Jeffrey Miller

Via Phil Lawler :

Sunday brought the staggering news that in the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, a priest who had been convicted of groping a young man has now been appointed as co-director for the archdiocesan office of clergy formation. What could Archbishop John Myers possibly have been thinking? How could he be so utterly insensitive?

To be sure, the conviction of Father Michael Fugee was overturned on appeal. But rather than risk another trial he made a plea agreement with prosecutors and agreed to enter a counseling program for sex offenders. So a sex offender is heading an archdiocesan office. And not just any office, but an office designed to guide other priests in their spiritual formation. Is this not exactly the sort of scandal that the Dallas Charter was supposed to prevent?

An archdiocesan spokesman said that Archbishop Myers has full confidence in Father Fugee, even while emphasizing that the priest is now in a position where he does not have access to children. Does that really bespeak full confidence?

Under the Dallas Charter—the policies the American bishops approved at their June 2002 meeting in Dallas, in a panicked response to public outcry about the burgeoning scandal—a priest who is credibly accused of the sexual abuse of children should be removed from public ministry. Yet here was Father Fugee, who had been not only accused but convicted by a New Jersey jury, serving in an office of the archdiocese. It emerged that he had previously served as a hospital chaplain, with unsupervised access to children, even after the conviction. The archdiocesan review board had cleared him for ministry, as had the archbishop. The case vividly illustrates that the policies put in place by the Dallas Charter provide no reassurance at all to the faithful, if the policy-makers do not prove themselves trustworthy.

There’s more. During Father Fugee’s trial, the jury heard a statement in which the priest said that he was homosexual or bisexual. (An appeals court would later cite concerns about that statement as a reason for overturning the verdict.) So now a priest who is homosexual or bisexual, who is in a sex-offender program, is dispensing advice to other priests in Newark, and potentially dealing with the priests who are coping with similar problems. Is there any reason for confidence that he is offering mature spiritual counsel? Can we assume that he would respond properly to other cases in which priests were accused of misconduct?

The astonishment, bewilderment, and outrage that greeted the news from Newark is completely understandable; the complacent reaction from the archdiocese (“We have not received any complaints from the prosecutor’s office…”) is appalling.

Right now, one of two things is true. Either

1. The phone is ringing off the hook in the office of Archbishop Myers, as other bishops all around the country call to ask him what on earth he has done, and demand that he quickly undo it. Or…
2. Ten years into the greatest crisis the Church has faced since the Reformation, most American bishops still haven’t begun to grasp the problem.

There is no third option. And as I look at those two possibilities, I shudder to think which is more likely. God help us.

One of the repercussions of priestly sexual abuse is how to handle a sex abuser. That they be suspended and dismissed from the clerical state is certainly required. Although turning them out on the street to possible abuse others has its own problems. There could be some case made for continuing to employ them in the diocese to prevent this, but this is fraught with problems. Employing them to guide other priests in their spiritual formation is incomprehensible. Desk job or not and regardless of how much he is supervised this shows a totally tin-eared approach both as a prudential matter and the obvious scandal it would cause.

The care of even a priest who is an abuser is an important matter and maybe ideally the case would be that they would live out their lives in for example the environment of a monastery. Maybe that is rather naive and that really there is no one solution. Still the solution is certainly not employing them for priestly spiritual formation.

Media bias can be a rather boring subject. Although this story is a text book case in regards to how the media treated the Family Research Council shooter and how the shooter used a “hate map” from the Southern Poverty Law Center to target the FRC.

Get Religion has a comprehensive post on the subject and the comparisons from previous media treatment.

On Friday the Obama administration released another “compromise” on the HHS mandate. Unlike the previous so-called compromise this time there is actually some minor change.

The new proposal eliminated three of the four prongs of the old rule: inculcate values, and primarily hire and serve co-religionists. But it kept the fourth prong from the exact IRS code section. The change therefore does not expand who is covered to schools or hospitals: it simply makes it clear to churches that they are covered even if they serve non-co-religionists. (Source)

So the new HHS mandate is slightly less evil than the previous one. No doubt many progressive Catholics who objected somewhat to the HHS mandate will be totally fine with it now.

As it is now it means that Catholic schools, hospitals, some charities, etc still have their rights taken away. EWTN still would be forced to comply. Private employers also would have zero rights in this regard.

The HHS mandate has an understanding of rights that is totally nonsensical. Rights are something that individuals have and those individual rights are the basis for what we see as an institutional right. Houses of worship receive their rights not because they have innate rights, but are projected via the rights of individuals regarding freedom of religion. The Bill of Rights detailed personal freedoms and it is the individual that receives them and not some corporate body. No doubt I am putting this forth badly, but still the point is that individuals are the proper object of rights.

To say that an individual has free exercise of religion and then say that it doesn’t apply if they run a for profit business order is nonsense. To say that same for a non-profit company whose sole purpose is to spread the Gospel is even more non-sensical. If you can’t act on your conscience you are not free. Although the HHS mandate goes beyond just questions of religious liberty. Objections to contraception, abortion, and sterilization can be based on natural law arguments. The HHS mandate takes a battering ram to the freedom of conscience. The Obama administration has a policy view that they would ram down the throats of everybody with typical social engineering and elitist thinking. Typical of enlightened thinkers is that there is usually a reign of terror to go with it. We are suppose to be pleased that instead of “off with your heads”, it is currently only “off with your consciences.”

It will be interesting to see the USCCB’s response. Archbishop Chaput certainly is not buying it.

The scholar Yuval Levin has stressed that the new HHS mandate proposal, “like the versions that have preceded it, betrays a complete lack of understanding of both religious liberty and religious conscience.” In reality, despite the appearance of compromise, “the government has forced a needless and completely avoidable confrontation and has knowingly put many religious believers in an impossible situation.”

One of the issues America’s bishops now face is how best to respond to an HHS mandate that remains unnecessary, coercive and gravely flawed. In the weeks ahead the bishops of our country, myself included, will need both prudence and courage – the kind of courage that gives prudence spine and results in right action, whatever the cost. Please pray that God guides our discussions.

Whatever the cost is exactly right. The Obama administration would like to wear us out in time and money. They know this attack on religious freedom will not get the attention it deserves.

Immediately complying with a judge’s order, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has released the personnel files of 87 clergy accused of sexual abuse and has posted the files online.

Archbishop José Gomez, who has led the archdiocese since 2011, announced that he has relieved his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony, of all administrative and public duties, and that Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Curry, at one time Cardinal Mahony’s vicar for clergy, has resigned from his duties as a regional auxiliary bishop.

Cardinal Mahony served as Archbishop of Los Angeles from 1985 until 2011. Until recently, Bishop Curry served as chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Catholic Education.

“I find these files to be brutal and painful reading,” Archbishop Gomez said in a statement. “The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed.”

“We need to acknowledge that terrible failure today,” Archbishop Gomez continued. “We need to pray for everyone who has ever been hurt by members of the Church. And we need to continue to support the long and painful process of healing their wounds and restoring the trust that was broken.”

• Source
• PDF of the letter

When I first saw this story last night I went through a series of reactions starting with “Finally and appropriate response.”

I already had little respect for the Cardinal and what was left was almost totally eliminated by the letter he wrote in reply to Archbishop Gomez.

“Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this grave problem.”

If only he had been trained to not cover up sexual abuse. His reply is exactly the type of thinking that led to the cover up of sexual abuse in that there is no responsibility and making decisions is hard. The problem is always because appropriate structures had not been setup. The problem and the horror of priestly sexual abuse is just something to deal with administratively, or at least this is what this attitude portrays..

What really outrages me about Cardinal Mahoney’s reply is that it displays zero sorrow for what he in fact did do. His attitude is that yeah I made mistakes and I apologized for them so just leave me alone about them now. There is really no public shame displayed in what he did and the fact is that even after this information started to come out it was business as usual for him.

Now as I said I was no fan of the Cardinal and it is easy to get caught up in what Archbishop Gomez has appropriately done. Still I find I have to look at my own reaction to this. I am experiencing too much schadenfreude and very little charity. It is quite easy to associate this story with the conservative/progressive divide when really it has nothing to do with it. Cardinal Law and Cardinal Mahoney fell on either side of this divide and yet acted roughly the same way. The types of attitudes that lead to covering up for priestly abuses transcend doctrinal orthodoxy for the most part.

One of the things that resonate about this story is the simple fact that there have been so few consequences for those who were involved in these cover ups. Once the facts of these cases came out the people involved usually going into bunker mode seeming to hope it will all pass by. Cardinal Law at least finally resigned. It reminds me of something Phil Lawler wrote on Bishop Finn wrote recently.

Having been found guilty in a court of law, and then having accepted the court’s verdict, Bishop Finn is now permanently handicapped as a teacher of the Catholic faith. The Los Angeles Times is not the first newspaper that has chosen to focus attention on his criminal conviction, nor will it be the last. Whenever he makes a public statement on a controversial issue, critics will be sure to remind us of the bishop’s troubles with the law, whether or not they are relevant to the issue at hand.

It may be unfair that Bishop Finn is now singled out as a convicted criminal, when so many other American bishops were guilty of the same offenses, and much worse, in the past. It may be unfair that the Los Angeles Times trains its editorial guns on the Bishop of Kansas City, when there is larger target at close range in Los Angeles. It may be unfair, but those are the facts. When an orthodox Catholic bishop makes a strong defense of the Catholic stand on contentious issues, the critics of Catholicism will fight back, and Bishop Finn is now vulnerable.

As much as I admire his stalwart leadership of the Kansas City diocese, I question whether Bishop Finn can act effectively as a teacher of the faith when his critics have such a handy means of impeaching his testimony. I question whether he can prosper as the leader of the Catholic community, in an increasingly hostile environment, while wearing a bulls-eye on his back.

Regardless of Bishop Finn’s past leadership I would agree with Mr. Lawler and it would be better for his diocese if he resigned.

Update:

Never mind, just more of the same. Archbishop José Gomez has issued the following clarification:

“Questions from the faithful and some members of the news media indicate that it would be helpful for me to clarify the status of Cardinal Roger Mahony and Bishop Thomas Curry.

“Cardinal Mahony, as Archbishop Emeritus, and Bishop Curry, as Auxiliary Bishop, remain bishops in good standing in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, with full rights to celebrate the Holy Sacraments of the Church and to minister to the faithful without restriction.”

Via Frank Weathers I saw that aleteia had been officially launched. Now you might justifiably ask “What the heck is aleteia?” It is an effort by the Foundation for Evangelization through the Media which was founded in 2010 to respond to Pope Benedict XVI urging members of the Catholic media to proclaim the Gospel on the “Digital Continent.”

This is suppose to be an open network and a evangelization effort. The front page is mostly a news portal made up of various sections and trending topics. It appears that the content linked to on the site is aggregated by people working with aleteia to find content from Catholic news sites and blogs. This in itself is rather a major effort and the fact that this is done in five different languages certainly increases the scope. There are also articles written specifically for this site.

If you do a search on the site you will get links to content they created along with sites they have specifically selected. Looking through various search results it looks like they have gathered together a solid set of sites that they will link to. A simple test of this showed that you can get results for the National Catholic Register, but not it’s evil twin The National Catholic Reporter. Father Z appears prominent in results and I wonder if they have weighted search results so that some of the more popular resources appear first? Apparently even my blog is on their whitelist of sites allowed in search results.

The design of the site is pleasant enough and uses a design ethic rather popular now. I like the color scheme, but I am biased since it is similar to my own. Like pretty much every site now there are social networking aspects. Commenting along with sharing information on multiple social network platforms.

Now is this site something that I would make a habit of going to? Well the answer is both yes and no. There are some flaws that I find annoying and hopefully will be fixed in the future.

For example the site has no RSS feed (at least none I could discover). I find this a major flaw as my daily travels on the web are almost totally via an app that uses my Google Reader account. I hardly ever bookmark a site since I usually don’t have to. RSS is a perfect way to keep up on news and is really mandatory for a site like aleteia. Oddly you can get an RSS feed for a comment thread on an article.

Now if I decided to visit and wanted to enter their name into the browser aleteia does not exactly roll off the tongue or the fingers for that matter. I know it is hard to find short meaningful domain names, but this is just clumsy. The fact that they don’t own the .com version of the name is doubly so.

For a site like this the thing I would be most interested in is their own content with the aggregation of Catholic sites being a secondary interest. Unfortunately they don’t make it easy to see what is their latest content. The “Most Read” section is prominent and does link to their content, but it should be easier to see fresh content. Currently the way to do this is to go to the bottom of the page and select “All Articles.”

As an evangelization effort I don’t see how this site would be appealing to people other than Catholics already interested in their faith. Matthew Warner previously had a critique when they were still in beta and some of his critique still stands. Especially this:

… my biggest concern is that the scope of this is too big. To sum it up, it’s target audience seems like it’s everyone. Which, from a marketing standpoint, means it’s for nobody in particular. Which is a difficult way to market, especially when you’re just trying to get a new, social site off the ground. Social sites are about the critical mass of the community. You go after a particular group of people and build a small community. Then expand your scope from there. Most every modern-day successful “social network” started with a relatively small, targeted niche in order to reach a critical mass before expanding. Facebook started with Harvard. Foursquare started with New York City, etc. And it’s not just big social media platforms, it’s anything that is community driven. Even your average blog is best started this way.

Then there are minor quibbles. For example the search field when the browser is at a width most people will see it says “Search within the Catholic” where “world” is cut off. Click on the search box and at times it now says the same thing in Spanish.

Hopefully they will fix some of these problems, but the problem with scope remains. I would certainly like to use it as a resource and hope it both improves and succeeds.