Paedophilia Scandal: Shadows Are Cast over Cardinal Dolan’s Actions

Vatican Insider
June 1, 2012

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Cardinal Timonthy Dolan

The issue of the unreported sex abuse cases in still alive in the Church’s internal debate and “paedophilia has contributed to the Church’s loss of credibility.” Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley stated this, in a speech this morning at the VII World Family Meeting in Milan.

The Cardinal said we must express our pain to the people who were hurt and assure them that in the future acts of abuse of this kind are not repeated. We must preach what we practice, he said, proclaiming the Gospel and acting as true disciples of Christ.

The Archbishop of Boston went on to remind his audience that in the countries where this problem was identified standards have been adopted.

Just as he is he is engaged in a fight to the last breath with President Barack Obama – which coincides with the campaign for next November’s presidential elections – the Archbishop of New York, and President of U.S. Bishops Cardinal Dolan, finds himself caught up in a scandal that could tarnish his image.

For the cardinal - who was chosen by Pope Benedict XVI to open last February’s Concistory and is held by some to be the next potential candidate for the papacy - the paedophilia issue and the way Dolan handled cases of clerical abuse of minors, when he was Archbishop of Milwaukee in 2003, remain the supposed “skeletons in the closet.”

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee admitted that priests who could not be reassigned other pastoral positions because of the charges against them, were offered up to $20, 000 to stop them opposing their process of laicization begun by ecclesiastical authorities. According to Jerry Topczewski, the diocese’s Secretary General, this sum was intended as a contribution to help priests in their transition to lay life: “Whether people like it or not, the archdiocese is canonically responsible for financially supporting priests, even if they have committed a horrible crime and a sin such as sexual abuse of a minor.”

But victim support group SNAP, (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) labelled the payments as “payoffs”, offered to priests so that they would leave the Church without creating any trouble. Half of the money was paid straight up and the other half was given once the laicization process was complete. What is more, the sum offered to paedophile priests was close to the maximum compensation sum of $30,000 paid out to victims.

“In what other occupation, especially one working with families and operating schools and youth programs, is an employee given a cash bonus for raping and sexually assaulting children?” SNAP asked in an open letter addressed to the archdiocese.

But, payoffs to paedophile priests aside, the real embarrassment for Cardinal Dolan is perhaps another. The current Archbishop of New York had stated he knew nothing about any programme offering cash payments to priests accused of sexual molestation and had in fact rejected the charges as “false, preposterous and unjust.”

The documents that were brought to light during the bankruptcy proceedings for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee – declared bankrupt in 2011 after it was unable to pay the compensation sums negotiated with victims of abuse – show that Archbishop Dolan attended a meeting of the finance council of the Milwaukee archdiocese in March 2003, which discussed the possibility of offering $20,000 to “unassignable priests”. The Archdiocese of New York has still not responded to requests for it to comment on the affair.