On the attack against priests: Anne Barrett Doyle and Terry McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org
Visitors to the home page of BishopAccountability.org are greeted with the name of the site and the tag line, "Documenting the Abuse Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church." Prominently displayed on the top of the home page is a feature called "Abuse Tracker," while further down the page, the site solicits any visitors to "send us photos of survivors, offenders, affected parishes, and important events."
What other conclusion are first-time visitors then supposed to reach except that any priests profiled on the site are guilty of horrific child sex abuse?
The "posting policy" of BishopAccountability.org (which is buried on its site) begins with the oft-seen boilerplate language attempting to shield the site from potential defamation suits: "In the U.S. legal system, all accused persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty." But the site clearly gives initial visitors the opposite impression: that any featured priests are guilty of criminal abuse.
And it is an incontrovertible fact that the site brazenly and openly features numerous priests whose complete innocence has already been long established and who are merely victims of public rumors, innuendos, and scams.
Tromping innocent priests
For example, in 2007, after a quarter of a century of unblemished ministry, a troubled man sued the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph claiming that Fr. Stephen Muth abused him some fifteen years earlier. The accuser hired the notorious Rebecca Randles as his lawyer, a woman so unhinged that she has actually repeatedly claimed that child sex abuse was, in fact, a "collective objective" of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph and that the diocese "ratified" and "encouraged" abuse by priests.
As the accuser's charges were being investigated, it became so clear that the man's claims were baseless and bogus that even the ever-litigious Randles asked to dismiss her own tawdry suit.
In a statement to display how spurious the claims were, the judge overseeing the case not only promptly dismissed the case but he did so with prejudice, meaning that the accuser is never allowed to file suit against the priest in the same court ever again.
Despite the fact that Fr. Muth's only claim ever against him was essentially a fraud, BishopAccountability.org still continues to plaster Muth's name and picture in its database of "publicly accused" priests on its site as if the man were a dangerous child molester. It even includes a full-page and ominous-sounding "assignment record" of the innocent priest.
Such is the atrocious "posting policy" at BishopAccountability, which allows just about any accusation – no matter how old, flimsy, and/or discredited – to be broadcast on its site. [More on Father Stephen Muth]
Smearing the defenseless
"Where do I go to get my reputation
back?" Anne Barrett Doyle
In 2003, a year in which California opened up a window for accusers to sue the Church and receive money big money for abuse no matter how long ago they claimed it occurred, a man came forward in Los Angeles to claim that Fr. Michael Joseph Haran had abused him many years earlier.
In nearly three decades of ministry in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, there was never any hint, suggestion, or allegation of any impropriety against Fr. Haran. So, what did Fr. Haran say to the allegations suddenly lodged against him in 2003?
Well, Fr. Haran said nothing, as he died 30 years earlier in 1973. His lone accuser claimed his abuse occurred sometime after World War II, in 1948. And although there was absolutely nothing to substantiate the charges against Haran, BishopAccountability has the priest's profile and work history, just like that of Fr. Muth, pasted on its site as if it were a fact that Fr. Haran was a known child molester.
And Rev. Haran is hardly alone. In Los Angeles alone, Haran is among dozens of long-deceased priests who have been publicly accused of abuse even though there was never anything in their personnel files to suggest that they were guilty of any wrongdoing whatsoever. And in many other cities like Boston, there have been men like Rev. James H. Lane and Rev. Rickard O'Donovan, both of whom were dead for years before a single accuser came forward seeking money and alleging abuse. Yet the men's names and files are openly listed on BishopAccountability.org.
Indeed, in 2011, 45% of all priests who were accused of abuse were already deceased. Indeed, almost a decade ago, one major archdiocese was already then claiming, "Most of the lawsuits against us involve dead priests."
Yet this blatant injustice does not mean anything to McKiernan and Doyle at BishopAccountability. It has no problem in the public trafficking of rumors against innocent, dead, and defenseless priests.
[UPDATE, March 2018: Fr. Muth's accuser has reached out to TheMediaReport.com and stands by the accusations of abuse against Muth. We appreciate his taking the time to talk with us.]
I have long wondered about Terrence McKiernan and his motives for exhibiting these lurid, but often uncorroborated details of sexual abuse. Having read a very accurate, though not very popular, article by Father Gordon MacRae, I came away understanding Mr. McKiernan with far more depth. Here is a link to that article:http://thesestonewalls.com/gordon-macrae/be-wary-of-crusaders-the-devil-sigmund-freud-knew-only-too-well/
One small point. 81% of all claims are considered accurate according to the John Jay report.
That's spelled: ACCURATE CLAIMS 81 % according to your own study.
There are more than six thousand priests in the database of "Credibly Accused" at Bishop Accountability. Accusers can't just make claims, an attorney has to believe you, and even then BA requires corroboration before a priest is posted. Out of 6000 names you found a handful that are questionable. Why are you focusing on that small number when the other 5900 are very worthy of documentation. McKiernan and Doyle worked years creating Bishop Accountability just because they knew it needed to be done. They are not flamboyant or careless. There are real stories of corruption and lies re the pedophile priest issue, but Bishop Accountability and McKiernan and Doyle are not among them.
Kay Ebeling
producing City of Angels Blog since Jan 2007 http://cityofangels12.blogspot.com
They are NOT flamboyant or careless?
Hysterical.
Who wrote this post? Doyle or Mc Kiernan?
In fairness, the priests mentioned are also cited by the following archdioceses/dioceses in THEIR lists of accused priests.
Note that BishopAccountability.org is not alone in listing Muth, Haran, Lane, and O’Donovan. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles includes Haran on its list of accused priests Los Angeles Archdiocese
and the Archdiocese of Boston includes Lane and O’Donovan on its list Archdiocese of Boston
The Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph commissioned a report that includes a discussion of Muth’s case, including Bishop Finn’s decision to remove Muth’s faculties Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph via BishopAccountability.org]
Bad point.
Do you get out of speeding tickets by telling the cops that others do it too?
Kay, that is exactly what I was thinking but Mediareport has a need to continually split hairs.
The conservative side of the roman catholic church faffs about when they're collared (pardon pun) when caught transgressing their own code of conduct. Having done a hatchet job on Clohessy of SNAP – IMO – easily the most credible of that organisation – the others have axes to grind – now you focus on BishopAccountability. If their info. was so inaccurate law suits would be served every day and they'd no longer function.
Get with it. The RCC has sheltered paedophiles, is homophobic in literal terms but most members could be proven to be just that, misogynistic and hypocritical.
Hailing from Ireland where a belt of the crozier was a regular occurrence it's heartening to see that we've at last woken from that incence filled slumber.
Ms. Brennan, SNAP is a Church created front group. A fraud created to control victims.
And this fraud is working .
In Ireland SNAP and Fr. Tom Doyle O.P. helped the government and Church pay victims 1/12th of what California victims got. SNAP is doing the same in Australia. FYI
Great point Honora, when mediareport saw that SNAP didn't give a crap what they thought they went after Bishop'saccountability.
Bishop-Accountability "requires corroboration" … of what? That a priest is "publicly accused" – which could be something as simple as putting an allegation up on a blog or standing in front of a church (and, but of course, a camera) with a placard upon which your claim is crayoned.
Tort-attorneys need only assure themselves that in bringing a lawsuit they (and/or their Plaintiff(s)) are not going to be overtly liable for filing a frivolous suit. And tort-attorneys are primarily interested in a settlement, not the time and expense of a full trial (this is also an element in the Game: making it sound as if only the Church sought to avoid trials).
Thus, the tort-attorney must perform some basic calculations as to whether – given the nature of the evidence and the claims, given also the general atmosphere of public opinion that can be presumed of potential jurors – a claim will be accepted with a straight face or be laughed off the field. This is where the Stampede has worked its dark magicks: so much of the public opinion has already been contaminated by the synergy of (deliberate or unwitting) media credulity (gullibility?) and the Oz-like internet presence of a relatively few vociferous types who, even if they don't display the in-your-face attitude of the high-school cafeteria food-fighters, nonetheless seek to reinforce a non-analytic and essentially non-rational and highly emotional response to whatever 'stories' are on offer (regardless of how old or discredited they may be).
The media's relentlessly singular focus on the Church constitutes its own bit of evidence: since it is generally agreed that sexual-abuse is a widespread phenomenon in this country, then the decades-long focus on the Church – to the exclusion of any sustained attention to any other venues – is itself suspect. Imagine, for example, if the media reported that there was a general air-pollution problem in the country, but then spent decades looking only at one entity or source for that pollution, as if that entity were the only or even the primary source of the general condition of air pollution.
To frame rational analysis and inquiry as nothing more than trying to "split hairs" betrays clearly the essentially anti-Western and 'revolutionary-justice' element at the core of the Stampede: it is precisely the purpose of the Western justice system as it has evolved (with a rather large historical and conceptual debt to canon law) to recognize that human 'judgment' is forever limited by the lack of human omniscience, and thus that careful and rational procedures and requirements must be emplaced and sustained in order for any human judgment to determine if there is actually 'evidence'. Otherwise Western justice and judgment would go back to the era of angry bunches of villagers with pitchforks and torches, and to the type of 'judgment' so vividly displayed in Monty Python's "Holy Grail" skit.
I recall a vivid instance of this: when a Massachusetts ex-ADA and professor at a second-tier law school, upon passage of a new law about child-abuse a while back, crowed that At last children would get justice, without having to worry about evidence. This non-evidence approach is lethal to Western justice and jurisprudence and judgment and also ultimately to the concept of limited-government itself.
Rather than the hard-won jurisprudential wisdom that for legal purposes (and especially criminal law purposes) there is no 'crime' unless there is reliable evidence of that crime, we instead get the reverse: you presume that a crime was committed – and a repellent one – and then the (presumed) existence of the crime overrides any piddling and hair-splitting requirements for 'evidence'. This is a lethally toxic legal philosophy, and the fact that it can be brassily proclaimed by someone with both prosecutorial and law-professorial responsibility should be a screaming alarm to everybody.
Clearly 'Hanora Brennan' is not "with it" in matters legal: given the brief disclaimer on the BA site to the effect that persons are innocent until proven guilty, a lawsuit would most likely fail on the merits, without even considering how any priest publicized on the BA site could conceivably risk bringing a lawsuit in a Time of Stampede. This would be like the McCarthy era, where if one were somehow branded as a 'Communist' or a 'Commie sympathizer', the chances of winning a lawsuit against the source of that branding would be infinitesimal. The disclaimer on the BA site is itself a neat example of "hair-splitting" and of reliance on 'technicalities'.
And then, in Ireland recently, there is the Magdalene Laundries matter. Sobered by that vivid exposure of a scam, Ireland may yet pull back from the brink of diving into the swampy abyss into which American public opinion and jurisprudence and judgment had long ago fallen.
And how any rational person could consider BA's financial records and consider that organization's leadership on-the-level is beyond me. Ditto any economium to Mr. CEO Clohessy, who in addition to on-the-record evasions of legal process (that Deposition saga) that embodies precisely the claims of evasion he and others have been making against the Church, actually said on the record that there should be two standards of truthfulness: one for the Church (which must be stringent and absolute) and another for the Abuseniks (who, having such wonderful intentions, should not have to be held to strict standards of truth and honesty in their accusations, claims, and statements).
And lastly, in regard to “hair-splitting”, I think of Mao: after the consequences of the Cultural Revolution, and the lethally violent depredations of the Red Guards whom he turned loose against all traditional sources of authority and knowledge, had become inescapably clear, his wife claimed that “we did not advocate beating up people, we simply said that beating up people is no big deal”.
I think that this brings us very close to the dynamic that we have seen – with government and media synergy and collusion – in the Abuse Matter Stampede: we do not advocate untruthfulness and dishonesty, we simply say that untruthfulness and dishonesty in the service of our cause is no big deal.
Split those hairs as finely as you like.
BA.org is good and important. I would never have come forward or told anyone of my sexual abuse by a priest but for having read of a complaint against the same priest on BA.org. All the BA.org website did was post the documents that the Boston Archdiocese had and that the Boston Globe forced into the public. Then, I knew that I was not unique and that this priest abused others. Took me years to do anything about it though because I had a lot of shame and worry to overcome. I was sexually abused from age 12 (1985) to 22 (1995) and finally told someone about it when I was 38. Decades ago? Yes. But it happend. The priest is still alive, 60 years old. Still a priest, on leave since 1999. Even if he was dead now, the abuse still happened. Wonder if he still works with kids? He practices family law.
Dear Boston Survivor,
I’m am sorry if you were molested at age 12. I want to believe that no one would say it, if it wasn’t true…but when money is at stake, people will say anything. Please excuse my skepticism, if you are truly a victim. I have two boys, who would have known that a priest or anyone, for that matter, has no right to their body. They would have punched him for suggesting it. A twelve year is quite capable of knowing that sexual relations/activity is reserved for a man and his wife. You received.teaching about that by then. If the priest that was giving you blowjobs didn’t.set off alarm bells by eighteen, Id have to think something is wrong with you. Can’t a grown man protect himself? You were 22 before you stopped wanrting oral sex from your lover? For heaven’s sake! I don’t deny you were molested at 12. I have no idea…but somewhere along the line, it became consenual homosexual relationship.
Well, anything is possible in the wide world. But Impossible Things don’t usually happen too often. Which is why I try not to Believe Them Before Breakfast without some thought.
That somebody would be ‘abused’ – however defined – for a full decade; and then not report it directly or indirectly to the increasingly friendly and receptive authorities (this all happened in Correct-leaning Massachusetts, after all), despite the fact that this person had gone from late childhood to early adulthood in the meantime; and all of this during an era when there were increasing numbers of priests coming to the attention of the justice system and the media (especially in the hometown of the ‘Boston Globe’, which was early onto the Matter with the local Fr. Porter case and others); and that the putative abuser – a priest – not only did not face prosecution when finally exposed but was allowed by that or some other State to continue or begin practicing law as an attorney, which he does to this day; and that the putative victim came forward only at the beginning of the 2002 sue-the-bishops Phase (which was kicked off nation-wide by the ‘Boston Globe’ and certain enterprising local tort attorneys on January 2, 2002) … this is a) an awful lot to imagine and b) so perfectly covers so many of the now-classic elements of the Abuse Narrative, that I’d have to say that the story raises far more questions than it answers.
So that even if the role of B-A is accurately described here, it hardly seems a major factor in the overall story. By 2002 or even 2001, media reports about local priests and the role of tort attorneys were well-established.
In fact, the whole time-line offers another possibility: that B-A carved a niche for itself by providing a shopping-list of priests that could be perused (or trawled) by anybody enterprising enough to go to the site.
And along those lines, I’d be interested in knowing if B-A has been the recipient of payments from enterprising (and increasingly well-remunerated) tort attorneys, as was SNAP.
This story seems to me to be a revenant of a type of claim that might have been more believable in an earlier era, but cannot achieve any easy credibility when set in the decade of the 1990s (also the decade of the general and intense national sex-offense concerns, many may recall) as those years then led into the very beginning of the ‘00s.
Was this ‘case’ resolved in some sort of lawsuit settlement in the sue-the-Bishops Phase?
Did a putatively decade-long rampage of ‘abuse’ (and with only one ‘victim’ coming forward?) yet fall so far beneath the criteria for official action by police or at least a Bar Association that even in the post-2002 era the priest involved could and can practice law somewhere in this country? And perhaps in Massachusetts whose Attorney-General, if memory serves, is a woman strongly involved in the prosecution of abuse matters, and which State is one of the last hold-outs in refusing to acknowledge its mistakes in one of those now-notorious child-day-care abuse case from the 1980s?
I can’t see it. But I cannot rule out the possibility that this story exemplifies the dynamic I mentioned at the end of my prior comment above.
You do not have to talk about me in the third person. I am right here. I could answer your questions and stop your wondering. But it is a lot of ground to cover on this comment deal. Sexual abuse for me? He performed oral sex on me. Never asked me to do anything to him. Nor did he ever remove any of his clothes. Strange, I know. He was my confessor and though that there should be no barriers between us. He got me all the way to St. John's Seminary in Brighton (1 semester) before I got the courage to break away from him.
Let's be aware that most probably 80% of the victims have not come forward. That is allowing a greater percentage of those abused by priests claiming relief because of the deep pockets of the church. The tactics of the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago in the 40's and 80's, for some specific time periods, was to intimidate the child and parents, or to hush them up.
And Chicago and Cardinal George are" front" and center when it comes to the brains behind SNAP which consistantly intimidates through it's complete lack of Democracy,in essense hushing up victims still.
Only a newer more corrupt way of hushing up victims: become the victims organization it self.
Say the truth about the hierarchs and don't organize victims, while pretending that's what you do. And presto chango poof! The corporate Church controlls a huge part of the debate. Both sides of the debate, in fact, and a few points in between. VOTF for example
But why the emphasis on compensation? Many kids are abused at home by family members – a greater betrayal of trust than abuse from an outsider – and they often receive no compensation of any kind. When money enters – unless to pay for therapy, in which case is justified – it changes the complexion of things.
To ‘Boston Survivor’: I used the third-person out of courtesy; direct address might come off as too confrontative and ‘personal’ and my interest is in the material presented, not in ‘getting personal’ with any commenter.
I also use the third-person so as to put some distance between myself and the material. Regular readers of this site will know that I do not automatically credit stories related in the internet forum, since there is no way to verify them. Rather, I take the material that is put up and look at that material and only that material.
In that sense, ‘you’ are not “right here” in any usable sense. The internet – as I have often said on this site – is not any sort of mere amplification of a person-to-person conversation; on the internet, crediting stories is nothing more than an act of faith, since there is no corroboration or possibility of corroboration of stories. There is only the material that is put up.
And – alas – you have now gone and put up a second classic give-away: you “could answer” all my questions, but it’s really just too much. Regular readers here will recognize this familiar bit from other notorious commenters who make big assertions but then suddenly can’t be bothered to back them up.
Oral sex for a decade seems to me a rather serious string of offenses, to say nothing of a the force and cunning necessary to create the circumstance and then effect the assaultive acts involved over the course of a decade (I am presuming a sustained string of such assaults, and not simply a single act followed by a second act ten years later, which grammatically and technically would qualify as taking place ‘over the course of a decade’). That the priest in question not only did not face prosecution but also began or continued a career as a practicing attorney remains difficult to accept as stated.
That your career actually involved entering priestly-formation, according to what you have said here, does raise some interesting questions but not for this forum.
To ‘Don Dohrn’: I would need to see the reasoning and some reliable material to back up the assertion that “most probably 80% of the victims have not come forward”. How can this be known except through surmise? In comments on this site we have already discussed at some length the difficulty with providing rational and credible justification for any such assertions; thus the claims that there are, say, eight or nine un-reported cases for every reported case remains hypothetical , creating invisible ‘masses’ of numbers that have not (perhaps cannot) be demonstrated to actually exist.
Whatever the policies of the Chicago Archdiocese 60 or even 30 years ago – and the LA document cache purporting to reveal similar and even worse policies in that Archdiocese fizzled rather substantially (also a matter discussed at length on this site) – yet the general atmosphere of the 1990s and 2000s certainly offered more than enough opportunity for persons to come forward, not only with the promise of a generally encouraging public reception but also with the possibility of substantial financial remuneration. And yet such numerous hypothetical masses have not materialized. Which non-development cannot be ignored and has to be accounted-for by the ‘8 or 9 unreported cases for every reported case’ theory.
What does "fizzled" mean to you? Are the documents not real? Are the statutes of limitations not up?
What "fizzled" means to me is the governments office of the AG isn't using civil rights issues here in regards to coverup. Weren't all of the abused minors' civil rights interfered with? And are"nt they still being interfered with?
If an organization: the Corporate Church is pretending it's above the law and the government is basicly agreeing that it is above the law since it refuses to pursue and apprehend the criminals, where is Justice?
Where's even the hollow attempt at justice. no where to be seen.
Don't you think SNAP should focus on that instead of the [expletive deleted] it pretends to focus on?.
“Fizzled” means, I can only imagine, what JR agreed it meant in a comment some pieces back. My definition has always been that they were intended to a) demonstrate the justification for numerous assertions made about how the LA Archdiocese (putatively) avoided and evaded the prosecution of accused priests b) on a large and long-sustained basis which also included c) deliberate and clear organizational cover-up, and d) to demonstrate the proof of those assertions beyond any reasonable doubt through the use of internal AOLA documents.
As I discussed at length in comments at that time, the documents neither performed sufficiently in the matter of (a), (b), (c) and (d) nor did the release of them create a groundswell of publicity or sustained public interest – such that even the LA Times let it all go very quickly and even a SNAP spokesperson referred to the document release and/or the subsequent publicity (non-)response as “disappointing”.
Now we are introduced to an entirely new (to this site) position: that the whole Abusenik position is or should be one of “civil-rights issues” and that “the government’s office of the AG” isn’t pursuing this course. And is not doing so – through some alchemy that substitutes for legal thinking – “in regards to the cover-up”. (I would be happy to see a competent legal rationale as to this newly-declared approach. Such a rationale would, among other things, have to satisfactorily deal with the question: in what way, then, is any and all crime and/or cover-up not a violation of some (putative) victim’s or victims’ civil-rights such that in the final analysis any and all crime/cover-up is a civil-rights issue?)
Recognizing JR’s ‘magpie’ role – whereby we receive here the fruits, I would say, of his poking around in the latest trends in Abusenik excitements (not to say ‘thought’) – I would say that this ‘civil-rights’ gambit, coming as the tide begins now to recede, is a last-ditch type of gambit from the Abuseniks.
For the past half-century the country has seen a large number of changes rushed through simply because they were framed as somehow being matters of civil-rights. A shrewd gambit since in the American ethos, civil-rights trump all other considerations (rationality, workability, consequences good or ill and intended or unintended and unforeseen). I see this current civil-rights excitement by the Abuseniks as an effort to re-ignite the Stampede on that civil-rights basis, since the more immediate sources of fuel are now burning-out.
I have no idea how the Church is supposed to “pursue and apprehend the criminals”. First, that is the job of the police (nor is it acceptable to merely claim that the police were bamboozled by the ecclesiastical authorities). Second, we see here once again the presumption of what has yet to be legally proven: i.e. that this, that, or many priests are indeed “criminals”.
“Where is Justice?” If this question means ultimate Justice, then it lies with God and nobody shall ever escape that. If it means earthly and legal justice then – on this bit of the earth – it means according to the rules and principles of Western justice. And not according to the (recently unhappily adopted in this country) maxims of a non-Western ‘revolutionary’ justice whereby presumption of the crime leads to presumption of the criminal with only secondary (if any) respect for rational evidence.
Between these two concepts can there be some intermediate form of justice? The Church has been subjected – and not altogether undeservedly – to tremendous public pressure and disappointment and even opprobrium.
She has conducted reform – and well-needed reform. And not a moment too soon, since the moral and even the cultural and social strength of the nation, already so greatly occluded, faces even more awesome challenges. More recovery of her spiritual Gifts and strength are needed, and urgently.
There is also the reality of treatment for genuine victims, once they can be determined from those who are otherwise.
Beyond this I cannot see what more is humanly possible. To put the 1940s or 60s or 80s on permanent feedback loop cannot be seen as anything except a form of madness. To have the government dabble even more deeply in the dark arts of manipulation and of revolutionary justice is lethal folly (already well-advanced in many areas of national life).
This is, I would say, the state of the situation at this point. Citizens and Catholics (lay and clerical) must work from this point toward a serious and increasingly urgent future.
Pub how much or in what form is payment for the smoke screen you paint. All that logic. And at the end? justice should not even be sought here on planet earth. Because your imaginary friend is going to take care of the injured in some imagined after life.
Sadly, Sadly lol.
Last thing I heard is that the Church can have it;'s clacks but pretending a clack represents the majority of Catholics feelings , is nonsense and here's what's up with your own, Catholics aren't thrilled with what your hierarchs did and do and the truth is they along with the hierarchs themselves are waiting out , Time.
For death to clear the decks on the good ship lolly pop.
They're waiting for the victims to die off too. And the game is give us nothing in the interm. Thanks in large part to SNAP.
Just throw in a few mea culpa's. Elect Humility it self as Pope and every now and then walk with your head down, a new improved brand of hierarchs.
They do nothing for victims not even one damned house of charity shelter for the people they damaged. Not a one.
Nothing! the Church corporate has done nothing, (Let's not pretend otherwise) to match it's behavior towards victims , to the teachings of Christ. Remember him do ya?
Publion, I am still here or as present as anyone can be on the Internet. I am no fraud or liar. In my experience, I got caught up starting around age 10 with with this priest who groomed me and gradually introduced sexual activity about age 12, eventually including oral sex. I did not tell anyone in authority until 2011. Statutes of limitation had run. Boston police declined to pursue a rape charge but I could not be precise about when the oral sex first occurred, ie before I turned 14. I always asked him not to touch me but he said that our relationship was all or nothing. I did not want to loose all the advice, friendship, dinners, movies, plays, clothes, tuition and money that he gave me. I thought I needed him and I just had to put up with the sessions that included confession and sex abuse. When you start something like this young with a kid, it becomes kind if normal.
The guy who came forward in 1999 about this priest by talking to the archdiocese has never pursued a settlement. His cannonical case is ongoing. The one incident of being fondled on his naked penis happened in like 1984. Statutes had run on him by the time he did something so no criminal action. I discovered this info. Way later because I did not look for it.
‘Boston Survivor’ illustrates the problem with thinking of internet commentary as if it were simply a more efficient amplification of face-to-face exchange: he is “here” and “present as anyone can be on the internet”. Just so – and that isn’t really much, in terms of validating whatever a person may choose to put up on the internet.
(And – once again – even in the case of face to face conversation: without further corroboration and analysis, how can any interlocutor confronted with such a story really know if the story as related is accurate and true?)
But again, it becomes clear precisely how much the internet as a (very limited) modality has served to feed this Abuse ‘Crisis’: scads and scads of ‘stories’ are now on the internet in commentary (and – alas – repeated as if verified by a mainstream media for its own purposes) and yet there is no way of really getting to the truth of almost any of those stories.
I also note that ‘Boston Survivor’ – according to his own self-report – entered the seminary. He was thus literally in the belly of the (putative) beast and was not therefore some uninformed ‘civilian’ or layperson. If the general narrative tropes of the classic Abusenik Narrative are to be believed, any Catholic seminary in those days would have been rife with clear indications and vivid actualizations of a stunning panoply of sexual and psychological dysfunction and misconduct, to put it mildly.
As to the (if I may) ‘non-recovered memory’ problem related here – i.e. that BosSurv could not recall within two years the starting point of his abuse (yet he said it was at the age of 12 and went on for a decade, in a prior comment): then the Boston Police were not bamboozled but simply realized that BosSurv had given them almost nothing to go on. And the only way the police could have continued that investigation would have been to embrace the ‘revolutionary’ and Cheka approach to their job (recalling here Dzherzhinsky’s remark that the Cheka does not investigate but rather it strikes).
In fact, one wonders how many of these stories were not so much muffled by the Church as simply dismissed by evidence-based investigation. (Which, of course, was precisely why advocates of prosecuting sex-related crimes had to abandon Western, evidence-based investigation and prosecution, and embrace Dzerzhinsky’s ‘revolutionary justice’ instead.)
Without going into it too deeply in this forum, I would also respectfully point out that there was some element of choice or decision in all of this story, as related above. And that surely holds when the no-longer-a-child BosSurv opted to enter the seminary.
This is no way is intended to support or approve the alleged conduct of the priest in this case, if his behavior actually did take place as described. But once again, one can see why the police were (to the extent that they were still operating at that time under the ‘Western’ principles) would find themselves hobbled – not by the Church but rather by the very actions of the allegator.
And I would also point out that while I hold no brief for the (alleged) actions of this priest, fondling of a penis (repellent as it seems to me) is a far-cry from a violent sexual-assault such as rape or any other action on the higher end of the sexual-assault spectrum. And I will further say – in the interests of efficiency and precluding predictable points that might be made – that introducing an element of proportion and perspective into this analysis is not in any way intended-to-be or characterizable-as ‘defending’ pedophilia or sexual-misconduct or anything else.
None of this is intended to personally demean BosSurv. But this exchange, I would say, illustrates rather richly so many of the complications and dynamics that are in-play in sexual-assault matters, and especially in the Catholic Abuse Matter: the police themselves (especially if they operating under Western principles of law and investigation) are hobbled by the actions as well as the claims of some self-reporting ‘victims’; the Church herself (from whose canon-law many of the principles of Western law are derived) is similarly hobbled in investigation; and the story itself – willy or nilly – reveals an element of acquiescence (especially in the case of self-reporters on the cusp of or already-into adulthood) that interferes with the too-easy Conventional Narrative of Pure Innocence Assaulted By Pure Evil (i.e. the mustachioed and leering villain tying the innocent protesting maiden to the railroad tracks, as in the old silent movies).
It is into such complicated thickets that the country’s approach to matters sexually-abusive has led us all in the past few decades.
Lastly, I would add that for persons or governments that do not formally believe in God, there is of course no sense of an Ultimate Justice that no perpetrator can or will ever escape. Hence the deranging and intense pressure to somehow have earthly governments take over the Ultimate Justice-doing that – without Divine Omniscience – is far beyond our poor human power to justly achieve. Instead, you wind up – as this country now has – with an all-too human government police-power and proscutorial power overflowing its limited banks in the increasing and ever-intensifying quest to fill in for the God that has been kicked to the curb.
Thus theology and religion and civics connect. And, in these cases, neither happily nor well.
Except theology and religion are imagined constructs built on faith where as civics is a bit more down to the provable. Hey I thought you were the Proof Guy?
But we were "maidens" untouched, under age and under the laws of this nation. Were we tied to tracks, yes, the tracks of our religious beliefs . The same beliefs that taught: Never bring scandal to the Church or home.
But there were laws you and the perpetrators of these CRIMES were under.
Child endangernment laws and conspiracy laws and laws about being accomplices before and after the fact. Laws ignored by teachers, Cardinals and Popes..
Laws ordained by God according to you.
Laws your hierarchs broke and broke again.
And with impunity so far.
Too Big Too Fail.
I would need proof for the rather broad assertion that religion and theology are nothing more than "imagined constructs". Which ties in with the point that I have been making all along: whenever we get a chance to look at these Abusenik stories and claims, they seem to melt away like ice-cream in the sun. Thus, as I have also been saying, I think a rather significant portion of the Abusenik material is itself an "imagined construct" at very best; and – even more so - a deliberately fabricated construct. The continued existence of which serves a number of interests.
And once again, we are also presented with assertions submitted as if they were proven, when actually they themselves have yet to be proven and – as I said – have failed to deliver such evidence and proof every time they are actually examined.
"With impunity … so far" … ? Again, every single time we look at anything relevant, it melts away. This portentous "so far" would move us to imagine that there is yet more 'evidence' and 'proof' to come … because the Ball Will not only Be Kept Rolling but the Game Will Come Back from its present embarassments.
Absent the consolations of crystal-balls and tin-foil hats, who will hold their breath for that "imaginary construct" to take actual and demonstrable shape?
You prove God exists. It's your contention he does exist there for the burden of proof is on you. Your contention your job. And you can't do it.
There is no proof of a god. So religion and theology are imagined constructs. And I'm bored and tired of your imaginary dieties being used to control me and everyother sane person on earth. Historicly against our own interests. Economicly, emotionally, physically and intellectually against our interests as well.
You pretend probably because you "believe" that all morality, "flows through the Church from the throne of the Lord'. Bunk!
Morallity is in us and religion, all religion has manipulated it to religion's advantage. More child abuse.
More will be revealed through settlements that demand corporate Church documents be turned over to the injured.
Australia , as example, will be a real barn burner.
And when time after time Bishops and Cardinals world wide are shown by their own records to have enabled child rape. Why, just Think of the changes to come.
Look at the changes that are allready happening. New Pope. New PR .New Spin all in reaction to us victims telling the truth.
And you can say, endlessly, that no new abuses will occur but the fact that they ever happened has already changed everything inregards to the corporate Church's PR.
No one will ever think of Catholic priests again without thinking about what was done to us as children.
Heralding yourself that it "won't happen again" in no way elliminates that it has happened before and on such a scale.
Morality; alltruism come from us, out of us ;for us, humans; and if we do it right, for the rest of the planet too. People have been moral long before there was a god. It takes a lot of moral courage to survive religion's Gods. And the innumerable "burnt offerings" of peoples lives sacrificed to those false dieties.
[edited by moderator]
In regard to JR’s April 13 comment at 915PM:
Justice can and must be sought – but, as I said, on this bit of earth, it must be sought according to the principles of Western justice. JR’s sly plaint would precisely move us beyond the question of ‘evidence’ and get right to the (highly contestable and as yet undemonstrated) imagery of the many stories.
But this is once more an excellent example of the fundamental shell-game gambit at the core of the Abuse Matter: A) assume the stories are true and then B) complain that nothing has been done about them and C) claim that the reason nothing has been done is because of deliberately evil and criminal actions on the part of the Designated Villain of the Narrative.
Thus much ink (and cash) have been spent on (B) and (C) – and yet both (B) and (C) utterly and totally depend on the validity of (A), which has never been demonstrated or established (and which has melted like ice-cream in the sun every time we have had the chance to examine it).
I have no idea what a “clack” is. But I note here another sly ploy: seeking to get us to presume that “the majority of Catholics’ feelings” are somehow supportive of the entire Abusenik agenda. That is surely an assertion that requires some rationale and evidence or else it remains an “imaginary construct”, and a slyly manipulative and self-serving one at that.
A number of Catholics “aren’t thrilled” with the performance of the hierarchy in all of this; I would include myself among that number, for reasons I have mentioned in comments on this site. But not being “thrilled” is a far cry from denying the entire corpus of Christianity and/or Catholicism or even the existence of God.
And I would especially be careful and distinguish between Catholics’ opinion of i) how the Church and hierarchy dealt with matters 70 or 50 or 30 years ago and ii) how it is doing so now. Once again we see the attempt to Keep The Ball Rolling by putting the past near-century into a permanent feedback loop, to be replayed over and over endlessly; as if we were or should-be some form of existential couch-potatoes who have limited our lives merely to replaying a favorite video on TV rather than turning the set off and going out to interact with the actual, current, real world.
“The aim is to give us nothing” while the Church waits for “us victims” to die off. I would hardly call a million-dollar payout “nothing”, especially for an unexamined story. But it’s an interesting (and no doubt unintentional ) give-away, isn’t it? That the ‘victims’ are now a temporally finite group that is not being replenished and is thus now in danger of “dying off”. In other words, there are no new “victims” coming along (thanks to the reforms, as much as to the now-unreceptive public attitude toward undemonstrated claims no matter how lurid).
“Just throw in a few mea-culpas” cannot seriously be accepted as the sum total of the Church’s reform (especially in light of the undemonstrated nature of the vast majority of the stories and the failure of such stories as have been examined to stand up to analysis). A million-dollar payout is a lot more than a “mea-culpa” and so are the reforms – which, as the second Jay Report indicates, have had no small effect.
And once again it has to be noted that the same commenter who has claimed that the Church can do nothing for victims now complains that the Church has done nothing for victims.
Perhaps some remunerated “victim” with a million bucks lying around might want to start up something for “us victims”?
So, and lastly, I do agree with the exhortation: “Let’s stop pretending”. Yes, I most very much do certainly agree with that.
[Edited by moderator]
That's a million before my attornies took %40 and costs.
That's undemonstrated to you? It's demonstrated enough for the Church to believe it to be true . The insurors believe it to be true.
We victims didn't pay for spin, the public was quickly on our side but the corporate Church has had to pay'd for it's spin.
Publicly people of all faiths are very supportive of the victims side here.
And then there's the silence the Church is attempting to buy through settlements. Silence about it's crimes not letting out what happened to us.
In Visconti's The Leopard, The Prince of Medina says to his family: "In order for things to stay the same, everything must change."
I think that's what "we're going through" right now in Rome. I may have to start praying.
So, let me get this right, the victims that already are, should be ignored for the victims that arn't?
The ones who you swear won't be coming.
Is their not coming thanks to us victims who blew the whistle or is it thanks to the hierarchy?
Mairin, I am happy to hear that of your boys. Keep them safe. I regret that I was too obedient and passive – I still am often. I am determined that my two boys and daughter will have a healthy distrust of authority. No need to punch, just leave and don't come back. My parents have been wrecked by finding out what happened to me.
In my experience, sexual abuse is like smoking cigarettes. If they get you to it early enough, it seems kind of normal. As I got older, I guess you could say that these acts I was coerced into became homosexual. They always were because we were both male. I never wanted or welcomed these acts though. I
I cut myself off. I just want to say that in Boston when you divide the big settlements by the number if claims, the awards are not that big. I came forward to confront and deal with the issue when I found out that the same priest that abused me started to abuse another boy with the same moves. Good for him that he ran off after one event. I wish I had done that. I have to say thought that I did not needc the money. I am a graduate of Harvard College with a degree in Philosophy. I am a lawyer with a great job. I have a beautiful wife and three great kids. We have a home in an excellent Boston suburb. This is just to say that in my case, and I am real, not just an avatar, the awesome money motive do not apply. I took the money offered though. That was the punch I threw.
If you think the public is so unreceptive, why , everytime a Bishop or Cardinal is caught out breaking laws. it makes big international news?
It's hypocricy and horror being revealed that calls the attention not religion being loathed.
Alas, only 600K after the tort-attorney’s cut. That must feel like a hefty form of victimization itself, I imagine. Still, as could be said of SNAP, any amount of money put toward therapy is better than none.
Yet the justification for the payout is indeed precisely “undemonstrated”. As I have so very often said here, the fact that the Church simply settled without trial rather than contest every allegation of every Plaintiff (and this was the 500-plus Plaintiff LA bundled-lawsuit) does not in any way constitute evidence-of or admission-of guilt in regard to any of the allegations or stories. In fact, I further noted specifically that the decision not to contest meant that not only were huge sums of money paid out, but then afterwards that Abuseniks would come back and claim (the checks having been safely cashed) that the settlement itself was ‘proof’ of their stories. Which the settlement certainly was/is not.
I don’t know where there is any evidence that the Church had to “pay for” its “spin”. Examples? And the fact that the public was Stampeded by all the elements of Stampede that I have so often enumerated here doesn’t really add much either. (And what, then, to say now that the public seems not quite so approving? Surely the LA Times would still be going on about the Matter if it were judged to be helping circulation.)
The Church’s “silence” about settlements may well be the result of whatever stipulations were drawn up (by both sides) as terms of the settlements. We’d have to know the stipulations of the specific settlement-agreements before making any assertions or coming to any conclusions about the “silence”.
In fact, one could quite reasonably imagine that the tort-attorneys themselves insisted upon Church “silence” precisely to prevent any of their Plaintiffs’ (dubious?) allegations from being rationally examined later on. And – marvelously – that would then enable a Plaintiff to come back later on and claim that the Church’s “silence” proved the validity of the remunerated allegation(s). You can’t say this Abuse Matter doesn’t have some impressive strategizing in it.
While a quotation from Visconti certainly adds a bit of snazzy gloss here, I don’t see the point’s relevance to the matter at hand. What will now “stay the same”? The Narrative’s cartoon of a sex-ridden Church and clergy? What then is the “change” factor as it applies to the material here?
I did not ever “swear” to anything about anything, including “victims”. It was the inference logically contained in the assertion that the Church was ‘waiting for victims to die off’.
And once again and all over again: a) we do not yet know who is a genuine victim and who is otherwise; b) beyond substantial cash payouts – and since the Church, as has been asserted, cannot do anything for ‘victims’ – then what is left but an endless feedback loop? And it really cannot be asserted that currently on-record allegants are to be “ignored” in favor of as-yet-undeclared allegants since there is no way to know that there is any such invisible mass of potential/future allegants out there in the first place.
And in regard to ”thanks” for “blowing the whistle”: we precisely have not established just how much genuine victimizing was actually revealed, as distinguished from a Stampede to cash-in on a piñata just waiting for enterprising party-goers with sticks. So no “thanks” are due until we can actually take an accurate inventory of how much ‘service’ was rendered. As I have said, there must have been some genuine cases – but that’s my surmise; all the cases we have been able to examine have demonstrated themselves to be less than convincing on any rational basis. In a warehouse, if one were doing a quality-check on a shipment-received, and all of the (few) cases available for inspection turned up to be of dubious quality, then what rational person would sign off on accepting the delivery?
(Yes, the Church ‘signed off’ on the settlements. But the Church was made an Offer It Couldn’t Refuse in the classic sense: either pay one lump sum regardless, or else pay for 500-plus separate and individual trials (perhaps more if each allegation rather than each Plaintiff were the subject). This was, in the Godfather trilogy, itself a form of racketeering and extortion.)
‘Boston Survivor’ offers us more revealing and – to me – very thought-provoking insights.
First, sexual-abuse is like smoking: if you’re exposed to it early enough you get used to it and figure it’s normal. I cannot see how that would work in this country since the mid-80s, given all the publicity and so forth, accompanying not only Catholic clerical abuse but also ‘sex-offenses’ generally and the Domestic Violence/incest concerns before that, and the Satanic, ritual, day-care abuse cases before that.
Actually, it sounds similar to things one might hear a habitual drunk-driver say: you drive drunk early enough and it seems normal. Although, as I said, the past 3 decades (at least) in this country have made sexual-abuse even more well-publicized than MADD made drunk-driving in the 1980s.
Also: it seems to me – although I make no general assertions – that having one’s sexual parts consistently fondled or otherwise intruded-upon by some other person would evoke some visceral and deep negative response. And the TV shows or movies of the past decades would certainly be there to prompt such a reaction, even if one were too young to read the news. And why would one “not want” and not “welcome” acts which apparently one also had come to consider “normal”? I can’t connect all the dots here.
As to being “forced to be homosexual”, the professional literature seems undecided on whether sexual-orientation is a ‘given’ and somehow ‘hard-wired’ or whether it is a choice, but – at least in regard to male sexual orientation – there is a strong theme of ‘hard-wired’ or ‘born-with’, as far as my reading can determine. (I distinguish sexual ‘orientation’ from ‘lifestyle’: one cannot – it seems – choose the gender of one’s sex objects, but one can choose to adopt the ‘lifestyle’ or ‘self-presentation’ style through which one presents oneself to the world. Thus one may not be able to choose one’s orientation (although one might decide to try and reject it), but one can certainly decide – to paint with obviously broad strokes here – whether to wear a business suit or a Carmen-Miranda outfit out in public.)
Apparently, however, there is a trend out there whereby one can claim that sexual-abuse actually determines (or changes) one’s (otherwise ‘normal’) sexual orientation.
But as I have frequently noted, rationality has not often been ‘valorized’ in Stampede matters. Indeed, it had to be just the opposite: people had to be moved quickly beyond rational analysis and pushed straight to the outrage and strong emotions elicited by the (unexamined) stories. And I think that nowadays – with the Tide somewhat receding – we can see why: analysis of the stories in even the most gently rational way quickly reveals all sorts of problems with their coherence.
(A difficulty shrewdly foreseen and – for a while – forestalled by suddenly-announced claims that sexual-abuse creates an expectable incoherence such that the stories told may not seem to add up … but … so what? Just go with the outrage and let things move on from there. See, for example, some of the more extended analytical remarks on the BigTrial site’s most recent ’56 Bags of Heroin’ and Juror-interview articles.)
I don’t mean to get into ‘Bos Surv’s’ business here – although he has chosen to share it in this forum. But I’m always fascinated to see the internal dynamics of things as they are revealed, and especially nowadays in this whole Catholic Abuse Matter. Watching and understanding how ideas are kneaded into narratives and constructs is something that has always interested me.
The thread of the exchange in regard to the existence of God was that I wrote I would need proof of the assertion that that theology and religion were “imaginary constructs”. Because they can – among alternative possibilities – be seen as theoretical constructs, which are not at all the same thing. Much of the material of theoretical physics or astrophysics consists in theoretical constructs, but their nature would not be captured by the phrase ‘imaginary constructs’, which could be shared with – say – the questions of how Olive Oyl and Popeye get along in their most recent adventures; thus in Cartoon thinking and such.
I have never made an issue of ‘proving’ the existence of God, since it can’t be done. Nor can that existence be disproven. The existence of God does not involve the this-worldly and material Plane of Existence (which is the realm Science works in); and it involves human capacities (sensing Presence, relationality) which are essentially beyond the scope of material Science.
A sly effort to create a non-Problem and then claim it’s somebody’s else responsibility to solve it. There is no Scientific proof of a God – but that’s neither news nor is it relevant to the thread of the discussion here.
The fact some people are “bored and tired” of being “controlled” is also not relevant here, although in its way informative. The core of the Catholic approach is to provide guidance in the nature of the human self and of the existence that humans are born-into. Like a flight-school gives aspiring pilots training in the basic principles of flight and aerodynamics so that they can operate aircraft without creating catastrophes for themselves and others; or a driving school gives aspiring drivers training in the basic principles of operating a motor vehicle so that they don’t go around wrecking the cars and banging into things. Ditto FAA regulations or traffic-laws: they are designed not to ‘control’ pilots and drivers but rather to keep them from making a mess of their activities. Pilots and drivers have the power to ignore those regulations and laws, but they will sooner or later wind up in unhappy situations if they do.
The opposite of ‘controlled’ is ‘out of control’ – and, hardly by coincidence, that phrase rather nicely captures some aspects of the matter here.
How to ground any morality such that it has the authority to command our attention (and not simply be nothing more than an individual or group preference temporarily embraced) is a major problem for any theory that doesn’t include some participation in the Beyond.
Whether morality is “in us”(if what is meant by this vague phrase is that we create it ourselves) – which is only one possible explanatory hypothesis – or whether morality is a sense or capacity we receive from elsewhere Beyond, has taxed human thinkers in the West going back to Plato. It will take more thinking than I have seen demonstrated here to deal with it.
More to the point here, we are assured that “more will be revealed” and that (now) it is Australia that “will be a real barn-burner”. Well – we’ve been assured of this in regard to the ICC war-crimes lawsuit, the LA document drop, the Irish situation, and so on; and such stories as we’ve actually managed to examine have also provided more cause for doubt than for assurance. So I’ll wait and see; if things work out as they usually have in these matters and even in comments on this site, we will eventually get some ‘Australian’ material, it will melt, and certain assertive commenters will suddenly not want to talk about it anymore – and no doubt will assert and assure that there is real clinching evidence yet to come.
Or, to use the example of the Millerites: we will be assured that the world will end definitively on such and such a date, it will pass, and we will suddenly be informed that the date has been moved back to such-and-such a new date but that it will now even more surely be arriving. There are people in this country who have been pursuing this path since 1844. Nor do they wish to think about the possibility that since none of their previous assertions have panned out, they might want to question their core assumptions. They will keep bethumping us with freshly-embraced new dates on which Everything They Have Been Asserting Will Be Made Clear and they will be shown to have been right all along.
Once again, rather than deal with what I have actually been saying, a straw-man position is cooked-up and then argued-against. I have never said that no fresh abuse will ever occur; I have said and am confident that new policies will make it much less easy for such abuse as might otherwise happen to occur. It is impossible for any human agency to completely prevent the occurrence of human sin or failure.
Which raises the specter of a Game here: if one assumes (without clearly expressing or admitting it) that it is possible for any human agency to prevent the occurrence of sin or failure, then one can set oneself up for a lifetime of doing nothing more than bemoaning the sins or failures that will inevitably occur. Neat. And the backward-looking variant of this is to put time into some permanent loop and keep pointing to the past for one’s purposes, just as one also points to some assumed future for one’s purposes. Neat again.
Any examples of where the hierarchy have been shown “worldwide” to have “enabled child rape” and “by their own documents”? Because none of those documents have appeared here.
And I would ask for the date-time stamp of the comment that is quoted to the effect that I have said “it won’t happen again” (i.e. “heralding yourself that ‘it won’t happen again’”): but of course, that documentary evidence won’t be forthcoming here either, since it doesn’t exist. Who can be surprised?
I don’t think there is much evidence that “people have been moral long before there was a god”. Morality and divinity are even more tightly bound up the farther back in the human historical record one goes. Counter-examples and historical evidence are, of course, welcome; mere unsupported assertions won’t suffice, however.
Once again, I take the time with all of this unpromising material for a specific purpose: any readers who in the course of their days might find themselves dealing with Abuseniks in written or spoken exchange are going to run into this type of stuff. I offer some possibilities for how to address the material.
Oh, Churchnik! "The opposite of ‘controlled’ is ‘out of control’ – and, hardly by coincidence, that phrase rather nicely captures some aspects of the matter here."
I would say that the correct opposite of controlled is free. "out of control" here makes no sense. The opposite of determinism is not choas. A sloppy rush to your point. That's OK. Just keep on being so arrogant in your Catholic humility and handling Abuseniks.
Well for one I wouldn't credit your God's record for morality.
the God of the Old Testament pulled this great example,
"If you love me you'll kill your kid for me": Abraham and Isaac.( What a practical joker and so moral. Isaac must have never turned his back on Papa again. So the fact that the majority of the people pre Abraham and pre Jaweh didn't kill their kids is definitely a sign of inate morallity and common sense.) Animals will sacrifice themselves to protect their young.Now that's real morality.
Some societies did sacrifice children. Catholicism has carried on that tradition. Example: Us victims.
Actually your God ordered many child killings and carried through according to the Biblical "record". Jericho for one and the complete nonsense of Moses' final plague on the Egyptians and the equally non existant ; Herods slaughter of the innocents. Let alone the slaughter of all those innocent babies in the also non existant Flood.
The Bible, the" historical" record of God's pique with humanity. Or how "we" really let the Big Guy down.
So He sacrificed His only Son, Himself really, to wash away our sins against Him. After this little sacrifice,( very little was sacrificed " really" after all He was immortal) was thought up, I'll bet he told Jesus, "What ever you do don't tell your mom what I've got planned. She'll kill me."
Masochism and self destruction praised as nobility for"crimes" yet to be committed. Humbug!
Documents don't "appear" here because they are not posted here.
Innuendo and myth and personal attacks and mockery and lies are the usual posts here by you.
Mahoney's and Law's documents are available for people to read if they want to. Google them.
Let’s be fair and just, and also thorough. I just read Ryan MacDonald’s link to an article by Fr. Gordon MacRae entitled “Be Wary of Crusaders!” Then almost immediately his point was demonstrated in a news article. Edward C. Domaingue, who was editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader for 28 years, wrote editorials excoriating accused priests, the Diocese of Manchester, and Father MacRae himself. Last month, Edward Domaingue was arrested on child pornography charges after being turned into the police by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Chidren. Additional charges are expected. Thus this story was buried in a three-inch blurb in the Union Leader. Father MacRae is right. Be wary of crusaders!
Another SNAP article, another whiny atheist emerges from the cracks. Never would've expected it.
—Kind of like the day "Copper" discovered something new!
Youtube: Beagle Puppy Howl, by Ginny Green
“Documents” might be referenced or linked-to by persons claiming that they are decisively or even largely supportive of assertions they make. But that referencing or linking doesn’t happen either.
Perhaps we might recall that the LA documents were already looked at here and they didn’t really reveal much in support of the Abusenik position at all. Nor did certain otherwise noisy commenters want to do anything except not-talk-about-it when that was pointed out.
And some persons are well-advised to be careful that lest they get what they so brassily wish-for: as the actual dynamics of the Stampede continually come to light now, they may well be ‘remembered’ – but not in the way they would like to imagine themselves.
Now, in regard to Bos-Surv’s comment of 740PM today, I would say this: is a pilot or driver who has refused the bounds of aerodynamics or traffic-rules “free” or “out of control”? Would rational person pay money to fly with a pilot who announces at the gate that s/he and this flight today will be “free” of the oppressions of aerodynamics and the FAA oppressions as to what altitude to fly and how much distance to keep between airborne aircraft? Would you care to share the roads with persons who have declared themselves “free” of the oppressions and hegemony of traffic laws? Would you want to live near a nuclear plant whose manager has declared the plant “free” of the hegemonic oppressions of Nuclear Regulatory Commission manuals and regulations governing the operation of such plants?
If Bos-Surv truly did go to Harvard and majored in Philosophy then we are given here a classic example of where philosophical-thinking has gone since it declared itself “free” of rationality and – ala Voltaire and Rousseau – all that nasty Churchy stuff.
One can only imagine oneself “free” rather than “out of control” if one has already kicked to the curb any pre-existing template as to what human beings and human life ideally can be, should be, or are. Bringing Catholic philosophy (informed by the Catholic faith-vision) into the mix here, then the Image of God in which all human beings are made / providing all human beings with an Ultimate Meaning and Purpose and even an Essence … create a comprehensive and durable Vision and – through Faith – presume as well a core human reality that is also not merely created out of the imaginative power of the human mind but is also a Reality that reflects the Master Vision of its Creator.
Getcha’sef “freeeee” from all that (thank you, Simon and Garfunkel) and you have basically tossed the starships into deep space without any Prime Coordinates (thank you, Star Trek). And human life becomes a booming buzzing frakfest as whacky and lethal as the air traffic without FAA and aerodynamic boundaries or Manhattan or LA without functioning traffic-lights.
Consider for a moment the type of mentality that can consider all of this ‘good’, ‘progress’, ‘liberation’.
Since BosSurv has opted to bring philosophy and philosophical skills into the mix here, I will share – merely as a personal reflection – that there seemed to me a rather clear incoherence in the points of the life-story he shared, for somebody trained in both Philosophy (and from Harvard, no less) and also trained in law. But perhaps it goes to the larger problems with training in philosophy and philosophical thinking as they have devolved in the past half-century and legal-thinking ditto.
In fact, in regard to the devolutions in both philosophical and legal thinking, I would submit that it was precisely such a profound and essential corrosive devolution in legal thinking that allowed this country to adopt ‘revolutionary’ concepts of Justice and jurisprudence while simultaneously convincing itself that all these (lethal) ‘changes’ were ‘reforms’ and ‘progress’ and ‘gooooood’. American and Western law were now “free” from the oppressions of Western concepts of Justice (nicely, so dependent upon the Church’s own hard-won canon-law achievements of earlier centuries). But I would then also point out that now, even in this country, Law and Justice are not “freeeee” but rather are – so clearly and palpably – “out of control”. Because that “freedom” simply led them, for lack of any constitutive shaping-vision, to ‘revolutionary’ law and the philosophico-legal stylings of Lenin and Dzerzhinsky and Mao. Such progress. Such freedom.
Churchnik, You had a pretty good metaphor freak-out in that first paragraph. LoL Here's the thing that my Harvard brain tells me: no matter how many scenarios you come up with where thing one is more desireable than thing two, you will not be correct that "out of control" is the necessary opposite of "controlled." Oh, it helps you make your point. And it is POSSIBLE that someone not controlled would be out of control. But these are not truly opposite states. Uncontrolled means free. The problem for Catholic Churchniks is that you have so much tied to this kind of distinction. What a burden. Not free thinking, man. (I added "man" to give you more fodder for you conspiracy-theory-like ranting about how I might not be who I said I am. And that it is impossible for you to know. You can go on and on wikipedia style about the use of the word "man" as an epithet in American slang. Tie that to possibilities about my age or an era that I identify with and off you go. You have to admit that the gross amount of historical information that you use to make many of your points is worthy of lampoon.)
There is no objectivity here, Publion. Just comments. Because it is a blog. And we are in the comments section. And my name is not BostonSurvivor and your name is not Publion. In a pretend way, you can apply all the standards you want to your investigation and assessment of everything. I said those things about my background because I wanted to make the point that I am OK and not a desperate person in dire need of some money. The speculation about money grubbing so-called abuse victims is out of control and just not accurate. Some people will try to take advantage of anything. In many tragedies, there are looters. Speaking of bad things happening, . . .
You get free when you think that something like what happened here at the Marathon on Monday, happened because someone(s) did something terrible. And three people are dead and many are suffering. God's plan? I heard on the radio this morning someone saying that you could really see the hand of god in this event in that many more people did not die. He protected those others. Now, that is dumb and I know that you would not go there. But the problem is that you have to look for some kind of good in everything and try so strenuously to assign it to god. Then, you have to take the bad stuff and stick that onto some individual(s) free will. It starts to get complex fast. But that is OK because we have Cardinal Sean, the sheppard, to sort it out for us. That is what was being suggested this morning on AM 1060 Boston Catholic radio. Such free thinking?
Same with the abuse of children by priests. You really have to contort your thoughts to protect your faith, your religion, your church in light of what has happened right up through 2002 when the media, driven by legal wins against the church, really forced the information on abuse into the public. Cardinal Law and the Boston church would not have delt with this issue but for the lawyers and the media that forced them to do anything at all. Even now the church still fights to keep secret or at least keep quiet anything on this sexual subject. Assign the all good that is done to the church and assign the bad to some individuals with free will. And the explanations and arguments get more complex quickly.
What's left to say Mahoney committed felonies and won't be punished for it.
I quote another athiest Kurt Wiel," And we're lost out here in the stars. Big stars. Little stars. Burning through the night. And we're lost out here in the stars."
There's nothing to be afraid of.
Jim, You are so right on. In my experience as a nonbeliever, I value life even more because this life is the only one I know I'll get. When one thinks that this world is just a vale of tears preceeding heaven, one diminishes it. To wish and wait for ultimate justice is to forego any justice in the world that is real, that counts, that we know exists.
Thanks Boston. Thanks for also being so sane. Rare!
I've been called every name in the book here; and that's draining. Christians seem to like casting aspersions. That's why I've found more Jesus, sans the diety suit, in athiests more than in his self styled followers.
Again Boston thanks and I'm sorry you were hurt.
I keep attempting to offer my settlement to P if he's just stop being so boring; but Dave never prints it.
Correction, sorry. O'Malley is the shepherd of his flock, not the "sheppard," as I wrote, though that could serve as a fine last name.
Let’s deal with the small stuff, first.
“Mahoney committed felonies and won’t be punished for it.” An assertion, unsubstantiated, unexplained. And made in the context of a site where all the documentary material that has been proposed fails to support any of it.
The name is ‘Kurt Weill’. Readers are welcome to wonder a) what relevance the quote has to anything here and b) how somebody can give the appearance of being familiar with something and yet not be able to spell it. Even if one were copying it off a Wiki page on the screen (according to whatever excitements or illuminations) the correct spelling would be right there. Taking notes over a phone?
Now to Bos-Surv. Pre-note to readers: I don’t often encounter submissions in comments that allow me to actually look at the material as if it were a university-level submission, but since we putatively have both an elite college-grad and an attorney here then I figure we have a right to expect some substantial thinking in an extended comment.
First, we really don’t know if we are dealing with a “Harvard” brain – this being the internet and the Abusenik matter and all – so I am not going further down the road of impugning Harvard since the place may actually not be involved. For that matter, I am of the same mind about impugning the Bar as well.
Second, let’s imagine as the readership that we are each a university professor and we have here an undergraduate paper to correct and to grade. If I were correcting and grading or evaluating this submission of student Bos-Surv’s [hereinafter: “BS”] here (although he is putatively at this point a long-graduated Philosophy major and now a practicing attorney) this is what would come to me:
First paragraph: “freak-out” makes no sense or contribution here since it is unclear what the term means; and is itself – to put it gently – an “idiosyncratic” term (i.e. you wouldn’t expect to find it in generally accepted discourse and usage in the field). However, more ominously, it suggests that the term is somehow deliberately deployed by the writer in order to somehow dispose-of or take a swipe at material (i.e. metaphors in the original material to which he is responding) that he cannot or does not want to deal with effectively.
Then we get a simple bald assertion that “you will not be correct that "out of control" is the necessary opposite of "controlled." He has now taken on the responsibility of backing up so clear and decisive an assertion with a sufficient deployment of clear and decisive demonstration. But even before that, he has gotten himself in trouble because the material he is quoting (my prior comments) never said that “the opposite of ‘controlled’ is ‘out of control’”; it simply offered examples of how his own asserted hypothesis won’t work in certain rather significant ways. So he has now gone and created his own straw-man argument, rather than deal with the material to which he has chosen to respond. And he has created this straw-man either a) unintentionally because of poor reading and conceptual comprehension or b) because he is not trying to illuminate the material or his position, but simply trying to cloud the issue for his own purposes.
He then admits that the material he is dismissing does help make the point it was intended to, and then that it is “possible” that his own hypothesis could lead to the outcomes outlined in the metaphors. But then tries to overcome those two rather substantial admissions by insisting through simple and bald assertion that his own position is correct (i.e. that “these are not two truly opposite states”). But once again, he is dealing here not with the material he is objecting-to, but rather with his own straw-man position that he himself created.
What he is missing here is that the original material did not 1)posit or stipulate or assert the utter oppositeness of the two terms, but rather 2) demonstrated (rather vividly) the consequences of carrying BS’s own material forward into actuality. Clearly, (1) and (2) are different propositions, and BS has gotten himself into a hole here arguing against the actually non-existent (1) while – intentionally or mistakenly – avoiding (2) – which is the actual proposition that was made.
He then deploys yet another assertion: “uncontrolled means free”. Which, in any of its variants, he has failed to actually demonstrate or defend as being anything more than his personal and preferred take on the matter.
He then starts simply descending into the epithetical, negatively characterizing what he has not yet demonstrated to be wrong (in the service of his own position, which he has not demonstrated to be right).
Thus – suddenly addressing all Catholics rather than his interlocutor – that “you have so much tied to this kind of distinction”. But the “distinction” to which he refers is i) from the straw-man argument he has already gone and made the mistake of creating for himself, and ii) actually raises the intriguing possibility that Catholics have made some form of subtle and interesting distinction that actually gets the reader interested in pursuing what BS here drops.
BS then goes on immediately to rhetorically dismiss what he has not – and should have – demonstrated, with a rhetorically immature and transparently false-sympathy: “What a burden.”
He then deliberately deploys a slang term-of-address (i.e. “man)simply to – as he then rather heavy-handedly goes on to explain – confuse readers as to whether he is or is not a Harvard-trained philosophy graduate and practicing attorney or not. This gratuitous gambit serves only to a) render his presentation less professional, b) create a distraction from rather profound problems he has already created for himself, and c) raise an issue as to his honesty and credibility that his own poor performance in raising it in the first place has actually now served to further support.
Then – grammatically failing to close a parenthesis and thus skewing the coherence of his presented thoughts – he proceeds to simply make epithetical fun of the historical references used in the original material (they are “worthy of lampoon”) to support its points. As if epithetical dismissal can ever substitute for rational counter-argument or the deployment of his own historical counter-examples (which arguments or examples he completely fails to provide).
He then claims in his second paragraph that “there is no objectivity here” – which, again being deployed without demonstration or rationale, simply hangs here as a quasi-epithetical assertion.
He then goes on to dismiss the entire possibility of “objectivity” and claims as explanation that the justification for that dismissal is “because this is a blog”. Which assertion i) instantly undercuts the possibility of his own objectivity and ii) must survive comparison with the rather substantial weight and tone of the original material against which he is making his epithetical assault.
He then proceeds to depart-from – if not abandon – all of his prior efforts of analysis (such as they are) in his first paragraph and instead simply creates other issues which were not actually contained in the original material with which his foregoing analysis in the first paragraph was purportedly intended to deal.
In his third paragraph he then introduces a recent and hugely-emotionally charged public event in order – one can only infer – to somehow bolster emotionally the already-weak conceptual case he has made: that the Boston Marathon bombings somehow support some element (not clearly explained in his text) about how to “get free”. Being putatively educated in the Boston area, is he trying here to simply cloak his already weakly-put position in the aura of this event?
The gravamen of his effort in this paragraph is apparently to link “finding good in” events with a putative general Catholic tendency to listen to their clergy and hierarchy and thus – tenuously – that they thereby show themselves almost constitutionally unable to engage in “free thinking”. This conclusion a) is rather tenuously reasoned and b) hardly distinguishes between i) Catholic persons who – in caricature – require their clergy to do all of their thinking for them from ii) Catholics who as part of their Stance toward the world and events check to see what might be of value from sources they consider to be of some worth in that project.
In his final paragraph he then attempts to link his foregoing material – such as it is – with the Catholic Abuse Matter. Here the gravamen of his position it that – again addressing either Catholics or the author of the original material – “you really have to contort your thoughts to protect” the Church in this general matter. Yet a) he offers no demonstrations as to how thoughts were actually contorted in order to achieve what he claims Catholics “have to” do and b) his presentation must be put in the context of extensive material put up by his interlocutor in prior submissions on this very thread. And in that comparison his presentation here clearly pales since – despite the fact that “this is a blog” – yet the original material seems to have managed to cover the ground it set out to cover far more substantially than BS has chosen to cover the ground he has chosen to cover here.
He specifically states that the media attention in the post-January 02 (phase of the) Abuse Matter followed the “legal wins” rather than preceded them by quite a bit (although since he is vague about to which legal cases he is referring, there might be cases which preceded that date, but none historically that preceded the media’s coverage of the Matter).
And he concludes this final paragraph with mere assertions about topics which the original material to which he is responding went over in far greater detail: i.e. that the tort-attorneys and media forced the Church to reveal (what he presumes to be definitive admissions or demonstrations of) both i) vast abuse and ii) efforts to keep everything covered-up or “secret” or – a palpable weakening of his immediately prior characterization – “at least to keep quiet”.
And finally concludes his submission with the valid observation that “explanations and arguments get more complex quickly”, which appears quite out of spirit with the material and dynamics of his submission and works as if to somehow make a last-line bid for ‘complexity’ that the entire corpus of his submission most certainly did not demonstrate at all.
Final assessment: This submission has a) created a false issue which was not the issue raised by the material to which it is putatively responding; b) makes assertions that are neither demonstrated or explained in a rationally coherent and effective way; c) deploys little conceptual or historical material in support of those assertions; d) deploys substantial amounts of distracting and manipulative rhetorical ploys. Taken in conjunction with previous material submitted by this student … [I leave the rest to the readership]
Apologies to all for the length of this comment of mine, but it does feel good to stretch a bit.
Publion, I cannot say that I am not impressed with your writings, especially if even half of this information is cerebrally available to you. I am jealous of that. That said, you were wrong all the way to the end of your note.
Let's start. You should stop bringing up my education. I am not arguing from authority.
Like I said before, I only brought up that part of my background to say that I am doing fine in life and did not need to pursue an abuse settlement for the money. BTW, in Boston now an accuser can get 75K max under the terms of the settlement. Not insignificant money but no million dollar awards to individuals. Not even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Money as a motive is not that strong, in my estimation. Certainly, money was not the motive in my case. I took it more to deprive the church of it, then to have it myself. In any event, the key thing is being right or being wrong about something and not where one went to school or what one does for work.
Next, this is me just writing on a blog comment. I am not writing a university paper or a legal brief. This is what I was getting at with you and your standards. The whole idea of you or any others assessing my comments like college paper is dumb. Why evaluate them like that? They are not that. I do not make a claim that I am writing scholarly works here. Candidly, writing to that level would take me a lot of time because I am not a particularly good or fast writer. I have gotten along in life by hard work, putting in hours, not because I am particularly gifted. Mistakes and flaws and inelegance in my posts are just organic unrevised, unchecked thoughts. We just met and we are talking about this – that is how I am writing.
The idea that you and others will assess the veracity of my education claims by how I perform arguing with you here is insane. It reminds me of a time recently where a new friend's mom found out that I went to Harvard for undergrad. (I almost never mention Harvard because of the negative reactions.) She asked me a lot of questions and seemed really interested in this. That evening she challenged me (and others) to play the board game Scrabble. So we played. Turns out that this woman plays all the time and has a great vocabulary. She wiped the floor with me. OK. I was not too embarassed. What was remarkable though was that she acted like she just debunked a myth. Maybe she did but the myth was her own creation. Yes, I went to school there and graduated. No, I will not crush anyone in any even vaguely intellectual game/endeavor. I also will not know how to do plenty of things that other people know how to do. I make tons of mistakes. When my wife is right about something and I am wrong. She will sometimes say, "Oh, Harvard, didn't you know that." Now, she means that as a joke. But often people do expect me to impress them in every/any interaction. I wish I had not mentioned Harvard here because it is such a distraction to you.
Next, when I am making fun of your historical references, I am making fun of the frequency, the quantity, the sheer girth of them. You do so much work to make a point. That you don't see any humor there says something. " . . . he proceeds to simply make epithetical fun of the historical references used in the original material (they are “worthy of lampoon”) to support its points. As if epithetical dismissal can ever substitute for rational counter-argument or the deployment of his own historical counter-examples (which arguments or examples he completely fails to provide)." I think that I was obviously making fun of you. You are the object, not the points themselves. I am not trying to prove anything. Just having a laugh. But the best is when you go on to take seriously my "man" joke. And analyze it! So ironic. I am making fun of you for going too far with your doubts and demading too much proof and overanalyzing, and then you go ahead and do that TO THE JOKE ITSELF! Awesome. I cannot be deceptive, if I tell you THAT I AM BEING DECEPTIVE! So obviously a joke. C'mon, man.
Next, it does get somewhat tiresome when you actually dispute, discount, distrust, and dissect everything. I am born and raised in Boston, Roslindale neighborhood. I have never lived more than 20 miles outside the city in my 40 years on this planet. Doubt that too, if you like. I brought up the Marathon bombing because it is on my mind, a mentally readily available topic. Also, I was hearing it talked about by catholics on catholic media yesterday morning. You then go ahead and analyze and assign possible strategies to my using the event. I brought it up as an example of catholic religious thinking from real people in real time. No need for caricature. Now, I say "real" and you can endlessly dispute my assertions by asking how you can be sure that this is true. And how real is it? You can always do that. I am from Boston but you are not going to get my birth certificate here. So, can you move forward, say with a disclaimer and a conditional acceptance of some of my unprovable assertions, or do I just have to abandon all personal experience references. This is like the rules of evidence but nothing is admissible in court. Have you ever read or listened to a Holocaust denier? They have facts, figures, historians, experts, testimony, documentation, sources and all kinds of proof. Still wrong. 9/11 Truthers have tons of supporting facts, figures, historical references, experts. Fail. Area 51 alien government conspiracy people. Mega fail. -Yeti, Sasquatch, Big Foot- I mention these things, assuming that you do not subscribe to any of them, because historical accounts and experts and reports are very often debateable too. Now, usually the advocates and supporters of the wrong position are in a minority. But people can still stand there and say, "Have you read this person's book?" Or cite that the expert behind this has a PhD in his field or was in the military or did work for the government. So, this is just to say that even in some instances, if I offered support for an assertion like that tort lawyers along with the Boston Globe drove the church in Boston to release documents and start to address the issue of sexual abuse by 2002, you could dispute every bit of information and discredit every source. I will say Mitchell Garabedian and you will just say anti-catholic bigotted tort attorney in it for the money. If that is your mode, I cannot be brought track down cases and give you citations. I just have my experience.
So, I will keep going but I have to run right now. I am an "Abusenik." Publion, do you have a dog in this fight? Why are you willing to put in the effort here? No motive in asking, I am just wondering.
I have a motive in asking that same question. Doubting Thomas"s dog is called cover up.
The education material is something you brought up. It bears directly on matters because it goes to the quality of the material you put up. I notice a tendency here: you don’t seem to like it when the material or ideas you put up go to places you don’t want them to, yet are places quite relevantly contained in the material itself. Thoughts have consequences – which should not be news to somebody with an elite education who also carries on a career as an attorney at law.
If it’s true about a cap on payouts in Boston (a cap imposed by whom?) it doesn’t change the piñata-type circumstances and possibilities that obtained for most of the duration of the Catholic Abuse Matter.
Money – the stuff that notoriously “makes the world go ‘round” – cannot be dismissed as a major potential motivator without some deep and extensive evidence to the contrary.
My approach to your – or any – material on this site, including my own, is that Catholic Abuse is a serious matter, TMR is a serious site (not a “blog”), and the articles and commentary here (since the site is one of the very few of its kind on the web) are going to be read by a great number of readers. This is not a general-opinion site (such as, say, HuffPost) where the usual web-quickie expression of emotion or off-the-cuff thought are going to contribute to the discourse (although there are such comments that appear here, and there is no effort on my part to deny the right of persons to make them).
After all, why would busy and intelligent people waste time with web-quickies or writing as if TMR were “just a blog” in the first place? Diversion? Entertainment? If people come to this site, and take the time to put up comments – especially longer or more involved ones – then they clearly aren’t doing it for plops-and-giggles.
Additionally, I can’t wrap my mind around the hypothesis that persons can be serious, engaged, and capable of making worthwhile input in their daily life, and then come onto a site like this, and (figuratively-speaking) take off their business clothes and thinking-cap, and then put a ball-cap on sideways and suddenly think and write at some much lower level.
First, it seems to me that one operates at the level one has achieved and maintains, and it has to be an effort to operate at some lower level. Why make the effort at all? Second, why would any person who has achieved an ability to know, think, and express oneself even want to operate at a lower level, especially on such a special and focused site that deals with serious material? (Material with which – in addition – such a person might have substantial emotional involvement.)
Yes, one takes a vacation to relax from pressures. But in what way can the material and subject of TMR be considered a webby ‘vacation-site’? And if one has actually achieved a level of personal and conceptual maturity, why would one ‘relax’ by spreading personal or conceptual immaturity into a site that is trying to deal seriously with serious matters?
So the “this is just a blog” justification doesn’t really cover the ground very well at all.
Additionally, competently and maturely conceiving and rationally presenting the fruit of one’s thoughts is not “scholarly”; it is precisely the aim of a liberal-arts education even at the undergrad level and certainly should be an ingrained habit for a practicing professional, and even more so for an attorney.
Which also goes to the matter of the claimed education (Harvard – Philosophy) and occupation (attorney): regardless of whether you do or do not formally “argue from authority”, you have made a claim that will raise in almost all readers the expectation of a rather high and regularly-sustained caliber of thought and expression, both in the technique and in the quality of the content. By such claims you have – I won’t hesitate to say – ‘committed yourself’ to a certain guarantee of competence and quality.
What continues to concern me is that any of this is apparently news to you.
Thus in holding your input to “standards” (the same standards to which I hold my own material) I am not being “dumb”. And – I repeat – a well-educated professional should have already internalized and incorporated such ‘standards’ into his/her on-going self-evaluation and approach to all of subjects which receive his/her attention.
Nor is it “insane” that persons reading your material should form some opinion and assessment of the success or failure of the (claimed) education from which such material springs. Especially – I will say – when there appears to be such a disconnect between the claims and the actual performance. (“Dumb” and “insane” are hardly the type of assessments or analysis one expects from elite-university graduates and attorneys; nor do they indicate a particularly well-honed capacity for analysis or expression.)
And in that regard, please be assured that it is not the simple thought of “Harvard” that prompts my reactions; it is – to repeat – the rather clear disconnect between the claim and the actual performance.
I do work hard to express and ground my “points”. This is a serious site and a serious Matter that this site deals-with.
And if “humor” is somehow quietly presumed to include incoherent or poorly-expressed thoughts, then I would suggest you analyze the phenomenon to which you are referring, because “humor” does not at all accurately capture it.
You come onto a site like this, with your claimed education and professional chops, and your claimed history of victimization and its consequences, and you cawn’t think why one wouldn’t “make fun” a little bit? Where do you think you are commenting? And what sort of people do you imagine your readership to be? (I will not refrain from pointing out some obvious possible answers to those questions: You are personally used to shoddy and immature thought and expression, and travel in circles – actual or webby – where that type of performance is considered ‘the very thing’ … which goes again to a point I have often made on this site: beneath the sustained career of the Abuse Matter is a rather unimpressive (along numerous axes) bunch of people.)
And you went through an elite-university education and have sustained a career as an attorney … and yet you find it rawwther “tiresome” and you are surprised that what you say and write is ‘analyzed’ by your interlocutors, hearers, and readers? Even if one were to credit the basics of your claims as to education and profession, one would then have to wonder just how much you learned or just how reliable a professional you are.
And you cawn’t think why anyone wouldn’t see that you were only “joking”? Where do you think you are? Do you think most of this readership is sitting at the screen with a ball-cap on sideways and a beer or a bong by their side? If I were to submit the surmise that you are a stunted failure operating deceitfully (if not also maliciously) here as the web-equivalent of a slacker bar-fly, who could say that the surmise is impossible or utterly gratuitous?
I don’t want your “birth certificate”. You have already given me a rather clear view of your “mind certificate” and that’s all that really matters on the web. And all that really should matter in any major site on the web dealing with serious issues.
The problem is not with your “personal experience”; the problem is with the internal equipment and Stance that – as far as can be gleaned from the quality of your material here – you brought to that experience.
You rightly point out that facts and statistics can be inaccurate or wrongly-applied or that in a number of ways humans cannot really know (Churchill’s phrase comes to mind here: “History, with her flickering lamp … “).
Has it not then occurred to you that the concerns about the validity of so very much of the Catholic Abuse Matter are hugely and deeply and vitally well-placed? That the Western principles of evidence – rationally derived and demonstrated – is of such utter importance to the integrity of the administration of any sort of human justice, especially as it involves the Sovereign Coercive Authority of the government? And that thus this site deals with vital serious matters? And that thus this is no place for joking around?
How can this be news to you? It has been sitting in your own espoused philosophy-of-history (as you have expressed it above) from the get-go.
Do I “have a dog in this fight?” Is it news to you that anybody concerned for Truth and Justice and the integrity of the Western and American fundaments of law and government (to say nothing of the religious and metaphysical/philosophical concerns involving the role, heritage and ministry of the Catholic Church) most certainly has a dog in this fight?
That’s how serious this Matter is and that’s how the serious this site is. Is this news to you? Hadn’t occurred to you on your own, despite all the time you’ve put into these comments of yours? With all that putative education and all the professional skills and characteristics which by this time one has a right to presume you have derived and developed?
Final-note: I have taken the time in this response not because I particularly want to focus on ‘Boston Survivor’ but because I believe his material offered a clear and somewhat rare opportunity to make some vital general points about the entire approach to the Abuse Matter and all of the even deeper issues which – upon analysis – wind up being fundamentally connected-to that Matter. I am pleased and grateful for the opportunity to do this.
"Money – the stuff that notoriously “makes the world go ‘round” – cannot be dismissed as a major potential motivator without some deep and extensive evidence to the contrary."
Just reading this now but had to stop and repost this sentence you wrote. So I need deep and extensive evidence to refute your cliche. You should be embarassed by this bit. If you try to defend it, you should hide your head in shame.
I disagree with everything you write. I hate your thoughts and attitude and orientation. But I do like it when you suddenly fall down like this.
"Additionally, I can’t wrap my mind around the hypothesis that persons can be serious, engaged, and capable of making worthwhile input in their daily life, and then come onto a site like this, and (figuratively-speaking) take off their business clothes and thinking-cap, and then put a ball-cap on sideways and suddenly think and write at some much lower level."
Now you are just calling me a liar without using the word. I really hate the "ballcap" comment. You better just be referring to a dunce-like look or you will be making yourself look like not a good person.
(“Dumb” and “insane” are hardly the type of assessments or analysis one expects from elite-university graduates and attorneys; nor do they indicate a particularly well-honed capacity for analysis or expression.)
You don't know many of either Harvard Alumni or Boston lawyers. Many are my friends. Well I do. Any many of them sound just like me and use words just like that. Your assessment of that carries no weight. Your are trying so hard to put me down.
It occurs to me that the question put to me in Bos-Surv’s recent comment here (Do I “have a dog in this fight?”) may not simply be a generalized sort of question. Rather, it may be a slyly-phrased bit as to whether I am somehow somebody who has a particular and personal interest – along the lines of if you defend this stuff then you must be one yourself.
I have dealt with this characteristic gambit before: don’t argue ‘our’ side with those who object (since our side may not have much of a conceptual position if people are allowed to analyze it carefully); rather: see if you can’t impugn the objector somehow and use that as a distraction; don’t get people used to the idea that ‘we’ will be available to discuss the rationale under, around, and behind our demands and our agenda and our objectives.
But it does raise for me the question: does Bos-Surv have a dog in this fight? Is it possible that his law-school education and perhaps attorney’s job are somehow connected to or in or through the offices of – say – some notable tort-attorney in this field?
That might help explain the unimpressive (for so putatively trained and practicing an attorney) performance of Bos-Surv in the material presented on this site. Of course it may also be true that he only comes onto this site to “joke” and demonstrate some “humor”, but even if so then such a possibility would not mutually exclude the possibility of my other surmise.
At any rate, on the web the material is the primary material. (Could that be a maxim? Materia materia est.)
Comments for this thread are now closed.
Thank you to everyone for contributing.