There is speculation among church insiders that Pope Benedict XVI will name a new archbishop in Philadelphia tomorrow. The new archbishop, whomever he is, will have his hands full dealing with the mess left him by outgoing Cardinal Justin Rigali who earlier this year suspended 21 priests over sexual abuse allegations. The suspensions came after Rigali had told Philadelphia Catholics that the Archdiocese had no priest working in ministry who’d been accused of sexually abusing a minor. Of course, that announcement came on the heels of another Philadelphia grand jury report which detailed the recent history of the Archdiocese’s handling of the priest sex abuse scandal. All this bad news will make it very difficult for the next Archbishop.
The rumors have been swirling for some time now but those who know the Philly situation note that three bishops have the inside track-Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta, and Pennsylvania native Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville. Both Lori and Gregory have had ample experience dealing with the priest abuse scandal and would be logical choices for the post. However, Whispers in the Loggia scribe Rocco Palmo is hinting that he already knows who it is and from what he’s writing, his money is on Kurtz. We’ll all know tomorrow, probably.
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The Latest Irish Abuse Report
The so-called Cloyne Report is the civil Irish government’s fourth report in as many years as it attempts to come to grips with the horrors of Catholic priest abuse in this largely Catholic country. What’s new in this report, new but not surprising, is that Catholic Church officials continue to cover-up for pedophile priests. The report refers to case after case in which priests’ sexual abuse was known and nothing was done about it.
The former bishop of Cloyne who resigned last year responded in the standard fashion, “I now realize. . .” as if it should be some great revelation to him and his fellow bishops that they have a moral and civil duty to protect children.
According to the NY Times, “The Cloyne Report is the Irish government’s fourth in recent years on aspects of the scandal. It shows that abuses were still occurring and being covered up 13 years after the church in Ireland issued child protection guidelines in 1996, and that civil officials were failing to investigate allegations. The report warned that other dioceses might have similar failings.
“That’s the most horrifying aspect of this document,” Frances Fitzgerald, Ireland’s minister for children, told a news conference on Wednesday. “This is not a catalogue of failure from a different era — this is about Ireland now.”
“Most damaging, the report said that the Congregation for the Clergy, an arm of the Vatican that oversees the priesthood, had not recognized the 1996 guidelines. That “effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore the procedures” and “gave comfort and support” to priests who “dissented from the stated Irish church policy,” the report said.
Now, let’s not think for one minute the situation in Ireland is any different than our own in the United States. If you’re tempted to think so, take a look at the disaster in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia or the Diocese of Gallup, just to name two recent examples. The Catholic bishops can not be trusted to police themselves and their priests. It’s time for a federal investigation of the entire enterprise and federal oversight in every diocese. We need something akin to a Superfund for a toxic spill. Nothing short of that will stop the abuse and the cover-up.
FDA Issues Warning About Vaginal Mesh
The Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning to surgeons and prospective female patients about a vaginal mesh that’s been used in surgeries to correct a condition known as pelvic organ prolapse. The directive called on surgeons to consider other options to the mesh until the FDA can convene an advisory committee to explore more thoroughly the problems with the vaginal mesh.
Use of the mesh is widespread with approximately 100,000 women having the mesh surgery each year. According to the FDA, mesh-related symptoms include painful sexual intercourse, infections, urinary problems, overall discomfort, and bleeding, usually from the mesh eroding through the stitched tissue or from skin contracting tightly around it.
According to the Boston Globe, “In 2008, the FDA announced that “rare’’ problems could be associated with transvaginal placement of the mesh, which is used along with surgical stitches to support sagging pelvic organs such as the bladder, uterus, and bowel after they have been lifted back out of the vagina, where they descended.
From 2008 to 2010, the FDA received 1,503 adverse event reports associated with mesh used for pelvic organ prolapse repair, five times as many as the agency received from 2005 to 2007. It also received three reports of deaths that were related to the mesh placement procedure.
Recent studies indicate that about 10 percent of women who have the mesh placed transvaginally experience mesh erosion within 12 months of surgery and that more than half require additional surgeries to remove the mesh. Less commonly, the mesh becomes so intertwined with scar tissue that it cannot be removed.”
DePuy Hip Lawsuits Intensifying
As more DePuy ASR XL lawsuits are filed, both sides are gearing up for a complicated litigation process. Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of DePuy Orthopaedics, has already submitted 200,000 pages of documents regarding the failed DePuy ASR XL hip replacements, according to the Wall St. Journal. In the end, the medical device company is expected to have to submit 18,000,000 pages of documents. Thousands of hip lawsuits have already been filed with most being consolidated in the multidistrict litigation in northern Ohio.
Johnson & Johnson has told the Wall St. Journal that it has already fielded 27,000 calls from DePuy hip sufferers who’ve needed assistance with reimbursements or information about the recalled hip. The company estimates that there are approximately 37,000 DePuy hip patients in the United States and 93, 000 worldwide. Some of these patients have already undergone the expensive, complicated, and painful hip revision surgery in order to have the failed DePuy hip replaced.
3 Doctors Cited for Not Disclosing Pay
Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have punished three psychiatrists for failing to disclose payments they received from companies in their industry. The three doctors, Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer, and Timothy Wilens received $4.2 million from drug companies for psychiatric research performed between 2002 and 2007. The income was never reported to either medical institution or the federal government.
It’s hard to fathom why doctors would continue to hide payments in such conflict of interest cases especially when the federal government has demonstrated a heightened concern over the issue as well as a willingness to investigate such matters.
The three doctors will be prohibited from receiving any payments for such research for one year as well as undergo conflict of interest training. In light of the potential harm such conflicts can generate, the penalty seems to be no more than a light slap on the wrist especially given some of the research they were doing.
According to National Public Radio, “The accusation carried more weight because Biederman is a leading proponent of the off-label use of antipsychotic drugs to treat bipolar illness in children. His work is widely seen as contributing to an explosive growth in such prescriptions, and much of his support came from companies that benefited from his research.
Biederman and the other two psychiatrists have also published extensively on the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.”
Paxil, Prozac Linked to Cardiac Birth Defects
A new Finnish study has linked the use of antidepressants Prozac and Paxil to cardiac birth defects in pregnant women who’ve taken the drugs. The study was published in the medical journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.
According to a media report “Researchers looked at national data from Finland on 635,583 births occurring between 1996 and 2006, and found that 31 out of every 10,000 women who took Paxil during pregnancy gave birth to children with right ventricular outflow tract defects that affect blood flow from the right chambers of the heart to the rest of the body, more than four times the frequency of births among women who did not take Paxil. For those who took Prozac, 105 babies born out of every 10,000 had isolated ventrical septal defects; a hole between the left and right sides of the heart, which was more than double the rate of babies born to women who did not take the drug.”
Surgeons Never Reported Infuse Trial Failures
Surgeons who were paid handsomely to test Medtronic’s Infuse bone graft medical device system never reported failures and complications in their research results, according to a new study published in the Spine Journal.
According to the Wall St. Journal breaking news report, Over the past decade, 15 of those surgeons have collectively received at least $62 million from the medical-device giant for unrelated work, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medtronic documents and of recent disclosures made on the company’s website.
Last week, the Senate Finance Committee began investigating whether Medtronic’s large payments to the surgeons played a role in the fact they didn’t report the complications, after seeing an advance copy of the study. The product, called Infuse Bone Graft, has already been the subject of a series of inquiries by the Senate committee, as well as of an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department into its use beyond its official Food and Drug Administration indication. Infuse represents about $700 million in annual sales for Medtronic.”
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The failed results are serious according to the study-cancer, sterility, infections, bone dissolution and worsened back and leg pain, occurred in 10% to 50% of patients who were administered Infuse or a sister product in 13 clinical trials funded by Medtronic and conducted by the surgeons between 2000 and 2010.
Three Priest Abuse Cases in Venice, Fr. John Corapi Make a Strange Week
The Diocese of Venice in Florida has had a rash (for them) of priest abuse cases in the news recently. First, there was the arrest of Carmelite priest Rev. William Wert for committing a sex offense against a minor. More charges against Wert were filed as we learned that Wert had been in trouble for similar sex abuse issues while stationed in Washington DC. Next, a Polish priest incardinated in the Diocese of Venice was arrested in a Sarasota park for exposing his genitals to an undercover officer as well as grabbing the officer’s genitals. Finally, this past week a former Catholic school teacher filed a civil lawsuit against Bishop Frank Dewane fired him after he blew the whistle on a Venice priest, Fr. Cory Mayer, for asking teenage girls inappropriate sexual questions during confession.
Dewayne denied responsibility in the Wert case since the priest is a religious order priest and not affiliated with the Venice diocese. In the matter concerning Fr. Chojnacki, the Diocese placed the priest on administrative leave but has said little about the matter. In the lawsuit concerning the teacher, the Diocese has yet to respond. Given Bishop Dewayne’s reputation as an authoritarian leader, it’s doubtful we’ll hear much about any of these matters.
In an unrelated matter, this past weekend Fr. Corapi, a popular televangelist priest announced he was quitting the priesthood after allegations surfaced that he had sexually abused a former female employee. Corapi cited the church’s own internal procedures for his resignation. Corapi’s popularity and his abrupt resignation will no doubt give rise to those who believe Catholic priests are being singled out and railroaded by those who make sexual allegations against them. These certainly aren’t new claims. We hear them regularly from the likes of William Donohue of the Catholic League. Of course, these same folks never mention the thousands of children who’ve been sexually abused and traumatized by priests and religious figures. The trauma and the damage is real but you’d never know it if all you heard was their proclamations.
FDA Approves a New DePuy Hip Replacement
After DePuy Orthopaedics has spent the last year fighting complaints about its metal-on-metal hips the DePuy ASR XL and the Pinnacle, the FDA has recently approved a new DePuy hip device. This new hip replacement is different from the failed hip devices in that it is the first of its kind-a ceramic on metal device that the company hopes will fare better than the ASR XL and the Pinnacle.
Due to all the problems with metal-on-metal hips, the FDA has insisted that this new hip will undergo a post-market study to monitor failure rates as well as patient complaints. The post-market study was a condition for the approval of the new DePuy hip.
The new DePuy hip will consist of a ceramic ball that fits into a metal socket.
Sex Abuse Changes Not Forthcoming from Bishops
The United States Catholic bishops have concluded their summer session in Bellevue Washington by upholding their own Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, a document that’s supposed to protect minors from priests who sexually abuse them. While some minor revisions were approved, the Charter remains essentially the same as it did prior to the bishops’ meeting.
This has left most child abuse advocates angry and even more disillusioned with the bishops-if that’s possible. It doesn’t help when the bishop in charge of the task announces, “The charter has served the church well.” In making that statement, Bishop Blaise Cupich seems to ignore what happened with the grand jury in Philadelphia, the pornography and sex abuse scandal involving the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, and their own audit that, according to Whispers in the Loggia’s own Rocco Palmo, “found over a quarter of the nation’s 197 dioceses, their identities undisclosed, were sent warnings after the USCCB’s designated auditors found the 55 local churches lacking in their enforcement of one or another aspect of the Dallas protocols. (Despite the “management letters,” the auditors found every diocese surveyed — Philadelphia, Kansas City and Gallup included — in compliance with the Charter for 2010.)
In other words, the Charter clearly hasn’t “served the Church well.” In the last few months there have been three glaring instances in which the Charter or its implementation failed miserably. This isn’t my assessment, Rocco Palmo, an influential blogger and faithful Catholic writing from Philadelphia came to the same conclusions.
Essentially, the Charter fails not because of its content. It fails because those charged with implementing it may pick and choose how it is implemented. Some bishops, notably Fabian Bruskewitz of Nebraska, has chosen to flaunt the document and nothing can or will be done.
The bishops of the United States failed children, their flock, and themselves in not having the moral courage to stand up and admit their efforts have failed. Of course, such courage would have compelled them to turn over their efforts to an independent civil authority to enforce child protection laws. Some bishops complained that they don’t have the authority to force their fellow bishops to do the right thing. They are right. But, they are bishops. They are their community’s moral leaders. They should have made the difficult decision to change that. Then and only then could they have left the Bellevue Hilton with their heads held high and not with their miters between their legs.