Church lawyer testifies Cullen, other clergy lied to him

Peter Hall
The Morning Call
Allentown, PA
May 14, 2012

PHILADELPHIA — A former attorney for the Philadelphia Catholic Archdiocese testified Monday that top church officials including retired Allentown Bishop Edward Cullen lied to him about a list of priests suspected of sexually abusing children.

Tim Coyne, who served as the church's general counsel, said a prosecutor asked him in 2004, in the midst of a grand jury investigation of sexual abuse by Philadelphia-area priests, to track down the list of 35 suspected child abusers Monsignor William Lynn had produced in 1994.

Coyne said he contacted five church leaders including Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua; Cullen, who was the cardinal's top aide; and Bishop Joseph Cistone, who is now head of the Saginaw, Mich. diocese, but the effort was unsuccessful.

Coyne testified that Cullen's attorney said Cullen had no recollection of the list. The others gave similar replies, Coyne told the court.

"Everyone I spoke to said they didn't know where it was," Coyne said, "and they didn't have a copy of it."

But when church officials earlier this year discovered a hand-written memo documenting instructions from Bevilacqua to shred the list, Coyne admitted under questioning by Assistant District Attorney Patrick Blessington that he was left with one conclusion.

"Somebody lied to me, or a lot of people lied to me," Coyne said.

Blessington retorted: "More like everyone lied to you."

"That's fair," Coyne said.

Lynn, 61, is charged with covering up sexual abuse by priests. He is the highest-ranking church official in the nation to face such charges.

He is on trial in Philadelphia county court with Father James Brennan, who is accused of attempting to rape a teenage boy. A third clergyman, Father Edward Avery, pleaded guilty before the start of their trial to a count of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a 10-year-old boy.

Cullen, head of the Allentown diocese from 1998 until his retirement in 2009, was not immediately available for comment Monday.

Germany seeks assurances on SSPX

The Tablet 

May 11, 2012

The vice-president of the Bundestag has visited the Holy See to convey German government concerns over negotiations between the Vatican and the Society of St Pius X (Lefebvrists).

German anxieties revolve around the fact that the SSPX refuses to accept Nostra Aetate, the Second Vatican Council document which rejected all forms of anti-Semitism and prepared the ground for a new relationship between the Church and both Judaism and Israel.

Wolfgang Thierse, a committed Catholic, met Cardinal Kurt Koch, the President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Cardinal Koch told him that the SSPX must accept the authority of the Church's Magisterium and must recognise the Second Vatican Council.

Prosecutor wants new charge against Bishop Finn

Mark Morris
 Kansas City Star
 May 7, 2012

 Jackson County prosecutors want to add additional misdemeanor criminal charges against Bishop Robert Finn and the diocese he serves. The charge, failure to report suspicions of child abuse, is the same as the bishop and diocese already face for their alleged mismanagement of a priest now facing state and federal child pornography charges.

 Prosecutors also have asked a judge to approve a massive request for records from the diocese’s so-called “secret archive” detailing the diocese’s responses to child abuse allegations both before and after Finn began serving in Kansas City in May 2004.

 ...........
A spokeswoman for the diocese declined comment, saying the church’s lawyers have not yet seen paperwork.

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Prosecutors also want the diocese to turn over a broad swath of records detailing how it has handled child abuse allegations received since Finn was ordained coadjutor bishop on May 3, 2004. Those records would include:
• All documents related to reports of child abuse received since May 2004, including records of the diocesan response team and Independent Review Board.
• Reports of prior concerns alleged against perpetrators mentioned in those post-2004 records.
• And all other relevant records kept in the diocese’s “secret archives,” as so described in canon law.

According to church law, the most sensitive documents of a diocese are to be kept in a secret archive, which can be as simple as a locked safe or a cabinet. According to church law, those records are to be reviewed, and some purged, annually.

 ..............
The request for records — usually called “discovery” in legal parlance — demands specific information from diocesan records about possible child abuse allegations against 10 priests and monks, eight of whom already have been sued in civil actions against the diocese or their religious orders.

 ....... Read full article at The Kansas City Star

An open letter to the CDF from Des Wilson (Association of Catholic Priests)

Fr.Desmond Wilson
 Association of Catholic Priests (Ireland)
 May 5, 2012

 Dear Friends in The Congregation for the Doctrine of theFaith,

 You may be aware that we in Ireland have a special reverence for our Saint Columbanus. He was one of our saints who disagreed with a Pope and said so. You may be more acquainted with Saint Catherine of Siena who did the same, although she had the disadvantage of having to disagree with three possible popes at one time.

 Some of us view with dismay then, but no great alarm, your decision to censor some of our fellow citizens and fellow members of the Catholic Church who have done nothing at all so serious.

 We are puzzled – naturally and supernaturally - by the fact that you and we preach the presence and inspiration of the Holy Spirit and then you tell us, so inspired, to stop talking - as if we had nothing important to say. This is not a matter of doctrine, it is one of logic and we in Ireland are inclined to judge these things by logic as well as doctrine and not too often by emotion. We remember the Gamaliel principle – you remember it too, when forced to make a decision, he told his colleagues, If this be of God it’s useless to oppose it, if it be of human planning it will fade away in any case, so we should not take extraordinary measures for ordinary happenings.

 You may be aware that in recent years we in Ireland lost to the priesthood some of our best intellects because priests were disciplined sometimes for trivialities, sometimes for making people aware that the churchis a seeking church not a triumphant one. When the issues involved were trivial – like that of shirts and collars or just discussing what we believe – we rightly feared that some important people in our church were trying to drag us with them on a road which might well lead from mediocrity to obscurity. We Catholics in Ireland have a strong intellectual tradition, we founded the ancient equivalent of a university in Clonmacnois centuries before our colleagues in Britain founded Oxford and Cambridge, and we took our part in intellectual leadership in Europe even when the empire centred in Rome was collapsing, indeed especially when it was. So you can see we have some experience in intellectual and spiritual leadership. It would be sad and quite unworthy if you were to insist at this time that we be reduced to tearing pages out of monthly religious magazines and asking permission not just to change laws but even to write about them.

 As well as this we in Ireland are wary of anonymous messages to anonymous receivers , we believe Our Lord was serious when He said people sometimes worked in secret because their works were evil. That is disquieting anywhere but especially in the community of the People of God. And most especially to the priests and others whom you have told to be quiet. I am presuming that this title, The People of God , still officially applies to us, although I understand that even at the time of the Second Vatican Council there was a desire among some of you to avoid it. Most of us accept the title with pride and gratitude but find it impossible to accept that we have to be a Silent People of God any more than we would accept being a silenced people ofIreland.

 So for reasons of logic, theology, scripture , history and reason we know it is damaging to us all to try to solve problems by silencing speakers rather than fostering and freshening ideas. You may possibly agree that this is so, but in any case , censors tend to disappear into irrelevance while ideas tend to remain if they are interesting ones – all the more if they are good ones , which is highly likely given that those who have them rely on the Holy Spirit for their spiritual and intellectual vigour.

 So I do ask you to join us in our decision not to be afraidof each other but to talk to each other with courtesy , remembering that when you silence good people that is a shame for you – but if we allow it to happen that is a shame for us.

 Looking back on more than sixty years as a Catholic priest in Ireland I think I know the value of those who choose their own silence, but also the emptiness of those who enforce silence on others. With great hopes for blessing for you and for a church which enlightens the world,

 Desmond Wilson, 6 Springhill Close, Belfast BT 12 7SE.

For a year now, Austrian Catholics debate obedience

Krista Pongratz-Lippett
National Catholic Reporter
April 30, 2012


VIENNA, AUSTRIA -- Cardinal Christoph Schönborn is an old hand by now at dealing with Austrian church crises. Appointed archbishop of Vienna in 1995 (at the age of 50), after the late Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër had to step down after being accused of sexually abusing a minor, Schönborn has had to cope with constant demands for church reform ever since -- demands that have now become a perennial issue and frequently hit world headlines. And although he makes no secret of the fact that he is a conservative at heart and an adamant advocate of both mandatory priestly celibacy and of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, for example, he has often surprised Austrian Catholics and others by the courageous way he has tackled seemingly insolvable dilemmas. He has, moreover, never hesitated to criticize the Vatican when to his mind it was at fault or shared in the blame for crises in the Austrian church.

In his chrism Mass sermon on April 2, the Monday of Holy Week, he offered his own Jesus-solution on how priests can cope with three of the most problematic situations confronting them in their pastoral work today:

The large number of people, including many young, conservative Catholics, who cohabit without being married; The large number of divorced people who remarry; The increasing number of same-sex partnerships. “We priests usually give up when we are faced with complete incomprehension at what the church teaches about marriage and abstinence, proliferation and indissolubility. ... There is only one way, the way his disciples learned: get to know Jesus himself better, grow into his friendship,” Schönborn told his priests. Priests should learn to walk the tightrope between canon law and true mercy as Jesus practiced it by asking themselves what Jesus would have done in each problematic situation and then following in his footsteps, the cardinal said.

 The sermon attracted much attention, especially in Austria, where the demands for church reform by the now 400-strong Austrian Priests’ Initiative, founded in 2006, culminated in an “Appeal to Disobedience” in June last year. In Msgr. Helmut Schüller, the founder of the initiative, Schönborn has met his match. Schönborn’s former vicar general and before that the director of Caritas Austria, Schüller is a well-known charismatic priest and media personality in Austria. And what is more, several of the reforms the initiative calls for, such as giving Communion to remarried divorced Catholics and to Catholics who have been excommunicated for not paying compulsory church tax, are widely practiced despite the fact that they disobey church law.

......... “Disobeying certain valid and strict church rulings and laws has for years been part of our life and work as priests,” Schüller told the press. The priests were fully aware that the word “disobedience” was inflammatory but “we do not mean general disobedience for contradiction’s sake, but graduated obedience, which we first owe to God, then to our consciences and, in the final instance, to church law,” he explained. “We priests at the grass roots in the church have to lead double lives as we have to cope with the problems the official church line forbids and in the long run that is wearing us out.” The word “disobedience” was not a “battle cry” but an expression of “impatience and clear grievances,” Schüller underlined.

For almost a year now the debate on what exactly obedience implies for Catholics has not died down in Austria, with prominent commentators quoting Cardinal John Henry Newman’s toast, “I shall drink to the pope, if you please, still, to conscience first, and to the pope afterwards,” and pointing out that Blessed Franz Jägerstätter was one of the very few Austrian Catholics to disobey the Austrian bishops when they called on Catholics to vote for the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany and signed their declaration with “Heil Hitler.” The church has since rehabilitated and beatified Jägerstätter, commentators noted.

........... In an interview on Austrian state television’s “Palm Sunday Press Hour,” Schönborn explained how he had arrived at his solution to this latest dilemma. “In all moral questions we must always first consider the individual human being. Jesus always considered the individual human person first and not the law,” he said, adding that he had been impressed by Stangl’s “deep Christianity” and active commitment to the church. The problem of allowing remarried divorced Catholics to receive the Eucharist is much the same, Schönborn said, and appealed to priests always to consider each individual case.
Conservative Catholic Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione forcefully defended Schönborn’s decision to allow Stangl to remain on the parish council. In an April 6 article in Il Foglio, Buttiglione said the cardinal’s decision was “an intelligent pastoral view of the church’s position on homosexuals and homosexuality.”

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The next day, Good Friday, Schönborn publicly called on the Priests’ Initiative to take back the word “disobedience.”
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The Austrian Priests’ Initiative has, however, refused to take back the word “disobedience.” Obedience without examining one’s conscience is dangerous, Schüller told the Austrian daily Die Presse on Holy Saturday. He recalled that the Second Vatican Council had begun with an act of disobedience on the part of those bishops who had refused to sign the documents prepared by the Vatican. “We would like to answer the questions the pope has put to us in person,” he said, adding he was “pleasantly surprised” that the pope had spoken of the “slow pace of institutions” and had not threatened the initiative with sanctions.

The Austrian group is now forging links with like-minded priests around the world, especially in Ireland, Germany and the United States.

...............

Events in Stützenhofen refueled the priestly celibacy discussion and further damaged the church’s credibility. They have also strengthened the cause of the Austrian Priests’ Initiative.

Is Austria, led by Schönborn, perhaps becoming a testing ground on how to cope with some of the chief dilemmas facing Catholic priests in their pastoral work today?


Read the full article at The National Catholic Reporter

Berkeley parishoners continue to call for change

Judith Scherr
Berkeleyside
March 26, 2012

Some 50 St. Joseph the Worker parishioners gathered Friday night, but they weren’t at the century-old sanctuary on Berkeley’s Addison Street. Instead, they met at old Finn Hall on Tenth Street, because, they say, they can no longer freely gather at the church many attended for decades – and that some no longer frequent.

The group, which some refer to as Salvemos (save us), met to spell out concerns with the St. Joseph leadership – and to strategize on how to reform the church they loved when radical priest Fr. Bill O’Donnell and progressive successors and colleagues were at the helm of the church community.

“We now find ourselves confronted by challenges that test our faith,” said parishioner Raul Ramirez, who moderated the meeting in Spanish and English.

“We have heartfelt concerns… in three key areas of our parish,” he said. “The lack of vision, the lack of communication, and failed leadership.”

Tensions within the church community date back to July 2009 with the arrival at the parish of Fr. John Direen. The appointment was made by Bishop Salvatore J. Cordileone, a conservative bishop who had been one of the driving forces behind Prop. 8, California’s anti-gay-marriage law.

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Raul Ramirez moderated the meeting: "We have heartfelt concerns." Photo: Judith Scherr

Critics say Direen doesn’t consult with the church community, and controls the parish councils through his appointments to them, but the Diocese said in a statement published last year that Fr. Direen appointed people to the parish council only after terms ran out.

Further, participants at the Friday evening meeting criticized Fr. Direen for turning what had been community space into a gift shop. The community room had been of particular significance, serving as a meeting space for the larger Berkeley community and giving birth to a number of initiatives that has empowered the Latino and other minority communities, they said. It’s also where the church councils met and where the Social Justice Committee hammered out plans over the years that led to its leadership in opposing U.S. arms shipments to Central American dictatorships, the death penalty and war.

Church leadership, however, has said that conversion of this space was to bring much-needed revenue into the church.

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Friday night’s meeting was a preamble to a Palm Sunday event, some declined to call a protest, where parishioners and former parishioners will wear their St. Joseph the Worker shirts and stand on the sidewalk in front of the church to call for change. They say they believe a large turnout will make the church hierarchy listen.

They held a similar demonstration that drew around 150 people to the sidewalk in front of the church last June; 10-20 people have been outside every Sunday since then, holding placards such as “We need a pastor who resolves conflicts, not one who causes them,” and “Our voice counts too.”

Parishioners' grievances were noted at Friday's meeting. Photo: Judith Scherr

.......


First on the grievance list was the question of Fr. George Crespin, a retired St. Joseph priest Direen removed last year and who spoke at Friday’s gathering.

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There were many demands for a more democratic-minded leadership. “We need to return to the old fashioned idea of consulting with the people of God,” one woman said.

Mary O’Donnell, Fr. Bill O’Donnell’s sister, drew applause when she called for direct action. “Let our voice be heard and put pressure on the Bishop,” she said. “Let’s bring our protest to the Bishop’s office.”

The evening closed with words and prayer from Fr. Crespin: “There’s a lot of pain in the community; there’s a lot of pain in this room,” he said. “What we’re fighting for is to live in a community of faith. It’s not a personal conflict between me and Father Direen. If we’re fighting for our faith, we have to act according to our faith. Faith is essential; love is essential.”

He called for reconciliation and forgiveness and, he said, “the gift of hope.”

Read entire article at Berkeleyside

Vatican loud on liberals but silent on abuse

Fintan O'Toole
The Irish Times
May 1, 2012


We are witnessing the cruel humiliation of a generation of clergy that deserves better

.........

I thought about writing one of those columns in response to the Vatican’s censuring of five priests – Brian D’Arcy, Tony Flannery, Gerard Moloney, Seán Fagan and Owen O’Sullivan – simply for saying what most Catholics actually think about celibacy, women priests and homosexuality. But I couldn’t find either anger or hope.

All that’s left is a double dose of sadness – for a generation of idealists; for a society in need of moral leadership that is being given just one more, all too familiar dose of the most abject cynicism.
What we’re seeing now is the sadistic humiliation of a generation of clergy that deserves better. At a simple human level, there’s something genuinely tragic in the fate of these priests: not just those who have been silenced but all their like-minded colleagues. These were once young men and women, mostly in rural Ireland, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. They were infused with the energy of reform and renewal. The priesthood still had glamour, and it was still tied up with familial snobbery, social prestige and institutional arrogance.

But there was also a promise of something more: that the institution to which they were drawn was changing, opening up, moving away from cult-like obedience to obsessive sexual doctrines. It was engaging with deep questions about power and poverty. And it was reasonable to think that this process was sure to continue, to imagine that by 2012 the church would long since have made its peace with democracy.

.........

These people don’t deserve to be called to heel like errant lapdogs. It is easy to say that they should refuse to follow orders or just walk away from an abusive institution. But that would be to walk away from the only adult life they’ve known. It would be to write off decades of work and sacrifice – to accept that the most profound decision of one’s life was based on a delusion.
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 But there’s also a sadness for Ireland itself. Our society hardly needs yet more hypocrisy, another layer of self-serving cynicism. The institutional church disgraced itself by systematically covering up child abuse. It is almost beyond belief that its final conclusion from that trauma – the real outcome of all those apologies and visitations – is that the true problem is some mildly liberal articles in Reality or the Sunday World.

This is the institution that told us that it was unable to control child rapists in its ranks because it couldn’t just issue orders. ...........

When priests were raping children, the institutional hierarchy was wringing its hands and pleading “what can we do?” The Vatican was very busy and very far away. But when a priest makes some mild suggestions that women might be entitled to equality, the church is suddenly an efficient police state that can whip that priest into line. The Vatican, which apparently couldn’t read any of the published material pointing to horrific abuse in church-run institutions, can pore over the Sunday World with a magnifying glass, looking for the minutest speck of heresy.

An institution so stupid that it thinks its Irish faithful is more scandalised by Brian D’Arcy than by Brendan Smyth is not worth anyone’s anger. It is doing a far better job of destroying itself than its worst enemies could dream of.

All we can do is mourn the passing of a strain of decency and hope in a society so inured to hypocrisy that one more example is neither here nor there.

Full article at the Irish Times