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Cardinal who fled Boston at height of child-molestation scandal dies in Rome
By adamg on Tue, 12/19/2017 - 10:20pm
WCVB reports the death of Bernard Law in Rome at 86.
As a cardinal, Law was the head of the Archdiocese of Boston until he resigned in 2002 after the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Globe exposed both child molestation by Archdiocese priests and efforts by church leaders, including Law, to cover the cases up. Several victims had named him in lawsuits. Law then moved to Rome, where he was given a Vatican sinecure. He never returned to Boston.
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Comments
"the traditional funeral rites in St Peter's Basilica"
Aren't they afraid the mouth of hell might open in the basilica to welcome him?
We'll all be there soon enough
.
Best headline yet
Cardinal who fled Boston at height of child-molestation scandal dies in Rome
Maybe
But not for the same reasons, at least in my case. I don't know about you.
Presumably he confessed his
Presumably he confessed his sins before he died. That means he goes to Heaven.
Thems the rules.
I'm going the W.C. Fields route
Supposedly when W.C. Fields was on his deathbed a friend came to visit and was surprised to find him reading the bible. He said to the star, "Are you looking for some last minute salvation?" Fields looked up and replied, "Nah, just looking for loopholes."
It's not just confessing your sins
You have to repent for them as well. Even then, I don't think that gives you an automatic "Get into heaven free" card.
So...
Can we get a script for all of this? Seems complicated
Heaven and hell are nothing
Heaven and hell are nothing but silly fairy tales. Thats why good people need to be appreciated while they are alive and slimebags like Law need to be punished on earth.
That would be nice.
But in a world where most often might makes right, and money can buy a way out of anything, and injustice is always thriving, such human accountability on earth is unlikely to ever be more than an occasional anomaly.
No Punishment
for him in MA. The attorney general that refused to prosecute him ended up as House Council for the Archdiocese of Boston. And the beat goes on....
ummm....?
ummm....?
Tom Reilly?
What's your basis for that claim?
I can't say for certain it's incorrect, but I did some searching online and found nothing that ties him to the Archdiocese other than many items about his investigations/actions as AG.
It certainly seems unlikely, when there are all sorts of professional/legal/ethics hurdles about former state employees (and sometimes their business partners) going into private sector business with companies they've been involved with in state duties.
Good. He was an awful person
Good. He was an awful person and the Catholic Church is a disgusting child rape cult who gave this scum a cushy life in Rome. I'm very glad religion is going the way of the Dodo bird.
Cut the crap
Insult the man or men all you want.
Potshots at an entire faith - any faith - are not in any way acceptable. The Church is not a cult.
Organization, not faith
Kinopio said nothing about the faith - that is, the tenets - of the religion. But from an organizational standpoint it's undeniable the Church as a group of people facilitated rape upon rape upon rape. Misconstruing that truth as an attack on a set of beliefs is your mistake, and is partially what enabled it to go on so long
The Church
The Church is not the hierarchy or a building. It is the faithful and the faith. And reading all of K's post, pretty clear her opinion on all religions.
Bullshit
Five yard penalty for moving the goalposts. First down Kinopio.
Bullshit back
"The Catholic Church is a child rape cult" and religions going the way of the Dodo bird.
The "Church" deliberately capitalized is not the hierarchy. You learn that in elementary school.
And the comment about religions and dodo birds nails it shut.
I'm a nonpracticing Catholic that was almost as close to this as you can be without directly being a victim. These men are evil horrible people. Many sinned and some made horrendous decisions that devastated the lives of kids I went to school with.
That doesn't excuse ANYONE from calling the Church a rape cult (although I'll readily admit many more priests and perhaps even some popes should have been in jail).
It's a large company
The Vatican is like any other large company.
This i agree with
There is nothing in Catholicism that remotely excuses what these perverse men did and their leaders allowed. This was a problem stemming from many causes (celibate priesthood, a strict closed hierarchy, poor "circle the wagons" management, mentality and more) - but NOTHING about Catholicism permits, endorses or allows what they did. This was the act of bad and misguided men (and again, yes, it was men). Do not blame this on the capital C "Church". This was 100% a human failing of the human part of the small c "church". And like it or not - the Church is technically a corporation as are all religious institutions.
Is this correct?
"There is nothing in Catholicism that remotely excuses what these perverse men did and their leaders allowed."
Not trying to be snarky, but it is my understanding that priests act in persona Christi. Would this not excuse their behavior, or at the very least empower them to get away with such behavior?
Absolutely not
Period.
Looks like K is drawing directly from the classic
atheist playbook by openly disparaging other people's belief structures ("fairy stories") and by maligning the members of an entire organized faith for actions most of them had no control over ("rape cult").
It's actually kind of sad if you ask me.
I think it's pretty clear
That people's anger is directed at the organization / the institution / the hierarchy, not at the faithful or the faith. What word other than "the Church" would you use to describe it?
People yes
Kinopio no.
The priesthood, the Church hierarchy, holy pedophiles - lots of things. It's not the Church - and clear that Kinopio's comments go well beyond the bad apples (most priests I know are flawed like the rest of us - but decent good men).
Yes, it is
It is the church. From previous popes, down through cardinals and bishops, the entire organization has been knowingly enabling child abuse for decades. The "faith" part is irrelevant in light of that criminality. The church has sacrificed children in defense of its reputation.
Not from around here but....
If the movie Spotlight is accurate then yes, the Catholic Church in BOSTON was a child rape cult, and depending on who still remains from those years in the organization, maybe still is.
The Offending Priests
As their offenses became known, the offending priests were shuffled all over the country. It wasn't just in Boston.
Also
Some of the priests were brought into the Boston neighborhoods after having committed atrocities in other states.
The Catholic Church, as an institution, is fair game
It has been shown that they criminally conspired to protect predators for decades. No reason to believe they did any better for the centuries preceding what has been reported.
I agree they're not a cult by the strictest definition. They've certainly acted as a criminal enterprise though.
Full disclosure: Raised Catholic to the point of being an altar boy. I've seen the good they've done and the comfort they provide to the faithful.
Law and his ilk deserve to be called out for their behavior, not their faith (or lack of it.)
Law's fake villa near BC
Should become a memorial to the victims of the church
Opinions vary
What's a cult? According to Christianity Today:
The RCC definitely meets 1) and 3). 2) is debatable.
Outside of the Church there is no salvation
True.
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_P29.HTM
Reminds Me Of When I Was An Electrolux Vacuum Cleaner Salesman
I once was inspired to join a team of Electrolux salesmen. Both my mother and grandmother were Electrolux owners, so I was taught all about them at a very early age. Of course, as I grew up, I experimented with Hoovers and other brands (even a Dirt Devil), but my faith in Electrolux vacuums was never shaken.
So, in 1983, when I was looking for an extra part-time job, the advertisement for "small appliance salesman" at my local Electrolux store, sounded like fun. When I found out it meant lugging vacuum cleaners door-to-door and ringing strangers' doorbells, it sounded like less fun, but I believed in Electrolux, so I believed I could do it!
... unfortunately, this was in Ft. Lauderdale — in August
people weren't opening their doors to strangers, let alone buying vacuum cleaners
Before sending us out to canvass selected neighborhoods, the elder salesmen would first extoll upon the grandeur of Electrolux products, but then go on to preach gospels of cold calling and give sermons about hard selling. If selling door-to-door in the Florida heat wasn't hard enough, I just couldn't reconcile my faith; derived from my own, personal relationship with Electrolux vacuums; with the dogma spewing forth from the hierarchy, which was often cruel and hurtful to the people they purported to serve.
The one thing that stands out, is their insistence of only one, true, Genuine Electrolux filter bag. It was something (at the time) which could only be obtained by going in person to a local Electrolux store, or by an Electrolux salesman delivering salvation for your vacuum directly to your home.
We were instructed to always praise the Electrolux filter bag when speaking with customers, along with a stern warning — if you do not use a Genuine Electrolux filter bag, the motor on your vacuum cleaner will surely go to hell.
Reminds me of the time - about 1968 -
when an Electrolux salesman showed up at our door. My mother played along with the guy, and had him go through those rooms in the house that had carpets with the vacuum. She then took the salesman's business card and noted "We'll get back to you."
Never saw the guy again, and we never bought an Electrolux.
Oh Yes — They Made Us Shampoo Carpets For Free Too!
The Electrolux Model B8 was a miraculous machine for scrubbing and polishing floors. The B8 scrubbed carpets well too, but left all the soapy dirt behind on the carpet.
The potential customers were not impressed. Nobody bought them — except for me. I loved my Model B8 for taking care of my own terrazzo floors!
( house cleaning heaven? — trust me, it's not that much fun! )
Dylan
"And there are no truths outside the gates of Eden."
-Bob Dylan 1965
nope. the faith earned this
The catholic church is the largest and most successful pedophile protection ring in recorded human history.
The evidence is irrefutable. Decade after decade and country after country the pattern has repeated itself. It's not a one-off problem or a few bad apples. It is the entire organization operating worldwide that is complicit.
You are a child molestation
You are a child molestation enabler. You attack me yet say nothing about the thousands of kids who were raped or the priests, cardinals etc who are responsible. This will happen again because of attitudes like yours. People like you who defend a group that rapes kids are guilty by association.
No organization in the history of the world has caused as much pain as the catholic church. War, rape, slavery. You name it they have done it to the highest degree.
No it won't happen again
Because people like me spoke up and will again - more forcefully than ever.
This was going on LITERALLY right under my nose in high school and I never suspected a thing - or heard even a whisper of it until decades later. I spoke up once I heard - and told the school they'd never see another penny from me. I have changed my mind because of some changes that were put in place and ultimately a request from a classmate that put his own kid in the school which gave me a belief that changes were made to prevent future problems, at least to the extent you can fix these things.
I don't practice - but my school does wonderful work even though a handful of scum almost brought the whole thing down. They have worked hard to eliminate the problem and if it does somehow happen again, I'm sure they will address the issue very differently.
You attack the faith of a billion plus people and call them "child molestation enablers".
War, rape, slavery- those are sins of the powerful in every religion (ever read the Bible?) or are you not paying attention to what's been happening in Africa the past quarter century and longer? These are not the sins of the religion. Nor the sins of the vast majority of the practitioners or leaders. They are the sins of the 1%, often those in positions of power that use religion as an excuse for horrific behavior. The problem is not the religion - the problem is people and people like you don't help by accusing the rest of guilt by association.
it is still happening
There were 2 archdiocese's where they hid and moved suspected priests in 2016 and 2017.
They have learned nothing.
I have changed my mind
Writing that sentence should have been the cue you needed to think "maybe I should recuse myself from this discussion" before clicking "Save," but I see you have chosen not to. So, if I have this straight: your principled stand against the largest institutional perpetrator of child rape in the last century was to stop giving money to your school, which you somehow managed to attend at the height of the abuse without so much as an inkling that something was wrong. You reneged on this principled stand, not because they made any demonstrable progress toward building processes for rooting out child rapists in their own midst, but because of a request from another classmate (who presumably never stopped giving money to the rapists). Now that you have resumed giving money to the organization whose figurehead elected to shelter one of the masterminds behind a nationwide coverup of institutional child rape, you are confident that this massive problem, which has plagued pretty much every organization that puts men in positions of unchecked power since the dawn of civilization, will no longer occur, despite numerous counterexamples WITHIN THE CHURCH in the last five years,. And you moreover qualify this totally unfounded hope with "at least to the extent you can fix things," with the clear implication that we just have to expect a certain base level of institutional coverup of systemic child rape because Catholics gonna Catholic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You pretty clearly do not give the faintest damn about child abuse, so long as it's perpetrated by someone wearing clergy robes. Which... OK, dude, you do you, but don't you dare act like you're making a principled stand on that in a public forum like this and expect it to go unremarked on.
You must be a master of yoga
Never seen even a gymnast stretch like that.
Not a stretch
You've been apologizing for and excusing the RCC with every comment you've made in this thread.
organizations causing pain
I think I might have gone with the Soviets under Stalin or National Socialist German Workers Party, or the Japanese Army during WWII or more recently the militias embracing War, and War rape in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Columbia, Iraq, Sudan and Nepal
(Smith-Spark, Laura (8 December 2004) BBC news. Retrieved Dec. 20, 2017)
If we wish to avoid including government institutions; then how about the Medellin Drug cartel and their ilk?
For an interesting read see this website ( http://necrometrics.com/gunsorxp.htm)
where the author (Matthew White) analyzes the question "Which has killed more people, gun control or Christianity?"
Apparently, 56 million deaths have been attributed to each cause. Matthew White easily smashes the gun control opponents tally, but the 56 million attributed to Christianity is parsed in an interesting way.
Defending Christianity in this fashion is not possible. Using the "but, they did it too!" argument does not wash. I am mainly arguing against Kinopio's statement. I would add that Christianity has done some good also.
It isn't a cult, huh?
Keep throwing those coins into the collection plate. The victims and the lawyers appreciate your faith in God.
Every once in a while I try
Every once in a while I try to figure out what the difference between cults and mainstream organized religions is. The only thing I can come up with is that if you get a large enough following and stick around for long enough then you are no longer a cult.
It's simple
In a cult there is one person at the top who made the whole thing up. In a religion that person is dead.
LOL
LOL!!!
Let me ask, if this were a
Let me ask, if this were a leader of the Jewish or Muslim faith's, would you disparage these entire religions as well?
Maybe again
If those organizations were shown to enable, commit, and cover up thousands of crimes against children, then they would deserve disparagement.
What does it tell you that there are not reports of thousands of such crimes committed by imams or rabbis, but there are about such crimes committed by Catholic priests?
hold up, buddy.
hold up, buddy.
you can find all sorts of travesties committed by the leaders in the major faiths. whether it is condemning gay people, preaching against the use of condoms in AIDS ridden nations, or simply saying that vaccines are for heretics.
at the end of the day, all religions are a bunch of phooey that bad people will use to enrich themselves, either monetarily (plenary indulgences!) or through the accumulation of influence and power (popes, ayatollahs, etc).
its all a load of horseshit that anyone with a modicum of sense can do without.
Maybe they just haven't been
Maybe they just haven't been caught yet?
the faith
Cardinal Law got off easy and should have been arrested and tried for conspiracy. At least give a public accounting and apology for his actions. Unfortunate the state of MA did not have the will.
As a former Catholic I must say that attacks on the faith are unavoidable in my opinion since the church the face of the faith and the church is still engaged in hiding and not reporting abuse. It is still ongoing this year. When will it end?
Parallel
Yes. I think there's an interesting parallel to be made between the two. There's something seriously broken with Catholicism because it spawned numerous child rapists and those who are willing to cover for child rapists. Just as there is something seriously broken with Islam because it has spawned numerous terrorists and those willing to cover for them. I'm not saying either religion is hopelessly poisoned, but to pretend like there isn't something broken in a set of beliefs that regularly gives rise to such horrible behavior strikes me as willful ignorance.
The latter, not necessarily the former.
I recall some of the analysis at the time, suggesting that the actual incidence of pedophilia among Catholic priests was about the same as you would find in any other similarly sized group of men -- that the main crime was the institutional enabling and cover-up.
Sure. The catholic church is
Sure. The catholic church is rotten from the to top to the bottom. The pope gave Law a nice life in Rome after he was responsible for hundreds of instances of kids being raped. Show me another group doing something similar and I'll call them out too.
The pope gave Law a nice life
I shake my head in wonder every time I see something like this.
What were they supposed to do? Any place in the US his presence would be a distraction and a hinderance to any thought of reform or healing. The Saint Mary basilica job in Rome was getting him out of the way and having him make himself useful, filling a job at a tourist spot. It's one of the few pieces of the mess they got any sort of right.
Q: What Were They Supposed To Do?
A: Ex-communicate him and strip him of his pension.
"What were they supposed to do?"
They could have denied his request to move to Rome and let him face charges in Massachusetts.
"Healing"
The usual excuse used by people who want to allow powerful criminals to escape punishment. Law was a criminal -- an accessory after the fact of multiple rapes of children. He should have been tried as the criminal he was, and punished after conviction. Ask some of the victims of his crimes how his escape helped their "healing."
What they were "supposed to do" was to allow him to be arrested and tried. That they didn't was more proof that the RCC holds itself above the law, and will do anything to try and protect its reputation and its criminals.
I'm not kidding myself that
I'm not kidding myself that healing is or was complete or likely ever to be complete - and that's with only my limited outside understanding of what people's pain and damage must be like.
I just remember the environment here circa 2001-2003. It would not have abated if he were in any stateside assignment or simply pushed into retirement & drawing a pension. Moving him to Rome allowed Lennon and then O'Malley to being dealing with some of it.
I certainly hope that "they" would have "allowed" him to be arrested and tried - if he had been charged with anything. Rightly or wrongly, he wasn't charged.
What were they supposed to do?
I can think of a lot of things they could have done other than whisking him off to a sinecure job in Rome.
For example, chaining him to a rock and letting vultures rip his flesh from his bones. Or opening up the records to the civil authorities and helping them to prosecute him.
Prosecution
Law was given a cushy life because he would have been sent to prison for obstructing justice and conspiracy.
That is where he should have died - in jail, not opulence.
JP II
was well on his way to being totally out of it when Law resigned. Ratzinger and a few others were calling the shots by then. Law was also plugged into the Opus Dei/ conservative power center in Rome, most of whose adherents felt he was being victimized. Several cardinals were quoted in the Italian press at the time calling his treatment a “witch hunt”. Even when he had all his marbles, JP II was loathe to discipline allies. Just look at Maciel, founder of the Legionnaires of Christ for whom Hell would be a much too temperate climate.
To answer the question, “what were they supposed to do?”— what had been done in the past: send the person to a remote monastery or missionary outpost to repent. That’s what was done to the Irish cardinal caught having fathered a child. He was sent to a mission in Ecuador, if I remember correctly.
What were they supposed to do?
They should have excommunicated him. He should have been prosecuted. He should have gone to jail for knowingly enabling child predators for so long. I was raised Catholic. There is simply no justification for moving child predators around knowing the harm they would inflict upon children and teens. I'm also a survivor.
Yes.
YES.
Now let's convert every church in Boston to condos and give a discount to the people who were victims of child molestation.
I'll start the campaign - "Condos before Child Molesters".
Here's the thing. Condemning
Here's the thing. Condemning Catholicism or the Catholic Church is not the same as condemning Christianity. Do we condemn radical sects of Islam (or any religion for that matter) that encourage murder of non-believers? Yes. If we have a sect of Christianity that is enabling child molestation, should we not criticize them as well?
Nobody's disparaging the religion
Nobody reasonable is disparaging the religion. The religion is a thing of the spirit. The organization, on the other hand, is a thing of this world: people, job titles, bank accounts, committees, offices, etc. . They are disparaging the organization and the people running it.
It's in the hierarchy
After the conversion of Constantine you get the Roman Catholic Church which is basically modeled on the Roman empire. Instead of Caesar you have the pope at the top, instead of generals down to soldiers you have cardinals down to priests (the saints took the place of the many gods but that's a discussion for another day). There is no real equivalent hierarchy in the Jewish or Muslim faith.
I think Law's fatal flaw was that he was more concerned as a general in that hierarchy with protecting the institution and it ended up destroying his ambition. Remember, lots of people were predicting that he would be the first American pope when he was elevated to cardinal.
Remember, lots of people were
Most people knew then and know now that the chances of a Pope from USA = slim to none.
From what I've read and heard, the more likely scenario would have been Law positioning himself as a kingmaker - delivering a block of voters to a favored candidate. Remember that he was involved in reviewing proposed bishop appointments. Then maybe he'd advance to significant position in Rome under that Pope, and who knows? Maybe he'd be in the right place at the right time...
Personally, I think the most likely (but still very unlikely) scenario for a Cardinal from the USA becoming Pope would have involved the timing and "political" climate of JohnPaul II's death. If JP had died and there wasn't a clear favorite and the prospect of a prolonged conclave battle was seen as counterproductive and there was an American Cardinal who was seen as benign & respectable & not too likely to upset others' political base & was old enough that folks figured he'd live only two or three years and be a good compromise transition pope... Imagine if JohnPaul II had died in 1998, when Cardinal O'Connor of NY was 78 years old.
I look here for news
and I found none.
He totally sucked and I hope he suffered to the end
Relax, guy.
Relax, guy.
This is breaking news. I have faith (no pun intended) that Gaffin will follow up and/or elaborate.
worth reading
the second link Adam posted
Rot In Hell
Law and all his enabled and those who enabled him. Taking innocence away from children for sexual gratification is the lowest. But under the guise of faith is the lowest of that. Monsters that will sadly never face any true justice.
I've Heard There's A Special Place Waiting For People Like Him
Law
If Law went to confession subsequent to the scandal, the priest would absolve him of all sin. Law will go to heaven.
That all depends
That all depends on whether he MEANT IT. If he just said the words and did all the little games to level up to being saved, he's headed to Lucifer.
You're making a huge presumption there
In order to confess, Law would have to believe that he had sinned. There's no reason to assume that he had such a belief.
You're making a huge presumption there
In order to confess, Law would have to believe that he had sinned. There's no reason to assume that he had such a belief.
Ah, excellent, commentary
Ah, excellent, commentary from true Bostonians in the tradition of those who have not sinned casting the first stones.
He was the ring leader just
He was the ring leader just as the others before him. He knew of it and did nothing. His hands are just as dirty. The fact that he was not arrested as well as let out of this country was just yet another trauma and slap in the face for the victims. Remember - the victims are still suffering...every damn day.
The Catholic church is a business. Period. End. If the repeated rape of children (and lets not forget nuns) and shuttling the priests around so they could rape more didn't bring down the church in this city/county then shame on the flock. Shame on the politicians that didn't have the balls enough to step up.
You can have your faith. You can practice your faith. You can live your faith. You can spread your faith to those that are interested. All those things are fine. But when you let a business organization continue (and give them money weekly) after knowing all of heinous acts they permitted for decades upon decades then you are part of the problem.
I sin proudly every day
That's why I have no problem relegating that old scumbag to whatever hell he ends up in.
Yeah, how dare people
Yeah, how dare people criticize the guy who enabled hundreds of cases of kids being raped!!1
R. I. H.
The only reason why I can believe Law was not personally a child molester is that the Globe would certainly have printed the story if they had it.
Jesus, speak ill of the dead much?
If you folks damning a human being to infinite eternal pain actually believe in God you might want to show some humility. He should have been prosecuted, but save some condemnation for the actual molesters, and all the local cops who enabled this as well.
Seriously?
Law deserves all of the condemnation he gets and then some. This is a man that actively allowed pedophile priests to continue to have access to vulnerable children. He covered up their actions, moved them from parish to parish, and all for what -- his ego and his image. Bernie never missed an opportunity to call out a politician on his/her stance on abortion, but when it came to taking care of the children in his flock, he failed miserably. Then, when the heat was on, he ran like the rat he was, never to be held accountable for his crimes.
Not for him
Given the position of power and influence of the church in the region at the time of these crimes, he was really the only, best option to stop it. He didn't and many people's lives were ruined. I can have plenty of room in my heart to despise both Law AND the pedophiles - it's not an either or situation.
Or do you think Paul Shanley would get a free pass from these same commenters if he were the one being discussed? I mean, really?
Respectfully disagree.
We have civil authorities for a reason. Massachusetts, post Roe v. Wade, after the cultural revolution of the 1960's, was hardly some kind of 12th century theocracy. Child sexual abuse is a horrendous crime. Where were the police? Law acted abominably, but not all that unlike some other bosses whose employees get accused of crimes (treat it as unproven, wait for authorities to conduct their invrstigation, etc).
On the other hand I have to think that if someone I know, or me myself, had been molested, perhaps my rage would rise to this level.
Enabler
Making the living or dead free from criticism created this problem.
You are perpetuating it.
Make up your mind
Up above you say this:
"But in a world where most often might makes right, and money can buy a way out of anything, and injustice is always thriving, such human accountability on earth is unlikely to ever be more than an occasional anomaly."
and yet here you are claiming that the lack of criminal conviction should mean we forgive and forget Law's sins?
OJ Simpson was also never convicted of murder so I guess he's a good guy too.
Yes Dan
If you had been molested you would perhaps understand why sexually abusing a child is a crime that leaves deep scars on victims that they can never truly heal from and why people are so angry at Cardinal Law. He knew this was going on, and he continued to cover them up - there is no forgiveness in me for such a person. Cardinal Law was an arrogant, evil man. He had the devil in his soul.
Sexual abuse of children destroys the most basic sense of trust and is a violation from which one can't fully recover. I speak from experience. These children grow up in to broken adults who do the best they can to live with the aftermath.
Big fan of institutional cover ups?
Are you? Law was not anything resembling a human being. A real human being would have stopped those men, not moved them around to different parishes.
That's not right either
Many human beings are terrible, evil people. A real person of faith and believer in the teachings of the bible, now that person wouldn't have done what Law did.
I prefer
to follow more current books of fantasy in my choice of who I worship. That's why I was on Team Bella for all those years. Praise her.
Of course.
Law was no TRUE
ScotsmanCatholic.If they were a malicious shitbag in life?
Then, yes. Dying doesn't make them less of a malicious shitbag, it just ends their ability to act as a malicious shitbag. Some things are irredeemable and death is never a redeeming trait anyways.
Satan is smiling
The greatest trick of the devil was to disguise himself as Catholic priests. He was so successful he now comes disguised as politicians, movie producers, actors, athletes, coaches , teachers and rock stars. I pray there is a hell for all of them.
Back when he was still ....
... a well liked and respected bishop of Boston, I spent some time in the same room with him. My impression was of a cold calculating cynical man greedy for power. A Whitey Bulger type.
It’s a terrible shame that he escaped justice.
My father was a reporter for
My father was a reporter for the Boston Globe in the 1980s, and when we were in the VIP section of the Esplanade July 4th Pops concert one year, I was briefly introduced to the cardinal. His handshake was limp, and he looked right through me as if I wasn't there. I remember thinking, as a precocious 14-year-old budding journalist, hmmm, aren't politicians supposed to be schmoozy and pretending to be glad to meet you? If so, he's not doing it right. (In retrospect, I wonder if it was because I was a woman.)
Seeing as how he wasn't a
Seeing as how he wasn't a politician...
I drove Law once
Picked him and one of his boys up at the complex in Brighton to take him to Donna Morrissey's little jerk off gala where the Catholics who fuck people every day in business got to feel good about it by throwing money at Law.
They had a little girl in the car with them and when the girl noticed the decanter in the back of the stretch with the Scotch in it, she asked Law what was in it.
"Medicine" was his reply. I wonder how many priests told how many kids that they needed the medicine to make the sugar go down. In His name.
Last night's late-night realization of irony:
Here we are, 15 years later, and the Archdiocese of Boston (even as rocky as the going is) is in better shape than the Globe.
Why is that ironic?
Any institution requires external review and distributed power structures or it will rot to the core.
Without independent external accountability, there will be consequences and ill-health.
The Archdiocese covered up child rape and the resulting shakeup left it far healthier.
The Globe blunders on, having cut all real reporting and favoring brainless sychophants.
That's not ironic. That is inevitable.
I give religion another
I give religion another century, tops, with only the least civilized still clinging to it then. I look forward to more churches being turned into condos and restaurants. Journalism will be around forever, thankfully, in some form or another.
Interesting. Hinduism,
Interesting. Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism and many others have been around for thousands of years but now all religions will become non-existent in 100 years? You have a very peculiar outlook on your fellow humans.
100 years ago
One hundred years ago a majority of the world's population never strayed more than one hundred miles from where they were born. Today an ever larger portion of the world's population has access to a world's worth of information at their fingertips. Things are changing rapidly so it's not too out there of a prediction.
A Jesuit account
From America, a Jesuit publication:
Cardinal Bernard Law, the face of the church’s failure on child sexual abuse, dies at 86.
Rot In Piss
Rot In Piss
O'Malley's statement on Law's passing
Here (if it doesn't come up, I've posted a copy).
disgrace
You should never say anything bad about the dead, only good.
Cardinal Bernard Law is dead. Good.
Lame headline
I was expecting more like
Commuters wait to get home, Law lies dead in Rome
or
Commuter rail riders stuck in the sticks, Cardinal packs it in at 86
After Protecting Countless Priest D**ks, Law Dead at 86
I think that one cuts to the chase
Burial in Rome
will make pissing on his grave inconvenient.
Maybe some enterprising travel agent could put together packages. I'm sure they'd be well subscribed.
And for those lacking the airfare, maybe there's a business to be created, under which the customer could mail in a small bottle, which would then be shipped to Rome and emptied in the appropriate place on the customer's behalf.
"Honestly, Mr. Swiss Guard, all these little bottles here that I'm emptying onto this grave are just holy water that loyal fans have sent from their local parish churches all over the Boston area... At least that's what they said."
It takes two to tango
Allow me to add some gasoline to this conversation. It takes two to tango.
There is no question that the church and its hierarchy failed the public and allowed the terrible assaults on children. This will not change.
That said, one of the unspoken elements to all of this is that parents were also teaching their children, as was the church, that religious authority, priests, brothers, nuns, etc are absolute authorities not to be questioned. They are deemed emissaries of the Divine and just a notch below God.
This was a fault of generations of conditioning that the Church imparted on its people. As such, and to at least a minimal degree, the parents of these children must also bear some responsibility. It is an unpopular item to even consider, and was totally left out of the dialogue as it is politically incorrect to even consider. That said, it needs to be a part of the discussion.
Can we, or should we, never question authority whether it is religious, school based, government, or corporate. Indeed the news has been full of accusations as well as convictions across that entire spectrum, and from both genders.
I was truly fortunate. My family was never one to knuckle-under to church authority and taught me the signs to watch for, and we had open dialogues about that.
I served on the altar of no less than 3 of the named accused, and witnessed events that were not acceptable, and when the familiarity and "conditioning" started, I knew the red flag warnings and bailed out, and that was wholly supported by my family.
Did my family say something? Sure, but like many, ignored.
I steered clear of all of the controversy as did a host of others. I knew that my position would be unpopular and I would be deemed a part of the problem as opposed to the solution. 'How dare you fault parents?' So along with the openly identified victims, there are many more who remained silent, or who were on the periphery, who escaped the worse possible fate.
In a modern world where being politically correct is "de rigueur" people like self tend to remain silent. It is not healthy.
So, yes... definitively lay blame at the feet of the priests, and others who did wrong, but leave a little room for enablers which can be closer to the problem than you may think. Many dirty hands in this whole mess and some were just swept under the rug and never publicly even considered -- at least not out loud.
Question authority.
Not much pedophilia under Cardinal Law
This was a gay priest scandal not pedophilia. The far-left Globe refused to call it that. Pedophilia is defined as sexual abuse of prepubescent children. Most of the victims were teen boys. Fake news. I had a neighbor briefly in St. John's Seminary who immediately quit after witnessing all kinds of homosexual acts there.
I'm no defender of Cardinal Law and his many mistakes but much of the sexual abuse went back decades before he arrived here. It's unclear to me if he knew he was entering the lion's den when he took the job in the mid 80's. If I recall, most of the offender priests were sent to "therapy" and Cardinal Law lifted the state limit of $100,000 on lawsuits against non-profits to allow the victims and their lawyers a more generous settlement. Witness all of the closed churches, sold off to pay them. I'm sure it wasn't easy.
Leave it to Fish to resurrect bigoted, worn-out myths
Though researchers settled this question decades ago, it’s still a popular talking point among right wing, low information, conservatives. Left unchallenged, Fish would have you believe that homosexuals can be fixed and, if in fact they couldn’t, they are a blight on God’s America that would inevitably drag us all to hell.
These days, about the only time we hear a connection between pedophiles and gay men is when it’s coming from far right-wing “family values” organizations. People such as Fish use it to instill fear and perpetuate bigotry and ignorance. At the core of their beliefs is the idea that unless LGBT people turn from their gayness, they will end up as destitute child molesters in hell.
There are factual studies that undermine their bigoted beliefs. For example, the National Research Council completed an exhaustive study of the correlation between homosexuality and child abuse (in 1993). They found that “the distinction between homosexual and heterosexual child molesters relies on the premise that male molesters of male victims are homosexual in orientation. In fact, their research found that molesters of boys do not report sexual interest in adult men.”
In 1982, Dr. A. Nicholas Groth, a leading researcher, wrote:“Are homosexual adults in general sexually attracted to children and are preadolescent children at greater risk of molestation from homosexual adults than from heterosexual adults? He concluded that there is no reason to believe so.
Dr. Groth’s research to date all points to there being no significant relationship between a homosexual lifestyle and child molestation. There is no reportage of sexual molestation of girls by lesbian adults, and the adult male who sexually molests young boys is not likely to be homosexual.
So the question becomes: where does this idea of a link between homosexuality and child molestation come from?
In the early 70s, Christian fundamentalist Anita Bryant began her “Save the Children” campaign, which sought to unite the conservative church against the gay community and deny gay people the right to hold jobs in public schools. Her fear tactics, claiming that gay men were molesters in teacher’s clothing, gained her a huge following and raised a lot of money. The same tactics are still used today, with much of the same misinformation used by Bryant.
A precursory Google search on the topic turns up a list of right-wing, fundamentalist Christian organizations, often affiliated with or supporting “ex-gay” ministries and reparative therapy counseling centers, that perpetuate this unscientific notion. The right wing Traditional Values organization said, “While they [homosexuals] comprise only 1-2% of the population, they are responsible for upwards of a third or more of all sexual molestations of children.”
World News Daily (one of Fish’s reference sources for all things fake) titled a 2002 article (emphasis theirs) PEDOPHILIA MORE COMMON AMONG ‘GAYS’, and then proceeded to quote a religious organization’s “findings,” though none of those same statistics could been found in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals.
Not surprisingly, the anti-gay group Family Research Council states unequivocally that gay people are “committing up to one-third of the sex crimes against children,” though it doesn’t state where it gets its information. Also not surprising, they supply a long list of resources on their website that state nothing more than most child molesters are male and then make the gigantic leap that male child molesters who molest boys are gay men.
What Fish is unable or unwilling to accept is the idea homosexuality is a natural variation of human sexuality, as research has shown time and time again. LGBT people have no more of a propensity for child molestation than their straight counterparts. The mythical “gay agenda” doesn’t exist, except maybe to be able to simply live life like everyone else.
Fish is who he is - not very smart, a racist, homophobe, and a notorious, proven liar. Most of the time it is best to ignored him as I, like others, see his bullshit and trolling for what it is…in this case, however, he injects himself in an emotionally charged-issue for the mere purpose of perpetuate a proven lie. I just cannot let his comments stand without rebuttal.
So in other words...
You let Fish win.
What are you talking about - win - lose...
You always seem to have a snarky comment for everyone which, by the way, are generally apropos of nothing meaningful.
You sound juvenile. What are lonely or something - looking for attention - or is it the Boston Herald comment section off-line today?
Hey, thanks!
Always happy to hear from a fan! Follow me on Twitter @trumpwatching1!