OK Catholic Official Promoted to Ks; SNAP Responds

By David Clohessy
SNAP
February 6, 2012

http://www.snapnetwork.org/ok_catholic_official_promoted_to_ks_snap_responds

We’re disappointed that Msgr. Edward Weisenburger has been promoted. For the past 16 years, he has been a high-ranking official (vicar general) in an archdiocese (Oklahoma City) with a disturbing record with children’s safety.

Oklahoma City’s archbishop tapped Weisenburger for the vicar general spot. In that role, Weisenburger was surely intimately involved in virtually all cases of clergy sexual misconduct.

Barely a year ago, Weisenburger kept silent for at least a month, and likely much longer, about credible child sex abuse allegations against Fr. Steven D. Cude. (A civil lawsuit against Cude was filed by attorney Shad Withers).That’s a violation of the promises that all US bishops made a decade ago to be “open and transparent” in clergy sex cases.

Furthermore, we see no evidence that Weisenburger or his Oklahoma City colleagues did anything substantive to reach out to others hurt by Fr. Thomas Benke, who worked there for at least eight years and molested several boys. Ditto with Fr. Dave Imming, Fr. Daniel Keohane, or Fr. Robert L. Foster, all of whom are accused of sexually assaulting kids.

We hope that as Salina’s bishop, Weisenburger will quickly and clearly reach out to anyone who may have been hurt by including Fr. Finian Meis, Fr. Ron Gilardi and Fr. Robert Reif (all of whom are or were Salina priests and all of whom have been publicly and credibly accused of child sex crimes).

[link]

We hope the new bishop will beg anyone with information or suspicions about child sex crimes to call police immediately. And we hope he will do what 25 of his brother bishops have belatedly and begrudgingly done – post on his website, for the safety of kids, the names of all proven, admitted and credibly accused child molesting clerics.