Auxiliary Bishop Morneau of Green Bay will withdraw from public ministry, devoting himself to “prayer for all victims and survivors of sexual abuse and . . . corporal works of mercy in reparation for what I failed to do.”
A model for others. one would think.
Easy peasey, girl. We all make mistakes.
A former classmate of Christine Blasey Ford tells NPR that she does not know if an alleged sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh took place as she first suggested on social media.
“That it happened or not, I have no idea,” Cristina King Miranda told NPR’s Nina Totenberg. “I can’t say that it did or didn’t.”
That’s different from what Miranda wrote Wednesday in a now-deleted Facebook post that stated definitively, “The incident DID happen, many of us heard about it in school.”
In other words, she got caught up in the moment. A resister who did not think twice.
It’s like the old laugh line: Next time, THIMK!
via NPR
Ringing defense by one who was there, closing with:
Is Goedert an unsung hero? That is hard to say. But he did not flee the arena. He stayed and did what he could. If that falls short of your latter-day moral standard, he will have to live with that.
But the public record should be fair. Rev. Raymond Goedert was a major player in a quiet effort that substantially cleaned up the Archdiocese of Chicago before the public was even aware of the problem. That should be his legacy, not an editorial calculated to humiliate him and, so meanly, to roust an elderly priest out of the cardinal’s house.
Long and detailed account.
“I’m calling on Pope Francis and Cardinal Cupich to send this hateful bigot packing,” [Ald.] Mell wrote [on her Facebook page]. “If the church is serious about restoring trust with its parishioners and spreading a message of love and tolerance, this is a perfect opportunity. This is a hate crime — plain and simple. I’m asking the City and Federal government to treat it as one.”
Won’t happen, however, according to
Julie Justicz, director of the hate crimes project at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.
“While we advocate strongly against hate crimes, I have a hard time calling this a hate crime,” Justicz said. “There isn’t an underlying crime that would make it a hate crime under Illinois law.”
Under state law, she said, a crime like battery or assault would have to accompany biased motivation or discriminatory intent.
Nobody got punched out. So maybe the alderman might want to cool down.
But she sure wants the priest’s head. A regular Salome, she is.
via Chicago Tribune
Gay-acceptance advocate James Martin SJ says he “cannot imagine a more homophobic act, short of beating up an LGBT person . . . What the pastor and some of his parishioners did shows the kind of hatred that LGBT Catholics still face — in their own church.”
The pressure is on.
via Sun-Times
The Great West Virginia President Firing
Deserved an article in Gent’s Quarterly or Vogue.
1. He had a personal chef whom he sent to France for two weeks to learn how to prepare gourmet food as the French prepare it. The chef enjoyed his time there and said he was amazed at how the French care for their vegetables
2. He had a sunken bar installed in his mansion on Elmwood Place, Wheeling, along with a huge wine cellar (be assured there was neither Boone’s Farm nor Mad Dog 20/20 on his shelves)
3. He took NUMEROUS first-class fights to Rome each year, always accompanied and always carrying a significant amount of dollars converted to euros
4. On one occasion while dining at the Chop House restaurant in Charleston he told an associate he had considered buying a helicopter for the diocese but ruled that purchase out because, “that would send the people over the deep…
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Byron York sums it all up, closing with justified conclusion:
But as Wednesday began, the situation was one of Democrats in turmoil, with their star witness reluctant to appear and their latest demands unmet, while Kavanaugh remained unshakably confident.
Good news. Al Hannity would say, let not your hearts be troubled.
More more more on this story, here at The Hill, in addition to Sun-Times.
From Sun-Times, in story headlined above:
[The pastor, Fr] Kalchik led seven parishioners in a prayer of exorcism Friday, and the flag was burned inside a portable fire pit placed the schoolyard next to the church. The ashes of the flag now rest in a church compost heap.
“That banner and what it stood for doesn’t belong to the Archdiocese or Cardinal Cupich. It belongs to the people of this parish who paid for it,” Kalchik said. “What have we done wrong other than destroy a piece of propaganda that was used to put out a message other than what the church is about?”
Spokeswoman Anne Maselli:
. . . the archdiocese was “unaware” that the flag-burning occurred, “and we are following up on the situation. As Catholics we affirm the dignity of all persons.”
Out of the playbook she spoke.
Gay group Dignity USA president Chris Pett:
“He’s hijacking the parish and trampling on core Catholic values . . . The archdiocese needs to denounce this in the strongest possible terms.”
Some history and more from Fr. K.:
Kalchik, 56, claims he was preceded by three “bad priests” who were “big in promoting the gay lifestyle” before he was ordained as pastor of Resurrection by Cardinal Francis George in 2007.
The flag was first displayed prominently at the church’s altar in 1991 to welcome LGBTQ worshippers to the faith, according to Kalchik, but it was later taken down and put into storage — along with priestly vestments and candles emblazoned with rainbow colors.
Kalchik said he found the vestments and destroyed them when he arrived in 2007, but somehow missed the flag until another cleaning session last month.
“The people of this parish have been pretty resilient and put up with a lot of B.S.” Kalchik said in an interview in his office Tuesday night. “And it was just by accident that this banner that was made to celebrate all things gay … did not get destroyed when I first got here.”
K. touches the third rail of progressive sensitivity:
Kalchik — who says he was sexually abused by a neighbor as a child, and again by a priest when he began working for the church at 19 — says the sex-abuse crisis plaguing the church is “definitely a gay thing.”
Indeed. Cardinal C., however,
. . . has rejected a connection between the scandal and gay priests but has drawn criticism in recent weeks for comments claiming the church should focus on other priorities instead of being “distracted” by the sex-abuse crisis.
C. wants it to go away. K. doesn’t.
“I can’t sit well with people like Cardinal Cupich, who minimizes all of this,” Kalchik said. “Excuse me, but almost all of the [abuse] cases are, with respect to priests, bishops and whatnot, taking and using other young men sexually. It’s definitely a gay thing.”
Of gays in the church, Kalchik says “scripture is crystal-clear. It’s against God’s law.
Or so says the church, including Pope Francis, apparently, though he is hard to chart in the matter, as in others, reportedly telling Italian bishops not to admit practicing gays to the seminary but to at to the disappointment of at least one gay advocate still holding to the Catholic line,.
One thing, he’s cagy on the subject and says a lot to make him seem very gay-friendly. Like his Chicago appointee, Cardinal Cupich.
Finally, another explanation by Fr. K., in The Hill, where he’s quoted from NBC News,
. . . the flag, which had the image of the cross intertwined with a rainbow, was a “profane” depiction of the cross and a “sacrilege.”
“We did [the burning] in a private way, a quiet way, so as not to bring the ire of the gay community down upon this parish,” [he] said. “It’s our full right to destroy it, and we did so privately because the archdiocese was breathing on our back.”
. . . . .
“We took matters into our own hands and said a prayer of exorcism over this thing,” Kalchik said. “It was cut into seven pieces, so it was burned over stages in the same fire pit that we used for the Easter vigil mass.”
Depends what you mean by desecration, says another LGBTQ spokesperson:
“Those involved in this desecration [of the flag] are violating the core values of the Catholic faith,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA. “They are hijacking the parish to further an extremist agenda, and damaging the community in doing so.”
She has the language, we must admit. “So’s your old man” never did mouth-fighting better.
Fr. Paul Kalchik had a call from the archdiocese’s two Vicars for Priests, Monsignor Dennis Lyle and Fr. Jeremy Thomas, calling from their office.
“It was a joint phone call with Fr. [sic] Dennis Lyle [Mundelein seminary rector 2006-2012] and Fr. Jeremy Thomas, who told me the cardinal had a message for me,” Kalchik told PJM.
“They said, ‘the cardinal wants you to know three things. First, you are not to burn the flag and if you do you should know there are canonical penalties for disobeying the cardinal.
“Second, you have put in a transfer request [to a northern Michigan diocese] to move closer to your parents and that will not happen if you do this.
“Thirdly, the cardinal thinks you should get a psychological evaluation.'”
This last is a killer:
Fr. Kalchik has been under psychological care for PTSD and depression since he was sexually assaulted at the age of 11 by a neighbor and then again at the age of 19 by a priest. “It was very insensitive,” he said of the cardinal’s message to him. “My condition is not a secret. All of my adult life I’ve been in treatment for the trauma of my youth. But still I’ve managed to have a functional life and a very successful career.”
Never mind. He apparently is not to provoke or embarrass the LGBT community which endorses violation of church law, under penalties prescribed by church law. Makes quite a tangled web.
via Catholic Priest, a Sexual Abuse Survivor, Burns LGBT Rainbow Flag
Blithe Spirit 