SHOCK STORY: Notorious Church-Suing Lawyer Obtained Clients by Phoning Parishioners and ‘Fishing for Victims’

 Although I acknowledge that there have been some real heinous cases of predators in priestly disguise, the media has jumped on the bandwagon to make sure that any priest who  is accused is automatically guilty. Their target is essentially the Catholic Church, and the reason is to discredit the moral teaching. The teaching of the gospel of life and of sexual morality is particularly despised. The lure of quick windfalls of money also became a factor.  People (lawyers and alleged victims) who had no conscience regarding the telling of lies in order to get rich began  taking advantage of the defiled reputation of Catholic priests. And there are those charlatan psychotherapists who assisted in the fabrication of false memories in people suffering from psychological problems.  There is a snake bed of false accusations to uncover. Whether you agree with the teaching of the Church or not, you cannot believe that it is right to falsely sully the reputation of another human being and even inflict long jail terms for crimes they did not commit. Truth will prevail in the end.

I was sodomized by the friendly parish priest hundreds of times from 1953 to 1956 because back then I believed I had to obey a priest or spend eternity in hell. If I had a dollar for everytime a "good" Catholic called me a malcontent, a trouble maker, an evil person, etc after I mustered up the courage to talk about at the age of 49 I'd have some money now. The hierarchy made it very plain to me that the statute of limitations ran out long before I started talking. No wonder the hierarchy fights so hard to keep the statute of limitations from being changed so people like me who kept the secret for years before talking can have justice. After all my dealings with the hierarchy I can only conclude they are for the most part nothing more than amoral parasites

An interesting bunch of comments.
 
In the Western legal system, in criminal matters it is the DA’s Office and the police – acting with the sovereign authority of the government – that investigate. In civil matters, attorneys have always been barred from ‘fishing’ for clients; nor is it possible for a civil tort attorney to ‘investigate’ and simultaneously be in the business of acquiring clients. The Bar and the courts have long recognized this and thus there are the regulations – which Mr. Manly appears to have breached, and not for the first time.
 
In that regard, I recall that one of the problems in the recent Philadelphia case was that the DA kept as a Defendant a priest against whom the DA’s own intensive canvassing and investigation could not turn up any further allegations.
 
Nor is it possible to excuse his actions by claiming that he is ‘exposing the truth’, since it is precisely the point that we don’t really know what the truth is in the matter; that’s what a formal and disinterested and impartial investigation is designed to do. Civil tort attorneys can investigate the case of a client who has sought their services, but are barred from approaching potential clients or seeking to drum up business. If this is what Manly has been doing, there is indeed a story here – by any legal and professional standards.
 
The assertion that a person can be raped “hundreds of times” over a period of three years by the same perpetrator poses a challenge to any reasonable assessment, no matter how predisposed to generosity and indulgence the assessor might be. Of course, the claimant might be speaking figuratively, but if that is the case, then how can we know where he draws the line at all between truth and exaggeration in the first place? This is a problem of fundamental commitment to veracity that exists not only in the internet forum but also in the basic reality of making the claim; it is precisely the same issue highlighted in the Clohessy deposition where that gentleman asserted that he operates on a double-standard of truth: the Church must be held to the strictest standards, whereas victims and – self-servingly – their representatives must be given the widest latitude in being ‘truthful’. The usual come-back claim here is that there is a ‘larger truth’, but that has been dealt with at some length in prior comments on this site.
 
Of what relevance an internet story about abortion in an Irish Catholic hospital has to do with anything discussed on this site is anybody’s guess. That ‘JR’ – why is it not surprising? – suddenly recalls being (an inpatient?) “in that hospital”, that very hospital,  is … what it is and every reader is free to make of it what s/he will. Perhaps he was merely conducting an “investigation” and was not there to avail himself of any of its professional or clinical services.
 
As is the assertion that the Catholic hierarchy is “majority gay” (what is it with JR and gayness?) and “self-oppressed” (whatever that means). But if his claim about his being an embarrassment to relatives in his childhood is to be credited, then there are far less convoluted possible explanations for his relatives’ discomfort than the proffered (and conveniently self-serving) explanation that he was a ‘victim’; his material produced with remarkable consistency on this site certainly lends itself to the possibility of ‘issues’ reaching far deeper and pre-dating any putative abuse experiences. I point this out merely as a matter of competent analysis and consideration of causality.
 
The bit about the Church somehow no longer having the “moral status” to address moral issues in society – if it is to be considered a rational and logical principle and not simply one more communication from the tin-foil hat – serves to equally undermine the US government’s status in making strong moral stands for democracy, since it has by its own admission engaged in such practices as deliberate torture and has caused the physical (not metaphorical or figurative) deaths of a rather large number of human beings in the past twenty or so years, including women and children (whose loss, some may recall, was publicly characterized by Madeleine Albright – then Secretary of State – as “acceptable” in her scheme of things).
 
Ditto another message from the tin-foil hat has revealed that there are few falsely accused priests. This bit has been dealt with before in comments on this site. I’d be careful about throwing around the “credibly-accused” term until it was determined exactly what definition of “credible” is being presumed; the Bishop-Accountability site had to put up a disclaimer about the clerics it put on its marquis ‘list’ for much that very reason.
 
And also from the tin-foil hat: I am apparently some form of conservative. Which is both odd and illogical, seeing as how the greatest enabler of the American mutation of victimist theory was Ronald Reagan in the 1980s (precisely when the McMartin Pre-School Day-Care Satanic Ritual Abuse trials and the Catholic Abuse Matter suddenly sprouted up). I could once again ask for some explanation, but apparently the messages from the tin-foil hat only dispense one-liners, and don’t provide the wearer with any larger, rational or coherent explanations.
 
I think ‘Julie’ is on to something with her thought that this site has finally attracted the attention of the SNAP types.  Perhaps the fact that the lawyers are now coming under scrutiny has something to do with that. Maybe some rational and substantive discourse might develop out of it; but from my own reading of comments on some of the SNAP-friendly sites (and NCR’s is a tame example of the genre) I think we will mostly see further examples of the inimitable stylings which we have already seen.
 
Last point: it cannot but be of clinical interest that the person most demonstrably unable (or – let’s not rule it out – unwilling) to spell correctly or even to conceive and express thoughts coherently considers persons not so characterizable as “verbose”.

A couple of things.

First, in regard to ‘JR’, I think the record shows with sufficient clarity at this point that ‘JR’ has ‘issues’ the nature of which are sufficiently probable for me to assure the readership of the following: I do not in any way seek to bait or taunt persons not fully in control of themselves; if there is material in the ‘JR’ comments about which I decide to comment, it is only because I think that such material – whether it be the content of assertions or the various rhetorical gambits deployed – needs to be noted because anybody who wishes to delve more deeply into the Catholic Abuse Matter is going to encounter this type of stuff. I imagine that SNAP meetings (such as the one JR reports having attended) are chock-full of this sort of stuff and that it constitutes the general content of discourse there, as it does without a doubt on the various relevant websites where adherents allow their expressions to flow freely.

In fact, I have considered it a positive boon that through all of the material ‘JR’ produces in comments readers are presented with such clear and unmistakable examples of SNAP-type material; through ‘JR” the Oz-like curtain is drawn back and we are able to see what mentalities actually play and have played for so long a major role in fueling this whole thing.

I am also grateful to TMR for deleting the expletives.

Mr. McGee’s quotation of Judy Herman is fair enough and he is welcome to embrace her thoughts. But I point out again that Ms. Herman starts the chain of her thought precisely after making the huge presumption that is fundamentally at question: she presumes ‘victims’ – self-proclaimed – are exactly and everything that they claim to be, and that the same goes for their allegations or stories.

Having thus quietly (not to say slyly) moved past the core Question simply by presuming it away, she takes a legitimate-sounding high ground by making a plea for the (presumed genuine) victims to be heard and so forth. Which seems a nice and even logical thing to do. Which it is. If you presume that all victims are a) genuine and b) demonstrably credible.

But that presumption is exactly what is at issue.

And thus the victims’ demands – in Ms. Herman’s statement of it – are already hanging in the air when they are made. And this is especially so when on the basis of that huge presumption such extravagant demands are placed upon the public – for legislation, for shared outrage that tends to stampede and sidetrack rational assessment, for all manner of weakening of fundamental and traditional jurisprudential protections.

Thus it is not at all the whole truth – to say the least – for Ms. Herman to imply that the victims seek very little except some empathy and that what “action” they demand is a small enough thing to ask for. As we have seen for decades, what ‘victims’ – or rather their self-appointed spokespersons and organizations – demand is not “small” or harmless. The “action” that is demanded has demonstrated itself to be very significant and substantive and heavily freighted with negative consequences for the integrity of the Constitutional justice system and – through the manipulative stampeding of public opinion – the integrity of deliberative democratic political process itself. (I am saying here nothing that I have not already discussed at length in comments on this site.)

I strongly approve of genuine and competently-run ‘support groups’ and supportive therapy for genuine victims. But even in the matter of genuine victimization, I cannot approve of the methods by which public opinion is manipulatively inflamed and legislative and judicial process skewed. Surely – it seems to me – any genuine victim who is also a Citizen of this Constitutional republic can understand the larger issues and dangers involved here, many of which dangers have already been actualized.

Nor is this merely a veiled defense of the Church and the hierarchy. First, because I do not deny the possibility of genuine victimization being perpetrated at the hands of some priests. Second, because it is now clear that this method (which I will call ‘victimist’) has migrated to many other areas of national life and public discourse.

To use a short image: it is hugely imprudent and dangerously self-defeating to burn down the ship to get rid of the rats. I say this without in any way inferring that all priests and bishops are demonstrably ‘rats’ – far from it. Both the Republic and the Church are Vessels bequeathed to all of us; and as the deep ocean and its stormy great waters once again threaten us as they have rarely if ever done before since 1787, then I firmly believe that we need those Vessels to be as strong as they can be made and kept.

This is a sad story affecting all religions that I know of. (A friend is married to a pediatrician who has spent 'too many' hours on the stand as a witness as to physical signs of abuse; he says 'all religions have sinned'.)
What I find missing from the mainstream churches is the knowledge that they had the means to deal with most of the offenders right in their own Bibles, at Mt 18:15-17, which I quote from the Douay:
Jesus: "But if your brother shall offend against you, go, and rebuke him between you and him alone. If he shall hear you, you shall gain your brother. And if he will not hear you, take with you one or two more: that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may stand. And if he will not hear them: tell the church. And if he will not hear the church, let him be to you as the heathen and publican."
To update the language, 'If a church member [lay or clergy] is molesting children, confront him privately. If he listens, confesses and turns himself around, you have gained him for the Lord. If not, take another one or two mature Christians to repeat the conversation. If he still doesn't listen, report to the congregation overseers (or elders or senior priest or whatever), and they will announce that he is to be treated as an outcast.' That is, excommunicated.
What is common to so many of these cases is that the overseers had not the courage to follow these steps, even from the first. So many wayward clergy were protected by so many bishops that their bad ways continued under color of authority, often in new congregations that were given no accurate knowledge of the situation. And that means the civil authorities ("Caesar") were not notified, either.
Too much bureaucracy, not enough Christianity.

Is sad that one is labeled anti-Catholic because one believes the only way to stop clergy from molesting the faithful is to confront the evil by exposing it. But, it was much more comfortable practicing Catholicism when we refused to look at evil. Damn those people who try to force me to use common sense.