Benedict's involvement in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee with Father Lawrence Murphy who was suspended from priestly duties in 1985 when he was dismissed from the St. John's School for the Deaf about which, he again wrongfully declares, that then Cardinal Ratzinger attempted to cover it up.

Unsatisfactory Results

If the quality of Mr. Anderson's efforts as a public relations man is any reflection on his legal abilities, it would be easy to see why he was outmaneuvered (deliberately?) at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota where he stage managed his confrontation with what he called centuries of "secrecy" and abuse of power.

We wonder why Mr. Anderson doesn't do more to chase the pederasts in the party he supports with the money he gains, but what of his effectiveness in dealing with pederasts in the past? Well, at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville where he began, the arrangement he helped forge there is no longer effectively in place and the very liberal Benedictines, who shares many of his political believes and those of the Democratic Party, are no longer in place. The 10 or so credibly accused pederasts at St. John's are free to roam the globe, despite the false claims of "restriction". One of the priests, Father Dunstan Morse, has even appeared in photographs with acclaimed author Kathleen Norris as a consultant to her book, Cloister Walk, here(pdf) and in her more recent book, Acedia and Me, here (pdf). It might be easy to see how those on the outside might view Mr. Anderson's legal work as uninspiring.

Well, the Mexican Government was certainly unimpressed with Mr. Anderson and David Clohessy's efforts, as they were barred for five years from entering Mexico when they attempted to serve the Archbishop of Mexico City.

If it weren't for all of the lawsuits he's filed against them over the years, considering the non-enforceable agreement he made with him and the fact that none of the perpetrators went to jail. It might be easy to see how they were in collusion together; perpetuating the problem, rather than adverse parties as we might suppose if we believed what was in the pages of Pinchy Sulzberger's New York Times.

Attorney Jeff Anderson Leaked Benedict-Milwaukee Sex Abuse Story to New York Times

Jeff Anderson has long been a very active person attacking the alleged "medievalism" and culture of "secrecy" of the Catholic Chuch. Now he's been responsible for conspiring with Pinchy Sulzberger's very anti-Catholic New York Times in the latest Milwaukee press release involving that old abusing boogey man hinmself, Arcbishop Rembert Weakland.

Standing beside a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., the increasingly vocal antagonist of the Catholic Church has shown himself to have a reach extending beyond the street and quiet graceful neighborhoods of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Jeff Anderson's Crusade Against the Catholic Church

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Jeff Anderson has filed thousands of lawsuits alleging sex abuse by priests and won tens of millions of dollars for his clients, but he has had a bigger goal in mind for nearly two decades. He wants to bring his career-long legal crusade against misconduct in the Roman Catholic Church right to the top. He would love to question Pope Benedict XVI himself under oath. Though that is extremely unlikely given that the pope is a head of state, documents Anderson has unearthed have the potential to take a scandal that has plagued dozens of dioceses around the world and place it at the doorstep of Vatican leadership. The documents, which became publicly known in the past week after Anderson shared them with The New York Times, show that a Vatican office led by the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, halted a church trial against a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 boys at a school for the deaf. “This is a tipping point,” Anderson said. He found the documents in handling one of the dozens of lawsuits he has pending against various church officials, and hopes to use them to bolster a separate federal lawsuit against the Vatican itself. Since 1983, Anderson and the five other attorneys at his downtown St. Paul firm have sued thousands of Catholic priests, bishops, and dioceses over allegations of sexual abuse by priests and other church leaders. He claims to have no idea how much he has won in settlements; in 2002 he estimated that it was around $60 million. “It’s not about the money,” Anderson told The Associated Press. The self-described “former atheist” who rediscovered faith in God through his recovery from alcoholism professes a deep empathy with abuse victims – he calls them “survivors.” More than a decade after his legal battles with church officials began, Anderson’s adult daughter revealed that as an 8-year-old she was molested by a therapist she was seeing as Anderson and his first wife were going through a divorce. The therapist, Anderson said, was a former Catholic priest. Anderson, 62, said the pain of that revelation “brought another dimension to the experience.” But he said he concluded years earlier that the responsibility for shuffling around problem priests and covering up their indiscretions would extend to the Vatican. “I came to the stark realization that the problems were really endemic to the clerical culture, and all the problems we are having in the U.S. led back to Rome,” Anderson said. “And I realized nothing was going to fundamentally change until they did.” The Wisconsin documents tie Benedict, who as cardinal led the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, to the decision in the mid-1990s not to defrock the Rev. Lawrence Murphy despite allegations that the Milwaukee priest molested some 200 deaf boys from 1950 to 1975. The Vatican is defending that decision, saying the case reached the Vatican only in 1996, two years before Murphy died. Church officials also say Murphy had repented in a letter to Ratzinger, and that the case’s statute of limitations had run out. They decry criticism over the case as an effort to smear the pope. The Milwaukee lawsuit does not name Pope Benedict or other Vatican leaders as defendants, but Anderson hopes to use it to bolster a separate lawsuit filed eight years ago in U.S. District Court in Oregon. In that case, an unidentified plaintiff claims he was sexually abused as a teenager in 1965 or 1966 by the Rev. Andrew Ronan at St. Albert’s Church in Portland, Ore. According to court documents, Ronan was accused of abusing boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in the Archdiocese of Armagh, Ireland. He was transferred to Chicago, where he admitted abusing three boys at St. Philip’s High School, and after that was sent to Oregon. The church removed Ronan from the priesthood in 1966. He died in 1982. The lawsuit says the Vatican had to approve the international transfer. The Holy See claims it is protected by the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which prohibits U.S. lawsuits against foreign countries. Several lower courts have produced differing rulings on the suit, and the Holy See has appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the question. The high court has not decided whether it will hear the case. Anderson said his legal team will attempt to use documents from the Milwaukee lawsuit to show the Vatican was heavily involved in decisions about how to deal with problem priests. Legal scholars have long been skeptical of Anderson’s chances of penetrating the Vatican’s foreign sovereignty. He said it may be difficult to persuade judges to consider documents from another lawsuit, but added that he feels “closer than we’ve ever been before.” “If there’s anyone to press this case, it’s Jeff,” said David Clohessy, national director for Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a longtime ally of Anderson. “Jeff doesn’t get sole credit, and he wouldn’t claim it, but he was among the very first to see the magnitude of this cover-up and is still among the most dedicated to its undoing.” Jeffrey Lena, the Berkeley, Calif.-based attorney for the Holy See in the Oregon case, declined to comment for this story. Andrew Eisenzimmer, a lawyer for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, has sparred frequently with Anderson and declined to be interviewed. In earlier interviews with the AP, he described Anderson as “prone to exaggeration” but also said he’s been undeniably successful. Anderson has always had a flair for the public relations aspect of his work, and a visit to his office the day after the Milwaukee story broke found him fielding interview requests from numerous media outlets as lawyers and researchers combed through documents on the large, dark wood table in his office. Anderson was raised Lutheran and his first wedding was in the Catholic Church, though he said his spiritual journey no longer involves church attendance. His office, however, is full of religiously symbolic art and sculpture, as well as items salvaged from churches – including a kneeler and confessional booths. Anderson downplays the significance of the Christian objects, pointing out he also displays Buddhist and Native American religious relics. “I like religious iconography,” he said.

Read further...

Televised Press Conference by Jeff Anderson:

Is Everyone at the New York Times a Moron? Celebrating the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter.

Hmm, perhaps, but you probably become one if you subscribe to the New York Times. We're going to celebrate today's feast of the Chair of St. Peter, and also the teaching authority of the Church and the Magisterium, by ridiculing the Pinchy Sulzberger's artless, unabashedly pro-depravity rag, the New York Times. We also know that the New York Times has an air of infallibility, but how often have they got it wrong, and for good money too? People keep lining up! Extra! Extra! Reading all about it! Step right this way folks! Get your liberalism here, it grows you new stem cells and frees you from the guilt of doing bad to your neighbor! Go away son, you bother me.

When Pope Benedict XVI approved a decree last month that nudged nearer to sainthood his controversial wartime predecessor, Pius XII, he sparked another round of the sort of Jewish-Catholic disputations that have marked his papacy, and even cast doubt on whether his trip to Rome’s main synagogue, set for Sunday, would go on.

This whole bruhaha has all of the earmarkings of a "spontaneous" demonstration in the Soviet Union to celebrate Misha's Birthday in 1979 as part of the Olympic Games being held at Moscow during their ill-fated Afghanistan Invasion.. For those of you who don't know, Misha was the big bear maskot that was part of an attempt to improve the Soviet Union's image in the face of its anti-Jewish pogroms, gulags and invasion of sovereign nations.

Here's what the Catholic Encyclopedia says about the Holy Chair, tracing it back closer to Apostolic times than might be comfortable for most protestant apologists, atheists and other non-believers:

From the earliest times the Church at Rome celebrated on 18 January the memory of the day when the Apostle held his first service with the faithful of the Eternal City. According to Duchesne and de Rossi, the "Martyrologium Hieronymianum" (Weissenburg manuscript) reads as follows: "XV KL. FEBO. Dedicatio cathedræ sci petri apostoli qua primo Rome petrus apostolus sedit" (fifteenth day before the calends of February, the dedication of the Chair of St. Peter the Apostle in which Peter the Apostle first sat at Rome). The Epternach manuscript (Codex Epternacensis) of the same work, says briefly: "cath. petri in roma" (the Chair of Peter in Rome).

New York Times Refuses Archbishop Dolan's Editorial Reply

It's alright for Jews to trash the Catholic Church, vandalize Catholic holy sites like they did in the Russian Revolution or in the Spanish Civil War, or more recently when Larry David urinated on a kitchy painting of Jesus Christ, unbelievably hung in someone's bathroom.

It's ok to run newstories by the minute and comment on clerical Catholic pederasts, who are, after all, a relatively small number of allegedly Catholic homosexuals who hypocritically draw a paycheck from an institution most of them don't really believe in anyway, but no one, at least not where there's all the news that's fit to print, does anyone seem to care if pederasty is rampant in Orthodox Jewish communities in New York.

At least leftist editor, Arthur "Pinchy" Sulzberger of the New York Times refused to post his Lordship's article, we've decided to post it here for the few who might find it illuminating:


October 29, 2009

The following article was submitted in a slightly shorter form to the New York Times as an op-ed article. The Times declined to publish it. I thought you might be interested in reading it.

FOUL BALL!

By Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan
Archbishop of New York

October is the month we relish the highpoint of our national pastime, especially when one of our own New York teams is in the World Series!

Sadly, America has another national pastime, this one not pleasant at all: anti-catholicism.

It is not hyperbole to call prejudice against the Catholic Church a national pastime. Scholars such as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. referred to it as “the deepest bias in the history of the American people,” while John Higham described it as “the most luxuriant, tenacious tradition of paranoiac agitation in American history.” “The anti-semitism of the left,” is how Paul Viereck reads it, and Professor Philip Jenkins sub-titles his book on the topic “the last acceptable prejudice.”

If you want recent evidence of this unfairness against the Catholic Church, look no further than a few of these following examples of occurrences over the last couple weeks:

On October 14, in the pages of the New York Times, reporter Paul Vitello exposed the sad extent of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish community. According to the article, there were forty cases of such abuse in this tiny community last year alone. Yet the Times did not demand what it has called for incessantly when addressing the same kind of abuse by a tiny minority of priests: release of names of abusers, rollback of statute of limitations, external investigations, release of all records, and total transparency. Instead, an attorney is quoted urging law enforcement officials to recognize “religious sensitivities,” and no criticism was offered of the DA’s office for allowing Orthodox rabbis to settle these cases “internally.” Given the Catholic Church’s own recent horrible experience, I am hardly in any position to criticize our Orthodox Jewish neighbors, and have no wish to do so . . . but I can criticize this kind of “selective outrage.”

Of course, this selective outrage probably should not surprise us at all, as we have seen many other examples of the phenomenon in recent years when it comes to the issue of sexual abuse. To cite but two: In 2004, Professor Carol Shakeshaft documented the wide-spread problem of sexual abuse of minors in our nation’s public schools (the study can be found here). In 2007, the Associated Press issued a series of investigative reports that also showed the numerous examples of sexual abuse by educators against public school students. Both the Shakeshaft study and the AP reports were essentially ignored, as papers such as the New York Times only seem to have priests in their crosshairs.

On October 16, Laurie Goodstein of the Times offered a front page, above-the-fold story on the sad episode of a Franciscan priest who had fathered a child. Even taking into account that the relationship with the mother was consensual and between two adults, and that the Franciscans have attempted to deal justly with the errant priest’s responsibilities to his son, this action is still sinful, scandalous, and indefensible. However, one still has to wonder why a quarter-century old story of a sin by a priest is now suddenly more pressing and newsworthy than the war in Afghanistan, health care, and starvation–genocide in Sudan. No other cleric from religions other than Catholic ever seems to merit such attention.

Five days later, October 21, the Times gave its major headline to the decision by the Vatican to welcome Anglicans who had requested union with Rome. Fair enough. Unfair, though, was the article’s observation that the Holy See lured and bid for the Anglicans. Of course, the reality is simply that for years thousands of Anglicans have been asking Rome to be accepted into the Catholic Church with a special sensitivity for their own tradition. As Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Vatican’s chief ecumenist, observed, “We are not fishing in the Anglican pond.” Not enough for the Times; for them, this was another case of the conniving Vatican luring and bidding unsuspecting, good people, greedily capitalizing on the current internal tensions in Anglicanism.

Finally, the most combustible example of all came Sunday with an intemperate and scurrilous piece by Maureen Dowd on the opinion pages of the Times. In a diatribe that rightly never would have passed muster with the editors had it so criticized an Islamic, Jewish, or African-American religious issue, she digs deep into the nativist handbook to use every anti-Catholic caricature possible, from the Inquisition to the Holocaust, condoms, obsession with sex, pedophile priests, and oppression of women, all the while slashing Pope Benedict XVI for his shoes, his forced conscription -- along with every other German teenage boy -- into the German army, his outreach to former Catholics, and his recent welcome to Anglicans.

True enough, the matter that triggered her spasm -- the current visitation of women religious by Vatican representatives -- is well-worth discussing, and hardly exempt from legitimate questioning. But her prejudice, while maybe appropriate for the Know-Nothing newspaper of the 1850’s, the Menace, has no place in a major publication today.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-catholicism is confined to the pages New York Times. Unfortunately, abundant examples can be found in many different venues. I will not even begin to try and list the many cases of anti-catholicism in the so-called entertainment media, as they are so prevalent they sometimes seem almost routine and obligatory. Elsewhere, last week, Representative Patrick Kennedy made some incredibly inaccurate and uncalled-for remarks concerning the Catholic bishops, as mentioned in this blog on Monday. Also, the New York State Legislature has levied a special payroll tax to help the Metropolitan Transportation Authority fund its deficit. This legislation calls for the public schools to be reimbursed the cost of the tax; Catholic schools, and other private schools, will not receive the reimbursement, costing each of the schools thousands – in some cases tens of thousands – of dollars, money that the parents and schools can hardly afford. (Nor can the archdiocese, which already underwrites the schools by $30 million annually.) Is it not an issue of basic fairness for ALL school-children and their parents to be treated equally?

The Catholic Church is not above criticism. We Catholics do a fair amount of it ourselves. We welcome and expect it. All we ask is that such critique be fair, rational, and accurate, what we would expect for anybody. The suspicion and bias against the Church is a national pastime that should be “rained out” for good.

I guess my own background in American history should caution me not to hold my breath.

Then again, yesterday was the Feast of Saint Jude, the patron saint of impossible causes.

Archbishop's Blog.