The role of the Catholic church WRT conspiracies

[smiths]

the priest whose mass i attend weekly was heavily involved in australian anti-vietnam war protests and suffered for it within the church

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

the priest whose mass i attend weekly was heavily involved in australian anti-vietnam war protests and suffered for it within the church

Sounds like a really good guy. Glad you've got one of those in your church.
Seems priests are like cops, some really inspiring ones and some really scary ones.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Simulist, I think I owe you an apology. Your question was a fair one, and perhaps the only question that can really be asked at this stage - it is certainly a question that deserves an honest answer. Whereas my response was... well, I would like to pass it off as typically Catholic, but it was more typically me.

On the news this morning a female victim of the Magdalen Schools said of her abusers and their superiors: "They chose to protect the institutions rather than the children." That's kind of what I did in my answer too - at least, I chose to take offence on behalf of my tribe rather than addressing your valid point. It was inexcusable.

I also want to make it clear that I only listed the numerous enemies of Catholicism because they do, in fact, exist - I wasn't suggesting that this thread, or anyone in it, shared their motivations. Just in case it came across that way.

The Daily Mail thing was cheap. Was supposed to be funny, but... it doesn't always work.

The interview on the news this morning was interesting, though. When she said: "They chose to protect the institutions rather than the children," she didn't just mean that the Church had chosen to protect itself - she was saying that all the powers of the state had been aware of the abuses, and were not only accquiescent but instrumental in the cover-up. Perhaps that's not a surprise to anyone - it shouldn't be here, in particular - but it's one of the few times I've heard such a suggestion on TV. The report posted by Hairball earlier in the thread supports the view that the state (in Ireland, and Northern Ireland) has as much to lose as the Church does. The victims and their advocates who were vindicated by that particular report were forcibly removed from the court by the police, on the judge's orders, before the findings were announced ( in case they caused "trouble" - what with them being known "troublemakers" and all.)

I hope what I said earlier in the thread was not seen as a defence of the Catholic Church. I have no love for it, or loyalty to it, apart from still being, when all is said and done, a Catholic. I'm glad I re-read the thread - Chiggerbit and many others have pointed out cases, and patterns, that were still not quite clear to me, and that I might never have faced up to without being shown.

In looking over what has gone before, I also discovered that Louis CK actually can be funny. Nothing I'd seen up till now had convinced me of that fact.

Still... the reality itself gets worse...

As if in a special effort to ruin St. Patrick's Day, the head of the Irish Catholic Church has issued a traditionally belated and half-hearted apology... and yet more evil has come to light:

The head of Ireland's Catholics has apologised for his role in mishandling the case of a serial child abuser.

As a priest in 1975 Cardinal Sean Brady was at meetings where children signed vows of silence over complaints against paedophile priest Fr Brendan Smyth.

He said he wanted to apologise to "all those who feel I have let them down".

Meanwhile, Pope Benedict XVI has announced that on Friday he will sign his long awaited pastoral letter dealing with paedophilia in Ireland.

He said in recent months the church in Ireland had been "rocked by the crisis of abuse of minors" and hoped his letter would "help repentance, healing and renewal".

Secrecy

On Tuesday, the Catholic Church in Ireland released more details about why Cardinal Brady asked two victims, aged 10 and 14, to sign secrecy agreements.

The church said the boys were asked to sign oaths "to avoid potential collusion" in evidence-gathering for an internal church inquiry.


"Looking back I am ashamed that I have not always upheld the values that I profess and believe in."
Cardinal Sean Brady

Analysis: Cardinal's apology
Profile: Sean Brady

The church statement did not explain why either Cardinal Brady or his superiors at the time did not share their information with the police. Fr Smyth went onto abuse more children in the following years.

Delivering his St Patrick's Day mass on Wednesday, Cardinal Brady said: "This week a painful episode from my own past has come before me.

"I have listened to reaction from people to my role in events 35 years ago.

"I want to say to anyone who has been hurt by any failure on my part that I apologise to you with all my heart.

"I also apologise to all those who feel I have let them down.

"Looking back I am ashamed that I have not always upheld the values that I profess and believe in."

Cardinal Brady added that the church "must humbly continue to deal with the enormity of the hurt caused by abuse of children by some clergy and the hopelessly inadequate response to that abuse in the past".

'Deeply saddened'

Meanwhile, the Norbertine Community - which Smyth was a member of throughout his time as a priest - has said it is "deeply saddened at the controversy surrounding Cardinal Sean Brady".

"We again acknowledge our failure to remove Fr Smyth permanently from the exercise of ministry," it said.

"We apologise again to each and every person who was abused at any time by Fr Smyth, to their families and to the many others who suffered through these events.

"We apologise also for our failures to Cardinal Brady, to Bishop Leo O'Reilly and to the congregation and friends who have continued to support us here at the abbey."

Smyth was eventually convicted of dozens of offences against children.
Paedophile priest Brendan Smyth
Fr Brendan Smyth was convicted of dozens of offences

But despite allegations being previously investigated by church officials, including Cardinal Brady it was almost 20 years before he was brought to justice.

Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness has said Cardinal Brady "should consider his position".

He questioned how many other children were asked to stay silent.

However, NI Secretary of State Shaun Woodward said people should not "rush to judgement" on the issue.

Critics of the cardinal have accused him of colluding with clerical child sexual abuse and pressuring victims to remain silent.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8572081.stm

Happened to catch both the "Boys of St. Vincent" films on TV not long ago, for the first time - they are films that really can change your perspective on things, even if you think you are familiar with this kind of... case. The scenes in the second film of the Education, Welfare, and Social Work Ministers (at the time of the abuses) being suddenly struck with amnesia fifteen years later during the inquiry were especially pertinent. We've all seen that kind of thing happen before, and if there is a real inquiry into how these things were allowed to happen in Ireland, we will soon be seeing it again.

EDITS for clarity.

[Simulist]

Simulist, I think I owe you an apology. Your question was a fair one, and perhaps the only question that can really be asked at this stage - it is certainly a question that deserves an honest answer. Whereas my response was... well, I would like to pass it off as typically Catholic, but it was more typically me.

I don't think you owe me an apology, Ahab, but I appreciate your kind gesture.

This is a difficult topic, to say the least; emotions can run high all around, and understandably.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

i pay money each week into a catholic kitty,
it goes to a priest in sri lanka who is doing his best to keep people alive, safe and fed in a dangerous country everyone is ignoring,

you guys subscribe to a demented view of religious people and dont seem to understand the reality,

there are very few thinking catholics who have any respect or affection for the church, most i know would not be displeased to see the complete collapse of organised Catholicism,
but they would still go about every day of their lives praying, reading the bible and attempting to do good works to help people less fortunate than themselves,
the core of christianity as a belief system as preached by its most famous advocate is love, assistance, forgiveness, non-violence and an engagement with community,
whatever the pope or gordon brown does, pedophilia is a crime and a sin according to christianity

One of the reasons I still have respect for priests, if not for the church that they (and I) belong to, is because all my priests have been great! Literally great! I could write whole posts about them - but my natural modesty and humility prevents me.

At my primary school we all sent gifts to El Salvador - and they sent us back multi-coloured friendship bracelets. I don't know if they really did send us the bracelets (or even if our school really sent our gifts) but from a very early age the doctrine of "good works" as a road to salvation, as opposed to the more modern "I am, therefore I am saved,", was put in place. The school chaplain went over to El Salvador as a missionary and got murdered. He was my first priest after the truly terrifying one who baptised me and gave the weekly incoherent sermons at my church (he was deaf, wasn't his fault - he was exactly like that older guy from the exorcist, except he couldn't speak, and I think he had a darker past).

Anyways, I still have respect for priests, even at this time of the morning. A lot of them are great. Some of them, as has been shown, are unforgivably evil - and guess which ones the Church sticks up for. I've known good priests who lost their parish and had to virtually go on the run because they had an adult girlfriend whom they intended to marry. It seems, in the eyes of The Vatican, and therefore God, they simply chose the wrong age, and the wrong sex.

[chiggerbit]

John DeCamp quote:

That’s right. It was exactly like Boston. I took it so seriously at the time that I went to Rome and met with Cardinal Ratzinger. He’s the one who has been in charge of this systemic problem in the church of priests involved in pedophilia. Ratzinger is now in the limelight over this issue, but he couldn’t get anyone to do anything 12 or 13 years ago when I was writing about this and filing my lawsuit.

Meanwhile...


http://writ.news.findlaw.com/hamilton/20100218.html

The Pieces of the Puzzle Are Falling into Place: Catholic Officials, a Global Web of Childhood Sexual Abuse, and the Judgment of History
By MARCI A. HAMILTON
Thursday, February 18, 2010


In 2002, the Boston Globe broke the story of Cardinal Bernard Law's cover-up of widespread childhood sexual abuse by serial pedophiles in the Boston Archdiocese. In the wake of the coverage, United States Senator Rick Santorum, himself a Catholic, declared what many assumed to be true -- that the problem was peculiar to Boston. According to Santorum, the child sexual abuse had been caused by the lax morals of a very liberal city.

Santorum's particular theory was laughable, but his core assumption that the problem was geographically limited needs to be examined carefully – for although this claim of exceptionalism has proved completely false, it has continued to be repeated, in other contexts, all over the country and the world. And as long as the problem of Catholic clergy child sex abuse is seen as local, ending it will be elusive – because strings are being pulled from high up in the hierarchy.

Pretending Each City's – and Diocese's – Problems Were Specific to It Alone

Yet, in 2002 and after, the media still covered the Boston story as if it were distinctive to Boston. And, after the Boston scandal broke, the Bishops held an emergency meeting in Dallas and declared that the issue was behind them. Of course, today we know that was hardly the case.

After the Boston situation received publicity, victims of child sex abuse by Catholic priests started coming forward in many other American cities, with the pattern of abuse and cover-up repeating itself again and again. There is no room here to list them all, but they have included Bridgeport (Conn.), Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, and Spokane. There were recycling bins for the abusers in New Mexico, Maryland, and Canada. A priest could abuse several children in just about any state, take a break in New Mexico (where more children could be abused), and then be sent back to either the original diocese for re-posting, or another city. A handful of honorable prosecutors made the issue a priority, documenting the problem through grand jury reports -- but only a handful. The assumption continued to be that this must be a localized problem in certain dioceses, not one that was endemic to the organization – that is, entrenched throughout the entire Catholic hierarchy and system.

The media in each city focused on the abuse in that city, and the bishops in each city said, after some abuse was finally brought to light, that it was all history now.

The Growing Realization that the Problem Was – and Is -- Greater and More General
Then the list of dioceses with sexual abuse allegations grew longer and longer -- to the point that no state was untouched. Priests started to complain that the "scandal" had started to taint all priests unfairly. Many lifelong – and especially, older -- Catholics rejected out of hand the notion that the problem was deep-seated, or that it might involve the entirety of the Church. For them, this was a short-term bump in the long history of the Catholic Church. Some, though, saw the pattern and formed the Voice of the Faithful -- a collection of devoted Catholics who see the child sex abuse scandal as having revealed an unfortunately built-in problem, not just an isolated set of criminal and tortious acts.

Editors began to treat the stories of abuse, though, as simply redundant, and often caved to the pressure from bishops not to engage in alleged "anti-Catholic bias" by covering one story after another about abuse by priests. The bishops hired public relations firms to spread the word that legislative reform in response to the knowledge of priest abuse was nothing but anti-Catholicism, and to repeat the false claim that all of the abuse had been publicly reported and was safely in the past.

However, lawsuits were filed in numerous jurisdictions, and discovery was demanded, with concomitant news coverage of the lengthening list of abuse allegations. The ambitious American bishops then began to vie among themselves as to who would be the most successful in turning back lawsuits and related legislative reform. Once again, there was an apparent pattern of behavior in response to the public revelations and the lawsuits. The very same arguments against the victims, their attorneys, and legislative reform in this area were floated in far-flung states -- from California, to Delaware, to Wisconsin, and more.

A Problem that Crossed Not Just State, But National Boundaries

Still, the media treated the cases as location-specific. Editors were driven by the need for a contemporary and local "news hook" and did not invest in investigative reporting to cover the (much) larger story. National coverage of the Holy See's 1962 document, Crimen Sollicitationis, which threatens excommunication for bringing "scandal" to the Church by telling outsiders about the sexual abuse of children was – and remains -- sparse. Yet that document provides an embarrassingly obvious hint that the problem was – and is -- endemic and entrenched, and that the cover-up has been constructed from the top down. Was the media in denial over child sex abuse (which is common in our society) or over heinous behavior by the largest church in the United States -- or both? Who knows? Either way, the denial was deep-rooted and pernicious, and unless one has been watching closely, the larger story has escaped the attention of most Americans.

The stories then started to float across the Atlantic from Ireland that many priests there had sexually abused Irish children. Lots and lots of children. Irish prosecutors dug deep and produced two reports. One report detailed how the Irish Church had victimized numerous children in church-run residential schools. Horrifying in itself, the report also served as a reminder of the many stories from Australia – stories that were never widely circulated in the United States -- of the omnipresent sexual and physical abuse of children in church-run residential schools there. The second report, which was 700 pages long and dubbed the "Murphy Report," and focused on the Dublin Archdiocese, painstakingly established that the hierarchy and the police had covered up persistent patterns of abuse. It also pointed to the Holy See as responsible in part for the perpetuation of abuse.

In the end, some Irish bishops were held accountable, with four even resigning after being shamed out of their offices. Then, the current Irish bishops demanded a meeting with the Pope, because they placed significant blame for the pattern of behavior on the Holy See. That meeting took place this week at the Holy See.

The Murphy Report also confirmed that Irish abusers were being shipped to the United States, where they abused American children. Some were sent back and some were permanently dumped here.

Meanwhile, at the same time that the Irish bishops were demanding accountability from the Holy See, discovery in a Wisconsin case -- as I discussed in my last column -- showed that the Holy See and in particular, then-Cardinal Ratzinger (who, of course, is now the Pope) were the official handlers for abusing priests in the United States. The exchanges that litigation unearthed show that there is little question that bishops operated under orders from the highest levels of the Roman Catholic hierarchy on the issue of clergy who had been caught sexually abusing children.

Thus, we have come to know with a certainty that at a minimum, Ireland, the United States, and the Holy See have been linked. And only the Holy See has transnational powers within the group.

Even while all of this information was developing, moreover, there was still a pervasive belief that certain clerical orders were beyond reproach on the issue, especially the widely-respected Jesuits. The lawsuits against the Jesuits for abuse in Alaska were not covered nationally in the media. Then, Germany erupted with stories of pervasive abuse in Jesuit-run schools. The sex-abuse victims are still coming forward, but one rector was recently quoted as saying that he expected that, in the end, they would identify over 100 victims of a single Jesuit perpetrator. And abuse is not limited to this one perpetrator; once again, it is pervasive. In other words, the situation in Germany is a mirror image of that depicted in the first Irish report and of the Australian experience with church-run residential schools. There is an undeniable pattern and web of connections, even for those who would do all that they can to deny child sex abuse and deny wrongdoing by the Roman Catholic Church. That pattern has led to suffering that is beyond human imagination.

Let's face it: there are only two options here: Either the repeated pattern of abuse and cover-up around the world constitutes a giant set of uncanny coincidences, or there is a single source of power directly responsible for the global pattern. The answer is obvious and that is why there are lawsuits currently pending against the Holy See in the United States. History will judge all of us if we do not bring this institution to account for the suffering of children. The Church officials' current behavior makes the selling of indulgences in the fifteenth century almost look quaint.

[chiggerbit]

Wow, I was just reading the wiki on the Murphy Report on the sexual abuse of children by priests in Ireland:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_Report

...It was found that some acts of abuse had taken place inside the Pro-Cathedral, which has been the main episcopal seat of the Archbishop of Dublin since 1825....

[chiggerbit]

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ire ... 46924.html

Family had to move to get away from priest

MARY MINIHAN

PARISHES: THE FATHER of one of William Carney’s victims said he had to move his family out of Ayrfield to get away from the then priest, the report records.

Appointed curate in the parish in 1977 and dismissed from the clerical state in 1992, Carney is described in the report as “one of the most serious serial abusers investigated by the commission”.

He pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent assault in 1983 and the archdiocese has paid compensation to six of his victims.

Parents from Ayrfield contacted senior church figures on a number of occasions to say they were concerned about Fr William Carney’s access to their children.

There was evidence suggesting Carney might have acted in concert with other convicted clerical child sexual abusers, Fr Francis McCarthy and Fr Patrick Maguire.

In Ayrfield, the commission was impressed by the efficiency and speed with which Garda Finbarr Garland investigated the complaints from young boys in 1983, and the manner in which he and his superior officers pursued the prosecution of Carney.

However, neither the church nor the Garda authorities made any effort to ensure that relevant people were made aware of the danger which Carney posed to children, the report concludes.

In Ringsend, “the situation regarding Fr [Tom] Naughton was quite well known”. Twice convicted of child sexual abuse, the commission is aware of complaints of child sexual abuse against Naughton by more than 20 named people. In the mid to late 1990s, a number of complaints of sexual assault were made to gardaí by men who claimed they were abused by Naughton while he was a curate in Aughrim Street between 1976 and 1980.

The gardaí followed up these complaints but the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) directed no prosecution should take place due to the lapse of time.

A young man told the commission that Fr James McNamee, who died in 2002, was “like St Francis of Assisi” because children would flock around him. At least 21 people have made complaints of sexual abuse against Fr McNamee.

These complaints date back to his period as a curate in Rolestown between 1950 and 1952; as a curate in Halston Street and Arran Quay between 1952 and 1960; as a curate in Harrington Street from 1960 to 1968; and in Crumlin, as curate between 1968 and 1973, and parish priest from 1973 and 1979.

Cabra parish was the scene of the first complaint, in 1981, about abuse by Fr Ivan Payne. The abuse of Andrew Madden, which began around 1976, took place in the house in which Fr Payne lived while attached to the parish.

[chiggerbit]

http://tinyurl.com/ycdl26z

70 Irish priests accused of sex crimes in US


Friday, 29 January 2010


US victims of child abuse have unearthed a direct link to scandals in Ireland, revealing that 70 irish priests who worked in the States have been accused of paedophile crimes.




This dramatic disclosure follows the admission by the archdiocese of Boston that the list includes the late Fr Brendan Smyth, who worked briefly in Arlington two decades ago.


It had previously been thought that at that time he was on the run in the Republic from police in Belfast.


The Boston archdiocese was responding to the demands of victim-support groups, which have alleged in the wake of the Murphy Report that church leaders in Ireland sent accused priests to dioceses in other countries, including the US.


The revelations come as Irish victims of clerical child abuse have reacted furiously to the refusal of a retired Dublin auxiliary bishop to accept the finding of the Murphy Report that church authorities covered up paedophile crimes and either transferred offenders to other parishes or sent them abroad.


Bishop Dermot O'Mahony, who was censured in the report for his handling of complaints, has attempted to rally Dublin priests to his defence by openly challenging Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.


Last month, Archbishop Martin claimed that Bishop O'Mahony showed neither remorse nor apology and withdrew permission for him to administer the sacrament of confirmation.


Last night, prominent abuse victim Andrew Madden, who first outed the notorious Fr Ivan Payne, said Bishop O'Mahony should reflect on the damage done to so many children by what he did and failed to do.


Maeve Lewis, executive director of the One In Four victim-support group, said the bishop appeared to be questioning the validity of the Murphy Report's conclusion that there was a deliberate policy to cover up allegations of sexual abuse.


She added: "It is this culture of denial which facilitated the sexual abuse of children in the first place.


"If this response to the Murphy Report is widespread, then the Catholic Church will never be a safe place for children."


The US revelations came after an organisation called BishopAccountability.org published a list of 70 priests from Ireland who had been accused of molesting children, either in Ireland or while they were working in the United States.




This followed a public letter to Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, head of the Boston Archdiocese, asking him to identify any priests who have faced accusations of abuse elsewhere and who had worked in the area.


The Boston archdiocese disclosed that it had granted faculties to three priests on the list, including the late Brendan Smyth. The faculties permitted the clergymen to celebrate Mass and perform other duties.


In addition to Smyth, they include Joseph T. Maguire, a priest from the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, who was convicted of molesting more than a dozen boys in the state, and who died in 2005.


The archdiocese said that a review of its records shows that it was not aware of any accusations having been made against the priests when they were granted faculties, and that it found no records of accusations while the priests were there.


A spokesman said Smyth, the notorious Norbertine monk from Kilnacrott Abbey, in Co Cavan, who died in prison in 1997, was given permission to work as a priest in the archdiocese for two days in 1991.


But the Boston archdiocese has insisted that it has no record of any accusations being made against Fr Smyth while he was working for two days in St Camillus parish in Arlington.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Ahab, smiths, my mum is catholic and raised me as one. I don't consider myself one anymore.

I have a second cousin who was priest in El Salvador in the 80s. He told some wild stories when he came back. He wasn't a big fan of the whole fascist thing, or elements of the Catholic Church that rejected "liberation theology" as a political act on its own, instead of part his role of pastoral care, which was how he saw it. Never got abused as a youngster either, well not sexually, or that much physically.

Dunno if catholic dogma qualifies as psychological abuse, maybe.

But yeah I have to agree with you. the Catholic Church is just like everything else, Most of the people are ok, but the real problems is with the institution and its hierarchies.

[chiggerbit]

http://tinyurl.com/yz9putn

Posted on Tue, Mar. 30, 2010
Suit: Vatican knew about South Florida priest's past

BY JAY WEAVER
jweaver@MiamiHerald.com

MIAMI HERALD FILE
The. Rev Ernesto Garcia-Rubio is surrounded by young Nicaraguans he had allegedly been helping in 2002 since 1987.
The Archdiocese of Miami, along with top Vatican authorities, knew as far back as 1968 that the Rev. Ernesto Garcia-Rubio, a priest later defrocked amid child sex-abuse allegations, had a troubled past in Cuba before transferring to South Florida, lawyers representing victims claimed Monday.

The lawyers say the Vatican's role is similar to what is alleged in the scandal now unfolding in Wisconsin, where top Catholic officials are accused of failing to defrock a priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys in a long career that paralleled the Miami cleric's. Pope Benedict XVI was in charge of the Vatican office that reviewed such cases when he served as Cardinal Ratzinger.

``It was a longstanding and well-known secret that the Vatican and Archdiocese of Miami knew exactly what Ernesto Garcia-Rubio was capable of,'' said Aventura attorney Jessica Arbour who with lawyer Stuart Mermelstein have filed several suits against the archdiocese involving Garcia-Rubio.

Garcia-Rubio, now 73, was celebrated as the Archdiocese of Miami's ``patron saint'' of young Central American and Cuban refugee boys who flocked to his Our Lady of Divine Providence in Sweetwater in the 1980s. He served there from 1975-88.

In the confidential, Sept. 3, 1968, letter, Washington-based Apostolic Delegate Luigi Raimondi warned then-Archbishop Coleman F. Carroll that Garcia-Rubio ``was forced to leave Cuba because of serious difficulties of a moral nature (homosexuality).'' Raimondi inserted the parentheses around the word homosexuality.

Some experts say the term was used by the Catholic Church then to describe priests involved in pedophilia or child abuse.

Raimondi urged Carroll ``to protect this priest with your accustomed paternal charity.''

Three days later, Carroll replied that the information was ``a surprise indeed to me. I had made what I thought were sufficient inquiries regarding his reason for having left Cuba. At no time did anyone indicate that the problem was of such a nature as that described in your letter.'' Carroll concluded: ``I assure you that I will do what I can in every way to protect him and also to do so with charity in my heart.''

Miami archdiocese spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta said Monday that back in the 1960s, the term ``homosexuality'' meant just that.

``Clearly, it doesn't mean that a homosexual is a child sex offender,'' Agosta said. ``I don't think there's a double code in there. My interpretation is what it is in the letter. To think of it as coded letter is incorrect.''

She added that the 1968 correspondence between the papal delegate and the Miami archbishop was necessary because after the Castro revolution there were no formal communications between the Catholic Church in Cuba and the United States.

An expert in a similar lawsuit alleging child sex abuse by Garcia-Rubio said in a sworn statement that among ecclesiastical leaders during the time of the alleged abuse, `` `moral problems' generally referred to sexual issues.

`` `Homosexuality' most often referred to same-sex issues between clerics and young adolescent males,'' said Thomas P. Doyle, a Maryland Canon Lawyer and Dominican priest.

The Miami Herald first broke the story about allegations of child sexual abuse by Garcia-Rubio in 1988 -- provoking condemnation from the Miami archdiocese. Top church officials denounced the story as an ``inquisition.''

But privately Archbishop Edward McCarthy had already insisted that Garcia-Rubio be evaluated for pedophilia, according to investigative records obtained by The Herald.

Six months before the paper's November 1988 story ran, the archbishop told Garcia-Rubio, then on sabbatical in Colombia, that he shouldn't return to Miami for a visit to celebrate his 25th year in the priesthood.

``I also must insist that following your sabbatical, but prior to your return, you receive a psychiatric evaluation in a setting determined by the archdiocese,'' McCarthy wrote him on May 11, 1988.

``Ernesto, this is as much for your protection as that of the archdiocese,'' said McCarthy, who is now deceased.

The complaints against Garcia-Rubio -- first lodged at the Sweetwater church -- eventually surfaced in The Herald story, which highlighted four sex-abuse allegations by teenage Nicaraguan and Salvadoran refugees from 1983 to 1988.

In late 1988, Miami archdiocese officials sent Garcia-Rubio to St. Luke's Institute in Maryland for a pedophilia evaluation.

The archdiocese's chancellor, the Rev. Gerard LaCerra wrote McCarthy that St. Luke's found ``insufficient'' information to confirm pedophilia. But he added: ``This does mean that great caution and monitoring will be necessary in the future. . . . They had said to me that everything was borderline.''

But six years would pass before Garcia-Rubio formally applied to the Vatican to be laicized, or defrocked. In his 1994 application, he noted that he left the active priesthood in 1989 because ``three couples in Miami made allegations in regard to unaccompanied children coming from Central America.''

But Garcia-Rubio's troubled past in Miami caught up to him after his transfer to Honduras, so he was forced to leave the priesthood in 1991.

The allegations triggered a criminal investigation in Miami-Dade, but no charges were filed.

In late 1999, Archbishop John Favalora wrote the Vatican to reactivate Garcia-Rubio's petition to be defrocked, saying his original request was ``apparently'' lost. Favalora noted that Garcia-Rubio married in 1992, had a child the following year and was living in the Miami area.

[chiggerbit]

The Miami Herald first broke the story about allegations of child sexual abuse by Garcia-Rubio in 1988 -- provoking condemnation from the Miami archdiocese. Top church officials denounced the story as an ``inquisition.''

Take note that "top" church officials denounced the newspaper's publication of the article, even though they themselves were aware enough of the man's problem that they had sent him to be evaluated for pedophilia. Which, at least to me, seems to indicate a conspiracy.

Also, there's this:

The allegations triggered a criminal investigation in Miami-Dade, but no charges were filed.

Is it my imagination, or has Ireland been more diligent about prosecuting offending priests?

[chiggerbit]

Part of a conspiracy might also include repeatedly attempting to take advantage of various statute of limitation laws by taking steps to obstruct the revelation of known instances of abuse by a priest long enough to have the offense fall outside the statute.

edit:

Statute of limitations vary state by state here in the US. It used to be in many of them that a suit or a prosecution had to be brought within two years or so of an offense, or for initiating a suit within that amount of time (two years or whatever) of the victim having reached the age of majority. A number of state laws were eventually changed to increase the amount of time of under the limitations, many of the changes done due to recognition by the states that sexual abuse victims often didn't recognize that their psychological problems were rooted in their sexual victimization.

[Simulist]

I don't think it's your imagination.

Irish have some serious ire — and I'm not sure Benny is at all prepared for that.

[chiggerbit]

In late 1999, Archbishop John Favalora wrote the Vatican to reactivate Garcia-Rubio's petition to be defrocked, saying his original request was ``apparently'' lost. Favalora noted that Garcia-Rubio married in 1992, had a child the following year and was living in the Miami area.

I'm kind of wondering if this little nugget might indicate the possibility that the church was attempting to drag out the amount of time between Garcia-Rubio's offenses and any claims for damages that might be brought.