When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
HOUSE OF PEDOPHILE PRIESTS - THE MOVEMENT TO BAN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH FROM AMERICA
IS CATHOLICISM HISTORICALLY THE GREATEST EVIL IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION?
These are stormy times for the Catholic Church in North America. First, Theodore McCarrick, whose resignation as cardinal Pope Francis accepted in July. Then the Pennsylvania grand jury report, which is having the effects of the detonation of an atomic bomb with its subsequent devastating shockwave and radioactive fallout. As a Catholic, I would be lying if I said the mind-blowing revelations over the extent and the creepy deep-rootedness of sexual promiscuity and perversity in the clergy have not taken a toll on my trust in the Church. As many of us are still reeling from the shock and the disgust, rage and exasperation mount.
Nevertheless, when the ones among us with the strongest stomach felt still optimistic enough to think the Church would, eventually, be forced to put her foot down once and for all regarding the overt disregard (within her own ranks) for what Catholic doctrine prescribes on sexuality, this happened.
The statement the pope had the gall to release was so lukewarm and insipid that the words "homosexuality" and "bishops" are nowhere to be found. Yet, to quote a LifeSiteNews column (analogous observations have been often made on several other occasions):
Statistics from the Pennsylvania grand jury report back this ... : Nearly three-quarters of the offending priests were homosexual; over three-quarters of the abusive priests were pederasts and of those, one fifth (21%) chose adolescent girls as their victims while four-fifths (79%) chose adolescent boys.
Last week Brad Miner, Senior Editor of The Catholic Thing, and attorney and international child rights advocate Liz Yore made it clear on EWTN's The World Over that the Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis is directly linked to homosexuality. "Largely it’s not a pedophile crisis," Yore said. "We know from the John Jay report, 81-percent of the victims were males, mostly teens. And we know because our subclass of predators are all male, this is a male-on-male crime, and primarily with teens between the ages of 14 to 17. Those are the victims."
Miner agreed: "It's a homosexual problem. The numbers show that."
Say what you will about this pope, but he definitely got his nerve purging his message to a shell-shocked American Catholic community of anything that could vaguely comfort her amid this storm. His holiness's mind-numbing letter can be read at the same link.
Facts are notoriously stark, and numbers don't lie: that homosexuality at all levels of the hierarchy is a huge part of the problem is not debatable anymore. But that those very people whom the Church herself appointed shepherds of the flock have not only partaken in that orgy of depravity the grand jury report unveiled, but actively operated to cover it up – or decided to look the other way – is repugnant. And to complete silence from the pope now.
The pope of "tenderness" and "mercy." The pope who loves talking in a offhand way – it's easier to tweak the Church teachings he doesn't like that way – couldn't bring himself to sound a bit less distant, less formal, less...curial.
But why? Why on Earth did he do that? Why is he so reluctant to tell it like it is?
Not to interrupt the process that has been morphing the very constituency of the clergy into bringing homosexuality within the bounds of the Catholic doctrine, obviously.
It takes no straining of the facts to say homosexuality is now bound for doctrinal acceptance – and soon, celebration. It's not only that hardly a day passes by without a report of this or that parish hosting a retreat for our "gay brothers and lesbian sisters," oppressed by the heartlessness of the Catholic doctrine. Or of this priest or that cardinal weighing in on same-sex "marriage," or blessing a homosexual couple. Or of that bishop remarking on the positive elements in a same-sex union. Or of "Father" James Martin and another of those "bridges" he wants to build, instead of exhorting the homosexuals to trust the Church and Catholic doctrine because "my yoke is easy, and my burden light" (Matthew 11:30). Countless other LGBT outreach initiatives could be mentioned, already embarked upon and in the making, with barely a bishop voicing any complaint or – dream on – stepping up to protect the faith of his flock from being contaminated or watered down.
Now we are at the point where no less a figure than the pope minces words in a pathetic effort to deflect attention from the evident root causes of the issue. The raison d'être for such a state of things can only be that too many within the Church – too many priests, bishops, cardinals – have a vested interest in exiling virtue of chastity to the distant and evanescent realm of Catholic recommended-but-not-compulsory precepts, and in replacing it with sexual nihilism – especially in its homosexual variant. It would have been too much, after all, to expect decades and decades of homosexual ordinations since the post-conciliar and post-sexual revolution doctrinal turmoil not to have any consequences at all.
At this point, all we faithful, infuriated, and disgusted Catholics can do is cope with the fact that this situation is not going to change anytime soon. The message couldn't be clearer: "homosexuality's got nothing to do with it" – as well as Islam had nothing to do with it and guns (and nothing else) had everything to do with it. "Get over it."
Many will get over it – and leave the Church in droves.
Archbishop calls on Pope to resign over cover-up of sexual abuse
By Peter Symonds 27 August 2018
In a vitriolic 11-page letter released over the weekend, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano alleged that Pope Francis was responsible for covering up allegations of sexual abuse by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and issued an unprecedented call for the pope to resign. McCarrick was removed as archbishop of Washington D.C. in June over claims that he assaulted a teenage altar boy while a parish priest 40 years ago.
The explosive contents of Vigano’s letter will only intensify the deep crisis in the Roman Catholic Church over the widespread sexual abuse of minors by priests over decades around the world and the ongoing systematic cover-up of these crimes by the church hierarchy. According to the letter, Pope Francis, who was installed in the top post in 2013 in a desperate bid to give the church a more compassionate and caring face, along with a long list of top church officials, was complicit in this criminal conspiracy.
Pope Frances has just completed a visit to Ireland where he performed what has become a standard, dishonest ritual: meeting privately with a select group of sexual abuse victims and asking for “forgiveness” as he presided over a mass on Sunday. On the same day, however, thousands of people protested against the papal visit in centre of Dublin with slogans such as “the Pope is protecting paedophiles” and “Hey Pope Francis you’re outta chances.”
The author and abuse victim Colm O’Gorman, who organised the protest, told reporters that the pope had apologised and met survivors but evaded Vatican responsibility for crimes and cover-ups. “I think [his visit] has made it worse,” he said.
Under siege over allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in a number of countries, Pope Francis wrote a papal letter to all Catholics last week asked them all to help end “this culture of death” and vowing that there would be no more cover-ups. His response to Vigano’s letter will only further undermine his standing and that of the Catholic Church. Speaking on his return flight from Dublin to Rome, he dismissed the document, declaring he would “not say a word” about its claims and simply telling reporters “judge it for yourselves.”
Vigano’s letter is certainly a bitter, subjective document that highlights the backbiting and intense factional feuding inside the Catholic Church that reaches to the very top of the hierarchy. Vigano, who served as papal nuncio or Vatican ambassador to the United States from 2011 to 2016, belongs to the so-called conservative wing that has been deeply critical of the “liberal” Pope Francis. He makes no attempt to conceal his homophobia and deep-seated hostility to any attempt to ease the church’s reactionary injunctions against homosexuality.
The letter itself was clearly timed to embarrass Pope Francis while he was visiting Ireland and signalled the start of a public campaign to undermine and remove him. It was published simultaneously by Catholic conservative mouthpieces and was immediately followed by supportive statements from fellow conservatives. Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas declared that Vigano’s allegations were credible and instructed that the statement be distributed at all church services and through social media.
There is absolutely nothing progressive in any of the factions of the Roman Catholic Church—a wealthy, powerful institution of the ruling classes that has been a bulwark of political reaction down through the centuries. Pope Francis, who postures as a friend of the poor and hypocritically comments on social inequality, was notorious as former Archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Bergoglio for his collaboration with the murderous Argentinian military junta and its crimes between 1976 and 1983.
While Pope Francis continues to make empty gestures toward the many thousands of young victims of sexual abuse at the hands of priests and bishops, he has steadfastly refused to make any formal admission of responsibility on the part of the Catholic Church. Such a statement would open the way for legal suits and demands for sizeable compensation payments.
Vigano’s posturing as the moral guardian of the Catholic Church is likewise riddled with hypocrisy. The letter is clearly targeted at Pope Francis and his “liberal” allies but in doing so Vigano traces a history of cover-up and deceit concerning allegations of sexual abuse that, by his account, stretches back until at least 2000. Vigano claims that his letters to Rome and those of two of his predecessors concerning “Archbishop McCarrick’s gravely immoral behaviour” were ignored by the Vatican.
Vigano’s chief accusation against Pope Francis was that he lifted the secret sanctions imposed on McCarrick by the previous Pope Benedict, which banned him from travel, celebrating mass and public meetings, and obligating him to follow “a life of prayer and penance.” Vigano pointedly exonerates the conservative Benedict and apparently believes that it is legitimate to sweep allegations of sexual abuse under the carpet by issuing a secret papal injunction.
Nor does Vigano try to explain why, given that he has known about the accusations for more than a decade, he has remained silent and only chooses to make the allegations public now. In reality, the entire institution is responsible for the systematic cover-up in defence of the wealth and tattered prestige of the church. The pope’s refusal to “say a word” about Vigano’s accusations is symptomatic of the stance of the institution as a whole—stonewalling in the hope the repercussions of its crimes will simply go away.
The determination of the Catholic Church to cover-up wholesale crimes of sexual abuse is a warning that there is no line it will not cross. Pope Francis’s collaboration with the Argentine junta and its murder of an estimated 30,000 workers, students, intellectuals and others is matched by the church’s backing for Franco’s fascist dictatorship in Spain and its cooperation with the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
As the political establishment lurches towards authoritarian rule in country and after country around the world, the Catholic Church will not be found on the side of the poor and oppressed but rather backing the wealthy elites and their governments in the vicious suppression of working people.
Former Vatican Official Corroborates Allegations Against Pope Francis
A monsignor who worked at the apostolic nunciature to the United States has corroborated an explosive report accusing Pope Francis of rehabilitating Cardinal Theodore McCarrick despite knowing of his record of homosexual abuse of priests and seminarians.
Contacted by the Catholic News Agency (CNA), Monsignor Jean-François Lantheaume, the former first counselor at the apostolic nunciature in Washington D.C., declined to give an interview, but affirmed the veracity of the report by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.
“Viganò said the truth. That’s all,” he wrote to CNA.
In a written 11-page “testimony” published Saturday, the Vatican’s former ambassador to the United States said that Pope Francis had reinstating Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to a position of prominence despite direct knowledge of McCarrick’s sexual abuse.
Archbishop Viganò alleged that Pope Benedict XVI had imposed “canonical sanctions” on Cardinal McCarrick in 2009-2010 forbidding him from traveling, celebrating Mass in public, or participating in public meetings, but that Pope Francis later lifted these sanctions and made McCarrick a close personal advisor.
Now that “the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy,” he wrote, “my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths regarding the heart-breaking case of the Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, D.C., Theodore McCarrick, which I came to know in the course of [my] duties.”
In his testimony, Viganò makes reference to Monsignor Lantheaume as having told him of the “stormy” meeting between then-nuncio Archbishop Pietro Sambi and Cardinal McCarrick in which Sambi informed McCarrick of the sanctions that had been imposed by Pope Benedict.
“Monsignor Jean-François Lantheaume, then first Counsellor of the Nunciature in Washington and Chargé d’Affaires ad interim after the unexpected death of Nuncio Sambi in Baltimore, told me when I arrived in Washington — and he is ready to testify to it — about a stormy conversation, lasting over an hour, that Nuncio Sambi had with Cardinal McCarrick whom he had summoned to the Nunciature. Monsignor Lantheaume told me that ‘the Nuncio’s voice could be heard all the way out in the corridor.’”
Archbishop Viganò replaced Sambi as nuncio to the United States in 2011, at which time he claims to have been informed of the McCarrick situation by Lantheaume.
Lantheaume has now left the Vatican diplomatic corps and serves in priestly ministry in France, CNA reported.
In his testimony, Viganò stated that he personally informed the pope of McCarrick’s abuse on June 23, 2013 and yet Francis “continued to cover for him.”
“Holy Father, I don’t know if you know Cardinal McCarrick, but if you ask the Congregation for Bishops there is a dossier this thick about him,” Viganò claims to have told the pope. “He corrupted generations of seminarians and priests and Pope Benedict ordered him to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance.”
Viganò claimed that Pope Francis “did not take into account the sanctions that Pope Benedict had imposed on him and made him his trusted counselor along with Maradiaga,” the latter being Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, who has been embroiled in scandals of both sexual and financial nature over the past months.
Pope on sex abuse: “We showed no care for the little ones”
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis has issued a letter to Catholics around the world condemning the “crime” of priestly sexual abuse and cover-up and demanding accountability, in response to new revelations in the United States of decades of misconduct by the Catholic Church.
Francis begged forgiveness for the pain suffered by victims and said lay Catholics must be involved in any effort to root out abuse and cover-up. He blasted the self-referential clerical culture that has been blamed for the abuse crisis, with church leaders more concerned for their reputation than the safety of children.
Francis wrote: “We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.”
The Vatican issued the letter Monday, ahead of Francis’ trip this weekend to Ireland that is expected to be dominated by the abuse crisis.
Nolte: Vatican ‘No Comment’ About Hundreds of Predator Priests Abusing 1,000 Children
The Vatican had “no comment” when asked about hundreds of Pennsylvania priests sexually abusing a thousand children.
Where is Pope Francis?
Where is the moral leader of the Catholic Church?
Where is the compassionate, accessible Wheelchair Pope, the Energizer Bunny Pope, the Cynicism-Busting Pope who has always been so eager to comment on every hot button issue, from Global Warming to immigration to homosexuality?
I know where Francis is not. He is not where he should be, in Pennsylvania overseeing a revolutionary and historic house cleaning of a satanic cancer that infects his Church, a 70-year-old cancer of priests and bishops and cardinals who are guilty of either engaging in an organized cabal to rape little boys and girls, or in covering up those unspeakable crimes.
Worse still, not only is Francis not in Pennsylvania personally disinfecting his Church, all we are hearing from the Vatican, the same Vatican that knew well in advance this utterly damning grand jury report was coming out, is “no comment.”
What we have here is a painfully detailed report using on the record testimony and — my God — the Church’s own secret archives, to lay out a painfully detailed case against hundreds of priests who abused and raped some 1,000 children over 70 years — a highly organized pedophile ring allowed to operate for seven decades.
Moreover, the cover up, the enabling of these child rapists goes all the way to the Vatican itself.
What the Vatican is dealing with here goes beyond even the original child abuse scandal that threatened to swamp the Church some 15 years ago. While the first scandal was its own kind of horror show, we were assured this was behind us, the truth had been fully revealed, the wrongdoers punished, the victims made as whole as possible, the page turned.
Now we are learning this is not even close to the truth, that in just one of our 50 states, the cover up and lies marched on to protect an unspeakable evil.
And where is Francis?
Why isn’t he in Pennsylvania personally thanking this grand jury, personally thanking Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, and calling on the attorney generals in all 50 states to launch similar investigations with the Pope’s personal assurance they will have the full cooperation of the Church?
You want to know what should chill every Catholic to the marrow? If this is happening here in America, a country with a legitimate criminal justice system and free press, what horrors are being unleashed in third world countries? In corrupt countries?
As a conservative Catholic (I joined the Church in 2008 believing the sex scandal had been eradicated), I have gone out of my way not to beat up Francis. Even though I believe he is wrong about a lot of things, something I admire about the Catholic Church is the intellectual diversity within. That debate is healthy. So this is not me exploiting the opportunity to bash our left-wing Pope, a man whose photo sits on my fireplace mantle. Rather, this is a practicing Catholic who joined the Church as a 42-year-old man with an open heart, who is just as angry and disappointed in St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and who fears the Church is beyond redemption.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
Hundreds of ‘Predator Priests’ Exposed in PA Grand Jury Sex Abuse Report
At least 1,000 children were molested by hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in six Pennsylvania dioceses, as senior church officials took steps to cover it up, according to a landmark grand jury report released Tuesday.
The grand jury report, which states in excess of 300 clergy committed abuse over a period of decades from the mid-1950s, the “real number” of abused children could be “in the thousands,” since numerous records were either lost or victims were afraid to come forward. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced the two-year investigation found a systematic cover-up by senior church officials in both the Keystone State and the Vatican.
“The cover-up was sophisticated. And all the while, shockingly, church leadership kept records of the abuse and the cover-up,” said Shapiro at a press conference in Harrisburg. “These documents, from the dioceses’ own ‘Secret Archives,’ formed the backbone of this investigation.”
One Pennsylvania priest sexually abused five sisters from the same family over a period of a decade. The youngest of the girls was just 18-months-old, according to the report. In another case, a priest raped and impregnated a girl, later arranging for the fetus to be aborted.
“The grand jury detailed that the coverups by the church served a key purpose – the longer they covered up abuses, the less chance that law enforcement could prosecute predator priests because the statute of limitations would run out,” said Shapiro.
Among other explosive findings, the report faulted Cardinal Donald Wuerl, a former longtime bishop of Pittsburgh who now leads the Washington archdiocese, for what it said was his role in the concealment of clergy sexual abuse. Wuerl, one of the highest-profile cardinals in the United States, released a statement Tuesday that said he had “acted with diligence, with concern for the victims and to prevent future acts of abuse.”
The president of the US Bishops Conf, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, released a statement immediately after the report was released. "As a body of bishops, we are shamed by and sorry for the sins and omissions by Catholic priests and Catholic bishops," he said. pic.twitter.com/ImADgAodlB
Cardinal Donald Wuerl of DC, who was bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988-2006 and whose actions as bishop are chronicled in the report, also released a statement, calling sexual abuse of children "a terrible tragedy" and defending his own record. pic.twitter.com/0OoywP1NUW
The grand jury scrutinized abuse allegations in dioceses that minister to more than half the state’s 3.2 million Catholics. Its report echoed the findings of many earlier church investigations around the country in its description of widespread sexual abuse by clergy and church officials’ concealment of it. Most of the victims were boys, but girls were abused, too, the report said. The abuse ranged from groping and masturbation to anal, oral, and vaginal rape.
“Church officials routinely and purposefully described the abuse as horseplay and wrestling and inappropriate conduct. It was none of those things. It was child sexual abuse, including rape,” the Pennsylvania Attorney General said.
The panel concluded that a succession of Catholic bishops and other diocesan leaders tried to shield the church from bad publicity and financial liability by covering up abuse, failing to report accused clergy to police and discouraging victims from going to law enforcement.
The document comes at a time of renewed scrutiny and fresh scandal at the highest levels of the U.S. Catholic Church. Pope Francis stripped 88-year-old Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of his title and ordered him to a lifetime of prayer and penance amid allegations that McCarrick had for years sexually abused boys and had sexual misconduct with adult seminarians.
Wuerl has come under harsh criticism over his response to the McCarrick scandal, with some commentators questioning his claims of surprise and ignorance over allegations that McCarrick molested and harassed young seminarians. Wuerl replaced McCarrick as Washington’s archbishop after McCarrick retired in 2006.
The Pennsylvania grand jury, convened by the state attorney general’s office in 2016, heard from dozens of witnesses and reviewed more than a half-million pages of internal documents from the Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and Scranton dioceses.
A group of current and former clergy named in the report went to court to prevent its release, arguing it violated their constitutional rights to reputation and due process of law. The state Supreme Court said the public had a right to see it, but ruled the names of priests and others who objected to the findings would be blacked out pending a September hearing on their claims. The identities of those clergy members remain under court seal.
A couple of dioceses decided to strip the accused of their anonymity ahead of the report and released the names of clergy members who were accused of sexual misconduct. On Friday, the bishop of Pittsburgh’s diocese said a few priests named in the report are still in ministry because the diocese determined allegations against them were unsubstantiated.
However, the grand jury’s work won’t result in justice for the vast majority of those who say they were molested by priests as children. While the probe yielded charges against two clergymen — including a priest who has since pleaded guilty, and another who allegedly forced his accuser to say confession after each sex assault — the other priests identified as perpetrators are either dead or will avoid arrest because their alleged crimes are too old to prosecute under state law.
“We are sick over all the crimes that will go unpunished and uncompensated,” the grand jury said. “We are going to name their names, and describe what they did — both the sex offenders and those who concealed them.”
“[W]e are going to make our recommendations for how the laws should change so that maybe no one will have to conduct another inquiry like this one,” the grand jury added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
U.S. Bishops: ‘We Are Shamed’ by Sins, Omissions of Catholic Priests, Bishops
The leadership of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) issued a statement Tuesday in response to a report by the Pennsylvania grand jury on clerical sex abuse.
“The report of the Pennsylvania grand jury again illustrates the pain of those who have been victims of the crime of sexual abuse by individual members of our clergy, and by those who shielded abusers and so facilitated an evil that continued for years or even decades,” said Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of the USCCB, and Bishop Timothy L. Doherty of Lafayette in a joint statement.
The 884-page grand jury report lists the names of 300 priests accused of sexual abuse over the past 70 years, many of whom are no longer alive, and alleges a systematic cover-up by members of the Church hierarchy. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said it was “the largest, most comprehensive report into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church ever produced in the United States.”
A prior comprehensive investigation into clergy sex abuse resulted in the 2004 John Jay report, which found that over 80 percent of abuse was committed against male victims, which has been used to underscore the predominantly homosexual nature of the clerical abuse crisis.
In its 2011 follow-up report, the John Jay College Research Team found that same-sex sexual behavior in the seminary “was significantly related to the increased likelihood of a male child victim.”
In Tuesday’s statement, the bishops thanked the victims of sexual abuse for coming forward with their testimony.
“We are grateful for the courage of the people who aided the investigation by sharing their personal stories of abuse,” it reads. “As a body of bishops, we are shamed by and sorry for the sins and omissions by Catholic priests and Catholic bishops,” it says.
The bishops say they are “profoundly saddened each time we hear about the harm caused as a result of abuse, at the hands of a clergyman of any rank,” while also promising “to offer avenues to healing for those who have been abused” as well as working resolutely “so that such abuse cannot happen.”
“We pledge to maintain transparency and to provide for the permanent removal of offenders from ministry and to maintain safe environments for everyone,” the bishops said.
“We pray that all survivors of sexual abuse find healing, comfort and strength” from God, the bishops said while pledging “to continue to restore trust through accompaniment, communion, accountability and justice.”
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter .
Catholic Church Covered Up Child Abuse By 301 Priests In Pennsylvania: Report
The grand jury identified more than 1,000 sexual abuse victims over seven decades — and suspects there may be many more.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro released an 884-page report on sexual abuse in six Roman Catholic dioceses of the state on Tuesday. He was flanked by victims of the abuse at a news conference announcing the release.
Pennsylvania’s attorney general released on Tuesday the long-awaited results of a damning grand jury investigation into how six Roman Catholic dioceses in the state covered up sexual abuse by 301 “predator priests” over 70 years.
The 884-page report is the largest, most comprehensive investigation on the church’s sex abuse scandal by a U.S. state, according to Attorney General Josh Shapiro. The grand jury identified over 1,000 victimsin the six dioceses examined in the report: Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton. But the jurors suspected the real number of victims could be much higher.
Shapiro said the report, which was delayed for months while individuals named in it raised legal challenges over what portions should be redacted, showed that senior church leaders in these dioceses and even at the Vatican knew abuse was occurring but systematically covered it up.
“The pattern was abuse, deny and cover up,” Shapiro said during a news conference Tuesday.
Listen to Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s news conference with victims below.
Most of the victims identified in the report were boys, but some were girls. The abuse documented included groping, being made to masturbate with assailants, and being raped orally, vaginally or anally.
The jurors accused Catholic Church leaders in the state of working hard to avoid public scandal and protect abusers. The grand jury found that victims were “brushed aside, in every part of the state, by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institutions above all.”
“Church officials routinely and purposefully described the abuse as horseplay and wrestling and inappropriate conduct. It was none of those things. It was child sexual abuse, including rape,” Shapiro said.
Matt Haverstick, an attorney representing the dioceses of Harrisburg and Greensburg, insisted in a statement that the Catholic Church discussed in the grand jury report no longer exists.
“The Dioceses I’ve gotten to know so well over the past two years are incredibly sorry for the harm to these survivors,” Haverstick said. “Today’s Church has listened and learned from its mistakes, and its reforms over the past two decades keep children safe.”
At the end of their report, jurors included hundreds of pages of previously hidden church documents that illustrate how officials handled reports of abuse. The release also included response statements from the six dioceses. Some of the individuals named in the report included their own rebuttals of the claims made by the grand jury.
In one egregious case in the Diocese of Scranton, a priest impregnated a young girl and then arranged an abortion, the report reads. The priest resigned in 1986 and was sent to a Catholic psychiatric treatment center. One year later, in 1987, he was reassigned to another Pennsylvania parish. In 1989, the victim received a settlement from the diocese and, in exchange, was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement. Meanwhile, the priest continued in active ministry until 2002.
In the Diocese of Allentown, the report claims a priest who freely admitted to sexually molesting a boy was allowed to continue in ministry for several years after his confession. The diocese concluded at the time that “the experience will not necessarily be a horrendous trauma” for the victim.
In the Diocese of Pittsburgh, church officials dismissed a report that a priest had abused a 15-year-old girl, claiming the girl had “literally seduced” him into a relationship.
Tim Lennon, president of the Survivors Network of those Abused By Priests, told HuffPost he was saddened and angered by the report. He believes it proves the church hierarchy was complicit in the abuse. They knew abuse was happening and didn’t work hard enough to discipline abusers, he said, which in turn enabled more abuse to happen over the years.
“They knew for years if not decades of this vile corruption. Those in the church hierarchy went to great lengths to hide and dismiss the suffering of survivors,” Lennon told HuffPost. “How many children were raped and sexually abused because the church authorities covered up sexual abuse and did nothing?”
During the investigation, which began in July 2016, the grand jury heard from dozens of witnesses and reviewed over 500,000 pages of documents from diocesan archives. The probe led to the arrests of two priests on child sexual abuse charges.
However, most of the priests identified in the report may never be brought to justice. Shapiro said most of the accused either are dead or the alleged crimes are too old to prosecute.
The grand jury report faced heated, behind-the-scenes challenges on its road to publication. A group of individuals named but not indicted in it argued that their right to due process would be violated if they couldn’t hold hearings to challenge parts of the grand jury report and try to protect their reputations. In June, the state’s Supreme Court decided to block the report’s publication.
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Shapiro fought the decision ― at one point appealing to Pope Francis to step in and persuade the individuals to drop their efforts to block the report. Seven news organizations also petitioned the state Supreme Court to try to force the report’s release ― including the Associated Press, Telemundo Mid-Atlantic, NBC subsidiaries, and several Pennsylvania-based publications.
In the end, the report was published with the names of some Catholic clergy redacted. The state Supreme Court plans to consider oral arguments on those individuals’ claims in September, the AP reports.
JESSICA KOURKOUNIS/GETTY IMAGES
Shapiro said most of the accused in the report either are dead or the alleged crimes are too old to prosecute.
Previous investigations have uncovered widespread clergy sexual abuse in the state’s other two dioceses, Philadelphia and Altoona-Johnstown.
Smaller states, including Maine and New Hampshire, have issued reports on the extent of the Roman Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal. But Pennsylvania is the largest state to date that has conducted such an investigation.
In April, the Erie diocese tried to get ahead of the report by releasing the names of 51 former priests and lay leaders who were credibly accused of sexual misconduct, ranging from providing pornography to minors to sexual assault.
Erie’s Bishop Lawrence Persico said in a statement that it was “shocking to read the graphic details” in the grand jury report. In a letter that was read aloud in all 97 parishes of the 13-county diocese on Sunday, the bishop said it was clear that church leaders failed to adequately address the problem.
“The most important thing I want to do at this moment is to express my sorrow to the victims of sexual abuse that occurred within the Diocese of Erie,” Persico wrote in the letter. “As the grand jury report demonstrates, they have experienced cruel behavior by the very individuals who should have had the greatest interest in protecting them.”
MARK SCOLFORO/AP
Harrisburg Bishop Ronald Gainer holds a news conference about child sexual abuse by clergy on Aug. 1, 2018.
The Harrisburg diocese followed Erie’s example in August, when it released a list of 71 priests and other members of the church who had been accused of sex abuse. The diocese also removed the names of accused bishops from its church buildings.
On Friday, Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik said a few priests named in the report were still in ministry. He said diocesan investigations had concluded that those allegations were unsubstantiated.
Currently, Pennsylvania law states that adults in their 30s and older who were abused as children can’t sue for damages. Criminal charges can’t be filed after the alleged victim turns 50.
The grand jury had four recommendations moving forward ― removing the criminal statute of limitations, establishing a temporary window for victims older than 30 to sue the dioceses, tightening laws about mandatory reporting, and making sure confidentiality agreements don’t give either party the right to decline to cooperate with criminal investigations.
The church has opposed moves to change the statute of limitations, claiming it would be financially crippling to Pennsylvania’s Catholic schools and parishes. Fifteen U.S. Catholic dioceses or archdioceses have filed for bankruptcy protection because of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, according to the watchdog group BishopAccountability.org.
Lennon applauded Shapiro’s courage in empaneling a grand jury. But he said the work of exposing sexual abuse within the Catholic Church is far from over.
“We see that when civil society investigates we get the truth,” Lennon said. “There must be a grand jury in every state.”
This story has been updated with more details from the report.
HOMOSEXUALITY DOES NOT EQUATE TO PEDOPHILIA!
HYPOCRISY DOES EQUATE TO CATHOLICISM!
Cardinal Burke: ‘Very Grave Problem of Homosexual Culture in the Church’
Cardinal Raymond Burke has called for “open recognition” of the Catholic church’s homosexual culture in light of recent revelations of sexual abuse.
“I believe that there needs to be an open recognition that we have a very grave problem of a homosexual culture in the Church,” Burke said in an interview Thursday, “especially among the clergy and the hierarchy, that needs to be addressed honestly and efficaciously.”
The former head of the church’s equivalent of the Supreme Court said it was already “clear after the studies following the 2002 sexual abuse crisis that most of the acts of abuse were in fact homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men.”
“There was a studied attempt to either overlook or to deny this,” he said, referring to the mainstream media cover-up of the homosexual nature of the abuse as well as such denial within the church itself.
“Now it seems clear in light of these recent terrible scandals that indeed there is a homosexual culture, not only among the clergy but even within the hierarchy, which needs to be purified at the root,” Burke said.
The cardinal’s analysis of the situation coincides with another report, also released on Thursday, by the president of the Catholic League, Bill Donohue.
In his report, Mr. Donohue, who is a trained sociologist, decried the ongoing “media cover-up of the role played by gay molesters” in the church.
Referring to the 2004 John Jay study on the sexual abuse crisis in the United States, Donohue notes that “81 percent of the victims were male, 78 percent of whom were postpubescent.” Since all of the abusers were male and most of the victims were postpubescent males, “that is a problem called homosexuality,” Donohue stated.
Despite the media’s insistence on referring to a pedophilia crisis, the report revealed that “less than five percent” of the cases involved pedophilia, Donohue said, and studies done in subsequent years report approximately the same ratio.
“It’s been a homosexual scandal all along,” he said.
“No amount of compassion for those who have been violated by priests should ever be done at the expense of telling the truth, no matter how unpopular it may sound. To do otherwise is cowardly, shameful, and unjust,” he said.
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Theologians, Lay Leaders Call for ‘Collective Resignation’ of U.S. Bishops
More than 700 educators and Catholic lay leaders have written an open letter urging the United States bishops to tender their collective resignation to Pope Francis in the wake of a string of scandals related to clerical sex abuse.
The letter references a recent Pennsylvania grand jury report that alleges not only clerical sexual abuse but also “systematic cover-ups by bishops and others in positions of power.”
The report came hard on the heels of “revelations of decades of sexual predation by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and in the long shadow of the sexual abuse crisis in Boston and beyond,” the letter states.
The centerpiece of the open letter is the following line: “Today, we call on the Catholic Bishops of the United States to prayerfully and genuinely consider submitting to Pope Francis their collective resignation as a public act of repentance and lamentation before God and God’s People.”
In May, the bishops of Chile resigned en masse following a three-day meeting with Pope Francis in the Vatican to discuss the sex abuse crisis that had shaken the church in that country.
In a written statement, the bishops said that their joint decision to hand in their resignations meant that “the Holy Father can freely decide on what to do with each of us.” On that occasion, Pope Francis ultimately accepted three out of 34 resignations.
The letter declares:
After years of suppressed truth, the unreserved decisiveness of the Chilean bishops’ resignations communicated to the faithful a message that Catholics in the United States have yet to hear, with an urgency we have yet to witness: We have caused this devastation. We have allowed it to persist. We submit ourselves to judgment in recompense for what we have done and failed to do.”
The letter writers justify the amplitude of their proposal by pointing to the momentous nature of the problem.
“The catastrophic scale and historical magnitude of the abuse makes clear that this is not a case of ‘a few bad apples’ but rather a radical systemic injustice manifested at every level of the Church,” they state.
The wounds of systemic sin “are not healed through statements, internal investigations, or public relations campaigns but rather through collective accountability, transparency, and truth-telling,” they add.
The authors further embrace proposals for specific reforms, including “external investigations of every ecclesiastical province in the United States akin to the one just completed in Pennsylvania.”
At the same time, other groups such as the Catholic League, while sharing an abhorrence for the crime of clerical abuse, have also pointed out the intentionally incendiary language of the grand jury report, as well as the anti-Catholic animus that seems to have motivated it.
The report is not crafted in the measured and objective tones one would expect in such a document, but seems designed to stir up anger and revulsion.
In a lengthy analysis of the report, Catholic League President Bill Donohue corrected what he saw as the errors contained in the report or propagated by the media in their interpretations of it.
He noted that the grand jury’s preliminary report was not a finding of guilt, but a list of unsubstantiated accusations that were never verified. In other words, it reads more as the statement of the prosecution without any possibility of defense.
In the 2004 report by the John Jay College for Criminal Justice, Donohue notes, only half the number of those “credibly accused” were actually substantiated.
“Importantly, in almost all cases, the accused named in the report was never afforded the right to rebut the charges. That is because the report was investigative, not evidentiary, though the report’s summary suggests that it is authoritative,” Donohue stated.
Moreover, he noted, the report covers accusations extending back to World War II, and “almost all the accused are either dead or have been thrown out of the priesthood.”
Mr. Donohue also takes issue with a targeted investigation of the Catholic Church when no such investigation is made into other institutions where adults regularly interact with young people, in which there is a comparable or even superior probability of sexual abuse.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro and his predecessor, Kathleen Kane (who is now in prison), “have never sought to shame imams, ministers, or rabbis—they just want to shame priests,” Donohue said. “Nor will they conduct a probe of psychologists, psychiatrists, camp counselors, coaches, guidance counselors, or any other segment of society where adults routinely interact with minors.”
“No amount of compassion for those who have been violated by priests should ever be done at the expense of telling the truth, no matter how unpopular it may sound. To do otherwise is cowardly, shameful, and unjust,” Donohue said.
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Pennsylvania Bishop Says Prelates Involved in Sex Abuse Cover-Up Should Resign
Pennsylvania Bishop Lawrence T. Persico has called for “complete transparency” in investigating the latest clerical sex abuse scandals, noting late last week that regaining lost trust entails ousting bishops who failed to deal effectively with abuse.
In an interview with Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) on August 16, Persico, the Bishop of Erie, PA, said that bishops can talk all they like about transparency and truth, “but much is going to depend upon our deeds” and how “we carry that transparency out” moving forward.
“That’s going to be key to all of this and we have to show that we mean what we’re saying,” he said.
During the interview, EWTN reporter Jason Calvi asked Persico whether bishops who knew about or covered up abuse ought to resign.
“I think they should,” the bishop answered. “I think we need complete transparency if we’re going to get the trust of the people back. We have to be able to demonstrate it.”
The Erie diocese was one of the six Pennsylvania dioceses investigated in the grand jury report alleging over 1000 credible cases of clerical sex abuse over a period of some 70 years.
Nearly all of the cases in the report were too old for charges to be filed and a good number of the 301 priests, deacons, and lay people named are either dead or no longer in ministry. But Catholic laity have been demanding accountability for those involved in covering up the abuse. As Breitbart News reported, the Pennsylvania grand jury report faulted Cardinal Donald Wuerl, a former longtime bishop of Pittsburgh who now leads the Washington archdiocese, for what it said was his role in the concealment of clergy sexual abuse.
“We need this transparency and we also need action, so that if there were other bishops or leaders that were negligent, then they need to be removed because the more we cover up, the less credibility we have,” Bishop Persico said.
The bishop noted that there has been significantly less abuse since 2002, when the first sex abuse crisis struck and the bishops implemented a series of measures meant to safeguard the young, but added that “we still have to be on guard.”
On Monday, Pope Francis issued a letter to “the people of God” recognizing the recent sex abuse scandals and promising further efforts “to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening” and “to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated.”
Nonetheless, the pope nowhere even mentions the name “bishop” in the entire 2,000-word letter and fails to propose that those responsible for the present situation should be held to any accountability.
He also chose not to address the root causes of the abuse and the homosexual nature of the vast majority of the cases.
This past week, a number of prelates, priests, and laypeople have insisted on the need for straightforward and direct recognition of the extensive “homosexual subculture” that currently exists among bishops and clergy and that lies at the root of the abuse crisis.
In his letter, Pope Francis sidesteps the question of homosexuality in the clergy, preferring to speak generically about solidarity and the general need for prayer and penance in the Church.
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Culture Warrior Morse: Weinstein and Archbishop McCarrick Both Believed They Were ‘Entitled’ to Sex
The founder of the Ruth Institute, a pro-family nonprofit that teaches about the “poisonous consequences” of the Sexual Revolution, says disgraced Hollywood magnate Harvey Weinstein and Archbishop Theodore McCarrick have both lived by the “sexual revolutionary creed.”
Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D. writes at National Catholic Register that it is irrelevant that Weinstein prefers female sexual partners and McCarrick prefers male. What they have in common, she asserts, is they are both “powerful men who believed they were entitled to use people sexually.”
In May, Weinstein was arrested and charged with rape and sex crimes some eight months after his once-powerful career crashed as it also triggered sexual assault accusations across industries and the global #MeToo movement.
McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, DC, was removed from ministry following allegations he sexually abused boys and engaged in sexual misconduct with seminarians.
Morse contends the root cause of the sexual abuse problems of both men is the same:
Men like Archbishop McCarrick and Weinstein think they are entitled to sex. And they both have (or used to have) enough power to take whatever they wanted. The fact that Archbishop McCarrick’s preferred sex partners are male and Weinstein’s are female should not distract us from this most basic point. Both men live by the Sexual Revolutionary Creed:
Sex is a private recreational activity with no moral or social consequences. Everyone is entitled to the sex lives they want, with a minimum of inconvenience. Any sexual activity is morally acceptable, as long as the participants consent. Believing all this is called being “sex positive.”
Morse says that, of course, the “creed” is “a sham,” and that both powerful and influential men have been able to “manipulate the terms of ‘consent’ out of all recognition.”
“The sexual revolutionary ideology creates cover for the predator, especially the well-connected, powerful predator,” she writes, adding that it is the ideology itself that caused the #MeToo movement to stall.
Morse notes the starlets who criticize the exploitation of women, but who still endorse the ideology that objectification of women is acceptable. She observes how many actresses wore black dresses to the Golden Globe Awards to protest sexual abuse toward women, yet many of those dresses were very revealing.
These women “want to keep their pills and their pornography and their view of themselves as progressive,” she notes. “They want to be ‘sex positive’ and never be caught in the predatory trap that the sexual revolutionary ideology makes possible.”
Urging Catholics not to make the same mistake, she says living by the true teachings of the Catholic faith in terms of sexuality and marriage – even when bishops and priests do not – is what is needed for lay people to effectively eradicate the “poisonous consequences” of the Sexual Revolution within our culture.
Morse asserts bishops and priests who are discovered in sex abuse scandals or in covering up such abuse are enjoying “worldly double-lives” in which they have not only brought immediate harm to their victims, but are also likely failing to teach the Church’s doctrines from the pulpit.
“Their silence has been a contributing factor to the advance of the sexual revolutionary ideology throughout society,” she writes. “Their corruption undermines their brother priests who are living godly lives. And the scandal of the predatory priests casts a cloud of suspicion over innocent priests.”
Because of the failure of these Church leaders to teach the faith and its doctrine on sexuality and marriage, Morse asserts the Church is no longer the “guardian of traditional sexual morality.” Instead, “the Catholic Church has become a symbol of hypocrisy or worse.”
Urging Catholics to take matters into their own hands – even if bishops do nothing – Morse teaches the way to do this is to stop watering down Catholic teaching in their own lives in order to be politically correct:
Let go of any part of the sexual revolution that you are holding on to. Maybe you agree that abortion is wrong, but you think contraception is OK. Maybe you are one of those parishioners who complain if the pastor preaches on pro-life topics. Maybe you are one of the parents in a Catholic high school who thinks the “gay” gym teacher shouldn’t be fired just because she married her same-sex partner in a public ceremony.
“Let’s go all in for the full truth,” she urges.
In Ireland, Pope Francis Denounces the ‘Grave Scandal’ of Clerical Sex Abuse
Pope Francis once more condemned clerical sex abuse Saturday, as well as the “failure of ecclesiastical authorities” to adequately address what he called “repellent crimes.”
“I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the Church charged with responsibility for their protection and education,” the pope said in his opening address at the World Meeting of Families in Dublin.
“The failure of ecclesiastical authorities – bishops, religious superiors, priests and others – adequately to address these repellent crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community,” he said. “I myself share those sentiments.”
Earlier this week, Pope Francis issued a letter to “the people of God” acknowledging the recent sex abuse scandals and insisting that “the heart-wrenching pain of these victims, which cries out to heaven, was long ignored, kept quiet or silenced.”
At the same time, the pope seemed to sidestep the root causes of the crisis as well as the concrete steps needed to overcome it.
While declaring that “no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated,” the pope did not propose that those responsible for the present situation should be held to any accountability.
In fact, in his 2,000-word letter, the pope never mentioned the word “bishop” even once, despite the fact that recent revelations suggest complicity on the part of a significant number of prelates who allowed such abuse to continue in their dioceses.
As Catholic lay people have been calling for a full-scale investigation into U.S. clerical sex abuse and even collective resignations by bishops, Francis mentioned no investigation, no inquiry, no apostolic visitation, and no accountability on the part of prelates.
Recent reports revealed a decades-long trail of sexual abuse and misconduct by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick that accompanied his rise from priest to bishop to archbishop to cardinal, but the pope failed to address the question of who knew of his activities and who benefitted from his patronage, despite the fact that innumerable Catholics have been calling for an investigation into these fundamental questions.
Moreover, while a number of prelates, priests, and laypeople have recently begun insistingon the need for straightforward and honest recognition of the extensive “homosexual subculture” that currently exists among bishops and clergy and that lies at the root of the abuse crisis, Pope Francis completely avoided the thorny question of homosexuality in the clergy.
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Scandal of the cesspit babies: Liam Neeson joins fight for Pope to confront truth about 800 children dumped in a mass grave by Irish NUNS as star makes film about tragic home for unmarried mothers
PUBLISHED: 17:20 EDT, 25 August 2018 | UPDATED: 12:53 EDT, 26 August 2018
Pope Franciswas greeted by rapturous crowds as he toured the streets of Dublin yesterday at the start of his historic visit to Ireland – only the second ever to the country by a Pontiff.
It was a warmth that will no doubt have come as some relief, given the cold shadow of abuse now covering the Catholic Church. That shadow will be all-too apparent once again today when Francis travels to Knock and its famous shrine to the Blessed Virgin Mary.
For Knock in the west of Ireland is just a short distance from another, darker landmark – a mass grave containing the remains of up to 800 babies and children at a former home for unmarried mothers in Tuam, Co Galway.
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A mass grave contains the remains of up to 800 babies and children at a former home for unmarried mothers in Tuam, Co Galway. Above, children at the home, run by nuns from the Bon Secours order
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The shocking story of the mass grave at the Tuam home was first revealed by The Mail on Sunday in May 2014. A series of hard-hitting reports forced the Dublin government to form a Commission of Investigation
As the Pope visits the shrine, crowds of protesters will tell him they want a forensic exhumation of the grisly cemetery nearby and the identification of the tiny remains. The Roman Catholic Church, they will tell its leader, must face the truth in full.
The long-running scandal of the Church’s cruelty to more than 30,000 ‘fallen’ women has shaken the country.
The forced adoption of babies born out of wedlock, the harsh treatment dealt out to those falling on the wrong side of respectability – these things have been highlighted by, among others, author and television presenter Martin Sixsmith. His investigation into a woman’s 50-year search for her son was depicted in the Oscar-nominated 2013 film Philomena.
The anger shows no sign of subsiding, nor does the growing pressure on the authorities. And now Irish star Liam Neeson is developing a new film about Tuam after the discovery of a horror so barbaric it almost defies belief: ‘significant quantities’ of child remains dumped in a septic tank in the grounds.
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Above, Maggie O'Connor, aged 21. She became pregnant aged 18 after being raped while she was living in an Irish children’s home. After giving birth on December 7, 1942, mother and daughter were forcibly separated by the nuns, as could happen at the time when children born out of wedlock. Maggie was sent to another home. Her daughter, Mary Margaret O’Connor, the family have since discovered, is one of the Tuam children for whom a death certificate has been issued
He was moved to act after The Mail on Sunday first uncovered the scandal in 2014 and now, on the eve of the Pope’s visit, he has issued an emotional statement calling on the Church to confront its past. ‘DNA technology is now available to identify all these bones, belonging to possibly over 790 babies and children, still lying in the ground in Tuam,’ he told this newspaper.
‘The Irish government, aided by the Catholic Church and especially the nuns’ order, the Congregation of the Sisters of Bon Secours, must not shirk the responsibility of giving these souls the dignity and respect of identification.
‘They had a right to exist. They were not “the devil’s issue”, as some people and establishments referred to them. A wrong is still a wrong and a crime is still a crime no matter how many years have passed. A proposed bronze plaque isn’t going to absolve those responsible for this horror.’
Among those pressing for a full examination of Tuam is Annette McKay, a 64-year-old councillor from Bury, Lancashire.
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Irish star Liam Neeson is developing a new film about Tuam. He was moved to act after The Mail on Sunday first uncovered the scandal in 2014 and now, on the eve of the Pope’s visit, he has issued an emotional statement calling on the Church to confront its past. ‘DNA technology is now available to identify all these bones, belonging to possibly over 790 babies and children, still lying in the ground in Tuam,’ he told this newspaper
She first learned about her own family’s disturbing link to the past when her grandson Joshua was born in 1996 – and her own mother, Maggie, made a terrible confession. As Annette cradled Joshua, her mother sobbed and shook with grief: ‘It’s the baby, it’s the baby. My baby who died.’
It was only then, at the age of 70, that Maggie revealed that she became pregnant aged 18 after being raped while she was living in an Irish children’s home.
After giving birth on December 7, 1942, mother and daughter were forcibly separated by the nuns, as could happen at the time when children born out of wedlock. Maggie was sent to another home.
Her daughter, Mary Margaret O’Connor, the family have since discovered, is one of the Tuam children for whom a death certificate has been issued, and now Annette is among those demanding a forensic investigation of the site. Without it, she says, there can be no conclusion for her or her family.
How MoS broke the story
The shocking story of the mass grave at the Tuam home for unmarried mothers was first revealed by The Mail on Sunday in May 2014.
A series of hard-hitting reports forced the Dublin government to form a Commission of Investigation.
It has used ground-penetrating radar, above right, to uncover ‘significant quantities’ of human remains, aged from 35 foetal weeks to two years.
‘Mary died aged six months,’ explains Annette. ‘On that day, a nun came to my mum as she hung out washing and spat out the words, “That child of your sin is dead. Leave the home.” ’
The seeds of the whole traumatic story were sown when Maggie’s mother died in 1936, leaving eight children to care for themselves as their father was largely absent. ‘Her dad was a drinker and worked away for months at a time so after their mum died, the children came to the attention of the powers that be,’ recalls Annette.
Maggie and her seven malnourished siblings, aged between three and 16, were marched by a priest through the streets of Galway City to the local court. Annette produces a piece of paper dated 1937 – Maggie’s ‘charge sheet’. In black, spidery writing, it details that she was a slightly built 12-year-old and outlines what she was charged with: ‘Found destitute.’ It adds the heartbreaking detail that she was ‘a rather nice child’.
In January 1937, Maggie and three of her five sisters were given a ‘sentence of detention’ at St Anne’s Industrial School at Lenaboy, Galway. Their two brothers were sent to a Christian Brothers home, while the two oldest girls were put to work in domestic service.
What was supposed to be their salvation turned out to be the beginning of years of abuse by the nuns.
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Ground-penetrating radar (above) at Tuam has uncovered ‘significant quantities’ of human remains, aged from 35 foetal weeks to two years
‘As we grew up, Mum had several breakdowns and would cry as she recalled being beaten repeatedly for anything from not walking in a straight line to defending her sisters,’ says Annette. ‘If her siblings wet their beds, they’d all have cold baths with cleaning fluid in, which would sting their skin. It was like a concentration camp for children.
‘She tried to tell her father about their treatment on his rare visits, but a nun would be standing behind her. She confided in a priest, too, but wasn’t believed. Mum lived in fear of them. To Mum’s dying day, nuns meant monsters.
‘She didn’t know she was free to leave the home at 16 as no one told her. She didn’t even know her date of birth until she left the home, where she worked in the kitchens and fed her sisters the nuns’ left-over food.’
Maggie developed into a beautiful, green-eyed young woman, but at 18 she fell prey to a male member of staff at the home who raped her. ‘Mum knew nothing about sex – why would she as she never left the home? She wept as she named the man who did it and his job. “It was his fault, he raped me. He had been nice to me, then he did that,” she repeated. Mum was puritanical and would not talk about sex, but she was very blunt that day.’
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The pregnant Maggie was sent to the Tuam home run by nuns from the Bon Secours order. There, she gave birth to Mary. ‘She was so bonny and such a weight on my hip, oh, she was bonny,’ was Maggie’s only memory of her first child.
Maggie was then moved to a different home, St Bridget’s, where she was callously told of her daughter’s death on June 6, 1943 – and subsequently ordered to leave.
According to her death certificate, little Mary died earlier that day from cardiac failure after suffering whooping cough for two months. In the 1940s, the Bon Secours nuns were paid by the Irish state nearly £100 per child a week to care for those in their care. Yet the harsh conditions of the Tuam home meant the infant mortality rate there was five times the national average.
After the secret of her lost child came tumbling out, Maggie never spoke about it again. She died in 2016 after developing Alzheimer’s, never knowing where her baby was buried. Indeed, Annette is not convinced her sister is dead: ‘I have a death certificate, but no burial site and no record of a grave, so where is my sister? Was she dumped in the sewers or has she been trafficked to America, sold like so many others?’
Annette gave evidence to the Residential Institutions Redress Board in Dublin, set up in 2002 by the Irish state to determine damages for children who were abused in homes. The board paid substantial damages to Maggie after Annette named the abusive nuns and the alleged rapist, and detailed how her mother’s tragic early life impacted her family.
How the Mail broke the story of the scandal at Tuam. It may never be known how many children died in Ireland’s unmarried mothers’ homes, or were sent abroad for adoption. However, the Commission of Investigation is looking into a total of 18 homes
‘Mum suffered depression. She tried to take her own life, had several breakdowns and was cruel to us at times,’ says Annette.
‘We’d get beatings if the beds were not made, but she was only copying how she had been raised. After visiting Galway, Mum suffered a severe breakdown. I think she had PTSD. If she saw a nun, she would start shaking, even in later life. She never set foot inside a Catholic church again.’
The fate of the missing children at Tuam was uncovered by local historian Catherine Corless. Remarkably, she has paid out of her own pocket for the death certificates of 796 children who died there between 1925 and 1960.
And it was Catherine who Annette contacted for more details before travelling to Tuam to report her sister as a missing person. ‘The police officer laughed in my face and said “Oh, that was all a long time ago” and sent me on my way. As I left the station, another officer sidled up to me and said discreetly, “There is stuff going on, a cover-up. Keep pushing on.” It is outrageous that the Church, the state and police are not supporting every family affected by this.
‘The church always told us to be truthful as we grew up. Why isn’t it practising what it preaches?’
It may never be known how many children died in Ireland’s unmarried mothers’ homes, or were sent abroad for adoption. However, the Commission of Investigation is looking into a total of 18 homes.
Last month, Annette travelled to Tuam with fellow Tuam Families’ Group campaigners to challenge Ireland’s Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone. Now she wants the Pope to confront the scandal. ‘He seems a compassionate man – we want him to visit the site and support our fight,’ she says. ‘He can lift the lid on the scandal that has plagued thousands of families.’
Annette believes a full forensic excavation is the only way to put the matter to rest. ‘If my sister is buried in that cesspit, I want her to be found and reunited with our mother in a space saved in her grave for her.
'The Tuam site is a crime scene and needs to be excavated. It is the right thing to do – for the children who died, their mothers, and those of us who had to pick up the pieces in the ensuing decades.’
After suffering abuse from the age of ten, Mike McDonnell saysthat he stole more than $100,000 dollars as recompense.
At ten, McDonnell “wasn’t sure [of] the things that were going on,” but by the time he was 12 years old, it was all too clear. McDonnell told Reuters that he woke to being molested by a priest in the bed he was forced to share with him. “From that day forth, I would never be that same child,” he said. “I went into shock mode and shut down. I would hold onto those secrets for 20-plus years.”
And while the Archdiocese of Philadelphia paid for counseling, it did not prevent him from struggling through years of broken marriages and alcoholism. Yet McDonnell had his quiet revenge, to the tune of $100,000. “I sought retribution in the form of submitting false invoices for a number of years,” he said.
McDonnell is only one of about 1,000 children abused by their priests in the 1940s, in the latest massive Catholic sexual abuse scandal centered on the Pennsylvania archdiocese. His prescription for the church is simple:
These bishops and the dioceses and the Cardinals need to come clean. You need to tell the Catholic faith community what you did. How you covered it up, how you transferred one to another parish so that he would go on and abuse more children. No one knew more about these abuses and no one did less.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told NBC’sToday on Tuesday that they have evidence in hand suggesting the Vatican knew of both the sexual abuses committed by priests in Pennsylvania and the ensuing cover-up by Church officials.
“Church leaders would lie to parishioners on Sunday,” Shapiro told Today. “They would lie to the public, they would shield these predators from the public, but they would document all of it and place it in these secret archives, feet away from the bishops.”
I think broader issues here with the Vatican knowing about this… With church leaders knowing about it, and the reaction you’ve seen — not just from Catholics, but from people from across the globe — is a fundamental disappointment and anger in institutions.
We’re seeing institutions, whether it’s Hollywood, universities, government centers, and certainly the church, putting their institutional reputation above the welfare of children. We will not tolerate that in Pennsylvania, and should not tolerate it anywhere.
The Attorney General asserted that investigators had uncovered documents, including handwritten notes, in the Pennsylvania church archives which detailed cases of sexual abuse spanning over 70 years and involving 301 priests and over 1,000 of their victims. Since the publication of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, more than 700 people have contacted the clergy abuse hotline created by his office. He suspects that the victim counts will continue to rise.
“It’s horrifying to think what these men of God did to these children, and then to have the cover-up that was quite literally purposeful to shield priests from law enforcement,” he said.
Shapiro stated that he “can’t speak specifically to Pope Francis[’s]” knowledge of the Pennsylvania abuse cases. However, allegations continue to surface that Pope Francis not only knew about Washington, DC’s archbishop Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual abuses, but reinstated him into ministry with that knowledge.
Thus far, the pope has refused to comment.
The Pennsylvania grand jury report also accuses Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the current archbishop of Washington, DC, of protecting sexual predator priests while he was bishop of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006. One of the most disturbing cases in the report details how Wuerl increased the stipend paid to a priest who abused minors and engaged in child pornography in exchange for the priest’s silence about other sexual predator priests.
Wuerl has also been criticized for claiming that he had no knowledge of his D.C. predecessor Cardinal McCarrick’s decades of alleged sexual abuse of seminarians, priests, and laypeople. This despite a report that Wuerl was informed by a high-ranking Vatican official that Pope Benedict imposed sanctions on McCarrick for sexual abuse. Shortly after this alleged discussion, Wuerl cancelled an event McCarrick was scheduled to host for young men contemplating a vocation to the priesthood.
A Wisconsin bishop has joined the president of the U.S. Bishops Conference in calling for an investigation into “credible allegations” of grave misconduct by a series of high-ranking Catholic prelates, including Pope Francis, in dealing with sex abuse.
Madison Bishop Robert C. Morlino issued a public statement Monday asserting that recent accusations by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal nuncio to the United States, merit to be considered credible allegations and therefore must be investigated.
Archbishop Viganò “has offered a number of concrete, real allegations in his recent document, giving names, dates, places, and the location of supporting documentation – either at the Secretariat of State or at the Apostolic Nunciature,” Bishop Morlino states. “Thus, the criteria for credible allegations are more than fulfilled, and an investigation, according to proper canonical procedures, is certainly in order.”
In a written 11-page “testimony” published Saturday, Archbishop Viganò said that Pope Francis had reinstating Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to a position of prominence despite direct knowledge of McCarrick’s sexual abuse against seminarians and priests.
The archbishop alleged that Pope Benedict XVI had imposed “canonical sanctions” on Cardinal McCarrick in 2009-2010 forbidding him from traveling, celebrating Mass in public, or participating in public meetings, but that Pope Francis later lifted these sanctions and made McCarrick a close personal advisor with a hand in the naming of future bishops.
Now that “the corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy,” Viganò wrote, “my conscience dictates that I reveal those truths regarding the heart-breaking case of the Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, D.C., Theodore McCarrick, which I came to know in the course of [my] duties.”
In his statement Monday, Bishop Morlino reiterated the thoughts of Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo that Archbishop Viganó’s recent report “brings particular focus and urgency” to the examination by the USCCB of the grave moral failings of bishops. The questions raised “deserve answers that are conclusive and based on evidence. Without those answers, innocent men may be tainted by false accusations and the guilty may be left to repeat the sins of the past,” he said, citing DiNardo.
Bishop Morlino also expressed his “disappointment” in Pope Francis for refusing to confirm or deny the Viganò allegations on the return flight from Dublin to Rome this weekend, choosing instead the strategy of “no comment.”
While Pope Francis expressly said that such a judgment of the allegations should be left to the “professional maturity” of journalists, Morlino said that in the United States and elsewhere, “very little is more questionable than the professional maturity of journalists.”
“The bias in the mainstream media could not be clearer and is recognized almost universally,” Morlino said. “I would never ascribe professional maturity to the journalism of the National Catholic Reporter, for example. (And, predictably, they are leading the charge in a campaign of vilification against Archbishop Viganò.)”
The huge sex scandal engulfing Pope Francis and the Catholic Church creates a dilemma for American news media. On the one hand, sex sells, and the Catholic Church has been an object of criticism by generations of the secular leftists that dominate journalism. On the other hand, Pope Francis is generally adored by the world’s media for his perceived liberality on sex and other issues, and the particulars of the scandal involve one of the favorite causes of the cultural left: normalizing homosexual behavior.
Since the release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report regarding sexual abuse by Roman Catholic clergy, the Catholic world has been in turmoil. That turmoil only intensified – exponentially -- when retired Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò released what amounted to an affidavit accusing senior Catholic hierarchs of knowingly covering up and even enabling the abuse. Viganò placed special focus on the retired Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore McCarrick, a prelate of vast influence in the American church, a reputed "kingmaker," a one-man fund raising juggernaut, close adviser to Pope Francis, and a mentor to such progressive luminaries as cardinals Wuerl, Cupich, and Tobin -- all among Francis's anointed. As if that weren't enough, Viganò called on Francis himself to resign for his knowing complicity in the coverup of McCarrick's crimes.
Viganò's release of his testimony was timed to coincide for maximum effect with Francis's controversial trip to Dublin -- already a public relations disaster due to lack of attendance. That disaster was compounded when Francis issued his non-denial statement in response to press questions about the Viganò testimony: "I will not say a single word ..." followed by a tacit appeal to the press to basically ignore it all.
Ordinarily that type of stonewalling by a high-profile public figure would be met with a storm of protest and accusation in the media. Just such a storm did in fact ensue, but mainly in the world of Catholic blogging and tweeting. The mainstream media, on the other hand, seemed strangely (or maybe not) indifferent.
In the past, Catholic sex scandals involving the clergy have been widely characterized as pedophilia. Knowledge that this characterization was, in fact, inaccurate, that the problem was overwhelmingly one of homosexual priests preying upon adolescents and young men, had been carefully kept in the background. With this fresh outbreak of scandal, however, the Catholic blogosphere, fueled by Viganò's testimony regarding McCarrick's abuse of seminarians, quickly galvanized around the accusation of a powerful "lavender mafia" of homosexual prelates dominating the post Vatican II Church.
The Catholic blog Rorate Coeli has published a handy review of the known situation by the eminent Italian historian of Vatican II, Roberto de Mattei:
The homosexualization of the Church started to spread in the 1970s and 1980s, as the meticulously documented book by Father Enrique Rueda reveals: The Homosexual Network: Private Lives and Public Policy, published in 1982.
In order to understand the situation at that time, it is essential to read the study dedicated to Homosexuality and the Priesthood. The Gordian Knot – of Catholics? by Professor Andrzej Kobyliński of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw.* Kobyliński cites a book entitled The Changing Face of the Priesthood: A reflection on the Priest’s Crisis of Soul, (2000) by Donald Cozzens, Rector of the Cleveland Seminary in Ohio, wherein the author states that at the beginning of the 21st century the priesthood became a “profession”, exercised predominantly by homosexuals and we can even talk about “a heterosexual exodus from the priesthood.” (snip)
In 2004 The John Jay Report appeared, a document prepared at the request of the American Episcopal Conference, in which all the cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests and deacons, from 1950 to 2002, were analyzed. This document of almost 300 pages is of extraordinary informative value – writes Kobyliński. The John Jay Report “demonstrated the link between homosexuality and sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy. According to the report of 2004, in the overwhelming majority of cases of sexual abuse it is not about pedophilia, but ephebophilia, that is, a degeneration that consists not only of sexual attraction towards children, but towards adolescent boys, at the age of puberty. The John Jay Report demonstrated that about 90% of the priests condemned for sexual abuse with minors are homosexual priests.” [emphasis added]
The McCarrick scandal is therefore not the last act in a crisis that goes way, way back. Yet, in the “Letter of the Pope to the People of God," and throughout his trip in Ireland, Pope Francis has not once denounced this moral disorder. The Pope maintains that the main problem in sexual abuse by the clergy is not homosexuality but clericalism.
Francis's ambivalent stance toward established Catholic teaching, dating back to Paul's letters to the early churches, has been well documented from the beginning of his papacy, starting with his famous "Who am I to judge?" Not as well-known outside the Catholic blogosphere has been his relentless advancement of prelates who are not only favorable toward the acceptance of homosexuality but who are notorious for living a "gay" lifestyle themselves. I can hardly do better than link to this account of the episode in which Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia commissioned a homoerotic mural for his cathedral church which featured "Jesus carrying nets to heaven filled with naked and semi-nude homosexuals, transsexuals, prostitutes, and drug dealers, jumbled together in erotic interactions." Paglia himself was included in the mural, embracing a naked man, and the image of Christ was modeled on a local male hairdresser. Paglia now heads the Pontifical Academy for Life, and Francis also appointed Paglia as president of the Pontifical Pope John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family -- after purging the institute of its orthodox members.
It's hardly surprising, then, that mainstream media outlets were initially loath to attack the "gay friendly" Francis. Indeed, the mainstream media was inclined to dismiss Viganò's testimony in favor of damage control narratives that were floated by proxies for Francis.
But this may be a crisis that is too good to waste.
The long term goal of the Left is simply to destroy any moral authority the Catholic Church may still have in the broader conservative society -- Catholic or not. To induce a sense of hopelessness among conservatives.
The Church is still the Church. Popes come and go. The goal for the progressive media will be to try to separate cultural Catholics from the influence of Catholic doctrine by discrediting the entire hierarchy -- not just "conservatives".
The current crisis offers an opening for progressives that may well override any other concerns. I think the more liberals consider their options the more confident they'll become that attacking the American bishops and even the Francis papacy can be done without empowering conservatives or endangering the homosexual agenda -- and they'll push ahead. To bring down a pope -- could it possibly get any better than that for progressives?
For all its warts the Church is one of the few truly significant social institutions that interposes between the State and the individual. Removing such "intermediary institutions" -- so that each individual in his individuality is confronted with the full power of the State -- is what totalitarianism is all about. One needn't accept the Church's claims to see where danger lies. We see the increasingly open totalitarianism of the Left everywhere today.
The Church -- or at least its hierarchs -- has brought this crisis upon itself, but it's a crisis that in its broader dimension will draw in all conservatives. We will need to be aware that while malevolent forces have been at work within the Church, other malevolent forces will be seeking to take advantage of this crisis for goals that are inimical to our freedoms.
American Catholic community of anything that could vaguely comfort her amid this storm. His holiness's mind-numbing letter can be read at the same link. 
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