Philly BOMBSHELL: New Evidence Further Exonerates Wrongfully Convicted Clerics; Will Justice Be Served? Will the Media Ever Take Notice?

Tonight I return to my high school. Junipero Serra High in Gardena, California, where I was raped.

I go to attend a dinner for a teacher, I and everyone else loved. A lay teacher, whose kindness and intelligence helped me, and many, many others at that school, survive.

Would that the same could be said for our marianist teachers. They were vioIent vicious men. (Religion brings so much joy to living. irony)

 I will walk past the rooms where I was raped. Not easy.

But I go to bear witness to my courage and my ability to love and to be a witness for the truth of all the horror that occurred in those years there. I'm that witness.

I'll be taking with me the "kindness, the honesty; the compassion" that you have NOT shown here to victims. You are the catholic church now and YOU are why people, world wide, hate it so.

People are leaving your church for very good reasons, you know. They are leaving because of you. You give the good no reason to stay.

In regard to the comment of the 13th at 231AM:

My experience has been that almost all ‘reunion’ dinners thrown by educational institutions have a fund-drive component, and it is usually not very subtle. Emphasizing that component in the 231AM comment as if it were somehow odd or unusual is rather tendentious indeed, but in the Abusenik Playbook you have to toss whatever you can.

In regard to ‘Abusenik’, by the way, I might point to a Russian “ik” word that has become somewhat familiar to Americans: apparatchik, which simply means an individual who is wholly a creature of some “apparat” or organization (in Soviet-era Russian usage, it refers to individuals who were wholly creatures of the government or Party organization and institutions). No thing-ifying to it at all.

Of course, it also might be that photos of old-time faculty members were up there – as they so very often are – just to remind grads of various faculty members of the grads’ school-days at the place. And perhaps the school doesn’t – as it didn’t way back when – consider the particular faculty member(s) as being perps at all. We have seen that before on this site, in documents contemporary with this or that allegation.

So the conclusion to which we are being pointed – “that’s how much the church cares for victims” – is hardly justified by anything we have read here. However I do agree with the comment that “some things never change”. Oh yes indeed.

One wonders perhaps why so outstanding and impressive a teacher as was being honored at the dinner was not back-in-the-day considered somebody who might be approached for advice about … this or that.

The reflections on the passage of time certainly ring familiar notes, common to almost all old grads returning to an educational institution.

If anyone can connect “denial” about “age” with the “denial about your church” as being anything more than a nice rhetorically-balanced phrasing, then good for them.

However we are then taken – rather deliberately – for a stroll on more complicated ground indeed. An “unbending control … of religion” – which apparently was still clear to the commenter more than half a century later. Is the phrase meant to refer to the consistency and consistently-stated presence of a sustained belief and of a sustained religious emphasis? And is that really characterizable as “fascistic” [correction supplied]? Was there, perhaps, a Mass in the evening’s schedule? Or an opening prayer?

The observation about “everything in high school was about being controlled” is hardly unusual, especially when referring to those institutions as they were back half a century and more ago. And it is a truism to point out that high-schoolers usually need a bit of “control” in terms of discipline (especially physically and mentally); the pedagogic idea was to help ground a certain Aristotelian-Augustinian habitualization of good practices and – not to put too fine a point on it – virtues, of both the maturational and the more formally theological kind.

But then but then but then: this teacher apparently passed on – we are told – that 1930s approach about “working class people” who “speak a different language”. Perhaps indeed they do; but truthfulness is certainly a virtue that recognizes no class boundaries, unless one is a committed Socialist or Marxist. Or perhaps we are to presume that the Socialist-Marxist version of Gnosticism applies here: that ‘the workers’ possess a special enlightenment that the bourgeois and upper classes do not and never-can possess … ?

The teacher’s pedagogical accomplishments – as reported here – might well be judged by their result.

Ditto the asserted failure of most of the rest of the faculty (“the brothers” [sic]]), “none of” whom “gave us anything”. Whether this was the fault of the Brothers or simply the consequence of the capacities of particular students is a pedagogical question that is hardly new.

But it is then some sort of conceptual leap to suddenly and immediately drag in the alleged perp as “the only one who came close very close”. Close to what, one might ask.

As for the final rhetorical flourish, I don’t see the need to “wonder” about such a thing at this point.

For the Catholic church to claim that priests are vicars of Christ, demands

that they suffer for the sins of others. Is that sort of logic, or illogic so difficult

to comprehend?

This is in response to my namesake's response to my first post on this thread. Would the other Mark include in the indivduals Susan Matthews who keeps the blog Catholics 4 Change and disagrees with a lot of what Dave Pierre says? How about Chrssie Foster, a Melbourne (Aust) mum whose daughters were raped by a priest and has been campaining for the Church to take accountablity since? That is understandable and commendable of course but I have never known her to speak out for falsely accused priests. Then there's Regina Lane who fought an entirely different battle with the Church. It was to preserve a Church building which was going on the market. She writes of this battle in her book Saving St. Brigids about which, more here: http://savingstbrigids.com.au/

Now I have only taken a quick look at the book; I haven't read it from cover to cover but I can't see anything there about falsely accused priests, only children abused by priests and re-absued by the Church bishops.

Sadly, I believe what Diana says is true. If only the Church had not swept the crisis under the carpet, we wouldn't have innocent priests going to jail.

In regard to the material of the 16th at 1043AM, I say yet again: In matters of a) spectral evidence that b) appears on the internet, third-parties (readers, jurors) are reduced to a matter of probability rather than proof. And this is especially so when just about all of the material that needs to be examined has already been placed behind a wall of secrecy demanded by the torties and the story-tellers as part of the settlement agreement, thus effectively sealing-off  the stories from becoming “examples” of false – or at least non-credible or incredible – allegations.

I have established the high-probabilities of non-veracious stories and I have demonstrated the type of questioning that needs to be practiced in regard to them.

Thus I do not give “only possibilities” –I have established probabilities, which are not the same as “possibilities”; but those probabilities are rather significant. Until such a time might arise when the original allegations materials are opened to the public, then probabilities are the best anybody can do.

For any allegant to demand “proof” and “examples” when the allegants’ own torties have effectively sealed-off any and all material that could constitute such “proof” and “examples” is the equivalent of somebody who has murdered his parents telling the court that it would have to ask his parents if he had any grudges against them.

And none of what I have written so far in this comment is new since all this ground has been covered before.

Then on the 16th at 344PM we get nothing but snark about Jeff Anderson, whose demonstrated efforts – now a part of the historical record – in his chosen projects have resulted in  a very great deal of success indeed. Weighed against that irrefutable and undeniable reality, any contrary assertions grounded in nothing more than the insistence that we merely “trust” the commenter seem rather weightless.

Then a mere repetition of the 3x5s about the Church setting up SNAP and other organization – all of which has been dealt with before, and with no subsequent counter-demonstrations or rational answers to the problems with that theory ever having been put forward.

What some self-proclaimed “activist victims” claim to see (and only they can see it, while “anyone and everyone” else cannot see it – which is as fine a working example of ‘spectral evidence’ and the ‘Gnostic’ dynamic as one is likely to encounter) is there for any reader to judge for him/herself.

But the reality remains that Jeff Anderson’s Strategies have amassed somewhere around 2.7 billion dollars worth of success, while said self-proclaimed “activist victims” have accomplished … not so very much at all in comparison, whether one measures in terms of dollar-amounts or alternative organizations set-up or in terms of any other measure of ‘success’.

Where have I ever said that “victims” were “a ‘strategy’”? The Anderson Strategies were the strategy, and they have succeeded in their objectives of garnerning settlement-cash for the allegants and huge amounts of fees for the torties themselves. Nor have any such “victims”, with a miniscule number of exceptions, indicated that they are dissatisfied with the outcome of their – and Anderson’s or any other tortie’s – efforts.

Thus the complete circularity of the argument here (the “rapes” created the “victims”, and the “victims” are proven to be authentic because of the “rapes”) fails utterly to demonstrate or establish anything actual at all.  We simply wind up in a carnival midway hall of mirrors, and a circular one at that.

And “rapes” constitute one of the smallest categories in the list of formally-lodged allegations. Unless we want to extend the definition of “rape” like play-dough to include just about anything.

Jeff Anderson may indeed be “ancillary to those rapes” (‘subsequent’ might be a better choice of words than ‘ancillary’ here) but the formal allegants have split 2.7 billion (minus the fees and expenses for the torties) and so I would say that “victims” had a great need for Anderson or at least his Strategies: if they didn’t have him they would have had to invent him.

And, lastly, we must consider just how many ‘victims’ (genuine or otherwise-classifiable) are included in that global assertion that “we [victims] don’t need him”. Because it appears as if Anderson was vitally necessary and greatly needed, since he (and his Strategies) delivered the goodies in amounts nobody might have imagined before those Strategies came into effect.  And nobody else and nobody else’s carefully-designed work has produced anything more amazing and more successful by any measure.

Or is there any number of known payees who rejected their settlement check because money wasn’t why they went to a tortie and put-forward their story or stories?

On the 17th at 1028AM we simply get yet again another repetition of the 3×5 insistence that it was the Church that “invented” Jeff Anderson. This still-undemonstrated and ungrounded assertion, for which no coherent rational theory to support it has yet been forthcoming, is introduced by means of – yet again – a quickie riff on the word “invent”. If there is any evidence – or even any rationally probable theory – as to how the Church could not only be in cahoots with Anderson but actually had ‘invented’ him, then we would need to see it put up here. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

There are numerous other lawyers around the country who have “appeared on the scene in the last 30 years”; D’Antonio, in his section on the events leading up to the  Boston Globe shenanigans prior to launching  of the January-2002 phase of the Matter, discusses the role of the local Anderson-Strategy tortie there at length. Thus the sense of next sentence’s question (beginning “How likely is that …”) fails at the outset. Nor was Jeff Anderson was the attorney of record for the monster 2006 LA settlement for the 500-plus allegants either.

Then the marvelous remark about a conversation with a “fellow victim” to the effect that “we should have united as a group and had lawyers bid to represent us”. Of course, they all did go to a tort attorney, did they not – the comment-maker included? And the bit about their imagining themselves trying to create a bidding-war for themselves among tort-attorneys is simply too splendidly revelatory not to notice: lawsuits (on the basis of allegedly life-wrecking trauma) calculatedly put on the market for the highest bidder (as if torties could legally promise a certain result) or the lowest-fee bidder (which also raises the fatuous thought that torties would or could take less than their cut).

And – as if on cue – we are adjured to “believe me” yet again, this time in regard to the cockamamie vision that had these “victims” done their horse-trading, then they would have avoided the 40-percent tortie fees. (It is about the money, isn’t it?)

Alas, poor torties just get no respect at all: here they go to all the trouble of hooking up the allegants on a successful surf-ride to big-bucks, and they are simply abused for being greedy profiteers off of others’ life-wrecking trauma … after the checks had been cashed, of course.

Then – apparently as ‘evidence’ – we are simply given anecdotes which, for all we know, may be mere constructions or phantasms. What jury cases, I would ask; could we get the name of a Party or a docket-number and the particular court involved? Or at least a news article (with its link or identifying bits)?

As for being offered 12 thousand dollars by the Marianists back in the 1990s: it would be helpful to know if the Marianists (and no doubt their Counsel and Insurers) had come to the considered conclusion that the story was of such a level of credibility as to only warrant that much. Without such information it is utterly unjustified to characterize (overtly or by implication) the Marianists as tightwads or insensitive; perhaps they were simply judging the quality of the material presented to them.

But in any case, the brilliance and efficacy of the Anderson Strategies is clearly demonstrated by the actual subsequent historical record: when the Stampede was factored in, and the ‘bundled lawsuit’ tactic, in the mid-2000s, the same story – now even further removed in time – netted its teller a million (minus, of course, the outrageous tortie-take). The horror.

And apparently we are a bit off to think that 2.7 billion dollars is “a lot of money”. But then but then but then but then but then: JR goes and makes precisely the point I have been making for quite some time in regard to the shrewd brilliance of the ‘bundled lawsuit’ tactic: it would have cost far more to defend at trial against each Plaintiff (and/or each allegation) than to settle out of court. The benefit to the allegants and torties being that in an out-of-court settlement, the ‘stories’ would not be subjected to the possible public exposure that the Billy-Doe story (or stories) now receive in Philadelphia – nor, once the secrecy clause was demanded by the torties, could those ‘stories’ ever be subjected to any actual analysis at all. So very very neat.

As for the “rape” and “cover-up”, we really don’t know, do we? And given the points I just made in the immediately preceding paragraph above, we probably never will.

And I would also add – in light of the response comment I made today in regard to the ‘Mark-A’ comment, that this ‘cover-up’ trope is a well-known element in the scripting of those 1970s ‘corporate depredation’ movies: evil corporation does nasty things, victimizes many many, and then covers-up. That was the script, as some readers may recall from back in the day.

I was under the clear impression that no adults had been told (have we not been previously informed that back then one simply was too embarrassed to reveal such embarrassing things?) “51 years ago”. And not that paragon lay teacher either. But for the purposes of discussion, let us consider what might have happened if the police had been called: it is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that the police would have asked some (or even more acute versions of) the questions that were posed to the story in comments on this site and that, consequently, the police would have had an even more acute version of the response that we saw here: this doesn’t quite make the sense it needs to make. Of course, the police back then had not been trained in the type of stuff we read in the Michigan Manual.

And how we get to the conclusion “Oh, I was raped all right” from the material in the sentences immediately preceding it is a process whose logical coherence is at best elusive.

In response to the question “Why?” posed to me, I would answer: I consider ‘compensation’ obtained under false pretexts to be most certainly “dirty or immoral”. Is that point hard to grasp?

Then – and yet again – the sly but failed effort to compare a) the ‘damage’ of the alleged (and only ‘spectrally-evidenced’) abuse with b) having one’s car wrecked in an MVA. And again I point out: in the MVA scenario we have a clearly wrecked car with a witnessed MVA; in the assorted proffered abuse scenarios we have no such corroborating evidence. (And of course: a good insurance investigator would then look to distinguish between a car already-damaged or purposely damaged by its owner who then falsely claimed it had been in an MVA or a car deliberately or through the negligence of its owner involved in an actual MVA, as opposed to a car ‘honestly’ – as it were – involved in an MVA.

And I would also then ask: if somebody cooked-up a false accusation against you, and stood to cost you a huge bundle, then you’d try to determine the veracity of that accusation, wouldn’t you?

If there is any grounds for considering the “idea that there is a large crowd of fake victims” to be “nonsensical”, I will simply say that in all the time and pixels spent on the point on this site, I have not seen any substantial and coherent explanation of why that idea would be “nonsensical”. The word hangs here as nothing more than an epithetical toss-off.

And then the commenter immediately goes on to undermine himself on precisely this point: he says “Maybe”. Then he says “I don’t know”. Then he says “I do know”. Readers are invited to go figure.

But then the commenter merely gives us a further anecdotal bit: he hasn’t “met any in my 12 years experience with the subject”. Ooooh, sounds professional and competent. Until one asks: just how would one go about determining if this or that, let alone every, specific case were “fakes” or not? If one has conducted that assessment of each and every case one has encountered, then what methodology was used to effect the conclusion of genuineness? If one has not conducted such assessments, then on what basis and of what actual value is the bit about not having “met any”?

The mere fact that we are faced here with such a mishmash says a lot, imo.

The concluding math problem can stay up where it was put for the amusement of the readers.

On the 17th at 1047AM we are – in a stunningly marvelous performance – given a splendid example of lack of self-awareness. Which commenter is the offensive problem here?

Then on the 17th at 1057 we – yet again – revisit the Church’s facilities for troubled and dysfunctional priests: I had said in comments a while back that the Church was ahead of just about every other corporate and government institution in the country in setting-up special facilities, staffed by competent professionals trained in the best-practices of the era, to help variously-dysfunctional priests.

The Abuseniks have taken this inconvenient historical reality and tried to turn it into a negative by insisting that these facilities functioned simply as hide-outs or some such for the (allegedly) ravenous child abusers. And I would be surprised if there were only four such facilities but let that number stand for purposes of the discussion here.

I have no idea who considers Ronald Reagan and John Wayne to be “your two Gods” (curiously and very uncharacteristically capitalized here) – but that they “came from Hollywood” is surely nothing more than a riff. They “came from” Illinois and Iowa, respectively. And if they also came from the era of the studio system, of what relevance might that be?

But it’s true indeed that in addition to the Church being ahead of corporations and government agencies in the setting-up of treatment facilities, it must also be added that the Church was well ahead of Hollywood in the studio-era or any time before or since that era.

Harry Hay and Harvey Milk, examples of only two 'gay' icons, out of many, supportive of man-boy 'love', would never persecute the homosexuality expressed in the Church throughout the 70s and 80s since it aligned with their 'sexosophy and sexigion'.

And, clearly, there is huge support for the Hollywood 'child' casting couch throughout 'gaydom', because as we all have been 'taught', if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, and I dont hear or see any of them screaming for any of those studio or production company heads, or boycotting the works of 'art' produced by these pedophiles. So, Hollywood is certainly not part of the solution; and it is certainly homocentric and homophilic.

I'd have call these facts indisputable evidence of a double standard. The only logical reason for this double standard is anti-Catholic bigotry.

Hypocrites!

Here's some of your history for you : http://opentabernacle.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/a-holy-week-reflection-on-church-and-state-and-pope-francis/#more-4055

In regard to the 20th at 824PM: A “treaty” may be roughly the same as a Concordat, but the actual key point is that a treaty is not an “alliance” – which was the problem with Deschner’s historical manipulations. During the Cold War the US and the USSR signed various treaties but they were hardly in a diplomatic “alliance”.

Deschner – and probably this Open Tabernacle piece – tries to claim that by signing a Concordat with Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany then the Vatican had clearly and deliberately ‘allied’ itself with Fascism and Nazism. But Pius XI had entered into numerous Concordats with the various post-WW1 governments (including the Soviet Union), as I mentioned in my prior comment here and in the extended discussion of Deschner back when his material was first proffered here. Yet the Vatican can consequently no more be said to have ‘allied’ itself with those governments than the US can be said to have allied-itself with the USSR by signing various treaties with the USSR.

What it interesting in all of this is that Deschner’s/ Open Tabernacle’s approach to history closely resembles the Abusenik approach: a) an imprecise use of terms in order to b) conveniently make the target seem evil or nefarious.

It remains to be seen whether in such a problem we are seeing i) a basic deficiency in language and historical skills that have led otherwise well-intentioned individuals down an inaccurate path or ii) a deliberate (and quite possibly malicious) manipulation of terminology for the convenience of an agenda.

And surely there has been much material in comments on this site about the similar misuse of terms in the characterizations made in various stories and allegations.

Intelligent people know there are coincidences in life. Yes I have Cherokee relatives. So what? I even named him. What the f is your problem?

Geraldo Rivera went to school as Jerry Rivers before he realized using his latino name might help him get into college. Elizabeth Warren claims her ancestry so what?

Every word I've said is gospel. You can bet on it.

You won't even tell us who you are. So why should we believe your being truthful about anything you say? You aren't truthful about who you are here from the start of each of your posts. Your name is a lie.

Are we supposed to believe you're the brains and Delphin's the invasion force in the latest "onward Christian Soldiers" show?. The last people, who tried to pass religion off as an automaticly virtueous standard for the state, above criticism, called themselves fascists.

In regard to the spate of comments following mine of the 22nd at 539PM, I simply point out that we have nothing more here than repetitions of the same assertions that were made originally – and let readers decide how many ‘coincidences’ or ‘serendipities’ can be believed before breakfast.

However there is one substantive point to be made: on the 22nd at 1001PM we are once again given the bit about ‘names’, as if real-names do anything at all to improve the quality of comments (examples to the contrary are easily and vividly available here). Whether a real-name does anything to make a comment more “truthful” is also part of the package, and readers may consider that as they will.

Using a screen-name is hardly not-“truthful” – it is not in any way a lie to say I am ‘Publion’. Once again, we see the Abusenik looseness with terms that they toss-around, and once again one might consider just how much of a role this characteristic played in the claims and stories and allegations.

I put up questions and ideas – they do not require any reader to assume anything since they make few assertions that must be taken solely on the credibility or presumed ‘truthfulness’ of myself as a commenter. Rather, the ideas and questions, and the explanatory material, can be considered by each reader for rationality, coherence, and logical competence. And the readers may judge as they will. I do not demand that they ‘believe’ me nor insist that they ‘trust’ me; instead, I offer material that they can think about and judge for themselves.

So my material does not require readers to judge my ‘truthiness’ because I make no assertions that are unexplained or un-grounded or that qualify as those category-iii assertions I discussed in a recent comment.

The remark trying to somehow connect religion and “fascists” can stay up there where it was put to twist in the wind. I have made no claims to being “automatically virtuous” [corrections supplied] and the bit about passing-off religion as “an automatically virtuous [ditto] standard for the state” makes no sense that I can see, especially in light of any material I have put up in comments.