sexual abuse

Scouts

in Psychology, sexual abuse No Comments Tags: ,

Joe asked:

Leon, how have the Scouts followed up on this, since the incident is at least 30 years old? Are stricter controls in place? Do the Scouts now have a policy of informing the police if one of their leaders molests a Scout?

I was a scout leader in my sons’ troop, but I have not been in the scouts’ administration, so I do not know how their internal policies function in practice.

Even twenty years ago, we had to undergo child protection training, which I thought was very good.

The scouts are a volunteer organization, and the scouts office can set policies, but it is difficult or not impossible to monitor whether scout leaders are in fact following policies.

One rule is that a single adult is not supposed to be alone with scouts, but this is difficult to observe universally. If two adults were along on a trip and a boy was injured, one adult had to take the boy to the emergency room while the other ran the program.

Parents are too trusting, When my oldest son became a scout, I started to go along on camping trips to monitor how things were going, and I was both satisfied and pleased and became a leader myself. But many parents just dropped their kids off and didn’t even know who we were. I thought this unwise.

Out troop leaders were all fathers of boys who were or had been in the troop, and almost all the leaders had grown up on Baltimore, a city small enough that everyone’s reputation and faults are widely known. We discussed problems other troops had had, and we decided that we would never allow a single male adult to become a leader, especially not someone from out of town. Other troops did not have this luxury – they were desperate for male leadership and had to take anyone who looked respectable.

The scouts have a watch list of known and suspected pedophiles. I know because I had a priest placed on it.

The scouts say they have no secret organizations,, but they have the Order of the Arrow – it is a semisecret service organization. Boys (and men) love secrecy – think of the Masons. I remember reading decades ago of a leader who used the Order of the Arrow as a cover for abuse – he claimed sexual hazing rituals were part of the initiation.

Any organization or profession that gives access to children will attract pedophiles, who will go to extraordinary lengths to achieve their goal of having sex with children. I am sure that some abusers entered the priesthood solely for the purpose of having sexual access to children. The diocese of Dallas considered having Rudy Kos’s ordination annulled. I do not have the documents that discussed the grounds for it, but I suspect it was what I have suggested – his only intention in entering the priesthood was to facilitate committing crimes.

From what I have seen, pedophilia is not simply a desire to have sex with children, a desire parallel to most people’s desires to have sex with sexually mature persons (of the same or opposite sex). It is something quite different and is hard for non-pedophiles, even psychologists and psychiatrists, to comprehend. It is therefore difficult for organization like the scouts and churches to prevent completely, but, of course, after the first incident, the abuser should never have access to children again, and that is where many organizations have failed.

Leave a Comment

Profound Irresponsibility

in Responsibility, sexual abuse 4 Comments Tags: , ,

This is what the CBC found that Turley had done:

In 1975, Turley did what he describes as the “craziest, stupid, bizarre thing” he would ever do. California newspaper headlines from 1975 dubbed it a “wild abduction tale.”

In a stolen single-engine Cessna, Turley kidnapped Ed Iris, an 11-year-old Nova Scotia boy living in La Puente, Calif., whom Turley had met while visiting a local scout troop.

A day earlier, he’d shown up at Iris’s house, telling Ed’s mother he was “one of Canada’s top scouts leaders” and asking if he could show the boy around town.

“He had badges all over the place,” says Iris, now 47 and living in Ontario. “He had his Canadian scouting book. It was impressive to a kid.”

Turley took the boy on a fun-filled day in the San Diego area. That night, the two slept in a car inside Turley’s double sleeping bag covered in scouts merit patches, said Iris. Turley later admitted to molesting the boy, though Iris says he slept through it.

In the morning, Turley stole a Cessna at a regional airport, vowing to take Ed back to Canada. With the plane low on fuel, though, Turley was soon forced to land.

Turley, then 21, was arrested and later pleaded guilty to child stealing. At trial, a judge committed him to a state hospital as a “mentally disordered sex offender.”

Police files obtained by The Fifth Estate and the Los Angeles Times show that Boy Scouts of America knew about the incident because they helped officers search for Iris and Turley.

Despite this Turley became a Scout leader in Canada and the U.S.

In November 1976, 18 months after Turley’s arrival at the Patton State Hospital, he was deemed well enough to be released. The judge ordered him to return to Canada and report for probation if he re-entered the U.S.

Within a year, Turley returned to Southern California to work at a Boy Scout camp near San Diego, an hour’s drive from the hospital. He spent the next three summers working for the camp.

‘Hopefully, he went back to Canada and that was their problem.’—Former Scout executive Buford Hill

On the last day of camp in July 1979, Turley arranged to stay an extra night with three boys from the Orange County troop. All three were molested that night, according to a confidential file later created by the Boy Scouts of America.

The next morning, one boy told his father, a scoutmaster, about the abuse.

The camp director, John LaBare, confronted Turley and “he readily admitted what he had done, expressed concern for his actions, immediately packed and returned to Canada,” according to a letter in Turley’s U.S. “perversion file.” The camp, meanwhile, was told Turley had returned home due to family problems.

Behind the scenes, camp officials requested that the Boy Scouts of America’s Texas-based national office create a “confidential file,” informally known as a “perversion file,” on Turley.

“The parents of the three boys agreed not to press charges if he would leave, but are quite prepared to do so if they hear of his involvement with scouting,” Scouts executive Buford Hill wrote.

Even Turley was surprised at the laxity:

When Turley was shown the 1979 confidential U.S. file created by the Scouts on him, however, he shook his head in amazement that officials had not contacted police.

“That probably would have put a stop to me years and years ago,” said Turley in an interview at an Alberta motel where he works as a manager and handyman.

“And yet I went back to the Scouts again and again as a leader and offended against the boys until they came forward.”

Turley returned to Canada and molested:

By August of 1979, Turley had returned to the Victoria area, and within a few years, he’d begun leading a local scouts troop.

Court records show that Turley took scouts on camping trips once or twice a month, often luring boys to his tent by offering warmth or comfort. He used skinny-dipping as a pretense to molest boys and plied them with alcohol.

In his Victoria home, stocked with ice cream, candy, alcohol and porn, he entertained an endless number of boys, including scouts.

In 1988, Turley sexually assaulted a child at a swimming pool. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and banned from associating with youth groups such as Scouts, YMCA and the Little League.

It was not until 1995 that police began their first large-scale investigation into Turley – 16 years after the Boy Scouts of America created a “perversion file” and nearly a decade after its Canadian counterpart put him on their “confidential list.”

In the end, it was not the Scouts organization that informed Saanich, B.C., police, but rather a suspicious girlfriend.

The Scouts have tried to deal with the problem, but Turley is dubious:

Scouts Canada also has a stringent “two-deep rule” requiring that two fully screened, registered leaders be present with youth at all times.

Turley recalls always having adult leaders present on his Scouts outings. “It didn’t stop anything,” he says.

Seattle-based lawyer Tim Kosnoff, who has viewed the U.S. “perversion files,” says historically the U.S. Boy Scouts “routinely” chose not to notify police when aware of child molesters, instead noting them in their own secret files.

Despite all the changes made to the Scouts organization, Turley maintains that “Scouting is still a flawed movement.”

“If I was a parent, I would never put my kids in Scouts.”

Leave a Comment

Pandemic Irresponsibility

in sexual abuse 1 Comment Tags: ,

Bishops are not the only clueless ones. The National Post has this story about the Scouts:

Richard (Rick) Turley, 58, who was involved with Scouts in California and in Victoria through the 1970s and ‘80s and who spent years preying on victims in Victoria and other Vancouver Island communities.

snip

In the 1980s, when Turley started volunteering with the 2nd Douglas Scout Group in Victoria, which met at Craigflower elementary school and included boys from the Gorge, View Royal, Burnside and Tillicum areas, had already had been convicted in the U.S. of kidnapping a boy he met through Scouts and served time in a state hospital as a “mentally disordered sex offender.”

Jean Buydens, 2nd Douglas group committee chairwoman during the 1980s, said in an interview that she was uncomfortable with Turley from the moment he arrived, but parents loved him.

“The mothers thought he was a wonderful leader. He would take the boys away camping at the weekends and he would have them over to his house. They thought he was a wonderfully involved Scout leader,” she said.

snip

One boy had gone to Turley’s house to cut the grass “and when his mother picked him up he was white and shaking and said ‘I am never going there again,’” Buydens said.

There were frequent, and sometimes unauthorized, camping trips and a Beaver leader, who unexpectedly dropped by Turley’s house, saw boys with beer bottles, she said.

Turley also brought boys into the Scout group from outside the area, including under-age boys, Buydens said.

snip

It was decided Turley should be removed from 2nd Douglas, but he was allowed to volunteer with Cordova Sea Scouts under the supervision of another leader, who had been warned he was never to be alone with the boys, Buydens said.

Police were not told because there was not enough proof, she said.

“I was shocked they would give him another chance, but they explained they had no grounds to stop it. It was just hearsay,” Buydens said.

snip

Turley was sentenced to seven years in 1996 for convictions on five separate counts of sexual assaults on four young boys, including a case where he committed buggery on one child between 1971 and 1973, court documents show.

snip

But the Boy Scouts were only a small part of his pattern of abuse, according to Ruth Picha, the Crown prosecutor working the case. Turley was involved in several community organizations, including Little League baseball, and more than once assaulted children of the mothers he was dating, she explained. He was willing to do anything to get him near children.

Leave a Comment

FAZ, TAZ, and Didi

in Germany, sexual abuse 4 Comments Tags: , , , ,

Child Abuser and TAZ Founder Dietrich Willier AKA Didi

Americans are a provincial lot, and the German language is Greek to them. Pope Benedict rightly pointed out that in the 1970s pedophilia was considered progressive.   I specifically pointed out that the co-president of the Green Party in Germany has written in his memoirs he had had sex with the children he was teaching  – he later claimed this passage was mere “provocation”  (épater les bourgeois and all that). Someone replied to me was this was all meaningless, that no one important had ever done such a thing, and who was this Daniel Cohn-Bendit dude anyway? 

The Germans, perhaps having been trained by post-1945 events to look at their history and not turn away from unpleasant realities, are examining the connection of the 1970s Left with pedophilia and pederasty. 

The Tageszeitung (TAZ), a Berlin, leftist newspaper, is shocked, absolutely shocked to discover that one of its founders, the late Dietrich Willier (although following German custom they identify him only as Dietrich W.) was a pedophile. 

The Odenwaldschule, an ultra-progressive school, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reports, was “a paradise for pederasts.” One of them was Dietrich Willier, who abused at least nine children and had an extensive child pornography collection, featuring victims as young as three. His students remember Willier as “charismatic, anarchist, and crazy.” With his “cool behavior” he connected with his young victims. 

He left the school and started a primal scream therapy institute. One of the former students who visited him there was Andreas von Weizsäcker, who died two and a half years ago. Andreas was the son of the Federal President.

 The editor in chief of TAZ piously declares:  

The connection between abuse of children, the German Left, and also TAZ has not yet been sufficiently publicly explained. 

Die Verbindungen zwischen Kindesmisshandlern, der deutschen Linken und auch der taz zu der Zeit sind offensichtlich noch nicht ausreichend geklärt”

 At the end of the 1970s Willier became one of the founders of TAZ. He served as the Stuttgart correspondent. TAZ provided pederasts a platform, because “part of the Left milieu sympathized at that time with the pederasts, who defined themselves as a liberating movement.” 

FAZ noted that the Pedophile Movement  had its origin in the 1970s in the School Movement. The “General Homosexual Work Society” demanded in the 1970s that “sex between adults and children” must be free of penalties.

Ihren Anfang nahm die sogenannte „Pädophilie-Bewegung“ in den sechziger Jahren in der Schwulenbewegung. Die „Allgemeine homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft“ forderte in den Siebzigern, dass „Sexualität zwischen Erwachsenen und Kindern“ straffrei bleiben müsse.

That is sex between adults and children should be completely decriminalized. In 1977 in the journal Plasterstand one read:

Since we understand ourselves to be human beings who fight against every oppression, than this applies also to pederasts…We do children violence,  when we do not grasp their sexual needs.

Wenn wir uns als Menschen begreifen, die gegen jede Unterdrückung kämpfen, dann gilt es auch für Päderasten. . . . Wir tun den Kindern ja Gewalt an, wenn wir auf ihre sexuellen Bedürfnisse nicht eingehen.

The editor of TAZ might begin by looking in its own files. FAZ looked at TAZ from the 1970s and discovered: 

The newspaper sympathized with “Pedo-Groups” among other with the Nuremberg “Indian Commune.” In 1979 there appeared in TAZ an article with the headline “Crimes without Victims.” The writer Olaf Stüben announced: “I love boys.”

Die Zeitung sympathisierte mit „Pädo-Gruppen“, unter anderen mit der Nürnberger „Indianerkommune“. 1979 erschien in der „taz“ ein Artikel unter der Überschrift: „Verbrechen ohne Opfer“. Autor Olaf Stüben verkündete: „Ich liebe Jungs“.  

TAZ reports of Willier that everyone thought he was making it with women, especially strong feminist types. But, FAZ notes, 

Whoever concerns himself closely with the topic “Pedo-Criminals” knows: Anyone who once has started to abuse children never leaves off.  

Dabei weiß, wer sich mit dem Thema „Pädokriminelle“ näher beschäftigt: Wer einmal damit angefangen hat, Kinder zu missbrauchen, der hört nicht damit auf

The moral of this story: 

The Catholic Church is not the only organization that is queasy about confronting its past connection with sexual abuse. The German Left is equally reluctant. Perhaps more so. 

Even more importantly: Abusers can exploit a variety of milieus. Abusers like Maciel used the Catholic culture of absolute obedience to get victims; the pedophiles at the progressive schools (and also “cool” priests) used an anything-goes atmosphere to get victims. 

Are there milieus in which abuse is less likely to occur or, if it does occur, to be detected and stopped immediately? That is what sociologists and psychologists should be able to help us determine, but the conversation about abuse has not yet reached this adult level.

Leave a Comment

German Reactions

in clergy sex abuse scandal, sexual abuse, Vatican 6 Comments Tags: ,

Although the abuse that has been revealed in Germany is neither as widespread or as deeply corrupt as the abuse that was revealed in the U.S. and Ireland (let me simply say that some priests found novel uses for the Eucharist and the crucifix), the revelations in Germany have shaken the Vatican more than the news from the “English-speaking” countries, as one cardinal dismissed them. 

Matthias Drobinski has a good commentary in the Süddeutsche Zeitung to explain the severity of the German reaction. He concludes: 

Die Kirche ist nicht in die Vertrauenskrise geraten, weil sie ein Verein von Missbrauchern ist. Sie ist in der Krise, weil sie sich immer noch stärker selbst bemitleidet, statt den Opfern zu helfen, zum Beispiel mit einem Entschädigungsfonds. Sie ist in der Krise, weil sie nicht zugeben will, dass der Priester- und Ordensberuf Männer mit sexuellem Identitätsproblem anzieht. Es ist eine Krise, die das gesamte Land angeht, weil in der Kirche bislang eine Nähe und Wärme möglich war, die anderswo in der Gesellschaft knapp geworden ist. Dieses knappe Gut könnte sie nun verspielen. Auch da ist nun der Papst gefragt. 

The Church does not suffer from a crisis of confidence because it is a society of abusers. It is in a crisis, because it ever more strongly pities itself, instead of helping the victims, for example with a fund for damages. It is in a crisis, because it willl not admit that the priestly and religious life attracts men with problems of sexual idenity. It is in a crisis that concerns the whole country, because until now in the Church were possible a neighborliness and warmth that scarcely exist elsewhere in society.  This good, which is in short supply, can now be lost.  And now the Pope is questioned. 

The Vatican’s touchy reaction, which tries to make the Pope look like a victim, is understandable but wrong-headed.  The Pope, even if he is being unfairly criticized, is not the victim: the abused children are the victims.

Leave a Comment

The Collapse of Church Discipline

in clergy sex abuse scandal, law enforcement, Moral Theology, sexual abuse, Voluntarism 4 Comments Tags: , , ,

As the Murphy Report noted, church discipline in Ireland was almost totally neglected in Ireland. In thirty years only two canonical trials were held, and these were held in opposition to the chief canonist. 

The Roman Catholic Church sometimes suffers from legalism, to which voluntarist moral theology and casuistry contributed. But law has a place in any society, as Paul explained in I Timothy:  “Now we know that the law is good, if anyone uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murders of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnapers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.” In this category defilers of children certainly belong. 

Despite all the claims that bishops were only concerned with orthodoxy, there has been almost no action against either practitioners or preachers of sexual immorality such as Paul Shanley or the Catholic Theological Society, which has never disowned its infamous book Human Sexuality that advises that until society accepts the full range of sexual practices, “enlightened and well-integrated individuals might well free themselves of conflict by simply reflecting on the relativity of their society’s sexual ethic and proceed discreetly with their sexual project.”   Bishops may have been personally orthodoxy, but they never did anything to assure that only Catholic morality was taught under Catholic auspices. In fact (as I know from extensive personal experience) they deeply resented anyone who pointed out the gross heresy that was being taught under Catholic auspices. Not the preachers of immorality, but the ones who asked the bishop to act against those preachers, were the objects of the bishops’ ire. 

At best bishops issued documents that were quietly filed away; the bishops thought they had done their duty and let the chaos in the Church continue unchecked. Only annoying the bishop would provoke his wrath; raping children did not concern him. The children and parents who begged for justice were the ones the bishops disliked –  they inconvenienced the bishop, and there was no greater sin in the bishop’s mind than to inconvenience a bishop. This was as true in Ireland as in the United States.

Leave a Comment

Bishop Lahey and Sacrilege

in Canada, clergy sex abuse scandal, law enforcement, Psychology, repentance, Responsibility, sexual abuse 1 Comment Tags: , ,

Nightmares are a hazard of those who investigate child abuse, and one of the most potent sources of the nightmares is the explicit sacrilege that is sometimes, perhaps often, involved in the abuse. Some abusive priests have dressed boys as Jesus and then assaulted them.

 

Bishop Lahey not only had child porn on his computer (bad enough) but, the Chronicle Herald reports,

Court papers state that the image of the “young, naked male” showed him wearing only “a set of black rosary and a set of white rosary beads around his neck.” The boy appears to be nine to 12 years old, court papers say.

A number of other images of young boys were found on the bishop’s laptop, the documents say, and videos show “young males engaged in sexual acts.”

One image allegedly depicts a young naked male who appears to be “hurt, as there are red welts and marks on his stomach and chest area.”

“He looks sad in this image,” the documents say.

It is bad enough that anyone should find pleasure in such images, but a bishop, a successor of the apostles!

Lahey was widely respected, even by sexual abuse victims. The failure of abusers to give evidence of their evil tendencies in other areas of lives is also deeply disturbing. If we see a person doing many good things, we assume that he is a good person – perhaps not without faults, but not concealing abominable evil either. But that assumption is wrong. That realization is also the stuff of nightmares.

Leave a Comment

The Lack of Anger against Evil

in anger, clergy sex abuse scandal, Moral Theology, sexual abuse 4 Comments Tags: , ,

As I noted in my book, Catholic bishops uniformly failed to get angry when they heard that a priest had defiled a child, often in the church itself. I examined this failure at length in my book Sacrilege, especially on pp. 465-471. 

The bishops have failed to heed the warning of St. John Chrysostom: “He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but the good to do wrong.” 

Dan Leger of the Chronicle Herald is also deeply troubled by Mancini’s response to the allegations about Bishop Lahey and child pornography.

But why wasn’t he angry? Why didn’t he rage at the idea that Lahey might have been another priestly exploiter of children? Why didn’t he pound his fist on the table and demand hard justice for every offender hiding in the folds of the Church’s holy vestments?

Every right-thinking Catholic should be furious at what’s happened to the institution that guides and nourishes their faith. And not just because they, not the Vatican or the institutional Church, are being asked to pay for the sins of the fathers.

Beyond who pays for the abuse settlements, a lot of people have cause to be angry at what’s happened to the Church over the past 50 years, and not only the Catholics. While all this was going on, people of many faiths and no faith at all were being hectored by priests, bishops and popes about morality and ethics.

Catholic authorities have constantly railed against abortion rights, against same-sex marriage, birth control, stem cell research and fertility treatments. They cite the word of God as their authority. By definition, anyone who disagrees with them is not only wrong, but immoral and a sinner.

Yet there is strong evidence, including at least one massive U.S. study commissioned by the Church itself, that those same clerical authorities were aware of abuse allegations against priests and clerics. Rather than cleaning up the mess, they covered it up.

That meant many offenders were moved around and protected by senior Church authorities, often to repeat their abuses in other parishes. That the Church evidently knew that and did so little to stop it suggests hypocrisy on a global scale.

Leave a Comment

The Heart of Man is Desperately Wicked

in Canada, clergy sex abuse scandal, sexual abuse 3 Comments Tags:

We shall see whether Canadian police have any record that confirms that in 1989 Earle told them about Lahey’s possession of child pornography. At that time, the possession of child pornography was not a crime in Canada, and the police may therefore not have made any record, even if Earle in fact told them.

 

Lahey’s testimony in the Burton case is however a matter of record, and it should have raised suspicions. Why would anyone give a character reference to a confessed child molester? Why would anyone claim that boy flourished during the time of the abuse?

 

An even deeper mystery is how a man otherwise apparently humane and a good Christian would have use child pornography. Even the victims of child abuse in his diocese said that Lahey treated them fairly, generously, and humanely.

 

Men who have been very wicked in their sexual behavior have done much good both in society and the Church: Polanski – child rapist but a great director; Maciel – a seducer of boys and women, but a builder of schools for the neglected Mexican poor; Bruce Ritter – who liked blond boys in his bed but who helped thousands of black and Latino throw-away children through Covenant House, and so on.

 

I have no easy answer to this mystery. Society is built upon trust, and we assume that people who do many good things are in fact good people and can be trusted. The mystery is even deeper in the Church. If any ordinary sinner tried to found a religious order, he would get nowhere. But Maciel attracted thousands of followers.

 

But total cynicism about human nature, inside and outside the Church, is also not a proper response. Ordinary people and ordinary Christians have to develop a great spirit of discernment so that they can distinguish between those who are truly doing the Lord’s work from those who are disguising themselves as angels of light.

Leave a Comment

The Repentance of Polanski

in Responsibility, sexual abuse No Comments Tags: ,

Michael Deacon unearthed Polanski comments about the crime he committed: 

Polanski told Martin Amis: 

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”

When the controversy dies down, the Swiss will probably let him go quietly. And Polanski will make the circle of fashionable dinner parties in Europe, and probably get invited to the Élysée. He and his hosts will exchange reminiscences of the pleasures they had with young teenagers, and lament how barbaric and vengeful Americans are. Perhaps Bishop Lahey can be invited to say grace.

Leave a Comment

Polanski and the Beautiful People

in clergy sex abuse scandal, guilt, law enforcement, Responsibility, sexual abuse, Vatican 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

If I may quote from my 1998 book Sacrilege: Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church:

Both literary critics for whom transgressive is a word of praise and whose hero is the Marquis de Sade, and psychologists who desire an ever-expanding field of sexual; liberation put forward the idea that sex with boys is the next area to escape from repression. The media horror at the exposure of the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests has not been entirely convincing. Both advertisements and entertainment sexualize teenagers, and critics continue to praise Roman Polanski, who cannot enter the United States because of an outstanding charge of child molestation against him, but who received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Festival in 2002. (pp. 339-40)

In fact it was not a charge, but a conviction. He pleaded guilty.

The reaction to his recent arrest has been instructive. Clearly the Beautiful People think that they are above the law, and are astonished that it is being applied to Polanski. These BCBG Europeans think that the arrest is another demonstration of Bush-era American redneck prudery. The Dutch have long complained about how the FBI has encouraged the Dutch police to enforce laws against child pornography.

For many decades the idea that punishment is the propose of punishment has been rejected. The law imprisons criminals to keep them from committing further crimes or to rehabilitate them, but not to punish them. The idea that punishment is demanded by justice of increasingly foreign to the chattering classes, especially in Europe. American prison sentences are draconian by European standards, and some American states still execute the worst criminals. Europeans find this barbaric – and Europeans staff the Vatican, which I think in part explains the ho-hum attitude the Vatican has taken to the sexual abuse of children.

The reaction of the little people in Europe has been different. The blogs and letters to the editor  have strongly come out against Polanski and in favor of his arrest, which demonstrates that not even the rich are above the law. But the European rich think they are above the law, that the law is for the little people, not for them. This attitude is a relic of the Ancien Regime which still persists in European class attitudes.

Leave a Comment

Killers as Doctors

in clergy sex abuse scandal, guilt, law enforcement, Medical ethics, Responsibility, sexual abuse, Vatican 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

The future Dr. Svensson of Sweden

One possible source of the Vatican’s lax attitude to sexual abusers in the clergy is that the Vatican is staffed by Europeans who consider America’s harsh punishments of crime barbaric.

Sweden, the New York Times reports, has a convicted neo-Nazi murderer in medical school.

Mr. Svensson…was convicted in the 1999 hate murder of a trade union worker and was paroled after serving 6 ½ years of an 11-year sentence — a typical penalty for murder in Sweden.

His sentence by American standards was lenient.

In contrast with the United States, Swedish laws and customs are sympathetic to released offenders, saying that once they have served their time they should be treated like ordinary citizens.

Although Swensson

has not publicly expressed regret for his crime

one should not be harsh on him.

A Swedish medical student opines:

Mr. Svensson should be allowed to become a doctor. “Who is to say that he might not become a great doctor, even if it in some ways would feel wrong or awkward to have a murderer for a colleague?” he asked. “It is not fair to have preconceptions about his character.”

Even if they are murderers.

Although the entrance to the state-financed slots at the medicals school are extremely competitive (2.603 applicants for 100 positions), the board that interviewed Swenson was not curious about his background:

The disclosures about his past proved deeply embarrassing to the institute. Among other things, two senior faculty members on the admissions committee that interviewed him failed to ask for an explanation of the six-and-a-half-year gap in his résumé, the period he was in prison.

So they admitted him, although there were repercussions:

A year ago, Sweden’s most prestigious medical school found itself in an international uproar after it unknowingly admitted a student who was a Nazi sympathizer and a convicted murderer, then scrambled to find a way to expel him.

The medical school decided that being a murderer was not enough; he had also falsified his records, and that was a serious matter, although not everyone agreed

Eventually he was expelled; but that is not the end of it.

The 33-year-old student, Karl Helge Hampus Svensson, having been banished from the medical school of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm on the ground that he falsified his high school records, has now been admitted to a second well-known medical school — Uppsala, Sweden’s oldest university.

The murderer is in medical school; the court records about the murder victim have conveniently and mysteriously disappeared, like many pages from the court records of priest-abusers in Boston.

In another embarrassing twist, a Swedish newspaper reported last month that much of the verdict and court files regarding Bjorn Soderberg, Mr. Svensson’s murder victim, had been cut out or replaced with blank pages. The police said they had been unable to find a culprit.

If murderers can make good doctors, a fortiori sexual criminals can:

And in still another case, a 24-year-old medical student at Lund University was convicted last April of raping a 14-year-old boy while he slept. A district court sentenced the student to two years in prison, but a higher court reduced the sentence to two years’ probation and medical therapy.

When the dean at Lund sought to expel the student, a national board that reviews expulsions blocked the action, saying that although the man had committed a serious crime, he was not considered a threat to people or property.

Doctors, even more than priests, have contact with extremely vulnerable people. But Europeans shy away from the harsh attitude to criminals that Americans have, and perhaps that explains the Vatican’s attitude to the clerical criminals that infested the Church in the United States.

Leave a Comment

Population Bust in Russia

in demography, sexual abuse No Comments

The headline of the NYT article says it all: Its Population Falling, Russia Beckons Its Children Home.

The United Nations predicts that the country will fall to 116 million people by 2050, from 141 million now, an 18 percent decline, largely because of a low birthrate and poor health habits.

Abortion and contraception are entrenched in Russia, and even baby bonuses haven’t slowed the population decline.

The Russian government is therefore looking to Russians beyond its borders.

Moscow has spent $300 million in the past two years to get the repatriation program started, and officials estimated that more than 25 million people were eligible, many of them ethnic Russians who found themselves living in former Soviet republics after the Soviet collapse in 1991.

Even Old Believers who fled to Brazil are being contacted.

But not much success so far:

So far, only 10,300 people have moved back under the government repatriation program, which has faced criticism that it is overly bureaucratic and unpersuasive.

Leave a Comment

Maciel – Four Possibilities

in clergy sex abuse scandal, Maciel, Narcissism, sexual abuse, Vatican 12 Comments Tags: ,

The Vatican and the Legion of Christ have decided to maintain a discrete silence about Maciel. Perhaps a further statement will be forthcoming, as promised, or perhaps the Vatican and the Legion count on the short attention span of the public.

The Legion has admitted that Maciel fathered a child in his old age and was leading a double life. Maciel went to his grave without admitting any guilt. He let the Legion portray him as a wrongly-persecuted saint.

When the Vatican told Maciel to retire to a life of prayer and penance, it showed it believed at least some of the allegations that he had molested seminarians.

There are further allegations and rumors, which I list in roughly descending order of probability:

– That Maciel absolved his sexual partners during confession

– That Maciel misused Legion money

– That Maciel led a luxurious life

– That Maciel used narcotics

– That Maciel became the lover of several rich women to extract money from them

– That Maciel was involved in narcotraffic

– That the mother of the daughter was only 15 when Maciel impregnated her.

The admitted double life and the certain molestations of seminarians are bad enough; the others simply compound the crimes.

From the admissions and allegations about Maciel I have come up with four possibilities, in descending order of seriousness:

1. He was a false prophet who was sent to deceive if possible even the elect. Germain Grisez leans in this direction.

2. He was a charismatic psychopath, totally lacking in empathy for the pain he was causing, and he constructed the Legion to indulge his vices.

3. He was a pathological narcissist, not completely lacking in empathy, but determined to keep everyone centered upon his personality and thereby control everyone. His altruism was in the service of his narcissism: he did good things so that he would be the center of attention.

4. He was himself seriously damaged by abuse and compartmentalized his personality, as men all too easily do. All his good work was in one part of his life; then there was another, sealed-off compartment that contained his sexuality.

I don’t know, and perhaps no human being alive knows, which of these possibilities is closest to the truth. Maciel did a lot of harm, whatever the cause, but clearly one’s attitude to him would change if he himself had somehow been a victim.

There were enough clues over the years to alert authorities in the Vatican that something was wrong, there was at the very minimum too much of a cult of personality and too rigid a control of members. But no one acted until Benedict became pope; he knew something was seriously wrong, and at least took some action. Was it enough? Those who said that Maciel abused them are still being called liars by some members of the Legion.

Members of the Legion want to think that Maciel was simply a sinner, that his one fling showed he had human weaknesses. But clearly Maciel’s personality was severely damaged and distorted to the point that the Legion, which was set up to reflect his personality, itself must suffer from serious distortions.

Can a religious congregation be founded by an unrepentant sinner? Who would want to join a congregation founded by a child molester? But what is the Church to do with the Legion? I would suggest a spiritual Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The assets of the Legion, its members, properties, and endowments, should be distributed to other congregations in the Church.

Leave a Comment

Double Standard for Roman Polanski

in clergy sex abuse scandal, sexual abuse, Uncategorized No Comments Tags: ,

One of the few legitimate complaints about the way the press has handled the clericals sex abuse accusations is that there is a double standard for clerical and non-clerical abusers.

Roman Polanski fled the United States after being accused of having intercourse with a 13-year-old girl. He admitted the act, but said he didn’t know she was only 13. He has never returned to the U.S., but has had a successful career and received an Oscar in 2002 for The Pianist.

He wants his case to be heard in absentia, according to the AP. The victim wants him to appear before the court, and the court has refused to have a trial when he has fled justice and it has no control over his person.

The prosecutor David Walgren explained:

Walgren said little has changed legally since the day in 1978 when Polanski failed to appear in a Santa Monica courtroom for sentencing.

“The defendant ignored a lawful and valid court order to appear in court and instead chose to flee to the comforts of France,” he said.

“It would be a farce for this court to review the case when it has no jurisdiction over the defendant,” the prosecutor said.

Walgren argued that allowing such a hearing would violate the basic principle of the fugitive disentitlement doctrine, that “a fugitive from justice has no right to ask the court to review the very judgment that the fugitive flouts.”

As for the victim’s right to speak, Walgren concluded: “Until such time that the defendant submits to this court’s jurisdiction and the court holds a hearing, the time is not ripe for the victim, either personally or through her attorney, to be heard in court.”

There is no outcry that the arts community has honored an admitted child-molester.

Leave a Comment
1 2 3 4