John Jay College – American Bishops Whitewashed Report on Child Abuse

The American Catholic bishops pulled a Bill Donahue of Catholic League fame by moving the goal line and redefining pedophilia as only having to do with children under 10 in this hack academic report out of John Jay College of Whatever Persuasion the winds blows in NYC.

If you control the definitions in any argument, you win the argument. The argument I think here is about common human decency as measured against catholic CEO mismanagement on this whole sex abuse scandal that does not want to go away. The truth could set them free? I don’t think so.

Children aged 10 and over must have wanted to be abused – were consentual ? – in this “blame Woodstock” “blame modernity” whitewash financed by the same American bishops who failed their flocks in this abomination these past decades that has caused so much desolation in the Christian church.


US Catholic Church study

…Researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice said most of the abusive priests were ordained in the 1940s and 50s and were not properly trained to confront the social upheavals of the 1960s. 

David O'Brien, a historian of American Catholicism at the University of Dayton, said the report, Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010, was dangerous because it seemed to exonerate bishops.


"This recalls an old tabloid banner headline from an early pre-Boston stage of this crisis: 'Bishops Blame Society'," said O'Brien, referring to the sexual abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston in 2002…


…Less than 5% of the abusive priests could be defined as paedophiles because the majority of victims were aged between 11 and 14.


"There's no indication in our data that priests are any more likely to abuse children than anyone else in society," said lead researcher Karen Terry.


But the finding was criticised by victims because the American Psychiatric Association defines paedophilia as an attraction to children aged 13 or younger….


…The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests dismissed the report as "garbage in, garbage out" because the bishops providing much of the funding for the report.

I am tired of ranting about these failed RC executives who do not even match their original job description. What good are they? Not worth a pile of …. IMHO.


1 Timothy 3:1-5 (KJV)


1 This is a true saying, if a man desire the office of a bishop, he desireth a good work.


2 A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;


3 Not given to wine, no striker, not greedy of filthy lucre; but patient, not a brawler, not covetous;


4 One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity;


5 (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)





Serial Predators vs. Pride of the Pope

I know that you may think I am harping on the Vatican Sex Abuse Scandal too much. I have come to put some things in perspective. I started down this road with articles being sent to me by a person who is a part time lay minister in prisons.

That person, though he never said it directly, probably would realize or hear that a lot of people in prison were abused as children – physically, mentally, sexually. That they were not all abused by the clergy but in civil lay institutions, family care, foster care. That the end result of abuse is in many cases a wasted life of God’s creation on this earth. That to minister to those with the message of hope and the words of hope in Jesus’ teachings is the little bit one can do and work with in ministering to those in prison. Jesus rocks.

All our lives are full of regrets and dead ends. But most of us have had a better break in life because we were not directly abused in our growing up to adulthood. Enough said.

Here is a comment from a victim, "Anne" (she has a name Joe), of the California “serial predator” Stephen Miller Kiesle of California. The victim is a woman – was a girl when abused. I suppose Bill Donohue at the Catholic League might question if she was raped by pulling out his handy Holy Guide to Rape with its point system and measurements of penetration to decide what really, really is rape.

Perhaps that little girl only got slapped around and fondled a few times which would not be a Catholic rape etc. (sorry for my bitterness regarding the inhumanity of the Catholic League and its campaign to erase this clergy sex abuse scandal in the RCC). Right now Bill Donahue’s Neanderthal logic and voice seems to be the only voice of the RCC in America.




It is too bad that the MSM has been gender neutral about the victims of these priests in the RCC. It took a loud mouth comedian like Roseanne Barr to point out the true nature and numbers of both boys and girls victimized in cooperation with the hack bureaucrat hierarchy of the church.

Which leads me to comment on how many American Catholic organizations are dumbfounded by the sheer lack of depth in the Vatican in addressing the church’s fucked up way of hiding crimes against humanity (children).

Lack of Vatican communications strategy on scandal baffles pope's U.S. defenders

Most American organizations facing such a barrage of negative news would long ago have pulled together a crisis management team and made top officials available for interviews to explain their point of view. But the Vatican said such an approach is too commercial for the Church to adopt. "We are not a multinational enterprise, this is clear," the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said in a telephone interview. "The normal situation of the Church and the Vatican is to help the people to understand the teachings of the Church and the documents of the pope and not to sell particular products."

Joe the Pope – Fire that asshole Rev. Federico Lombardi. Get your head out of your own ass and admit you made a mistake and start over. Fire dozens of crony bishops who facilitated these crimes to persist and fester.

If not – Joe the Pope – this whole thing reeks of Nixon and Watergate. It was not that Nixon did a great criminal thing, it was minor. It was the coverup that was major and brought down the most powerful political figure on the planet. Nixon’s sin was Pride.

Your sin too is Pride. I do not wish to see this scandal go on and on like Watergate. But if your pride is more important than the good of the People of God – the Church – then I hope there is air conditioning in hell and perhaps your roommate will be Dick Nixon.

You can both spend eternity lying to each other about how great you were in life and how what a rotten deal they dumped on you. Have a nice life.

Happy Human Light Holiday - 2009

The so-called War on Christmas did not have much energy this year. Everybody is recycling lights and decorations, those lucky enough to still have their own home. The economy and the massive PR efforts on politics in Health Care legislation has exhausted any patience or tolerance for additional nonsense about the right way to celebrate Christmas – the right talk and the right walk etc. this year.

Indeed Senator Coburn’s recent Prayer on the United States Senate floor to pray for God to strike down Senator Byrd, 92, in a wheelchair, to not make it for a rare One A.M. Senate vote on Healthcare says it all to me about the mean spirited Grinch like love of GOP "Christ-Inane-ity".

The War on Christianity is a self inflicted wound like flagellation. The more you beat yourself, the holier you and your cause becomes? Yeah right.

The War on Christmas is largely I think a time killer on entertainment news which in the Bush years would not dare investigate or report misconduct in government.

Make an artificial enemy out there and blame them for America not being as white or as Christian as it used to be.

Ran into an interesting article about how many foreign born or non-Christians deal with “the December Dilemma” because they do not celebrate their cultural or religious holidays in December.

For many, December's a dilemma

"We definitely had a little bit of anxiety in childhood," Tarin said. But that changed as he grew up and refined his American Muslim persona amid the American atmosphere of diversity and tolerance.

Now, where he and his family live in northern Virginia, "we don't celebrate Christmas. We celebrate our holidays" -- pointing, for example, to Eid al-Fitr after Ramadan and Eid al-Adha after the hajj pilgrimage. But he welcomes the goodwill of the season -- the gift-exchanges with non-Muslim neighbors and the requests from schoolteachers to talk about Muslim holidays.

And

Interfaith couples celebrate their diversity during the Christmas season. Jeff Silver, a certified public accountant who is Jewish, and Shweta Gupta, a dentist who is Hindu, are planning their marriage next year. They will have an interfaith household and said they hope to raise children to understand both of their traditions. At their home in Atlanta, they've set up a holiday tree decorated with Hindu and Jewish ornaments.

And

Non-religious Americans embrace a December "secular holiday" called HumanLight.

Patrick Colucci, vice chair of the HumanLight Committee and member of the New Jersey Humanist Network, said the holiday can uplift "atheist, humanist and nonreligious" people who feel left out and isolated during Christmas.

Which brings me to the Human Light holiday celebrated today December 23. Never heard of it before today. It is a man made holiday by Humanists to make – I won’t say non-believers but perhaps non-conformists – have a day of celebration and gathering in the midst of all the other pagan year end celebrating.

HumanLight

The energy of the diversity of America is sometimes a surprise and delightful.

Happy Human Light Holiday to you all !

(– and that includes Bill O’Reilly and Bill Donahue too. XOXO)

By the way … GOD is not spelled G-O-P

This is perhaps a bit of a rambling piece of writing but all parts I think are related. It is perhaps a news dump of sorts.

Have not published anything these past few days. Looking for something to catch my eye and gut.

I look in the Brit papers first. Because a lot of what you might see featured on a worldwide news highlight section on the Internet is there first. These lead stories appear in America with a follow up time of 12 hours to forty eight hours later in the USA.

There was a piece in the religion section of the Guardian about how the Movie the Golden Compass was not likely to follow through on two promised sequels. The actor Sam Elliott was blaming the boycott by the Catholic League in 2007/2008 that forced domestic profits down but not worldwide. I did a little research and found out that another piece, on the Golden Compass was in the Guardian under Cinema/Arts. Not the same article. The skinny on this whole thing was that this was some sort of PR stunt to stir up interest and capital to get the movie back online with its original schedule.

The Golden Compass

The thing that I did not like was that the truth was not being told in selling the product. The blame on the Catholic League was supposed to stir up resentment against the ethnic minority that supposedly controls Hollywood ( you know the ethnic minority that MG hates ) and were now afraid and listening to the church’s PR mouthpiece.

Further research found that fantasy or sci-fi always does much worse in the States than the Agnostic audience worldwide. Golden Compass made something like $70 million domestically on a 12 week run and over three hundred million worldwide. With an original budget of $180 million that leaves a theoretical profit of $200 million. If you cannot operate on that kind of profit margin, you better get out of the business.

Getting back to the Catholic League boycott about how the movie promoted atheism to the young. I saw the movie on cable and there was none of what the CL said was there. The books, the trilogy by Philip Pullman, is largely not so much an anti-religion theme but more one of the question of the existence of God – legitimate question to ask. The real fear, I think, of the catholic church was that this movie, a watered down version of the books would inpsire the young and everyone to read these books. A symbolic PR and or preventative, aborted "book burning" so to speak. Jeebus money well spent.

The movie is about a secular worldwide control of the people by the Magisterium but the movie is not anti-catholic. There is this PR hack named Bill Donohue, a down on his knees altar boy mouthpiece for the Catholic Church who led the so-called boycott against the Golden Compass.

Bill Donahue is the whole Catholic League.

Considering Donohue’s annual budget, he could not effect a boycott in this day and age – Impossible – nobody in the choir or the pews to preach to anymore. He was helped out by the Mushmouth of Bill O’Reilly over at Fox News that did trash this movie and urge the boycott. Facts however do not follow through on that spin.

With a $25 million opening weekend in 2007, the movie fizzled. The boycott did not work. Word of mouth would have generated more income than expected but the product had been mislabeled. The movie was billed as the next “Lord of the Rings” which it was not. Domestic sales were weak after that and the bully boys take credit for something they did not do.

Donahue and the Catholic League are no innocents. They got picked on in this present situation because it is convenient to generate PR energy, not news, attacking this PR firm. Blowback - payback time for the alleged boycott. If the truth be told I have to agree with the raunchy comedienne Kathy Griffin that the Catholic League is just one man and one computer – and a lot of hot air and bullshit. Kathy knows a lot about bullshit. She makes a damned good living off of it like Donahue. I do admire her moxie.

Moving along, I was waiting on a story yesterday for a Judge in Oklahoma to rule on the ongoing restraining order on the “Scarlet Letter” law in which ten pages of questionnaire stats on every abortion performed in that state would go online for the all world to see.

Waiting for the judge to get back from his three hour lunch, I did some research and realized that a similar recent anti-female, pro-lief Oklahoma law required a sonogram be performed on each perspective women wanting an abortion. That law got vetoed by the Dem Governor Brad Henry only to have the veto overridden in the legislature. The law itself was challenged in the courts and was eventually thrown out because it was not well written and did not conform to the rules of legislative bill writing in that state.

The judge postponed yesterday's expected ruling until February.

Along comes state Representative Dan Sullivan and state Senator Todd Lamb who are either stupid, naïve or both and write this Scarlet Letter law which seems to be sloppy and addressing more that one issue that would make it invalid under judicial review.

I don’t know if these two moral munchkins did the sonogram law but here is the skinny. If you want to generate lot of bullshit energy and get paid to support the Pro-Life Lobby, you write a law in a sloppy manner and generate months of hype and anger and whatever before it too bites the dust. The MSM has easy leads and easy stories and everybody is happy. Of course the courts might not throw this case out and then the appeal is onto the Catholic, I mean, U.S. Supreme Court.

Next story. “Now for something completely different” as they say on Monty Python.

I once wrote a line of poetry to describe how “New York is a loud and constant shouting”.

I guess I was impressed with the energy and the hustle and the loudness and the diversity of the New York City I first encountered over thirty odd years ago.

Thirty years ago Manhattan was still an American city and not an international rival today with the likes of a Hong Kong on the other side of the planet.

Things have changed or I have changed. Perhaps the energy too has changed.

I caught an article on the Internet about the decline of the use of the death penalty and I stopped to read it. A few interesting statistics and the like.

Death penalty use declining nationwide

Use of capital punishment by states continues its steady decline, with fewer death sentences handed down in 2009 than any year since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976.

"The annual number of death sentences in the U.S. has dropped for seven straight years," said Richard Dieter, the report's author and DPIC's executive director. "In the last two years, three states have abolished capital punishment and a growing number of states are asking whether it's worth keeping. This entire decade has been marked by a declining use of the death penalty."

DPIC is a nonpolitical group that provides facts and analysis, while opposing capital punishment as impractical and ineffective.

There were 106 death sentences issued in 2009, compared with a high of 328 in 1994. Death sentences have dropped 63 percent since 2000, when there were 235 issued.

Maybe there are more lenient judges or more lenient juries. Maybe the bureaucracy of the state killing someone is bigger and more cumbersome, costlier than in the past. Maybe there are more appeals etc. Perhaps fewer people are dying violent deaths. The article doesn’t go into detail and perhaps ends on a positive that:

…New Mexico in March became the 15th state to abolish capital punishment, although two inmates still remain on death row there.

New Hampshire's House of Representatives voted to abolish lethal injection, which would currently affect only one inmate on the state's death row. The measure is pending in the state Senate, but the governor has vowed to veto any bill. An execution has not been conducted there in 70 years, when hanging was the preferred method.

Thirty-five states still have the death penalty.

Perhaps we are having less stomach for it. Are we becoming vegetarian so to speak?

Perhaps like my aging perception of New York City, I am changing and not the stats? I do not think so.

There was a time when “law and order” was the stock in trade backbone of the Republican party and conservative Dems. Have we changed or have our tastes moved on?

Perhaps it is a cyclical thing with New York, the death penalty and law and order.

Is this a tribal thing, a beating of the drums? Or does every generation have to latch onto and invent some new catch phrase? In any event, the phrase “law and order” seems to have worn out. “Family Values” from a party of adulterers and closeted gays is definitely worn out. Definitely cliché. Passé.

When there is no substance beyond the phrase, the marketing technique falters, the product fails. The product is discontinued.

So too we seemed to have in the last 40 years (a biblical kind of cycle) worn out the name of God, and of Jesus, putting those names on products such as birth control or adopting a political party. Why no Jesus stadiums? Next logical step after mega-churches. It’s the economy stupid.

Jesus is a product, a commodity and no longer a spiritual energy to most rubes. It has come that far in spent physical and economic $ energy by fervent religionists who mistake humanity for a carton of milk or some other product to sell and or sell to. It reminds me of the book “The Selling of the President” by Joe McGinnis in 1968. Subject of that book … Roger Ailes is still around sad to say…running Fox News. He crowned Richard Nixon king with mere PR and bullshit. His cycle and his Madison Avenue lies, illusions I hope are near an end. I dare say his swan song will be to crown somebody else in the GOP in 2012 – this time maybe a queen. And I am not talking Mitt Romney ( though I think he might look good in a dress ).

By the way … GOD is not spelled G-O-P.

This is not a political endorsement for the anemic Dem party. I hear mayor Bloomberg to going to start, I should say buy a third party in 2012. History has a way of surprising people to quote something from comrade Lenin. We will see. We are living history at this very moment, eye opening moment.

“Family Values” is the stock in trade for the once powerful GOP. Now they seem to be selling their positions short and living from one lobbyists’ paycheck to the next. Hoping to buy back cloth coated values with their current profits somewhere down the road and somebody, everybody loses in the process.

This current debate about health care seems to be going nowhere. There is little substance of change behind the rhetoric and egos of, useless to the American public, doddering old men in the senate.

Congress and the airwaves seem to me be a “loud and constant shouting” too – not very poetic but very real.

Back to the subject at hand…Can you imagine that we do not as a society have the energy anymore to kill criminals, to get revenge. I know in general I do not believe in the death penalty but I leave room for exceptions to my general rule in the case of heinous crimes which defy logic or my strength to forgive. I did not cheer at the recent execution of the DC beltway sniper. Nor did I object. Something poetic and just and right in my gut about it.

Forgiveness is supposed to be a Christian virtue and a Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu virtue to name a few as well.

Are we as a culture evolving out of our stone age angers, hatreds, dysfunctions? Hard to tell from just one news article.

I believe there is hope and redemption and the chance to evolve to a better place and here on this earth as well – and for us all.

Drunk on the Blood of Saints and children too

'Endemic' rape and abuse of Irish children in Catholic care, inquiry finds.

The Ryan Report, out of Ireland, details decades of neglect and abuse of children by Catholic clergy and religious in Catholic institutions such as orphanages, workhouses or reformatories – whatever you want to call them. The bottom line is that the Irish Government dumped children in these places and trusted the Church to run these institutions as a substitute for a secular run system. This is what you get in a one religion state where Catholic Sharia Law and morals match what is on the books in the civil government. Why bother to waste taxpayer money on the children of the poor?

The Irish Government gave into demands for an inquiry and the then Prime Minister ordered this inquiry that has taken nine years to assemble. There are no names of the victims or of the alleged victimizers. No doubt Ireland recognized its culpability, co-conspiracy, in these many acts and crimes against humanity when it put a money cap limit of something like $175 million on the Church’s financial liability. The rest of the bill – the bailout so to speak – has now been dumped on the Irish taxpayer and the bill will likely be in the one to one and one half billion dollar range. No doubt in better economic times that sounded reasonable but the burden in reparations to victims is long overdue.

The standard cookie-cutter numbnut R.C. Archbishop of England and Wales Vincent Nichols (photo above), soon to be installed at Westminster, had words of praise for the courage of these disgraced religious orders to look upon their sins and brave on in their current duties.

Catholic Archbishop Explains Remarks on ‘Courage’ of Abusers

…It’s very distressing and very disturbing. And my heart goes out today, first of all to those people who will find that their stories are now told in public…. Secondly, I think of those in religious orders and some of the clergy in Dublin who have to face these facts from their past, which instinctively and quite naturally they’d rather not look at. That takes courage. And also we shouldn’t forget that this account today will also overshadow all of the good that they also did…

It is a tough road to take, to face up to our own weaknesses. That is certainly true of anyone who’s deceived themselves that all they’ve been doing is taking a bit of comfort from children….

“Taking a bit of comfort from the children…”(?)- sounds like a John Cleese line from Monty Python. And like a standard line from that comedy let me repeat the punch line “taking a bit of comfort from the children”(?) … “please sir, I want some more”… Dickens is not dead in Ireland at least or in living memory of these horrific crimes against the innocence of children.

Archbishop Nichols – can we all take a little comfort from you – PLEASE ?!

Words of comfort too from the Catholic Blogosphere and Bill Donahue, President of the Catholic League:
Hysteria over Irish Clergy Abuse

"Reuters is reporting that “Irish Priests Beat, Raped Children,” yet the report does not justify this wild and irresponsible claim. Four types of abuse are noted: physical, sexual, neglect and emotional.

"Physical abuse includes “being kicked”; neglect includes “inadequate heating”; and emotional abuse includes “lack of attachment and affection.” Not nice, to be sure, but hardly draconian, especially given the time line: fully 82 percent of the incidents took place before 1970…

There is nothing quite as therapeutic like some tough love for the little bastards to let them know their place in the scheme of things. Right Bill?

For a balanced more calm and more honest evaluation and perspective of this I recommend the ten minute video contained within below of an interview with Colm O’Gorman on British TV:
Response to Irish Abuse Report

According to one of the thousands of victims of abuse during this period, Colm O’Gorman, who was raped by a priest as a teenager, the abuses detailed in the 2,600-page report are “horribly, horribly shocking.”

Mr. O’Gorman, who now runs the Irish branch of Amnesty International, has recently written a memoir, “Beyond Belief.” On Wednesday he discussed the report and his own experience of abuse, during this interview with Jon Snow of Channel 4 News in London.

And if you think that the U.S. has cleaned up its priest abuse portfolio – don’t hold your breath – the reporter’s notes (a bit dated but still valid) and comments by Judge Anne Burke, who headed up a Catholic Bishops’ review of clergy abuse, is reflective of the on going cover up and Public Relations front of the American Church Hierarchy:
Judge Burke Tells All ( or at least some )

As an example of how the bishops twisted the truth to evade accountability, she recalls the story of an unnamed bishop who allegedly told her he'd cleaned out the stables in his diocese, but who later made front-page news by having a convicted sex-abuse priest living with him in his rectory. When Burke accused the bishop of lying to her, he said he didn't lie, because the priest had not been convicted. Burke reminded the bishop that the priest in question had pled guilty to the crime. The bishop insisted, bizarrely, to the judge that that isn't the same thing as being convicted.

She calls on the USCCB (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) to be disbanded. “All it is is a trade association. And not a very good one at that.”

Burke and her NRB colleague Bob Bennett discreetly flew to Rome to meet with then-Cardinal Ratzinger (now, of course, Pope Benedict), to make sure he understood what the situation was in the American church.

I believe Ratzinger, I mean Joe the Pope, still has that report on his desk.

I do not mean to criticize here but I recognize that over half the Christian faith under control of the Hierarchy in Rome and its trickle down morality sound bites is still and has been since the Reformation – “Drunk on the blood of the Saints” and on the blood of children as well.

The sanctity of life not only begins at conception but should continue after it comes out of the womb. Comes out of the womb into a very cruel world where children worldwide and in the United States as well are nothing more than a commodity to be exploited if the society as a whole does not have a conceptualization of a holistic – total life – vision of the sanctity of life.