Goes around the covering-up archbishop, priests arrested.
An activist pope, to be sure.
FYI: Almodóvar’s “Bad Education” treats clergy abuse in grim detail.
Goes around the covering-up archbishop, priests arrested.
An activist pope, to be sure.
FYI: Almodóvar’s “Bad Education” treats clergy abuse in grim detail.
His diocese paid, lips were sealed, he considers it all behind him, but the homosexual-rape victim wants him off the street, wherever he is.
Eck was drunk when he brought the car back that night, he said, and Ericksen told him that rather than go home and face his parents, he could sleep it off in his spare bedroom.
That night, Eck said, Ericksen raped him.
He is Paul Eck, age 17 when he says the rape happened. The man he says did it is the Rev. Tom Ericksen, then of the Superior Wis. diocese. It happened in 1983. Eck’s complaint, together with that of his nephew, James Eck, age 8 or 9 when he says Ericksen began touching him sexually, was settled in 1989 for $3 million.
It was the standard handling of an abuse case. But this one has arisen again. The Ecks want Ericksen, long since out of the priesthood and living outside Wisconsin, including in Minnesota — where he worked for 20 years as an AT&T customer service specialist and was a member of AT&T’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employee association — brought to criminal trial.
“He needs to be taken off the streets because he’s a pedophile,” Paul Eck said of Ericksen. “I guarantee you that there are people before and after me that have been molested. This is not all of a sudden something you do in a short amount of time.”
The present bishop is prohibited from discussing the case. The local prosecutor is not responding to the Ecks’ request to arrest Ericksen, whose move out of the state “stops the clock” on expiration of arrestability, according to Ecks’ lawyer.
However, the Duluth News-Tribune notes that the Wisconsin Supreme Court is considering an appeal by a Jesuit priest — Donald McGuire, of Chicago — who was convicted in 2006 of assaulting two teenagers in the late 1960s.
Am returning The Rite of Sodomy: Homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church to OP Library, which got it for me from the Oak Lawn Library. It’s a 1,282–page stunner, both in intensity — fascinating in sense that watching a car wreck is fascinating — and shock effect.
Almost 13 years ago, I stood in the old Kroch’s & Brentano’s on Lake Street in Oak Park and brought the store to complete silence with the mention of “gay priests.” I was at a mike in the rear of the store facing 40 or so people who were there to hear me talk about my just published Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics.
I was saying how I’d run across reference to the phenomenon while interviewing for my book. Priests had mentioned their being out of the gay loop among fellow priests. Bishop Bill McManus had told me he knew of gay priests who kept their vows and did good work.
But the very concept had quieted book buyers on a summer night. Now we have heard much about it, even from the head U.S. bishop a few years back, and I have written about it. And there’s this book, about which more later . . .