Philly Priest Abuse Case STUNNER: Claim Prosecutors Withheld Evidence That Would Have Exonerated Wrongfully Convicted Priests

this is why we don't prematurely canonize "victims". whenever one's name pops up it is almost always someone who made a phony accusation.

It is all so sad how this Nazi-style allegation has made some lawyers very rich, moved some DAs to higher political positions and at the same time destroyed others, both victims and alleged abusers.  In time God will bring truth to bear and this is only the beginning.

It seems to me the only malfeasance in this new motion is that the defense lawyers did not depose the victim assistance coordinator for the diocese and ask her if she spoke about the case with anyone else. Also, Gallagher moving to "sunny" Florida, the defendents not admitting guilt or the views of an alternate juror are not proof of a false allegation. 

Have long been pessimistic about the wheels of justice turning impartially… when the court cases involve a Catholic priest. But surely the D.A. has a clear responsibility to make available, to the defence, all relevant evidence. Not to do so could be construed as withholding evidence that might have helped to aquit the defendant.

And even last month the D.A. has succeeded in having the court records sealed. Surely this is just a cunning move to conceal what they have done. No reason was given for this unusual request. You would think that they would be morally obligated to give their reasons.

Which prompts the question….what else are they trying to hide?

I truly appreciate the depth of Publion.  We must teach our children to philisophically and internally ask the questions that provide depth such as that.  We must teach and demad justice.  Lawlessness and coercion is ruining individuals, families, and our Nation.  

In regard to the most recent comments of ‘MG’ and ‘Malcolm Harris’: Thanks and I would follow those thoughts by saying that using a rational thought process to examine the Stampede is indeed the value I see in this site: DP puts up material and we can then look at that material and discuss.

But ‘Malcolm Harris’ is also right, I would say, that the skills and even mental stance necessary for such examination are not often found these days, especially a) in the media and public conversation, and b) especially around the precincts of the internet.

One reason for (a), I think, is the quality of education as it has increasingly become more centered on feeling and feelings and less on thinking and thoughts. Feminism and what I would call Victimism have certainly contributed to this, and before that – going back almost 50 years – we saw that in the light of numerous government-embraced (and –imposed) broad social initiatives that were ‘Correct’ (that old totalitarian bit) in regard to which therefore no critical analysis (especially in regard to costs and consequences) could be permitted.

And it is for this reason that even collegiate education is no longer so much the education into strenuous critical thinking about carefully and laboriously acquired facts but rather has become merely socialization into holding and tossing-around the ‘Correct’ stance and attitudes and ‘feelings’.

Universities – and earlier institutions such as high-school and even K-12 – have increasingly become a modern equivalent of 19th century ‘utopian communities’ where the primary objective is merely to socialize and indoctrinate and to create( somebody’s idea of) the perfect community.

Needless to say, a citizenry increasingly ‘educated’ in this way (and ‘educated’ out of the skills and stance of genuinely rational and critical thinking) is going to be far more prone to manipulation. And thus genuine democratic politics and governance diminishes as the citizenry becomes ever-more manipulable by government and elites.

And in regard to (b), we have seen as well the ‘democratization’ in commenting which actually is far too nice a term for the type of ‘thinking’ (‘cognitive processing’ is probably more accurate, since competent thought doesn’t often seem to enter into it) that one encounters in high-school cafeterias and pubs or bars (high, medium, and low). Which – as we have seen in the Stampede – provides useful sound-bites for government and elites, amplified by manipulation-friendly media.

Bringing all of this closer to the Stampede, I have recently read Boston-focused historian Philip F. Lawler’s nicely-titled The Faithful Departed (the 2010 revised edition of the original 2008 book). This is a book that uses the history of the Archdiocese of Boston as an example of the larger trends in the U.S. Catholic Church’s experience in this country, from the beginning to the present-day.

It is well-worth the read and I find much in it with which to agree. He is especially cogent in his primary concern that over the course of the 20th century the American bishops became less grounded in their utterly vital spiritual responsibilities and more concerned with their role as administrators and iconic figures in the Church as a social and cultural institution. This dovetails with my imagery of prelates as having become commanders of ‘the City Cohorts’ as opposed to ‘the legions’, using the old Roman military terms.

He centers his concerns – rightly so, I would say – on the bishops themselves and their utterly vital role in the Catholic schema.

And beneath his treatment there lies the question as to the Church’s proper stance-toward and position-in any particular culture in which she finds herself: does she i) seek to become completely immersed in that culture (providing, as it were, ‘benefit of clergy’ or ‘benefit of Gospel’ to whatever that particular culture embraces or ii) take a substantially oppositional stance to everything in that culture that she finds unacceptable or iii) maintain a demanding and complex role that balances support for the best in the culture with acute and forthright witness against the anti-Gospel aspects of that particular culture?

As you might imagine, (iii) is probably the best route, but it is also the most demanding, and it demands a very high caliber of bishop.

This necessity or imperative has always been true in the Church’s history, but certainly became even more acute as the concept of ‘Christendom’ faded with the dawn of Modernity and most surely became more acute in Europe as it ‘modernized’ and in the U.S., which suddenly appeared on the stage just as the Enlightenment mind (and heart) was seeking to create perfect – though formally secular – communities, and has become even more acute in the past half-century in the U.S., which has seen both Vatican 2 and the massive government-embraced cultural revolution (and ‘culture wars’).

And Lawler has some excellent points to make about the gaping difference between what the Council known as Vatican 2 actually called-for and what the American Catholic episcopacy and clergy and theological elites called “the spirit of Vatican 2”, especially during the 1960s and 1970s.

I would add here that Lawler has some remarkably incisive comments to make about the interplay between the New England region (or Province) of Jesuits – centered in Boston College – and the Democratic ‘liberal’ interests starting in the 1960s. It is especially thought-provoking as he describes a July 1964 informal gathering of selected Jesuit theological and political types (Jesuit Fr. Drinan, who would later go on to election to Congress, figures largely here) under the auspices of the Kennedy interests at their family compound in Hyannisport.

Readers may recall that 1964 was the year of the passage of the federal and national Civil Rights Act. Almost simultaneously, this little gathering was called to consider how Democrats might – without running afoul of the cover of legitimate Catholic thought and doctrine – support abortion. Readers might further recall that in that year and for some years thereafter ‘abortion’ was not a major topic of public concern. Yet the Kennedy interests were already working quietly on how to position the Democrats in regard to it and this group of Jesuits was there to advise on how the whole thing might be arranged without too much complication (providing, as it were, ‘benefit of clergy’ to the political calculations).

The dynamics of that strategizing, based on JFK’s position enunciated to a major gathering of Protestant ministers in Dallas before the 1960 election (his ‘private’ religious principles would not interfere with his ‘public’ political decisions), make for very interesting reading – theological as well as conceptual and historical – indeed.

And the roles of both long-lived early-mid 20th century Boston prelates – the self-consciously princely William Cardinal O’Connell (1907-1944) and the folksy (and Kennedy-favorite) Richard Cardinal Cushing (1944-1970) – are also thought-provoking in that regard. (Teaser: the folksy Cushing had such a get-along-to-go-along approach to doctrinal matters and perhaps such a personal connection to the Kennedy interests that he let an awful lot of problematic developments go un-challenged and even supported some of them, using JFK’s (highly problematic) tactic of casting religious and theological beliefs as personal and thus of no relevance to public activity.)

While Lawler is no ‘liberal’ (as the term is defined these days) he is adamant in his holding the episcopacy to account for the conceptual and theological marginalization of the Church and of Catholic life and thought in this country – and long before the Stampede.

He also holds the episcopacy to primary account for what we now know as the well-documented spike in claims of clerical abuse (although the spike has now passed) dating to those years of the 1960s and 1970s.

But I would also note that it is precisely his overriding objective of demonstrating how the American episcopacy needs to be spackled-up that leads him to make the mistake of presuming that all of the allegations are genuine.

Nor is he even-handed here: he criticizes the post-2002 reports made by Dioceses in regard to their compliance with the Dallas protocols because all there is to go on are the self-report statements of the bishops themselves, and he doesn’t think they can be taken as completely valid simply because the bishops say so. Yet he makes no such criticism of the self-reported (and equally self-interested) claims and stories and allegations lodged against the Church and he presumes their accuracy and veracity without further comment or assessment.

I have no doubt that some abuse occurred but I am highly doubtful as to the Stampede vision that there were virtually innumerable such instances of actual and valid ‘abuse’ (however defined) and that the Church is or was therefore an egregiously and uniquely and fundamentally flawed institution in which such abuse (and far too laxly handled episcopal oversight) was the primary operative dynamic driving the Church’s activities.

The book is well worth it as a highly readable and clear discussion of the interplay of Catholic thought and praxis in this country. And it might provide a valuable example of the type of careful and critical thinking that more citizens (and Catholics) could read to grasp the fundamentals of competent knowledge-gathering and then of discussion and assessment based on that foundation.

Honestly you get funnier and funnier, P.

Still stuck in the lunchroom and pretending the rest of us force you to be there? Your projections are nothing if not redundant and deluded and deeply sad.

I don't see how you have any moral ground on which to stand. Using the good old days as being more moral is a standard right wing play that doesn't stand. It just doesn't hold true at all.

You are upset that your church got caught with our pants down; and for the first time ever is being held to account for it, barely. But you even hate the "barely".

And now you've got your Australian pal running the same nonsense. 2 idiots saying "things used to be more moral" don't make your arguments true. Was Auschwitz more moral than Viet Nam or the Iraq invasion? Was institutional racism more moral than equality? The right wing always harkens back to "whiter" days when things were so much better. Better for who? White heterosexua male supremesists?

LDB, I don't judge books by their covers. I've seen to much shit attempting to pass itself off as shinola. I don't care what people look like. I care what they do.

It's so interesting, to me; that you take my comments ; pretend they are by someone else; and then throw my words back at me with the exact same amount of analytical support that you claim i use. Analytical support you say i don't show.

The difference is I made my analysis. I made my imagry. You steal mine and pretend it to be yours because, it seems, that you only use your imagination when it comes to deities and demons. Never when it comes to choosing imagery to back up your bullshit raps. ("lunch room" for, example.)

You are a bore; a thief; and a bad joke.

In the two years I've been posting here; never once have you "acted" as an equal to your opposition, as in: you're a person and so am I; but only as a "superior" informing the "lesser thans". An interesting tact given a) you aren't superior; and b) you are an apologist for child rapers and their enablers. Prove they aren't.

When I speak to people here as equals, because they are my equal. You demean it as a "fireside chat".

You lack humility, P.

When you truely, have so very much to be humble about.

Well, from the recent comments there was a lot on the table for the Abuseniks.

What then do we get from them now?

From JR (the 10th, 1104) we get an essential revelation. And nothing more.

On to LDB (the 10th, 353PM) then.

Out of all the possible issues to which he might have made substantive comment, if not response, he chooses instead a “distortion” that I have – he believes – perpetrated. Indeed?

Apparently LDB can see a tongue “sticking out under the top of the teeth” in the Doe/Gallagher photo that accompanies this TMR article. I see that as the top of his lower lip. And it is certainly not the type of ‘sticking out your tongue’ that “mocks”, where there is a distinctly visible extension of that muscular organ sticking out from the teeth and beyond the teeth, sufficient to obscure the full vision of the teeth.

So whose is the “distortion” here?

But the  real “distortion” here is the fact that although LDB had the option of so many issues actually raised by my recent comments, he instead chose to create what can reasonably be construed as a non-issue that he has created himself.

But he does go on.

He will try to use this photo bit of his to shoehorn in a characterization of my making a “typical” and “usual” mistake or misinterpretation of something LDB wrote. If LDB could provide several quotations (accurate, of course) of my having done so – the multiplicity so as also to justify that “typical” and that “as usual” – then that would be very nice. (But let us not postpone the next meal while waiting for it.)

And – yes – I would say that he had indeed made “an inaccurate claim about a picture that [he has] right in front of [him] on the screen”.

And  – yes – I would say that on that basis one must conclude that he is “either incompetent or devious”.

And – yes – on that basis I would make the substantive point that “abuseniks” do seem to “make things up with some frequency”.

So far, so paraphrased. I’d said as much in the comments I put up.

Would there be a substantive point to his presentation in this paragraph of his?

There is not. This paragraph of mere paraphrased repetition concludes with nothing more than – waitttt for ittttttt – an epithet. And thus back to the high-school cafeteria he goes.

And as I noted, “the tongue” is certainly not there in any clear sense; let the individual reader decide.

And it is most certainly not there in the sense that Doe/Gallagher can be construed as ‘mocking’ – which calls for a clear and indubitable extension of the tongue beyond the vertical plane of the teeth, and not simply the tongue pushed up against the back of the teeth or – if at all – the tongue extended just enough to be visible behind the teeth or in between the teeth without breaking their vertical plane.

So then LDB’s bit about TMR ‘selecting’ the photo fails.

But what’s of even more import is this: we see here an attempt to work the Playbook gambit that Abuseniks are victims of the ‘appearances’ or ‘impressions’ that others form of them – even from photographs for which they posed (and, thus, they are not responsible for whatever actual characteristics that those impressions indicate). They are victims (of others’ “impressions”), doncha see, and what more does anybody need to know?

And if the photo is genuine (i.e. not photo-shopped or otherwise faked), then what matter if it is ‘selected’ or not? If the photo genuinely shows the actual person in some act, then where is the problem in regard to its having been ‘selected’?

And to wrap things up, LDB will then make a further “distortion”: he characterizes my references to his utter lack of having demonstrated any legal mentality or competence whatsoever as merely having been “continued invitations to debate issues of criminal law, civil law, and jurisprudence”.

But I did not make any such invitations. Indeed, it should be clear from my observations that I don’t really imagine he has the capacity – or the legal education or competence – to “debate” any such matters at all in the first place. (Nor has he ever demonstrated any such competence or the expectable fruits of any such education.)

He then tries to extricate himself by flat-out claiming that he has “no interest”. Which can be left right where it was put for readers to consider. Ultimately, it is merely a more politely phrased rendering of JR’s frequent ‘out’ when confronted with material he can’t handle: he doesn’t care.

Such a dedicated professional.

And here we are on this site dealing seriously with issues that very much involve criminal and civil law and jurisprudence and allegations and charges and evidentiary principles and the first principles of Western law.

And here is LDB making comments on the site. And yet in the one area where he might be presumed (on the basis of his educational and professional claims) to be particularly suited and competent, he has “no interest”.

In what way, then, have I ‘distorted’ the picture of LDB as evidenced in his comments all along?

He then tries to reduce this stunning rejection of legal discourse to being merely a broader lack of interest in world or military history. As if i) the substance of the legal points relevant to the Stampede and the ensuing legal process and ii) the secondary analogies and images and examples drawn from world and military history were of equal weight and he simply doesn’t feel like expending any effort on such ancillary matters.

Is he “not qualified” in matters of world and military history? Fair enough – he apparently only had a Harvard education and majored in Philosophy. I do not ask and never have asked that he enter into any extended discussion of my analogies, images, and examples drawn from world and military history.

But if he is indeed “qualified” in law, then he’s going to have to come up with another excuse for why he doesn’t want to demonstrate his competence in legal matters.

But then he has: he has “no interest”.

That opens up a relevant line of thought: in what, then, does he have an interest? I would say: in merely tossing around the usual victimist boilerplate and agitprop and kitsch that has done so much to fuel the Stampede and distract from any serious analysis of the Stampede.

Since these lawyers (and judges) are 'officers of the court 'and members of the bar association, they're very anxious to dispell any notions that they might be operating dishonestly.  It should therefore be no surprise that the Superior Court promptly sealed from public view the details of the latest allegation of prosecutorial misconduct, in much the same way that a cat hides her waste products – by immediately burying them.

Many lawyers tend to 'look out' for one another.  Regrettably though, in some cases they'll just look the other way.  The persecution and conviction of these individuals is one sterling example.

I'm hoping and praying that the ethical lawyers who work in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office have the intestinal fortitude and courage to come forward with the unvarnished truth.

This is almost like Diogenes with his lamp, searching for an honest man (or woman).  There must be at least one…..

Well, if the Abuseniks had had a lot of issues and matters on the table before, from which they might choose to make some substantive comment, they certainly had even more after my last comment.

So what have we got, then?

From JR (the 11th, 1211) we get an odd one indeed: I – apparently to his mind – am somehow making myself out to be God. Readers may make it of it what they will. One imagines the student JR whining thus: ‘Two  plus two doesn’t equal  nine? Who died and made you God?’ That sort of thing.

Then we merely get the same old un-supported and epithetical bits from the bottom of the 3×5 file: defending the indefensible, whitewashing the church’s crimes – waittt for ittttt! – “by denying any crimes occurred” (correction supplied). In regard to that last bit, a) JR will have to produce an accurate quote of my making any such denial and b) there would be no evidence to back up (a) since (a) does not exist and JR simply made it up (which appears to be an ingrained habit with him) for his own convenience and amusement.

And then more epithets in the second paragraph.

And then back to the “proof” bit, although the principle in law is that the accuser has to prove that the crime was committed and was committed by the accused.

Then – however – a truly phantasmagorical bit: “Show us the proof that will support your claims that we have no proof of our rapes?” (sic) I suppose the only counter to that is: the proof is in the fact that although the accusations have been made, no proof has been proffered by the accusation-makers. A problem which could easily be resolved by the accusation-makers proffering such proof. And yet they haven’t. So either i) they have proof that will justify their accusations but simply choose (insanely?) to withhold it or else ii) they have no proof (and thus they have to always try to raise enough dust to cover up that abyssal lack).

So we’ll wait, perhaps, for an answer to whether (i) or (ii) immediately above is the actual state of the situation. (But don’t postpone the next meal while waiting.)

Then LDB (the 11th, 1207PM) chooses to try to keep his most recent gambit going: in my comments he is merely being invited to get involved in a debate and he chooses not to debate. Which becomes merely a more polite formulation of JR’s oft-heard bit that he doesn’t have to explain anything to anybody and he knows a whole lot but doesn’t have to prove it to anybody but he most certainly does have to be taken as a serious commenter because … well, because whatever.

The Wig of Above-It-All Dignity, doncha see?

On top of which Wig he will then lard a hefty dollop of the old dodge that we merely disagree on facts. But I am still trying to get some relevant facts and to distinguish them from phantasms and deliberately-spun distractions. Which is not at all the way the Abuseniks want the ball to bounce.

Thus: since “we cannot agree even on” whether Doe/Gallagher’s tongue a) is actually visible in the photo or b) is so far stuck out as to constitute ‘mockery’, then in light of that impasse LDB doesn’t have to address any of the other issues either.

The logic of this bit escapes me, but perhaps Harvard’s Philosophy Department is teaching some new kind of logic now that – marvelously – looks very much like illogic but truly and really isn’t illogic and instead is logic disguised as illogic. Prescinding from LDB’s own actual condition, the disturbing bit here is that such a gambit from a university these days isn’t impossible.

But at any rate. LDB is off the hook – at least to his own satisfaction.

Thus then the Wig of Regretful but Honestly Baffled Intelligence and Integrity: LDB sniffs that “To go any further with you is not practicable”. Oh, alas and alack! (Stage direction: keep sidling toward the curtains gracefully as this line is delivered.)

But this is LDB and some sort of snitty concluding zing simply cannot be passed-up.

Thus, just before reaching those curtains, LDB will turn and deliver his version of le mot juste: He (apparently) takes a swipe at ‘Mark II’ (whose opinion of LDB’s material seems rather forthrightly negative) and then – as best can be made out of his rather conceptually confused misch here – purrs that I might “soothe” Mark-II with “some extra criticism or disparaging of me [i.e. LDB]”.

It’s not much of a zinger, really, but LDB is struggling under the weight of that complicated Wig and the added weight of the all the issues he’s trying to avoid – so perhaps he should be cut some slack. Readers may decide as they will.

Bottom line: nothing responsive to anything and just a hodge-podge of dodgy bits from both of these classic Abuseniks.

I doubt we’ll be seeing anything except more of the same from these two. We’ve seen all of the 3×5 cards now, and most of the Wigs.

And why bother with the stuff? Because, to repeat, it gives readers a clear glimpse of how the Abusenik mind – guided by the Playbook – works.

And it demonstrates clearly why few torties would ever want to risk putting such types on the stand, where their performance would be no better than it has been here.

And it demonstrates clearly what might have been if the media had actually tried to get to the bottom of the Abusenik stories at the outset.

In response (so to speak) to my various comments – but apparently especially to the points about the legal principle that accuser has to prove the accusation against the accused – JR (the 13th, midnight) gives us this: “we were never in a court of law so ‘legal’ proofs don’t apply, period”.

Whenever we get that “period” from JR we can pretty much expect that it’s merely an emotionally-manipulative way of distracting from something he’s tossed up that isn’t actually that substantive or definitive at all.

And so it is here.

First, JR – for one – was most certainly “in a court of law” because it was that massive, Anderson-Strategy type case in LA half a decade and more ago that got him his money and he had to have signed the Complaint containing his allegation under pains and penalties of perjury. And we haven’t seen anything he’s ever said here that even contributes to the probability of his story holding-water, and indeed most of his stuff in that regard works in the opposite direction.

Second, JR has spent quite a few pixels here throwing around allegations of the vast numbers of crimes of “rape” (his idea of it, anyway) and assorted other crimes committed by priests and bishops. So since he opened up the criminal-forum approach, then the criminal and legal elements of it are most certainly relevant here.

Third, we note the interesting sense that if one isn’t in a court of law then … evidence (accurate and truthful, presumably) isn’t really involved in whatever one claims or asserts or alleges. (Bringing us back to the old revolutionary presumption that if you are doing it in a good cause, then whatever it is you are doing cannot really be wrong – which I think has become a vital enabling bit in the Stampede. That’s how ‘revolutionary morality’ works, and you can see the mischief that is possible under such a system.)

Thus his histrionics (delivered with the Wig of Outraged Integrity And Frustrated Intelligence) in the question “When are you going to quit lying?” … actually work – through the dynamics of projection – to indict himself. Perhaps this marvelous question is yet another one to write down on a yellow stickie and tape onto his bathroom mirror.

Then – in yet another deployment of I’m Not/ You are (or its reverse twin: I Am/You Aren’t) – JR contents himself with claiming that it is now he who is waiting for me to – presumably – stop lying. I shall leave him there up on the stage, Wig and all, to consider his next gambit.

Nothing would be impossible to god's chosen religion. If the church is overwhelmed by false cases it shouldn't be difficult for the best of all religions to herald it's resources and fight such fraud.

One problem: there is no such fraud. The absolute truth of our claims is exactly what is causing your church and it's insurors to settle. If any fraudsters get through the church's and it's insuror's truth digging process; it's not the fault of real victims. So far you can't even show one example where that's happened. Can you?

It seems then the "person' with the most "exaggerated format" here is vous. No false claims to show = False thesis.

Over on the BigTrial site, commenter Kay Ebeling has made a comment that I think has great relevance for what we have been looking-at on this site.

In a comment (the 11th, 644PM) to Ralph Cipriano’s very recent BigTrial article entitled “Psalms and Prayers in Prison” from the 10th of September, Ebeling asserts that the “’credibility challenged’ qualities that Cipriano constantly refers to are all personality characteristics that one finds in a person who is abused by multiple priests”. She then claims that “mounds of documentation released in cases across the country show that”.

This type of assertion goes back a long way (and I have discussed this topic before in comments, some time ago). Some readers may recall the mid-1970s explosion of ‘self-help’ books about incest (one of the earliest sexual issues raised up by an intensifying feminism). The earliest and most popular books were not written by clinicians but instead by enterprising and ‘properly’ motivated non-professionals and/or ‘advocates’.

Some readers may also recall in such books the list of do-it-yourself diagnostic bits that any reader could apply to herself. Presuming that there was no direct and clear and corroborated memory of an actual incestual experience, these lists ‘helpfully’ provided a list of behavioral and emotional tics and characteristics that would justify a presumption that one was incestually assaulted.

The lists were breath-takingly broad, comprising behaviors and emotions that often arise among persons of either sex in the course of a life.

Their approach was very much akin to this: if you are an adult woman and find that you don’t like hot coffee, then you were probably incestually-assaulted because (incestuous) daddies drink hot coffee … see, it’s science!

And while such authors – when forthrightly pressed on the matter – back-tracked as to their ‘clinical’ grandstanding, yet the dynamic that they released into the public opinion forum remained and intensified, selectively amplified by an increasingly ‘non-judgmental’ and non-inquiring media.

And you can imagine what such a demonstration of ‘evidence’ could do for enterprising torties and DA’s. And for pols and legislators who saw a bandwagon picking up speed and decided to jump on it.

The key problem, of course, is with what are formally called ‘differential diagnosis’ and ‘etiology’: it is not enough to a) establish the presence of some X (a characteristic or emotion or mental event); one must also establish – to the exclusion of other causes – that this X was caused by a particular action or experience (in this case, criminally assaultive incest) Y. If you can do that, then you can claim that if X is present, then Y must have happened to cause it. And thus you can call X a genuine bit of clinical and legal ‘evidence’.

But the challenge then remains: can it be scientifically established beyond doubt that this Y caused and causes this X? And thus that if you encounter a person with the characteristics of X then you can legitimately presume that you have indubitable evidence that the action Y had to have been the cause of it?

You see the problem here.

Typical of Stampede-type phenomena as they took shape in American culture and society back then, this vital scientifically-validating step was not fully resolved, but instead was merely presumed: millions took-away from this type of book the idea that if they had any characteristic X, then Y must have been perpetrated upon them even if there was no memory of it.

But when you look at the lists of possible ‘evidence’ of incest in those books, you see that many bits are proffered as ‘evidence’ that actually are very common human feelings or tics that might have any number of causes.

The Playbook for any Stampede would deal with this type of objection by simply asserting that in that case, there must be huge amounts of Y being perpetrated and thus so many people (if not just about everybody) is suffering from the results (evidenced by just about everybody having some X behaviors or emotional or mental characteristics).

But the alternative and more scientific possibility is this: the X behaviors or characteristics claimed to be presumptive and definitive evidence of Y are widely-spread in the population because they are not actually caused by Y at all, but rather arise from any number of possible and quite common (and non-criminal) human experiences or from other clinically-recognized causes and sources.

Thus in the Ebeling comment we see this dynamic still active in the Catholic Abuse Matter: since Doe/Gallagher has all these X characteristics, then that (sort of) proves Y, i.e. that he must have been abused by a priest.

This neatly presumes that only abuse by a priest (or by “multiple priests”, in Ebeling’s take on Doe/Gallagher’s story) could cause the assorted characteristic behaviors and such displayed by Doe/Gallagher.

Thus then  – and even more neatly – it can then be claimed that all of the problems (such as with rationality and coherence) with Doe/Gallagher’s stories and claims and testimony actually serve to prove that his stories and claims are true … because how else would he have all these problems (such as with rationality and coherence) if he weren’t abused (by “multiple priests) in the first place? QED, and case closed!

This is one of the core mirrors in the hall of mirrors that is the Catholic Abuse Stampede (or any Stampede).

But to think diagnostically here: Doe/Gallagher certainly demonstrates what can be validly seen as many of the characteristics of an addict, including the queasy character-disorder characteristics that so often accompany (and complicate the successful treatment of) addicted persons or addictive personalities, especially after the addiction has become well-seated in the self and, as it were, has ‘entrenched’ in the self.

But addiction is not a cause that itself is mono-causal, i.e. that has a single cause (in this case, the Stampedepresumption is that only abuse-by-cleric can cause the addiction and the sequelae).

And in fact: the addiction – however caused – may very legitimately imagined to be the cause of the claims, allegations, and stories.

In other words: the allegation might be a symptom and result of the addiction … rather than the addiction being considered to be presumptive evidence of the allegation.

So the scientific method does not support what is otherwise a very neat and economical sleight of hand (or mind) pushing people towards accepting that the allegant’s very problems – which would otherwise work to seriously undermine his credibility – are actually instead undeniable presumptive proof of his credibility and of the truth of his allegations.

Further flowing from Ebeling’s “mounds of documentation” assertion: the only thing all those cases would have shown is that an allegant claiming abuse-by-a-cleric displayed those characteristics. But we are still left with the vital question of causality unaddressed: are we looking at a) an allegant most surely turned into an addict by abuse at the hands of a cleric or b) an addict (with attendant characterological derangements) who saw a chance to make a score by making an (untruthful) allegation and playing the role best-suited to support his scam?

Once again: the Abuseniks and the Stampede Playbook have no way of dealing with this question, and indeed do everything they can to distract anybody and everybody from considering it. (What I would call the Victimist Playbook has dealt with this fundamental issue by so adorning and burnishing the (claimed) status of ‘victim’ that nobody would dare to ‘re-victimize’ the ‘victim’ by raising the question at all.)

It was 2 against one to see if we were telling the truth about our abuse. You don't just walk in and say fr. Dick Head molested me and get a cheque.