SNAP's founder and president Barbara Blaine
According to a tip received by TheMediaReport.com, Barbara Blaine, the founder and president of the anti-Catholic group SNAP, has admitted that she wrote a letter on behalf of a Louisiana psychologist, Dr. Steve Taylor, who was arrested and jailed on charges of possessing over 100 images of kiddie porn.
In 2009, when the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners was considering revoking the license of Dr. Taylor following his arrest for child pornography, Blaine wrote a letter to the board and explained that Taylor had founded a local chapter of SNAP and had done extensive work for the group. She then begged that the board "refrain from taking any action on this case until Dr. Taylor's guilt or innocence is determined in a court of law."
Taylor later pleaded guilty to the kiddie porn charges and was sentenced to prison for his crimes.
While Bruce Nolan at the Times-Picayune (Louisiana) newspaper first reported that Blaine had sent a letter to the state board on behalf of Taylor, SNAP has steadfastly refused to publicly acknowledge its existence. However, thanks to a tip to this site, the letter and Blaine's subsequent defense of the letter are finally public.
According to our tip, Blaine made the admission about her letter on behalf of Taylor in a lengthy internal 2012 memo issued by her and National Director David Clohessy to concerned leaders of SNAP's local chapters across the country who were troubled by the fact their leader had written a letter in support of a man arrested for a kiddie porn crime. In the memo, Blaine defended her decision to write the letter and her refusal to publicly acknowledge writing it.
Barbara Blaine's iron fist
A number of regional leaders at SNAP were apparently angry that the leader of a sex abuse victims group had written a letter on behalf of a person who had been arrested with sexually explicit pictures of children on his computer.
Some SNAP leaders had begun to ask that Blaine "apologize" or "explain" her decision to write the letter, with some people actually demanding that she resign over it.
And shockingly, according to our tip, after a SNAP leader wrote a measured and heartfelt email requesting that Blaine publicly apologize for writing her letter, Blaine promptly expelled the leader.
The rank hypocrisy
Busted for kiddie porn:
Dr. Steve Taylor
"Barbara was told the letter would remain private," the memo explains. "Obviously, for reasons we don't know, that didn't happen."
In other words, Blaine wrote a letter on behalf of a guy arrested with a large cache of kiddie porn expecting that no one would find out about it.
Yet ever since its inception, SNAP has repeatedly blasted Catholic officials for their alleged "secrecy" and "concealment" in their handling of cases decades ago involving alleged abuse by priests.
The hypocrisy could not be more clear: Secrecy for SNAP, but full transparency for the Catholic Church.
SNAP's cover-up – exposed
Astonishingly, Blaine's and Clohessy's memo lays out a plan to keep any knowledge of Blaine's shocking letter on behalf of Taylor out of the public realm.
Blaine and Clohessy issued a recommendation to SNAP chapter leaders and members about what they should do if they receive inquiries about Blaine's letter, and the pair's recommendation is simple and straightforward: Say nothing. Do nothing.
"As harsh as this may sound, we'd recommend that you not respond," the memo advises.
Again, SNAP's rank hypocrisy is blinding. Just days ago, SNAP's Clohessy published a blog post in which he upbraided Church officials for their alleged "increased silence" about decades-old claims and the frequency with which some dioceses respond with "no comment" in the media.
Yet Blaine and Clohessy are here advising their members to cover up SNAP's own letter to a government authority to go easy on a consumer of kiddie porn.
A call to SNAP for honesty and transparency
In truth, Blaine's letter simply asked that the Board of Medicine to hold off on the decision over Taylor's medical license until his criminal case had been decided. In her mind, an accused friend is innocent until proven guilty and should be entitled to a presumption of innocence with respect to his professional status.
However, if SNAP had ever discovered that a Catholic bishop had recently written a similar letter on behalf of an accused priest, its response would be explosive. And mainstream media outlets like the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times would no doubt be running screaming headlines about a bishop "endangering the welfare of children" by "covering up" and "defending" the crimes of an abusive priest. Media calls for the bishop to resign would be deafening.
Barbara Blaine and David Clohessy should now publicly apologize for their secret, hypocritical acts. And if they are unwilling to conduct themselves by the same standards to which they hold others, then they should both resign.
[See also: *SPECIAL REPORT* SNAP Uncovered: Shocking Facts About the Media's Favorite Church-Bashing Group]
LOL!
You have your facts all screwed up. if you are going to slander someone in the name of the Catholic church at least get the facts right otherwise you're adding dishonesty to slander.
[edited by moderator] [To Delphin:] Here's my POV. Bear with it.
First,
Hey Tommy I thought slander was dishonesty? I've noticed SNAP doesn't go after me because it's only slander if it's a lie.
It's been known, as far as I know for years, about this letter.
As a citizen Barbra can write a letter to Santa recomending Hitler to be a good boy, that's up to her;
But to write a letter on SNAP staionary using her political weight to support this perp, that's beyond the pale.
But when you use the exact same arguement as your "enemy" i.e. "forgiveness" " mistake"etc When you've critizised that that behavior for 20+ years in your opposition
It's a set up.
Come closer. a set up.On SNAP stationary!!!!!! and using the political power of a victims movement that is completely controlled by SNAP. And you don't see this as a victory for the Church again by the self proclaimed "oldest and largest victims support group".
Well I, sure as hell, do.
As a matter of fact,I see the only victories, the Church has won lately, have all been handed them by SNAP
On the one hand there's SNAP and its mamoth errors in leadership money wasted and on the other hand is the Church only and always benefiting from SNAP's true behavior. Over and over and over again.
Please just step back and look at the bigger picture.
P.S. Any leadership can be "fired" if it's appointed rather than elected.
You need a base to have elections.
the Church didn't want organized victims so no base was necessary or wanted. And thanks to SNAP that's just what the Church got.
Look all the little nubby groups and SNAP standing like The Empire State Building. All Church created facades, "committees" as Tommy boy called them.
Mr. Doyle, exactly what facts are wrong? Or do you just expect us to take your word for it?
It would be appreciated if Tom Doyle will tell us what facts reported about this situation are incorrect.
In case I didn’t make myself clear in my thoughts about the ‘father doyle’ comment: Might the commenter state specifically just what facts are screwed up? And if we have here the actual still-Father Doyle, then that would indeed be helpful.
When I began composing my prior comment there were no other comments up.
I see now that, among other things, we have something from ‘thomas doyle’. This being the internet there is no way of knowing if this is actually the noted still-Father Doyle or somebody just living out a fantasy (as so often happens on the internet, which pretty much invites such things if persons are thus inclined).
Perhaps ‘thomas doyle’ can explain – one presumes s/he has read the linked-to SNAP memo, but that might actually be an unjustified assumption – how one can do any ‘slandering’ in light of the text of the memo itself?
Commenter ‘Gloria Sullivan’ says (544PM) that “in 2009 not many people knew of the hideous crimes against humanity that were being perpetuated by the RCC”. In 2009? Where had this commenter been from 1985-2009?
And is this commenter using “crimes against humanity” in its original legal sense? If that is so, then what does this commenter have to say about the now-disappeared Complaint that SNAP filed with the International Criminal Court claiming ‘torture’, ‘war crimes’, and ‘crimes against humanity’? Or is this commenter using “crimes against humanity” in a looser and more imaginative sense that does not so much accurately describe a situation as much as it merely expresses some inner feelings? (There’s so much of that going around in the Abusenik universe, as we have so often seen here.)
That might certainly seem to dovetail with the statement that “I found out he was a EVIL person”. So nice to a) not be ‘evil’ oneself and to b) find out that somebody else most surely is “EVIL” and thus c) go on about this sure and certain discovery. Very nice indeed.
But then we are advised that since “Barbara and David” haven’t “committed any crimes against humanity” then “we should forgive until we find out otherwise”.
But i) we haven’t “found out” that the Church has committed crimes-against-humanity (and it looks like the ICC in The Hague) hasn’t found that out either.
And ii) what that SNAP letter asks is an awful lot more than SNAP has been willing to provide for priests: the presumption of innocence until proven in a court of law. (Which, given the Stampede that was already long-established by 2009, is also disingenuous in the extreme.) And on top of that, what SNAP is asking the Board to do is to “refrain from taking action” that would remove the doctor’s license – but isn’t that precisely what the Abusenik hue-and-cry has been demanding for accused priests? Removal from ministry (which now has mutated into laicization or ‘defrocking’ with no shilly-shallying about canon-law and ‘rights’). And by 2009 general sex-offense theorizing and legislation had pretty much established for its own purposes that any type of child-oriented sexual deviance has to be dealt with verrrry quickly and forcefully, or had SNAP not kept current on any of what was going on all around them? The President had even made internet-child-porn a special issue of concern for law-enforcement.
Thus: substitute “Father X” for “Dr. Taylor” and see what you get when you then read the letter. But of course, there is that SNAP ‘double-standard’: if you are doing it in the service of the revolution, then you should get special consideration and a special pass. Y’a see how easy it is?
And iii) “if they haven’t committed any crimes against humanity” then “we should forgive them until we find out otherwise”. How can we forgive them if we haven’t found out if they have done anything wrong? Moreover, in terms of the ‘standard’ to which SNAP and others have insisted that the Church and priests be held, how can anything in the letter or the memo be considered as ‘right’? (The answer to that – and the only honest answer – is that there is that double-standard and we should just get used to it.)
So, finally, (iv): through the letter and the memo we have indeed ‘found out otherwise’.
I don't think it is Tommy Doyle really, that "dishonesty trumps slander" rap is too dumb for Tommy.
In 2009 not too many people knew of the hideious Crimes Against Humanit,y that were being perpetuated by the RCC, on our precious catholic children .They should have known but many know now…! I was one who left the Church in 2001 when I found out all the things I had heard from the "Religious" in our family, many years before, WERE TRUE .I can see how Barbara and David felt. I too believed in a priest( who was my pastor for over 15 yrs) was a good man and in 2012, I found out he was a EVIL person. I would have vouched for him and many others that I have since found out are pedophiles. So if they (Barbara and David haven't committed any crimes against humanity, we should forgive until we find out otherwise. . IMHO
Thanks Gloria but you're off on 2009 people have known much longer and thanks for pushing the Church's line about "forgiveness'.
Gloria, you left the Church over the sins and crimes of another human being?? Did THAT human being SAVE YOU?? Did THAT human being forgive you sins and promise you that Death would NOt have its final say with you?? You left THE CHURCH because of a priest or bishop?? You ABANDONED YOUR SALVATION over a human being??? Then you are a true RELATIVIST and were NEVER really a Catholic to begin with!
I can understand your rage, your indignity, your revulsion and all those things about the people who are called to lead the Church. Sometimes their crimes scream to Heaven for vengeance and sully the Church with their filth. But LEAVE THE CHURCH??? Then you never really believed that the Church is Divine, did you? In many ways I can't blame you. After 45 years of watered-down Catholicism-Lite of the radical post-Vatican II interpreters, The Church of Feel-Good Nice-Nice left you NOTHING in terms of rock hard faith and conviction. So when the going gets tough, you hit the ejector button? Call me old fashioned, but I'm NOT ABANDONING MY FAITH over any prist, bishop, archbishop, cardinal, or, God Forbid, POPE! (If you read church history, you'll know that we had some lechers and criminals as popes … yet we're still here!) Why, BECAUSE THE VERY GATES OF HELL SHALL NOT PREVAIL AGAINST YOU!! AND I'M GIVING THAT UP FOR NO ONE!!!
First, congrats to DP/TMR for this work.
Second, imagine that the heading of this secret memo is “Archdiocese of …” and that it is written and signed by “Archbishop” or “Bishop” X. Now with what you have seen for all these years in this Matter, consider the possibilities.
While you’re working on that, I’d add just a couple of bits from the text of the secret memo.
First, this is ‘secret’ in a way you never see in the Church: instead of a reader’s awareness that certain subjects go into a confidential secured archive so staffers can’t just go in and leaf through them, what you have here is not simply a ‘burn this memo’ directive but the even more stringent ‘return this memo’ directive. (Again, imagine the delirious frakfest if SNAP or Bishop-Accountability had come across a memo stamped ‘return this memo to the Vatican after reading’.)
“One SNAP person” had written a letter: neat minimization. But it was Barbara Blaine, she whom Mr. CEO Clohessy had said under oath (during his own dodgy Deposition Saga) was the only one who really “knows everything” (or perhaps anything) about how SNAP works. This would be the equivalent of saying that ‘one Archdiocesan official staffer’ had written a memo, when really it was the Bishop himself.
Author Jason Berry had written a letter for this guy. He who made quite a splash with his writing about how the Church had secretively … and etcetera and etcetera and etcetera. (Thank you, Yul Brynner, wherever you are.)
The advice – as we have discussed on this site before – is: don’t respond. And how often have we seen that primary rule of revolutionaries deployed, even in some of the commentary here? Don’t engage the issues because if they haven’t embraced the revolution then they cannot understand anyway; don’t debate anybody because it only makes it look like those any-bodies have something worthwhile to think about and we all know that only the cadres of the revolution have or ever can have anything worthwhile to think about; don’t allow yourself to become involved in rational discourse because making a revolution is not primarily a rational process but rather is a process of Will: revolutionaries don’t discuss or debate revolutions, they make them; since nobody else besides the cadres of the revolution and the Party will actually be able to grasp our wisdom, then there is absolutely no need to make anything ‘public’ – our ‘secrecy’ is purely practical and logical, based on the fact that the herd will never understand our wisdom so why waste it on them and distract ourselves with arguments, debates, discussion, analysis, and deliberation?
All of this is pure Lenin right out of Revolution 101. Substitute ‘victim’ or ‘advocacy’ or ‘Abusenik’ where necessary and you pretty much see exactly where SNAP is coming from, and where so many of its cadres (wherever they fall on the spectrum of rationality) are coming from. In fact, as you can see, one needn’t be rational to participate in a scam like this – in fact, rationality is probably a substantial drawback to being on this type of ‘team’ in the service of a grand Cause. (For that matter, think of the Himmler’s Wannsee Conference admonition: we are up to something so marvelous, SS comrades, and yet no other human beings can know what we are really doing. Ja.)
But clearly the memo reveals that SNAP fears its own game being played in reverse, against SNAP itself. Mr. CEO Clohessy had hoped to cover this hole in the boat by claiming (in Deposition) that there should be two standards of truthfulness: one very strict to which the Church should be held, and another one kinda not so strict for all the Abuseniks (no, he didn’t use the term) who have such good intentions and such sad stories to tell, which stories – even if they are kinda not-so-strictly true – are nevertheless ‘true’ in some other sense that is even bigger and more important.
Viewers of a certain age may remember an early made-for-TV-movie (back in the days when that’s what they were called) starring an aging Bing Crosby as a local general practitioner, and Frank Converse (I think) as a young med-school grad coming out to take over the practice when der Bingle retired. The town felt particularly blessed because all sorts of persons of all ages who were in difficult straits seemed – with blessed convenience – to die, which was a relief to almost everybody. Converse’s young doctor is rummaging through some of the old doc’s files one afternoon and notices next to a recently deceased (and greatly physically impaired) infant the handwritten notation of a capital “R”. Asking Bing, he gets the response: Oh, that’s for ‘rest’; that’s what I prescribed.
But the young doc thinks: you don’t prescribe ‘rest’ for an infant – that’s pretty much all they do anyway. And then with further rummaging he finds that all of the conveniently-deceased have “R” on their patient-cards. And he realizes that “R” means ‘Remove’.
What does he do? He confronts the old doc about playing-God. The doc says that it’s in a good cause and it’s a shame to just let all this suffering go on for everybody when a quick little something can solve everybody’s problems. Converse’s young doc talks about ethics and the Hippocratic Oath, but the old doc says that he is helping more people with his ‘treatment’ and it’s precisely in the cause of general well-being that he’s been doing this for all these decades. Converse insists that this is grossly unethical.
Plus the old doc has something on him going back to some crime in Converse’s youthful college days.
Converse finally decides he has to stand up for ethics and integrity so he slips a fatal dose of something into the old doc’s coffee . Crosby drinks it, and realizing immediately what is happening to him, even as he falls to the ground, he says to Converse: Ya see how easy it is? And with that famous crinkly smile, Bing exits Stage Down.
Y’a see how easy it is?
Bing who? Wow what cutting edge relevence!
And Lenin? I'm the only commie (small c) here. So pretending your abuse of children and your coverup is some Marxist conspiracy is amazing really.
Only an organization as corrupt as yours could continue to blame the victims and un-seen revolutionaries (???? ) for YOUR crimes against children. Truely extraordinary.
"The 'Revolutionaries' made us do it" Whaaaa Whaaa Whaaa < (fake crying by you)
Can we sic the IRS on this scandalous 501(c)(3) "charity"?
Rules for Radicals "…by any means necessary…".
It's going to be fun to watch when the lefty-trained government and media pitbulls turn on their owners.
If this story is true, then Barbara Blaine is nothing more than a hypocrite, plan and simple.
Mark T, Blaine's hypocracy is a "plan" that is not so simple.
HO! HO! SNAP EXPOSED!!!!!
Thanks to DP/TMR and the tipster. No surpries here. SNAP was already morally bankrupt. They are now ethically bankrupt. And finished.
The straw that broke the camel's back. Snnnaaappp!!
‘Delphin’ makes a comment that prompts a connection.
What Delphin talks about – the attack dogs turning on their owners – is actually taking place now in the military in regard to ‘sexual assault’.
And the manner of it is on this wise: Two or more decades ago, as the Clintons came into office and brought with them Executive support for ‘governance feminism’ and radical-feminism and all the feminist-friendly victimism, there was a lethal synergy that coalesced (like tornadoes coalesce when all the enabling elements are in place) around ‘sex offenses’ in the military.
Prosecuting them would give the military lawyer-corps (the JAG corps and the JAGs, as they are called) and the police-agencies within the Services some fresh new fields for ‘achievement’; the military commanders would please their political bosses; the radical-feminists would weaken the status and credibility of males while actually also making life increasingly difficult for them (thus paving the way for more females in the military); the victimists and sex-abuse advocates would get not only publicity but also huge swaths of government funding for vast sex-abuse bureaucracies within the military command structure. And the pols would get the credit (and win the various voting ‘demographics’) for being so very sensitive and progressive. What was not to like?
Fast-forward 20 years or so: money is getting tight even in the government and Pentagon budgets; it requires increasingly obvious machinations to Keep The Ball Rolling (so, for example, a year or two ago the DOJ insisted that any sexual-assault be reported-as ‘rape’ in police reports and government stats – even though for prosecution purposes the alleged assault would not be tried for ‘rape’ if no legally-definable rape was alleged); military law was made increasingly comprehensive in the matter of what constitutes ‘sex assault’ (see Article 120 and its sup-parts in the current Uniform Code of Military Justice).
But currently we are seeing this grand alliance (or axis) start to come apart: the sex-abuse advocates are now turning on their former allies, the military lawyers and the military command structure itself. Now the military Abuseniks want their own special courts and (civilian-controlled) adjudication system for sex-assaults, since the military is – by reports that rely heavily on those two trusty bugbears Surveys and Extrapolation – so rotten with sex-abuse that it cannot be trusted with adjudicating its own military law.
The pols are over a barrel: whom to disappoint – the Abuseniks or the pro-military types? The JAGs are split: some of the younger ones have been trained in law-schools where Victimist/Revolutionary law is considered cutting-edge; but to agree with the Abuseniks here will undermine the role of the JAGs themselves. The military commanders are now seeing that their former allies want things that will take a huge bite out of the very foundations of the military command structure, with all the possible and probable consequences flowing therefrom.
The JAGs and military commanders would have been well-advised decades ago to remember the story of the Scorpion and the Tiger: the Scorpion asks the Tiger for a ride across a raging river; the Tiger agrees; halfway across the torrent the Scorpion bites the Tiger with its fatal venom; the quickly-dying Tiger asks: Why did you do this when now both of us are going to drown; and the Scorpion replies: I’m a Scorpion – this is what I do.
So what Delphin imagines is already taking place. And may well spread further as money gets tighter.
Now you're blaming woman being raped by men in the military the women's fault? The men just can't controll themselves because of the precence of equal women? Pathetic.
SNAP should be sued. Where are all the professional abuse "victims", now?
The Church needs to take the offensive here.
Delphinium the Corporate Church is offensive here. That's why it's in trouble.
You are right, Delphin, about suits that should be filed, starting with JUDY SNAP JONES, who should be libel for all of her sing-song comments on news articles and blogs. The problem other than being obnoxious? She names NAMES of innocent men (priests, of course-never, EVER saw where she has commented about anyone else who is accused even though SNAP are supposedly concerned about all abusers!!!) . I know of several who have been falsely accused here in Philadelphia and exonerated by law enforcement and the archdiocese. But she has already added to the damage done to them by her stupid pleas to have others come forward to accuse these men. Something should be done.
Who the hell are you Publion?
Gloria Sullivan/Glorybe1929,
Other than to say that you are an 84 yr old blogger who despises the Catholic Church which you left in 2001 (after having been a convert) and lots of unimportant info about yourself,, ranting and preaching incessantly about the "evil institution", what is your agenda, Gloria, other than your desperate attempt to destroy the Church with your ramarks?
Gloria S. bluntly says "Who the hell are you Publion?"
Well at the risk of butting into a dialogue… Dare I ask "Where the hell are you coming from Gloria?" You believe that the Catholic Church has "committed crimes against humanity".Why do you believe that?
Furthermore that a pastor whom you trusted for 15 years, later turned out to be "Evil". Well what did he do?
My reason for asking is because I fear that you and I have existed on different planets. Let me briefly describe my planet.
I went to a convent school for 8 years and that school was rarely visited by a priest. My impression was that most students only saw a priest at mass on Sunday, and also when they went to confession. (but physical contact is impossible inside confessional box) The only exception to this pattern were the altar boys, and I was one for about 3 years. We were rostered for one week in every month. Roster called for two boys for each mass.
Now I will talk about 'opportunity' because Gloria asserts "crimes against humanity" and crime investigators will always look at 'opportunity' as well as 'motive'. The only time I was alone with a priest was when the other altar boy did not show up. This the exception and not the rule, The sacristy was behind the altar and the access door only had a curtain across it. The door that lead outside was closed but not locked. People came into the sacristy, at any time, without knocking. So there was not much 'opportunity' for 'crime' even if the priests were so inclined, Which they were not.
How do I know that? Because that provincial city was a full of vindictive gossip about various people. Each day brought a fresh batch of gossip. But in thirty years in that place I never once heard any suggestion of priests molesting children. Gossip about some priests being too friendly with some women…but nothing about children! My wife was born and raised in another country and her testimony is similar to my own…. nothing about children!
Now let's come to 'motive'. Well if a man is a pedophile his motive is deviant sexual desire for children. But a common trait of this deviancy is recidivism, so even after release from prison, they have a compulsion to repeat the offence. Which means the predator would surely give himself away, and it would only be a matter of time. If all priests were pedophiles then surely, over a time span of thirty years, at least one victim would have said something to his parents, and started an investigation, or at least started gossip. But there was no gossip about children being molested.
So perhaps Gloria will now tell us about her personal experience and how she became convinced that the Church was 'guilty of crimes against humanity', But it must be her personal experience only.. and not something that she has read or has been told
But I won't be holding my breath, because the Abuseniks have an aversion to details.
Malcolm,
I have somng to add to your very perspicacious teaching moment for Ms 1929 Gloria. Will later-on my way out now
Adding to Malcolm's testimony about growing up in the Church….I will keep it short as the thread is to be closed.
There are13 brothers/half brothers between my husband and myself. All attended Catholic private or parachial schools. Some were altar servers, mostly in grade school. All had many, many friends and neighbors were close. Time frame ( there is a great age difference between the families and our position in families) for high school 1940-1980. Obviously, grade school an earler time but one can. get the idea. Neither one of us had alcoholic parents, but there were other circumstances where one might have been vulnerable.I know that there were friends of mine and theirs as well that had alcoholic or missing parents
After asking most of them specific questions over the past 2-3 years about what they knew or experienced with regard to abuse by priests, not one had an incident to report, a story to tell, or knew of anyon else that had this occur. I am well aware that abuse did occur at some time (as most know decades ago) and that it was handled poorly by all concerned. I just felt that it is interesting that the widespread problem that is "reported" in other ways has always seemed a little suspect to me.
I am glad there will be no more comments as I have more to say and do not desire to go back and forth with dissenters and "Abuseniks"
Maybe, in a future forum.
Not too much material in the most recent comments.
But just to refresh our awareness:
‘JR’ will need to demonstrate with a clear explanation of his reasoning process just how he gets from my comments about the military-justice situation to the assertion that I am “blaming women raped by men”. What I am doing is to lift the Abusenik/victimist curtain and show all the calculations and machinery and dynamics that have gone into fueling this branch of the overall victimist Stampede in the country.
And the ‘Gloria Sullivan’ question of 1044PM last night: of what conceivable relevance would it be to anything we are doing here if she were to know my name? And the answer, as we all know now: it might provide grist for the mill of Distraction From The Issues and Realities. So, GS, you can see now precisely why I use a nom-de-plume: it quickly draws certain types of commenters to reveal some of the basic operating dynamics of their scam: Distract From The Issues, Avoid Discussing or Examining The Issues, and Bring The Whole Process Down to the level of whatever mud-slinging can be put together.
Of course, the whole thing could equally as well simply fizzle.
But mud is the favored terrain in this scam, I would say.
But why distract ourselves from the Matter at hand?
And thus deprived of a Distraction, might GS wish to address the material I put up?
Why bother? If the basic premise is flawed any real logic that is built on that false premise becomes equally flawed.
Two wrongs never made a right, SNAP lost whatever claim to the moral high ground it ever had from its start, if it everr did with Dr Bill Donohue's undercover expose' of one national meeting. Apart from the rantings of David C on several occccasions and some angry members' lies and vindictive efforts to malign the living and the dead. Each of us faces a day of reckoning here, which has been denied many, and in eternity, It will be interesting to see the supposed winners here face the Truth when deceptive lawyers,media and some lying church people are shown the down elevator for destroying innocent lives and the faith of many just to make money or cover their own hides, or destroy others in the climate when an allegation meant guilty. Ms Blaine already lost her credibility publicly on this one letter- cash over a serious pervert. Tragic value system and "cover-up." Y'all hear that tired old cliche?.
I’d also note the neat ploy of Using Extremes, deployed (intentionally or otherwise) by ‘JR’: I had discussed ‘sex assault’, which – as my reference to Article 120 of the UCMJ will clearly demonstrate – covers vastly more ground than the specific charge of ‘rape’. But “rape” is so nice and vivid, and gets people worked up so that they don’t really do much thinking. Thus the ploy of Using Extremes turns the discussion into a Cartoon – and a Cartoon that has the specific effect of Distracting. Neat.
Also, I note the rather curious limiting phrase “women raped by men”, which was neither in my comments nor in the articles discussing this (see McClatchy News articles following this topic) nor is it a specific element in the military system. In the military system the UCMJ Article 120 does not distinguish between male-on-female, female-on-male, male-on-male, or female-on-female ‘sexual assault’ or even ‘rape’.
SOS, BLAH Blah Blah!
And Josie, given the corporate Holy Roman Catholic Church's behavior towards victims; despising them is the only normal outcome.
If i am going to hold the catholic church to legal and moral standards and would not blink twice if it fell, I CANNOT ask an organization such as SNAP not to do the same. The secret letters and the hiding of a secret letter only seems to mimic the catholic church of how they have operated for years. The internal letter that was circulated to individual chapters is nothing less then someone at the top telling others on how to react or respond, something that we have seen here in Philadelphia with the Lynn trial and we all know how that ended up, the follower spending time in prison.
If all what is being said here is the truth, and I cannot confirm or deny, then Blaine and everyone at the top needs to step down and walk away. If the SNAP name is to regain any credibility by those looking for help to report abuse by clergy or any abuse by any person, or if someone who is an abuse survivor just wants to talk they need to make changes.
But to send a letter of support for a pedophile with you being the founder of an organization to assist those sexually abused, it only looks like to this man as aiding and giving comfort to the enemy, and in my days we called people like that traitors !!!
Dennis, SNAP doesn't mimic the Church. SNAP is the Church.
It's no accident SNAP behaves like the Church. That's who SNAP is.
I've been spilling the beans on this forever. As have other victims.
A small point in this article or on this topic is the common use of the term "kiddie porn." My children get kiddie cones when we go for ice cream. They go on kiddie rides at amusement parks. "Kiddie" things are sized or made for kids, not using kids. I hate the term "kiddie porn," among many things that I hate, because it euphemizes the illegal material and the act of looking at it for pleasure. Anyone who would acquire and use pornography involving minor children is deranged and dangerous. Not quite as deranged and dangerous as the perpetrators that abuse and exploit children but not shy by much at all. I invite people to do better and not choose to use a term like that.
Amen!
Predicting now that socialist Spain will apply this age-of-consent law revision, retroactively, to the Catholic Church, only.
http://www.thelocal.es/20130530/spain-set-to-raise-sex-age-from-13-to-16
Really this is the extent of hypocrisy? How many priests have raped how many chlidren over the years. This doesn't even come close to damage done to all of them. Not even in the same ballpark. To compare the two as equal is ridiculous. The church doesn't need any help destroying itself, it's doing just fine on its own.
Yes JT, this is hypocricy. Your ignorant comment is a distraction and utter nonsense. No one in the Church is defending sex criminals within Her ranks at this time. No one. Approving of the actions of Blaine in this regard by saying, "Ya, but look what they did" is a childish schoolyard response. Grow up and let adults handle this discussion.
JT, I will say that your comment is right on. There is nothing that can be compared to the damage the catholic church has caused and the letter that Blain wrote does not in any way compare to the crimes the church has committed. And you are right the catholic church has been destroying itself and that is because they have been taking that rope that is being fed to them and now it is swinging back and forth with no one in sight to cut them down.
However, if it is true and I believe it is regarding this letter by Blaine showing her support for a pedophile and the hiding of a document only reminds me of the actions the catholic church has taken, and if I was a survivor using SNAP as my support I would now be questioning the trust in an organization that is suppose to be supporting me.
Andrew, you are the distractor here. J.T.'s comments were right on.
Well, what has happened to Barbara Blaine and SNAP is what tends to happen when you go and defend/support the accused person that you think you know, who has done so many good things, who is so bright, well educated and accomplished. Good that there was excellent evidence of the crime to be had in this case so that criminal and civil actions could be pursued.
Guys, this was a planted bomb intended to go off to smear victims; to show us victims as hypocrites.
just as the SNAP records nonsense was also created to embarass victims and make the Church's behavior in hiding it's records appear to be the most "rational" response possible.
The whole thing's a scam. Add to that the clowns that post here and Billy Donahue and the SNAP defenders and attackers and you've got Barnum and Bailey.
And nada for victims. Mission accomplished.
In regard to the ‘JT’ comment of 1051: it strikes me as useful here because of its – intentional or unintentional – conflating of facts and questions.
“How many priests have raped how many children over the years.” The introductory interrogatory element “how” seems to indicate it is a question, and yet the period at the end of the sentence would indicate that is a statement and not a question. (Third possibility: an exclamation, which would require an exclamation point at the end of the sentence.)
The confusion in the grammar accurately reflects the confusion (intentional or unintentional) in thinking: Is ‘JT’ asking or stating about how many priests have raped how many children over the years?
If ‘JT’ is asking, then I’d like to know too – does ‘JT’ have demonstrable evidence that clearly and definitively answers that question?
Or is ‘JT’ stating – in which case (moving now beyond the grammar) then I’d need to see the evidence. Even the allegations filed with the Church do not primarily concern child-rape, so what is the basis for this statement?
Or – my own assessment here – what we have from ‘JT’ is a classic example of the sort of antiphon-response dynamic by which certain types set each other off like tuning forks. Thus the ‘JT’ statement here is actually coming to us from another dimension, the dimension of usual Abusenik revival-meetings: i.e. ‘How many priests have raped how many children??!!!’ – And the response from the crowd is: ‘MILLLLLLLLLLYUNS!!!!!!!’ (Perhaps followed by self-congratulatory applause all around. And a mass movement toward the Kool-Aid dispenser.)
Whether intentional or inadvertent, this is precisely the type of incoherent thinking and expressing that has fueled this Catholic Abuse Matter from the get-go.
I'm sorry Jim. You did mention to me the SNAP and RCC connection.
It seems that the dots can be connected.
Remember when Nixon said , he wasn't a crook? But poor Dick always looked like a crook.
Now look at the picture of Barbra above. I rarely judge books by their covers but check her out.
Does that face look like the face of someone working for victims? Think of Caesar Chavez or Martin Luther King jr. open faced innocents comparatively.
Maybe, sometimes, people are readable by their mug.
It appears that there’s something in the French-fries down at the cafeteria today.
However at 322PM we are offered a lesson in logic from those environs. Perhaps JR could provide a logical a-b-c of my position (as he sees it) or even – this would be helpful all around – a logical a-b-c of his own position.
Something like: a) the Church is bad; b) SNAP is part of the Church; c) SNAP is bad. (That would be my effort at trying to explain the logic – so to speak – of JR’s position. Which – as we can see – has attracted approving chin-strokes from around the table down there.)
But the whole bit yields – I would say – some useful material. I would use the image and phrase Sandbox Thinking, and I would say it works like this in the Abusenik universe: you have your little picture of, say, your town in your head, according to which you use your plastic tools and pails to shape a little simulacrum of that vision (that little town). Others (adults, let’s say) who come along are expected to absorb themselves totally in this little town in the sandbox; any who actually look up at the actual town and then mention that there are some discrepancies will be met with a tantrum.
As many will realize, it’s a judgment call how much to ooh and ahh over the sandbox town, and how much to try to guide the vision toward the reality beyond the sandbox. Who hasn’t found themselves in a situation like this?
And it’s always a techy job, since who likes to set off a tantrum?
The stunning historical phenomenon of the past few Stampede-decades is that so many of our culture’s putative ‘adults’ (media, pols) simply got into the sandbox and went along with the plastic-tooled sandpiles in there, without ever really suggesting or observing that there was a larger actuality beyond the sandbox.
It’s curious as much as it’s odd – because in the larger American society there has been for some decades the tendency for the putative adults to give themselves over to the vision of the sandbox-ers with no effort whatsoever to assist in the (necessary) maturing passage from the sandbox to the larger actuality and reality. In some circles what this approach creates is a world where the children run the adults. Or – to use a term from a regimental commander back in the day – ‘the clowns are running the circus’.
But the ‘adult’ purpose here remains vital: to analyze and assess in order to get a more accurate and comprehensive grasp of the Catholic Abuse Matter and – I would further think – to acquire a clearer grasp of where and how the Church should proceed from here.
Not interested in your position, I've heard it again and again. Why would I want to honor, with my respect and attention, someone who insults decency the way you do.
You've created a fantasy of speculation based on your critiqing others claims to truth as speculative. Yet you're speculative. you have no proof.
You know I've hung out with Lily Tomlin and her character Edith Ann in the sandbox always told the truth. Being compared to someone in a school cafeteria. or a sand box. Is better than a hypocrite's speculations on speculation.
I need to share this, I was a 5 year old in kindergarten at the public school. Accross the street was the Catholic school. I was playing in the sand box. I looked up a little girl was running accross the street on fire. She'd played with matches in the Catholic school's hedge. One of our teachers knocked her down and smothered the flames. The girl died the next day..
Sorry sand box is a loaded concept to me..
As far as tantrums go. Don't the ever lengthening posts you write equate to a tantrum?
I think it is shocking to some here who leave comments and read this blog see that two of the critics of the catholic church who see that survivors are heard have not come in defense of the organization known as SNAP. An organization up until now that has been known by the media to be the voice of clergy abuse victims/survivors.
I wanted to stress this because it shows those who think we are one sided and do not look at each abuse case with an open mind, that the standards that we demand from one organization to follow are demanded by all organizations .Although the letter that was written was not illegal, I will be the first to say it does bring up a moral question of the organizations agenda and what else maybe found.
Thanks Dennis. Isn't it strange when real victims tell the real truth about anything at this site; it tends to be discounted and mocked. That's religious conservatives for you. There's only one truth, their "beliefs".
I don't know why anyone who is a Catholic would need to know, "where and how the Church should proceed from here"?
You have no say.
And you "conservatives" are only given attention by the hierarchy as long as you agree with them; and as long as you keep those collection plates busy.
Some are here to cleanse the Church of demons, others are here to embolden those demons.
And never the twain shall meet.
The Church critics on this site are hypocrites because they only criticize the Church, and never the greater society that breeds the ills that afflict man found in the Church-and, everywhere else. Only the Church is addressing those ills-yet, she gets no credit from her critics. Not because her gains are not well-documented, but because it isn't in line with their bash-the-Catholics philosophy.
The dishonesty which befalls those church critics is not related to their claims about what happened to them at the hands of deviants, but about their acceptance that the relative to the greater population insignificant deviant problem in the Church was hyped, is hyped, and was/is completely polticized by the leftist ideaologues that hated the Church long before the fabricated abuse matter, and for a myriad of "other" reasons.
Once that fact is recognized by these hypocritical posters, only then can a truly honest dialoge about why you hate the Catholic Church occur.
Until that happens, it must be assumed that you are only at this site, dedicated to discovering the truth about the Church abuse matter and revealing the inadequacies of the justice system in prosecuting these cases, to continue to promote your Christophobic agenda.
I don't hate the Church. [edited by moderator]
Lovin' Louisiana?
This is sad and shocking. Who is smiling and laughing? No one. No one ever was.
Anyway, maybe the red states will get a little more credit moving forward?
Thank you– Washington Post: http://apps.washingtonpost.com/national/fallen/ [link fixed by moderator].
I pray these young boys/men are in heaven surrounded by the Angels.
Everyone makes honest mistakes–including being too good hearted, and,
advocating for undeserving, unappreciative individuals. The important thing is
to learn quickly, and, try not to make the same mistake twice!
The two most recent comments (as I write this comment) – coming to us just a couple of minutes apart, by amazing coincidence – provide useful demonstration.
First, we again see the idea of personalizing matters: as if I write to garner anybody’s “honor” and “respect” (however various commenters might idiosyncratically define the terms). The concept of working with – and ‘honoring’ and ‘respecting’ – concepts, ideas, rationality and truth … continues (from all demonstrable indicators) to elude some commenters.
Evidence of how I “insult decency the way [I] do” are apropos here.
But if I have created any “fantasy of speculation” to match the idea that SNAP is and always has been a sly tool of the Church, then I’d need to see a quotation from my material to back that up. And astute readers may realize there is a special term for this sort of thing, from that universe of professional discourse that some commenters will toss a tantrum about if we go there. So we will not.
Ditto the epithet that I am a “hypocrite”. But this is getting repetitive, isn’t it?
And am I to credit a story that now apparently (and rather conveniently) goes back before the alleged victimization (for which great remuneration was acquired) and covers ‘sandbox’ days? And of what relevance is that story here? Are we to derail or disengage-from deliberation and analysis simply because somebody claims that a particular term is “loaded” for them? But hasn’t this been precisely a marquis Victimist gambit from Day One: don’t revictimize me by asking me any inconvenient questions or discussing-it in any way that I don’t want you to discuss it … ?
Yet it could certainly be construed as a Distracting play and perhaps even a pose: I am victimized and therefore ‘speshull’ so stay out of my way and do what I want. This reminds me of current Russian traffic arrangements: if you have enough pull with the government you can get a clip-on blue-light and a siren assigned to you for your personal car so that you don’t have to bother with everyday traffic and can make other citizens stay out of your way.
Readers are welcome to consider whether “lengthening posts” constitute a “tantrum”; for purposes of comparison they can, of course, take a look at some of the so very much shorter comments that we have on record here.
In that regard, a “tantrum” is distinguished not by length but by tone and – on the internet – various types of formatting deployed for the purposes of expressing emotion that the commenter insists upon.
And I will note conceptually a hardly infrequent characteristic of so much Abusenik method: the quick resort to assuming poses (as victim, as shocked, as this or that like a chameleon). And either without any awareness-of or care-about how the pose of the moment is or is not congruent with yesterday’s or last week’s pose or even the pose of a few hours ago. One wonders if this chameleon-like ability and propensity didn’t play a part in claims and allegations. It’s impossible to know for certain, of course, but then isn’t that one of the key problems with the entire Stampede?
And then – from a few minutes later at 1106PM last night – we get Inspector Reynaud: one is shocked-shocked.
I have personally never held with the promiscuous use of that term. Any thoughts as to the medical origin of the term – think of electroshock therapy or the various types of anaphylactic, hypovolemic, and cardiogenic shock, or the military usage of ‘shock troops’ designed to deliver a sudden and swift and lethal assault – should place in perspective the exaggerated application of “shock” to characterize far lesser human experiences (such as reading various bits of material).
And yes, SNAP has indeed “been known by the media” – although I wouldn’t agree with that “known” since it implies that the media have demonstrable proof of a fact that can be “known”. Rather, I would say that the media have chosen to get into the sandbox and go-along-with the visions and excitements that the media found there. Up until now, anyway.
Apparently it is considered significant that two “critics” of the Catholic Church (a rather mild characterization, it seems to me) and whose self-appointed task is to “see that survivors are heard from” haven’t come to the defense of – not SNAP but – “the organization known as SNAP”.
To a reader who operates ‘totally in the moment’, so to speak, that might seem to be a telling observation. But one need only go back a bit further in the comments on this very thread to see that these two “critics of the Catholic Church” are both of the studied opinion that SNAP is and always has been a tool of the Catholic Church.
(And does ‘father doyle’ have any thoughts about that, since the actual still-Father Doyle has been actively involved and continues to remain actively involved with SNAP and its various pomps and works?)
And so – once again – we see this curious lack of awareness or lack of concern as to whether the comment of-the-moment is at all coherently connected to comments by the same individual even as recently as a day or two ago.
None of which tends to prompt a sense of the reliability of some comments. Of course there is a quick answer to that: If you don’t find my comments reliable then you must (fill in the blank: defend rape and child-rape and’ pedophile priests’; be a victimizer yourself; hate victims; hate the heroic few who … and so on).
There is certainly a second possible explanation for readers’ hesitation as to the reliability of certain material: that the offense-taken is merely a tactical pose to gain rhetorical high-ground. While this ploy is part of the armamentarium of tort-attorneys preparing their plaintiffs for a trial (or a press-conference), it is also a dynamic that will be familiar to anybody who has watched children squabbling at a breakfast table (or in a sandbox, for that matter).
More ominously – although I speak here purely conceptually – there is also the possibility of a more deep-seated origin for this dynamic: the type of functional paranoia so often encountered when trying to treat addicts of any sort. It works like this: a) I (the addict) am so careful that nobody but nobody can ever really see any traces of my addiction; thus b) if anybody keeps mentioning the possibility of my addiction because of what they claim to observe, then c) the only possible reason for that continued-mention is that the observer is deliberately ‘against me’.
And things go downhill from there.
So many interesting possibilities, nor do I here claim to have dispositive knowledge as to what applies and what doesn’t in any particular case.
That’s why I don’t like Stampedes: they tend to override careful assessment, and especially tend to require the overriding of such assessment, and also tend to ignore the humility required of all assessment and analysis and investigation: there is so much that humans, and their “flickering lamp” of knowledge, cannot easily know.
Precisely why I don’t like Stampedes of any sort.
Civilization is a fragile enough vessel as it is, without creating Stampedes that place even more stress upon it.
Lastly, this is why I am deeply concerned that the Church continue to reform herself in this country: so that she (clergy, laity, hierarchy) will be ever more acutely prepared for the threats to civilization that threaten to envelop us all.
You can talk till your blue in the face P about "careful assessment" but that's not what you do.
You carefully speculate, imagine, invent scenarios about victims that aren't true or relevent.
If you think "careful assessment' equates with smoke screen (because that's all you do here blow smoke, obfuscating smoke,), carefully assess again.
Are we not yet privelaged to be informed of the evidence linking the Catholic Church with SNAP? Is it as tenuous (feeling generous today) as the evidence that convicted innocent priests (dead and alive) of "crimes" committed decades ago, or is it tangeable, as in evidence that has been required in the US for centuries to take a mans freedom and destroy his reputation and livelihood, beyond a reasonable doubt?
If not, can we finally drop the red herring SNAP-Church routine? We get that we must accept your "word" that you were victimized. We get that we must accept that priests must be guilty only because they are Catholics. We get that you don't believe in God. Can we get something more than a still indefensable wild-eyed and insane claim that the Church is behind SNAP?
We never made the investment in SNAP that real and fake victims alike made. It is too bad for the real victims that they trusted anybody but the proper authorities pre-during-post their victimization (i.e. parents, law enforcement). I do hope that the real victims that have been reinjured by being defrauded by SNAP pursue them legally with all the zeal (eg. unsavory media and lawyers) that was applied in pursuits against the Catholic Church. Gaining justice doesn't always have to include financial gains – it is good (cleansing) for the soul.
We look forward to the real victims making SNAP accountable for their corruption. If they truly are connected to the Church, look at it this way, you can get a second retirement fund payout-
If you think I'm "wildeyed and insane" I may need to rethink everything……
You have defined by example the very essense of "wild eyed and insane" in every thing you've posted here.
So maybe you "knows 'em when you sees 'em".
Scary!
But I'm the one addressing you with respect, comparatively. I must stop doing that. You are not worth it. You never return the favor. IMNSHO.
Can't answer the question- huh?
I would never ever offer either you D or u P any proof of any thing.
I'd tell any other person on this planet but the 2 of u.
Any body else but u 2.
Unlike Jesus with Doubting Thomas I would not let you near my wounds( and SNAP is a real wound). [edited by moderator]
Well, it appears we have to add a new bit to the playbook: a variation of the-dog-ate-my-homework claim is this one from 10PM on the 1st: I have the proof and would gladly reveal the proof to anybody in the whole whole world … exceptexactlythetwopeoplewhoareaskingfortheproofandarerighthere.
This is why Lenin made it a rule never to allow oneself to remain in sustained contact with discussion, assessment, or deliberation: because sooner or later one is either going to have to demonstrate the weakness of one’s position or one is going to be reduced to making some sort of embarrassing excuses.
The Bolsheviks never allowed themselves to be drawn into deliberating or persuading-about the value of a possible revolution. Rather they simply imposed the revolution. This was sly: there was no way to guarantee beforehand sufficient public support for what would clearly be frightful social and cultural and human costs, so they omitted the need to do so. And instead, they held out visions of future marvelousness that would – through some vague wondrousness – definitely result from the revolution.
It was a form of what was so neatly expressed in the classic Wimpy gambit from the Popeye cartoons: I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Of course, having gotten the hamburger, Wimpy’s next challenges were a) to prevent time from ever moving on to ‘Tuesday’ and b) always making sure that time remained in ‘today’.
And the victimist movement – having drunk deeply from Nazi propaganda and from civilian marketing theory – added some twists (twists which had become embedded in American society from 1950s Cold War military spending and political focus): keep public focus on the ‘need’(from the marketing field) or the ‘emergency’ or the ‘crisis’ or the ‘threat’ (from the military field). And if that means creating the ‘need’ or the ‘crisis’, or at least exaggerating it … well, then that has to be the way to go. Let the perception create the reality. So manipulate the perception.
When you combine i) Wimpy’s need to make sure that it never becomes ‘Tuesday’ and always remains ‘today’ with ii) the strategy of always manipulating the public perception in order to create and sustain the particular ‘reality’ that you want … then it can be clearly seen just what strategies have sustained this almost 30-year old ‘crisis’.
By grasping this combination of concepts, we can see how the dynamics of this strategy helped fuel the Catholic Abuse ‘Crisis’ in all its presumed elements: a) that huge amounts of children; b) were outrageously and fundamentally life-wrecked; c) by untold numbers of ‘rapist pedophile priests’; d) aided and abetted and enabled by a worldwide hierarchical Church; e) that was and had always been organized around the principle of perpetrating such abuses.
But, as I have said, all of this has presented the Church with an opportunity to undertake what I would say are some long-overdue and greatly-needed reforms. For too long there has been a functional laxity or looseness in the Church’s own grasp of her responsibilities to her ministry of embodying the presence and call of Christ and of the Gospel.
Nor did the Church hierarchy in the United States respond either a) accurately or b) sufficiently to the hugely complex synergy of powerful forces unleashed here in the short half-decade between 1965 and 1970.
First, Vatican 2’s effort to update the Church’s Stance toward the world somehow mutated into a general presumption that fluidity could be practiced wholesale with no danger of inducing a fundamental spiritual and theological invertebracy.
And second, the campaign led by Martin Luther King to complete the liberations promised by the North’s success in the Civil War almost a century before somehow became entangled with 20th-century revolutionary theories that insisted upon wholesale and fundamental (and government-imposed) ‘liberation’ from all sorts of ‘hegemony’ and ‘oppression’ along a broad spectrum of social-cultural issues, no matter what the cultural or political consequences to first-principles.
Which resulted in far too much confusion in priestly formation among the many Dioceses. What was vital to the Church’s and the priest’s mission? What had to be changed? What could be changed? What core elements had to be retained and perhaps even intensified? Different Ordinary jurisdictions answered those questions differently, or simply maintained the priestly-preparation that had been developed for ministry in a society and culture that was rapidly changing (not to say disappearing).
Curiously – to me – the Church in the United States underwent some of the same difficulties that were simultaneously besetting American military strategic theory and command when confronted with the challenges of achieving success in Vietnam: their primary operational paradigms were not suitable to meet the challenges of the novel situation in which they were deployed. (And into such confusing vacuums, such abuse as did occur, did occur.)
It was some awareness of all this, I think, that lay beneath sense of urgency and the potentially useful and accurate bits in the 1985 Doyle (et al.) Report. A Report that was in any case not considered by the Bishops formally.
I noticed this week that Pope Francis has appointed a new Bishop of Oakland (CA), a Jesuit with some experience as a Navy chaplain (in the Reserves, I would think) who has spent the last three years conducting priestly-formation in Boston. I have no specific knowledge sufficient to venture any predictions, but I think the Pope is right to send the message that priestly-formation must be given a primacy and clarity and urgency that for quite some time it has not so clearly enjoyed.
Yeah, we'll just have to take your word for everything. Just like all the innocent priests imprisoned on the words of others just like you – they didnt need any evidence (or even have to pass the laugh-test) to get their tainted booty from our Church, either.
Forget "D and P"- give your evidence to TMR. If there's anything there, I am sure DP would be more than willing to investigate, and publish.
Well, unless the strategy is to sit on another "abuse" story for a generation or two and then sue somebody. Who knows, the political climate may be ripe for an escapade to "witch-hunt" the Church's "witch-hunters".
My word is proof enough about SNAP and my own abuse.
I need prove nothing to you. Nothing.
Besides because of your faith based damage you believe nothing but lies anyway.
Juxtapose my progressive background vs. your scepticism, I have a very long history in support of truth telling .
You 2 can't even write your real names here; let alone post anything or recognize anything credable.
As far as honesty goes: imaginary sky friends are delusional at best and add nothing to your ability to be considered believable.and or reasonable.
So sorry, you'll just have to take my word as an decent person that everything I've said here re SNAP/Church connection in particular, is as true as true can be.
You believed the Church never harmed it's own children but it did.
Your skills regarding truth discernment are negligable
…but, we took your "word" when you said that you have nothing against our Catholic beliefs, in writing, numerous times on this very site -whatever shall we "believe" about your "word" this time?
I believe the word we need to apply here is… BUSTED.
More useful bits for increasing a general comprehension of Abusenik tactics and strategy at 902AM today.
There is no evidence so – conveniently – we get the assertion that a primary (but completely unexplained or unjustified) insistence that one’s “word” is all the proof that is required. As I have often said, this demand-to-be-believed is perfectly within anybody’s rights if they want to make the demand.
But while it is within one’s rights to demand to-be-believed, it is not incumbent upon any other human being to simply cave to that demand and proffer the demanded ‘belief’. (One thinks of the long-established victimist mantra/demand – believe the children! – from the Satanic Day-Care Ritual Child Abuse cases of 30-plus years ago.)
Nor – of course – is this demand any more workable in the internet-modality. Just the opposite.
But again, this sets up a remarkably durable (if ultimately unworkable) Game: a) I demand to be believed about my victimization; b) I am not believed; c) therefore I can claim a further victimization or re-victimization because I am not being-believed as I have demanded. This Game can – in its limited way – set one up for a lifetime. And can help Keep The Ball Rolling.
And more specifically, we see a variant displayed here and there in comments on this site: a) I offer no proof or rationale to justify my assertions or demands; b) I am therefore not taken seriously; c) therefore those that do not take me seriously must be some kind of evil or Evil.
Fascinating. More for the notebook on the playbook.
I am unfamiliar with any “progressive” material here from JR, nor have I seen anything “progressive” in whatever “background” has been proffered in material on this site.
His theological and religious eructations are what they are and enough said about that.
I personally am not prepared to grant this blithely-presumed “decent person” bit, and if that’s all we are going to get in the way of rationale and evidence or demonstration, then I don’t see how material emanating from the ketchup-splattered tables down in the cafeteria are going to ever command any serious respect. But the denizens of that environ are welcome, of course, to put up whatever ketchup-splotched napkin-scrawled messages they wish on the bulletin boards. Any reader who’s been to high-school will have the capacity to deal with them.
I won’t presume to speak for ‘Delphin’ here, but if JR could put up even one quotation from my material where I denied that the Church has ever harmed its children, I’d like to see it. That would be his homework, not mine. (Although how much homework ever got done at a cafeteria table with the fries flying around?)
As to any “negligable” skills for “recognizing truths”: do we not see here precisely an example of the dynamics I have been discussing recently? That is to say, the offense-sensitive claim that: a) I am clearly (in my own mind) good and decent and true; b) you do not give me what I want; c) therefore you clearly cannot recognize goodness and decency and truth and thus are no doubt evil as well as dumb.
Lenin’s advice, as I have said before, is here demonstrated to have been wise (in its limited way).
Further, I think that this explains the existence of that curious sub-group of Abuseniks whom mainstream Abuse and Victim activists keep at arm’s length: this sub-group so clearly violates the Leninist wisdom and so clearly expose the ultimate core dynamics of the Abusenik/Victimist playbook that they actually put the whole shebang at risk.
And on top of that, it seems, this sub-group has – in marvelous conformity to the predictions of various professional maxims from a field the name of which cannot be mentioned here – come up with its own self-consoling explanation for such banishment from the Abusenik campfires: the banishment is due to the fact that the mainstream Abuseniks themselves are evil tools of the Church and have been all along.
Lastly, if I may, I will continue in the near-future to develop my idea of comparing the post-1965 American hierarchy’s responses to the massive shifts in American culture to the American military’s command-and-strategy level responses to the challenges posed by Vietnam.
And – in the service of precluding some predictable napkin-scrawling – I point out that when I do this I am not at all intending to denigrate the efforts of the ground troops in that conflict. I will be speaking about the level of command-and-strategy, far beyond the quotidian military experiences of the hard-working ‘grunts’ of that era. Thus too: the comparison with the Church will be at that hierarchical and command-strategy level, and not intended to denigrate the efforts and ministry of all individual priests and nuns in that era.
The posters who post here, solely to bash the Catholic Church and Catholics under the disgusting guise of sexual abuse "victimhood" at the hands of priests, have been proven to be liars. I am not inclined to soften my criticisms of their dishonesty any longer (and may suffer at the editorial hands of the moderator(s), ultimately).
As Publion has proven all along, the harshest Church critics that visit this site are not interested in any dialogue, restitution, resolution, forgiveness or healing. All these radical idealogues are focused on is how to continue to pound the Church and Catholics to their own destructive leftist, atheist advantage. As such, they simply have no credibility. Their "words" have no meaning, their grievances are false.
Too bad these frauds are so selfish that they don't care that their narcissistic and despicable actions (akin to the characteristics of all predator homosexuals) make it far worse for the real victims of sexual abuse, everywhere, to gain justice - and recover. Their dishonesty, here and everywhere, is far more harmful to real abuse victims than are the shenanigans undertaken by SNAP, or anything the Church is accussed of doing.
The vicious dog has not only turned on it's owner, it is now devouring it.
What I can't critizise your beliefs when they are illogical? Or worse violent?
Hate's a pretty strong word. Not believing is not the same thing as hating.
Do I love the Church no. I told you I don't even think about your Church save it's harm of victims.
And wait a minute who says I have to like your faith or hate it? Those are your constructs not mine. You don't get to limit me.
You are picking a fight with me? Why? Why Delpinium are you always on the war path?
Always angry always. Always SNAPping , as it were.
What you don't think the rest of the readers here see you as angry? Think again.
Whats the deal? Is it because your faith, the richest religion in the world, has been called to task?
Really?
This has been the first time it has since the Reformation and that was not a successful revolution in toto for the Church.
The Church failed dismally with the Nazi's and the other facists they backed and back still.
So It's really us victims who the Church will later, after we're are all dead, declare saints, we are the ones who have shown you how your corporate Church works in real life.
And that's part of your anger. You've put all your eggs, emotionally, spiritually in one basket.
Not your faith in God or Jesus but your trust in the men who run your faith.
And your solution is less homosexual priests.
It must have been that career in the military you didn't have.
Great story for TMR.
When it comes to sex abuse and the Catholic church this is the site to go to.
Well, if nothing else, "we're" off the "SNAP is Church" rantings.
And, now, we're on to "…oh, look, over there, squirrel…"
Deceive and deflect.
I notice a couple of historical references. I’d like to make some observations.
Peter Kreeft notes that the Medieval Christian Synthesis was broken when the Renaissance sought to go back purely to the Hellenic (or Greek) strain of that Synthesis and the Reformation sought to go back purely to the Hebraic strain of that Synthesis. The Hellenic strain emphasized Reason and the Hebraic emphasized Will; we might say that the Greek strain sought to understand its way to God and the Hebraic strain sought to will its way to God (through the observance of the Law).
The Medieval Christian Synthesis was the result of the Church – in the developments of doctrine and theology over the prior millennium – having been able to hold these two thick strands in dynamic but constructive tension and weave them into a dense and powerful combination capable of bearing under such constructive tension the awesome and awe-full weight of the reality of being human.
The Renaissance threw humanity back simply on Reason, creating part of the future that was to become what is now called Modernity. The Reformation threw humanity simply back on Will, creating another part of that future that was to become what is now called Modernity.
Yet the two strands were not synthesized; precisely the contrary: they were put in opposition to each other. And have remained so ever since.
Meanwhile in the Counter-Reformation the Church had been prompted to reform those elements of herself that stemmed – as so often happens to humanity throughout history – from the very successes of the prior millennium.
So I would not at all say that the Reformation (and the Renaissance before it) turned out poorly for the Church. But I would say that both of them turned out less than optimally for Modernity and its Mordred-like child, Post-modernism.
Now as to the Church and the Nazis (and that “the Church failed with the Nazis” … and that the Church failed with “the other fascists they backed and back still”):
I can recommend a recently published book entitled The Pope’s Last Crusade by Peter Eisner. It opens up the remarkable experience of Pius XI, who died in 1939, to be succeeded in that year by Cardinal Pacelli as Pius XII.
Pius XI was a remarkable man, continuing to pursue Alpine mountain-climbing even as a Monsignor in his fifty-first year. Elected Pope in February 1922 he issued numerous encyclicals, including Quadrigesimo Anno, written on the fortieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. In QA, he repeated but with even more acuity Leo’s concerns about the dangers of greed latent in industrial-capitalism and the consequent threat to social justice for the many who labored under and for that system. He realized the dangers threatening the vital and necessary social order of human society, without which a vicious and ferocious anarchy would develop and in turn create even more vicious and ferocious government responses.
Mussolini took power in 1922 and began to impose Fascism with as much violence and duplicity as was required. In 1929, in the Lateran Treaties, Pius XI worked out an arrangement that would keep the Church free from becoming – as happened a millennium before in the East – merely a court chaplain to the Fascist regime. The Treaties required the Vatican to be recognized as a sovereign state (albeit the world’s smallest), thus protecting within the boundaries of those 109 acres in the middle of the city of Rome the Church’s integrity and freedom from the voracious and lethal power of the Fascist regime’s armies and gangs of Blackshirt goons.
Pius was convinced that the rising Fascist and then – most certainly – Nazi threat was the greatest and most immediate danger for Europe and for Western culture and civilization.
In this he found himself opposed by Cardinal Pacelli, the accomplished and studious and semi-regal diplomat and by the Polish General of the Jesuits. Both of them saw Communism as the greatest threat: as a Pole, the General of the Jesuits would be understandably of that persuasion – although Hitler’s treatment of Poland would prove him wrong in the end; Pacelli saw the Fascists and the Nazis as merely some revenant forms of the ‘barbarian’ warlords and tribes who had sooner or later been incorporated into the Church and Western culture over the course of the prior millennium, and when they were tamed they would provide a protection against the Soviet Communist monster in the East.
Eisner’s greatest service is to provide today’s reader with a sense of how frightfully difficult Pius XI’s position became in the 1930s as Hitler’s grip on German and – through Mussolini’s increasing indenture to the Nazis – Italian power put the tiny sovereignty of the Vatican in a physical as well as conceptual vise.
All Vatican State communications (with the possible exception of the diplomatic pouch) had to pass through Italian phone, telegraph or postal systems; all visitors to the Vatican had to pass through Italian border control. Italian troops and Fascist Blackshirts surrounded those 109 acres and controlled all access, even for food and basic supplies as well as electricity and water. The Vatican civilian workforce had been honeycombed with Fascist agents.
Worse, even among the clergy and the hierarchy there were those who felt as Pacelli did. (In this the Vatican State resembled many governments of the 1930s, even in the United States where FDR was stymied by a deeply-divided public opinion, and Nazi-sympathizing German-American Bund meetings replete with swastikas, marching bands, and paintings of George Washington were held in Madison Square Garden.)
Pius XI in the 1930s was – if I might put it this way – a Churchill, but a Churchill not living free in an England safely removed from the increasingly bloody-ground of continental Europe, but rather a Churchill dwelling literally in the midst of the ferocious and voracious monstrosity of Nazi/Fascist domination. (Of course, I would add here that Pius was possessed of far more theological and philosophical chops than Churchill; his encyclicals and writings are true gems within the Catholic treasury of thought.)
I would also recall John Paul II’s powerful role in bringing about the events of 1989 and 1991 – the dissolution of the Soviet bloc and then of the USSR itself.
In pointing out this history, I hope to offer readers some further and insufficiently-known information, and some possibilities for further study if they wish. I will not be spending too much time with any ketchup-splattered Cartoons that might show up on the bulletin-board, but will be open to any serious discussion that might arise here.
Lastly, I have to address the rather odd comment about “a career in the military” that somebody (Delphin? Myself?) “didn’t have”.
First, are we now to be told that among his myriad other claimed accomplishments JR conducted and completed a successful “career in the military”? If he is indeed 66, then it is hardly impossible that he saw some military service for a single or even for a couple of military enlistments. But I would find it hard to accept that he sustained a full “career”, rising to advanced enlisted rank. I base my surmise on the fact (similar to what I have said on this site about certain other assertions as to elite-university and professional credentials) that I can find nothing in any of the material that JR has placed on the record here that would indicate any of the competences and characteristics appertaining to such a career accomplishment – and indeed precisely the opposite. And this would most certainly be true of any “career” in “counter-intelligence”, if we recall JR’s occasional (and wooly) deployment of that term. And should this claimed military career be intended to claim officer-rank, then I most surely say that I have seen nothing in any of his prior material that would indicate any of the competencies required for a successful career in one of the Service Corps or in the Line.
Nor can I discern the relevance of a “military career” to any of the material on this thread, or in any foregoing commentary on this site.
Again, I can recommend to the readership any wider and deeper study into the life, times and writings of Pius XI that they might wish to pursue. To my mind he is one of the most impressive Popes of the twentieth-century and indeed in the history of the Papacy.
You can set your little mind at rest Delphinium.(emphasis on little). I rant while you leasurely peruse purging your oh so perfect church.
The only persons ranting here are you and and what's his name? Oh yea, we don't know either of your names.
Why don't I call you Billie Donahue; and the other guy: Cardinal George.
That way the readership can get an idea as to who you truely represent.
Cardinal George. I have clearly said I was in the Army for 2 years during Viet Nam. I was a 19 year old draftee. It's all been written here.
It was Billie Donahue, aka Delpinium, here who "claimed" a career in the military not me. I wasn't referencing your military career Cardinal George. I was referencing Ms Donahue's, Delphinium's, self "styled" "career".
Let's see if I can make this simple enough for you to understand Cardinal George:
Imagine your a victim. Imagine you've called SNAP because you've seen them on the news.
You call SNAP wanting to get information. They tell you SNAP's having a "demonstration" at a Cathedral or Church near you and or have a meeting set up near by.
You go. you are asked to hand out pamphlets at Mass to families walking in or you attend a meeting , a self "help" meeting mind you no therapists,and are asked to "share". You are told by the SNAP leader not to share details of your abuse but to "stay in the pain"( I ain't kidding folks).
O.K. you've heard this SNAP thing is good, It's unlike any gathering you've ever been to before in your activist pas;.but There are always lots of female and authorative males like Tommy Doyle "Supporters" of victims around. Who are self described people of conscience who want to be "supportive" and of "help" to victims. And who tell you : how great Barbra Blaine and Clohessy are. How virtuous Blaine etc are and then Blaine and Clohessy tell you how great VOTF is (when it fact it's absolutely useless to victims)
(Example: My best friend in Worcester Mass.'s father was head of VOTF there. As of 2008 Dan Dick, my friends dad. had never even heard a victim's story, ever. That's 18 yrs after SNAP's founding! I told him mine).
And Blaine etc. tell you victims, who your" heros" are too.
Starting with Father Tommy Doyle O.P. and Sipe and Wall; and Jeffy Anderson. All real heros you are told. You victims are'nt the hero's these priests and x priests and Barbra are the heros. They even give each other hero awards in front of you.
Now you( Cardinal George) being a real victim and activist in the past through out your entire life, you want to aid yourself and other victims because you've tried privately to get some help from the church and were offered 12,000 dollars i.e. nothing.
So you go along to get along. You buy that all these people are virtuous but they don't like you very much. As a matter of fact they avoid you. But since you have an awfully low sense of self worth due to your abuse, you think. well they've just sussed how unlikeable I am in other words it's , you not them that's the problem. And you keep showing up.
Then time after time year after year you realize you and the other victims are all treated terribly by SNAP. All your press releases you're asked to demonstrate around never never come from your local group but always from the mid west: St. Louis or Chicago. The issues being underlined are all local issues. But Clohessy or Dorris in Missouri "know" what needs to be said in L.A about L.A.. even when they are never in L.A.
And one more thing. You are never asked to elect anyone.
.And the years roll by. Time after time your actions are criticised. Every demo SNAP creates seems creepier and creepier. i.e. a former priest pedophile who's served his time in prison is picketed outside his home as a warning to the nieghborhood of his living there.
You never wanted to play vigilante ( I refused to go) or holding up plastic handcuffs at a press conference in front of police headquarters as if the police didn't want to arrest these bastards if they could, (statutes of limitation had expired) the cops could do zip.
And always demos at the Cathedral, linking the criminals to the faith and there for "safety" Who in America save SNAP would even dare to be hostile towards religion; when religion had nothing to do with the criminal issues at hand. All for the hierarchs benefit. Who elses?
Do you think any of those demo's brought our settlements? No it was through the laws and in the court room that was accomplished.
But why am I even attempting to tell you the truth of my experience. 3 other victims have posted here about how they hate SNAP's behavior but you still won't get it.
Not getting the truth of what I write seems to have become both your reasons d' etre. Basta!