this is a mishmash of links and comments and not all of them in a good time line.
But the dirty little secret is that when Sandusky was schtupping little boys, the local Catholic church and Penn state's Catholic group were pro gay...I know, because I lived in the area in the early 1990's...
-------------------------------------------
the Chronicles writes about a culture of evasion at Penn State that led folks to ignore Sandusky so they wouldn't get any bad publicity...
A better explanation might be that they were influenced by the local Bishop's attitude toward the problem:
Compassion toward the perpetrator you know, while seeing the crime as
normal consensual behavior a bit outside the law, but that should be
stopped by counseling and understanding..
.
link
http://ncronline.org/files/imagecache/leadimage_full/maine_marriage.jpg
Altoona Diocese contributes to repeal gay marriage...since it's NCReporter, it is an article complaining about it, and full of comments saying that opposing gay marriage is wrong: Example:
Submitted by Matt Ellsworth (not verified) on Nov. 25, 2009.
There is a bright line on this issue. The bishops and dioceses
who supported the referendum stand on one side. Jesus stands on the
other.
and
LINK
The letter by a group of local priests to the bishop defending his gay priests from attack was posted on FreeRepublic...date May 16, 2003...excerpt:
[bold emphasis in original document]
Priests Federation of Altoona-Johnstown
Johnstown, Pennsylvania
Dear Sisters and Brothers in the Lord:
Whereas the rights and dignity of priests in the Roman Catholic Diocese
of Altoona-Johnstown are threatened by forces both external to the
community of believers and internally by our bishop and his staff.
Whereas, in response to this threat, the Priests Federation of
Altoona-Johnstown was secretly formed by 26 clrgy of this Diocese to
demand the rights and dignity of all priests be respected and protected
by our bishop.
Therefore, we, the Priests Federation of Altoona-Johnstown, joined with our fellow clergy, ask the following from our bishop:
Whereas our bishop insists on publicly defending lawsuits against this
diocese and thus increasing the threat that more names of our priests be
exposed in the media, we demand that our bishop cease and desist his
public defense of any and all lawsuits concerning alleged priestly
misconduct and instead settle these cases out of court so as to protect
the reputation and well being of those priests so named and others that
may be revealed in the course of any trial.
Whereas our bishop threatens and harasses homosexual priests into fearing for their office, we
demand that our bishop cease and desist any and all harassment of
homosexual clergy and instead work to protect the reputation and well
being of clergy of all sexual orientations.
Whereas our bishop placates those who attack our diocese and its priests, we
demand that our bishop turn the attention of his legal representation
towards stopping the hateful and homophobic actions of George Foster,
Brian Barcaro, Dr. Brian Kopp [FReeper "Polycarp"], et. al., who are set
upon destroying the reputations of homosexuals priests and this
diocese.
Whereas our bishop ignores the actions of certain priests who consistently act against the unity of this diocese, we
demand our bishop suspend Fr. James Foster and Fr. John Nesbella
immediately, for repeated and constant acts which threaten the unity of
our community of faith.
Whereas our bishop removed Dr. David Brown [of "GoodBye, Good
Men" book fame] from his position as intake psychologist and from
candidacy for the permanent diaconate program due to the incessant
demands of several Talibanic conservative clergy and laity, we demand our bishop reinstate Dr. Brown both to his position as intake psychologist and to the permanent dioconate program.....
Link New Oxford Review on the same letter.
and
link from News Max: Anti Catholic 'experts" fuel scandal.
It discusses "Goodbye Good Men" and is part one of an investigation if the allegations are true.
At this point, reading the book would be a good idea.
GoogleBooks
Father Trigilio's book review
HERE.
those of us who actually survived the seminary experience know too well
how true those tales really are. The problem is that no book can address
all the issues and propose all the solutions. The horror stories Rose
relates brings back many painful memories, but also sheds light on dark
secrets which until now have been kept locked up in the basement. Like
the pedophilia scandal, the seminary scandal was swept under the carpet
for too long. Sadly, without the pressure of the media and the threat of
impending lawsuits, this demon may not get the speedy and serious
response as was given in Dallas by the Episcopal conference. Even though
the Holy See has ordered a thorough investigation of all seminaries and
their formation programs, whether or not it disintegrates into an
impotent "visitation" like the last one may be an easy bet.
and then there is
this 2002 article, about the Penn State Psychologist used by the Altoona diocese from the Centre Daily Times: the original article is no longer on line, but Free Republic still has it.
Brown, 58, the State College psychologist who does
psychological evaluations for the diocese, said he had no doubt that he
was the target of the anonymous ad. He said the ad appeared to signal an
escalation of efforts by some conservative Catholics to pressure Adamec
to discontinue contract work with him.
The Altoona-Johnstown
Diocese includes 104 parish priests and about 112,000 parishioners. As
the head of the diocese, Adamec uses Brown to provide about half of the
psychological evaluations of priesthood applicants.
Brown said in
an interview that he has conducted about 200 psychological evaluations
of seminary candidates in the last 25 years, and that virtually none of
them admits to gay orientation during the interviews. Brown said his
report to the diocese about a candidate's sexual orientation includes
what the candidate says, what the tests show and what he himself thinks.
In
response to some of the accusations made against him, Brown said he has
never given an unfavorable recommendation on a priesthood candidate
because the candidate is heterosexual, and has never endorsed someone
because he is gay or liberal.
He said perhaps one out of every
four of the 200 seminary candidates he has screened has become a priest,
and he said none of those priests has ever been accused or otherwise
been alleged to have been sexually abusive to anyone.
"I'm proud of my record," Brown said.
His
critics have also accused him of telling some candidates they were "too
rigid," as Morella phrased it, referring to the infallibility of church
doctrine on faith and morality.
Brown said that such a commentary
on someone's personality would never come up in the psychological
evaluation interview itself but could come up weeks later if a candidate
sought feedback on the evaluation, part of which is a standard test
designed to measure rigidity and other characteristics.
"Rigidity is a personality dimension that can apply to all ideological perspectives," Brown said.
Brown faulted his own critics for their narrow focus on right and wrong.
"They
think there's only one right way to be and anything else is sinful," he
said. "It really is just a discrimination against homosexuality."
(Timeline
HERE)
The problems in the Altoona Diocese were alive and well when I worked in the area in the early to mid 1990's: I heard many reports from women who left the church because the "monseignor" was harsh to them, but worse was the neighbor who told me the story of how the "monseignor" abused her son's friends and refused to attend the local church, something that happened in the 1980's. The bishop back then once tearfully confessed he had given way to pressure from "experts" that this should not be reported but treated by psychological counseling (which was also how California was treating their child molesters and was being praised by the press for their compassion)...But later he confessed that he was wrong and that he was sorry for his actions.
Alas, his successor, who came before I moved there, and has been there since the early 1990's, was worse, not only bowing to the "experts" but continuing a cover up even after everyone in the area knew what was going on.
Luckily, we were in another parish, but that was not the only case I heard about: one Catholic priest who bought a ticket to go with us to Medjugorje was pretty well ignored openly by our group, and the one who arranged the pilgrimage told me he was known to have abused several boys in his small town church...
(the "us" here was an Orthodox prayer group that was run by a local Russian Orthodox priest and included many Catholics in the group...we went with the blessing of the local Orthodox bishop...the catholic bishop, hated Medjugore,), and the prayer group filled a gap for Catholics in a town with six Catholic churches who had no prayer groups, but of course you could attend Sister's PC bible study if you wanted the latest way to decide the bible was nonsense).
Those were the good old days when Newsweek was telling us docs not to
report incestuous fathers, because it would break up the family,...I
can't find the Newsweeks article on line, but this article on
the Daily Beast
article defends incest and does name names of those who back then
defended the practice as harmless or even beneficial in years past.
If you want to see extent of the problem today, check out this
cdc article which uses neutral language to describe childhood sexual abuse.
especially(
Table 55).Nope, I'm still waiting for this report to get in the headlines.
Sigh.
We docs see these things, and often see the victims years later for substance abuse problems.
I'm starting to see articles "courageous" enough to notice that there is a link between morality and poverty,
with even the libertarian
Instapundit saying:
HOW TO REDUCE INEQUALITY:
Get (And Stay) Married.
Since it’s apparently okay to use government coercion to reduce
inequality, does that mean we should be implementing policies that
discourage single motherhood and divorce? You know, for the sake of
“fairness?” I’m just asking. . . .
but our media still gladly keeps pushing to define deviancy of all types as normal.
Here is Holly Ordway's essay about looking into the abyss...the same media that gives you "big love" and pornography is now promoting the free love promiscuity as normal.
-----------------------------
Just a few more links that might hint why the backstory of Penn state leads to the Catholic church's local gay friendly bishop, and even furthur back to Kinsey and some of the distortions of his work by activists.
LINK
a 2006 article from the Johnstown tribune democrat
when Nesbella became a priest, and his strong stance against
homosexuality in the priesthood drew venomous mail from his colleagues,
he kept the faith.
But now,
at age 43 and after being banned for the past year from publicly
performing any priestly duties, the outspoken and controversial Cambria
County priest is taking off his collar.
John Nesbella has resigned from the priesthood.
“This is the end of a sad tale of how wicked so-called Catholic priests
and bishops drove me and a few other priests out because we dared to
speak up about the corrupt brotherhood of homosexuals in the
priesthood,” he said.
Officials at the Altoona-Johnstown Roman Catholic Diocese declined to comment on Nesbella’s resignation.
“It’s a personal decision,” diocese spokesman Rob Egan would only say.
Nesbella has been a conservative standard-bearer and a favorite of conservative lay leaders in the diocese.
In 2005, Nesbella was the second Altoona-Johnstown priest in three
years to be placed on a leave of absence for protesting diocese
policies.
Before him, James
Foster, an outspoken Ebensburg priest who often locked horns with Bishop
Joseph Adamec on the issue of homosexual priests, was placed on leave
in 2003.
LINK
Gary Morella has rants lots of links about his feud (on his penn state webpage) with the bishop about the problem.
Yes, he has a lot of "red" printing there and it might sound paranoid, but I was working in the area in the late 1980's to mid 1990's and it is, alas, true.
As far as the penal precept toward Msgr. Saylor, I have know this priest as my pastor at Our Lady of Victory in State College PA, and later as pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul in Philipsburg, PA. His writings in the local press were as orthodox as they come.
Why, then, was he summarily told, under threat of excommunication, that he was to no longer make any type of public statement in the State College area, while concurrently being wished the best in retirement by Bishop Adamec, a schizophrenic act to be sure?
The end result is that an honored priest, for what appears to be no good reason, was silenced by his bishop when his respected voice would have been welcomed by orthodox Catholics in the State College area.
This small group of individuals united with one local priest, Fr. James Foster, publicly spoke out in defense of the faith. They found themselves fighting the moral rot emanating from Penn State, and sadly, the Penn State Catholic Center with no support whatsoever from their diocesan Church. (italics mine).
This is a diocesan Church that undercut them whenever they tried to defend the faith, leaving them hanging out to dry when their Bishop, through his spokesman, repeatedly told the community that they do not speak for the official Church when, in fact, all that they were doing was quoting, chapter and verse, from the Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, whom local Catholics must now also presume does not speak for our diocesan Church.
--------------------------------------
NewsMax links
are all after 2002...
New bishop arrives in Altoona: 2011
says the older bishop arrived in 1987...
LINK
Judith Reisman discussing her book on CSPAN (no embedded video)...
I'd say some of these guys were paranoid, but I was there in the mid 1990's and saw the damage already done by what was going on in the 1980's, and the old bishop then once cried and told the laypeople that he wanted to remove the priests, but the psychologist told him no, so the bishop didn't. The new bishop was worse: the local parish newspaper bragged about the gay friendly priest chaplain at Penn state, for example, and the abuse cases continued: I know of one case then where a nurse cried on my shoulder that her husband was asked to intervene in a new case of a boy abused by a "visiting priest" who was a "very nice guy" so they didn't want to send him to jail. That was about 1993 or 1994...
Mr. Morella has this on his website, to put things into perspective:
The evidence speaks for itself. The
bishop incredibly in a previous statement says that he was not required to do
this until the Church told him so. See http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/e/j/ejm1/morella/m140.htm where
Bishop Adamec says
As for reporting to civil authorities, at the
time of the abuse as alleged in the present complaints, there was no obligation
or law requiring clergy to do so. This was changed in 1995. Then, as now, those
who feel victimized have the freedom to report the matter to proper
authorities. Today, that is very much encouraged. And, clergy are now, since
1995, required to report in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Yes, there was no obligation for him to report the abuse, and those who "feel victimized" (i.e. underaged boys who often don't even report it to their families) can report it: but parents, worrying about their son facing a hostile court cross examining and confronting all those nice people from the church saying, oh this was just a momentary lapse by a good priest who is a nice guy, can you just forget about it? What would you say as a parent?
I worked with abused girls, both to examine them to check for physical evidence of abuse and also when older women came to cry on my shoulder that it had happened to them (after a TV show on abuse was shown, many women who suffered similar abuse including incest came "out of the closet" and had to talk to someone...) and yes, two victim whose cases went to court admitted what had happened at the court case and being cross examined and called a liar in front of a jury was worse than the abuse.
So one case of incest I am aware of came to the attention of the authorities via her boyfriend telling a teacher, but to spare her the trauma, the cops pressured her minister (!) father to plea bargain to a lesser charge and he got only six months instead of ten or more years that he deserved. It kept the girl from trauma, but the last time I heard where he was he was dating a single social worker with five foster children, who we had to telephone (don't know if she believed what we told her: in those days, child abusers didn't have their names and addresses on line).
In another case, a father divorced but allowed visiting rights, abused his oldest girl, who was persuaded it was her fault so she kept quiet. When she hit 14, he started on her 10 year old sister, and by then she had learned enough to know it wasn't her fault, and went to the cops. The father denied everything, until we caught him in a lie, and then he also plea bargained...and it was accepted for the girl's sake.
Nor is abuse a "new" thing: one old man said his wife had been raped by her parish priest in the 1920's, and in another case,in the biography of Catherine Doherty (of Madonna house) there is a mention of her son being resentful and hating his mother for abandoning him....later it turns out he had been abused by the priest she trusted to keep an eye on her son (to get him away from his abusive and negelectful father and his bimbos!).
Nor is abuse of people by priests new, as anyone reading Chaucer or knows the back story of Death in the Cathedral can tell you (Thomas a Beckett was arguing that the church courts, not the civil authorities, should try a priest accused of rape.) and Dante, of course, put one of his beloved teachers in hell for sexually abusing his pupils.
The dirty little secret is found in Andrew Greeley's book "confessions of a parish priest", where he says back in the 1970's, the authorities decided celibacy not orientation was what needed to be screened...so with the breakdown of discipline after Vatican II, the celibate gay priest became active, and some who were thought to be merely gay, but were serial pedophiles, had their crimes covered up by gays in the bishop's office. Greeley denies that Bernadine, at whose feet this can be laid, was gay, and also has the statistics about sexual immorality in the church using hard sociological data (as opposed to "experts" usually quoted in the press who use anedotal estimates which exaggerate the problem).
A Boston Globe story on various surveys B
oston Globe
The draft of the study, done by John Jay College of Criminal
Justice for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, found that 4,450 of
the 110,000 priests who served between 1950 and 2002 were accused of
sexual abuse of minors, according to CNN, which reported yesterday that
it had reviewed the draft.
The number of alleged perpetrators
given in the draft study is higher than the tallies by news media
outlets, including the Associated Press and The New York Times, that
have tried to count reported allegations nationwide.
The number is
also higher than that projected by church officials. A top Vatican
official, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, said in 2002, according to the
Catholic News Service: "In the United States, there is constant news on
this topic, but less than 1 percent of priests are guilty of acts of
this type."
But the number of victims is lower than expected by many....
In 1993, the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, a sociologist at the University of
Chicago, estimated that between 2,000 and 4,000 priests had abused
minors, and predicted more than 100,000 victims; last year, Greeley
wrote that he suspected 4 percent of priests had abused minors. Plante
and Greeley's projections were published in America magazine, a Jesuit
weekly.
Ah yes, the Jesuits, who were partly to blame for being on the cutting edge of heresy and pushing the idea that celibacy doesn't mean no sex (if conspiracy theorist Malachy Martin's book The Jesuits is true, which it may not be).
So does this mean that Catholics are evil and the church hopelessly corrupt?
Well, there are a billion catholics: everyone from the Borgias to Mother Teresa.
The sardonic Jewish carpenter got in trouble for pointing out the problem of religious officials taking bribes and kick backs and being "wolves in sheep's clothing" (and I suspect they left the woman caught in adultery alive because Jesus started writing about their own sexual shennanigans in the dust).
It's a power play, and if some chose religion to cloak their deed, it is not confined to religious leaders, alas, as the above cited CDC article shows, it's still common.
The number of cases are small in percentages for the church, but the dirty little secret that the church needs periodic cleansing. One hopes that now that this is being cleansed, it will too pass.
What does not bode well is that the press and the Obama administration are trying to marginlaize the Catholics in favor of the gay friendly gnostic takeover, that will allow abortion, euthanasia and polyamoury of any orientation as the norm.... As for the Episcopalians: They accepted father "cutie" who had a bimbo, the bishop of New Hampshire who abandoned his wife, Bishop Spong who was an atheist, and now are allowing funeral services for your pets. I guess we should be grateful: They still don't allow dogs to marry in the church...
The vehemence of the press attacking the ordinary believing Catholic is well known, but the censorship of the gay lobby is worse.
The bad news is that no one wants to admit that the abuse of the priest isn't usually against children but is against young attractive boys, and that the gay subculture has a love of pubescent boys since the time of Alcibiades and Plato.
And it also has to be remembered that some abuse cases are fake and about money (the one case the Altoona bishop "lost" was a priest accused of abusing a 14 year old boy. The case went to court because the priest said he only liked older boys...they lost, but it was commonly known that the boy's older brother was a male prostitute who got to know the priest in Pittsburgh gay bars, and concocted the story with his mother and brother that it was the younger brother who was abused to get money. Everyone knew this, but also knew the "good catholics" were being pressured to stay quiet, so the jury gave the family a bundle of money to punish the church)...
This is about power, not religion: and the rate of abuse is just as bad by teachers etc. if not worse.
Even a culture of abuse can harm a boy, as
this article by Michael O'Brien in Catholic world news shows:
I was awakened in the middle of the night by the supervisor's favorite boy. "Get up," he said, "Mr. H wants you!"
I was suddenly wide awake, and said with perfect inner peace and certainty, "No."
This, too, was out of character, because I
was obedient by nature and a conformist at the time. To resist the will
of anyone, let alone a man who was prone to irrational outbursts and
who was also our absolute master, was practically unthinkable. My act of
resistance was even more inexplicable when I consider the everyday
events that occurred in our dorm: discipline by slaps and humiliations,
excessive and unnecessary communal nudity, verbal abuse, sexual and
racial slurs. I also recall our communal shower which the supervisor
observed every night, and into which he once burst fully clothed,
flailing about him with a rubber hose and raising welts on several of us
as he shrieked about lust and impurity. The situation was made worse by
the fact that for the entire school year we were forbidden to leave the
hostel grounds except to go to the classrooms across the fenced yard.
Within this enclosed environment, there were constant attacks upon
anyone who did not cringe before the iron will which ruled it. Most of
the boys learned to curry favor or to live under continual intimidation,
and in the case of a few, to acquiesce to Mr. H's more personal
invitations.
The morning following my refusal to go to
his bedroom I entered a period of suffering. Mr. H began a campaign
against me that was both merciless and relentless.
yet, as author
Michael O'Brien's testimony shows, the bishops just didn't get it (and the abuse in Canadian residential schools included not just Catholic but Anglican schools).
Some years ago, I wrote an article, first published in Catholic World Report, that described my own experiences as a child in a residential school. It is posted here on my studio website:
Victims, Scandal, Truth, Compassion
At
the time I did not wish to add scandal to scandal, and did not mention
the fact that the criminal abuser, a layman who had damaged the lives of
so many boys, and was convicted under law as a "dangerous sexual
offender," was released after nine years in prison and then went on to
apply to enter a Canadian seminary. He was accepted by the
then-archbishop with full knowledge of the man's past, a fact which came
out during a later civil trial, after the man had been ordained a
priest. Now the full story is a matter of public record. While it is
true that an individual committed these gravest of sins, it is also true
that he found a welcoming, sympathetic environment that allowed him to
go on to become the "pastor" of souls. Such is the madness that has
infected many dioceses and the national bishops' conference of the
particular church in my country, and in other countries as well.
Justified with endlessly nuanced theology and disordered anthropology,
there is a pattern of "national" ecclesial disobedience to the universal
Church under Peter, compromise with sin and error, and a massive
failure of Christian prudence that have blighted the Bride of Christ for
several decades now. However, let us not forget that, as G. K.
Chesterton once wrote, "The Church is always leaping out of the tomb,
just when the world pronounces her dead."
The
timeline for Sadusky is in the mid 1990's, about this time, (although like with most cases, I suspect he had been doing it for awhile before then)...
x abuse of minors:
1969
Jerry Sandusky starts his coaching career at Penn State University as a defensive line coach.
1977
Jerry Sandusky founds The Second Mile. It begins as a group foster home
dedicated to helping troubled boys and grows to become a charity
dedicated to helping children with absent or dysfunctional families.
January 1983
Associated Press voters select Penn State as college football's national champion for the 1982 season.
January 1987
Associated Press voters select Penn State as college football's national champion for the 1986 season.
1994
Boy known as Victim 7 in the report meets Sandusky through The Second Mile program at about the age of 10.
1994-95
Boy known as Victim 6 meets Sandusky at a Second Mile picnic at Spring Creek Park when he is 7 or 8 years old.
1995-96
Boy known as Victim 5, meets Sandusky through The Second Mile when he is 7 or 8, in second or third grade.
1996-97
Boy known as Victim 4, at the age of 12 or 13, meets Sandusky while he
is in his second year participating in The Second Mile program.
1996-98
Victim 5 is taken to the locker rooms and showers at Penn State by Sandusky when he is 8 to 10 years old.
Jan. 1, 1998
Victim 4 is listed, along with Sandusky's wife, as a member of Sandusky's family party for the 1998 Outback Bowl.
1998
Victim 6 is taken into the locker rooms and showers when he is 11 years
old. When Victim 6 is dropped off at home, his hair is wet from
showering with Sandusky. His mother reports the incident to the
university police, who investigate.
Detective Ronald Schreffler
testifies that he and State College Police Department Detective Ralph
Ralston, with the consent of the mother of Victim 6, eavesdrop on two
conversations the mother of Victim 6 has with Sandusky. Sandusky says he
has showered with other boys and Victim 6's mother tries to make
Sandusky promise never to shower with a boy again but he will not. At
the end of the second conversation, after Sandusky is told he cannot see
Victim 6 anymore, Schreffler testifies Sandusky says, "I understand. I
was wrong. I wish I could get forgiveness. I know I won't get it from
you. I wish I were dead."
Jerry Lauro, an investigator with the
Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, testifies he and Schreffler
interviewed Sandusky, and that Sandusky admits showering naked with
Victim 6, admits to hugging Victim 6 while in the shower and admits that
it was wrong.
The case is closed after then-Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar decides there will be no criminal charge.
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