Doing their job exposing the truth: Los Angeles' Jason Felch, Barbara Jones,
Howard Blume, Jason Song, and Kim Christensen
Reporters in Los Angeles are highlighting the fact that the criminal abuse of children is not really very bothersome to a lot of people, unless Catholic clergymen are involved.
This past year has been a banner one for journalists in Los Angeles who have unmasked stomach-turning episodes of child sex abuse and cover-ups in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and elsewhere. However, there has been almost no resonant outrage over the sickening findings that these writers have uncovered. Where's the outrage in the rest of the media?
Los Angeles Times: Sex abuse at LAUSD
Just last week, the State of California released an audit report into how LAUSD handled allegations of child sex abuse at its schools. And as the Los Angeles Times' Howard Blume reports, the results of the audit were not good – at all:
"Los Angeles school officials failed to promptly report nearly 150 cases of suspected teacher misconduct — including allegations of sexual contact with students — to state authorities as required by law, an audit released Thursday concluded.
"The audit found that L.A. Unified submitted at least 144 cases of alleged teacher misconduct more than a year later than required, 31 of them more than three years late.
"In one case, the district reported an alleged sexual relationship between a teacher and a student in March – 3 1/2 years after the teacher left the district over the incident, the audit said. The 'lack of timely reporting' prevented the commission from taking steps to keep the teacher from working elsewhere."
As we have reported before, the Times actually has an excellent record in exposing LAUSD's serious sex abuse problem. The Times' Jason Song, for example, has done some excellent investigative work.
Unfortunately, the Times' efforts have not received the kind of attention they deserve. The story of LAUSD's shocking audit, for example, was barely reported outside Southern California.
Los Angeles Daily News: Sex abuse at LAUSD
Although her work does not get nearly as much attention as it should, Barbara Jones has long done some very important reporting over at the L.A. Daily News.
And just as with the coverage at her cross-town rivals at the Times, Jones' work has not garnered the nationwide notice that it warrants.
This lack of attention is notable, because unlike Catholic abuse, almost all of which occurred decades ago, Jones has spotlighted abuse happening today in our local public schools.
The disparity in media coverage and outrage is glaring.
Los Angeles Times: The Boy Scouts
In addition, the Times has also published some blockbuster work by Jason Felch and Kim Christensen exposing rampant abuse nationwide over decades in the Boy Scouts.
Felch and Christensen have exposed damning documents, and as recently as Sunday, they reported that the Boy Scouts actually opposed mandatory reporting laws.
While the pair's reporting certainly has received some notice, it has not nearly attracted the level attention and outrage that decades-old abuse by Catholic priests have.
Double standard? You bet.
Molesting Boy Scout leaders was a joke and a sad reality, long before abusing priests supplemented them in joke writers minds.
I wonder why SNAP isn't generating tons of press releases on this matter and sending them out to all the papers.
I would say that this article contains the strongly suggestive indicators that the Catholic subset of the Abuse Matter (which is itself a subset of the old Sex-Offense Stampede of 20 or more years ago) has been specifically underwritten and enabled by some congeries of ‘special interests’ (about which I have commented at length before).
Clearly no general ‘abuse’ (sexual and otherwise), and even abuse-of-children, has received the attention lavished upon the Catholic subset. (Although the LA reporters are to be congratulated, and TMR also for bringing this bit to light.)
So the Question quickly presents itself: Why is this? Why the sustained and specific focus on the Catholic subset of an ‘abuse’ (however defined) that is indubitably far more widespread and – to use this word carefully – ‘common’ in American culture?
Clearly the usual SNAP-ish explanation is insufficient: i.e. that the Church is “unique” and so its abusiveness (however defined) is unique. I can’t see a sizable chunk of the American public having so specific and urgent a concern for a primarily arcane (and rather dubiously-grounded) theological explanation. Nor has such a putative theological interest expanded to involve other churches and religions.
Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) eagerly hires homosexuals.
LAUSD has sovereign immunity. It is not easily looted by trial lawyers.
LAUSD is a parking place for Democrat career politicians and hangers-on who are between jobs in more lucrative and visible positions in state and federal government.
LAUSD's teachers unions are a rich source of support for left-wing causes.
LAUSD, as a public school system, is widely considered to be a mainstream American institution in a way the Church is not.
LAUSD does not teach sexual abstinence or chastity.
A little thought can produce many more examples of why the usual crowd that rushes the Church like ants at a picnic is uninterested in LAUSD's wrongdoing.
Again allegations that The Catholic Church is being picked out and focused on comparatively doesn't ring true to me. I would say something if I thought that was true. I'm not a bigot; I am afraid that you just have that many perps. Plus all the financial manuevouring by the Archdiocess i.e. Missouri; and Wisconsin etc. tends to keep the Church's behavior about victims in the news. Just my opinion.
Jim, There are none so blind as those who will not see. Your agenda is clouding your vision. If you can read all of the posts on this site and still have that opinion, you are simply being willfully ignorant. You ARE a bigot. I remember you coming on here and spouting off all kinds of ignorant untruths about the Catholic church.
JR, I can't agree with the idea that the explanation is simply that "there are that many perps", for reasons I've gone into before.
But you submit it here as your "opinion" and that's your right and I fully support your right to state it.
I do not often find myself agreeing with your material, but if we all simply offer our opinions in the spirit of sharing what we can see, then I think that's just what makes this site valuable. So I strongly support your 'opinion' approach. If i can say this supportively and respectfully and I do not in any way intend this to be condescending or any such thing: keep offering your opinions.
What else have I or any of us been giving here but our opinions? I am not a judge. I can make no rulings.
I do appreciate your tone. Thank you.
News alert! The L.A. files on priests who've abused are being released with the hierarchs, who moved the abusers around, names Deleated………..Because the Church thinks it's supraspecial (and to you all it is .)that doesn't release it from liability and from honoring our contract of settlement here in Los Angeles. In the L.A. Times the hand picked Judge Tevrizian, seems to be working for the paranoids side pretending as you do that there is a big bad witch hunt, Joe Mc Carthy style going on agaist the wealthiest religion on the planet. He said he didn't want to upset people by telling the whole truth.
All because of the victims, that you do not wish to compensate. Fair enough but if you've got the money to pay people for the harm, the horror they've gone through (and how it has changed them for the negative.) And if you don't compensate them; then who are you.?Certainly not a person of character who pays their just debts. You just don't want to do it. And that's the simple truth of it.
With absolutely no examples of mobs at Church doors with pitchforks and torches and very little if any criminal prosecutions' how you can maintain the illusion that your Church is under attack? It is beyond me. Are we not to mention when criminals and their cover ups are caught out? Have the rules changed in the country? Again you all seem to be forgetting who is on your side. Are you going to go with what Jesus would do? Or give me an alternative. ah! yes! Or are you going to do what Bill Donahue would do?
The publishing of the most recent L.A.Times article Saturday on the Didacted hierarchs names on the now being released records in L.A. is so manipulated. I could heave.
Published on a Saturday. People are so busy they won't even notice. And SNAP is where? Australia?
No demonstrations. Why no press? You know why and so do I. SNAP only underlines hostility and confrontation about minor, obvious issues and does that so distastefully to the people in the pews that they cling to their leadership. And it skips, for whose benefit, the big story?
I use the SNAP phrase to remind you of the war SNAP has created with the Church. the phrase is: SNAP "Blasts" the Church. That's Molotov cocktail lanquage. You don't hear the Church say it "Blasts" the victims. And that "war" language has been used by SNAP constantly and consistantly for two decades plus. Why would a victims' " movement" choose such violent imagery to win the hearts and minds of the people in the pews: our very own families and neighbors? The answer is: a real movement wouldn't.
The exact quote from the L.A. judge was that he wanted the Church files not to be used to "embarrass or ridicule the Church".
I don’t want to get ahead of DP/ TMR on this weekend’s release of documents in L.A., but I did go to the L.A. Times site and read their article (first link at the end of this comment) and also looked at the single document they provided as a specimen/example of what might be coming when all of documents are released (second link at the end of this comment).
Several thoughts and questions come to me, but first a thought about the question as to whether Catholics can consider the Church ‘under attack’ if there are no mobs with pitchforks at the doors, like villagers outside the castle in a Frankenstein movie.
There is more than sufficient historical precedent for governmental efforts to discredit the Church’s public status and integrity in order to clear a path for a government’s own agenda: Bismarck did it (it’s where we get the term Kulturkampf (culture war) – Bismarck specifically made the Church his target in order to clear paths for his government’s programs and policies; Hitler did it both by threat of physically imprisoning Catholic clergy and notable Catholic politicians (he had the head of the Catholic Center Party killed during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in June, 1934) and by threatening to interfere with Catholic education and also by trying to convict an entire Bavarian monastery of sexual-impropriety (sort of a replay of the French king’s charges against the Knights Templar centuries before) although that attempt failed rather miserably. Stalin was both more overt (imprisoning and eliminating numerous Orthodox clergy and hierarchs) and more subtle (getting regime-friendly hierarchs appointed). Mussolini, of course, needed only rely on the intimidating fact that the Vatican was completely surrounded by his army and Fascist Party goons (whatever jokes one still might want to make about ‘the Italian army’ in those days, it was more than capable of dealing with the Swiss Guards).
But there is a second general approach a government may take: Italian Leninist and Communist Antonio Gramsci’s early 20th century plan for subversion by a sustained campaign of revealing or – if necessary – creating every possible shortcoming of a targeted organization in order to reduce its credibility and standing among the public and thus reduce or – best case – eliminate its ability to obstruct your objectives. This plan of Gramsci’s is specifically non-violent (Gramsci’s whole effort was directed at working out how to subvert the West, where there was little chance of overt armed revolution on the Russian model of the early 1900s); so with Gramsci you don’t get crowds with pitchforks, but instead you get carefully staged and calibrated publicity campaigns and so forth. It is this Gramscian approach – specifically designed for deployment in Western countries – that seems a very probable model here in this Catholic Matter.
Gramsci’s methods have figured largely in the development of current American secularist strategy, especially as adopted by radical-feminists here (read Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, for example).
Now as for my initial thoughts on the limited material (the LA Times article of this past weekend and the single specimen diocesan document they put online) I have found.
First, it still remains cloudy as to the relationship between the court settlement of 2006 (600 million dollars for 562 victims, minus tort-attorneys’ cut and expenses) and the release of documents – the LAT article does nothing to address or explain that relationship. The case was concluded – as we have been informed by JR on this site and by the retired judge overseeing the release – and yet if the case was concluded then this release of documents (theoretically an element of the case settlement) is somehow just happening. Was the ‘agreement’ to release documents ‘informal’ and non-enforceable? Was it formally an element of the case conclusion in 2006? Was it Ordered by the cognizant Court?
This is not a quibbling matter since the retired federal judge overseeing the case has said that “the case is over”, so I still can’t connect all the dots here. If the release of documents was a formal element in the settlement of the case, then the case is not over until release is completed; if the case can be rightly said to be ‘over’ then the release of documents could not have been a formal element of the case or its settlement since that release is only now taking place, more than half a decade later.
There is a brouhaha over the fact that this same judge has allowed the names of any prelates referenced in the documents to be blacked-out (a decision which may be overruled by the sitting judge who oversees the retired judge). His reason for this has been crystallized in the news reporting (that I have seen) by his comments to the effect that there’s no need to further embarrass the Church.
As best I can discern, the retired judge’s point is that since the particular 2006 case is settled and over, and since it’s now pretty much generally established that some prelates – especially prior to the Dallas reforms of a decade ago – didn’t take sufficiently robust measures, then there isn’t any sufficient need to beat this dead horse any longer.
This has upset many whose primary concern, it seems from what I have read, is to expose the names of the prelates (and I expect the allegations in the case went back some number of decades before 2006 and – quite possibly – were even then mostly ‘historical’ rather than ‘current’).
Part of the problem here stems, I think, from the weirdly long period allowed to elapse between the settlement of the 2006 case and the current release of documents: possibly half a decade and more ago there was less of a generally-established public sense of how the hierarchy handled priests before the Dallas reforms; the retired judge may quite accurately reflecting the fact that at this point, 6 years later, that is no longer the case. Meanwhile, persons who, for whatever reasons, are and have been deeply invested in exposing the names of the bishops and prelates (and – it gets a little fuzzy here – it seems the individual priests as well) are claiming Foul.
The police – or some of them – have chimed in helpfully that release of the names might help in investigations. But the police and DA have the authority to get the names on their own without any public release, so this bit – I would say – goes more to that old ‘police trawl investigation’ gambit that we just recently saw exposed by the Daily Mail in the UK: toss names out like chum in the water and sit back to see who among the public phones in an allegation and let the games begin. I would also add that any priest whose case was ‘settled’ (‘over his head’, so to speak)by the formal Party Defendant – the Archdiocese – cannot be presumed to be legally ‘guilty’ … but no doubt this is a point that will be lost in the general media scrum, which would serve the purposes of i) a police trawl and ii) the Keep The Ball Rolling crowd and iii) any other special-interests concerned to reduce the credibility of the Church.
The comments to the LAT article give you a sense of how certain elements are thinking.
Then there is the single specimen/example document put up on the LAT site (as of this afternoon, anyway). It is a Memo from 1996 – now 16 years ago, and half a decade before the Dallas reforms – from a Monsignor-rank official to other official persons (only the last name of the youth involved is deleted). Apparently a Monsignor (pastor?) had discovered a parish priest with the boy up in the priest’s quarters in the rectory. The boy was interviewed and pronounced himself unmolested and not unhappy at receiving the priest’s attention; the boy mentioned that the priest often took him places although if they spent an overnight one or the other would sleep on the floor.
In comments typed on the side of the Memo, the reviewing official notes that this is “grooming behavior” by all reasonable standards (this is 1996, recall) and that he sees “a problem” here because (already in 1996) this is a clear violation of policies regarding relationships between priests and minors.
That’s the Memo. No crime has been committed and no complaint voiced by the interviewed minor – who is actually neither an allegant (in the Memo) nor claiming to be a victim. There is no additional information as to the present (2012) status of this 1996 priest or anything else.
I don’t know why this particular Memo was selected as a specimen/example. There is no ‘smoking gun’ here in terms of criminal activity. Yes, I would certainly say that this priest – whoever he was – needed a calibrated dose of having the Riot Act read to him and some carefully monitored therapy, but this was 1996, we don’t know what developed from all of this, and the officials involved certainly evinced some clear and professional awareness that what he was doing was not within bounds of Archdiocesan guidelines (even in 1996). I – for one – would not be happy to know that he received neither the reading of the Riot Act nor any focused and sustained reparative intervention. But we shall perhaps see when more documents (and possibly names) are released.
As I said, these thoughts are based on the two pieces – the LAT report and the Memo – that I have been able to find today. And I am sure that DP/TMR will be following the release with customary clarity and thoroughness when they become available. My thoughts will follow the course of the released documents when they come into view.
Overall, at this point, it seems to me that this release is essentially a revenant of a legal-political strategy from more than half-a-decade ago that is just now (for whatever reasons underlying the delay) coming into play. I would not be surprised if most or perhaps all of the documents deal with matters prior and even long-prior to the 2002 Dallas reforms. Thus I think we can expect to see many of the supporters of this release running the old game-plan from half-a-decade ago: i.e. this is earth-shaking revelation, this proves the bishops moved priests around or didn’t take necessary action, and other such movie-trailer type claims and assertions (Never Seen Before On the Wide-Screen! Brought To You In Living Color and the new technology of Amazo-Vision! A Must-See! You Will Be Shocked! … that sort of thing, which takes me back to Saturday afternoons at the movies” in another galaxy long ago and far away”.
This release may be a source of satisfaction to some, and perhaps they are legitimately enthused about it. But it comes (in its oddly delayed way) long after the Problem has been addressed, sort of like seeing film of a major conflagration downtown on the evening news and only afterward being told that the fire actually took place some years ago. But it may serve – like CPR paddles – to give the old Ball a bit more of a Roll and give some people the consoling feeling that it’s still the 1990s or the 1960s or the 1950s.
And that’s as may be, as the Brits say.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/10/files-on-catholic-priests-who-abused-children-to-be-made-public.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-files-20121208,0,3376780.story
Apologies for this but let me also include this link to that Memo.
http://graphics.latimes.com/storyboard-church-abuse-redacted-documents/
to JR. 'The Wealthiest Religion" in the world?? give me a break… check the financial records of the Vatican. Maybe you should do some fact checking…
Wasn't it the Medici's who invented double entry book keeping?
For whatever its relevance here, double-entry goes back to 13th century Florence, but that's only according to what records have been discovered, and it probably was in use before that time.
Are we seeing here a fallback-position or excuse already being prepared even before the supposedly slamdunk document are even released? I.e. that these documents aren't the real good ones anyway, because the really good ones were hidden by the Church through yet more 'double-entry' secret files?
So you think the Church hid good documents for 5 years? My double entry book keeping comment refered to the Catholic Church being the wealthiest religion.
If you think hiding information on and transfering child abusers again and again is some kind of slam dunk for anybody. I would suggest you think again.
Good post.
The JR comment of Dec 11 at 354PM nicely indicates the type of problem here: he goes for a single phrase that seems familiar and without seeing how the phrase fits into the sense of the comment, he goes off on a tangent sufficient for his interests of the moment.
It is not I who think the Church hid documents for 5 years. I clearly asked in my comment if this hiding-for-5-years (6, actually) bit would be put forward as an excuse we might be seeing if the LA documents don’t turn out to be very revealing.
It is not I who think the documents would be a slam-dunk. It is a number of persons and the type of mentality who are heavily invested in their being ‘revealed’; we saw this in the recent Philly case where the whole thing turned out to be a 1-for-7 fizzle (and may turn out to be a 7-for-7 fizzle if the single conviction is reversed on appeal). We also saw it (or more specifically, didn’t see it) in the Dutch Abuse Report whose actual text has not been made public although press releases were put out in a blizzard.
How many times have we had to listen to or read persons asserting that ‘this trial’ or ‘this report’ or ‘these documents’ would ‘prove’ everything they had been claiming all along, only to find that the trial or report or documents did no such thing at all?
I recall one ‘charge’ included in that oddly-disappeared SNAP lawsuit against the Church/Vatican filed with the International Criminal Court some time ago: the claim was that in one chancery of one country ‘investigators’ had literally been refused access to documents and the episcopal staff had ‘hidden’ them – the image you get is that episcopal staffers were hiding or burning documents at the back of the chancery while police with a search-warrant were banging on the front door of the chancery. But further reading indicated that the ‘investigator’ was merely some non-official and self-appointed person looking to trawl through the files on his own, and the ‘hiding’ turned out to be the fact that for lack of space some files were stored off-site in a secure storage facility. (In the event, if I recall correctly, there were something like 109 allegations that covered a period of 50 or more years, averaging out to about 2 per year for all of that nation’s priests.)
While I’m on the subject, let me add a bit to the ‘police trawl’ purpose of the release of these LA documents. I would add the possibility of a ‘media trawl’: i.e., that the documents are put out there with names (the names of the clerics being essential to the play) and then both the media and the police sit back and wait for the phones to ring. The allegations that might come in will hopefully be far more lurid and vivid – or at least can be made out to be such in the ‘reporting’ and no doubt the SNAP press releases – and since there won’t be any serious critical media analysis, then the ‘police trawl’ investigation can surf along without too much ‘insensitive’ and ‘chilling’ and ‘re-victimizing’ questioning and investigating of the allegation(s). That sort of thing. That’s how this Game is played and has been played for decades now.
Will it continue to work nowadays as it has worked in the past? Let us stay tuned.
Of whatever relevance (or accuracy) of the assertion about the Church being the world’s wealthiest religion, I don’t clearly see. The United States is (or was up until recently) the world’s wealthiest nation. What would be the point? And how exactly is “wealth” being defined here? Cash assets, real assets, income compared to expenses, with or without factoring in liabilities?
But since “contract of settlement” is not itself an actual legal term (check, for example, Black’s Law Dictionary), and since JR reports himself a Party to the 2006 lawsuit and keeps bringing the point up, then I for one would like any explanation he could give that might help resolve the question of just what sort of legal connection exists between the 2006 settlement and the release of the documents. Surely as a Party to the case he would have seen a copy of the paperwork and could give some amount of clarification. This question has been on the table on this site for a while now. A simple check of his files from the case should do the job.
"The JR comment of Dec 11 at 354PM nicely indicates the type of problem here: he goes for a single phrase that seems familiar and without seeing how the phrase fits into the sense of the comment, he goes off on a tangent sufficient for his interests of the moment." Bingo.
Pub why would the Church hide documents for YEARS , go to the Calif Supreme court in an attempt to not release documents, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to hide what? Commendations?
I never said there would be new revelations. I don't know what the files will or won't show. I do know it was part of my agreement of settlement and I want the info.
Refering to documents regarding sexual abuse of minors in anyway as a "slam dunk" is callous, rude, indifferent and bleak.
The SNAP charges leveled at the Church in the International Court in the Hague are still there.
You keep defining this scandal as a game. Maybe to your sad way of thinking. To the normal world your game is the Church's horror. And for people of faith it's been a crisis that your word "game" fails to address.
Your "game" for victims is the most devastating moment of our lives. But since empathy( save for the hierarchy) is not your game. You might want to sit on the bench for a while; see exactly what the released documents will reveal and then talk.
Wealth for the Church in this case means any sellable asset. You know Jesus didn't own anything and he started your Church. What's the hiding by transfering of assets about?
In regard to JR’s points immediately above.
First, note the game-play: ‘Why Else Would …?’ This is the explanation-by-innuendo approach: well, if it isn’t our explanation, what else could it be? (Rhetorically, you the reader are supposed to presume the answer to that question is There Is No Other Possible Answer. And many fall for it – or have, anyway. (I am not here suggesting that JR in his comment realizes this; rather, his comment exemplifies it.)
A short-list of possible Other Answers: A) The principle of not-having the government troll through any organizational files without substantial justification; this case – beyond the specific pretext here – will establish a precedent. And not simply in the formal legal sense but in the public mind: i) the government can poke around (‘trawl’, perhaps) anywhere and anytime; ii) any organization the government chooses to trawl is probably guilty anyway.
B) Under the circumstances and atmosphere established by this entire Catholic Abuse Matter Stampede, any priests and any incident that is dragged up in the trawl may well lead to a presumption of guilt without any substantive legal process (which is pretty much how almost all of these ‘settlements’ have been achieved).
C) Since the government already has the police authority to examine those files in an investigation, then this whole ‘publication’ of documents (and names) is clearly not necessary for law-enforcement. Unless what is actually going on is the playing-out of a police/media trawl, whereby certain members of the public might be encouraged (Tempted? Seduced?) into giving an allegation a whirl – secure in the knowledge that no allegation will be handled ‘insensitively’ (i.e. no allegation will really be critically investigated, by media or police). Given the declining number of allegations, the trawl-gambit will perhaps jump-start a declining number of formal allegations. And while a 600 million dollar payout might actually not work out to a huge settlement for any individual Plaintiff if a civil lawsuit starts up, there are plenty of people – especially if they aren’t given to too much serious thoughtful analysis – who might envision a Dance of the Sugar Plum with a pot of gold at the end of the legal rainbow. After all, they might think, such a miraculous windfall has happened before (and the Church is so fabulously ‘wealthy’, about which see below).
Once again, my characterization of ‘slam-dunk’ is intended to portray the claims by document-release supporters. Thus the neat little rhetorical bit about my making “callous, rude, indifferent and bleak” comments about this Problem is merely an epithet in support of a distraction in the service of a spin. (But I sort of agree with “bleak”: I think the whole history of this Game is indeed loaded with bleak-ness, for the maturity of public opinion and the independence of critical thought and the formulation of legal policy.)
But it’s JR’s opinion and he is welcome to toss it out there.
And if JR’s (as an example) support of the document-release with names isn’t (probably isn’t, maybe isn’t, possibly isn’t?) going to lead to much, then why go through this and set into motion or further motion the precedents and dynamics I listed above in this comment?
The Complaint lodged with the ICC is “still there”, but where exactly is ‘there’? Not a peep from the Court after all this time … that Complaint could be, as I said in prior comments on this site, in the ‘toss out when it’s polite to do so’ file. It certainly isn’t on any fast-track. And anybody is welcome to read that Complaint and make up their own mind as to its coherence and credibility. Don’t forget, the Complaint charges ‘crimes against humanity’ and even ‘torture’ (which is also a war-crime).
There were ‘horrors’ quite possibly involved for those genuine victims who experienced actual ‘rape’, but the Game is and always has been that very few allegations are lodged at that high-end of the spectrum of possible instances of ‘abuse’ and yet the public is constantly being manipulated (including by some of the rhetorical ploys and scams evidenced in JR’s comments) into thinking that this is about numerous crimes on the high-end of the abuse spectrum – which by any demonstrable evidence, including the types of allegations themselves, is not at all the case. As I have always said – so this point I am making is merely and yet again a repetition of what I have always said.
And I firmly believe that I have in comments on this site discussed more than enough of the various tactics and ploys used to further this Game to justify calling it a Game – because by and large that is precisely what it is. It is a Game of exaggeration and innuendo designed specifically to make something that is real but not in actuality very large or widespread into some form of epidemic of epic proportions, and even unique to the Church.
If JR could point out with a quote any comment I have made that demonstrates merely “empathy for the hierarchy” he can put it up. But – of course – this goes to the Game bit that if you don’t agree with the Game then you must most surely support and totally support the Evil which the Game insists is there in epic and world-historical proportions. The fact that I don’t expect a Biblical Flood in the next few decades doesn’t mean I deny the existence of rain or of water. The fact that I don’t agree that Vietnam constituted a sure domino-effect guarantee that Communists would take over the world doesn’t mean that I support Communism.
And the fact that I have a BS-meter that doesn’t quietly take to such Games as this one with all its dodgy tactics and ploys and dynamics, and that I am deeply concerned for the larger consequences of such a Game for the overall health of the polity and the integrity of legal principles, doesn’t mean that I support crime or – for that matter – Evil. (And as we have seen in the UK, there appears to be some crime, and surely some grossly dodgy business, perpetrated by tort-attorneys and allegants and putative ‘victims’, in support of this Game.)
And since the Game has existed for decades now, then I need not “bench” myself until we see what the current batch of LA documents reveals. Because I am talking not only about the LA documents but about the decades-long Game of which the current documents are merely a part.
And while I hold no brief whatsoever for any imposition of unwanted sexual experience by one human being upon any other human being, I am also of the belief that if a) there has been – especially on the lower end of that spectrum – a great deal of such imposition in the history of the species (as abuse-proponents claim) then b) I can’t see how the species has survived if each individual experiencing such imposition considered it a “devastating”, life-and-development-stopping event pure and simple. If that is true, then our human species – by operation of the dynamics inferred by abuse-proponents and victimists – shouldn’t be here now. Once again, I think that the fact that the species is still very much alive indicates that for most of human history most humans have realized that you can’t burn down the whole ship to get rid of a few rats. (And – again – I am not here inferring that all accused clerics are demonstrably ‘rats’.)
As regards the putative fabulous wealth of the Church, what does “sellable” mean? Sell the Vatican or the works of the thousands of artists and artisans and sculptors whose works adorn the various cathedrals and structures that have come into existence over the course of two thousand years? The US government owns so many sites and buildings and monuments – does the fact that it owns the Capitol and the White House and the Washington Monument and the various battlefield sites such as Gettysburg mean that it is fabulously wealthy because it owns all these tangible properties? For how much could you put any of those sites and structures on the market? Is there here a Cartoon imagining that the Church can simply sell-off such assets? And pay-off yet more ‘victims’ whose allegations have not been established by careful investigation – and pay-off the fees to all those tort-attorneys?
Still no answer as to the precise nature of the obligation putatively created by the 2006 settlement to release documents (and names). Perhaps a moment on the bench to consult his personal Plaintiff’s files of the 2006 settlement case would be in order for JR. Or has he lost them or does he not have the time in a busy life to pull them out of the box? Or – since I and other readers are supporters of Evil – do we not deserve to know?
And lastly – and I again repeat myself here – notice how much commenting is necessary to deal with relatively short expressions so typical of the Game. But this indicates exactly part of the dynamics of the Game: if you do too much thinking then the Game isn’t going to work as desired. It works best with quickie toss-offs of emotion and one-liners that can only look like careful analysis if you don’t think about them too much. Once you start looking at things too closely, the Game deflates like a leaky old tire. In the Game, as in trail-bossing large cattle herds, you don’t want the herd to think; you just want it to move and moo in the direction you’ve already chosen. And if your Game works well, then its Bonanza for real. In the Game’s plan, we are the herd. It’s annoying no doubt for the Gamesters and the trail-bosses when we don’t move and moo on cue as is called for in their script.
Dude. A, I'm not your personal research library. You want the ifo you look it up.
B, You are the King or Queen of innuendo. Trot out the fakers you are so afraid of. Where are they? You infer they exist, No examples? Your house of cards is built on sand. (Malaprop intended.)
As far as the Church's wealth. I can only attempt to quote your faith's founder "Lay up your stores not on earth but in heaven."
It seems your Church has quite some store here on terra firma. Example: the Catholic Church is the largest property owner in downtown Chicago.
Hey they can own what they own only they shouldn't be able to move titles to that wealth around in order to hide it from victims' claims.
It isn't that we victims grant ourselves title , to the most devastating experiences of our lives. It's that it usually is the most devastating experience of our lives. In grade school I think I got the second most honors in my graduating class. and a full scholarship to the high school I was injured at.
My class mate Dennis Murray either came in first or third just after me. We came from Ascension School on 112thst. and Figueroa in south central L.A.
Dennis is now President of Marist college. Bobby Zamora (who came in first, I think) Has had a great career as a teacher and coach.
I have been a messenger, a security gaurd; a paper deliverer. All decent professions but my peers did so well. More power to them. They weren't touched by their teachers. I was. I've done every drug but crack. I've had sex with literally thousands of people, yet no relationships. And been fired from every low level job I've ever had.
When I speak of this devastating tragedy. I know what I'm talking about. First hand.
And let me add another point to what I have just said above.
We see also the conflation of a) the individual (presumably genuine) victims and b) the Game into which their issues have mutated through the efforts of such organizational entities as SNAP. Or, to put it another way: we see the organizations hiding behind the suffering of the individual victims; using them as a cover for the organization’s (and its supportive special-interests’) purposes. Sort of like bank-robbers hiding behind hostages or submarines sneaking in through torpedo-nets by hiding under supply-ships.
Such that – as we have seen – any questioning of the Game is quickly spun as an attack on the individual (presumably genuine) victims.
And in saying this I am not denying that there are genuine victims in all of this Matter. (Although one still has to establish just where on that abuse-spectrum their victimization occurred and just how much high-end abuse occurred.)
Just peeking in to see how Ol' Robertson is keeping you all focused on his magic tricks…"look over here" ….at what other enormous amounts of dung I can throw up on the wall to keep you all too busy cleaning up my mess to fight the real battle.
Such great and informed minds on this site being wasted on Robertson's insanity. He has NOTHING, means NOTING and is NOTHING (as pertains to the mission of this site) but an angry, confused, embittered and embattled "victim" with way too much time on his idle (and somewhat culpable) hands.
It is far more fruitful for the occasional (yet, loyal) visitors to come to this site to learn from the resident sages of this site than to see the same old, tired tail-chasing that Roberston initiates and continues to feed.
May be time to just pat that old, faithful (albeit curmudgeony) doggie on the head and send him along his way, already….
Delphin pick a finger. Don't tell me which one.
Why Delphin then you shouldn't fling dung at walls or anything else that's the first sign of sanity not throwing your own dung dear. I know u meant me but u said "I" Freud would have a field day. Mean noting????? Why thanks again, I can take a mean note.
You are so angry. Who stepped on your gown? And I'm so old I can hardly move. Ooooooooh I am old. Old old old am I old dear oh dear old and irrellevent. And what charm school gave us you?
Truth must look like a "magic trick" to you.
Notice the neat dodge here: as if I expect JR – JR! – to do reliable research for me. Rather, I have asked him to: share with us some very relevant information / about points he himself raised / to which he as Party to the case would have easy and immediate access. (If, of course, his stories are to be believed.) Not all of the documents in the 2006 LA 562-Plaintff case (now that is bundled lawsuit) appear online and since most of us aren’t in LA to look up the records at the court-house, and JR has – if his story is to be believed – the information almost literally at his fingertips … then here’s a chance for him to post a meaty and informative and useful comment indeed. But … apparently not.
The point in the prior comments was whether the Church was indeed ‘wealthy’ – which in successive comments has not been established. Now we get a neatly diverting scriptural theology lesson from JR about what Jesus said. Jesus also said “let the dead bury their dead”, so why are there Christian and Catholic undertakers and why are there Christian funeral services? Answer: because Jesus expected the end-times to come rather quickly and as it turned out, they haven’t arrived and over the course of time Christians and their churches have had to make do among the material complexities of human existence. The same charge can be leveled at the Anglicans or any other Christian ecclesiastical polity and the same Answer can be given.
I’d need to see the supporting reference about “downtown Chicago”. Until I see that, this assertion is just as likely to be one more internet legend passed around the victim groups like baseball cards or Trivial-Pursuit bits. As of this afternoon the Google search-engine returns 323 million responses to “largest property owner in downtown Chicago”; the most I could come up with under “Archdiocese of Chicago largest property owner in downtown Chicago” was a passing reference to the fact that the Archdiocese owns the ground under a hotel downtown; although given the mindset of victim groups, I can easily see this being inflated to JR’s assertion as stated in his comment.
Now the story changes and victimization (no distinction between genuine and otherwise, nor about where on the spectrum the allegated activity falls) is now only “usually the most devastating experience of our lives”. That’s no doubt a retreat in the service of accuracy, but who’s to say it’s gone far enough? And how does JR know what most victims experience? For that matter, even if he talks directly with others who claim to be victims, how does he know they are telling the truth and relating an accurate story about their experience? If one were sitting face-to-face with JR and got all the same information and material he has posted in internet comments, would one feel any more certain of his veracity or his capacity to convey actual facts accurately? How do any of these folks really know – without careful corroboration and investigation – that they are all telling each other the truth? Which brings us back to the Tuning-Fork phenomenon I have mentioned in prior comments.
The closer you look, the more it becomes a hall of mirrors like the ones on an old carnival midway.
As for the stories about himself which JR has volunteered in his 414 PM comment (which was not visible when I submitted my 416 PM comment): even if his reports about his life are accepted, there are other, and hardly remote, possibilities to explain such a trajectory in an individual’s life. And certainly, there remains the fact – as I have often mentioned – that no causal link has been established here between whatever abuse (wherever it falls on the spectrum) he experienced (presuming his victimization claim to be genuine) and the events and shape of his subsequent life. (Let the record show here that I didn’t go barging into JR’s personal life but rather am simply responding to information about himself that he chose to publish in a comment.)
And I raise this point not to single out JR but simply because I think we see here a classic dynamic that feeds so much of this victimist approach and the Abuse Matter as well: grasping at the role of ‘victim’, with its attendant status (‘heroic’ and yet also ‘helpless’ in the face of consequences), is far less daunting than considering other possible reasons for the shape and the negative aspects of how one’s life has turned out. Nor am I breaking any new ground here – this is Basics of Therapy 101 (second semester): most human beings, if left to themselves, are going to go for the least self-responsible explanations for their life problems, and it is precisely the job of competent therapy to help them gain mastery, first and foremost, over themselves in order to gain mastery over whatever experiences they have had and will create for themselves in the future.
So when JR – and I am going to imagine this goes for a lot of other folks as well – claims to know all about “this devastating tragedy” and knows it “first-hand”, I would have to say that at this point, with what there is to go on, that “tragedy” may be his life, but not necessarily because of whatever abuse may have been suffered. That link and that ‘knowledge’ still remain to be established and achieved.
I trust no one who doesn't know the difference between a human being and a dog.
Thank you, everyone, for your contributions!
I will be shutting down comments on this thread for now.