BishopAccountability.org
	Church Errs in Casting out Women, but Not Predator Priests By Margery Eagan Boston Herald July 22, 2008 http://news.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/columnists/view/2008_07_22_Eagan_column/srvc=home&position=also The latest uppitty women to get whacked by the Roman Catholic Church are would-be priests Judy Lee of Florida, Gloria Carpeneto of Maryland and Gabriella Verlardi Ward of New York. Sunday in Boston all three were "ordained" in a ceremony run by a pro-women priest organization. The Archdiocese of Boston promptly declared that the women had automatically excommunicated themselves by such action. Their excommunicable sin: yearning to dedicate themselves to the church and faith they love. Meanwhile, here's who hasn't been excommunicated: hundreds of priests and bishops who've admitted to or been accused of multiple sexual assaults on children and teenagers. Some resign. Some are defrocked. But many more remain Catholics in good standing or even retain their titles, their pay, their clerical trappings and the support of the church. "I'm not sure I've heard of anybody (in the sex scandal) being excommunicated for raping a child," said someone who follows these cases nonstop. "But a woman who wants to say Mass?" Off with her head. Clearly these priests' sins are not as grievous as hers. Here's but a couple of predator priests who remain in the fold: Thomas L. Dupre resigned as bishop of the Springfield diocese in 2004 after being confronted by what Hampden County District Attorney William Bennett then termed "credible accusations" that he had repeatedly raped two young boys over many years in several states. Dupre never denied the accusations and took the 5th before a civil grand jury. Anthony J. O'Connell, former bishop of Florida, admitted abusing at least 10 children and stepped down in 2002, whereupon lay Catholics began a brutal, year-long campaign to have his name removed from a parish building and his portraits removed from the hallway and principal's office of a Catholic high school. "Only the church would allow a building to be named after a pedophile," said one of the organizers. Francis E. Bass, a former bishop in the Davenport, Iowa, diocese, was accused of abusing many boys and of sharing them with multiple priests in group sex orgies. He settled a lawsuit with the archdiocese after the statute of limitation ran out for criminal prosecution. The archdiocese, by the way, asked the Vatican to defrock Bass. The Vatican said no, leaving him free to say Mass every day. Lawrence D. Soens, also a former bishop of Davenport, was accused of abuse by more than 20 teenagers at the high school where he taught and was principal for years. This, as I said, is but a tiny sampling of priests and bishops' sordid misdeeds. They're all documented on Bishop-Accountabilty.org, a Web site that offers complete and harrowing details of the hierarchy's continuing sins and, in some cases, continuing cover-ups. If you think the church has reformed, visit this site and learn otherwise. Every time I write a column like this I gets calls and e-mails asking why don't I and these whiny women just leave the church? My answer: because I will not be driven from my faith by a bunch of pedophile coddlers who've got big-time problems with uppity women. It was terrific that Boston Cardinal Sean O'Malley arranged for a handful of abuse survivors to meet with the pope during his visit to New York this year. Obviously, that's not enough. One more thing: The Catholic Church over many centuries has changed its mind or apologized for many mistakes, including its embarrassingly slow opposition to slavery and the Holocaust, horrible mistakes driven in large part by anti-Semitism and racial prejudice. Sooner of later it will come to its senses about prejudice toward women, too. It'll have to. There won't be enough non-pedophile male priests left.
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