You don’t knock the big guy. Your position is tricky enough when you serve an autocrat.

O’Malley believes that the pope understands how important the issue of sexual abuse is: “His encounter with victims has made a very profound impact on his life and his ministry,” the cardinal said. And yet, the Church faces enormous structural and cultural barriers to establishing worldwide policies and procedures to deal with abuse, which O’Malley acknowledged. As for the meeting in February, “My worry is that the expectations in the United States are that this meeting is going to address all of our local concerns here,” he said, “which is not necessarily the case.”

A very sensitive one, at that. So O’M reads his mind or thinks he does, even after being double-crossed.

He detailed his proposal to establish Vatican tribunals to deal with bishops accused of wrongdoing—one of the major problems the Church has yet to address. The pope “was convinced to do it another way,” O’Malley said. “We’re still waiting for the procedures to be clearly articulated.”

Was convinced.

He often described problems in the Church passively, without directly assigning agency or fault. For example: American bishops have asked the Vatican for an investigation into Theodore McCarrick, the former cardinal who was consistently elevated despite widely acknowledged rumors of sexual misconduct, until he was removed from ministry last summer.

After months of requests, an investigation appears to be under way. “Certainly, many of us have personally expressed to the Holy Father and the secretary of state the need to do something quickly,” O’Malley said. “I keep getting assurances. But we’re waiting for the documents to be produced.”

Personally expressed does not do it, hence leaks, which are dishonorable, or going public, which is not cricket and gets you defenestrated. Thus patience.

Best he can do in the present moment:

As for the meeting in February, “My worry is that the expectations in the United States are that this meeting is going to address all of our local concerns here,” he said, “which is not necessarily the case.”

Not necessarily does not do justice to the odds in this case. Especially in view of the insulting public undercutting of the U.S. bishops in November, engineered in part by his man Cupich, who could not get himself elected to the office a year ago.

Which is how an autocrat can finesse unseemly independence. You have your man among them, who after the blow was administered, has the chutzpah to jump up and lecture his unsuspecting fellows about what a great idea it was to abandon their best laid plans to do something on their own, as if they had not just got their lesson without his rubbing it in.

He already knows about it:

Annals of Socialized Medicine

“Health service is chaotic and dysfunctional, says NHS chief Lord Prior of Brampton,” The Times (U.K.), Feb. 15

Anyhow, the news would be the opposite where I come from.

Gays rule.

[New book] includes the claim that about 80 percent of the male�Roman Catholic clergy who work at the Vatican, around the pope, are gay.

It contends that the more showily homophobic a Vatican official is, the more likely he belongs to that crowd, and that the higher up the chain of command you go, the more gays you find.

And not all of them are celibate [rather, “chaste,” celebate
meaning unmarried]. Not by a long shot.

Ah. And what about chanceries?

Lotsa bucks speaker:

According to the House Press Gallery, House speakers earn an annual salary of $223,500, which amounts to a roughly $30,000 raise for Pelosi, who is now again the third-highest-paid elected official in the U.S. federal government (after the president and vice president). Of course, this is a substantial salary by any means, but it doesn’t come anywhere near to accounting for Nancy Pelosi’s huge net worth.

According to Time, estimates of Pelosi’s net worth vary. Roll Call’s most recent Wealth of Congress analysis says she’s worth at least $16 million, but OpenSecrets puts her around $100 million.

She has refused to talk about it. What we do know comes from her financial disclosure reports. For example, she and her husband, Paul, own a house and vineyard in California that’s worth at least $5 million and that brought in between $15,000 and $50,000 in grape sales in 2017. She owns a commercial property and a four-story building in San Francisco that each earned her at least $100,000. She also has stock in Apple, Facebook, and Disney.

Could be questioning her finances is a case of sour grapes?

This was last December.

VATICAN CITY—A little-known Vatican appeals panel established by Pope Francis has sharply reduced penalties meted out to priests convicted of sexual abuse under church law in more than a third of the cases that have come before it, drawing criticism from some bishops who favor a harder line.

The pontiff has promised a policy of zero tolerance against sex abuse, and critics say the decisions of the panel, composed of eight cardinals and bishops, undermine that message. In some instances, the panel has reinstated clerics expelled from the priesthood by other church authorities.

At a June 2017 meeting of top Vatican officials, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston complained about what he considered the panel’s excessive leniency, according to people familiar with the matter. And tensions over the issue have mounted since, those people said.

Now this today:

At the 2017 meeting:

“If this gets out, it will cause a scandal,” Cardinal O’Malley told Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, in effect the pope’s prime minister, and other Vatican officials, according to a person present. No action was taken to address the issue.

Predictably,

The Catholic Church’s handling of the long-running crisis over clerical sex abuse has exposed fissures within its hierarchy. Activists and some church leaders hoped the Vatican would take a tougher stance on abuse under Pope Francis—and thought a meeting next week at a global summit of bishops would make progress toward that goal.

Instead, the opposite has happened, deepening the gap between the Vatican and U.S. church leaders, who have pushed for a more stringent response. No clearer is the rift than in the relationship between Pope Francis and Cardinal O’Malley, a bearded Capuchin friar who likes to be called “Cardinal Sean.”

Now Cardinal Sean is on outside looking in:

The Boston cardinal’s influence has declined to the point where, in November, the pope excluded him from the organizing committee of next week’s summit, which had been Cardinal O’Malley’s idea.

A spokesman for the Vatican declined to comment.

Quite a souring of a once warm relationship:

Cardinal O’Malley “should be nominated for the Nobel Prize for common sense,” Cardinal Bergoglio told a mutual acquaintance in 2010.

That year, the American paid him a visit in Buenos Aires. In a meeting room adorned with portraits of past cardinals, down a hall from Cardinal Bergoglio’s spartan quarters, the two men surveyed church and local politics around Latin America, according to a witness.

Francis once endorsed what he considered O’Malley’s common sense zero-tolerance prescription. No more. It’s a grim situation that has the once-favored Franciscan now ignored. What is Francis thinking of?

more more more at this WSJ article . . .

This is voodoo. In a class with the evil eye or witch’s curse.

These people are on the same page.

“Near unanimity” among cops it’s a no-go.

I can’t recall a large crime story where there was a bigger gap between what the police and media are saying publicly, and what they expressing behind the scenes, than the saga involving the recent alleged hate crime against actor Jussie Smollett. Similarly, there may not be a story where you can tell more by what has not happened, in comparison to what actually has occurred.

Behind the scenes, however, based on conversations I have had with multiple people covering the story, there is a radically different take on what really did happen to Smollett. In short, there is near unanimity among police sources that Smollett’s story is very likely not true. And that even the media outlets still regurgitating the current “party line” don’t really believe it.

Later: The phone information was given to cops, but that’s a no-go so far.

. . . police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said on Monday that Smollett, 36, had not given enough proof that he was talking to [his manager] Brandon Z. Moore when he was jumped on January 29. ‘We continue to investigate but the records are insufficient to corroborate some of the information.

‘We appreciate the cooperation but will be following up for some additional data,’ Guglielmi told DailyMail.com.

What did they give to the cops?

TMZ reports that Smollett gave a redacted, PDF print-out of a bill but police would not confirm that detail on Tuesday morning.

They also would not confirm whether or not they planned to ask the cell phone company for the records they say he is withholding.

It comes a day after Smollett’s representative hit out at the department for revealing that he had not, until yesterday morning, handed over any phone records to support his story.

Later yet: Chi Trib has confirmed it:

Chicago police on Monday confirmed that representatives for “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett had turned over phone records nearly two weeks after he reported being assaulted by two strangers near his Streeterville apartment.

But a spokesman for police Superintendent Eddie Johnson by late evening said that the records “are not sufficient and do not meet the burden of a criminal investigation,” and that police may require more assistance from the actor.

The New York Post’s “Page Six” column first reported that phone records for Smollett and his manager, whom he told authorities he was speaking with during the attack, were turned over to Johnson’s chief of staff on Monday.

Investigators had sought Smollett’s phone records since shortly after he reported the attack Jan. 29 in the 300 block of East North Water Street.

But police described Smollett’s phone records as a heavily redacted document file and his manager’s records as a screenshot of phone calls that provide limited information to investigators. Chief police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said police were “appreciative” of Smollett’s cooperation in providing the records but said detectives will likely need additional data from Smollett to crack the case.

A representative for Smollett wasn’t immediately available for comment.

Whole thing very dramatic, I’d say.

Remember when protesters chanted “Hey hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today”?

It’s what I think of when I see this kind of story, absent the LBJ part.