‘The Darkest Two Years of My Life’: Popular Priest Describes Long Torment of False Abuse Accusation

I am grateful for the outcome of Fr. Boland's case in Ireland. We should all take a cue from this that false allegations are very real and far more common than some would have us believe.  American Catholics must come to terms, however, with the reality of the Dallas Charter and what this means for accused American priests. Even if a priest is found not guilty in a criminal complaint, that alone does not prevent a diocese or a diocesan insurance company from providing a quiet out of court settlement to extinguish any related civil claims. This means that a priest can be found innocent in a court of law but a case is still declared "credible" because money has changed hands. This means that many Catholic priests who have never been convicted of any offense remain barred from ministry because their dioceses have found it easier to pay off claims rendering the priest no longer able to engage in public ministry. It is a sham, and the real solution lies in tort reform. I have learned a good deal about this process from Dave Pierre's two books and from the story of Father Gordon MacRae told clearly at http://www.TheseStoneWalls.com. Just have a look at his series, "When Priests are Falsely Accused" at "Special Reports" on his website. Just devastating!

As of 2002, there were over 1000 allegations against priests that were not substantiated.  The book, Conspiracy by Monsignor McCarthy describes the five years it took for his name to be cleared and the toll it took on his body, mind and soul.
What I do not understand is why Catholics are not outraged at the complete injustice of false allegations against our priests?  Why are we not outraged that some very evil people are making money by destroying innocent men?  Why are the books already written by David Pierre, James Valladares, and Monsignor McCarthy not discussed on Catholic Radio, EWTN or in the many Catholic magazines?
 

I’d also point out something that had been mentioned in comments somewhere on the Philly trial site a few months ago.
 
A comment insisted that there were something on the order of 10,000 “pedophile priests” and “rapists” and then ‘estimated’ that there were at least 10 times that many unreported pedophile rapist-priests still running around loose.
 
It was then pointed out by another commenter that apparently these numbers were reached in the following manner: each instance of allegation formally reported in the first John Jay Report was gratuitously presumed to have a) been an allegation of ‘rape’, b) committed in each instance by a separate priest, and then c) it was ‘estimated’ that for each allegation there were nine or ten un-reported allegations of similar gravity.
 
Both (a) and (b) rely on very inaccurate presumptions: in the case of (a), that the allegations even back in the early ‘00s mostly dealt with rape; and in the case of (b) that each allegation dealt with a separate priest.
 
In the case of (c), you wind up with a curious form of statistical manipulation: while it is impossible by definition to actually know how many crimes are not-reported (how do you knowledgeably count what is by definition unknown? – it’s like asserting that one can know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin), you might try to conduct a ‘survey’.
 
Such a ‘survey’ is not actual research; basically you pick a group of people to contact, and ask them if they have ever been the victim of (fill in the blank). The persons – in a phone conversation with you, or by mailing back a questionnaire you have sent – simply answer your question, secure in the knowledge that there is no way you are going to actually do the real ‘research’ involved – which would require that you the researcher actually try to corroborate or establish the accuracy of the answer you are given in the survey.
 
Naturally, if you then add ‘stories’ to those survey-answers, you can come up with not only ‘numbers’, but – literally – stories that would appear to put actual instances to the public, with the addition of all sorts of emotionally-arousing details . And if very little effort at corroboration is carried out, then things can become positively florid.
 
On such a basis, you can – say for example – get nine or ten Yes answers: Yes, I was the victim of such-and-such although I never reported it. And on that basis you might go public and assert that while there have been only X-number of reported instances, there actually are X-times-9 or X-times-10 that number as you have ‘proven’ through your ‘research’ (i.e., that survey you conducted).
 
This is a common gambit in situations where persons wanting to sell a product to the government can bolster the case for buying their product by jacking up numbers to make the need for their product seem much greater than can be demonstrably proven. (Some readers may recall ‘the bomber gap’ of the 1950s, or ‘the missile gap’ of the early 1960s – although we now know that the Soviets did not have anywhere near the bomber-force or missile-force ‘estimated’ by military-product contractors of that era.)
 
I would say that this sales-stratagem migrated and mutated over time, and was later taken up by – among other special interests – the congeries of interests seeking to reduce the credibility and public influence of the Church.

Victimism? Victimist? Who's" playing" the victim here? Those actually sexually abused or the Church. He who is "playing the victim" shouldn't be casting stones against those who really are the victims here.
Do you see Black or Jewish ; or Gay people as examples of Victimism or were they simply victimized?
Is there a place where one can become a Victimist?
And are you the founder of Victimism?

Jim Robertson, if are referring to the statement of Stephen Cook in 1993 regarding Cardinal Bernardin, Cook never retracted his accusation. There is no evidence of a "false accusation."
Quite a bit has been written about Bernardin and his history of being associated with pedophiles throughout his career. Paul Likoudis wrote about this in his book, “AmChurch Comes Out.”
The article linked below has some information about the Bernardin situation. It has been reported that Bernardin spent $ 3 million in payouts to buy silence from Cook and others.
http://ricochet.com/main-feed/American-Catholicism-A-Call-to-Arms

 FYI, Steve Rubino was also my lawyer. I didn't choose him. I was handed over to him by the lawyer I hired Kathy Freiburg. I talked to him on the phone but never met him.

As a rule, self-proclaimed victims have not been examined carefully in front of juries.  In the first place because compared to the number of allegations there have been very few criminal trials or civil trials, especially of individual priests. And in court trials for which there are transcripts, the dynamic is that the ‘story’ is told but it is not examined.
 
This is glaringly obvious in the recently-concluded Santa Clara trial – where the accuser was (inappropriately, to my mind, as I said in comments on this site at that time) simply allowed by the court to tell his story about the alleged assault of 1975 without any examination in front of the jury; thus the story was allowed – through a jurisprudential ‘reform’ mentality I have mentioned – as if it were demonstrated and proven evidence, although it was never itself subjected to actual adversarial scrutiny and examination.
 
The Grand Jury presentment does not require or permit adversarial examination – to say the least – and hence in that venue all of the stories presented by the prosecution are simply that: stories (meaning that they were not subjected to examination). Thus in the ensuing Philadelphia trial of Msgr. Lynn (et al.) the unproven stories were lodged in the public mind as if they were demonstrated evidence; as we saw in that trial, when the stories of rape or attempted rape were presented and actually examined, they largely failed.
 
“Upset” does not begin to reach the gravamen of my concerns. The legal and Constitutional derangements are nothing short of ‘alarming’, in my opinion. And the damage done to the Church by so widespread a campaign based on so much unproven material simultaneously raises serious concerns for me not only about the integrity of the legal and legislative systems, but also for the well-being of any society and culture where such campaigns can be carried on against any religious organization by any congeries of special-and-hostile interests.
 
To envision my concern as being in essence anything less than that – e.g. I am personally miffed that priests are being dragged through the mud or that my favorite religious organization is getting a black eye in the public mind – falls substantially short of comprehending the source and cause of my alarm.
 
I would have to see far more evidence than anything I have seen published or in comments here to credit the assertion that in the matter of Catholic clerical abuse allegations “9.5 out of 10 are valid claims”. And I would submit that there is nothing morally or theologically “unforgivable” in refusing to accept such an assertion whole-hog; and rather, indeed, I would say that it would be conceptually and morally an egregious failure of integrity if I were to accept such types of assertion without sufficient validation.
 
And I would submit further that the weirdly-sustained and cyclically-repetitive nature of this ‘crisis’ could not have gone from a storm to a tornado – and a weirdly repetitive tornado – if more people had done more thinking-through of the stories presented as proof and evidence and justification of the whole Thing. Just as a large and steady supply of warm water can feed a tropical storm to the point where it engorges into a hurricane, so too a steady supply of public gullibility or lack-of-skepticism can feed a Problem until it engorges into a Deep and Permanent Crisis.
 
Thus too, the assertion that “real victims are coming forward about their abuse” seems not to reflect available facts: in the Church matter, allegations have dropped off significantly. Although, as the economic downturn has continued, there has been now a slight uptick again, but not approaching anywhere near the levels of a decade ago and – unsurprisingly – most newly-lodged allegations a) have to do with some behavior other than rape and b) have allegedly taken place in the long-ago  (a trend which might continue to be fed by the ineluctable reality that priests in active ministry four and five decades ago are now approaching senescence or have already died).
 
I stand by my extended analysis on this site as to the synergy between various proponents of secularism among certain influential political elites and various movements for radical change within the Church, all of which have found Victimism (a long-recognized and proclaimed phenomenon going back politically at least to the beginning of the Reagan years or conceptually at least as far back as 1971’s influential book ‘Blaming the Victim”) to be a very useful pretext for their own larger objectives.
 
Hence the effort to reduce all of this complex reality to the Church’s sudden current attempt to “get itself off the hook” fails rather completely. The Church is clearly on the receiving end of an orchestrated campaign; the fact that victims – genuine or otherwise – have been so concerned for their own position that they did not notice the much larger Issues moving this whole Thing all around and beneath them like flotsam on a flood tide is a regrettable but undeniable reality.
 
As some comments have consistently insisted on this and other sites – although without sufficient insight as to what they had dimly but accurately perceived – this ‘crisis’ has never been primarily about its victims (genuine or otherwise) but about the damage the sustained impetus of this ‘crisis’ could cause to a Church whose very existence obstructs various very large and deep political and cultural agendas.
 
If anything is “non-existent” in all of this, it is the abiding and primary concern for victims – genuine or otherwise, among the accusers or the accused. Rather, the ultimate objective has always been the sustained Game of Keeping The Ball Rolling in the hidden interests of  those larger political and cultural agendas, within and outside of the Church. I will go so far as to say here that for the purposes of these large and deep special interests, SNAP is merely a kept pawn and the genuine or not-genuine victims – to use (but not approve of) Lenin’s vivid phrase – are to those interests nothing more than “useful idiots”.
 
That’s a sad thing, but there it is.

The ‘JR’ comment of August 30 at 5:41 PM is very useful.
 
It is not a matter of ‘choosing to believe’ – as if all there was to differing positions is a matter of who likes vanilla and who likes chocolate-chip. This, I think, is a decisively clear indication of a far more fundamental difference in how one goes about coming to conclusions that ground the position one takes.
 
The ‘bundled’ lawsuits are not accidents; they are shrewd legal moves that almost guarantee that no prudent Defendant (the Bishops or Dioceses, not the individual priests who – not being named Parties Defendant – have no say in the disposition of the lawsuit) or defense counsel or Insurer could possibly risk the expense and effort of defending each Charge by each Plaintiff. The Church and its Insurers “find it cheaper” because the way the lawsuits are structured there is no possible prudent way to do anything else; there is very little element of ‘choice’ in it.
 
And in regard to my ‘wanting to believe’ that “real sexual abuse and real damages from that abuse” is largely untrue “in the great majority of cases”: I find myself constrained by the extant evidence, such that to actually ‘choose to believe’ ‘JR’s assertion would necessarily involve disregarding the rather stunning lack of evidence (as distinct from ‘stories’) and  – yes – literally ‘choosing’ to believe otherwise despite the serious lack of evidence. Once you commit to the principle that evidence is necessary to justify allegations, then you no longer have the simple choices confronting a kid in an ice-cream shop.
 
It is precisely on this point, I have been saying on this site, that the Victimist playbook as it has mutated here shrewdly and yet also lethally has worked to undermine traditional evidentiary first principles of American and Western law (through what are commonly spun as ‘victim-friendly’ or ‘victim-sensitive’ ‘reforms’). It was clear to any careful thought from Day One that the traditional and well-established evidentiary principles underpinning Western jurisprudence would quickly stifle any momentum toward the type of ‘crisis’ campaign we have seen mounted and sustained against the Church.
 
For that matter, the radical-feminists realized exactly the same thing and mounted their own campaign as discussed and explained in great and revealing detail by law professor Catharine MacKinnon in her 1989 book “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State”. That synergy worked powerfully especially in the 1990s, and was well-established by January 2nd, 2002.
 
The settlements of those bundled lawsuits did not formally establish any truth whatsoever about any of the allegations that were settled for cash. Indeed, because the strategy of the bundled lawsuits pretty much forced an out-of-court settlement for cash, it almost guaranteed that none of the covered allegations would ever be formally examined. One can claim that thus they would never be proven, or that thus they would never be disproven – but the incontrovertible and ineluctable fact remains that there remains precious little evidentiary-grade proof of most of the allegations.
 
I can’t make sense out of the final assertion about morality and marriage, and I leave it to others who might perceive its meaning and its relevance to the subject at hand.
 
I again make two of the points I made at the end of a prior comment on this TMR article: 1) Genuine scientific investigation and analysis requires the researcher to forego his/her personal preferences and follow the actual evidence. Einstein – since his name was raised in comments by ‘JR’ on this site – did not rest easy until other researchers were able to confirm his 1905 (Special) and 1915 (General) Relativity Theories; he specifically designed three tests that would have to be conducted by astronomical field research in order for his theories to be proven and he specifically stated that unless those tests were successful then he would consider his Relativity theories as “untenable”. It took until 1923 for all three of his conditions to be met and successfully demonstrated.
 
Meaning that a genuine researcher doesn’t simply ‘choose’ the results s/he would like to see. What has been called ‘advocacy science’, however, precisely does seek merely to assemble whatever theorems, factoids, stories or whatever other material might create the impression of ‘scientific proof’ (thus, as I mentioned in earlier comments on this article, the rise of the ‘survey’ as if it were actual scientific research).
 
And 2) the operating dynamics of this entire Thing long ago left individual victims – genuine or otherwise – in the dust, treating them merely as pawns and – to use Lenin’s brutal but lucidly relevant phrase – “useful idiots”, somehow trying to work their own outcomes in a Game that was actually taking place far beneath and above them. And that dynamic – required from the outset, in my opinion – remains active to this day. Nor was any of this the work or strategy of the Church, which can hardly be said to be ‘controlling’ the course of this Thing as it makes its destructive way through the nation’s current events and recent history.

Dave,
Facts in my previous post are correct, and I appreciate your linking two articles about the case in your reply.  I read both articles. I probably read the Tribune article when it was publsihed in '94, but was unaware of the conference at the journalism school.  
In the article about the conference it seemed all the panelists conveniently avoided the most significant fact of the Bernardin/Cook controversy: Cook dropped the lawsuit AFTER a secret financial settlement (estimated to be about $3 million) was reached with Bernardin. Conference panelists did mention, however, that the court files are sealed, apparently at the request of Bernardin. Thus, I think you will have to admit that the complete truth of what happened regarding the court case is unknown.
Nor did the Chicago Tribune article mention the settlement between Bernardin and Cook.
Dave, wouldn’t filing an FOIA request to get these court files unsealed be an excellent project for you and Media Report? That way there would be no question as to what happened in the case.
In his book, “AmChurch Comes Out,” Paul Likoudis discusses both the Cook lawsuit as well as the  Bernardin's relationship with priests who were pedophiles.  Likoudis states that he did see the secret settlement between Cook and Bernardin, and is adamant that Cook did not retract his accusation. Below is an excerpt from Paul’s book:
“… in February 1994, Cook dropped Bernardin from the suit, saying he couldn't trust his memory. Cook never retracted his charges; nor did he say they were inaccurate — contrary to the accepted party line that Bernardin had been exonerated, which persists to this day.”
You can read the Likoudis viewpoint at this link: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/110419
In this case, as in much  this sex-scandal mess, there has too much secrecy and too much money spent by the Church to pay off victims to keep quiet.  The Cook case is part of it.
 

And once again with a motherlode.
 
The key matter is accuracy, not "honesty". The latter is – neatly – completely self-referential while the former requires conformity to some external standard of fact. I point out inaccuracies or illogical elements in what you say; you think that's being 'drubbed' – which is a phenomenon I pointed out in comments on the Colorado Planned Parenthood editorial piece: if you don't agree with everything I say then you are attacking me. That sort of thing.
 
I now see a new twist here: your "responses" to me aren't being published so the "debate is fixed". I have nothing to do with what comments get published or not. But I will say this: what you publish sequential to my comments cannot be classified as "debate" because you don't respond to any ideas or objections nor do you put up further evidence of any contested assertion. You simply change the subject or try throwing a fresh pile at some other point on the screen. This is neither "debate" nor 'conversation' nor 'exchange'.
 
And if you are inferring that all of your rather sophomoric comments are being published (obscenties included) but all of your acute, insightful, and discussion-furthering masterworks are not, then say so – because that's the corner you have now gone and painted yourself into.
 
And while I have nothing to do with the editing of comments process on this site I will venture this supposition (which I hereby clearly lable as such): if there is any truth to the matter that some of your material consequent-to-mine is not published, and from what I've seen of your material and what I've said in the foregoing paragaraph, then I would – until I see demonstrable evidence to the contrary – expect that what hasn't been published (if there is any such material) is not a 'response' in furtherance of the ideas involved, but rather simply a) sophomoric or distracting (and possibly obscene) or else b) material which might reasonably be construed to be seriously embarassing to you in the eyes of other readers (a possibility that may never have occurred to you, I admit).
 
So to any implication or insinuation that you are ready-willing-and-able to respond to my thoughts, and have been doing so all along, and it's merely a matter of your rather competent and effective commentary not being published … to any such implication or insinuation I would respectfully opine: Not likely.
 
I also point out that this is not a matter of "freedom of speech" being suppressed. From what I have seen of your your published comments you have enjoyed a large freedom on this site and the record of how you have used that freedom is up there for everybody to see (unless you also want to insinuate that parties unknown are putting up obscene or sophomoric comments in your name).
 
People are entitled to their own opinion; but they are not entitled to their own facts. You are free to say whatever you want; but to point out the cartoonishness of what you say is not an abrogation of your free speech rights – it is a comment on the quality (or lack of it) of the material you produce under the aegis of that right.
 
So trying to smear this site just because you don't feel you are appreciated the way you fancy you should be or your comments aren't given the reception you would prefer … I would simply opine that that's not how the game is played on the varsity level. If you're swinging and not hitting, then the only varsity solution is to work on your batting – don't blame the ump, the bat,  the stadium, the other team, or parties-conspiratorial, known or unknown.

It seems not to have occurred to you so I will say it clearly: I am not personally interested in your positions or in ‘having the last word’ with you. As I have said before in comments, to the extent that your material offers useful examples of one thing or another relevant to the Catholic clerical abuse matter, then I make comments, which may often include analysis of your comments. I make my analysis of your comments simply because they exemplify so many elements often seen in comments about this Catholic clerical abuse matter and this site is a great spot for providing some analysis of things people interested in the Catholic clerical abuse matter are going to run into all over the place.
 
So then, to your comment of 12:10 AM today.
 
You exaggerate rather largely (I never suggested you don’t have a right to exist or to “breathe”), which neatly paints you as a victim and avoids the actual gravamen of my comments: that I find a great deal of the logic and thinking in your comments insufficient to the assertions that you make.
 
Further, you – as best I can make out from the vague wording – seem to think that since I have never “seen” something, then I have no right to “critique” it. But I most certainly have seen your comments.
 
Or if you are trying to imply that since I have never seen victimization then I have no right to comment upon it, I would respond as follows. A) How on earth do you conclude that I have never experienced victimization? B) Victimization is a rather wide-spread human phenomenon and human experience, so on what grounds do I – as a human being – not have the right to comment about it? C) On the basis of one’s own personal and thus arguably ‘private’ victimization, you and a number of other self-declared victims are demanding public attention, public recognition and acceptance of your stories and claims, public resources, public funds, and very very substantial and significant action on the part of legislators, policy-makers, law-enforcement, and judicial personnel; so by ‘going public’ you and all such other persons have yourselves opened your experiences to public attention (which includes examination, analysis, discussion, and so forth).
 
Since this clearly is a site designed for comments, then  of what use is a comment where you do not to all appearances respond to a comment? How can you claim to have responded to a comment although nobody appears to have seen any response in your response? Is your answer or response somehow there but invisible?
 
And again you repeat by inference your assertion that your best and most masterful responses are not being published (while apparently your sophomoric and sometimes obscene comments are being published). How could this conceivably be and why would it conceivably be? And are you trying to infer that while you make logical and effective responses if you take hours to think about it, yet if you simply bang off a comment off the top of your head that putative competence for logical thought somehow disappears and your sophomoric and obscene mentality suddenly kicks in? This is like turning in a 2-page, half-baked term paper and insisting that you have a much better 10-pager back at home but you didn’t think it was worth bringing it in.
 
And you again blame external forces for your failure to produce anything worthwhile at bat: this time it’s an “unequal playing field” – whatever that means in this context.
 
You are welcome to tell everybody your point of view. But it’s a public comment site, you have chosen to publicly make comments (and some very serious claims and assertions), and you have chosen to do so on a matter of very large public import, to which – on top of everything else – your assertions indicate that you think you have the answers pure and simple. And when difficulties are pointed out and explained at some length, with the material that you produce, you claim to be some a victim of disrespect or of some conspiracy against you. Give that some thought – it seems to be a rather clear and sustained personal pattern.
 
So I can very easily quit in the sense that I am not really personally involved with you or your material at all. I am, however, personally involved with the type of thinking (or lack of it) that has in my estimation driven a great deal of this whole Catholic clerical abuse matter; you just happen to be a continuous example of what I think has been going wrong for quite a while – and that constitutes the only basis of my interest in your comments.
 
As for the rest of the self-indulgent and self-pitying mischaracterizations in the service of making you look like the victim in all this, they’re up there for anyone to see.
 
And lastly, in regard to the baseball bit that somehow appears to you connected to American males: I submit that your biggest “false god” is your own self. And in trying to protect that false-god you will quickly revert to covering up its short-comings by claiming to be victimized and conspired-against. I suggest you give that some serious thought – nor do you have to avoid doing so because any comment you make about it won’t be published here … rather, keep a personal log of your thoughts for your own private reference.
 
It’s a public site, about a public matter. If you choose to have an at-bat, then fine. But don’t blame everything and everyone but yourself if you don’t seem to hit the ball.

Jim, I don't get the point of your posts. Your aim seems to be to insult the commenters on here because they are Catholic.