*Do Pope and Obama, Pelosi, Boehner, et al., Agree on ‘Insider Abusers’ ? DON’T ASK ! DON’T TELL !

By Jerry Slevin
Christian Catholicism
June 6, 2015

http://christiancatholicism.com/do-pope-and-obama-pelosi-boehner-et-al-agree-on-insider-abusers-dont-ask-dont-tell/

Recent US criminal court revelations relating to child sexual abuse scandals in Illinois and Minneapolis, that both have US national political connections, suggest that US leaders, including House leaders, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama, may hardly be more forthcoming about “insider child sex abuse scandal” related matters than secretive Pope Francis and his Vatican “old boys’ club” have been about numerous cardinals.

Some of these recent revelations relate to two separate and significant new US criminal proceedings: (A) one involving abuse allegations and the former No. 3 US political leader, longtime Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and (B) the other involving several priest child abuse cover up allegations and former longtime Minneapolis Catholic Church top official, Fr. Kevin McDonough, brother of Democratic President Barack Obama’s well regarded Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough.

The Minneapolis revelations, on top of the ongoing Cardinal George Pell revelations from Australia, raise serious questions about Pope Francis’ real agenda in holding bishops accountable. The pope’s US representative or nuncio reportedly has been directly involved in the Minneapolis Archdiocesan decision making. Indeed, as intrepid grandmother and advocate for children, Betty Clermont, has very pointedly reported recently, Pope Francis defiance in practice of the UN committee seeking to protect children from torture is extremely troubling and raises even more questions about the pope’s real agenda.

Fortunately for US children and their parents, these recent revelations are arising in independent and public US criminal judicial proceedings that promise full future disclosures, rather than secretive and captive Vatican proceedings ultimately controlled by the pope, like the current one for disgraced and admitted multiple child abuser, Polish Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski.

Disappointingly, the Vatican clique and the US political establishment appear to share elements of the same flawed approach to “insiders” who abuse children sexually or who protect child abusers — “DON’T ASK ! DON’T TELL !”. This approach will change soon, one way or another.

Reviewing some US politicians’ seeming silence about these scandals, brought to my mind the memory of my former Harvard Law mentor, Watergate prosecutor, Archibald Cox, who would likely have asked here, “What did they [politicians and bishops] know and when did they know it?”

A former Democratic Congressman,  Rep. Melvin Watt, reportedly heard over 15 years ago an “unseemly rumor” about about Hastert’s sexual misconduct. Moreover, a sister of a second alleged Hastert  sex abuse victim as a high school student, now deceased, credibly told ABC TV’s Brian Ross in this recent video how she tried futilely to get the media and others, including ABC TV, to listen in 2006 to her story about Hastert’s alleged abuse of her brother. That was around the time Hastert was being pressed for being so lax for so long on the Congressman Mark Foley scandal, which did political damage to the Republican Party in 2006.

Foley resigned amidst accusations of inappropriate sexual communications with young male House pages, that Boehner and Pelosi were both at some point aware of. Hastert unexpectedly resigned as well the following year.

Did John Boehner or Nancy Pelosi hear the rumor about Hastert? When? How about others from Illinois like President Obama, Michelle Obama, Valerie Jarrett and Hillary Clinton? If they knew of the rumor, why did they not speak up? Did protecting Hastert, and possibly others, have anything to do with the national political establishment’s surprisingly very muted reaction to the 2002 and subsequent Boston Globe’s bombshells on the priest sex abuse scandal.

Interestingly, Nancy Pelosi, in her chapter in a 2009 Kerry Kennedy book, indicated that the pedophile scandal was a “major sorrow” for her. She also noted she had “very strong views” on how the Church dealt with it. If her views were so strong, why has she apparently done so little to curtail the priest pedophile epidemic? She and Boehner had and have a duty to protect US children, no?

Moreover, in 2011, Boehner and Pelosi co-nominated Jesuit Patrick Conroy to be House chaplain. Conroy, a civil lawyer, had reportedly worked with native Americans in the Jesuit’s West Coast province that then had recently reached a $166 million settlement dealing with 400 claims of child sexual abuse, many involving native Americans.

Furthermore, reportedly in 1986, Conroy knew of likely child sex crimes but didn’t call the police. Instead, he just told a bishop once. And he never followed up according to published reports. With 40,000 US priests to choose from, Boehner’s and Pelosi’s nomination of Conroy is a shameful mark against both of these political leaders, as I said at the time.

As to Minneapolis revelations, the local Ramsey County district attorney’s office recently filed charges in a detailed criminal complaint against the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis for “failing to protect children” from an abusive priest, marking the first time that a U.S. archdiocese has been criminally charged for such offenses. The complaint names 10 senior Archdiocesan officials as active participants in numerous misdeeds.

The charges stem mainly from the Archdiocese’s oversight failures regarding a former priest, who is now serving a prison term. “Today we are alleging a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior committed by the highest levels of leadership of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis over the course of decades,” said the local prosecutor who also called the facts of the case “appalling.”  He added that the Archdiocese’s failure to protect these children is part of an institutional pattern of allowing unsuitable priests to continue working in the local Catholic Church, and have access to children, the complaint says. These facts were “ignored, minimized or not shared,” the prosecutor said. Lack of oversight was not unusual, the complaint said.

“A review of Archdiocese priest files reveals a long history of an institutional failure to prevent and responsibly respond to child sexual abuse by clergy,” said the complaint.

During a related press conference, the prosecutor said Church officials failed to act when warned about a priest that Archdiocesan officials knew to have engaged  sexual misbehavior, yet kept him in ministry. In 2011, Rev. Kevin McDonough, the second most powerful member at the time of the Archdiocese, sent a memo to the head of the program that monitored potentially risky priests in which he acknowledged he knew the predatory priest had approached young men at a bookstore for sex, Minnesota Public Radio reported. McDonough is mentioned over 140 times in the complaint, it appears.

“Facts were ignored, minimized, were not shared with other individuals that needed to know,” the prosecutor added. He said police and prosecutors were falsely led to believe that the Church had a mechanism in place for monitoring and punishing abusive priests.

“This is precedent setting,” reportedly said Marci Hamilton, a New York law professor and a national expert on clergy abuse litigation. “It sends a message that these are not cases against individual priests and individual victims, it’s systemic.”

As to Cardinal Pell, popes and their clique are currently “nearly under the law”, as the current Vatican’s No. 3 official, Cardinal George Pell, an alleged protector of priest child abusers, is learning. AP’s Rome reporter, Nicole Winfield, with her customary reliability, has with her colleague, Kristen Gellineau, superbly, fairly and succinctly summarized the allegations in Australian abuse probe of Cardinal Pell. Peter Saunders, an adviser to Pope Francis on curtailing priest child abuse and holding bishops accountable, in his remarkable recent interview here on Australia’s  60 Minutes, has shone a bright light on some of the allegations about Pell.

Pope Francis will visit the USA in September. He wants to try to help elect next year a “Vatican friendly”  US President and Congress and thereby solidify a “friendly” US Supreme Court majority for decades to come. The pope’s evident immediate goal is to head off a potentially catastrophic US national investigation of institutional child sexual abuse, like independent investigations already underway in Australia, Ireland, the UK, Canada and elsewhere.

The media magnified pope prefers, often with amplification by some opportunistic and fawning journalist cheerleaders, to pontificate vaguely, superficially and even at times magically and inconsistently, about subjects like the “poor”  and “climate change”. He pontificates as an out of touch celibate 78 year old bachelor who got a community college equivalent certificate in chemistry over a half century ago. He then ruled for years in a purportedly mainly Catholic Argentina where few now even regularly attend Mass.

The pope had been invited to speak to the US Congress before top US leaders got to see strong evidence of the pope’s real weakness among Catholic voters, as Irish voters recently overwhelmingly proved in rejecting a key position of the pope’s on marriage. Many Catholics like the pope’s friendly and refreshing style, but the Irish have shown few will vote for the pope’s medieval positions that are mostly aimed at preserving the absolute papal monarchy.

The pope wants to avoid discussing openly in the USA how his irrational and self interested opposition to modern birth control hurts the poor and accelerates global warming by generating unaffordable and unwanted population growth. And surely the pope wants to avoid talking about still unaccountable bishops, like Cardinal George Pell and those ten US Catholic Church officials described in a recent criminal complaint in Minneapolis, who protect alleged priest child abusers, as the pope also did in Argentina, and in effect is still doing as pope from many indications.

Unfortunately for the pope, there are clear, disturbing and public parallels between (A) his troubling disregard, evident when promoting Pell last year to the No.3 Vatican position, of credible allegations about Pell relating to serious child sex abuse cover-up and even worse actions, and the pope’s ongoing avoidance mostly of the worldwide priest child sex abuse scandal, just shown again in the Minneapolis criminal complaint covering at least ten senior Church officials’ failures, and (B) the US Congress’ recent minimizing of child sex abuse allegations about longtime former No. 3 US government official, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (who was recently criminally indicted), and the US Congress’ (and President Barack Obama’s) inexcusable avoidance of investigating the US institutional child sex abuse epidemic, including in the US Catholic Church. The case for a US national  inquiry into institutional child sexual abuse has been made by many, including here by leading Australian advocate for abuse survivors, Aletha Blayse.

Hastert’s recently disclosed scandal, and the recent disgraceful revelations about Minneapolis’ Church officials, including Fr. Kevin McDonough, brother of President Obama’s Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, now help explain perhaps why both the US Congress and the White House avoid even mentioning the Catholic child sex abuse scandals.

What are these politicians trying to hide? In the much smaller UK, for example, British police recently reported that more than 75 politicians are currently being criminally investigated for child sex abuse. Are US politicians “purer” than UK politicians, or even US bishops for that matter. Perhaps, but unlikely. The Hastert case suggests they are not.  Time will soon tell, with some help from independent prosecutors, and hopefully as well, from Obama and Congressional leaders!

International survivor group SNAP’s President, Barbara Blaine, an abuse survivor, a lawyer and a key player in Australia’s structuring of its Royal Commission investigating institutional child sexual abuse, has recently called out the shameful US national political establishment, which includes President Obama and Catholic Congressional leaders, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner.

Barbara boldly stated, in pertinent part;  “In September, Pope Francis will address the US Congress, a body that has refused, over decades, to take a single action to investigate or expose clergy sex abuse and cover up by Catholic priests, bishops, nuns, seminarians and brothers … . But as a body, no federal US institution [including the White House] has ever taken action about – or even investigated – this horrific, on-going scandal… . When dozens of baseball players were charged with illegal use of steroids, Congress held hearings. But Congress has held no hearings whatsoever when it comes to the known 6,427 US priests that are credibly accused of sexually assaulting more than 100,000 children … ”. SNAP’s executive director, David Clohessy, has now fairly called for the removal of Hastert’s portrait from the US Capitol until the allegations about him are resolved.

The current developments in the Hastert,  Pell and Minneapolis scandals, and the prophetic Irish vote, signal trouble for Pope Francis, who is to address the US Congress on September 23, and even for Obama and House leaders, John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, among others, for their failures to press for a long overdue US national investigation.