Month: October 2009

SNAP’s long shot in Wheeling

SNAP not only wants Fr. Gleeson removed and investigated.

The group also wants an explanation about why he was appointed to the board despite allegations against him, and it is seeking a settlement involving him and an investigation into the original accusation.

Ah, but the Jesuits have never conceded anything in the matter.  Not in California, where the accuser and the three accused functioned at the time, and not in West Virginia.  Indeed, the three were reassigned but not demoted, one of them to Seattle, where he became a university vice president.

So SNAP is barking up an impregnable, unclimbable tree, or so it seems.  They cite Catholic rulings. 

“In 2002, the U.S. Catholic church adopted a national clergy sexual misconduct policy . . . .  It mandates openness in cases of alleged clergy misdeeds, and it requires that a priest who is credibly accused of sexual abuse be suspended while the case is investigated.

“After that policy was adopted, many bishops re-examined earlier allegations that had once been ignored, dismissed or deemed unsubstantiated. Dozens of Catholic clerics who had been accused but kept in ministry were suspended. That is what we want to see happen here with Gleeson.”

But if the accuser was told by his California provincial to whine no more, as he claims, what will the Maryland provincial — Wheeling Jesuit is in that province — say?  Butt out, is my guess, or nothing at all.

The million-dollar suit in 1999, keep in mind, was about workplace harassment, not abuse of a minor.  The three kept hitting on this scholastic (seminarian) until, his complaints ignored, he bailed out. 

The appeals decision was very important, in that it permitted the law to enter the seminary, jumping over the wall, as it were.  Once the decision was rendered, on Dec. 1, 1999, the suit was enabled.  The settlement was made during 2000.  By August of that year, Gleeson was back in Maryland, his home province, on a new assignment in charge of a retreat house.

As reported below, he is currently on sabbatical from a similar assignment in Wernersville, PA.

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Wheeling Jesuit trustee on the spot

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) is on the case of a Wheeling Jesuit U. trustee, one of three Jesuits who voted to fire Rev. Julio Giuletti SJ as president.  They want him suspended from the much larger, lay-and-Jesuit board of directors, on which he has also been serving.

WJU’s interim president, Davitt McAteer, told AP the university is pleased with Rev. Thomas F. Gleeson — he’s been a director since 2004 — and has no plans to suspend or investigate him.

Gleeson is discussed in an earlier blog.  He had been named as a defendant in a highly publicized sexual harassment suit filed by a former seminarian, John Bollard, a Jesuit in training.  Gleeson was president of the seminary, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley.  Bollard told his story on “60 Minutes.”

Aside from [Rev. Anton} Harris [S.J.] sending suggestive pictures of naked men, he said, Gleeson, . . . asked Bollard to masturbate with him. [Another Jesuit, Rev. Andrew] Sotelo, a faculty member at St. Ignatius [High, where Bollard taught], suggested that they cruise gay bars, Bollard [said].  When he reported these passes to a supervisor [the provincial], he said, he was handed a coffee cup printed with the words “No whining.”

Bollard sued, asking $1 million, claiming workplace harassment.  He won an appeals court case enabling him to do so.  The Jesuits settled without going to trial.  Gleeson, pictured here,

TomGleeson SJ_edited,

meanwhile has left his post as rector of the Jesuit Center at Wernersville, PA, for a September-to-December sabbatical.  His replacement is filling in “until a certain unnamed long-term Jesuit replacement [be]comes [available], next summer.”

John Bollard:

226seattleu06_bollard

Riding the CTA for free no more?

Look out, old-timers, they’re coming after us:

To avoid “very ugly” fare hikes and service cuts on the Chicago Transit Authority system, Mayor Richard Daley said the Legislature needs to end free rides for senior citizens.

Ugly?  I’ll tell you what’s ugly.  It’s you, Daley.

“They have to revisit everything,” Daley said. “And that is one of ’em they have to revisit. Definitely.”

Why?  We’re old, we’re feeble, we’re crabby when we don’t get our own way, we’re more than you can handle, big guy.

The free-ride program was added to the 2008 CTA bailout by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich and later was extended to low-income riders with disabilities, disabled veterans and military personnel. The CTA figures free rides will cost it about $60 million in 201.

He did the Democrat thing, and now some other Democrat’s going to take it away.  Look.  Blago embarrassed Dems because he was so obvious about it.

He spent public money to get votes, he gave favors for private money (his own).  OK, but he over did it!

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Mild-mannered opposition

Sen. Grassley sums up objections to the Baucus bill, boldface added:

First and foremost . . . [it] moves the nation to “more and more government control of health care.”
 
[It] would produce the biggest expansion of Medicaid since its creation; it will create an “unprecedented federal mandate” for insurance coverage, which the Internal Revenue Service would enforce; it increases the size of government by at least $1.8 trillion when fully implemented; it gives the Health and Human Services secretary the power to define benefits for every plan in America and to redefine those benefits annually. . . .
 
The bill “will cause health care premiums for millions to go up, not down,” Grassley said. He pointed to new insurance rating reforms as well as new fees and taxes that will end up raising premiums for million of Americans.

Big Daddy will love it.  Individual responsibility and freedom will suffer.

And, what we know too well, it’s a Dem bill (with maybe [did I say maybe?  Was never any doubt] Sen. Snowe to buy in).  Grassley:

“I still hold out hope that at some point the doorway to bipartisanship will be opened once again. I hope at some point the White House and the (Senate) leadership will want to correct the mistakes that they made by ending our collaborative bipartisan work.”

Hope away, Senator.

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Clear as mud

I’ve been meaning to say this for a long time, you have to believe me.

For all his flourish, President Barack Obama sure falls back on a few familiar phrases.

Make no mistake. Change isn’t easy. It won’t happen overnight. There will be setbacks and false starts.

Those who routinely listen to the president have come to expect some of those expressions to pop up in almost every speech. (That includes you, cynics and naysayers, the ones Obama mentions all the time without identifying who is saying nay.)

Yet in the portfolio of presidential phrases, none is more pervasive than Obama’s four-word favorite: Let me be clear.

So I give a begrudging cheer to ABC’s [oops, AP’s] Ben Feller, who beat me and, I’m sure, many others to the punch.

My opinion? It’s part and parcel (chestnut there, sorry) of his overall dishonesty.  (They all are dishonest, you say; but like the pigs in Animal Farm being equal, some are more so than others.)  Those catch phrases are b.s., right?

Later: Oh my, Instapundit linked this, and now my neatly graphed WordPress ups and downs of hit numbers won’t mean a thing, will look uniformly flat as today’s and tomorrow’s shoot up.  Oh well.

Later 2: Another winner, from Reader D, who hates it

when Obama says, “I said it once, and I’ll say it again . . .” Because then I don’t believe he ever said it once.

And few of us look it up at the time.  It becomes a sort of creeping disillusionment if we once believed him or are generally loathe to disbelieve people, a shock of recognition (of a gifted liar) if we hadn’t thought about it.

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And there’s that matter of abortion

The health care revamping has been on my radar mainly for its cost and its dumbing down, as it were (groping for another term), of health care itself; but the abortion business might be its big achilles heel:

(CNSNews.com) – Rep. Bart Stupak (D.-Mich.), co-chairman of the House Pro-Life Caucus, told CNSNews.com that Democrats who oppose government funding of abortion will try to block the health care reform bill from coming to a vote on the House floor unless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) allows a floor vote on an amendment to explicitly prohibit abortion funding in the bill.

Meanwhile, the RC bishops have not yet dropped the ball on this one and find fault with Obama, the sweetheart of Notre Dame:

(CNSNews.com) – One day after the White House contradicted an assertion by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that all current versions of the health-care bill permit funding of abortion, the Catholic bishops declared they would “vigorously” oppose the bill if it was not changed to include language to prohibit abortion funding.

Meanwhile, Mayordaley II of Chicago has shown Obama and all other pols the way to true honesty, in an abortion-related context:

“My religion is very personal. …Religion does not play a part when I make a decision on behalf of the people of Chicago. It is a decision I have to make as mayor, not as a Catholic. …That is separate for me,” he said.

He’s one of the few — I’d guess the only one — who have declared themselves politically irreligious as a matter of policy.

Later, D., picking up on Daley as irreligious: That’s probably why there are so many crooked deals made in Chicago — because Thou Shalt Not Steal is the 7th Commandment — the religion thing again. So what DOES Daley base his decisions on — the rules of Parcheesi??

Me, moved to respond: No morals in politics, only expediency.  — V.I. Lenin.  Not kidding.  Got it as a Fenwick senior in religion class, from the late James Regan, O.P., 1948–49 school year.  Thus politicsprofessor.com and Time Mag, 11/17/1947, where Fr. Regan read it, I bet: he went regularly to Time for such items, remained an avid consumer of current events reporting to his final days nine years ago, at the Dominican Priory in River Forest.

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Email old hat?

Reading at The Daily Beast that email is being (has been) overtaken by Facebook and Twitter, for its instant-communication factor, this man or woman spoke from the heart.

As one over 40, I’m still trying to get a handle on Facebook & Twitter. Negatives re Facebook: too many relatives have too much time on their hands and clog up my wall; relatives who send personal emails via facebook which requires me to then log on to facebook to respond [not that hard] and who knows who all will see my response.

Seems easier and more personal to send regular email [or snail mail?] when contacting one person direct. I don’t have much to say that I need to broadcast to everyone (except when I’m commenting on articles like this!)

As one friend said, facebook can be a real time suck. [Hear, hear!] 

Facebook positive: easy to see what’s going on with friends and family.

Email negative: can’t really think of any, other than you can’t really post a photo album for family to easily see whenever they want. [Huh?  I get photos, album or otherwise all the time but have to admit some are not easily accessed.]

The original story is at Wall St. Journal.

MM comments:

Facebook and Twitter: don’t we already waste enough time going through 40 emails a day of cute dog pictures and chain letters?  Now we have to get on the computer and tweat about every little thing we do, and put our entire lives on the net for all the world to see on Facebook?  Riciduluous waste of time. 

I wonder how the younger generation was conned into believing this is a good thing.  Perhaps behind the groovy facade sits the real owner of all these sites: the government!  What a great way for big brother to know everything we do, think, believe in, who we know, where we go, etc.

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