New Bishop Once Blamed Devil for Abuse Lawsuits

[Elmore Furth]

Source: Associated Press

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) -- A Chicago bishop who once blamed the devil for sexual abuse lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Church and proposed shielding the church from legal damages has been named to lead an Illinois diocese.

Thomas Paprocki, an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Chicago, was announced Tuesday as the church's ninth bishop of Springfield.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said it was disappointed with Paprocki's promotion.

''It says to us that the Vatican is more interested in doctrinal purity than child safety -- or at least that child safety isn't the No. 1 priority,'' said David Clohessy, SNAP's executive director.

Paprocki, 57, said three years ago that the principal force behind the waves of abuse lawsuits was ''none other than the devil.''


Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/04/20/us/AP-US-Bishop-Appointment.html?_r=1&ref=news

---

The devil made me do it," was originated by Reverend Leroy Jenkins, pastor of the 'Church of What’s Happening Now'. (Flip Wilson)

[Indenturedebtor]

1. HAH! I'm going to use this at work

"Why didn't you wrap up that project?!?!?!"

Me: "Satan"

Wish me luck......!

[No Elephants]

5. What? Suddenly "The dog ate my project" isn't good enough for you, anymore?

Pffft.

[Indenturedebtor]

13. Well..... ozzy ozborne made the dog eat my homework..

:P

[chollybocker]

2. The devil has a proven track record of settling out of court.

Meanwhile, all that black smoke currently circling the planet? For naught.

[Angry Dragon]

3. Why should they take responsibility

for their actions when they can blame something that can not be seen nor proven to exist?? They hide behind the devil and he will protect them.

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. Colombian cardinal praised pedophile cover-up

The Vatican on Thursday confirmed the authenticity of a 2001 letter published by French website Golias in which Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos congratulates French bishop Pierre Pican for not reporting a sexually abusive priest to the police.

In the letter, dated September 8, 2001, Castrillon, then a clergy prefect, backed Pican's decision to not report the priest, who was later sentenced to eighteen years in jail for the rape of a boy and the sexual assault of ten others.

"I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration," the now-Medellin cardinal wrote in the letter. "You have acted well and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son-priest."

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said the letter confirmed "how opportune it was to centralize treatment of cases of sexual abuse of minors by clerics under the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith."

The letter is the lastest in a series of church documents published recently that suggest the Vatican encouraged the cover-up of sexual abuse by priests.

Last Friday a Colombian Catholic priest was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for sexually abusing a 13-year-old altar boy.

http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/9191-colombian-cardinal-congratulated-french-bishop-for-pedophilia-cover-up.html


Also in GD

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8186998

[Ichingcarpenter]

6. Mexican Cardinal blames Sex Education for their Child abuse problems

"In the midst of the invasion of so much eroticism, it is not easy to remain faithful in celibacy, or in respecting children," Arizmendi, the bishop of the San Cristobal de las Casas diocese in Chiapas state, said at a meeting of Mexican bishops.

He said part of the blame for the current environment lies with sex education programs that gave "only genital information."

In a statement Friday, the Mexican Association for Sexual Health, a group of professional counselors and educators, defended the need for the government sex-ed programs and criticized the bishop's comments.

"Those of good conscience in the church should stop this absurdity and find good help," the statement said.

"Blaming the problems that the Catholic Church has had with priests' sexually abusing minors on sex education makes no sense," it added. "It borders on the pathetic."

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Catholic-Sex-Abuse-Scandal-Mexican-Bishop-Blames-Pornography-On-Television-And-The-Internet/Article/201004315607185?f=rss


http://article.wn.com/view/2010/04/17/Mexican_official_defends_sex_education_after_bishop_blames_i/

http://christianchildabuse.blogspot.com/2010/04/mexico-rejects-church-criticism-of-sex.html

[No Elephants]

7. With all due respect to Wilson, "The devil made me do it" is AT LEAST as old as Adam.

[ima_sinnic]

8. but people will still continue supporting this racket with their attendance and offerings

so what do they care?

imagine a world where nobody showed up one Sunday -- and every day after that ...

[struggle4progress]

9. Bishop seeks limits for sex abuse payments (Chicago Tribune October 2007)

By Manya A. Brachear
Tribune religion reporter
9:27 PM CST, November 9, 2007

... Paprocki has suggested reviving some of the safeguards of charitable immunity, a judicial doctrine that fell out of favor in the middle of the 20th Century because it shielded non-profits from suits for negligence and abuse ...

Ordained in 1978, Paprocki went to law school to help the poor and occasionally represented clients at the same time he served as a parish priest on Chicago’s South Side. Appointed chancellor of the Chicago Archdiocese by Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, he served on the archdiocese’s review board, meeting with victims and removing priests accused of abuse.

Paprocki describes the evolution of the church’s sex abuse crisis in three phases. Before 1960, the church treated the sexual abuse of minors as a moral failure for which penance and absolution were adequate solutions, he said. From 1960 to 1990, the approach was therapeutic, and since 1990, the approach has been primarily litigious ...

“I’m not saying the plaintiffs in that case or the lawyer were acting demonically,” he explained later. “I’m saying it is in a sense a diabolical consequence when you can no longer provide a charitable service" ...

http://reform-network.net/?p=1127

[Kelvin Mace]

10. Here's a clue

Molesting children is not a "charitable service" I want.

[struggle4progress]

11. I don't think I've seen you since that evening at Kempe's a few years back.

If I recall correctly, you were working hard on election reform at the time, so I'm pretty sure I'm not talking to an empty-headed neophyte. In particular, I'd bet you've walked the halls around the government mall in Raleigh enough to know the importance of getting the details correctly and accurately. I feel certain, too, that you've cracked open a paper enough times to know that not every story is quite right -- and if you're like me, you've seen yourself or your friends misquoted in the media more than once over the years

American political discourse isn't in a particularly good state nowadays, and while the intertubes puts more information at our fingertips more quickly than ever before, I'm not sure that certain online cultural trends really help us cultivate the habits we need to build the lasting broad-based coalitions we need to move the country in a progressive direction. Snark and anger, of course, can be effective tools, when used precisely and with some disciplined restraint -- but freely indulging them will be counterproductive in almost any context

It's fine with me if you don't like the Catholic church: I have quite a long list of my own substantial disagreements with them, and I won't bore you by repeating it here. But get a clue, yourself: it's a large and complicated institution; it is not uniformly reactionary but has some definitely progressive communities inside it; for various reasons, sex-abuse stories about the Catholic church have received more attention than awarded other groups, but there's no reason to think the Catholics' have more such problems than anybody else -- and you know perfectly well that the Catholics never offered molesting children as a "charitable service." I will guess most of us never heard Paprocki's name before this thread, but whether or not that's true, and whether or not you like him, Paprocki is being misquoted by half-sentence to perpetuate a stereotype, and the noisy content-free emotional outbursts in this thread don't help any of us think lucidly about anything

[Kelvin Mace]

14. First of all, my comment was sarcasm

Second, while the Catholic Church is certainly not the only religious institution with "molesting" problems, it is the one church that has conspired GLOBALLY to not only not report these things to the police, but to actively protect pedophiles and move them to new locations and, in essence, give them new victims. They have also worked to thwart police investigations and to hide evidence of criminal actions of priests.

From a legal perspective, this constitutes obstruction of justice, conspiracy to obstruct, accessory before and after, and probably a few others I'm missing. If this were a chain of day care centers, these people would have been prosecuted and sued out of existence years ago (in fact, the RICO statues would have been invoked and they would have been shut down in 2002).

But, since they are a church, they are given wide latitude, like all churches are, to commit crimes.

ANY church should be prosecuted for this type of behavior. Hopefully, the Catholic Church will be the first in a long line of overdue prosecutions.

[Kelvin Mace]

17. One more point

But get a clue, yourself: it's a large and complicated institution; it is not uniformly reactionary but has some definitely progressive communities inside it;

This is the same argument I get from good cops about tarring all cops because of the actions of a few bad ones.

Yes, there are bad apples, but the good cops keep their mouth shut because they prefer to defend bad cops rather than help remove them. When a good cop does point out a bad cop, he is ostracized as a rat, and his/her career is OVER. He is victimized by other "good" cops for doing what is right.

Thus, the actions of the few, DO reflect the whole. Good cops know who bad cops are, but remain silent.

This is also true of the Catholic Church. The "good guys" know who the molesters are, but collude to protect them. Parishioners who continue to give their attendance and money to the Church, indirectly support this evil.

When the Church stops lying, stops shielding molesters, stops making excuses, stops attacking the victims and when it starts opening ALL of its records, starts apologizing without qualification, starts making the molesting and the protection of molesters punishable by excommunication, when it starts picking up the phone and calling the police (instead of lawyers and PR firms), then, and ONLY then will the Church be a true Christian institution.

No good works can excuse, or make up for this evil. The "progressive communities" within the Church toe the Vatican line. Thus, they embrace the evil and are part of the problem.

[msanthrope]

16. Tort reform to benefit child molesters???? Am I reading the fucking Onion? n/t

[struggle4progress]

18. Perhaps you just have some difficulty reading carefully and accurately. The point

of my post was that Paprocki actually said something rather different than "blame the devil for abuse lawsuits." Of course, you're also perfectly free to disagree with what he actually said, if you ever bother to read it and understand it -- I don't see him anywhere advocating "tort reform to benefit child molesters" -- but such discussion might be moot, as the proposal is several years old now and went nowhere

[hedgehog]

12. The Pope and his buddies are playing with fire. Sooner or later

they will find the straw that breaks the camel's back, and they will face the ire of the vast majority of Catholics.

Here's the story that outsiders may be unaware of: What's happening now is that fewer and fewer men are becoming priests both because of the hierarchy's standard of only ostensibly celibate males need apply and because more and more of the priests and bishops who remain are seen as total nut cases and/or corporate hacks. Worldwide, the response has been to start shuttering parishes. In other words, in order to preserve its power, the hierarchy is attacking the grassroots Church. People can ignore Benedict, ignore the local bishop and tolerate any kind of pastor but when the community that knows and cares for you and your family in good times and bad is wantonly destroyed and scattered...

Look for the revolt when the first parish stands up and refuses to be closed.

[LuckyLib]

15. I would have liked to have seen revolt when a parish stood up and defended children.