Not surprised to see NC Reporter going to bat for Cardinal Daneels, he being one of their own — progressive, you know, and all that. Alarms sounded throughout progressive Christendom with the bad news about him. Maybe it’s a bad rap, but can we imagine them sticking up for, say, Chaput of Denver? Not that Chaput needs their help.
No, I have not been on planet Mars, just very busy, and yes, Rev. Donald McGuire, ex-SJ, was convicted and sentenced in federal court in Chicago.
Chicago, IL (AHN) – Donald McGuire, a defrocked Catholic priest belonging to the Jesuit order, was convicted by a federal court on Friday for taking a boy on religious retreats to have sex with him.
The jury found the 78-year-old former priest guilty after three hours of deliberations. U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer read the verdict including his 30-year prison term while McGuire sat in his wheelchair.
If I hadn’t read it in the paper, I would have known something was up, from the huge uptick in views of this blog, including 75 hits in the last two days at this post, about him as a retreat-giver.
Rev. Donald McGuire, ex-SJ, goes to trial in another courtroom Oct. 6, this time federal, in Chicago. Among accusations in the prosecutorial filing is that he told one victim
that pornography was “like artwork, comparable to the paintings in the Sistine Chapel.”
This time he is charged with molesting
an underage boy during overseas travels in 2000. That person, now a college student, is expected to testify at a trial set to begin Oct. 6 in Chicago’s federal court.
So are four other alleged victims to testify if prosecutors have their way, each allegedly abused between 1989 and 1999. They said in their filing:
“His technique, victim after victim, was substantially the same: Isolate the boy from his family; use his role as a Catholic priest to induce the boy to talk about sex in the context of confession; progress to use of pornographic magazines and videos to heighten the sexual discussion; incorporate physical contact . . .”
McGuire was found guilty in Wisconsin for molestation that occurred in the 60s and has that case on appeal. Trial in Arizona awaits him on charges of molesting two Phoenix brothers from 1998 to 2002. He’s being held in the federal lockup in the Loop.
His lawyer, Stephen Komie, recently lost a case in Illinois’ LaSalle County in which a man was found guilty of possession of crack cocaine with intent to deliver, after a two-hour bench trial.
The client, who had prior convictions for drug dealing, battery, trespass and disorderly conduct, belonged to a family, several members of which were convicted of drug offenses in the past year in La Salle County Circuit Court.
As for McGuire, Komie said he
continues to think that the alleged victims are making false accusations to reap a financial settlement from the church.
Having talked with McGuire supporters, I find this easy to believe. In conversation, they make a lengthy, fervent case against the accusers, especially those in Arizona, where the trial has not been scheduled.
Where many Catholic conservatives meet many Catholic liberals, from the boisterous, indefatigable, melodramatically named Voice from the Desert:
The AP story on [Google] News . . . makes my blood boil.
Last year Los Angeles Cardinal Mahony cut a $660 million deal with survivors of clergy sexual abuse, money donated by hard-working LA Catholics. The cardinal cut the deal to ensure he would not have to take the witness stand and tell the truth about how he covered up rapes of kids by priests. As part of the deal the cardinal promised to allow the release of accused priests’ confidential files. Now he’s going back on his word.
Cover-up, shouts “Voice,” and why not?
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago announced Tuesday that it has reached a settlement of more than $12 million with clergy sex-abuse victims, including ones abused by Daniel McCormack, a former priest on the West Side.
The settlement also covers allegations against 10 other archdiocese priests or former priests, according to lawyers for the victims.
The announcement was made at 10 a.m. at the archdiocese headquarters at 155 E. Superior St. by Cardinal Francis George and the archdiocese chancellor, Jimmy Lago.
And if they do it, will they be turned in by alert lay person?
The Archdiocese of Cincinnati has issued a detailed list of inappropriate behaviors for priests, saying they should not kiss, tickle or wrestle children.
The newest version of the archdiocese’s Decree on Child Protection also prohibits bear hugs, lap-sitting and piggyback rides.
But it says priests may still shake children’s hands, pat them on the back and give high-fives.
A Chicago Jesuit in the early ‘60s, studying in Rome, was given to probably innocent displays of affection. But when a mother saw him hugging a kid in the roadway, she flew out the house and pulled the kid away, spouting fearsome commentary.
He told about it on his return to the States, degreed and ready to teach. I thought nothing of it except to wonder at Italian parents’ worry about us cassock-wearers. Doesn’t look so simple now.
The priest later was credibly accused of displaying unwarranted affection to coeds, telling them it wasn’t a sin because he was a priest. Not simple at all.
Rev. Thomas Doyle, O.P., the canon lawyer who left a great job in Washington years ago to pursue a life in opposition to clerical abusers, commends Pope Benedict XVI for his facing up to the problem:
It is well worth noting that Pope Benedict said more and did more relative to the worldwide plague of clergy sexual abuse in five days than his predecessor did in two decades.
His predecessor, John Paul II, kept his counsel on the matter for nine years after learning of it “in detail” in 1984. From then to his death in 2005, he mentioned it publicly 11 times. Requests for meetings with victims and victims’ groups were routinely ignored.
For all practical purposes, the victims of the worst scandal in church’s history since the dreadful days of the Spanish Inquisition were non-persons as far as the Vatican was concerned. Not so with Benedict XVI.
For that matter, Benedict, then Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Vatican office for defending orthodoxy, “was interviewed and gave the usual party line” in 2002, when the Boston revelations surfaced, calling media coverage of abuse “a planned campaign . . . intentional, manipulated, [motivated by] a desire to discredit the Church.”
But by 2004, he was considerably more open, meeting for two hours with Judge Anne Burke of Chicago and two other members of the U.S. Bishops’ National Review Board who “by-passed” the bishops and came calling on him. Three American lay people talked, and the cardinal listened, as Burke described the meeting at a Voice of the Faithful gathering in Indianapolis in 2005.
Most dramatically, in 2006 the Vatican put a lid on the infamous Marciel Maciel-Degollado, founder of the wealthy and powerful Legionaries of Christ. Ratzinger had been blamed for putting one on the investigation of Maciel, but this had been John Paul’s doing. When Maciel died last January in Houston, he was buried privately, significantly without comment by the Vatican.
For a compelling account of the sordid Maciel doings, see Jason Berry and Gerald Renner’s Vows of Silence: The Abuse of Power in the Papacy of John Paul II (Free Press, 2003), in which Ratzinger makes a cameo appearance, by the way, in which he is not sympathetic to the former Legionaries complainers about Maciel’s abuse.
The pope’s pointed commentary during his visit, broken out by Doyle in 10 parts, including his admitting that the problem “sometimes was very badly handled” is
a long overdue indication that the pope and hopefully the Vatican bureaucracy, are beginning to comprehend the profound ramifications of the legacy of clergy sexual abuse and hierarchical duplicity in the ecclesial culture
It is not, however, as some have said, “a sign that the crisis is passed and the Church can now move on.” To think so, Doyle said, is “a combination of wishful thinking and naiveté.” Suspicion of official church statements about it “will not be turned around in a week.”
There’s more more more . . .
Convicted pedophile Donald McGuire has been expelled from the Jesuits. “Defrocked” is the going term, which he is for all practical purposes. No more ministry, no more membership in worldwide organization.
Defrocking has been advocated by bishops in recent years as a means of punishing clergy found to have abused children, but it’s not a simple procedure. Priests who do not voluntarily leave the cloth — as McGuire did not — must be forced out by official order from the Vatican.
However, expulsion automatically means suspension from priestly functions. He lost his “faculties” worldwide, as the term used to be. But in the Catholic scheme of things, was he laicized? That is, reduced to the lay state, again as matters used to be stated?
Probably, almost certainly, in fact. But the term “laicized” deserves to be part of any official statement. If it were, the papers would use it. Why isn’t it?
Rev. Donald McGuire, SJ, is charged again, this time in federal court in Chicago:
McGuire, once a spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa, is charged with traveling with the teen to Austria, Switzerland and Nicaragua and with traveling interstate to Minnesota to engage in sex with him.
The offenses are alleged to have occurred in 2000, 2001 and 2002.
He is said to be in ill health, but his nephew, lawyer for complainants in a separate civil case being tried in Wisconsin, doesn’t believe it:
As for Father McGuire’s claims that he’s in failing health, his nephew calls that a “gimmick” and a “ploy for sympathy.” In his words, “Father McGuire has been dying for 40 years.”
Free on appeal from an earlier Wisconsin conviction, he is living in an Oak Lawn apartment.
Sun-Times religion writer Susan Hogan/Albach reprises her rundown on how Chicago churchmen prospered in the wake of the Rev. Daniel McCormack scandal in this (farewell) blog. She did well in her short time at that newspaper, now being axed beyond recognition in paroxysms of budget-cutting.
Two years ago this month, the Rev. Daniel McCormack was arrested for molesting boys. He’s in prison now. And the top leaders in the Archdiocese of Chicago who might have stopped him have risen in their church positions.
They are:
* Cardinal George, elected president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops four months after McCormack pleaded guilty and went to jail
* George Rassas, made an auxiliary bishop a few weeks after McCormack’s 2006 arrest following his 2005 arrest and subsequent further molestation of children while remaining a pastor
* Chancellor Jimmy Lago, who kept his job throughout the McCormack sequence, while overseeing offices that handle sexual abuse, claiming ignorance.
* Rev. John Canary, seminary vice rector in 1992 when sexual accusations were made against McCormack involving two adult males and a minor starting in 1988, later seminary rector and in 2006 appointed vicar general, replacing Rassas when he was made a bishop
* Bishop Gerald Kicanas, seminary rector during McCormack’s years who knew of “sexual improprieties” reported about him but said, “It would have been grossly unfair not to have ordained him” and became a bishop in 1995, a year after McCormack’s ordination, in 2001 being given his own diocese (Tucson) and being elected vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops two months ago, with presumed right of succession to the presidency now held by Cardinal George.
Loads of comments follow the blog item.
Blithe Spirit 