We neglected to mention last post that Fr. John Feit, who wrote the minutes of the Servants of the Paraclete meeting we ran November 15, 2010, came to Via Coeli himself under a cloud of suspicion that includes an unsolved murder, read more below. Also in today’s “Roundup of Stories We Could Not Cover While We Were In Transit” we argue that it does not matter who is the new President of the USCCB, as no Catholic bishop has a clean record when it comes to clergy sex crime cover-ups. We also link in this post to video of plaintiff attorney Jeff Anderson speaking to Australian victims from what I call "space" and give CofA's take on Oprah’s nod to pedo-priest victims, on William Levada leading a Vatican session on sex crimes, and on Bill Lynch beating up his perpetrator priest in San Jose, and More: First this email:
“Hi Kay, I see that TheServants.org have pretty much closed down their web presence. You might make use of the web archive http://web.archive.org/ also known as the Way Back Machine. It is amazing and has been attempting to archive the entire World Wide Web since the mid 1990s. Useful in this instance since here’s the 2001 version of the Servants of the Paraclete website home page (which they apparently deleted a year or so ago). Here is a link to a very rosy description of their whole history “the story” and a philosophy of ministry and here is the index for articles in their magazine Priestly People for 2001. OK I’ll get back to work and let you pick up the research!!!- Jennifer.”
Click those links to see what Servants of the Paraclete tried to delete from the internet, but the WayBack Machine has brought back to life, articles from 2002-2003, before the light started to shine down on them, so they had to hide in shame.
Oh Oprah!
City of Angels was dark for about a week and this Roundup post is only part one, as I catch up on news alerts. I didn't want to get caught up in the flibbermejibbit that resulted when Oprah spent a cosmic blip of time on the issue of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church Nov. 5, 2010. It was interesting to observe news media reaction to the show: endless repetition of the same sound bytes, one end of the globe to the other, in our copy-and-paste world of news coverage. By the time Oprah ran Part two the following Friday, the world seemed to have forgotten.
When Oprah said, “Pain is the same,” early in the first show, I about shut off the TV, but forced myself to watch the rest. The pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church produced about a hundred thousand crime victims alive today in the USA alone. Yes, when a father or schoolteacher rapes a child it is horrendous and shocking, but what happened in the Catholic Church is an entirely different story. Six thousand Catholic priests raped children in the last sixty years, systematically, almost as if children were an entitlement that came with the job of being a priest.
Bishops covered up the crimes. There is no comparison to Catholic priest sex crimes.
Bishops continue to cover up the crimes today claiming First Amendment rights in the USA. That total aberration of justice and misuse of religion has no comparison to any crime spree that's ever happened before in recent history.
So no, all pain is not the same.
I honestly don't even care anymore about the individual rapes, the salacious details on which Oprah loves to dwell, as the individuals who committed those crimes were sick and should have been in treatment and separated from society.
Felonious cardinals and monsignors continue to lunch at country clubs, continue to be pictured in thousand dollar get-ups posing as leaders in the community, and continue to influence American politics, and that's the thing that has stoked my rage for decades.
Felonious bishops still in power is what Oprah totally missed.
So when someone like Oprah says it's best to forgive your perpetrator and move on, it shows they are speaking very authoritatively as an outsider.
Oprah's staff did not do the research.
We weren’t just raped by priests, we continue to be screwed by a religion.
Not just any religion, either, but the religion that claims to be the root of all Christianity, the Pope, The Vatican.
No, Oprah, all pain is not the same.
Not for us who see our perpetrators leading public prayers, commanding respect, and brandishing authority with lawmakers in our country.
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William Levada to run session
at The Vatican Thursday
to show the rest of the Cardinals
how to handle pedophile priests
When the cardinals devote maybe an hour to the issue of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church at The Vatican November 19, William Levada will conduct the session.
What a joke.
City of Angels Blog began quoting the Levada Deposition from January 2008 here last July and here last May reporting from L.A.***
What a great authority on child sex abuse in the Catholic Church we have in Cardinal Levada. At that deposition he testified about the Doyle Peterson Mouton report from 1985. Levada said the report was “more aggressive in its response than the facts as I knew them warranted.”
Then Levada testified that in all his years as a priest up to becoming Bishop of Portland, Oregon:
Q: At no time during those years did you ever hear anything about abuse of a child by a priest?
A: Not that I can recollect.
Q: When you were in Rome at the North American College, never heard about this problem of priests abusing kids?
A: I'm sure I didn't.
A: Same question, St. John’s Seminary School of Theology, nothing at St. John’s Seminary, no rumors, anecdotal stories, nothing about priests abusing kids?
A: Nothing.
If The Vatican thinks the former Archbishop of San Francisco is qualified to conduct its session on child sex crimes by pedophile priests this week, it must be because Levada was so good at convincing American judges that he did not see serial sex crimes going on right in front of him.
Levada is going to teach other cardinals how to sound innocent under oath.
Levada can show the other cardinals how to convince judges that their negligence makes them innocent.
It's much like a story on AlterNet today- Jail the Bankers where author Josh Holland says as long as bankers don't go to prison for the crime of destroying the American economy, there is no justice. The criminals are empowered.
Well, Josh Holland should try being in the world of pedophile priest crime for a few years.
Innocent Ignorant Bishops?
How could you work your way up in an organization, indeed be one of the bosses, and not know that about ten percent of your employees are serial pedophiles, flagrantly committing sex crimes against children on your corporate properties?
And how does not knowing about the crimes make you innocent?
We had Bishop Gerald Kicanas, who did not get elected President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops this week, using the “I didn't know” excuse yet again, this time defending his handling of pedophile priest Daniel McCormack when he was in seminary:
From Catholic Tide: “Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tuson,[SIC] Arizona, told the National Catholic Register that he had never heard reports that Daniel McCormack had been guilty of sexual abuse when he supervised McCormack’s study at Mundelein seminary. After his ordination, McCormack would face charges of molesting more than 20 boys.” ( Read Catholic Tide story here )
Also in a November 2007 Chicago Sun-Times story about McCormack, Kicanas is quoted as saying, “I would never defend endorsing McCormack’s ordination if I had had any knowledge or concern that he might be a danger to anyone, and I had no such knowledge or concern.”
So you were so incompetent, so unobservant that you had no knowledge?
That is your defense?
**********
Bizarre development in the William Lynch trial at a hearing in San Jose last Friday.
Demonstrators outside the courthouse (pictured) showed support for Lynch after he pummeled William Lindner almost to death in a rage like many victims of pedophile priests have expressed to me on the phone since I started City of Angels Blog.If Church Hierarchy had only told the truth from the start, no misdirected enraged victims would be stalking perpetrators today. If people want to beat up pedophile priests, what do you expect, after the way the Catholic Church has abused the justice system to avoid being prosecuted, after they allowed about a hundred thousand children to be raped in the last sixty years in the USA alone.
When I saw the Free Willy photos last Friday, I phoned Joey Piscitelli in the Bay Area to see if he had been there:
“No, but I would have been if they’d contacted me,” Joey said. “It was organized by his family, Lindner raped all their nieces and nephews."
Joey said the Jesuits of San Jose are continuing to lie about Lindner: “That's the same guy that I did a protest in Los Altos about, with John Chevedden. And at that time I asked them, ‘Where are you keeping Lindner?’
“They said, ‘Under close guard because he’s a dangerous serial predator.”
Joey continued: "They said, they watched him 24 hours a day under lock and key. When William Lynch beat Lindner up, the local news reports said Lindner drove himself to the hospital.
“So he must not have been under lock and key.
“They're liars. Lindner still has access to kids,” Joey repeated.
“Where was the DA who’s prosecuting William Lynch in San Jose Superior Court here was she when Lindner was raping kids?” What has she done about Lindner? But she goes after William Lynch.
We've written about Lindner at City of Angels before, in October 2009: Mysterious Death of Father Cheveddon And that same month: Police call it suicide, survivor sees wrongful death
Those were another couple of stories that never made it into the Bishop Accountability database.
I hate to say it but, expect a lot more pummeled priests, burned down churches, and defaced statues, as long as The Vatican and all its overstuffed occupants continue to lord over us with their undeserved power.
The San Jose Mercury News ran Herhold: The sadness of the Will Lynch Case in the San Jose Mercury News, where the columnist recommends healthier ways for victims to express anger. I sent him this email:
I am one of about a hundred thousand pedophile priest victims and I'm also a journalist, so I started City of Angels Blog in Jan 2007 and turned myself from a perpetual victim into a warrior using words and images as my weapons.
I understand the anger William Lynch feels.
The real culprit is the justice system that has allowed bishops to continue to be in powerful positions after six thousand priests were able to rape children in Catholic Churches. (read story on these statistics from Jan 2010 at CofA.
In four years doing the blog, I've interviewed dozens of victims. The unspent rage, the lack of closure- watching bishops continue to sway public opinion and garner respect- really feeds the anger and frustration we all feel. So I understand why Will Lynch did it and am afraid more victims will feel they have no other recourse.
I write to you just because in your column today about Lynch you talk about victims finding a more sane way to deal with these un-resolved crimes. My blog is a good example of what this one victim did...
Thanks for your words on the issue. I have to write about Lynch next post and will probly quote you.
Kay E.
The City of Angels
*******
Catholic hierarchy keep getting making this claim of innocence because bishops did not know all this crime was going on in the dioceses they run.
Victim John Vai testified last week in his case that's gone to trial in Wilmington Delaware:
“It was hard to believe that priests who lived and worked with DeLuca didn't know he was molesting children,” according to Associated Press coverage of the trial in Dover Delaware.
**********
Watch video of Jeff Anderson talking to Australian victims here and see why I say he’s speaking from space...
**********
Re Father Feit:
From Camp Ped
By Ron Russell
Los Angeles New Times
August 15, 2002
The author of glowing reports about Porter and fellow priests who molested during furloughs from Jemez Springs during its early days was Father John B. Feit, who became the superior in charge of the psychosexual treatment program after only two years there. Feit, who had no professional training other than in theology, exemplifies all that was wrong with Camp Ped, not to mention the cynicism—or incompetence—of bishops who sent their priests there. Incredibly, Feit had switched from another religious order to join the Paracletes in 1962, just months after pleading "no contest" to a reduced charge of assault while a priest in Texas. A 20-year-old school teacher had accused him of attempting to sexually assault her as she knelt to pray inside a church in Edinburg, Texas, where he was the pastor, in 1960.
What's more, Feit had been a suspect—although no charges were filed against him—in the murder of a 25-year-old South Texas beauty queen. Three days after she went missing, the woman's partially clad body was found in a drainage ditch near the same Edinburg church, barely a month after the assault on the teacher. Irene Garcia had been raped and suffocated. Garcia's car was found parked at the church, where Feit, who had heard her confession, was the last known person to have seen her alive. "It pains me even now that the person who killed that girl was never brought to justice," retired McAllen, Texas, police officer W.L. "Sonny" Miller, now 70, tells New Times. Miller reviewed the evidence at the request of a now-deceased police chief in the 1970s. Four polygraph tests administered to Feit were "inconclusive," and for lack of physical evidence no charges were brought in the case against anybody, he says.
Garza's clothing and other items remain in an evidence locker at the McAllen Police Department. Miller has pushed in vain to have authorities use DNA testing, which wasn't available at the time of the murder, to revive the investigation. "It's the only right thing to do," he says. Feit, now 69, left the priesthood years ago and works for a Catholic charity in another state. He did not respond to interview requests from New Times, but he told the Brownsville Herald newspaper—which cited the four inconclusive polygraph tests—that he had had nothing to do with the Garcia slaying. He also said he would never have pleaded to the earlier charge if, at the time, he had known what a no-contest plea suggested.
Yet, sadly, the Feit era wasn't an aberration. Camp Ped's track record continued to be the source of tragedy—and the butt of jokes by critics of the bishops' failed rehabilitation model—until it closed in 1994.
Read the entire story Camp Ped at Bishop Accountablity.
***************
* Please click the PayPal buttons on the left or send cash by Western Union.
** Watch City of Angels Blog in the near future for more quotes from the Levada January 2008 deposition. This winter, I promise, this winter I will finish that series of posts. And now that I'm hunkered down in a warm place where I may be snowbound several times this winter, I will finish reading the deposition and do more posts with quotes on the entire January 2008 deposition.
Coming soon.
*** We still need $53.00 of the $88.50 to purchase the trial transcript from Roger Mahony’s testimony in Santillan versus Bishop of Fresno, $35.00 raised so far, thank you.
Read another post at CofA2, more about moving at Mystery Woman of Albuquerque posted earlier today.
ke
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