‘bait & Switch’ Ruse of Cardinal O’malley and Pope Francis, Plus Pell’s Pressure, Are Abusive to Peter Saunders and Other Abuse Commissioners

By Jerry Slevin
Christian Catholicism
June 8, 2015

http://christiancatholicism.com/pope-and-omalleys-bait-switch-ruse-and-pells-pressure-abuse-saunders-commission/

Pope Francis is meeting now for three days with Cardinals Sean O’Malley and George Pell. The pope needs now, after over two years of papal foot dragging, to stop playing games on curtailing priest child abusers and on holding bishops accountable. He needs to fund and staff adequately his presently almost illusory abuse advisory commission.

The pope also needs to tell Pell emphatically to stop using legal threats to try to intimidate Peter Saunders, and thereby other commission members as well. Inexplicably, other than Marie Collins, the other members seem almost invisible and even indifferent to the abuse Saunders and Collins continue to be subjected to.

Francis’ silence now is reminiscent of his earlier failure to stand up squarely and bravely for his two Jesuit confreres tortured by the military in the 1970’s in Argentina. The two Jesuits continued to help the poor despite physical threats from the military. Saunders continues to help abuse survivors despite legal threats from Pell. Francis could not control the military. He can control Pell. What is the pope waiting for? Will he repeat his mistakes of the 1970’s? Saunders has had to retain his own lawyer. What a travesty!

The pope and O’Malley appear to have used a shameful “bait and switch” strategy with Saunders and other abuse commission members. They selected Saunders to meet with the pope to unload privately his abuse survivor stories. Last July, Saunders and five other survivors attended a private Mass celebrated by Pope Francis, where he made the first promise by any pope to hold bishops accountable for preventing sexual abuse by clergy. The pope said, “All bishops must carry out their pastoral ministry with the utmost care in order to help foster the protection of minors, and they will be held accountable.” See Vatican Information Service here.

As Bishop Accountability’s intrepid Anne Barrett Doyle correctly recently indicated, the only meaningful measure of the sincerity of the pope’s historic vow will be whether he removes church officials who fall short of his “utmost care” standard. Disciplining such powerful colleagues as Pell will be politically tough, but for the pope to make good on his promise, accountability must begin at the top. Diocesan bishops cannot be expected to comply with standards that Vatican officials have ignored with impunity.

Then the pope and O’Malley picked Saunders, a devout Catholic, for the abuse commission.

After Saunders and others publicly accepted commission membership, the pope and O’Malley farcically told the commission members that the commission will not address “individual cases”. If the commission fails to address individual bishops’ accountability, yes, it is a farce!

Thank God the brave Saunders was unswayed by the papal ruse. He has prophetically pursued the individual cases of both Pell and Chile’s Bishop Barros. Amen!

Pope Francis must rebuke Pell and insist that he immediately withdraw his threatening, even menacing, approach to Saunders.

The pope should then take this opportunity to launch a review of the evidence of Pell’s harshness towards victims that has emerged in two government inquiries in Australia.

Meanwhile, US bishops are set to hold their last national meeting before Pope Francis’ US visit, the pope and bishops’ 2016 US presidential election strategy appears to be in a “free fall”.

Pope Francis, with his seemingly discredited No. 3, Australian Cardinal George Pell, and the pope’s criminally investigated Minneapolis USA Catholic officials, may turn out to be more of a net liability than an net asset, as a supporter for US Republican candidates and their low tax billionaire backers, at least by the time the elections are held in November 2016, given the current negative papal trajectory.

Two new US criminal court proceedings have uncovered revelations relating to child sexual abuse scandals that have significant US national political connections. These cases, as well as the recent overwhelming negative Irish vote on one of the pope’s marriage positions, and the unending public relations miscues of the combative and shameless Pell (with at least some tacit yet shameful papal blessing, it appears), have important and potentially adverse implications for Pope Francis’ upcoming US trip and for his potential effectiveness in helping to elect Republican candidates in next year’s US elections.

The pope’s and his worldwide subordinate bishops’ credibility with many Catholics continues to nosedive as Irish voters showed. And yet Pell and Australian bishops continue to act as if they are ‘out of touch’ with Catholics lived reality. The Australian 60 Minutes news program has replied to Pell’s direct complaints and indirect legal threats about their first segment featuring the pope’s handpicked abuse survivor adviser, Peter Saunders, with their latest scathing segment on Cardinal Pell here. Pell and the pope seem to be getting poor media management advice. 60 Minutes is surely not FOX TV! Pell, by his shameful and public combativeness against Saunders, a survivor of sexual abuse by two priests, is arrogantly mostly making Saunders case against Pell for him, as the pope shamefully and silently observes.

Also, Canadian government officials recently demanded that the pope visit and apologize for “cultural genocide” and for the Catholic Church’s historical negative role with “native Canadian” aborigines. The pope objects fairly to genocide-like atrocities AGAINST Catholics, like Armenian, Iraqi and Syrian Catholics. What about genocide-like atrocities BY Catholics against indigenous populations?

The Canadian demand just further buttresses California Native Americans’ objections to the unwarranted and unnecessary canonization process for Fr. Junipero Serra. The Hispanic Franciscan’s flawed canonization is evidently mostly another offensive political sop to try to attract US Latino voters for the pope’s US Republican candidate, as Pope John Paul II earlier tried to do with Serra’s beatification six weeks before the US election in 1988 aimed at drawing US Catholic Latino voters to a “Vatican friendlier” Republican candidate, G.H.W. Bush, it appears.

Is outrageous treatment of native populations historically by Catholic leaders south of the Canadian border to be celebrated and canonized by the pope, but condemned and apologized for north of the border? Que pasa?

Significantly, over a million Irish voters, mostly Catholics, recently showed that the media friendly pope may be able to generate a lot of smiles, but not many votes. Moreover, well respected former top media adviser to George W. Bush, Mark McKinnon, persuasively argued recently that US Republicans cannot win 2016 elections by opposing same sex marriage laws. Are Archbishops Salvatore Cordileone, William Lori, John Nienstedt, et al., and the pope, paying attention, with their plans to make the pope’s over-hyped September visit to Philadelphia mainly part of the 2016 US elections driven anti-gay marriage crusade?

US Republicans and some of their low tax billionaire backers seem to think the pope can help them to increase by at least 50% their US Latino votes for president next year over the 27% Mitt Romney received in 2012. Some pollsters project this Latino vote increase will be needed for US Republicans to win in order to offset other adverse changes in their voter support, as well as cover the Romney deficit.

Some of these ominous developments also indicate government investigators and prosecutors continue to close in on the previously unaccountable Catholic hierarchy, including at the Vatican. Are US bishops nervous? They should be, in my view as an experienced lawyer.

Pope Francis will visit the USA in September. He appears very much to want to try to help his “low tax” billionaire donors 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 appears to be 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 pope on his US visit is to give the first papal address ever to Congress at the invitation of Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, who had said that the Pope’s address “… .would … offer an excellent opportunity for the American people as well as the nations of the world to hear his message in full.” Will the pope address the priest child abuse epidemic and related cover-ups, which Vatican experts have estimated has affected over 100,000 US children so far? Or will the pope and the politicians all try to continue to apply to the institutional child abuse scandals a “don’t ask don’t tell” stonewalling strategy — that strategy cannot succeed for the pope and US politicians in the current media environment!

Incidentally, 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!

As noted above, one of the abuse related cases is in Illinois, involving former Republican US House speaker Dennis Hastert, and the other in Minneapolis, involving at least ten Catholic Church leaders, including the morally challenged Archbishop John Nienstedt, former Vicar General, Fr. Kevin McDonough, brother of Democratic President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, and former Minneapolis Archbishop Harry Flynn.

Flynn, in the 2002 Boston Globe triggered Catholic Church abuse crisis, headed the US bishops’ ad hoc committee on clergy sex-abuse. Flynn’s committee played a key role in crafting the US bishops’ flawed child protection charter that failed in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York and almost everywhere else, it appears.

Some of these recent revelations 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 tarnished cardinals, including Australia’s Cardinal George Pell and Philadelphia’s former Cardinal Justin Rigali. The family of Rigali’s former top aide and convicted child endangerer, Monsignor Lynn, have reportedly in effect blamed Rigali and his predecessor for the crimes Lynn had been charged with. The pope still treats Rigali, and Cardinals Law, Mahony, Sodano, Danneels, et al. with high respect when they visit the Vatican.

Ironically, Nienstedt reportedly once criticized Pelosi for her “misinterpretation on the question of when life begins,” adding that her “remarks underscore once again the need for Catholics, and especially Catholic politicians, to form their consciences according to the moral truths taught by the Catholic Church”. Nienstedt, with his reported longtime ties to major fundamentalist papal donor, Tom Monaghan, is breathtaking in his hypocrisy, no?

Predictably, senior bishops of the Australian Catholic Church (except Adelaide’s Archbishop Philip Wilson) publicly pledged their support for Cardinal Pell after the initial 60 Minutes allegations aired. Many of these bishops share Pell’s cover-up legal risks. Wilson is the first Catholic Archbishop criminally charged for covering up a priests’ child abuse.

Incidentally, reportedly, Wilson in 2002 evidently selected the barrister who was paid by the Catholic Church and apparently ‘investigated and cleared’ Cardinal Pell of allegations that Pell himself had in 1962 sexually abused a 12 year old altar boy at a church summer camp, as described in this “report” of an inquiry into the allegations against Pell of sexual abuse. Convenient no? A close colleague apparently picks the “judge” and the Catholic Church even pays the judge, it appears. Amazing, clerical justice up close!

The Minneapolis revelations, on top of the ongoing Cardinal George Pell revelations from Australia, raise serious questions about Pope Francis’ real commitment to holding bishops accountable. The pope’s US representative or nuncio reportedly had been directly involved in the Minneapolis Archdiocesan decision making. Indeed, as intrepid grandmother and advocate for children, Betty Clermont, has very pointedly and thoroughly 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 priorities.

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 many, many times in the complaint, it appears.

“Facts were ignored, minimized, were not shared with other individuals that needed to know,” the prosecutor added. He also reportedly 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, Pell, an alleged protector of priest child abusers, is currently 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.

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 had gotten to see the recent 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 allegedly protect suspected priest child abusers, as the pope also allegedly did in Argentina, and may in effect 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 possibly 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. That is really unacceptable!

What are these politicians trying to hide? As noted above, 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 steadily increasing potential problems 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 inexcusable failures to press for a long overdue US national investigation.