Put pedophile priest scandal behind us now, say the bishops, find closure. Right. What about the rest of the crimes?

*****
By Kay Ebeling
No we can’t put this all behind us now, or find closure, whether with or without a settlement, dear bishops and cardinals, et al. The church has to take responsibility for what it did, not just to the 20 or 30 thousand people who are walking around the world damaged from sex abuse by pedophile priests in the Catholic church, but its responsibility to the entire American culture.

By allowing pedophiles to operate, protecting them and covering their crimes, the Catholic Church is in part responsible for the epidemic of sex crimes against children we have in this country today.

Pedophiles network. Even before the internet they found each other and compared notes. So when word got out that priests were getting away with it, pedophiles in other areas of life got enabled and empowered. Men who tended toward pedophilia entered the priesthood to gain free access to children.

Pedophiles everywhere watched and learned from the priests. And as research shows, often the victims of child molest grow up and act out the same crimes themselves. How many of those violent pedophiles roaming the United States raping and murdering children today got their initial spark from the diddling they got from a Catholic priest when they were children?

The church has to own up to its responsibility in so many more ways than it has so far.

There has been a rash of violent sex crimes against children in the United States in the last decades.

How much of that crime wave is a direct result of pedophiles seeing priests get away with it, second and third generation pedophiles who got their start from priests, now pushing the envelope of the crime, getting more and more violent, more and more fearless?

We know from the few documents that emerged in LA last year that pedophiles in Catholic seminaries recruited young boys to be their private sex toys while training in the seminary to be priests.

These young boys often grew up to be second generation pedophiles who also became parish priests all over Southern California, from the 1950s to this decade.

It’s still going on today.

These stories would all have come out in testimony, had the LA cases gone to trial.

The mandate the bishops gave each other in 2002 is not going to solve the problem. The Dallas Charter has no jurisdiction over religious order priests. So the thousands of Jesuits, Vincentians, Salesians, Franciscans, etc, in the US aren’t even covered by the church’s new pedophile screening and prevention policies.

We go hot and cold, all of us, as activists, pushing for justice re the pedophile priests. I sensed almost a plaintiff call, tears in the voice, of Tom Doyle in “VOTF and the Reform of the Governmental Structure of the Catholic Church” released earlier this month. Doyle wrote:

“I am not much interested in working for internal church reform anymore mainly because my experience within the structure over the past two decades has been so painfully revelatory for me. It is way too toxic. Life is short and being part of the Christian community is supposed to be joyful.”
*****
We all get impatient, but truth is justice is happening, but not in our time, in God’s time. We don’t even know for sure what the story will be in the end, or what our roles are. We just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and keep telling the truth, and digging up more truth.

It could be the story that the general public “gets” will be the legal battles, the criminal misuse of the justice system by archdiocese attorneys.

The church with its battery of lawyers cooked up legal strategies that beat down the plaintiffs and kept the lawsuits against the church from ever going to trial.

For now we're all a little bit in shock, and we need a few months, maybe years, to gain perspective over what happened, especially in Los Angeles, in the civil lawsuits against the church.

It wasn’t justice.

If we can’t prosecute the church for harboring pedophiles, maybe we can prosecute them for abuse of the courts.

Doyle summarized where we are so far:

“The U.S. bishops still live in their delusional world as far as clergy abuse is concerned. The Dallas Charter, the diocesan review boards, the National Review Board, the Office for Child Protection.....all are bureaucratic attempts to right the wrongs, make the bad memories go away, restore trust and faith in the bishops and above all, create the false image that it’s all over.”
*****
How Can It Be Over When They've Never Even Come Clean As To What It Was in the First Place?

I can’t shake this feeling. The way the church bent over backwards to prevent release of documents, even about crimes we already know took place, even about priests who were incarcerated and admitted their crimes.

It makes me think there’s more crimes that they're covering up.

Why else would they go to such great lengths to keep anyone from seeing their files, even an objective judge, whose only role is to see if there is evidence in the documents, why does the church still pay millions in attorneys fees to prevent documents from being released?

Unless they're hiding something more, something even more horrendous than aiding and abetting child molesters.

COMMERCIAL
For an ethereal experience, click the PayPal button in the top left column. We also generate income from the Google ads, those little black links at the top and sides of the blog. Click on the ads and we make as much as 25 cents.
END COMMERCIAL*****

Writing about pedophile priests, you have to take a pledge of honesty. I can’t let even a small untruth slip out here, as there are Opus Dei types who read every blog post, and as soon as they see a slight non-fact, they jump on it.

There’s a wonderful freedom you get when you don’t trust anybody at all. You don’t even have to think about it, just know that anyone you're dealing with could at any moment turn on you. You have total freedom within those confines.

I'm rambling. It’s middle of the night, and I’m only on a break from work. Doing all nighters these last few weeks.

Truth is I don't even write this blog. It’s hard to explain. The posts write themselves. I’ll get a nudge, and I’ll open a document, or make a phone call, and the story just plays out in front of me. I just happen to have studied journalism in college in the 1970s and this story is now in front of me.

Tonight's blog came from listening to the song in the video at the top of the page, Madonna's "Swim."

Maybe this blog is one last chance for me to have a career.

Funniest thing. I found this journal I started in February 2003, where after reaching out to SNAP and expecting them to solve all my problems, I wrote this:

“Betrayed.
“I’m all jazzed thinking I'm going to get help. Then it turns out they're just going to email me a few times a week with news articles. What did I expect?

“I wanted someone to come in here, pick me up, and put me in a penthouse. Tell me the Catholic Church agreed to pay for the rest of my life at a high comfort level.

“Because I would have been a successful accomplished person. I would have kept at least one of the jobs I had in the last 30 years. I’d at least be able to buy a new car every few years like about half of America.”

A woman survivor of pedophile priest rape came through LA recently and interviewed me for a book she’s doing, about survivors. She’s traveled the country interviewing us now for years, has interviewed maybe a hundred survivors.

She’s found this weird similarity in so many of our stories. Something happened around 1992-93.

I watched it happen as I went with her to interview another survivor. That woman told her story and there it was, something that happened in 1992-93 that made her wake up and see it wasn’t okay, change her perspective.

In my case 1992-93 was the year I remembered what Father Horne did to me when I was five. But it took a confluence of “coincidences.”

In 1993 I had been sober and clean for two years. (I’ll probably never be that clean again. I have to take things for pain today. I have to.)

In 1993 My daughter turned the age I was when the abuse happened.

In 1993 My daughter and I lived in a rural area near woods much like we did in the 1950s when the abuse happened.

In 1993 My A-A Home Group invited a priest from LA up to speak and I WOULD NOT GO, no matter what, and pained up with fibromyalgia to avoid his speech.

In 1992-93 my A-A sponsor told me that the way I was obsessing about sex experiences in my life, that she’d seen it before, when people obsess like that, it means there’s something that still has to come out.

She was right, a few weeks later I was remembering being sexually aroused by this Catholic priest in a rural town outside Chicago in 1953-55

He also taught me to talk dirty in the confessional. He made me create sexual fantasies and then repeat them back to him.

I'm still plagued by those fantasies today.

COMMERCIAL
For an ethereal experience, click the PayPal button in the top left column. Then pay any amount of money you want for Readership of City of Angels blog. You'll be helping to keep the blog and the blogger alive. Also we generate income from the Google ads, those little black links at the top and sides of this blog. Click on the ads and I make as much as 25 cents. Remember blogs are keeping freedom of speech alive in America, so support city of angels blog with a PayPal Click and by visiting the Ads By Google.
END COMMERCIAL*****

There have been a lot less posts here. This blog is not going to die, it’s just simmering.

We have video production equipment now, a camera and editing software. I just need to learn how to make it all work. As soon as I do, there will be video blogs posted here, little productions that tell our stories, and who knows where we’ll go from there.

Original Videos Here Starting In February

Meantime, as far as the bishops and cardinals saying it’s all in the past:

More from Tom Doyle:

“Archbishop Gregory said in Feb. 2004, the ‘the history of sexual abuse is today history.’ More inaccurate words have never been spoken!

“Bishops continue to force victims through incredibly painful and demeaning court processes in which they and their lawyers do all they can to revictimize them.

“In State legislatures throughout the country, State Catholic Conferences and the local bishops spend millions of the faithful’s dollars to defeat any legislation that would offer greater protection to child victims.

“In State after State, the only opposition to child protective legislation is the Catholic Church. How ironic! The world’s largest religious organization which is based on the mission of Christ and it opposes State laws that do what it not only could not do, but would not do...protect children from deranged predators and self-centered institutional enablers."
*****
One of those states is Illinois where my case would be, if the Illinois law would allow it.

I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to know that if my rape by a pedophile priest happened in California, I’d have a settlement right now. But it didn't, it happened to me in Illinois.

So, gotta go back to work.

It's best to be honest.

Onward.