BishopAccountability.org
	Pedophile Priests Live Free and Unmonitored in Neighborhoods All over the Country. By Kay Ebeling City of Angels September 11, 2009 http://cityofangels5.blogspot.com/2009/09/pedophile-priests-live-free-and.html EXTRA: Since they do not have to register on sex offender lists, hundreds of known pedophile priests live unsupervised in neighborhoods all over the USA, thanks to the Catholic Church’s current way of avoiding accountability for decades of sex crimes. First the Church transfered priests from parish to parish. Now they defrock them and forget about them. And since no one "legally" admits guilt in most civil settlements, pedophiles who are now former priests live wherever they want, free of criminal records or public knowledge of their crimes. SNAP gives a real clear suggestion of what to do with priests who are sexual predators in a statement they put out today from Vermont, but it really applies to the entire country. “Bishops should centrally house and oversee them in remote, secure, widely publicized and professionally-run centers. This ensures that the predators get treatment and that kids are protected." Hmm, sounds like Servants of the Paracletes were onto something back in the 1950s when they tried to buy a remote island to house these guys like lepers... As is so often the case with sex offenders, these pedophile priests will likely continue to act out as sex criminals. First pedophile priests were transferred from parish to parish, now the Catholic Church turns them loose on society, still evading accountability for decades of sex crimes against children and adolescents. The Bishops seem to think they can turn these pedophile priests loose on society and then wipe their hands and say they've done their job. The SNAP statement continued: “While hundreds of the roughly five thousand pedophile priests across the US have died or are locked up, most now quietly live unsupervised, on their own, in neighborhoods where parents are unaware of their crimes. This puts kids at risk of more abuse. "According to an independent research group called Bishop Accountability, 13 priests and nuns who worked for the church in Vermont are proven, admitted or credibly accused sex offenders. While some have died, SNAP believes most walk free, live independently, and get little/inadequate church supervision. “Bishops recruit, educate, ordain, hire, supervise, transfer, shield, and defend priests, some of whom molest kids. So SNAP feels church officials have a moral and civic duty to do more than merely suspend them.” It feels so good to see powerful words and statements like this come out of SNAP. God knows how many more children in America are in danger thanks to this defrock 'em and forget about 'em practice, which is the next step in the Church’s bungling of the predator priest problem. I watched L.A.’s Cardinal Roger Mahony literally wipe his hands and boast he no longer had anything to do with George Neville Rucker when I attended one of Mahony's “apology sessions” with a plaintiff in L.A. Clergy Cases 2007. Today, when you ask an American bishop, where are the perpetrator priests from your archdiocese now, they shrug as if defrocking these priests shed the Church of anymore responsibility. Of the five thousand pedophile priests identified so far as predators in the U.S. from the past 70 years, sure, some have died. But where are the rest of them? We know Rucker lives at Nazareth House, a retirement home in a tony part of L.A.’s west side and Michael Wempe was last known to live in Leisure World down at the beach. How many other perpetrator priests are living in neighborhoods around the country thanks to the Church’s ongoing neglect of their duty to society from this problem. The defrocked pedophile priests often live on Social Security, Medicare, and whatever money they can con out of the wealthy individuals they met while they were still priests. As is so often the case with sex offenders, these pedophile priests will likely continue to act out as sex criminals. Even Fox News gets it that we have too many sexual predators living in communities where they endanger law abiding people: "There are 674,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States. An estimated 100,000 of them have failed to register. And their sheer numbers are overwhelming police efforts to keep track of them, according to police and experts in the field. other places where children congregate, they have been forced to settle down in more remote, often rural, areas where restrictions haven’t been imposed or there is enough space to avoid them." (I would not have seen the Fox News story without the help of Off My Knees blog by Michael Baumann.) They aren’t counting the five thousand or so Catholic priests who have been defrocked and forgotten by the bishops. After the Church pours millions of dollars into the legal battle to keep the priests from ever being convicted or to keep them from admitting guilt, only a handful of the identified pedophile priests have landed on sex offender lists. THIS POST IS AN 'EXTRA' We still plan to post two more stories about Jay Nelson's book Sons of Perdition in the next few days... that's life in the world of blogging.
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