Murmur She Wrote 1, or the City of Angels Is Everywhere, City of Angels, October 16, 2010

Murmur She Wrote 1, or the City of Angels Is Everywhere

City of Angels
October 16, 2010

http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/10/murmur-she-wrote-1-or-city-of-angels-is.html

City of Angels will make a move next month that will take the blog to a whole new level. We are going to New Mexico as the first stop on a long term project, investigative reporting on pedophile priest crimes all over the country. Next few years we'll be publishing stories on perpetrators, victims, lawsuits, criminal cases, and collateral damage, from cities across the United States.

Because these are true crime stories about which people don't like to speak loudly, the working title for this project is "Murmur She Wrote." The author is a little old lady, me, and the crimes to be documented follow similar patterns in every region; but unlike the 1984-96TV show "Murder She Wrote," these are dirty little crimes about which people Murmur rather than Shout.… Okay it's a working title.

City of Angels will continue to cover the crimes of pedophile Catholic priests and how the victims survive. But the location will change as the CofA motto has become:

Not Just L.A., The City of Angels Is Everywhere.

How this started: In 2008, someone connected to the Clergy Cases in L.A. handed me a stack about 4-inches thick of documents found in Discovery about Servants of the Paraclete (pictured), but at the time I was still so unschooled and new to this subject that the pile of photocopied pages overwhelmed me. I came home from that meeting with my head swirling and wrote a slew of confused posts at City of Angels 4. Then I put the documents in a closet and in the true PTSD affected "faster than the speed of life" pattern I've lived most my life, I forgot about them.[See especially: Proof: Bishops Knew about Pedophile Priests As Far Back As 1950s and Worked to Keep the Problem Secret. See also an easy-to-print copy of that important post.]

When the person handed me the stack of discovered documents, they made a kind of presentation and explained what several of the pages meant. I nodded, "Sure I understand," when I was really in way over my head. The posts I ended up writing repeated what the my source had said to me. I scanned in some docs for people to click enlarge and read. After the rest of the stack went into a cabinet, the chaos of my survivor life included my post-adolescent daughter moving back in and piling her stuff on top of the package that I'd gotten from the source, as she threw her stuff in the hall closet.

The stack of docs was forgotten.

Still, Servants of the Paraclete play such a major role in the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church, this religious order has fascinated me since I first heard about them in the 1990s, these priests who help priests and seem to have had a handle on the scope of the pedophile problem back in the 1950s, but the Vatican ignored their expert pleas for action. The Boston-rooted Servants of the Paraclete started a recovery center for priests in New Mexico in 1949 and by the mid-fifties, men with "psycho-sexual problems" such as "homosexuality with youngsters" became a high percentage of the patients.

They had grounds in Jemez Springs, New Mexico…a spa…

Writing CofA last four years, I've learned these crime stories are global, there are hundreds of victims in every city in America, all of us have similar stories to tell, and the existence of treatment centers like Servants of the Paraclete proves the Catholic Church was well aware of its problem with sexually anomalous priests at least as far back as the 1950s.

I've been emailing my friends for a good two years, I want to go to New Mexico and do research on Servants of the Paraclete.

Now I'm going to do it.