Showing posts with label deception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deception. Show all posts

31 May 2011

Baptist pastor who preaches gays deserve death makes secret settlement with 4 men suing him for sexual coercion



CNN  -  May 26, 2011

Bishop Eddie Long settles with accusers

By John Blake, CNN



Atlanta (CNN) – Bishop Eddie Long, the Atlanta-based megachurch leader, has reached an out-of-court settlement with four young men who accused him of sexual coercion, representatives for both sides said Thursday.

B.J. Bernstein, the attorney representing the men, said in a statement that the lawsuits against Long and his church have “been resolved.”

Bernstein's two-paragraph statement said that neither she nor the accusers would talk about the lawsuits “now or in the future.”

Art Franklin, a Long spokesman, said Thursday that the pastor settled because it “is the most reasonable road for everyone to travel.”

“This decision was made to bring closure to this matter and to allow us to move forward with the plans God has for this ministry,” Franklin said in a statement.

Long is an internationally known televangelist who crusaded against gay marriage, and the lawsuits against him drew national attention.

The settlement comes eight months after Long, the senior pastor of New Birth Missionary Church in Lithonia, Georgia, said from the pulpit of his 25,000 member megachurch that he vowed to fight the accusations against him, with the congregation cheering in response.

Long entered into mediation talks in February. According to news reports, the sessions between Long and his four accusers - Anthony Flagg, Maurice Robinson, Jamal Parris and Spencer LeGrande - were tense.

The suits accused Long of using his position to coerce the men into having sexual relationships with him while they were teenage members of his congregation.

The lawsuits say Long engaged in intimate sexual acts with the young men, such as massages, masturbation and oral sex.

Long took the young men on trips including to Kenya, according to the suits. He allegedly enticed the young men with gifts including cars, clothes, jewelry and electronic items.

Long's attorneys deny those allegations and maintain that the pastor was attempting to be a father figure to the youths by providing them with financial assistance and encouragement.

Though no trial will now take place, Long may face the judgment of his congregation and fans worldwide.

Shayne Lee, a sociology professor at Tulane University in Louisiana and an authority on televangelists, said Long’s out of court settlement may erode some of his support.

“When you settle outside of court, it implies that there’s some guilt involved,” said Lee, author of "Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace."

“To the average congregation in the black church, those are some very serious charges,” Lee said, referring to the men’s charges against Long. “You can’t settle outside of court. You have to fight and roll up your sleeves, be defiant and fight it.”

Since the scandal had erupted, attendance at Long’s church had fallen, and New Birth officials have announced plans to lay off staff and cut Long’s salary.

But Lee said it would be premature to think that Long will retreat from the pulpit.

“He can say ‘I still have my anointing and I still have my ministry,’ ’’ Lee said. “He can say that God is working out the weeds so that the tree has a stronger foundation.”

The four men’s accusations stunned many of Long’s followers. A married man, Long had often preached about the sanctity of marriage. He once led a march against gay marriage.

Long had also cultivated a public image that was built on his machismo. He wore tight muscle shirts in the pulpit. He wrote books that compared Christian men to spiritual gladiators. He told people he had a special calling to reach men.

One Atlanta pastor predicted Long will survive the scandal because his core audience will forgive him.

“Black folks have very short memories,” said the Rev. Tim McDonald, senior pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta. “We are the most forgiving people on the planet."

McDonald, who said he has talked privately with Long since the scandal erupted, said Long “went into a shell” after the accusations against him went public.

Before the scandal erupted, Long would often publicly criticize other black pastors, and once said they “major in storefront buildings,” suggesting that they lacked the business acumen to build a megachurch like he had.

But Long had shown a different public face lately, McDonald said. His entourage wasn’t as big; he was more visible in the community.

“I found him opening up,” McDonald said. “If he can pick that back up and humble himself and stop saying things like, ‘I ain’t just another chicken-eating preacher,’ he’ll survive.”

Lee, the Tulane sociologist, said Long will remain in the pulpit for another reason.

“This is what he knows,” Lee said. “He’s not going to be able to sell insurance or cars. He’s cocky. He’s confident. He believes in redemption.”

This article was found at:


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CNN  -  May 27, 2011

My Take: No justice in Eddie Long's settlement

Editor's Note: Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of "God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World," is a regular CNN Belief Blog contributor.

By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN



The Roman Catholic Church isn't the only religious institution that has failed to respond directly and transparently to allegations of sexual impropriety.

Bishop Eddie Long, the pastor of the Georgia-based New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, has just settled out of court with the four young men who alleged Long had sexually coerced them. And neither side is talking.

After the allegations surfaced last September, Long said he would “vigorously” defend himself against charges that he used a combination of spiritual authority and material enticements (cars, jewelry, cash) to curry sexual favors from the men, who were 17 and 18 at the time.

Not any more, at least not in court.

And Long’s accusers won’t be talking either. B. J. Bernstein, their lawyer, said yesterday that they would not discuss the matter “now or in the future.”

Over the last few decades, observers of the Roman Catholic Church sex scandal have rightly argued for transparency — for taking sexual assault cases out of the hands of the secretive old boys network of priests and bishops and bringing them out into the open, including into the courts.

Why? So justice could be done, and so Catholic parents might come to feel safe once again entrusting their children to the care of priests.

American Zen centers have dealt in recent years with their own contagion of sexual abuse allegations against Zen masters, and they have done so with remarkable candor and transparency.

In December, a group of Zen leaders wrote a series of letters calling for the dismissal of Eido Tai Shimano from his position as abbot of the New York-based Zen Studies Society.

In her letter concerning the this case, Joan Halifax, founding abbot of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, did not pull any punches. She called Shimano an “embarrassment to Buddhism” and his behavior, brought to national attention last August in the New York Times, “abusive, gender-biased, predatory, misogynistic.”

But she also compared the situation to “family members in a dysfunctional family,” adding that the wider Buddhist community was “complicit in some way . . . as we all knew what was going on."

To be fair to Long, the case against Eido Shimano was clearer cut (recently unsealed papers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa detail decades of sexual liasons with his female students), as are many of the cases against pedophile priests. But the reason we can say that is because the evidence has come out.

In Catholicism’s sex scandals, critics have commonly criticized structural issues. Rather than blaming this priest or that, they have blamed the Catholic practice of clerical celibacy. Or, in the case of a recent study by researchers at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, they blamed the permissiveness of the 1960s.

So I have to wonder whether there are structural issues in the Long case also. As names such as Swaggart, Bakker and Haggard remind us, he is not the first megachurch pastor accused of sexual abuse.

The Protestant Reformation was in part about getting away from the authority of priests and popes. Why approach God indirectly when you can do so directly, Protestants asked. Why not read the Bible for yourself?

Unfortunately, there isn't much evidence that many American Protestants today are reading scripture with frequency or care. On a battery of 12 questions about Christianity and the Bible, American Protestants got 6.5 questions right on average, for a score of 54%. Many must rely on pastors like Long to tell them what to do and think.

In her letter, Halifax discussed the dangers of “being under the spell of a teacher or person of authority.” But Christians fall under that spell too. And as they do, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to imagine that their ministers might be sexual predators.

I do not know what Bishop Eddie Long did or did not do with these four young men. I will say, however, that I am predisposed in these cases to give credence to the accusations of the alleged victims, if only because I have seen sexual coercion happen so often in religious groups.

A civil trial might have changed that predisposition. And a complete and public investigation of Long’s actions by the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church could have done the same.

It’s a shame that neither of those things are going to happen. And those who have the most to be ashamed of — perhaps more than Long himself — are the people in the pews who come every weekend to worship him.

If you aren’t familiar with Long’s preaching style, you can view a sermon he gave in 2000 called “Stop the Cover Up.” To which I can only say, "Amen."

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Stephen Prothero.


This article was found at:



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30 May 2011

Italian priest in diocese of Cardinal assisting Pope on child protection reforms arrested on pedophilia and drug charges



TIME   -  May 19, 2011

Priest Sex-Abuse Case Hits Church of Pope's Adviser


By Alessandra Pieracci and Giacomo Galeazzi / La Stampa / Worldcrunch




This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in the leading Italian daily La Stampa.

(GENOA) — The latest sex-abuse case to rock the Catholic Church is unfolding in the archdiocese of an influential Italian Cardinal who has been working with Pope Benedict XVI on reforms to respond to prior scandals of pedophile priests.

Father Riccardo Seppia, a 51-year-old parish priest in the village of Sastri Ponente, near Genoa, was arrested last Friday, May 13, on pedophilia and drug charges. Investigators say that in tapped mobile-phone conversations, Seppia asked a Moroccan drug dealer to arrange sexual encounters with young and vulnerable boys. "I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues," he allegedly said. Genoa Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco, who is the head of the Italian Bishops Conference, had been working with Benedict to establish a tough new worldwide policy, released this week, on how bishops should handle accusations of priestly sex abuse.(Read "Vatican Gets Tough on Child Abuse but Not Tough Enough.)

Bagnasco said that when he met the Pope this weekend, he "asked for a particular blessing for my archdiocese" in light of the alleged crimes, adding that "like every father toward a son [feels] great pain in seeing a priest who is not faithful to his vocation."

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi praised Bagnasco's handling of the Sastri Ponente case, lauding its "timeliness and competence." On Saturday, May 14, the Cardinal visited the Santo Spirito church, where Seppia was the parish priest.

According to investigators, Seppia told a friend — a former seminarian and barman who is currently under investigation — that the town's malls were the best places to entice minors. In tapped phone conversations the two cursed and swore against God. The priest is charged with having attempted to kiss and touch an underage altar boy and of having exchanged cocaine for sexual intercourse with boys over 18.

Seppia's defense lawyers are expected to argue that those conversations — monitored since Oct. 20, 2010 — were just words, sex games that were played by adults. It was just a game even when he claimed to have "kissed on the mouth" a 15-year-old altar boy, according to the defense.

On Monday, May 16, during formal questioning by Genoa's investigating magistrate Annalisa Giacalone, Seppia chose not to respond. The magistrate decided to keep him in custody to avoid a risk of relapse or tampering with evidence. Defense attorney Paolo Bonanni said the defense wants to evaluate all the charges, reserving the right to respond to public prosecutor Stefano Puppo in the coming days.

Questioned by the investigators, the altar boy reportedly confirmed the attempted kiss. Another male minor who, according to the investigators, was stalked with messages and pressing invitations, will be questioned soon. Psychologists are helping Carabinieri police officers obtain testimony from the alleged victims. "The boys are ashamed to talk and to admit what happened," says one of the investigators. The evidence amounts to at least 50 messages and phone calls. In the tapped phone conversations, the drug dealer contacted the boys and gave their phone numbers to the priest, who paid them with cocaine or 50 euros each time for sexual intercourse.(Read "Controversial Study Links Catholic Abuse to '60s Culture and Church Hierarchy but Offers Few Solutions.")

"[The investigators] made us listen to that man saying terrifying things about our children. Things so terrible that I cannot repeat them," a father of one of the boys said.

Investigators are also examining three confiscated computers: the priest allegedly looked for partners via chat as well.

Seppia is currently being kept in a confinement cell in a Genoa prison. He met the jail's priest and psychologist. "He has read the newspapers, and he is pained by his parishioners' comments," says his lawyer. The investigation is ongoing.

This article was found at:



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27 May 2011

The Bible is not historical it is hysterical



Chain The Dogma      May 26, 2011

The Bible is not historical it is hysterical

It causes hysteria in those who believe it is a literal account of history

by Perry Bulwer




Hysteria:

1. Behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic
2. A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability, etc., without an organic cause.

U.S. television network, History, announced on May 24, 2011 that a 10-hour series covering the entire Bible has been in the works for two years and is expected to air in 2013. News reports covering the announcement all refer to the series as a docudrama, which is commonly understood to be the dramatization of factual events. Such dramatizations, however, almost always use dramatic and historical license to manipulate, distort or ignore certain facts for entertainment purposes without making their audience aware of what those distortions are. The recent movie, The King's Speech, is a good example of that, as explained by Christopher Hitchens.

History president and general manager, Nancy Dubuc, referring to the series as bringing “the historical stories of the Bible to life for a new generation”, seems to suggest that 'docu' in docudrama indicates documentary, in other words a factual representation of real historical events. I suppose she had no choice but to maintain the pretence of history when announcing this project, but remember, she is not in the business of teaching history but in delivering eyeballs to advertisers. The History channel exists to make money, not to educate viewers with actual history, and what better way to make money than to promote the Bible to the gullible. It's what god frauds have been doing for centuries.

It is simply not true that Bible stories are historical, especially the most dramatic ones likely to be portrayed in the series. At best they are historical fiction -- metaphors and myths mixed in with bits of real history -- at worst they are lies. And they do create hysteria in people who believe the Bible is a factual, true account of reality. Just look at the recent hysteria created by Harold Camping, or browse through the more than 3,000 news articles in the Religion and Child Abuse News archive that document the hundreds of ways in which hysterical Bible believers abuse children. I've linked to some of those articles below. The headlines alone are enough to prove the point.


This article was found at:



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The Westboro Baptist hate cult that indoctrinates children with lullabies about people going to hell


Bible Belt just meant pain for me

26 May 2011

Jesuit priest being considered for sainthood among order's leaders who protected "the Hannibal Lecter of the clerical world"



San Francisco Weekly   -  May 25, 2011

Let Him Prey: High-Ranking Jesuits Helped Keep Pedophile Priest Hidden

By Peter Jamison




The conservative Catholic family lived on a quiet cul-de-sac in Walnut Creek and took pains to observe the traditions of a church racked by social change. Their lives appeared driven by the famous motivational phrase of Saint Ignatius, "Ad majorem Dei gloriam" — for the greater glory of God. It was the same motto that ostensibly guided the Jesuit priest, Donald McGuire, to whom they turned for spiritual guidance.

Then, in 1993, they learned that McGuire had done unthinkable things with their 16-year-old son, Charles, who traveled with him as his personal assistant. The boy and the priest had allegedly looked at pornographic magazines, masturbated, and taken showers together. The family took this devastating news to an esteemed San Francisco priest, Joseph Fessio, who, like McGuire, had once been a teacher at the University of San Francisco.

Fessio runs the Ignatius Press, a Catholic publishing house based in the Sunset District that is the primary English-language publisher of the pope's writings. He and McGuire shared a reputation for doctrinal orthodoxy. McGuire, for his part, was a cleric of worldwide renown, functioning as adviser and confessor to Mother Teresa.  [see related article links below]  While family members considered reporting the abuse to secular authorities, Fessio urged them to stay quiet until he could confer with Jesuit higher-ups.

Confronted with the allegations, McGuire, a famously manipulative man known both for his charm and periodic rages, denied Charles's accusations or made excuses. His Jesuit bosses in Chicago, where McGuire was technically based, ordered him to undergo a residential treatment program at a psychiatric hospital for priests. In about seven months, McGuire was released and returned to active ministry. He continued to prey on other children for the next nine years.

McGuire, who was officially defrocked by the church in 2008, is serving a federal prison sentence stemming from his acts of child molestation. In 2009, SF Weekly published a story revealing his extensive ties to families and institutions in the Bay Area. But not until last month did newly released court documents in a lawsuit against the Jesuits reveal the full extent to which his colleagues and bosses were aware of his highly questionable relationships with teenage boys.

Despite this knowledge, fellow priests did not report McGuire's behavior outside the Church. In California, that silence may, at times, have amounted to a violation of state law, which requires professionals who work with children to immediately report suspected child abuse to police or child welfare workers.

"It boggles the mind how you could have something so well documented and nobody could act on it," says Mark, a second Walnut Creek man who asserts he was molested by McGuire and is part of the lawsuit filed in Illinois against the Jesuits' Chicago Province. He joins three others — Charles, George, and Dominick — in the ranks of alleged victims who were abused by McGuire in the Bay Area or reported their abuse to local clergy. Only Mark and Dominick have taken legal action against the church. (SF Weekly is identifying three of the men by pseudonyms because they are victims of childhood sexual abuse whose names have never been made public. The fourth victim has already been identified in federal court proceedings by his real first name, Dominick, though his last name has not been disclosed.)

The trail of quiet complicity leads from San Francisco to unexpectedly high levels. Among the revelations in the documents is that John Hardon, a now-deceased Jesuit priest who is being formally considered for sainthood by the Vatican, advocated on McGuire's behalf after he was caught allegedly molesting one Bay Area boy, and sought to downplay the significance of McGuire's sexual abuse. Records suggest Hardon's involvement might have led to McGuire's premature emergence from psychiatric treatment and resumption of ministerial duties.

Some of McGuire's colleagues maintain they acted appropriately and according to guidelines accepted in church culture at the time. "As soon as I knew of any allegation, I reported it to the proper [church] authorities. I didn't report it to the police, but I don't think I should have reported it to the police," Fessio says. "I think it's the proper way to do things. There are a lot of false allegations going around. It can destroy a man's life and reputation."

McGuire's case sounds many of the same themes as other priestly abuse scandals that have convulsed the Catholic church over the past decade. Yet experts say he stands out, both in the harm he did to families and the extremely detailed paper trail left behind. The latter factor can be attributed largely to McGuire's identity as a Jesuit.

Founded by the soldier turned saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1534, the Society of Jesus, as it is officially called, is organized under a rigid, quasimilitaristic order. Its administrators record their actions and conversations with the diligence of government bureaucrats. As a result, phone conversations, correspondence, and general reflections on McGuire were often preserved in written form, though the Jesuits initially denied they had the information when a criminal investigation of his actions began in 2003.

What those documents portray is a criminal career marked not only by the destruction of many young lives but by a particularly twisted modus operandi. McGuire seemed to revel in the elaborate torment of his victims, perverting the sacraments into vehicles of abuse and turning vulnerable boys against their parents. One of his more notorious practices was to coax admissions of masturbation out of his victims under seal of confession — and then massage their genitals as part of the process of penance.

"If I had to make a Top Five list [of predator priests], Donald McGuire would be number one," says Patrick Wall, a former Benedictine monk who performs investigations on behalf of abuse victims suing the Catholic Church. "He truly is the Hannibal Lecter of the clerical world. He did more psychological and physical damage to children than anyone else. And what makes it worse is that the Jesuits knew about it, and did nothing."

____________________________________________________________________________
On Feb. 11, 2009, McGuire — an ailing 78-year-old who had already been stripped of priestly office — was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison by U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer. He had been tried and convicted in the Northern District of Illinois for transporting an adolescent boy across state lines in 2000 for the purpose of sexually abusing him.

"I want any such person to know the system of justice and this judge personally finds it absolutely abhorrent," Pallmeyer said. McGuire is serving his sentence at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Mo., and the Jesuits are facing a lawsuit from multiple victims, spread across the country, who claim the order's negligence enabled his crimes.

Complaints about McGuire date to the first years after his ordination, when he traveled in Europe. In a December 1964 letter, Jesuits in Austria wrote to their counterparts in Illinois that "rumors and suspicions arose" because McGuire "has much relations with several boys." Police in the Austrian city of Innsbruck went so far as to question one boy about his relationship with the American priest. Despite these warning signs, McGuire was assigned upon his return to the U.S. to teach at Loyola Academy, a Jesuit high school in Wilmette, Ill.

He molested at least two boys there, whose cases formed the basis for his first criminal conviction in 2006 in a Wisconsin state court. In 1970, McGuire was abruptly fired. In a letter to officials in the Chicago Province of the Jesuits, Loyola Academy president John Reinke offered a litany of complaints about McGuire, including his habit of frequently striking students and allowing others to stay overnight in his office. "His presence here, in short, has become positively destructive and corrosive," Reinke wrote. "There is little hope of effecting any change. He cannot be corrected."

The Jesuits' response was to reassign McGuire to USF. No concrete abuse claims have been made public from his time at the university between 1976 and 1980, but there is some indication that his relationships with college students came under scrutiny. In May 1981, then-dean David Harnett wrote to the California Province of the Jesuits stating that McGuire had engaged in "highly questionable acts," among them unspecified "interactions with a student." Harnett did not respond to calls seeking comment. In 2009, he said he did not recall writing the letter about McGuire or the circumstances of the priest's departure.

James Torrens was the rector, or religious supervisor, of the Jesuit community at USF during McGuire's tenure. In a telephone interview from Fresno, where he is now posted, Torrens said the decision to get rid of the priest was not related to abuse allegations. Bill Wood, a Los Gatos-based Jesuit who in the 1980s was the head of education in the California Province, said McGuire's "maniacal behavior" around his colleagues, rather than suspicions of sexual improprieties, led to his ouster. "He would go into dramatic, scary explosions," he recalls.

Jesuits have historically served two functions in the Catholic Church: teaching and acting as missionaries in inhospitable locations. With his failed postings to Loyola Academy and USF, McGuire had shown himself incapable of fitting into the academic settings for which he had been trained. His response was to create a new role for himself that proved especially well-suited to his criminal career.

He became a director of spiritual retreats for families. In these overnight sessions, based on Saint Ignatius' seminal mystic text, the Spiritual Exercises, McGuire operated without supervision and wielded near-absolute authority over participants. It was an apt means of grooming young abuse victims, who were forced to spend extensive time with the priest alone as they confessed their sins.

In February 1991, Robert Wild, head of the Chicago Province, received a phone call from Ricardo Palacio, a priest in the Brothers of the Christian Schools, an order of religious educators. Palacio was at a spiritual retreat for students in the idyllic Napa Valley town of St. Helena. McGuire was also there, traveling with George, a 16-year-old boy from Anchorage, Alaska.

According to a memo prepared by Wild, Palacio "became quite suspicious of this whole arrangement and began to check up a little about it." He approached McGuire's bedroom, and, as he prepared to knock, heard "giggling" inside. Silence fell after Palacio rapped on the door. The boy answered, his hair tousled and shirt untucked. Pushing past him, Palacio found McGuire lying on his bed, fully clothed.

Wild noted in his memo that the incident was "at least very imprudent, perhaps much more serious." Yet rather than investigating this complaint thoroughly, Wild — who is now president of Marquette University in Milwaukee — decided to issue a set of "guidelines" governing McGuire's interactions with minors. "I ask that you not travel on any overnight trip with any boy or girl under the age of 18 and preferably even under the age of 21," he wrote to the priest. Wild also requested that any future contact with George be limited to when his parents were present.

As Wild put it when deposed in the pending lawsuit against the Jesuits, with no apparent sense of irony, the accusation was "ambiguous, yes, but serious ... we didn't have fire, but we had smoke." Through his assistant at Marquette, Wild declined to comment for this story.

George could not be reached for comment. His mother, speaking by telephone from Alaska, declined to talk about McGuire. "This has been a very traumatic thing for our family," she said.
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Two years later, the Jesuits began to grasp the scope of the problem McGuire posed. That's when Charles's family first turned to the order for help. The incident would lead to the most extensive paper trail of any of the allegations against McGuire until a criminal investigation into his conduct began 10 years later. It was also illustrative of how the Jesuits chose to manage their wayward priest.
In April 1993, Francis Daly, socius, or second-in-command, of the Chicago Province, received a call from California. Fessio, the San Francisco priest, told him that he had been approached by a lawyer who was a close friend of a devout Catholic man in Walnut Creek. The attorney reported that McGuire had had inappropriate contact with the man's 16-year-old son, Charles, while on a trip to Russia.

McGuire, according to Daly's memo on the conversation, was "accompanied by some young men, one of whom he was taking showers with and reading hard pornography together. They also masturbated, but McGuire may not have touched the young man." The memo noted, "Joe [Fessio] asked [the lawyer] to keep this quiet until he could represent this to McGuire's provincial."

Charles's father had consulted the attorney along with several other local Catholic men, including Fran Crotty, an administrator at the Kolbe Academy, a private Catholic school in Napa. In a subsequent phone conversation the lawyer, speaking on behalf of this group, told Daly more. According to Charles, McGuire had purchased "explicit pornography, worse than Playboy" and looked at it with the boy "so that [Charles] could learn more about his body." Daly's memo stated that "if no action were begun in a few weeks," Charles's family members "are prepared to go to civil authorities. ... However, they prefer to keep it quiet and allow McGuire to keep his reputation if he goes for help."

McGuire, when confronted by his Jesuit bosses in Chicago, denied or mitigated the allegations. In a manner that would become characteristic of his responses to abuse complaints, he tried to turn attention away from himself and attack his accusers. He called Charles's father "tyrannical" and "unbalanced" and asserted that the boy was "very depressed and deals with his depression through sex," according to Jesuit records.

McGuire acknowledged he was "tolerant" of Charles reading porn, but denied that he had purchased it. No showering together had taken place, he said, although he allowed the boy to wash his foot, which he said was difficult to reach. McGuire said they stayed in the same room, but claimed the door was left open. He protested that he was not violating his 1991 restrictions on traveling with minors because he and Charles were staying at religious residences in the company of other people.

In a May 1993 letter to Brad Schaeffer, head of the Chicago Province, Charles's father revealed further details. McGuire had bought "skimpy sexy briefs" for the boy. He had asked the boy to drive, though he did not yet have a license, and had introduced him to alcohol. Just the past month, Charles's father said, the priest had called from San Francisco demanding that Charles come to the city for 10 days to stay with him. When Charles's parents refused, McGuire flew into a rage, revealing what he said was information the boy had told him in confession. It is unclear from the records what McGuire shared, though Charles's father described it as a "temptation" for which McGuire prescribed urgent spiritual guidance. This alleged violation of the confessional seal was an extremely rare and serious offense for a priest, bringing with it potential excommunication.

In June, Charles's father, dissatisfied with the Jesuits' response, asked that the Chicago Province seek out other possible victims. This request was reiterated in another letter sent by the family's lawyer acquaintance in early July. "We will proceed on our own if we do not feel that there is a permanent resolution," the lawyer wrote, implying a threat of legal action.

In a July memo, Daly recorded another conversation with Charles's father; it was clear that the socius' patience was wearing thin. "Although these folks seem pleasant, they are quite controlling," Daly complained, describing them as "religious legalists." Beyond the interview with McGuire, there is no evidence that the Jesuits sought to independently verify Charles's allegations of sex abuse or identify other victims.

Despite this lassitude, McGuire was directed to get the "help" Charles's family had advocated. Shortly after the original complaint was delivered by Fessio, the Jesuits ordered McGuire to undergo a psychological evaluation and, later, a residential treatment program. Remarkably, McGuire was permitted to perform a retreat in Phoenix in the interim, with the proviso that he tell his superior that a complaint had been filed against him and that he should not be in the presence of minors unsupervised.

Daly and Schaeffer did not return calls for this story. The Chicago Province responded to questions about McGuire with a statement from current Provincial Timothy Kesicki.

"We are painfully aware that in the past we did not do enough to prevent abuse of children and vulnerable adults, and that we made mistakes by thinking that restrictive measures we undertook with regard to Donald McGuire would be effective," Kesicki said in the statement. "More important, we failed to listen to those who came forward and to meet their courage in dealing with Donald McGuire as we should have." Province spokesman Jeremy Langford said Jesuit officials could not address specific questions about McGuire because of the ongoing litigation.
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In the summer of 1993, as Charles's family was prodding the Jesuits to perform a full investigation of their complaint, McGuire arrived at Saint John Vianney Center, a psychiatric treatment facility for clergy situated on a green-lawned campus outside Philadelphia. He was promptly diagnosed by his care providers with "frotteurism," a sexual fetish with touching or rubbing one's hands and genitals against a nonconsenting partner, a condition doctors often ascribe to child molesters.

In another of Daly's detailed memos, this one recording the reports of McGuire's psychiatrist, the socius noted, "Don is beginning to disclose more and acknowledge showering together, looking at porno together." McGuire also admitted to his therapist, Dennis O'Hara, that "he has been close to 12-14 youngsters over the years." O'Hara, who no longer works at the center, said in a telephone interview that he did not remember McGuire, and would be unable to discuss his case even if he did, because of patient confidentiality.

Daly recorded this progress in September 1993. But McGuire's therapeutic program was about to take a turn. In November, McGuire was visited at Saint John Vianney by John Hardon, a laconic Jesuit whose rigid orthodoxy earned him the nickname "Father Hard On" among more easygoing priests, according to a former colleague. Like McGuire, he worked with Mother Teresa, the famous nun who established humanitarian convents throughout the world.

O'Hara saw Hardon's presence as an obstacle to McGuire's treatment. "Despite what John [Hardon] said about psychotherapy, he does not believe in it ... and does not see Don in need of this kind of treatment," O'Hara reported. "He sees Don more as a victim, which ... fed Don's denial." He described Hardon as an "advocate" for his troubled fellow priest. An internal summary of McGuire's history later created by the Jesuits describes a November 1993 letter Hardon wrote to the Chicago Province in which he "downplayed Don's very real sexual problems."

Hardon rose to prominence within the church before his death in 2000. He was close to Pope Paul VI, and consulted on the writing of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a summation of doctrine edited by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. In 2005, a formal inquiry was initiated into whether Hardon should be made a saint.

Robert McDermott, a priest from the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, is the "postulator," or chief researcher and advocate, for the cause of Hardon's canonization. He was not aware of the role Hardon played in the McGuire affair before SF Weekly provided him with documents detailing the late priest's involvement. McDermott said it is the closest Hardon has come to being implicated in a pedophilia scandal, though the record does not conclusively show how his actions influenced the Jesuits' handling of McGuire.

"They were both working for Mother Teresa. That might have been a common bond. But I don't know why he didn't take a harder line on this," McDermott says. "I'm a little puzzled at this, but beyond that, I don't know what to say."

McGuire left Saint John Vianney two months after Hardon's visit. In a January 1994 memo, Provincial Schaeffer wrote a resigned memo describing his "extremely difficult" debriefing with the returning priest. McGuire ranted about the constraints imposed on him at the hospital and assailed his superiors for not being more supportive in the face of Charles's allegations. "It is clear that the basics are not going to change here," Schaeffer wrote. "Don McGuire is going to try to continue to lead his life as independently as possible."

In hindsight, the prescience of McGuire's Jesuit superiors over the years would be darkly comic, had it not been linked to the physical and emotional havoc the priest wrought. Because McGuire, true to their predictions, did not change. Over the decade between his release from Saint John Vianney and the beginning of the first police investigation into his conduct in 2003, eight new allegations against him were lodged with the Chicago Province. The society's responses were consistently lackluster. In 1995, the Jesuits issued guidelines barring McGuire from traveling or spending the night with anyone under the age of 21. In 2001, the permissible minimum age was raised to 30.

In the later stages of McGuire's career, it appears that the priests who had known him for decades were once again alerted to his unsettling behavior. Fessio was copied on a 1995 letter from a Southern California woman warning McGuire not to "attempt to harass or contact my son." In 2000, according to Jesuit records, Fessio reported to California Provincial Thomas Smolich that he had heard McGuire was in Massachusetts claiming to act as "legal guardian" for a 14-year-old boy, whom he intended to bring to live with him.

In 2002, Cornelius Buckley, a Jesuit priest and former colleague of McGuire and Fessio at USF, reported to the Chicago Province that McGuire was traveling with the same boy, who was named Dominick. Al Naucke, socius of the California Province, also passed on the information, as well as Fessio's 2000 concern about the suspicious arrangement, to Chicago priests. In 2007, after a phone conversation with Dominick, Buckley reported to Chicago that the boy "had been abused by McGuire for a couple of years" as a teenager, abuse that Buckley described as "being of an intimate character."
___________________________________________________________________________
What are the legal and ethical implications of how complaints against McGuire, particularly the pivotal allegation brought by Charles's family, were handled? At the time when Charles alleged his molestation, California's Child Abuse and Neglect Reporting Act required professionals who interact with children — doctors, teachers, therapists, and others — to report suspicions of child molestation to the appropriate government agencies.

Clergy were not specified in the legislation as mandated reporters until 1997. Nevertheless, they can and should be construed as falling under the law's pre-1997 category for adults who professionally supervise or interact with children in any public or private setting, according to San Diego attorney Andrea Leavitt, who has helped draft revisions adopted in the state's reporting laws and has represented plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases.

"The failure to report is to knowingly expose more children to being sexually abused," she says. "You're a handmaiden, if you will, of the abuser."

In 2002, former Assemblyman and Republican Minority Leader Rod Pacheco, who went on to become district attorney of Riverside County, authored a bill that specifically required priests to disclose knowledge of child abuse that took place before they were listed as mandated reporters in 1997. But the bill was watered down before passage.

"It boiled down to more of an encouragement than a requirement," says Pacheco, a former altar boy who attended Catholic schools and described himself as deeply disturbed by priest abuse scandals in the U.S. "Quite frankly, that wasn't satisfactory to me. It was bad enough that priests were molesting children, but 100 times worse that the Catholic Church was protecting them."

In sum, the legal ramifications of how Charles's complaint was handled are unclear. Fessio said he had fulfilled his responsibilities by reporting what he heard about McGuire to Jesuit officials in Chicago in 1993, and said the blame lies with them for not taking action to control the priest. Fessio pointed in particular to a 1998 "letter of good standing" that then-Chicago Provincial Dick Baumann wrote to the Bishop of Las Vegas, indicating that McGuire "had never been accused of improprieties with minors." Two years later, Baumann apparently realized his mistake and declined to issue such a letter when the bishop made another request. "For a later provincial to write a letter saying, 'We have no indication that there have been any complaints about Father McGuire,' to me, that's the most reprehensible thing," Fessio says.

Baumann could not be reached for comment. According to Jesuit online publications, he was posted as of December on a mission in Ghana. A man who answered the telephone at the home of Crotty, the former school administrator who also learned of McGuire's abuse of Charles, refused to speak to a reporter. State law in 1993 unequivocally required that educators report suspicions of abuse to civil authorities.

The question of whether Charles's case should have been brought to police is also complicated by the fact that his family had no desire to do so. Today, Charles's father says that while the Jesuits' early responses to his family's complaints were inadequate, the Society's recent actions have been more satisfactory.

"I think the Jesuits were slow to believe ill of a fellow member; and underestimated [the] nature and scope of the problem," he wrote in an e-mail to SF Weekly. He credited Chicago Provincial Edward Schmidt, who stepped down in 2009, with treating his family more compassionately than earlier officials. "When Father Ed Schmidt did step up to the plate, their response was really excellent in our view," he said, declining to elaborate on what the response entailed, or whether they received financial compensation. "Our family has had what I would call a miraculous reconciliation and healing with them because of their sincerity and good faith."

After Charles's complaint, the legal landscape changed. From 2000 on, when Fessio and Buckley informed the Jesuits of McGuire's additional inappropriate activities with Dominick, clergy were specifically listed under state law as mandated reporters of child abuse. Buckley, now chaplain at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, Calif., declined to comment for this article. "I have nothing to say. That case is dead. He's in jail," he says. "I'm sorry. I can't give you any information." Naucke, the California socius who Jesuit records indicate passed on their concerns to Chicago, said he did not consider reporting the information on McGuire to police or child welfare officials. Fessio and Buckley "didn't tell me anything that would have triggered that," he says. "They had some rather vague concerns."

Fessio defends his actions, saying the report of the suspicious guardianship arrangement did not involve specific suggestions of sexual abuse. "It was not even an allegation; it was only that Father McGuire was in New England claiming that he was adopting this person," he says. "There was no abuse there. I just thought it should be looked into."

There was abuse there, even if Fessio was unaware of its existence or extent. McGuire had, in fact, tried to represent himself as Dominick's legal guardian on an application to a parochial school. And if anyone had looked into the situation, McGuire's sexual molestation of the boy — which included the priest's hallmark pornographic seminars, as well as invasive massages in which he inserted his fingers in Dominick's anus — might have been revealed.
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Victims would have to turn to secular authorities before justice could be done. A civil lawsuit stemming from McGuire's years at Loyola Academy was filed in 2003, followed by a criminal investigation in Wisconsin. That state's statute of limitations on child molestation charges reached back into the 1960s, allowing authorities to prosecute McGuire for taking Loyola students on vacations into Wisconsin and abusing them. McGuire was convicted in 2006 on five counts of sexual assault of a minor. Dominick's suffering did not fully come to light until 2007, when his past abuse formed the linchpin of federal prosecutors' case against McGuire.

Phil Koss is district attorney of Walworth County, Wis. He was the first law enforcement official to take on McGuire, gambling that he could prove a 4-decade-old crime while facing enormous resistance from the Jesuits. In response to his cross-state subpoena for records on McGuire, the order provided him with a single double-sided page of the job postings the priest had held over the years, but none of the extensive documentation that would later emerge in civil litigation.

For Koss, the McGuire saga is an illustration of why statutes requiring the reporting of suspected child abuse should apply to clergy, and be rigorously enforced. Few better examples can be found of a religious organization's failure to prevent harm to innocents through internal controls. "The point of [the laws] is so these exact same things don't happen — 'I passed it on because I thought someone else would handle it,'" Koss said.

It is a timely observation, particularly in light of the Vatican's current thinking on its relationship to secular law enforcement agencies. In the wake of the McGuire scandal, the Chicago Province adopted a policy of reporting all abuse allegations to "civil authorities." George Wesolek, spokesman for the Archdiocese of San Francisco, likewise said it is the church's policy to fully comply with California's mandated reporting laws. Yet earlier this month, Cardinal William Levada — the former San Francisco archbishop who is now prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, one of the most powerful positions in the Roman Catholic Church — issued a letter requesting that bishops around the world draw up new guidelines on how to respond to child sex abuse. The results of this effort could be critical in steering the church's future handling of victims' complaints.

On the heels of McGuire's experiences in the criminal justice system, a form of ecclesiastical justice was, belatedly, delivered. In June 2007, McGuire was officially removed from membership in the Society of Jesus. In February 2008, the Vatican defrocked him. He had been an ordained Catholic priest for 47 years. He spent the last two of those years, and his final 16 months as a Jesuit — still serving humanity, in theory, for the greater glory of God — as a criminally convicted child molester.

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24 May 2011

Israeli government task force recommends legislation to protect citizens from cults



Jerusalem Post - May 24, 2011

Welfare Ministry calls for legislation to fight cults

Authors of special report dealt with recent fallout from Goel Ratzon, who had 17 wives and 39 children.

By RUTH EGLASH




The government must create comprehensive legislation to combat the phenomenon of cults in Israel and provide a clearer definition of what constitutes cult activity, a report published Monday by a special Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs task force has recommended.

Authored by the team of professionals that dealt with the fallout of Israel’s largest cult to date – that headed by Tel Aviv polygamist Goel Ratzon – the 48-page report focuses on four main areas: preventive action, therapeutic intervention, legislation and government involvement.

In its conclusion, the report calls for the government to formulate legislation that would curtail the activities of these groups, create a clearer definition as to what is a cult, and provide guidelines for all relevant government ministries to pool resources and work together.

“The subject of cults is a complex issue,” commented Minister of Welfare and Social Affairs Moshe Kahlon in a statement. “This phenomenon is indeed marginal, but its effects are far-reaching: It affects families, adults and children.”

The creation of the task force followed the January 2010 raid on Ratzon’s compound by police and welfare officials after a six-month undercover operation that gathered enough evidence to charge the 60-year-old with rape and incest. Since then, a special Welfare Ministry unit has been tasked not only with providing rehabilitative treatment for the cult leader’s 17 wives and 39 children, but also with creating a comprehensive program and recommendations for national policy to tackle between 80-100 other cult groups operating here.

A spokeswoman for the Welfare Ministry said the report was the first comprehensive look into how Israel should deal with its cults, and that the task force looked at a wide range of sources from around the world. Currently, no legislation exists to prevent cult activity here, although polygamy is illegal.

The authors recommend defining a cult as a group that converges around one person or idea and adopts thoughtand behavior-controlling methods. Cults, they said, encourage emotional dependency, loyalty, obedience and subordination to the leader. The leader is a person who takes advantage of the members to promote the cult’s goals and causes emotional damage and physical, economic and social detachment from other members of the cult, their relatives and the surrounding community.

In addition to creating legislation and defining cult activity in Israel, the report also recommends increasing public awareness of the phenomenon and even holding workshops for teens so they understand the dangers of becoming involved.

Its recommendations also include the creation of a national body that will immediately intervene with cult activities, and the establishment of a national hotline for the public to report on such groups. The National Insurance Institute should also be involved in providing rehabilitative services and financial aid to those able to free themselves from cult activity.

As well as its recommendations, the research also provided detailed guidelines for social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, educational professionals and other professionals who might find themselves working with former cult members.

The guidelines divide the process into two parts: focusing on preventing vulnerable individuals from joining cults or curtailing their involvement in the early stages before they are too drawn in, and rehabilitative assistance and therapy for those who have fled or been rescued from these groups.

Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs director general Nachum Itzkovitz said that for victims of cult activities and their families it is a “deeply rooted crisis that requires the involvement of the government and Israeli society to help tackle this phenomenon and find ways to provide the correct assistance and preventive aspect.”


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