Judge Blasts SNAP In Ruling That It Cannot Intimidate and Harass Catholics Worshiping at Sunday Mass

Perhaps a website set up by JR would be the very thing for everybody concerned. There are services that pretty much walk the novice through it and charge nothing or close to nothing. Or would such a site run the risk of demonstrating uncongenial realities? Better to piggyback on serious sites rather than run such risks?

Nice Arch though – and the riverboats .They seem to have been missed in the wiki tour of the city provided above.

I would have thought the "center of the Catholic junta" would have been Washington, where the Nunciature is located.

Where has SNAP fostered vengence??? SNAP's behavior by approaching families outside of Church's at mass may appear to look like "vengence" that's what it's supposed to look like. Like us poor [edited by moderator] victims hate your religion when we don't. (As I've said personally I don't even think about your religion anymore. Haven't really for 40+ years.)

But SNAP made the Cathedral here and certain churches the place to go to be active.(I just thought the SNAP leadership was dumb, hickish actually but I believed the Kool Aid.)

SNAP centered all demo's at churches. Never at the Federal or local DA's office. And the "war" was on.

"Piggy back on serious sites like this"

You are half correct about piggybacking by me. I would use this site for the dispatchment of the truth about victims; SNAP and you.

And since the corporate Church has spent tens of millions of dollars backing fake "warriors" like you and SNAP, I have no problem at all in using any part of that "mission" to get the truth out about it. and using it's own press to do it, thanks.

Since the press's belief in SNAP seems to be locked down. I'll use some of that XBavarian beer money for victims,

by riding you.

P.S. other victims, Kay Ebling , who has posted here, for example knows full well that SNAP is counter-intelligence as is VOTF. (Bishop Accountability in my opinion is a far less complicit member of the "project";. Listing accused priests does nothing to control victims as i see it. but i can be educated about that.)

And why I say Kay knows SNAP's a fraud it's from her own personal hell dealing with their back stabbing, sabotage and all round nastiness. Let alone Kay's own degree'd education in investigative journalism.

I have intentionally lied to you and others here; Never.

NEVER!

[edited by moderator]

Well Jim it seems once again there are individuals here who think they know better on what your thinking or what is in your heart. 

The best thing that I see here is there is not one survivor trying to defend the actions of SNAP. They did something wrong, and should face the consequences. Unlike those who continue to fight for four individuals who have been put away under our system. 

Or should I be like them and defend Snap only because they say they help victims,  and ignore the evidence ?

Pub the authorship goes Doyle then Sipe then Wall.

I  also note an effort by another commenter to reduce everything about this merely to what JR is himself  "thinking" or "what is in [his] heart".

This is another classic example of the hall of mirrors that is at the core of the Catholic Abuse Matter as it has mutated over the decades. We are trying to establish rational explanations and – where proffered – reliable and credbile evidence. The issue is not what people are somehow "thinking" if that use of the word is meant to imply deeply and incommunicable personal illuminations or excitements. Nor is it a matter of what is in anybody's heart (for the same reasons) but rather what is available to everyone through rational and honest analysis and assessment.

That rather clearly appears to be news to some.

I notice you also didn't mention the phrase that describes the reasons for creating secretly funded committees in Doyle's paper to the Bishops. That phrase being "to control victims and their families"

Now why would a Catholic Canon Lawyer at the D.C. Vatican Embassy want to or even think to write that phrase; "to control victims and their families" in his paper to the American Bishops?

Answer: Because that's what the corporate Church has always done.

If the first fire wall, the shame of the victims breaks down and the Church had to deal with our families. Then Catholic lawyers were found and or Catholic cops and prosecutors all with excuses for silence and promises that it wouldn't happen again; or "he's going into treatment etc. etc. ad nauseum.

This is PATHETIQUE!

Counter-Intelligence alway tells you who they are. Fool! Judge the man by his actions not by his words.

The Doyle Report and Proposal to the bishops (which, we recall, they rejected) was an internal organizational proposal that was made through normal channels to the bishops for consideration at their general meeting at Collegeville, MN. I cannot see how it can be asserted that such a Report/Proposal or the funding for it can be characterized as “secret”. If JR went out yesterday and bought a pound of grapes and did not advise the LA Times, would that be a “secret” purchase?

The phrase appearing in quotations in JR’s comment of May 4 at 1100 (“to control victims and their families”) is not one I have found in the Report. Where does it come from? I will go so far here as to say that it is not from Doyle or the Report. I could easily be refuted by a simple and accurate quotation (with page-number) from the Report. But as I said, I have not been able to find it in the text. To make things easier for JR – although he no doubt already has it handy – the entire 4th Chapter of Sex, Priests, and Secret Codes (pp. 99-174) is nothing but the text of the Report itself.

Now why would JR want to or even think to write that phrase  – “to control victims and their families” – here?

Answer: Because that’s what … well, I leave the rest to the readership.

And while we’re on the subject, I’m still standing by on the matter of “page 170 and forward from that”.

Lastly, let me save us all some time. Doyle proposed a “Crisis Control Team” – comprised, as I have previously said, of himself, a civil attorney, and a psychologist – in order to handle what he saw as an imminently emerging situation where the Bishops would lose the initiative for proactively addressing the instances of abuse if they became publicized; that would be a “crisis’, in the Report’s estimation. If this is the “control” which JR is talking about – then I point out that the “control” was of the Crisis (hence the title: Crisis Control Team) and not of anything or anybody else.

If I am correct here in my surmise, then we see as a matter of insight into the Abuse Matter generally just how things get twisted (by accident, ignorance, or design) and then on top of that go uncorrected by media ‘reporting’: from Doyle’s “Crisis Control Team” we somehow suddenly get “to control the victims and their families”. And the circus proceeds downhill from there.

P.S.On a lighter note, please excuse my appalling grammatical misuse of who, instead of whom in my last posting.

That would be Fr. Tom Economus, whose work advocating for ‘victims’ appears on the website Priests of Darkness, which describes itself as dealing with “sex, sin, and Satanism in the Catholic Church”.

Doyle’s plan (which we recall was rejected by the Bishops) was to have his Crisis Control Team employed by the tort-attorney, Mouton, or other attorneys,  formally retained by the Bishops in some form; under that aegis, working as agents of an attorney who had been retained by the Church, their work would be immune from the formal legal process known as Discovery  - I will use a capital ‘D’ here, although the text of the report does not – which means that tort-attorneys, in Doyle’s plan, would not have been able to subpoena any of the materials or information that Doyle’s Crisis Control Team came up with while trying to deal with the overall Abuse Matter.

The ‘Discovery’ here does not carry the conventional meaning of ‘discovery’ (small ‘d’) but rather the legal meaning of the process of Discovery, the formal process by which attorneys in civil cases can require sources of possible information (under subpoena if necessary) to divulge what they know.

Clearly it could not have meant an overall effort to manipulate all ‘discovery’ in the conventional sense, since the cat could easily be let out of the bag by allegant-Plaintiffs, their attorneys, family members and witnesses who already ‘knew’ about the allegated actions that were the basis of their claims. And the media already would have had direct access to all those potential sources, as well as to any police agencies to which any of these above-mentioned persons could have gone. And – of course – the tort-attorneys could also have gone to the media themselves, which was precisely the strategy embraced by Jeff Anderson and many others.

Doyle here was proposing a legal mechanism by which the Bishops could grant his group wide authority to work on the various abuse-cases without creating the legal possibility of amassing documentation which could at some future point be ‘Discovered’ by tort-attorneys. Nothing more.

In this sense, taking steps to somehow preclude ‘Discovery’ is not at all the same as ‘cover-up’, since all of the issues could be and probably would be publicly known and ‘discovered’ through all the other avenues and sources I mentioned above.

I imagine Doyle was trying to somehow reassure the organization that he could come up with a plan and a group that could simultaneously i) work robustly on the Abuse Matter without ii) creating an even larger legal and media vulnerability.

But in the event, Doyle’s plan was rejected by the Bishops  – and indeed not even formally considered.

And I doubt very much that even Doyle could have seriously imagined that eventually the corpus of information his Group amassed could have permanently avoided some form of discovery or Discovery. Perhaps the Bishops realized that too – it will be interesting to see the history of this Matter when actual historical research competence is brought to bear on it in a sustained way.

I would also note that the dog that rarely ever barked in any of this was all those other potential sources of information who could have gone to the police, whose authority to discover matters through criminal investigation is even more acute than that of tort-attorneys working on lawsuits. Nor – as MDA gave the game away with his relating of matters pertaining to the Boston Globe – did elements of the mainstream media become actively critical for quite some time.

I also note that so much of the material that eventually was Discovered – think of the LA document cache here – did not really provide what advocate-activists had hoped anyway.

Even the Boston priest, Geoghan, was convicted of only one count of fondling a boy’s buttocks when lifting him out of a swimming pool. The judge in the case – if memory serves – sentenced him to the maximum for that single conviction because, as she said at sentencing, she just “knew” that he had done a lot more. (In the event, the single conviction, coupled with the publicity and general public atmosphere, was enough to lead functionally to a death sentence, when he was killed in his prison-cell by a murderer who wanted to ‘do his bit’ for justice, and somehow mysteriously got out of his own theoretically locked cell and into Geoghan’s theoretically locked cell)

But to the original point: there was never in the Doyle report any quotation to the effect that victims would be “controlled”. And if this quotation is from the deceased Economus, and was intended to quote Economus and not the text of the Report, then perhaps JR has learned to be more careful and precise in his use and expression and attribution of material. That, certainly, is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But in response to JR’s final question – is not Doyle here trying to “control victims” – I would say that would be an impossible stretch of language. Victims were never controlled – they could have gone to the police or to the media and the fact that they didn’t (the dogs that didn’t bark) says something (but not everything) here. We have been so soused with stories of how the Bishops did not respond sufficiently, that many forget how many other avenues were open to victims through the police and the media. MDA mentions at a couple of points that tort-attorneys didn’t want to take such cases because until the 1980s they couldn’t see how to win settlements (and fees) through such lawsuits – and perhaps public attention might want to consider how many such attorneys failed victims by toting up the possibilities for a remunerative settlement and fee rather than simply seeking formally to bring alleged torts and injustices to the attention of the legal system.

And of course there also remains the fact that up until the past decades, none of the major institutions of American culture and society considered sexual-abuse and victimization as a priority: not police nor legislators nor courts nor media nor the Church and Bishops nor – it has to be said – the public.

It is precisely here that we see the role of ‘publicity’: to get the public interested.

Which is a good thing. So long as one is trying to awaken the public to an accurately reported and accurately conceived problem or issue.

What has happened in the Abuse Matter, I would say, is that too many hungry and eager chefs got into the game: tort-attorneys needed a massive and organizationally-directed conspiracy of ‘cover-up’ in order to drive up settlements (and subsequent attorney fees) through claims of ‘fraud’ and ‘reckless negligence’ and thus there had to be a ‘culture’ of abuse and cover-up; disaffected reformers such as Doyle and Sipe eventually allowed themselves to envision that ‘normal distribution’ of the Bell curve rather than the ‘power-law distribution’ of the hockey-stick and so cast treacherously broad aspersions on the entire clergy as well as the hierarchs; media elements needed a clear Good-vs-Evil story, Pure Innocence Assaulted By Pure Evil and in the Boston Globe’s 2002 sortie there was even an effort to go for some sort of ecclesiastical Watergate to rival that storied media event of days gone by; assorted activists, writers, some academics, and assorted professionals and paraprofessionals saw a chance to surf a Wave and make some money and creds; legislators saw how to keep a new demographic or congeries of sub-demographics happy by pulling apart Western law (to the extent that many legislators even had the wit to realize that that was what they were doing); and assorted law-enforcement and DA types saw that this was going to be the new path to career-enhancement and to keeping the government funding coming for their organizations and agencies.

What has happened in the Abuse Matter, then, I would say, is a very large game of musical chairs, with the Bishops and the Church made the odd-one-out who wouldn’t have a chair when the music stopped. Meanwhile, all the other agencies and organizations of influence in American society and culture quickly saw their path would be to placate the new ‘victimist’ sensibility in the country by distracting attention from their own prior non-performance and painting the Church – as the Designated Villain – as the sole and deeply corrupted Evil upon which the rest of them could now piously and loudly pig-pile.

As long as nobody paid too much attention to careful and rational analysis and assessment.

But as I have said, the Bishops certainly left themselves open to a lot of this – Doyle was right in 1985 when he pointed that out. Through the mysterious workings of Providence we now have far less of a ‘parade’ hierarchy and clergy, and more of a Church – if I may – of the legions. Which, given the storms and abysses into which American society and culture are heading, is a very good thing indeed.

So I would say that if JR is going to be doing more careful reading and quoting, and the Bishops have started to clean up Dodge effectively, then this whole episode here is a win-win all around.

And – the very end of my thoughts here – all of this presumes that efforts to work for and with genuine victims will continue. As I have often said before here.

I came across a Letter to the Editor today (and to the Boston Globe, nicely) by a personage I keep an eye on out on the Web: Wendy Murphy, a former ADA and now holding a position at a non-first-line law school.

She is complaining that “it is improper to call a 5 year-old victim an ‘accuser’ in a story”. Rather, she says, “the accuser is the state and the child is but a witness for the prosecution”.

She further asserts that it is improper to use the term “alleged victim”. Rather, she says that “the child is the victim of alleged crimes” because – she continues – “using the word ‘alleged’ to modify the word ‘victim’ wrongly attaches skepticism to the word of the child”.

She concludes that “these young people have a right to declare themselves actual, not ‘alleged’, victims in the real world”.

Her material is relevant to much of what we have been discussing on this site.

First, the State does not come up with accusations; persons come to the police agencies of the State with accusations; the State’s role is to prosecute on behalf of ‘The People’ or ‘The State’ since any possible crime that may have been committed harms the integrity and commonweal of the entire People of the State.

The victimist approach to law – of which Murphy is a great promoter – is to change the dynamics of criminal law in what I would say is a regressive way: the State and prosecutor merely become the muscle or ‘champion’ by which the (alleged) victim goes after the accused. This is the Dark Ages in a business suit and represents a regression in Western law.

Civil lawsuits – as we can tell from the titles of the cases – are the proper forum for X, Plaintiff to legally pursue a case against Y, Defendant. Whereas the titles of criminal cases indicate that in the criminal forum ‘The People’ or ‘The (Jurisdiction)’ go versus the accused Defendant.

In the criminal forum the prosecutor works for ‘The People’ and the State and in a very real sense it is The People and their commonweal that are the ‘victim’. Whereas victimist law would simply make the prosecutor a tool and servant of the victim – which is actually the role tort-attorneys fill, and in the civil forum.

Thus we have seen – as I have mentioned in a number of place in comments – the vital principles of the criminal-law process deranged in the service of making the awesome (in the classic, not slang, sense) deliberation as to the deployment of the Sovereign Coercive Authority against an accused into merely an effort to put that Authority placatingly at the service of one Party – the accuser – who also has a verrry vested interest in how the case turns out.

That skews the entire process. In Western law, both prosecutor and defense counsel, as Officers of the Court, are bound to seek truth; neither is to presume outright from the get-go that one Party (the ‘victim’) is or must be right and true. The People and their commonweal will not be served if justice is miscarried through a built-in partiality to one side, especially when the awesome power of the State’s Coercive Authority is thrown onto one side, against the accused. The State’s power should remain neutral, seeking only to determine the truth according to the rational examination of the evidence presented.

Second, we see clearly Murphy’s effort to avoid and indeed to disqualify any “skepticism” as to the credibility of the accuser. (I know she slyly uses the examples of child-victims here, but to my mind she is using children here as sort of baby harp-seals, for the emotional effect; her legal theorizing, such as it is, would have to apply to adult-accused as well. And thus – bringing this to our own concerns here – to accused priests.)

It is a classic trope of ‘victimist’ law that the word of the victim (again, she neatly uses only the image of a ‘child’ here, but her theorizing would apply to any accuser of any age) cannot be questioned, since that would be to ‘re-victimize’ the (presumed) victim all over again. This approach to law does not want anybody asking any uncongenial questions.

Third, she then declares that anybody (again, hiding behind “these young people”) should have the right to declare themselves publicly as victims and not be asked any questions. But as I have said, while anybody surely does have the right to go online or out onto the sidewalks or into any unofficial forum and state that they are (or at least consider themselves to be) a victim, yet when they are going to go into a court and demand the deployment of the Sovereign Coercive Authority against the person they are accusing, then they have accepted – willy or nilly – the responsibility for showing sufficient justification for the awesome (and perhaps lethal) deployment of that Authority on the basis of their claims.

And it is the prosecution’s job in criminal cases to robustly make the case – within the bounds of truth and reason and the rules of due-process and of evidence – that what happened to the accuser has actually happened, to the harm and detriment of The People and the commonweal.

There’s simply no other way to do it in a world where earthly governments and the humans who comprise them are not in possession of the Divine Omniscience.

Unless you cut corners: as does the ‘revolutionary’ approach to justice which simply makes the convenient presumption that a certain type of crime is simply too important not-to-be-true, and that thus any accuser can reliably be credited with total truthiness and the Coercive Authority can thus simply take their word for it and strike, rather than investigate and prove a case-against, the accused.

This is the type of abyssal difference in legal templates (Western and revolutionary/victimist) that has played so profound a role in the Abuse Matter.

(Link to the Letter: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/letters/2013/05/04/case-sex-abuse-wrong-attach-word-alleged-victims/Ly8pIWno7bEUutjmc7eMxJ/story.html

In regard to the comment of 8:19PM:

I had gotten the book Friday and then … I went and read it. Especially the parts about the Report. I had not planned to get it or to read it, but then various assertions (subsequently demonstrated to be groundless) required me to read it. So there was no "well-planned barrage" because – this is my fault – I had not really expected to be confronted by the assorted types of material that suddenly showed up on the screen.

You would have to ask Doyle why he came up with his plan. The idea was his. The Bishops – is it necessary to repeat it again? – rejected it.

Simplicity is all well and good if it is skillfully handled. Otherwise … not so much.

Thus, for example: I am not "a religion". No doubt just a habitual imprecision of thought and/or expression. But there it is.