The imprisoned former Jesuit priest and sex offender Donald McGuire has leukemia.

A close friend of McGuire dislosed [sic] his diagnosis to the Dallas Blog on Sunday after the priest called his residence on Saturday night. McGuire made the heavily-restricted and closely-monitored one-and-a-half minute phone call from a federal pentientiary [sic] in Springfield, Mo, which can be proven through phone records.

He’s been having a hard time of it.

Sources working closely with McGuire claim that he’s been violently beaten by inmates on numerous occassions [sic] while prison guards watched in amusement.

This “Dallas blog” heard from him before he was incarcerated.

Shortly before McGuire was convicted in the Chicago trial, the defrocked Jesuit spoke to the Dallas Blog on the phone around Christmas time in 2007. He loudly proclaimed his “innocence” in what could best be described as a “contentious” conversation.

Around that same time period, the Dallas Blog received thousands of pages of documents and evidence showing that his accussers [sic] may have perjured themselves on the witness stand in Wisconsin. They had proof that McGuire had proven alibis showing he was elsewhere on some of his so-called nightly escapades. Witnesses inacurately [sic] described his rectrory [sic] rooms and his physical body description when they were first interrogated by investigators in Wisconsin.

Supporters claim he got a raw deal.

Sources from McGuire point their fingers at inadequate legal representation from his defense attorneys, Jerry Boyle and Stephen Komie, in the two trials. They claim they provided sufficient evidence to the lawyers to more rigourously [sic] cross-examine the accusers, but they failed to do so. After reading the entire transcripts of the Wisconsin trial, it appears that McGuire’s team has a legitimate argument.

This version has no legs with mainstreamers.

The McGuire team made attempts to approach media outlets this past year to show some of their evidence, but to no avail as an eeiry [sic] silence ensued. They were informed that editors were no longer interested in the story.

Barbara Blaine of SNAP is not buying it either.

Nonethless, Barbara Blaine, a licensed attorney and founder of SNAP (the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priets [sic]), continues to focus her attentions on the convicted pedophile priest. A few months ago, she told the Dallas Blog that more accusers alleging sex crimes by McGuire will soon come forward with a “mountain of evidence” that will be difficult to dispute.

Tom McGregor covers the waterfront for The Dallas [TX] Blog, which

is intended to be a news and viewpoints, online newspaper. Our Texas writers will comment on major issues affecting our community, state, nation and world. It is no slam at Dallas’ only daily newspaper to say that competing news sources make for a better community. We will attempt to give our readers insights into various issues and public personalities that you may not see in the pages of the Dallas Morning News.

We will do things differently in more ways than one. First, we intend to invite you to Blog here. Yes, we will have our own reporters and our own commentators who write for Dallas Blog. But, we give you the opportunity to respond to our stories and viewpoints by posting comments on our site.

This piece links to another of his about Jesuit sexual misconduct, reporting allegations about a “Fr. JG,” for The UN Post, and another by a Dallas Blog-connected writer, Tom Pauken II, for Ohmy News, about a lawyer who is appealing McGuire’s 25–year sentence.

Black eye here for immediate past acting/interim president at Wheeling Jesuit, or at least a smudge or at least a potential smudge:

[Catherine] Smith claims she discovered federal grant funds were being misused, including the classification of direct and indirect costs, direct payment of salaries without proper time and effort certification and payment of rent for John Davitt McAteer’s personal law office

and that she “promptly” reported what she found to McAteer himself, who was her supervisor, and to others, reports the West Virginia Record, a legal journal.

This would be about the NASA overcharge, announced almost simultaneously with Rev. Julio Giulietti’s firing as president and installation of McAteer as acting/interim president last August.

McAteer [had already] used inappropriate language [says Smith in her “whistleblower” suit] that was verbally abusive, vulgar and sexual in nature.  . . . after [her] report, McAteer responded by creating a hostile work environment,

Smith says. 

Subsequently, she was fired immediately after an employee whom she had “counseled” regarding his “substandard job performance” complained, she further says.

If she can make this stand up in court, it’s potentially a blow to the midsection for McAteer, who relinquished his acting presidency position this month, returning to his former position as University Vice President for Sponsored Programs.

Sex Offender Information has dozens of news stories offered

as a service to the community to heighten awareness about Sex Offenders.  Hopefully, this site will raise the level of precaution necessary to reduce the number violations to women and children, and likewise, reduce the number of offenders.

Not surprisingly, it picked up the Press TV account of the German Jesuits and abused school boys,

No end to German Jesuit-run school’s sex scandal

as reported here yesterday.

But that was yesterday for the sex-offender site also.  Today, the German Jesuits did not even make its front page, which has 10 items, none of them about German Jesuits or any other priest or Catholic institution.  Nor does its next page or the one after that.

Not all are about pederasty, to be sure, nor is there any specialization in religion-related abuse.  A bunch of sites with clergy abuse as its focus are found by Google, including Bishop Accountability dot org, where veteran religion reporter Kathy Shaw holds forth (and is read by Vatican biggies among others, she has told me).

Another site, with items mostly about Catholic abuse but also an Amish (!) cover-up and an Albany NY rabbi (!!), is Clergy Abuse, reporting findings of the Rick A. Ross Institute, founded by a cult expert.

And StopBaptistPredators.org: Shining light on Baptist clergy sex abuse is self-explanatory.

But emphasis in mainstream media is on Catholics, as we know.  And I can see why, allowing for knee-jerk response by some, it should be.  It’s a matter among other things of high expectations dashed by grim reality.

Catholics (and others) expect more of the Catholic Church, and when they don’t get it, it’s news.  Big news.  That’s a compliment.  If it were not shocking that priests hit on little boys or young men, where would we be?  God help us if we took it for granted, as some were always prepared to do and more are prepared to do the more they read.

The Baptists have it right.  Shining light on such stuff is very important for all concerned.

More on the German Jesuit abuse business:

* From Iran-based PressTV,

Germany’s heinous sexual abuse scandal, which has cast shadow over the country’s Jesuit-run institutions, deepens with the likelihood of over 100 victims in one of the schools.

. . . .

Some 50 students have come forward with allegation of abuse, but the Berlin college’s rector said Monday he believed the victims in that school alone would amount to at least 100.

“I believe that it will turn out to be a three-digit number…More and more victims come forward every day,” Klaus Mertes, director of the Canisius Kolleg told the Berliner Zeitung daily in an interview.

* From Irish Times,

The German reports are all the more alarming since, at least initially, they have concerned elite Jesuit boarding schools in Berlin, Hamburg, Bonn and other cities. Last week, Fr Theo Schneider resigned his position as principal of a Jesuit school in Bonn after two former pupils claimed to have been abused at the school.

. . . .

The news magazine Der Spiegel last week reported that, following a survey of Germany’s 27 dioceses, at least 94 priests were suspected of sexual abuse of children.

Jesuit Hans Langendoerfer, secretary of the German bishops conference, told Der Spiegel : “The revelations show a dark side of the church that scares me . . . We expressly want an investigation.”

The reigning pontiff has a chance to do something for his home turf, it would seem.

The nuns at Mount de Chantal moved to Washington in December, leaving their property, which is adjacent to Wheeling Jesuit U., for disposal.

The sisters have indicated an evaluation of the property and its contents is continuing as there are many valuable items involved in the property’s liquidation.

“The future of the Mount de Chantal complex of six buildings with construction dates ranging from 1865 to 1982 has been and will continue to be studied by a group of expert advisors who assist the sisters,” [Sister Mary Alicia] Sours [the superior] added.

Reports at the time of Rev. Julio Giulietti’s ouster as president of Wheeling Jesuit had it that if the bishop were behind the ouster, this property was an issue.  For instance,

“First and foremost,” [alumnus Steve] Haid wrote [in a letter published in The Charleston Gazette], “Father Julio’s lynching was the handiwork of Bishop Michael Bransfield, who wanted to slap down a Jesuit priest who sought to acquire the Mount de Chantal property for Wheeling Jesuit.”

A sale was in the works, but Bishop Bransfield opposed it.

“I was not in favor of the sale of property to Wheeling Jesuit because the price they offered the sisters was half of the price offered by competing bidders,” Bransfield wrote in a message to [National Catholic Reporter].

It never went through.  Bishop Bransfield’s financial officer chaired the board that tried to get Giulietti fired, but the bishop had nothing to do with it, said Davitt McAteer, WJU’s interim president until recently.

“There was no involvement by Bishop Michael Bransfield in the firing of Julio Giulietti, stop, end of game,” said McAteer. “We’re seeing the effects of the anonymous Web and the efforts of a small clique who are unhappy. It’s the guy in the theater yelling fire.”

Bad, bad news out of Germany, where Jesuit abusers are coming out of the woodwork in a national scandal.

The Catholic Church in Germany has been shaken in recent days by revelations of a series of sexual abuse cases. Close to 100 priests and members of the laity have been suspected of abuse in recent years. After years of suppression, the wall of silence appears to be crumbling.

says Der Spiegel, whose punched-up reporting delivers a shock.

Berlin’s Canisius College, an elite Jesuit high school, recently disclosed the sordid past of a number of members of the order, who had abused students at the school in the 1970s and 1980s [after which] new victims began coming forward on a daily basis. By last Friday, at least 40 of them had accused three Jesuit priests of molesting children and adolescents, first in Berlin and later at the St. Ansgar School in Hamburg, the St. Blasien College in the Black Forest and in several parishes in the northern German state of Lower Saxony.

We ain’t heard nothin’ yet.

[T]he revelations . . . are merely “the tip of the iceberg,” says the current director of Canisius College, Father Klaus Mertes, who made public the sexual abuse of students.

The German bishops are coming clean.  Spiegel surveyed 27 dioceses last week, of which 24 responded.

[A]t least 94 priests and members of the laity in Germany are suspected or have been suspected of abusing countless children and adolescents since 1995.

Group-home abuse has been charted since the 50s, almost half of which homes are Catholic-operated.

According to the report, more than 150 victims of sexual abuse have come forward with their stories in recent months. One of them is a woman who, as a 15-year-old girl, had to sit in the confessional and watch a priest masturbate. When she tried to get away from him, she was beaten by the nuns who ran the home.

The top cleric is saying nothing.

To this day, the chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, Archbishop of Freiburg Robert Zollitsch, has not offered any convincing [sic] words of apology or emphatic gestures of redress to the victims of the church’s double standard.

He won’t talk to Spiegel, which does seem to be out for blood, especially in light of such blatant editorializing as this:

The official Church prefers not to allow the suffering of its victims to become a major issue, because it doesn’t fit into the Church’s hypocritical worldview.

Not exactly nuanced.

Later: NY Times has picked up on the story, noting that Der Spiegel’s cover this week had “an image of a priest reaching suggestively under his robes.”

“Already a tremor is shaking the church, which could be the beginning of an earthquake” Der Spiegel said.