Skip to main content

Anti-Contraception Cardinal Paid Pedophiles to Disappear

By Valerie Tarico ~

Cardinal Timothy DolanTimothy Dolan, Cardinal of New York and head of the Catholic Conference of Bishops, had his prime time career launched by the pedophile priest scandal. Now, despite efforts to distance himself, his role in pedophile protection may come back to bite him. Wednesday the Archdiocese of Miwaukee admitted that during Dolan’s tenure there pedophiles were paid to simply disappear.

In June of 2002, Dolan was appointed Archbishop of Milwaukee after his predecessor, Rembert G. Weakland, admitted a confidential settlement of $450,000 to a man who accused Weakland of sexually assaulting him in 1979. In contrast to Weakland, Dolan was a known theological conservative with the trust of the Vatican, and, despite questionable management of sexual abuse scandals in his previous position, in St. Louis, he was tasked with cleaning up the mess.

From the start, Dolan positioned himself as a victim’s advocate: "...[i]t is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the situation, and the suffering that victims feel, because I've spent the last four months being with them, crying with them, having them express their anger to me." His response to those tears and anger, however, foreshadowed events of this winter, when Dolan has consistently argued that the Church is above the law.

In the case of the pedophile priests, Dolan almost immediately set about exploring financial incentives that would encourage them to step down and fade away into the community. He emphatically denied in 2006 that this was the case. But during subsequent bankruptcy proceedings for the Milwaukee archdiocese, public documents showed that Dolan had discussed payout options with his finance committee as early as 2003. Now email from Julie Wolf, Communications Director for the archdiocese, confirms that pedophiles were paid up to $20,000 apiece in exchange for quietly relinquishing their positions in the Church.

Dolan almost immediately set about exploring financial incentives that would encourage them to step down and fade away into the community.Peter Isely is Midwest director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests and a resident of Milwaukee. Isely expressed outrage at the newly confirmed payoffs, which his organization has long alleged despite Dolan’s denial. “This is as ludicrous as a school board, instead of firing a teacher for criminal acts against children, calling the police, and revoking his license to teach, instead saying that they had to pay the child molester tens of thousands of dollars to hand over their license to the board.”

In 2006, serial molester, Father Franklyn Becker admitted that he had been paid $10,000 for signing “laicization papers” renouncing priesthood. At the time, Dolan insisted that the payment was to cover health care expenses. “For anyone to assert that this money was a ‘payoff’ or occurred in exchange for Becker agreeing to leave the priesthood is completely false, preposterous and unjust.” Minutes from the 2003 Finance Committee meeting suggest otherwise. Payouts to pedophiles like Becker were to be on top of pension, salary and health care benefits, and had no strings attached.

Since moving to New York and taking over leadership of the Catholic Council of Bishops, Dolan has leveraged his position to advance a set of priorities based on conservative theology, anti-reproductive rights and anti-gay rights in particular. He has been a vocal and visible opponent of comprehensive health care access and marriage equality, arguing, essentially, that the religious freedom operates at the level of institutions and trumps civil rights law. His position as Cardinal gains him not only the ear of the Catholic laity but of the White House. Last November, for example, a meeting between Dolan and Obama was described as “one among many meetings with officials from the Catholic Church and the administration.”

In this fight, Dolan has had a strong ally in Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. Like Dolan, Donohue appears more concerned with protecting the Catholic Church than past and future abuse victims. In March, Donohue said that the Catholic Church had been too easy on victims, “too quick to write a check,” and should instead “fight them one by one.” In 2011, Dolan thanked Donohue for a press release that, among other things, called SNAP a “phony victims group.” In January he scorned a gathering of victims and advocates in Boston as “the professional victims lobby” and “a pitiful bunch of malcontents.”

Like Dolan, Donohue is a staunch Vatican loyalist, who has a played a fierce and vocal role in what are being called the Vagina Wars. He launched a boycott of the Jon Stewart Show after Stewart displayed an image of a manger blocking a vagina that the League called hate speech. Delta Airlines compliantly pulled their advertising. Donohue’s professions of horror at the image are matched only by the “horror” that Dolan expressed at the “strangling nature” of Obama’s narrow contraceptive exemption for Catholic Churches. But will the Vagina Wars be sufficient distraction from Dolan’s history of enabling abusers? That remains to be seen. In a 2011 60 Minutes interview Dolan himself said that the abuse scandal needs to haunt the church for some time to come. Perhaps he should watch what he asks for.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two