Mo. judge to SNAP: Hand over your files

Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment
Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To clergy defendants’ lawyers, that is, to see if they have been coaching complaining witnesses to dig out repressed memories that lead to accusation.  It’s an attack on the accuracy of the dredged-up memories, which are crucial in Missouri, where the five-year statue of limitation begins only at the time of the recovered memory of abuse.

If defense lawyers can prove that the plaintiffs did not actually suppress memories of sexual abuse for decades, judges would have to throw out the lawsuits under a five-year statute of limitations that the Missouri Supreme Court reaffirmed in 2006, The Kansas City Star reported (http://bit.ly/IeKExU ).

Read more: http://www.kmbc.com/news/30940594/detail.html#ixzz1szPf7S7m

It’s an “ironic reversal,” comments Catholic World News.

In scores of other cases, SNAP has demanded complete disclosure of confidential personnel files by Catholic dioceses. But the group has fought stubbornly to prevent disclosure of its own internal records. [Jackson County Judge Ann] Mesle said that she expected her order would be appealed.

Carol Marin fulminates feverishly

. . . about bishops and nuns.

Criminal trial in Philly, Peoria bishop compares Obama to Hitler (sic), and Vatican takes on U.S. nuns. How dumb and irrelevant can the Vatican be?

What, no condemnation of pederasty, no instant censure of over-top sermonizing? The Vatican approves of pederasty, is indifferent to what’s playing in Peoria? Apparently.

You decide if this makes sense. Ongoing, longstanding over-the-top pronouncements by nuns’ leaders over many years finally motivates the glacially speeding HQ of the world’s biggest, longest standing, most intricate and many-faceted religious organization, unparallelled in global sweep, to do what? Investigate nuns’ leaders. And a Chicago columnist is thinking Philadelphia and Peoria? You decide.

Yes. The Philly trial provides a sickening display of moral cancer in the world’s biggest, etc. religious organization, which has what to do with the sisters? It’s a war on them? Rather, a war between them and the Vatican, which is supposed to butt out until people forget about the moral cancer? A tough sell, to be sure. Major problem. But not to obscure every other problem.

That sermon in Peoria. Lesson #179 in the problem of comparing people to Hitler, even if you speak of lesser indignities that point to greater ones on their way, lesser infringements leading to greater, etc. But you can’t win talking that way, and you don’t need Hitler for your case in point. Better stay with, say, Bismarck, whose Kultur Kampf sounds more like what’s happening here and now:

The German term About this sound Kulturkampf (help·info) (literally, “culture struggle”) refers to German policies in relation to secularity and the influence of theRoman Catholic Church, enacted from 1871 to 1878 by the Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck. The Kulturkampf did not extend to the other German states such as Bavaria. As one scholar put it, “the attack on the church included a series of Prussian, discriminatory laws that made Catholics feel understandably persecuted within a predominantly Protestant nation.” Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans and other orders were expelled in the culmination of twenty years of anti-Jesuit and antimonastic hysteria.[1]

Bismarck sought aggressively to secularize Germany. He was a man on a mission, in which he succeeded, created one glorious reich where there had been rival and barely cooperating duchies and the like. Thing is, he could not abide churchly competition.

More later, perhaps, on the current Bismarcking of Obama’s country by him and his devotedly secular allies, among which he is obviously very comfortable, thank you.

See also the Catholic Encyclopedia on this pregnant subject.

African Americans wig out, beat up caucasian man

See how reporting is done here on tippy toes, lest people know that this was black on white crime.

Victim’s sister:

 “It was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed.” [Ashley] Parker says 20 people, all African American, attacked her brother on the front porch of his home, using “brass buckles, paint cans and anything they could get their hands on.

Police will only say “multiple people” are involved.

Episcopal perps?

Barack Obama delivers a speech at the Universi...
Who will rid me of these troublesome bishops? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This Notre Dame alum blogging at The Weekly Standard says a stand-off between Obama and the Catholic bishops on the HHS mandate “may not be good for either side.”

He gives an instance, “the disastrous situation of the president sending bishops to jail for being faithful witnesses to their religious convictions.”

I’d say he’s on to something.

Later, from an informed source, an alternate scenario:

The bishops and obama go head to head — the bishops blowing steam — and Catholics (some) getting all revved up for months. Then, just before the election — a week — Obama caves on HHS and  Catholics are relieved to relax and get off their soap boxes.

They watch the bishops on TV kiss and make up profusely to Obama — photo op all’round, conciliatory quotes from Obama, and it’s practically an endorsement just before casting their ballots. You know nothing would make many of these bishops happier…to be assured they’d get the rest of Obamacare initiated.

As the poor lad legendarily told Shoeless Joe, say it ain’t so.

The Bishop Jenky sermon

The Bishop Jenky sermon/call to arms is video’d and verbalized here, as poached by Orate Fratres from a leftist site that wants to capitalize on it as episcopal politicizing, nasty talk, etc.

A key quote is featured:

The Church survived barbarian invasions. The Church survived wave after wave of Jihads. The Church survived the age of revolution. The Church survived Nazism and Communism. And in the power of the resurrection, the Church will survive the hatred of Hollywood, the malice of the media, and the mendacious wickedness of the abortion industry. The Church will survive the entrenched corruption and sheer incompetence of our Illinois state government, and even the calculated disdain of the President of the United States, his appointed bureaucrats in HHS, and of the current majority of the federal Senate.”

The call to political arms is clear enough, and not new, in view of the importance stated by many bishops of the abortion issue:

This fall, every practicing Catholic must vote, and must vote their Catholic consciences, or by the following fall our Catholic schools, our Catholic hospitals, our Catholic Newman Centers, all our public ministries only excepting our church buildings could easily be shut down. Because no Catholic institution, under any circumstance, can ever cooperate with the instrinsic evil of killing innocent human life in the womb. No Catholic ministry and yes, Mr. President, for Catholics our schools and hospitals are ministries can remain faithful to the Lordship of the Risen Christ and to his glorious Gospel of Life if they are forced to pay for abortions.

Note the abortion emphasis. The HHS mandate (Thou shalt do this, under pain of . . . ) also calls for insurance coverage of morning-after pills, of course; but this is little noted and rarely remembered in reportage of the mandate.

Likewise underplayed or omitted is the religious freedom issue. First they came for the Socialists, etc.? — the Hitler-era sequence meant to alert others to their danger from arbitrary imposition of laws and regulations? Let’s see . . . A war on circumcision, the anti-mohel mandate?

Nah. It can’t happen here.

Are you sure?

Wheeling Jesuit president: 2008 independent review found no problem in federal grant billings – The Washington Post

Wheeling Jesuit University's Seal
Wheeling Jesuit University's Seal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An unnamed “independent, special counsel experienced in federal grants who had served as general counsel for a major research university” examined how Wheeling Jesuit U. allocated its NASA grants and issued a clean bill for the U. in 2008,  WJU president Richard Beyer says in the wake of recently publicized findings to the contrary by a NASA investigator:

That person, who was not named in Beyer’s statement, “determined the university’s cost-allocation method to be permissible under federal regulations and found no improprieties.”

The period covered by the NASA agent’s report was 2005 through 2011 and referred to WJU vice president Davitt McAteer, who oversaw the grant expenditures..

McAteer’s attorney hasn’t commented on the allegations, but the affidavit suggests he and the university could face five possible federal crimes — theft of federal funds; major fraud; conspiracy; false claims; and wire fraud.

via Wheeling Jesuit president: 2008 independent review found no problem in federal grant billings – The Washington Post.

Blithe Spirit

Very hot news in Catholic circles: the Society of St. Pius X, broken away from the Vatican since the 2nd  Vatican Council, is “on the verge” of reconciliation with the church.

It’s remotely comparable to the resolution and dissolution of The Great Schism of the 14th  century, the three-pope period when disarray was the order of the day. 

Benedict XVI is making it happen.  Standing objections by the SPX people to Vatican 2’s “rupture” or disruptive aspects will remain. 

Trust me, folks, it’s like The Episcopal Church U.S.A. making room for Evangelical Christians.  Somewhat like?  Am working on that.

In Oak Park it means that the Pius X Latin mass church at Ridgeland and Washington, kitty-corner from Julian Middle School, is no longer out of bounds for venturesome Catholics. 

More to come.  more more more

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Blithe Spirit

Assorted Jesuits, Jesuit university teachers, and other liberal Catholics DO NOT LIKE Rep. Paul Ryan’s citing Catholic teaching in support of his budget.

Among his sins surely would be his embracing the long-ignored principle of subsidiarity, which says big organizations or governmental entities should butt out of matters better handled by smaller ones. 

In accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, neither the state nor any larger society should substitute itself for the initiative and responsibility of individuals and intermediary bodies.

No surprise here: A Jesuit history prof at a large Jesuit university told me 20 years ago that the principle no longer had currency.  If it did, one might add, big government would not be considered the cure-all it is treated as today.

It was Dorothy Day, I believe, who referred ironically to “holy mother the state.”  It’s a good phrase for today’s feckless reverence for big…

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