Francis’ Synod, Wall Street, Ncr, Crux, Nuns & Kids: Just Amazing!

By Jerry Slevin
Christian Catholicism
September 9, 2014

http://christiancatholicism.com/francis-synod-wall-street-ncr-crux-nuns-kids-just-amazing/

Pope Francis’ Synod in three weeks, Wall Street’s pre-US election push with Vatican help, the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) censorship strategy, the disappointing start for the Boston Globe’s Crux website for Catholics, the “new rolling of the Nuns on the Bus” and efforts to protect children from priest rapists — these are all seemingly about to collide!

The apparent conservative takeover of NCR continues. Its “lifting” of David Gibson’s Religion News Service (RNS) report, about Sr. Simone Campbell (of the Nuns on the Bus) and “dark money”, has been “planted”, apparently, where it is inaccessible to NCR blogger comments. It inexplicably has been placed in NCR’s conservative “Hilton Foundation funded Global Sisters Happy Talk private enclosure” on NCR’s website. Other RNS “lifted” stories are not usually so restricted by NCR. Why is this being sealed off from comments?

NCR’s “spin tricks” continue to proliferate, it seems, no? For more background, please see my “What Is Really Up At the National Catholic Reporter?” here

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Of course, “dark money” manipulation apparently may include some of NCR’s donors, not just the Koch Brothers (who donated $1 million recently to the US bishops’ Catholic University of America), no?

Who do you suppose are behind some of NCR’s key donors and advertisers, such as FAIDICA’s Hilton Foundation and the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management? Hardly Mother Teresa types, to be sure!

Please see, for example:

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I now have to wonder who suggested to billionaire financier, John Henry, to set up the Boston Globe’s new website, Crux, and to call and hire for Crux John Allen, NCR’s former chief “papal spinner”, now replaced at NCR by Tom Reese, a pliable and obedient Jesuit who is still swooning over a Jesuit Pope, even one who reportedly was quite disliked by many Argentinian Jesuits.

John Henry obviously has many Wall Street contacts, likely including some associated with key donors and advertisers at NCR. Disappointingly, Crux’s early efforts seem to me mostly to indicate just another papal spin outlet. This is what I had expected it would be, especially given Allen’s extensive history of”softball” papal promotions at NCR. A reporter like Allen apparently can get more interviews “pitching softballs” and accepting uncritically papal propaganda, than by being an objective and critical thinker. Allen may not understand that there is a difference between journalism and cheer leading.

I hope the Boston Globe newsroom has, at least, put some drapes over its earlier Pulitzer Prize for its game changing stories a decade ago about Cardinal Law and the Catholic hierarchy’s broader priest child abuse cover-ups. Wow, does the Vatican papal media machine recover quickly, or not?

Of course, Pope Francis had earlier worked closely with Cardinal Law and Carl Anderson in Spain, well after the Boston scandal disclosures, on a Curial Commission about “family matters”.

Hardly promising for the soon upcoming Family Synod of Fathers Without Kids, with only 175+ celibate male clerics being entitled to vote. No women or married men need apply, thank you very much!

These men reportedly include Belgian Cardinal Daneels. In 2010, Daneels, reportedly recommended silence about an especially obscene sex abuse case that had involved Bishop Roger Vangheluwe. Cardinal Daneels reportedly advised the victim, a nephew of Vangheluwe, to delay a public statement until Vangheluwe had retired. So what else is new?

At another meeting Vangheluwe, in Daneels’ presence, reportedly made a private apology, which the nephew rejected and went public with his charges.

During 2010, Bishop Vangheluwe resigned, admitting his guilt publicly according to reports. The shameless bishop also gave a TV interview subsequently where, in effect, he admitted to abusing as well another nephew as a child, without appearing to comprehend at all the seriousness of sexually abusing his nephews.

The bishop, like so many predatory priests before and after him, is now free to enjoy the “good life”, with impunity, while the abuse survivors go to their graves often irreparably harmed and indigent.

And Francis now appoints Daneels to advise about families! Hello??

Some couples have been added by Francis, late, to the likely “rubber stamp” Family Synod of Fathers Without Kids, apparently as non-voting public relations props. Why do mature Catholic parents let themselves be used like this? I cannot understand this.

Perhaps Francis may also add Daneels to Cardinal O’Malley’s illusory Commission on Minors, assuming they ever get their act together. Who knows? The cover-ups never end, it seems. How long does Francis think he can continue to try to bury this unprecedented crisis that is the Vatican’s ultimate challenge?

Following NCR’s recent call on Archbishop Nienstedt to release his diocesan law firm’s report on Nienstedt’s personal and secret “pastoral outreach” reportedly to some of his selected gay subordinates, NCR hypocritically continues to avoid addressing calls from many NCR bloggers that it explain its controversial censorship actions. NCR, under a purported claim to being “independent”, accepts contributions and owes all of its donors a full report. If the other donors fail to get a satisfactory explanation, they should stop donating.

Now NCR is apparently trying to “spin the dark money” story away from its own seemingly “dark money” door, no?

If you want to comment on Simone Campbell’s efforts, please consider doing so at Bilgrimage.com, since Bilgrimage avoids censoring unreasonably like NCR increasingly is doing.

Apparently, the timid LCWR ( the American Catholic sisters “umbrella” group) is apparently now “permitting” Simone Campbell to complain about the 1%’s corporate media political domination under the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, but seemingly not about either the Vatican’s opposition to the Obamacare contraception insurance mandate or the growing influence of “lower tax billionaire advocates” on Catholic and secular media outlets, including NCR.

Will Simone Campbell selectively “cherry pick her dark money” spots? Let’s hope and pray not!

NCR has, in my opinion, recently been trying to co-opt Simone Campbell’s message and has been mostly successful so far. But Sister Simone is one sharp person, and a fine lawyer to boot. We will see if she is so easily conned!

NCR also, it appears, had tried to undercut the LCWR by a carefully timed article on “sister child abuse” that appeared when the LCWR recently was having its timid “non-event” convention. Perhaps, the reason the LCWR’s outstanding communications director is no longer on NCR’s Board of Directors is related?

Please note as to the extensive and growing Wall Street and London investment bankers’ papal influence, the pertinent parts of this recent report:

” … {Peter} Sutherland addressed the Council of Cardinals, the most senior advisers to the Papacy, in a room close to Doma Santa Marta, the Pope’s residence….

… Sutherland, chairman of Goldman Sachs International, was appointed as an adviser to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See, an asset manager for the Vatican.”

See more at:

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What is the extent and nature of the direct and indirect financial fees these investment bankers and their allies have earned and will earn as a result of their Vatican connections? Will we ever know?

Will Simone Campbell at least ask and/or try to find out? She should, if she is really serious about exposing “dark money”. Little chance sadly that NCR, increasingly more like the new “National Conservative Reporter”, with its increasing right wing subservience, will even ask the key questions, let alone investigate.

Perhaps Simone Campbell will address the “coincidence” that two of the prominent investment bankers associated with NCR’s key donor and with a frequent NCR advertiser, have been heavily connected to the same investment banking firm as are Pope Francis’ top economic adviser and another member of his new financial team.

Francis likes to “play with the sheep”, but “to run with the bulls”, it appears. How long does Francis think he can maintain this misleading facade about the Vatican’s most significant challenge?

Francis still maintains, in effect without real accountability, absolute papal control over all Vatican finances, despite his superficial tinkering and spin to satisfy the government investigators who are criminally investigating former Vatican Curia clerics related to several financial scandals.

What do you think? Do these investment bankers and their former colleagues talk to each other about how best to press the Vatican to help elect a right wing US Senate majority in eight weeks that will likely both lower their taxes and preserve a right wing US Supreme Court majority?

Very likely, in my experience as a Wall Street lawyer for decades. And a cheap way as well for these bankers and their 1% buddies to save billions in taxes by, in effect, getting critical media influence through less expensive donations, such as to Catholic media outlets, no?

A couple of million dollar donation directed to NCR is peanuts when a US tax hike under Democrats on the 1% could cost the 1% hundreds of billions in additional taxes.

Of course, the nonstop and fawning “praise Pope/King Francis” stories abound still on NCR, as do the stories about the diversionary “papal crusade” against the New Devil, radical Islamists who attack Catholics, now called the new “Thirty Years Wars’ by NCR war drummers. When you want to avoid a subject like the Vatican’s continuing refusal to hold bishops accountable for protecting priest child rapists, find a Devil to oppose. In the past, Jews were the usual Devil of choice for the Vatican, but Islamists are more frequently the current choice.

And, of course, the anti-Obama immigration stories continue non-stop, pre-November’s US elections, with no mention, again, of the role of Pope Francis’ top adviser, Honduras Cardinal Maradiaga, supporter of the reportedly corrupt regime there. The largest number of child migrants to the US recently are fleeing Honduras’ chaotic conditions reportedly.

Is it time for NCR to be more honest and to “rebrand” and change its name to the National Conservative Reporter (NCR, also)

Have the old ex-bouncer Pope and his NCR publicists forgotten that there is a priest child abuse scandal and that no bishop has ever been held accountable for covering up for priest child rapists?

NCR cannot decide, it appears, whether it wants to return to Pope Pius XII’s 1950’s or to George Orwell’s “1984”.

Too bad, really, that the ex-Pope failed to follow my advice for a “synodless” commission in my 2010 Washington Post column linked here:

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As Fr. Thomas Doyle, O.P., the world’s leading expert on curtailing priest child abuse and on making bishops accountable for predatory priests recently indicated, little has changed and little will likely change with the Vatican hierarchy. Of course, if President Obama sets up an Australian style US presidential commission on curtailing institutional child sexual abuse, a lot would change, and quickly too! Tom Doyle has supported my call for such a commission in the US.

Please see Tom Doyle’s excellent recent views here:

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A perceptive blogger unknown to me recently sized up well much of the current NCR situation in a Bilgrimage.com. comment. The pertinent portions are set forth here:

“I will observe that organizations such as NCR all too often begin to behave in very similar fashion to those which they most vehemently criticize. I believe this is especially true of those where the membership and particularly the leadership is somewhat mono-cultural.

While the editors at NCR criticize the lack of transparency and inclusiveness in the Church of Rome, most were raised in the Church of Rome, many worked as “journalists” for diocesean newspapers and the like earlier in their careers and so on. As such, the “tools” and responses they have learned are “Distinctly Catholic” to borrow the name of one of NCRs columns.

That includes the tendency to take decisions “in camera” in response to unaccountable anonymous complainants, which is what appears to have happened here. That also includes an almost 1984-ish ability to “doublethink” such decisions; it probably doesn’t even occur to these folks who live and die by the First Amendment (in a sort of a double-whammy, when you consider their journalists at a religious newspaper) that they are being hypocritical in the extreme….

… NCR is in danger of going that very same way. Jerry Slevin was one of the most knowledgeable and equinanimous of the NCR posters. His legal knowledge was a pearl beyond price. I do not recall seeing anything by him that was particularly offensive; certainly the taunts of the conservative “you aren’t Catholic” crowd stood head and shoulders above anything Jerry ever posted.

To paraphrase what he was told, it is “There have been complaints and it has been decided.” Passive voice all over the place. Nobody taking responsibility, nobody accountable for what they’ve said about Mr. Slevin.

It is apparent, then that there needs to be an alternate venue for comments on NCRs stories. Perhaps a site with simply a hyperlink to the base story and a comment space.

That’s one thing about the internet… nobody can control the whole space.”