Day: Dec 27, 2018

Yet another one of Cardinal Mahony’s auxiliary bishops disgraces the Church.

Former Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony is long retired, but his scandals keep exploding like ticking time bombs around the feet of his successor. The latest eruption was this week’s revelation that Mahony had elevated Monsignor Alexander Salazar to auxiliary bishop in 2004 despite a credible allegation of abuse against Salazar from the 1990s. Mahony’s successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez, announced that Salazar’s resignation flowed from “deep concern for the healing and reconciliation of abuse victims and for the good of the Church’s mission.”
The Church has known about the allegation against Salazar for at least 13 years and in all likelihood much longer, but only got around to forcing Salazar’s resignation this week, presumably out of a PR need to tidy up such cases before Pope Francis’s “abuse summit” next February, and perhaps also out of fear of exposure by approaching investigators.

In anticipation of that gathering in February, Pope Francis vowed in a speech before cardinals this week that abuse cover-ups would “never” happen again, a promise that he can’t even keep in the most obvious case — the ongoing scandal of Theodore McCarrick, who remains holed up in a Kansas friary next to a school and tourist site while his criminal defense attorney issues protestations of innocence to the press in his name. Never happen again? The cover-up is happening right now.
Salazar, by the way, is only the most recent Mahony-era auxiliary bishop to disgrace the Church. Mahony really knew how to pick them: in addition to Salazar, he selected Gabino Zavala, who had a secret family.

And then earlier he selected Patrick Ziemann, a repeatedly accused molester whose ecclesiastical career was punctuated by an affair with an embezzling priest at one of his parishes (the priest also claimed coercion).
In 2004, Salazar was co-consecrated by Mahony and Zavala. Mahony had appointed Zavala to auxiliary bishop in 1994. It came out later that he had sired a couple of children from a mistress residing in another state. He resigned in 2012.
Salazar, Zavala, and Ziemann were Mahony’s kind of bishops — politically and theologically liberal, big on “social justice,” and mired in scandal. Mahony liked to keep bad priests close and the worst ones even closer. He made a molester known to him, Fr. Carl Sutphin, the associate pastor of his cathedral until prosecutors closed in on him.

Through Mahony’s string-pulling, Ziemann ended up a bishop. He went from Los Angeles to the head of the Santa Rosa diocese until ripped-off parishioners demanded his resignation in 1999. The police discovered that Ziemann had outfitted his embezzling priest-boyfriend with a special beeper for spur-of-the-moment sexual demands and had concealed his larceny during the throes of their affair. By the time Ziemann left the Santa Rosa diocese, it was $16 million in debt. Outraged parishioners wanted him prosecuted, but Vatican officials rode to his rescue and whisked him into a safe retirement. He was later hit with multiple molestation charges, dating to his days as dean of studies at a high school seminary in Los Angeles.
Salazar and Zavala might have received their own dioceses too had they managed their affairs a little more discreetly. I found an old story from a Utah paper purring over Salazar as a possible future bishop of Salt Lake City. But it turns out that Salazar, according to the Church’s latest admission, was under “precautionary” measures during his time as an auxiliary bishop, whatever that means. In other words, the Church knew perfectly well that he was a credibly accused molester and decided to let him retain his lofty title anyways. The utterly scandalous arrangement was overseen in part by Cardinal William Levada, an old crony of Mahony’s who conveniently assumed the top position at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith the year after Salazar’s elevation.

Levada, Mahony, and Ziemann all came out of the same rotten 1960s-era seminary in Los Angeles, St. John’s, and had been trading favors for years. Before Pope Benedict XVI inexplicably promoted Levada to the head of his doctrinal office, Levada served as the archbishop of San Francisco, where he too had a molesting priest on his cathedral staff. Out of all these intersecting friendships from seminary days came a golden parachute for Ziemann after he got bounced from Santa Rosa. Levada oversaw Ziemann’s landing far from police in the Arizona desert, where he joined the “artsy party circuit in nearby Tucson” until his death, reported the journalist Ron Russell.
All of this is beyond the grimly satirical imagination of Evelyn Waugh, and the Church hasn’t even hit bottom yet. The news out of Illinois this week — its attorney general says that Illinois dioceses excluded at least 500 cases from their self-accounting of alleged priestly abuse — hints at the many revelations to come from unfolding state investigations across the country.

In the recent resignations of auxiliary bishops from New York (Bishop John Jenik) to Los Angeles (Bishop Salazar), one can already see the effects of that pressure. Both Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Archbishop Gomez knew that grand juries would eventually find out about the abuse allegations against their auxiliaries and apparently urged the Vatican to cut them loose sooner rather than later.
The Vatican has been spinning the abuse scandal as a relic of the “past.” But almost all the figures responsible for it remain highly visible in the present — even Mahony got his chance at the microphone in Baltimore at the fall bishops’ gathering — and they continue to exercise real power. Here and there a derelict bishop drops out, but for the most part the hierarchy stumbles on as a club for the compromised and the corrupt in which yearly membership is earned through mutual complicity in the cover-up.

PAT SAYS:

Everyday the rotten underbelly of the RC hierarchy and clergy is being shown up more and more.

We are seeing it big time in the USA because of how many bishops they have and because of the size and power of the American media.

The RC Church in the USA is more rotten than a ship load of rotting, smelly. weeks old fish.

But that’s not the most serious issue. What is more serious is:

1. The widespread abuse and sexual assault of children, seminarians, young priests and other adults.
2. The massive coverup of all this rottenness of the bishops and the Vatican.
3. The promotion of men to the episcopate on the basis of having done sexual favours to others and being involved in all kinds of corruption.

IRELAND:

At this stage we can be 100% sure that what has been happening, and is happening in the USA has been and is happening in Ireland.

The most urgent necessity in Ireland is exposing Irish bishops who have been, or are, involved in sexual misbehaviour and corruption.

This will be exposed. It is simply a matter of time until it happens.

I, for one, am digging hard.

 

Pope Francis offered his “heartfelt thanks” in a lengthy speech on Friday to members of the media who helped expose sexual abusers within the ranks of the Catholic clergy.
In his yearly address to members of the Roman Curia, the pope publicly thanked “those media professionals who were honest and objective and sought to unmask these predators and to make their victims’ voices heard.”
“Even if it were to involve a single case of abuse (something itself monstrous), the Church asks that people not be silent but bring it objectively to light, since the greater scandal in this matter is that of cloaking the truth,” Francis said.
The pope himself has come under fire in recent months for a lack of transparency regarding his own conduct in the case of disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, accused of serial homosexual abuse of seminarians, priests, and laypersons for decades.
In late August, the former papal nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, accused the pope of having rehabilitated McCarrick despite knowing of his abuse.
Cardinal McCarrick enjoyed a “long friendship with Cardinal Bergoglio” and played an “important part” in his recent election, the archbishop claimed in an 11-page affidavit, which led the pope to continue using McCarrick as a trusted aide in the naming of American bishops even after learning of his misdeeds.
“McCarrick was part of a network of bishops promoting homosexuality who exploiting their favor with Pope Francis manipulated episcopal appointments so as to protect themselves from justice and to strengthen the homosexual network in the hierarchy and in the Church at large,” Viganò wrote.
When journalists questioned him about the truth of these and other allegations, the pope refused to answer and has maintained his silence ever since while lashing out at his accuser as an agent of Satan because of his attempts to reveals others’ wrongdoing.
“It is true, we are all sinners, we bishops,” the pope said in September, but the Great Accuser “seeks to unveil sins so that they may be seen, to scandalize the people.”
In his address Friday, Francis praised the “heroic example” of the martyrs and countless good Samaritans but said that their witness cannot “make us overlook the counter-witness and the scandal given by some sons and ministers of the Church.”
He said:
The Church has for some time been firmly committed to eliminating the evil of abuse, which cries for vengeance to the Lord, to the God who is always mindful of the suffering experienced by many minors because of clerics and consecrated persons: abuses of power and conscience and sexual abuse.
Comparing abusive priests to King David, the pope said that these men “perform abominable acts yet continue to exercise their ministry as if nothing had happened. They have no fear of God or his judgement, but only of being found out and unmasked.”
“Today too, there are many Davids who, without batting an eye, enter into the web of corruption and betray God, his commandments, their own vocation, the Church, the people of God and the trust of little ones and their families,” he said. “Often behind their boundless amiability, impeccable activity and angelic faces, they shamelessly conceal a vicious wolf ready to devour innocent souls.”
The pope also reiterated the commitment of the Church to root out the evil of sexual abuse.
“Let it be clear that before these abominations the Church will spare no effort to do all that is necessary to bring to justice whosoever has committed such crimes. The Church will never seek to hush up or not take seriously any case,” said the pope.
“To those who abuse minors I would say this: convert and hand yourself over to human justice, and prepare for divine justice,” he said.
“Remember the words of Christ: ‘Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea,’” he said.