BishopAccountability.org
	" The Just Man Justices" Kingfishers, Dragonflies and Stones [United States] April 16, 2007 http://epaulkelly.blogspot.com/2007/04/just-man-justices_5641.html Open Letter to BishopAccountability.org and Other Group Advocates for Victims: We are a strange country, our America, struggling by, from one justification for our conduct to another, tagging our steps with phrases and slogans, as we go. • Sex offenders must be exposed to save our children. • Innocent until proven guilty. • Statutes of limitations must be abolished. • Justice cries out for accountability. • A country of laws, not of men. • Cover-ups are worse than sexual abuse. • Rebels who win revolutions become oppressors. • Who will guard the guardians? Some of you know me from work I did with Paul Baier on the original database of priests accused of sexual abuse of minors, back in the early days, when Paul and his crew started literally from scratch. That work gives me some right to offer an opinion which has been growing, too slowly, within me. I am very frightened that we Americans have come to despise the Rule of Law and want our justice against those who commit crimes against humanity to be swift and merciless. While I was a trial attorney in New Hampshire from 1960 until retirement in 2000, my practice rarely dealt with criminal law. Still, I knew that the only thing that mattered in the courtroom was evidence, and how it was presented by the trial lawyer. No lawyer will or can accept any of the following for evidence: • Gossip, • Prejudice, • Bias, • Animosity, • Likes, • Dislikes, • Ancient wounds, • Majority opinions, • Minority objections, • Rumors of the grossest crimes against humanity – such as sexual abuse of minors by clergy? • Newspaper articles. And evidence is governed by The Rules of Evidence, the single most important tool of the trial lawyer,who had better know the Rules of Evidence as a carpenter knows his tools. Without them, that lawyer is a fraud. I agree that Catholic priests, a small minority to be sure, had sought out children, wee ones, elementary school ages, teenagers, for gross sexual practices, and had been doing so for decades. Many of their bishops knew about their crimes against humanity and suppressed as mightily as they could the leaking of any disclosures of those monstrosities, lest the Roman Catholic Church's reputation be stained. They transferred them within and without their dioceses, pulled a rug over the whole tragic slaughter of the young, and looked the other way. The explosion of that news in January, 2002, was unbelievable, unimaginable, incomprehensible. We, all of us, were enraged and we roared into action to see that justice be done, accountability be extracted from those responsible, and punishment be imposed for those resonsible. I joined in. Now, however, I am frightened for our country, as well as for our religion and the institution that calls itself its church. We have forgotten who we are. Our country is mean. Justice is a synonym for vengeance. The rule of law is ignored by vigilantes in their relentless pursuits. Accusation in a news story is conviction without courts. The government is a sham and the Department of Justice itself is in tatters, from the current administration's abuse of power. And lawyers are beginning to wake up. Our church continues under the leadership of its bishops, as it has always done, impervious to change, excommunicating those of us who seek change, ignoring us as people of the church by the stalemate of silence, and plowing straight ahead with The Three Ds: Dogma, Doctrine, Discipline. Many of our bishops and their church have become masters of the hardball tactics of unscrupulous lawyers, frustrated judges with delay by discovery, obliterated victims' hopes with bankruptcies, and turned the search for justice into a bare-knuckled game where victory goes to the meanest. It is time for lawyers to stand and speak, for the sake of our legal system and the oaths they swore to uphold the Rule of Law. One of them is Mark A. Sargent, the Dean of the Villanova University School of Law, and the author of "Vengeance Time: When Abuse Victims Squander Their Moral Authority," in the current issue of Commonweal, April 20, 2007, — http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1915 Please, consider it quietly and seriously in your current work seeking accountability from American bishops. Especially, because not one has as yet paid any attention to your plea and your work. No comment of mine is being given on Dean Sargent's article, because I need to consider it quietly and seriously myself. Let Dean Sargent talk to us. In deciding whether or not you will open his article, remember, please, and if you will, the two news stories that mesmerized our strange country just one week ago, setting forth different levels of our national conscience in stark contrast. In both, the primary focus was on college athletes, a group not normally trashed, usually far removed from our normal opinions and prejudices. 1. Don Imus' lifetime work was immediately terminated, even though some may have accepted his apologies, or others were willing to wait until he met personally with the young women from Rutgers, in an effort to make amends. We may even be astonished that he is gone. In a rush to judgment that was so swift. 2. Duke University's lacrosse players have been deemed innocent by the Attorney General of North Carolina, after a long, intensive investigation for evidence, which convinced him that a rogue prosecutor violated the rules of the Rule of Law. In a rush to judgment that was so swift. Our strange country is waking up. There is injustice in our land, and we may have the power to correct it. We should use that power justly. Before you judge me for writing this letter, read Dean Sargent and remember that we are not only Americans, but also Catholics, who see Christ in others. As my favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, wrote, "I say more: the just man justices." That line is the beginning of the second stanza of The Kingfisher. • As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; • As tumbled over rim in roundy wells • Stones ring, like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's • Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; • Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: • Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; • Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, • Crying What I do is me: for that I came. • I say more: the just man justices; • Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces; • Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is — • Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, • Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his • To the Father through the features of men's faces. Each of us should stop and reflect on what we have done and are doing for victims of sexual abuse by some clergy in our church, how we are acting now for justice to be done to the perpetrators and accountabiity be rendered by their bishops, in order to know whether we are doing so in the name of God. It will be a most difficult reflection for many of us, especially lawyers, whether active or retired like myself.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.