Boston’s incendiary priest-sex abuse scandal in 2000 slammed not only the Catholic Church, but the entire nation and dwarfed the eon-old adage, “When the feces hits the fan, everyone involved gets splattered.” Bostonian Catholic laity became enraged, more so when their then-revered leader, Cardinal Bernard Law, less than 18 months later, would utter more than 25 times in his 2-day-in-court defense, “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember." Being presented by the prosecuting attorney with Law’s own signed documents of quietly transferring known pedophile priests, Law failed to alter his deviant proclamations, dominated by either ignorance or memory lapses.
Eleven years later, and paralleling the Church’s centuries’ old and present-day secret and Inquisitorial canonical practices, the golden rules remain:
1-The Catholic hierarchy must protect its Church at all costs.
2-The mandate, “Separation of Church and State” is to be adhered to, and, therefore…
3-The Church is never to be questioned on any spiritual or civil principles. (Simple translation: “Whether pertaining to clerics, religious, or our revered laity, we will take care of all in-house turbulances appropriately as we see fit.”)
The church’s national conflagration, after 11 years continues to burn, sending its charred embers to the skies for all to witness. In 2011, another 164 priests, 38 ordained Deacons, and 11 religious-order nuns nationwide were accused of sexual abuse – all with substantial evidence to warrant detailed investigations by both the clerical hierarchy and civil authorities. (For a weekly up-date, one needs only to enter “Clergy Sexual Abuse” into the Google-Alert” option provided on the Google Homepage.)
One of multifold laity-sex-abuse examples below: Notice how Msgr. Brennan circumvents the issue of Patrick Lott, the accused criminal – evidently a star-volunteer coach for the Immaculata boys’ basketball team. “Pictures of the videos” or “that the accused ever touched one inappropriately” are irrelevant. Those were not the accusations. Additionally, the Blame Game, as usual, takes Center Stage: “Brennan slammed the media….”
Accusations are not synonymous with guilt, but the “de facto” remains: Per our Jurisprudence system, Lott cannot remain in jail on a gargantuan half-million-dollar -- or any amount -- bail without sufficient evidence.
…and on it goes, ad infinitum, ad nauseam while the media pundits blatantly refuse to turn off the ever-persistent lacrymose whirling fans.
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SOMERVILLE, NJ-Jan.1, 2012 — About 100 parishion
ers gathered at 9 a.m. at the Church of the Immaculate Conception to celebrate the first Mass on the first Sunday of the new year. Halfway into the ceremony, murmurs spread through the pews when the pastor, Monsignor Seamus F. Brennan, brought up the school sex scandal that rocked the community less than a week earlier.
It was Brennan’s first public comments on Patrick Lott, the Bernardsville Middle School assistant principal who serves as a volunteer basketball coach at the parish’s Immaculata High School.
Lott was arrested Dec. 23 and is facing more than 50 charges of videotaping 15 boys, all 15 or 16 years old, showering together at the high school. He remains in the Somerset County Jail in Somerville in lieu of $500,000 bail.
Brennan said that he did not want to be understood as being “defensive.”
“At this point there is no evidence that any pictures were ever shared with others,” Brennan said. “Likewise, there is no evidence that the accused ever touched anyone inappropriately.”
In his nine-minute remarks, Brennan slammed the media for what he considered, “inaccurate … rather sensational” and “inflammatory” coverage of the scandal.
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WJK-Jan.-2012
