In his new novel, “The Priestly Sins”, the Rev. Andrew Greeley tells the fictional story of Father Andrew Hoffman who witnesses a fellow priest brutally raping a child and is sent away to a mental institution for reporting the crime to his superiors.
Greeley, a prolific author and controversial priest-sociologist, pins the blame for the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church on the shoulders of the bishops in the United States. “If the church had been responsive 20 years ago, none of this would have happened,” Greeley said in speaking about the crisis that has rocked the church in the United States since 2002. Greeley points out that the bishops have established a zero tolerance for priest abusers but there’s no oversight or discipline for bishops who hide abusive clergy or do nothing to stop the abuse from occurring.

I was invited onto the Pat Campbell show this morning in Orlando to discuss the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. We spent about 30 minutes talking about why the Church was slow to respond to the crisis as well as the ongoing cases I’m handling throughout the state of Florida and across the country. I also talked about how abusive priests were secretly transferred from parish to parish and in many instances, transferred from Diocese to Diocese. The most recent case in the Diocese of Orlando concerns the Rev. Vernon Uhran. The Diocese settled three cases for approximately $1.5 million against Uhran. Uhran moved around the Diocese of Orlando as well as stints in the Dominican Republic where he was working with youth and in Alaska. He was finally removed from active ministry in 1992 by then Bishop Dorsey.

Indicted on two rape charges by a grand jury last fall, Bishop Thomas Dupre of the Catholic Diocese of Springfield in Massachusetts escaped criminal prosecution because the District Attorney decided that too much time had elapsed since the incidents of abuse occurred. Dupre resigned from his post and went into seclusion at St. Luke’s Institute, a treatment center in Maryland. Since that time, no one has seen or heard from the Bishop. This is in spite of two victims’ advocacy groups asking the Catholic Church for help in determining the Bishop’s whereabouts and removal from the priesthood. A Springfield diocesan spokesman skirted the issue by stating that it’s a matter for the Vatican to resolve. Supposedly, the Vatican is investigating Bishop Dupre but no word on the status of such investigation is forthcoming from the Diocese of Springfield or the Vatican’s representative in the United States, the Papal Nuncio. David Clohessy, Executive Director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests commented, “We want to see these guys defrocked-not for punitive reasons but for preventative reasons. If they can’t call themselves priests, it will make access to kids a little tougher.” Priests and bishops who abuse children and are left unaccountable and unaccounted for can continue to harm children.

Former priest Edward Olszewski is now free on $10,000 bail after being arrested at his Key Largo home last Friday on charges of possessing sexually explicit material in violation of his probation.
Olszewski, originally a priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit, worked in the Archdiocese of Miami as a parish priest for many years. He was pastor of St. Justin Martyr Catholic Church in December 2002 when he was convicted of 4 counts of taking indecent liberties with a minor who was 11 at the time the abuse occurred.
This is an important case because it highlights how these priest sex offenders are not always being tracked. Of course, Olszewski was tracked and that ultimately led to his arrest last week. However, I’m concerned with the thousands of priests who’ve sexually victimized minors but have never been convicted because the criminal statute of limitations has expired. They remain free to continue to victimize and prey on our children. That seems to be the true injustice.

The Archdiocese of Miami announced today that it had settled a sexual abuse case involving the Rev. Jan Malicki and a woman who claimed Malicki abused her while she was a teenager. Through his attorney, Ellis Rubin of Miami, Malicki continues to deny the charges stating he wants his day in court to clear his name.
The settlement reportedly was in the amount of $500,000 and came after the Archdiocese of Miami had settled previous lawsuits involving young boys and various Miami priests.

Recently, the Associated Press reported that the Catholic Church’s payment for sexual abuse claims has reached the $1billion mark. It’s sad to note that the Church hierarchy was warned of such a financial cataclysm back in 1985 when Fr. Thomas Doyle and others warned the US bishops that priests preying on minors was a major problem. Doyle, a Dominican priest, has been vilified for his outspoken and prophetic position on such matters.
As the US Catholic bishops meet in Chicago this week to discuss revisions to their sex abuse policy, it appears that they will vote to weaken it. Some of the proposed changes include: moving to a system by which the Bishops are in charge of their own audits and leaving it up to the individual bishop to determine if past cases of sexual abuse are to be sent to the authorities. Present policy mandates that all abuse allegations are to be sent to the civil authorities for investigation. This seems like a clear bacwards step.
It’s truly a sad commentary when it takes major financial consequences for a large institution to begin to mend its ways. The jury is still out on whether true reform has begun. The US bishops are wavering and equivocating. Real change is difficult and takes courage and integrity. We’ll have to wait and see if these bishops have those qualities of character.

Fifty seniors at Trinity High School in Manchester NH have asked NH Bishop John McCormack not to come to their graduation. McCormack, a top lieutenant of disgraced Cardinal Law of Boston during the 1980’s has been in the forefront of the clergy abuse scandal in Boston and Manchester NH. According to the Boston Herald, a tense meeting between the Bishop and students was held last Friday. During the meeting, the Bishop was asked questions about the abuse scandal and responded by yelling, “Prove it! Show me the evidence!”
In spite of the students’ protests, a spokesman for the Diocese of Manchester said McCormack will celebrate a Mass at the graduation anyway. So much for listening to the voice of the faithful.
During McCormack’s tenure in Boston, he was in charge of supervising and transferring such pedophile priests as John Geoghan and Paul Shanley.

Maciel scandal won’t go away
If Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the religious order the Legionaries of Christ, were a priest in the United States, he would not be permitted in active ministry.
Some may not consider the U.S. norms ideal, but the crisis caused by the sex abuse scandal and the concomitant crisis of authority in the church demand bold and determined measures. Few cases have generated the notoriety and challenge to the church’s integrity and credibility that the Maciel case has. Maciel was warmly praised by the late Pope John Paul II and, by all accounts, was able to raise enormous amounts of money that have gone to establishing a religious empire in a short time.
Clergy sex abuse victims the world over who have heard pious words and statements of resolve from the hierarchy were waiting to see if the church at the highest levels would discontinue the practice of protecting priests at all costs and do a thorough investigation of the charges against Maciel, as well as a thorough accounting of its findings.
So, when the news reports said that the Vatican had apparently dropped the investigation, had not launched a formal canonical procedure in response to allegations, and that it had no plans to do so, many saw the development as a stinging disappointment. The announcement raised far more questions than it answered. The lack of resolution to the case eventually could be far more damaging to the church’s credibility than the jolt of bad news that might issue from a thorough airing of the case against Maciel.
As it turns out, however, the real problem may not be any decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but rather papal palace intrigue involving an old friend of Maciel and the willingness of the Legionaries to mislead the world and allow the misconception to stand until a reporter happened to ask the right question of the right person.
It turns out that the reasonable presumption that everyone was working under — that the statement had been issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the agency with the responsibility for making such judgments — was incorrect. The statement on which the Legionaries had based their release, a release that itself overstates the Italian in translation, actually came from the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, an office run by Italian Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a longtime friend of Maciel and an enthusiastic supporter of the order.
To be fair, the Legionaries didn’t misstate anything. The release reported that the “Holy See” said that “there is no investigation now” and that one was not foreseen in the future. “Holy See” covers a multitude of possibilities.
However, had the Legionaries said in the release that the Vatican’s Secretariat of State had made the statement, anyone familiar with the workings of the Vatican and with who’s responsible for what, would immediately have exercised a great degree of skepticism and started asking more questions.
For the record, it should be noted that the wording of the communication from the Secretariat of State is not quite as categorical as the Legionaries’ May 20 news release implies. The Vatican has not said definitively that there never will be a process, but that one “is not foreseen,” leaving open the possibility of future developments. It may seem a small point, but it adds to the mountain of disinformation that the Legionaries have generated over the years about their founder.
Further, that small point will be cold comfort to Maciel’s alleged victims, who believe their day in court has already been long delayed, and whose hopes were raised by recent meetings with the congregation’s chief investigator, Msgr. Charles Scicluna. Given Maciel’s age, 85, not moving forward now is perhaps tantamount to a decision never to do so at all.
To date, the Vatican has offered no explanation for the decision. It’s not clear whether it’s because Scicluna or his superiors, including Pope Benedict XVI, don’t believe the charges against Maciel; whether they determined that the evidence is compelling but not beyond a reasonable doubt; whether they decided that in view of Maciel’s age, his resignation in January as superior of the order, and his service to the church, that it did not make sense to prosecute; or whether the logic is something else altogether. Leaving this up in the air is simply not satisfactory. It is unfair to many in the Legion because suspicion will linger over their founder, and it is unfair to the larger Catholic community, which once again is left to deduce that protecting the reputation of the clergy and of the institution is more important than getting at the truth.
The Legion itself has been of little help in pursuing the truth. In response to queries, it sends people to its Web site, which contains a tired and wholly inadequate defense of Maciel, even as new charges and evidence piles up. That Maciel once declared his innocence is irrelevant in the face of the accusations and the lack of a process that gives the charges a fair hearing. Citing the reluctance of young seminarians decades ago to come out against a leader who has been described repeatedly by responsible witnesses as a dominant and domineering personality overseeing a culture in which he demanded absolute and unquestioning loyalty to himself is an absurd way of trying to dispel suspicion. Anyone who has had anything to do with abuse victims knows that reasonable people, in far less intimidating circumstances, have been cowed into silence for decades by the awful experience of being sexually abused.
Church authorities have been understandably hesitant to discuss individual cases in public, on the grounds that both the accused and the victims have a right to their good names and to privacy. In this case, however, silence does not serve the interests of any of the parties. In the U.S. vernacular, what is happening in Rome on the Maciel case is a whitewash, a continuation of the cover-up and deception that has so deeply wounded the church here.
If Vatican officials believe that Maciel is innocent, justice demands that they say so, especially given the way these charges have enjoyed wide international circulation. If they believe the evidence is inconclusive, that too should be said, so that at least the parties will know where they stand. If officials have prudential reasons for not moving against Maciel, the accusers have a right to know that this inaction does not presume a judgment about the veracity of their accounts.
Moreover, it’s not just the rights of Maciel and his accusers that are at stake. The broader Catholic public has justifiable concerns about the pattern of official response to the sexual abuse crisis, and a laconic statement that the church does not intend to move against an accused priest, with no explanation offered, will do little to assuage those concerns. On the contrary, it will deepen the cynicism and resentment that is already too pervasive in the Catholic community.
For pastoral reasons, therefore, as well as due process of law, the Vatican needs to offer an explanation.
Pope Benedict XVI’s motto as the archbishop of Munich was cooperators veritatis, “coworkers of the truth.” He has challenged Western culture to recover its confidence in objective truth, over against a lazy relativism. All the more reason, therefore, for the church to practice what its leader preaches — it needs to tell the truth, and the whole truth, about the Maciel case.
National Catholic Reporter, June 3, 2005

By Jim Hannah
Enquirer staff writer
The Enquirer/Andrea Remke
The Catholic Center in Erlanger, which is closing in part because of settlement fees for sexual abuse claims paid by the Covington Diocese.
BURLINGTON – The Covington Diocese announced this afternoon it will pay $120 million to settle the nation’s first class-action lawsuit involving priest sexual abuse.
A settlement fund will be made up of $40 million from investments and real estate. The remaining $80 million will be paid by insurance companies.
No parish property, parish funds or Diocesan Parish Annual Appeal money will be used for the settlement, said diocesan spokesman Tim Fitzgerald.
The diocese has, over the past two years, been settling sexual abuse claims. In addition to today’s settlement, the diocese has paid about $10.5 million to settle 56 sexual-abuse claims in the past 18 months.
The diocese’s share of those earlier settlements was $4 million, while insurance companies picked up the difference.
It is not clear how many people are eligible to collect money from the class-action settlement, which still requires court approval, though the plaintiffs’ attorneys have said there are hundreds of victims.
As part of the settlement, claimants will be grouped into four categories, based on the nature and severity of the abuse. Both sides have agreed that victims will get from $5,000 to $450,000 each.
“From the moment I was made aware of the extent of the abuse of children by priests in this diocese, I made a promise that I would do all I could to reach out to the victims,” Bishop Roger Foys said in a written statement. He was appointed in July 2002.
“After personally meeting with more than 70 victims, I am painfully aware that no amount of money can compensate for the harm these victims suffered as innocent children,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, I pray that this settlement will bring some measure of peace and healing to victims and their loved ones.”
Cincinnati attorney Stan Chesley, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said any person who claims to have been sexually abused by any religious person or employee of the diocese may make a claim no matter when it occurred.
“The additional anxiety and stress that would have occurred to the victims had there been a trial has been eliminated,” Chesley said in a statement. “While this took a long time to accomplish, it could not have occurred without the commitment of both sides to work toward a fair and reasonable resolution.”

Fresh allegations have been raised about a pedophile ring operating within the Anglican church in Australia in the 1980s.
Former Anglican archdeacon Louis Victor Daniels was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in jail last month for molesting 10 youths aged between 11 and 19.
One of his victims, Tasmanian Brett Andrew Skipper, killed himself last year just months before Daniels was arrested.
Brett Skipper’s mother, Zena, says her son was sent from Hobart to Adelaide, where he was abused by then-Anglican youth worker Bob Brandenburg.
“He did on two occasions,” she told the ABC TV’s program.Stateline
“This again was bribery – with promises to go to the grand prix and literally do what they wanted.”
She says she has no doubt the priest’s abuse contributed to her son’s suicide.
“[The abuse] had a great impact on Brett’s life,” she said.
“He had really deep bouts of depression and sometimes he’d lock himself in his flat for three or four days at a time.
“He wouldn’t answer the door, he wouldn’t answer the phone.”
The latest allegations have led to further calls for an investigation into the church’s role in pedophilia during the 1980s.