9 Nov 2010

Mother Teresa failed to protect teen boys from her spiritual adviser, the Jesuit order's most notorious convicted pedophile

SF Weekly - July 27, 2009

For He Has Sinned

A new lawsuit sheds light on the San Francisco years of Mother Teresa's spiritual adviser – who is also one of the Jesuit order's most notorious convicted pedophiles.

by Peter Jamison

Two decades ago, an 11-year-old boy from the Bay Area was honored with an invitation most devout Catholics would envy. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, winner of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize for her work among the developing world's poor, was celebrating Mass at her order's convent in Noe Valley. The ceremony was part of a retreat led by one of the famed humanitarian nun's close spiritual advisers, a Jesuit priest and former University of San Francisco professor named Donald McGuire.

It was at McGuire's bidding that the 11-year-old came to serve as an altar boy that morning at St. Paul's Convent, a boxy building of yellow stucco that rises from a tree-lined block near the intersection of 29th and Church streets. (The convent houses local novices in the international Missionaries of Charity order, founded by Mother Teresa in 1950.) The priest was close to the boy's family: He had baptized the boy, and offered his mother spiritual and psychological counseling over the years. Indeed, within church circles, McGuire was something of a celebrity himself.

Steeped, as are all Jesuits, in the cerebral traditions of Catholicism, McGuire dazzled his many admirers with his command of ancient history and literature. He could speak eloquently about philosophy and theology, and deployed his rhetoric to powerful effect during multiday religious seminars based on the teachings of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Jesuits' founder. He had silvering brown hair and a round, red Irish face that often creased into a puckish smile. He liked to give advice. And he liked to hear confession.

On that morning almost 20 years ago, however, McGuire's interests were more profane than sacred. Following a morning Mass, he asked the boy to retire with him to a private chamber reserved for the priest at the convent. While the nuns and Mother Teresa milled about, McGuire closed the door to his room and asked his favored altar boy to join him, in his cot, for a nap. The boy lay down. The priest lay on the outside of the narrow bed and then reached across the boy's body and into his pants.

So said the boy in a recent interview with SF Weekly. Now 30, he is suing the Jesuits for turning a blind eye to McGuire's repeated acts of child molestation. His lawsuit was filed this winter in Cook County, Ill., home of the Chicago Province of the Jesuits, where McGuire kept his primary residence.

The boy — who is identified in court documents only as John Doe 129, and requested that SF Weekly not publish his name or hometown to spare him the stigma attached to childhood sexual abuse — is accusing the Chicago Province of negligence and fraud in failing to keep McGuire away from children. He and his attorneys allege that over a period of about 10 years beginning in 1988, McGuire forced the boy to massage the priest's genitals and watch him masturbate, among other acts of abuse.

Doe 129 is not the first to accuse McGuire, now an ailing 79-year-old, of such misdeeds. In 2006, the priest was convicted in a Wisconsin court of molesting two teenage boys he had taught decades earlier at a prominent Jesuit high school in the Midwest. Earlier this year, a federal judge in Illinois sentenced McGuire to 25 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of traveling abroad with a teenage boy to sexually abuse him. (For his part, McGuire still insists he is innocent and has appealed his latest conviction.)

While the federal case rested on molestation charges involving only one boy, investigators believed McGuire had abused dozens during his career. In fact, Jesuit leaders first received complaints about the priest in 1969, although he was not officially defrocked until last year. Some of the ex-priest's alleged victims — many of them now grown men — and their family members were permitted to address U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer during his sentencing hearing. Their statements, not surprisingly, were emotionally charged. The Arizona father of two boys McGuire allegedly molested said he would like to hand down his own sentence on the ex-priest using a baseball bat.

One of those who traveled to Chicago to speak out was the mother of the altar boy allegedly molested at the Missionaries of Charity convent in San Francisco. "I told the judge that I thought that he deserved the maximum sentence," she said. "Even we, as adults, couldn't stand up to someone who was Mother Teresa's confessor. Can you imagine children that have no voice?"

Doe 129's lawsuit is just one of multiple pending civil cases against McGuire nationwide. But it is the first to draw attention to the strong San Francisco ties of the man who is arguably the most prominent convicted child abuser in the Jesuits' 470-year history. Interviews with McGuire's former colleagues, associates, and admirers cast light on the pivotal phases of his life that took place in this city — it was in San Francisco that he began his working relationship with Mother Teresa — and suggest that the disgraced ex-priest committed acts of abuse here for which neither he nor his superiors have ever been held to account.

In 1976, Father Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit instructor at the University of San Francisco, was busy recruiting students and professors for a new classics program. Called the St. Ignatius Institute, it would focus on a traditional "great books" curriculum, functioning as an autonomous college within the university. As he organized the institute, Fessio got a call from a well-known Jesuit teacher from the Midwest who was interested in joining. His name was Donald McGuire.

Fessio had heard of McGuire. By reputation, he was "very dynamic" and "a very exciting teacher," Fessio recalls, known for his orthodoxy and loyalty to the church. The truth, as documents unearthed in McGuire's subsequent criminal and civil cases would later reveal, was more complicated. As a matter of fact, at the time he came to USF, McGuire's Midwestern superiors had already received complaints that he had sexually molested two boys at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit high school in Illinois. (The same incidents eventually led to McGuire's first criminal conviction in 2006.)

Fessio, now an editor at Ignatius Press, a San Francisco–based publishing house, said in an interview that he didn't know about the skeletons in McGuire's closet back then. But once McGuire moved to San Francisco and began teaching freshman seminars in ancient Greek literature and history, it didn't take long for Fessio to notice that his new colleague had a dark side.

"He loved the classics, and he communicated that to the kids. That was the positive side," Fessio said. "There was a negative side. He seemed like he had to have people around him. He needed to have an audience. ... For all of us, our failings are pretty well interwoven in our personalities. There was a talent, but it was kind of a dangerous talent, and I was always a little bit reserved toward it."

McGuire was mercurial, quick to turn on colleagues or friends, and inclined to nurse grudges. He was also prone to bragging — even about his own piety. "Joe, I can pray circles around you," Fessio recalled McGuire once saying to him. "It was a weird claim."

Father Cornelius Buckley, a former history teacher at the St. Ignatius Institute, said he was troubled by the strangely intense attachments McGuire cultivated among select groups of students. (In contrast to his strained relations with other teachers, McGuire was always wildly popular with those enrolled in his classes, former colleagues say.) Those students who followed the Greek professor's banner "seemed to be more involved with him than they were with the program," Buckley recalled in a telephone interview from Santa Paula, Calif., where he is now chaplain at Thomas Aquinas College.

McGuire taught at the St. Ignatius Institute for four years. Jesuit records from that period show that Buckley wasn't the only one vexed by McGuire's closeness to his students. Father Alfred Naucke, an official at the California Jesuit Province, said his office's files on McGuire indicate that USF officials frowned upon the priest's practice of inviting students into his private room. (Those students were most likely boys, since women would not have been permitted to enter the university's Jesuit residences.)

In May 1981, then-USF Dean David Harnett wrote a letter to California provincial officials, obtained by SF Weekly, explaining that McGuire would not be rehired for the following academic year. Among the reasons Harnett cited for the priest's sacking were "highly questionable acts on his part" and "interactions with a student." Reached by telephone in Philadelphia, where he now lives in retirement, Harnett said he did not recall the letter or the circumstances of McGuire's departure. Father Joseph Angilella, academic vice-president of the university at the time, declined to comment on McGuire's firing or whether it was linked to incidents of abuse involving USF students. "It's unfortunate you have that letter, but I'm not going to add to it," he said. "This material is confidential in terms of the decision that was made. I assure you that nothing that happened during these times has anything to do with the present legal matters that are happening in the Midwest."

Doe 129's attorneys plan to depose California Jesuits, including some formerly associated with USF. However, university records — as opposed to those kept by the California Province — illuminate almost nothing about McGuire's time as a professor in San Francisco. Apparently, that's because they no longer exist. When Doe 129's lawyers requested the school's personnel records on the priest from the four years he taught at the St. Ignatius Institute, they were told that the file on one of the church's most notorious predators had been thrown out.

In an e-mail response to questions about McGuire from SF Weekly, USF spokesman Gary McDonald offered this explanation: "USF retains employee records for seven years after an employee leaves the university, and USF has few employee records dating back 30 years, including those of Donald McGuire."

McGuire's ouster from the university's St. Ignatius Institute did not signal the end of his career. Far from it. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, he took up the life of an itinerant spiritual adviser. Based at a Jesuit residence in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, McGuire trotted the globe, leading the Ignatian spiritual retreats that had become the hallmark of his ministry. The retreats typically involved daylong prayer and ritual interspersed with talks from a priest. During these trips, observers say, McGuire was often accompanied by teenage male attendants who he said helped him manage his diabetes.

It was during this time that McGuire first met Mother Teresa. Fessio said he introduced the pair after the nun had asked him during a visit to San Francisco to recommend a priest who could lead retreats for the nuns of her order. Despite the two men's prickly relationship while academic colleagues in the late 1970s, Fessio suggested she seek out McGuire.

From the beginning, Fessio said, Mother Teresa's opinion of McGuire was "very high." Though he was probably not — as he liked to boast — her most esteemed spiritual adviser and confessor, observers of the pair agree that she respected McGuire, and would occasionally confess her sins to him.

Judie Hockel and her husband, Jack, often hosted McGuire's retreats in Northern California at their Walnut Creek home. The couple met him through their oldest son, who was a student at USF during McGuire's time there. (On his subsequent trips to the Bay Area, McGuire often stayed at a house attached to a Carmelite monastery adjacent to the USF campus.) Even now, Judie Hockel, 70, finds it hard to reconcile McGuire's charisma and intellectual heft with his acts of abuse.

"Everything seemed to combine together to give him a really superhuman ability — it probably was superhuman; Satan is pure intelligence, and maybe that's where it came from — to make you feel that you were liked by God, that you were worthy of being loved by God, that Christ was calling you to be closer to him," she said. "Catholicism is an adult religion. I certainly would not want to deny the significance of faith, but a lot of times people need a grasp of the rational thought. They're not getting the depth or the richness of Catholicism from the pulpit these days, and Donald McGuire filled that need in many people's lives."

In contrast to other Jesuits, who tend to occupy the liberal end of the Catholic spectrum on political and cultural issues, McGuire was a staunch conservative on doctrinal questions, including those involving gender and sexuality. Brigid Crotty, a 40-year-old Napa resident whose family became close to McGuire in the 1980s, recalled that the priest demanded that women wear long skirts in his presence.

Looking back, Hockel said she could pick out "red flags" that signaled an unstable personality. "There was always a chaos that surrounded his presence," she said. Meetings started late; appointments were not kept; people were made to wait, or to indulge McGuire's eccentricities. He was something of a control freak, forcing his hosts to cater to strict demands regarding his schedule, accommodations, and diet.

"He always wanted a salad with his meal," Hockel said. "He always wanted four ounces of fresh-squeezed orange juice. I can't believe every time he came I actually made an effort to squeeze orange juice. You look back ..." She paused. "I think deep down inside he enjoyed the coronation that we laypeople gave him, because we felt so lucky that we had this time with this brilliant, devout prophet."

It was this later phase of McGuire's life, as a traveling Jesuit guru, that federal authorities investigated as they built their case against him. They discovered that the priest, while he preached the virtues of intensely orthodox Catholicism to his followers, was subverting the traditions of his calling in startling ways. According to a sentencing memorandum filed by federal prosecutors after McGuire's conviction, one of his primary means of "grooming" young abuse victims was the ritual of confession.

For example, when the primary victim in the case confessed to McGuire at the age of 13 that he masturbated, McGuire "seized on it" and said the boy had an "addiction" that could send him to hell, according to court documents. He then demanded to "inspect" the boy's penis using a magnifying glass and baby oil.

Doe 129 said he was never abused in the confessional. But he does recall other strange twists on McGuire's vocational interests. During a visit to the Jesuit residence in Evanston, Doe 129 said, McGuire began masturbating in front of him in a private upstairs room. The classics scholar had allegedly preceded this exhibition with a discourse on how gay sex was a common practice among the ancient Greeks.

There is reason to believe that Doe 129 was not McGuire's sole local victim during his post-USF decades of world travel. A colleague of McGuire's within the church said in a recent interview that he received a complaint from a Bay Area family that McGuire was molesting their teenage son in the years after the priest left the university. The church official, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal from his superiors, said he had passed the complaint on to McGuire's Jesuit higher-ups. (Doe 129 confirmed that he was not the complainant.)

Likewise, Crotty said her father, Fran Crotty, a former administrator at a North Bay Catholic school, was informed "in no uncertain terms" sometime in the last few years by a local man that McGuire had abused his son in the past. Reached by telephone, Fran Crotty declined to comment. "I'm not at liberty to discuss anything concerning McGuire," he said.

Stephen Komie, McGuire's Chicago-based lawyer, said in an interview that his client continues to maintain that the allegations leveled at him are lies intended to wring money from the church — and that his criminal convictions are simply by-products of accusations that drove the civil suits against him. "Father McGuire has always said that these are stories made up for the financial benefit of the persons who are bringing the case," Komie said.

It is true that the interplay among abuse victims, private attorneys, and law-enforcement officials in McGuire's case has at times been complicated. The victim whose complaint led to McGuire's federal conviction — his identity was withheld during the trial, and he is named in court records only as Dominick — originally consulted a private attorney known for representing plaintiffs in priest-pedophilia civil suits in Southern California. That attorney's name is Kevin McGuire, and he is Donald McGuire's nephew.

Kevin McGuire said he urged Dominick to take his allegations to federal authorities, and accompanied him to the U.S. Attorney's office on the day he filed a complaint. "I traveled in the same Catholic circles that a lot of these same victims traveled in," he said. "I realized it was my obligation to turn my uncle in. I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do."

Kevin McGuire is also representing Doe 129, who claims he is motivated by desire to hold the priest's superiors to account, rather than the prospect of financial gain. The litigation "certainly hasn't made my life any easier, and it's certainly not fun, and I certainly question whether there's any justice that can be done," said Doe 129, who still lives in the Bay Area. "I'm just really disgusted and furious about the fact that they knew about this for so goddamn long, and didn't do anything about it. If you had a carpet-cleaning business and a guy was a rapist, you wouldn't let him out and about working for you."

In response to questions from SF Weekly about Doe 129's lawsuit, Chicago Jesuit Provincial Edward Schmidt (the regional head of his order) said in a statement that the province was "aware" of the suit. "Because this matter involves a court action, we do not plan to make any further comment about these particular allegations at this time," he said.

Kevin McGuire said his uncle's time as a professor in San Francisco, and his later trips to the Bay Area and around the world, were encouraged by superiors as a "pass-the-trash" strategy to keep the predator priest far from his home base. "USF was a place where the Chicago Province sent Father McGuire to get him the hell out of their hair," he said. "That's why this guy was allowed to roam around the country. They wanted him everywhere but Chicago."

And he said that while there's no evidence Mother Teresa herself was consciously covering up for the priest whose piety she admired, the nun, who died in 1997, should have known something wasn't right.

"I think Mother Teresa had plenty of evidence in front of her that something was wrong," Kevin McGuire said. "When you see Father McGuire seven to nine times a year at your retreat houses or nunneries around the world, and he's constantly with teenage boys who are essentially his slaves, and to have these boys in your bedroom — yeah, I think that's plenty of notice to anyone with oxygen in your brain. I don't care how holy you think your confessor is. Something's wrong."

While Doe 129's lawsuit moves forward in Illinois, McGuire, who according to his lawyer is legally blind and suffers from diabetes, has begun serving his 25-year prison sentence at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. His federal conviction is pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. (In May, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals denied his request for a new trial in that state related to his earlier abuse charges.) Absent a successful appeal, Komie said, his client "is not going to survive this prison sentence."

As the disgraced priest faces his earthly end, he has resolutely declined to embrace a concept at the very core of Catholicism: repentance. McGuire, the great confessor, has never admitted guilt in any of the instances of abuse for which he stands accused or convicted. He has also taken what could be interpreted as a less-than-Christian stance toward the victims who have chosen to speak against him.

"I want my accusers to be sentenced," he said during the postconviction phase of his first trial in Wisconsin in 2006. McGuire took advantage of his opportunity to address the judge prior to sentencing to profess his innocence in a rambling soliloquy in which he compared himself to Socrates, St. Thomas More, and Jesus. "I am humbled when I think of the company of saints I'm called to join here," he said, according to a trial transcript.

Earlier that day, McGuire said, he had meditated on his life. "I plead with the Holy Spirit to enlighten me, show me, in what way am I not living truthfully," he said. He added that he had resolved "to be more truthful, more like Jesus. I don't know how other people live, but that's the only way I can live." He continued, "Your Honor, I did all of this with the image of Christ crucified before me. I've never been closer to the crucified Christ, never in my life. It's a terrible experience, but it's glorious."

This article was found at:

http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-07-29/news/for-he-has-sinned/


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11 comments:

  1. Dark times with nuns of Mother Teresa: a memoir

    National Post - Charles Lewis

    There’s an episode in Mary Johnson’s An Unquenchable Thirst that seems to epitomize the painful years she spent in Mother Teresa’s religious order.

    It is just one of dozens of uncomfortable moments the former nun recalls as a member of the Roman Catholic Missionaries of Charity, but it exemplifies the degree to which she saw life around her as one of repression, repercussions and guilt — the things that drove her out of the order in 1997.

    At one of the order’s homes in Rome, a supervisor, Sister Dolorosa, began shouting in her sleep, “I need a man! I need a man!”

    The sister was faithful to her vows, but the evidence of her subconscious desire sent shock waves through the other nuns.

    Sister Dolorosa’s words “reverberated in my brain, my gut, my bones,” Ms. Johnson writes.

    One sister said, “It’s only normal. We are all human.”

    “But she’s our mistress,” said another. “We’re supposed to learn from her.”

    When Sister Dolorosa found out what she had said, she hid in shame from the others.

    Ms. Johnson, who was in Toronto this week to promote An Unquenchable Thirst, said no one reading her book should think life in the Missionaries of Charity was typical of that in other women’s religious orders.

    Other orders, she said, allow their members to have some semblance of a normal life: to engage with friends outside; to keep up with current events; and to stay in close contact with their families.

    “We weren’t even allowed to be friends with each other,” she said. “All our contacts were cut off.”
    ...

    Still, reading it is hard to fathom why anyone who would have lasted 20 years. But Ms. Johnson explained the conviction you have been called by God to do something is far stronger than anything that could be imagined in a secular pursuit.

    “We’d always been told you are here because God has called you, so the worst thing you could do is leave.”

    During her time with the sisters she broke her vows with chastity with another nun and later with a priest. She believes now if the order allowed more humane relationships she would never have broken her vows.

    “I think if I hadn’t been that lonely it would have been a whole lot easier to keep my vows. I’m not making excuses. I know I violated my vows and that was something very complicated for me and that I felt guilty about for a very long time. But at the same time I found myself unable to resist having a relationship.”

    The book tells of superiors who became drunk with power, whose normal mode of communication was to shout and invent irrational accusations against those below them.

    Because arguing back was considered a sin against humility, even the most irrational charges could not be countered properly for fear of appearing to be proud or arrogant. Self-flagellation with a rope or a chain was used as a means to conquer pride.

    “As I lived it out, I realized that sort of radical draw also brought these drawbacks where people didn’t have any way of pursuing any form of pleasure or relaxation,” she said.

    “The food was bad, living conditions were difficult, and we didn’t mind that, because we had signed up for that. But what happens is some of the people get their only pleasure in the exercise of power. And this part of what happened in the Missionaries of Charity.”

    read full article at:

    http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/09/23/dark-times-with-nuns-of-mother-teresa-a-memoir/

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  2. Tainted Saint: Mother Teresa Defended Pedophile Priest

    By Peter Jamison, San Francisco Weekly January 11 2012

    The death of journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens last month gave those familiar with his work a chance to revisit one of his more controversial subjects: the Albanian nun Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, better known to the world as Mother Teresa. In his 1997 book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Hitchens argued that the "Saint of Calcutta," who founded and headed the international Missionaries of Charity order, enjoyed undeserved esteem.

    Despite her humanitarian reputation and 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa had set up a worldwide system of "homes for the dying" that routinely failed to provide adequate care to patients, Hitchens argued — an appraisal shared by The Lancet, a respected medical journal. Mother Teresa also associated with, and took large sums of money from, disreputable figures such as American savings-and-loan swindler Charles Keating and the dictatorial Duvalier family of Haiti.

    Notwithstanding these black marks on an otherwise sterling reputation, Mother Teresa — who died in 1997 and is now on the fast track to a formal proclamation of sainthood by the Vatican — was never known to have been touched by the scandal that would rock the Roman Catholic Church in the decade after her death: the systematic protection of child-molesting priests by church officials.

    Yet documents obtained by SF Weekly suggest that Mother Teresa knew one of her favorite priests was removed from ministry for sexually abusing a Bay Area boy in 1993, and that she nevertheless urged his bosses to return him to work as soon as possible. The priest resumed active ministry, as well as his predatory habits. Eight additional complaints were lodged against him in the coming years by various families, leading to his eventual arrest on sex-abuse charges in 2005.

    The priest was Donald McGuire, a former Jesuit who has been convicted of molesting boys in federal and state courts and is serving a 25-year federal prison sentence. McGuire, now 81 years old, taught at the University of San Francisco in the late 1970s, and held frequent spiritual retreats for families in San Francisco and Walnut Creek throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He also ministered extensively to the Missionaries of Charity during that time.

    In a 1994 letter to McGuire's Jesuit superior in Chicago, it appears that Mother Teresa acknowledged she had learned of the "sad events which took [McGuire] from his priestly ministry these past seven months," and that McGuire "admitted imprudence in his behavior," but she wished to see him put back on the job. The letter was written after McGuire had been sent to a psychiatric hospital following an abuse complaint to the Jesuits by a family in Walnut Creek.

    "I understand how grave is the scandal touching the priesthood in the U.S.A. and how careful we must be to guard the purity and reputation of that priesthood," the letter states. "I must say, however, that I have confidence and trust in Fr. McGuire and wish to see his vital ministry resume as soon as possible."

    The one-page letter comes from thousands of pages of church records that have been shared with plaintiffs' attorneys in ongoing litigation against the Jesuits involving McGuire. (The documents were also shared with prosecutors who worked on his criminal cases.) It is printed on Missionaries of Charity letterhead but is unsigned, and thus cannot be verified absolutely as having been written by Mother Teresa. Officials in the Missionaries of Charity and the Jesuits did not respond to requests for comment on its provenance.

    continued in next comment:

    http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-01-11/news/mother-teresa-catholic-church-john-hardon-donald-mcguire-child-abuse-jesuits/

    ReplyDelete
  3. continued from previous comment:

    Yet statements throughout the letter point to Mother Teresa as the author. The writer speaks of "my communities throughout the world" and refers by name to Mother Teresa's four top deputies, calling them "my four assistants." Rev. Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit and former University of San Francisco professor who knew Mother Teresa, said the reference to her assistants is an "authentic" aspect of the letter.

    The letter could have an impact on the near-complete process of canonizing Mother Teresa. In 2003 she was beatified by Pope John Paul II, the penultimate step to full sainthood.

    "What we see here is the same thing we see over and over in regard to the [priest pedophilia] scandal — the complete lack of empathy for, or interest in, possible victims of these accused priests," said Anne Rice, the bestselling author of novels including Interview with the Vampire and a former Catholic who has been outspoken in her criticism of the church's handling of the sex-abuse scandal. "In this letter the concern is for the reputation of the priesthood. This is as disappointing as it is shocking."

    Other documents that have emerged in the criminal and civil cases involving McGuire could affect the sainthood prospects of another deceased religious leader eyed by the Vatican for sainthood. Among the newly uncovered church records are letters by Rev. John Hardon, a Jesuit who also worked extensively with Mother Teresa and died in 2000. He collaborated with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a landmark summation of contemporary church doctrine. In 2005, the Vatican opened a formal inquiry into whether Hardon should be made a saint.

    But statements by Hardon in his letters could complicate that process. The documents reveal McGuire admitted to Hardon that he was taking showers with the teenage boy from Walnut Creek whose complaint led to McGuire's psychiatric treatment. He also acknowledged soliciting body massages from the boy and letting him read pornography in the room they shared on trips together.

    Despite these admissions, Hardon concluded that his fellow Jesuit's actions were "objectively defensible," albeit "highly imprudent," and told McGuire's bosses that he "should be prudently allowed to engage in priestly ministry."

    The postulators, or Vatican-appointed researchers and advocates for sainthood, assigned to investigate Mother Teresa and Hardon did not respond to repeated requestsfor comment.

    While it is unclear exactly what impact the new documents will have on the evaluation of both figures for sainthood, the evidence of involvement by two prominent and internationally respected Catholics in the McGuire sex-abuse scandal is likely to cause consternation among critics of the church's handling of predator priests. The situation is aggravated since McGuire went on to abuse more children after suggestions to return him to ministry were heeded.

    "We're talking about extremely powerful people who could have gotten Father McGuire off the streets in 1994," said Patrick Wall, a lawyer and former Benedictine monk who performs investigations on behalf of abuse victims suing the Catholic Church. "I'm thinking of all those post-'94 kids who could have been saved."

    [...]

    read the rest of the article at:

    http://www.sfweekly.com/2012-01-11/news/mother-teresa-catholic-church-john-hardon-donald-mcguire-child-abuse-jesuits/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Mother Teresa 'saint of the media', controversial study says

    by Kounteya Sinha, TNN Mar 2, 2013

    LONDON: A study conducted by Canadian researchers has called Mother Teresa "anything but a saint", a creation of an orchestrated and effective media campaign who was generous with her prayers but miserly with her foundation's millions when it came to humanity's suffering.

    The controversial study, to be published this month in the journal of studies in religion/sciences called Religieuses, says that Teresa — known across the world as the apostle of the dying and the downtrodden — actually felt it was beautiful to see the poor suffer.

    According to the study, the Vatican overlooked the crucial human side of Teresa — her dubious way of caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.

    Instead, the Vatican went ahead with her beatification followed by canonization "to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline".

    Researchers Serge Larivee and Genevieve Chenard from the University of Montreal's department of psychoeducation, and Carole Senechal of the University of Ottawa's faculty of education, analysed published writings about Mother Teresa and concluded that her hallowed image, "which does not stand up to analysis of the facts, was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media campaign".

    According to Larivee, facts debunk Teresa's myth. He says that the Vatican, before deciding on Teresa's beatification, did not take into account "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding ... abortion, contraception, and divorce."

    At the time of her death, Teresa had 517 missions or "homes for the dying" as described by doctors visiting several of these establishments in Kolkata. They welcomed the poor and sick in more than 100 countries. Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving apt care.

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  5. Miracle of medicine

    According to the study, the doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions and a shortage of actual care, food and painkillers. They say that the problem was not a paucity of funds as the Order of the Missionaries of Charity successfully raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Researchers said that when it came to her own treatment, "she received it in a modern American hospital".

    The three researchers also dug into records of her meeting in London in 1968 with the BBC's Malcom Muggeridge who had strong views against abortion and shared Mother Teresa's right-wing Catholic values.

    The researchers say Muggeridge had decided to promote Teresa. In 1969, he made a eulogistic film on the missionary, promoting her by attributing to her the "first photographic miracle", when it should have been attributed to the new film stock being marketed by Kodak.

    Following her death, the Vatican decided to waive the usual five-year waiting period to open the beatification process. According to the researchers, one of the miracles attributed to Mother Theresa is the healing of Monica Besra, who suffered from intense abdominal pain, after a medallion blessed by her was placed on Besra's abdomen.

    Larivee said, "Her doctors thought otherwise: the ovarian cyst and the tuberculosis from which she suffered were healed by the drugs they had given her. The Vatican, nevertheless, concluded that it was a miracle. Mother Teresa's popularity was such that she had become untouchable for the population, which had already declared her a saint."

    Larivee however signs off on a surprisingly positive note and says there could also be a positive effect of the Mother Teresa myth. "If the extraordinary image of Mother Teresa conveyed in the collective imagination has encouraged humanitarian initiatives that are genuinely engaged with those crushed by poverty, we can only rejoice," they signed off.

    http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-03-02/uk/37389641_1_mother-teresa-vatican-study

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  6. Mother Teresa: anything but a saint

    University of Montreal March 1, 2013

    http://www.nouvelles.umontreal.ca/udem-news/news/20130301-mother-teresa-anything-but-a-saint.html

    The myth of altruism and generosity surrounding Mother Teresa is dispelled in a paper by Serge Larivée and Genevieve Chenard of University of Montreal's Department of Psychoeducation and Carole Sénéchal of the University of Ottawa's Faculty of Education. The paper will be published in the March issue of the journal Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses and is an analysis of the published writings about Mother Teresa. Like the journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who is amply quoted in their analysis, the researchers conclude that her hallowed image—which does not stand up to analysis of the facts—was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign.

    “While looking for documentation on the phenomenon of altruism for a seminar on ethics, one of us stumbled upon the life and work of one of Catholic Church's most celebrated woman and now part of our collective imagination—Mother Teresa—whose real name was Agnes Gonxha,” says Professor Larivée, who led the research. “The description was so ecstatic that it piqued our curiosity and pushed us to research further."

    As a result, the three researchers collected 502 documents on the life and work of Mother Teresa. After eliminating 195 duplicates, they consulted 287 documents to conduct their analysis, representing 96% of the literature on the founder of the Order of the Missionaries of Charity (OMC).

    Facts debunk the myth of Mother Teresa

    In their article, Serge Larivée and his colleagues also cite a number of problems not take into account by the Vatican in Mother Teresa's beatification process, such as "her rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce."

    The sick must suffer like Christ on the cross

    At the time of her death, Mother Teresa had opened 517 missions welcoming the poor and sick in more than 100 countries. The missions have been described as "homes for the dying" by doctors visiting several of these establishments in Calcutta. Two-thirds of the people coming to these missions hoped to a find a doctor to treat them, while the other third lay dying without receiving appropriate care. The doctors observed a significant lack of hygiene, even unfit conditions, as well as a shortage of actual care, inadequate food, and no painkillers. The problem is not a lack of money—the Foundation created by Mother Teresa has raised hundreds of millions of dollars—but rather a particular conception of suffering and death: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's Passion. The world gains much from their suffering," was her reply to criticism, cites the journalist Christopher Hitchens. Nevertheless, when Mother Teresa required palliative care, she received it in a modern American hospital.

    Questionable politics and shadowy accounting

    Mother Teresa was generous with her prayers but rather miserly with her foundation's millions when it came to humanity's suffering. During numerous floods in India or following the explosion of a pesticide plant in Bhopal, she offered numerous prayers and medallions of the Virgin Mary but no direct or monetary aid. On the other hand, she had no qualms about accepting the Legion of Honour and a grant from the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Millions of dollars were transferred to the MCO's various bank accounts, but most of the accounts were kept secret, Larivée says. “Given the parsimonious management of Mother Theresa's works, one may ask where the millions of dollars for the poorest of the poor have gone?”

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  7. The grand media plan for holiness

    Despite these disturbing facts, how did Mother Teresa succeed in building an image of holiness and infinite goodness? According to the three researchers, her meeting in London in 1968 with the BBC's Malcom Muggeridge, an anti-abortion journalist who shared her right-wing Catholic values, was crucial. Muggeridge decided to promote Teresa, who consequently discovered the power of mass media. In 1969, he made a eulogistic film of the missionary, promoting her by attributing to her the “first photographic miracle," when it should have been attributed to the new film stock being marketed by Kodak. Afterwards, Mother Teresa travelled throughout the world and received numerous awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance speech, on the subject of Bosnian women who were raped by Serbs and now sought abortion, she said: “I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing—direct murder by the mother herself.”

    Following her death, the Vatican decided to waive the usual five-year waiting period to open the beatification process. The miracle attributed to Mother Theresa was the healing of a woman, Monica Besra, who had been suffering from intense abdominal pain. The woman testified that she was cured after a medallion blessed by Mother Theresa was placed on her abdomen. Her doctors thought otherwise: the ovarian cyst and the tuberculosis from which she suffered were healed by the drugs they had given her. The Vatican, nevertheless, concluded that it was a miracle. Mother Teresa's popularity was such that she had become untouchable for the population, which had already declared her a saint. “What could be better than beatification followed by canonization of this model to revitalize the Church and inspire the faithful especially at a time when churches are empty and the Roman authority is in decline?” Larivée and his colleagues ask.

    Positive effect of the Mother Teresa myth

    Despite Mother Teresa's dubious way of caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it, Serge Larivée and his colleagues point out the positive effect of the Mother Teresa myth: “If the extraordinary image of Mother Teresa conveyed in the collective imagination has encouraged humanitarian initiatives that are genuinely engaged with those crushed by poverty, we can only rejoice. It is likely that she has inspired many humanitarian workers whose actions have truly relieved the suffering of the destitute and addressed the causes of poverty and isolation without being extolled by the media. Nevertheless, the media coverage of Mother Theresa could have been a little more rigorous.”

    About the study

    The study was conducted by Serge Larivée, Department of psychoeducation, University of Montreal, Carole Sénéchal, Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa, and Geneviève Chénard, Department of psychoeducation, University of Montreal.

    The printed version, available only in French, will be published in March 2013 in issue 42 of Studies in Religion / Sciences religieuses. This study received no specific funding.

    *The University of Montreal is officially known as Université de Montréal.

    On the Web :

    Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses
    http://sir.sagepub.com

    Official biography of Mother Teresa published by the Vatican: http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20031019_madre-teresa_en.html

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  8. Mother Teresas orphanages end adoptions because of new liberal rules in India

    By Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post October 10, 2015

    NEW DELHI —Thirty orphanages run by the group founded by Mother Teresa have decided to shutter their adoption services in India rather than comply with a new government system that makes it easier for single and divorced people to adopt children.

    “We have already shut our adoption services, because we believe our children may not receive real love,” said Sister Amala at Nirmala Shishu Bhawan, a New Delhi orphanage run by the Missionaries of Charity. “We do not wish to give children to single parents or divorced people. It is not a religious rule but a human rule. Children need both parents, male and female. That is only natural, isn’t it?”

    In recent months, the government has overhauled India’s complex adoption bureaucracy to reduce the long, frustrating waiting period faced by prospective parents and boost the country’s woefully low adoption rates.

    [India moves to improve ‘shameful’ record on orphan adoptions]

    Estimates of the number of orphans in India vary from 16 million to 30 million, a figure cited by several nongovernmental organizations, but only about 2,500 orphans were adopted last year, down from 5,700 four years ago, according to the Women and Child Development Ministry.

    Under the earlier system, orphanages around the country were allowed to handpick parents and match them with children. But that process, officials say, operated with scant oversight and was plagued by corruption, trafficking, delays, favoritism and prejudice.

    Since August, the government has required orphanages to submit records of children to a central authority that maintains a database. Prospective parents are now asked to register with the authority, whose automated system will match them with children.

    That means children from any orphanage can potentially be matched with single parents anywhere in the country, something that the nuns of Mother Teresa’s order frown upon.

    At a meeting in New Delhi this past week, Maneka Gandhi, the minister for women and child development, said the Missionaries of Charity had refused to register children in their care with the central authority.

    “They have cited ideological issues with our adoption guidelines, related to giving a child up for adoption to single, unwed mothers,” Gandhi said at the event. “They do not want to come under a uniform secular agenda.”

    Gandhi said the government will try to persuade the religious order to work with the new system because it has “valuable, good people” and experience in adoption.

    The order, however, said it will give up its license. In New Delhi, it has transferred six unadopted children to Holy Cross Social Services, a Catholic organization.

    “We want to bring everybody under a uniform, secular Web site. We do not want different groups to run their own parallel systems anymore,” an official in the Women and Child Development Ministry said.

    The vacuum left by the order is being filled by other agencies.

    “We are seeing a sudden rise in children coming to our adoption home. It could be because the Missionaries of Charity is not accepting any more,” said Lorraine Campos, assistant director of Palna, one of the oldest adoption homes in the capital. “We do not have a problem with single parents or divorced people. We have to accept that society is changing. We have to be flexible, too. But we carefully study the kind of job pressures of the applicant, and we also ensure that they have a family support system that can step in to give care to the child.”

    The Indian system does not, however, allow adoption by gay prospective parents. “We have not progressed to that extent yet,” Campos said.

    Adoption agencies say the new system has cut the waiting period from several months to a few weeks.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nuns-linked-to-mother-teresa-halt-adoption-services-to-avoid-single-divorced-parents/2015/10/10/338111fe-6ec2-11e5-91eb-27ad15c2b723_story.html

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  9. Mother Teresa to be canonized Sept. 4

    by Rosie Scammell | Religion News Service March 15, 2016

    VATICAN CITY (RNS) Mother Teresa of Calcutta will be made a saint on Sept. 4.

    Pope Francis made the announcement on Tuesday (March 15) during a meeting with Catholic cardinals, which also saw four others approved for sainthood this year.

    Approval from the pontiff marks the definitive stage in the path to sainthood for the Albanian nun, who became reputed globally for her charity work in India. Mother Teresa’s canonization will come almost exactly 19 years after her death on Sept. 5, 1997, a relatively speedy sainthood for the Catholic Church.

    The Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, the postulator behind Mother Teresa’s canonization case, welcomed the news on behalf of the Missionaries of Charity, the congregation founded by the nun. “With her canonization, the Church presents her as a model and intercessor of those who, like her, ‘long to light the fire of love and peace throughout the world,'” he said.

    “May we all continue to live and deepen our awareness of being in need of mercy and our willingness to extend mercy in our communities, in our families and in our service of the poor,” Kolodiejchuk added.

    The pope’s final clearance for Mother Teresa’s sainthood has been anticipated since his approval in December of a miracle attributed to her, through which a Brazilian man in 2008 woke from a coma after prayers to the nun.

    Francis signed the canonization decree 13 years after St. John Paul II beatified Mother Teresa — a significant step in the sainthood process — after attributing another miracle to her intercession.

    The canonization is expected to be held at the Vatican after Francis failed to respond to an invitation from the Indian bishops’ conference to hold the ceremony in that country, The Times of India reported.

    High-ranking members of the Missionaries of Charity will travel to Rome for the canonization, bringing a relic of Mother Teresa’s blood, while the two people healed through the two miracles are also expected to attend, the newspaper said.

    http://www.religionnews.com/2016/03/15/mother-teresa-to-be-canonized-on-sept-4/

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  10. Mother Teresas Secret Billions and a Vatican Seminary Rampant with Sex Abuse—a New Book Tells All

    A choirboy saw 140 acts of sex abuse on his roommate. Mother Teresa’s secret stash of cash. Pope John Paul I wasn’t murdered by clerics. Inside a new tell-all book on the Holy See.

    by Barbie Latza Nadeau, Daily Beast November 12, 2017

    ROME—By now nothing should surprise us about what goes on behind the protective walls of the not-so Holy See. But the latest book by Italian investigative journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi, titled Original Sin delves far beyond the sleazy rumors and alleges blatant criminal activity in Vatican City.

    Two of Nuzzi’s last books, Merchants in the Temple published in 2015 and His Holiness published in 2012, landed the best-selling author in a Vatican courtroom for the so-called Vatileaks trials. This time, Nuzzi tells The Daily Beast he had his new book hand-delivered to the Vatican’s chief prosecutor. “There is proof of crimes committed by clerics against children,” he says. “Let’s see what they do with it.”

    The book is filled with salacious scoops, backed up by copies of documents printed in an exhaustive index. He shines a light on the disappearance of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, the daughter of a Vatican employee who went missing 30 years ago after a music lesson and whose body has never been found. Conspiracy theorists waffle between theories that she was kept as a sex slave for priests for years or that she was murdered by a local Roman gang of criminals as a threat to her father, who may have witnessed a crime.

    Nuzzi provides interview transcripts, sealed court documents and secret video from when police opened a mobster’s tomb in Rome to search for her body to support the theory that she was murdered by an “international group” that Pope Francis has been made aware of. He asks if justice has or will ever be served in the case.

    He also seeks to correct the theory that Pope John Paul I, who reigned just 33 days prior to the election of Pope John Paul II, was murdered. Instead he says he succumbed to the weight of the corruption and criminality he was charged to deal with.

    Nuzzi also sullies the legend of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, made a saint by Francis in 2016. He has uncovered accounting slips from secret bank accounts, in dollars and Italian lire, that the austere nun kept in her charity’s name in the troubled Vatican bank during the time when American archbishop Paul Marcinkus led the institution.

    Nuzzi said her accounts were so flush that if she had withdrawn the money or transferred to a more legitimate institution, the bank “risked default.” The nun, whose net worth is thought to be in the billions in the name of her charity, was such a valued client that she was ushered in through a secret door so no one suspected she was the bank’s wealthiest patron at a time when most women were prohibited from having accounts in their own names.

    Nuzzi uses the example to prove the existence of a network of administrators who still control the purse strings and reign over the Vatican’s considerable wealth, who he says are so powerful they have blocked some of Francis’s reforms and who were instrumental in Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to retire, essentially pushing him out of office.

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  11. But the most troubling revelation in the book is one that Nuzzi himself admits he only scratched the surface of. He provides horrific proof of widespread sexual abuse inside San Pio X, the pre-seminary boarding school where middle school and high school age boys who express interest in joining the priesthood are still sent today.

    The boys of the institute, housed in the same majestic building where former Vatican secretary of State has a controversial penthouse apartment which was recently renovated with funds from the Vatican’s children’s hospital, officially serve as altar boys at Vatican masses and choir boys for St. Peter’s basilica. But the author also alleges they are actually nothing short of play things for the Vatican priests who like sex with young boys.

    Nuzzi interviewed a former seminarian thought to be a victim and published disturbing phone transcripts in which priests discuss playing with the boys, how ejaculate was referred to as “milk” and that oral sex was described as “a game” that should only be played once every two days.

    He also amplifies the accusations of a Polish man named Kamil Tadeusz Jarzembowski, who was a student at the pre-seminary when he was 13 years old and who has sent a number of complaints about what he saw to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which acts as gatekeeper for such accusations to determine their legitimacy. Despite saying he witnessed at least 140 sexual acts by an older priest who was “favored by various monsignors in the Church” on his underage roommate, he was eventually expelled from the seminary.

    Specifically, he says the older priest who was “able to exert a form of power and intimidation” over the young boys, engaged in oral sex in his presence with the young boy and sometimes took him to his private chambers for other sexual activities. Jarzembowski also said that the priests who run the boys school “say mass in the morning and go to Mucca Assassina at night” referring to a well known gay disco in Rome. The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment about the allegations.

    Nuzzi told The Daily Beast that of all the revelations in his book, the “choir boy accusations” are the most important. “Pay attention to that story,” he said. “It will surely grow. Or at least it should.”

    https://www.thedailybeast.com/mother-teresas-secret-billions-and-a-vatican-seminary-rampant-with-sex-abusea-new-book-tells-all

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