by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on January 11, 2012 · 8 comments
. . . Ted made the very same point that I made above about the news media letting pass an opportunity to truly expose and effect sexual abuse: “I hope the pendulum swings back to some degree. I never agreed with zero tolerance. There has to be some respect for priests as basic citizens presumed to be innocent . . . The lack of balance in regards to the Globe and NY Times coverage indicates that they have clearly missed a chance to address societal child abuse. This belies a more sinister agenda by people who want to destroy the Church. Since the level of sexual sin in our society is so great, it makes people somehow feel good to persecute the Catholic Church for its abuse problem as a way to feel absolved of their own sin in some way.” . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on September 14, 2011 · 17 comments
. . . So I was not at all surprised when prisoners came one after another to my cell door during “Court TV’s” coverage of the Father Geoghan trial. After some incredible testimony from the accuser, they showed up during commercials to ask, “Are you watching this?” I was watching it, and I heard what they heard. The twenty-something-year-old accuser testified that a dozen years earlier, when he was eleven, he was in a public swimming pool. He said that he recognized Father John Geoghan as someone who had visited his housing project. While trying to climb out of the pool, the young man testified, Father Geoghan came up behind him and, under the guise of helping him to climb out, squeezed his buttocks. Based upon this testimony, the 68-year old priest was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to nine years in prison. It was a death sentence. . . . Am I defending Father John Geoghan? Not at all. Do I doubt that this accuser told the truth? Not at all. The behavior ascribed to Father Geoghan was consistent with what scores of others said of him, and an egregious example of how much his own reasoning and judgement skills had deteriorated. The Church had a responsibility to protect young people from John Geoghan and a responsibility to protect Father Geoghan from himself. Church officials failed on both counts. I don’t question the truth of any of it. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on November 10, 2010 · 9 comments
. . . It’s time for a revolution, and it should be a revolution of real faith in a modern world that values it not. It isn’t going to be easy. But before we all sign up for remedial CCD classes, the bad news was offset just a bit by the reality that the United States as a whole flunked the test, and Catholics came out just three percentage points behind the national score of 50% – a solid “F.” Other Christian denominations fared just slightly better than Catholics – but still flunked. Jews and Mormons both passed, though just barely, with scores slightly under the atheists. Weighing everything, my own conclusion is that the problem with religion in America isn’t religion – it’s America. Catholics should remember the value of being counter-cultural. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on September 15, 2010 · 10 comments
. . . I have never written of any of this before now. Those months
awaiting trial became so stressful and depressing that I began
to give up. I stopped accepting treatment for epilepsy, and
ended up hospitalized at Albuquerque Presbyterian Hospital for
a week. After a traumatic night, my good friend and co-worker
Father Clyde Landry, came to see me. He brought from my room
at the center a portable short wave radio to listen to.
Later that night, I plugged in my earpiece and turned on the
radio. It was close to midnight, and I was not even aware it
was the Feast of the Visitation, May 31. I also didn’t know my
radio was on the short-wave band. Father Clyde must have moved
the band by accident. I raised the antennae and played with
the tuner, then stopped. I had stumbled upon EWTN’s short
wave broadcast from Birmingham, Alabama. As I lay there in the dark in that hospital room, I heard the
Salve Regina intoned and chanted in my ear. . . .
. . . The sole accusation that just destroyed this 8O-year-old priest’s good name is that he abused someone fifty-one years ago when he was 29 years old. Kelly Lynch, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston, announced that Father Menna was placed on administrative leave, barred from offering the Sacraments, and ordered to pack up and leave the rectory where he had been spending his senior years in the company of other priests. . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on May 12, 2010 · 9 comments
. . . Go back just another thirty to forty years, I wrote, and you will find yourself right in the middle of the Nazi horror that engulfed Europe and claimed the lives of six million Jews and millions of others. I suggested that Catholics should not accept what some would now impose: that the Catholic Church is to be the moral scapegoat of the Twentieth Century.
A TSW reader responded to that insight by sending me a rather startling document. As I began to read it, I almost tossed it aside dismissing it as just another sensational headline. You might be tempted to do the same. Resist that temptation, please, and keep reading: . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on April 21, 2010 · 7 comments
. . . William McGurn filled in an essential part of the story that Laurie Goodstein conveniently left out of the New York Times. Jeffrey Anderson, a lawyer quoted at length by Ms. Goodstein isn’t just a lawyer “for five men who have brought four lawsuits” against the Church. He is a lawyer who has become ravenously wealthy suing Catholic institutions for decades. He is a lawyer who once boasted to a newspaper that he is “suing the sh– out of them everywhere.” . . . The information that Jeffrey Anderson has made a long career of suing the Catholic Church was well known to Goodstein and The New York Times. As far back as 1988, Mr. Anderson spoke of receiving referrals from other lawyers with clients interested in suing Catholic dioceses and religious orders. He appeared on the “Geraldo [Rivera] Show” on November 14, 1988 to speak of his representation of a man who had been in prison and was then suing a priest for sexual abuse. I wrote of this in . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on April 14, 2010 · 9 comments
. . . Perhaps NBC sensed the line of decency was breached a few weeks ago when it apologized to The Catholic League and the world for a scandalous and libelous smear against Pope Benedict XVI on its affiliate news channel, MSNBC. We owe a debt of gratitude to Bill Donohue and The Catholic League for not letting this one pass. It is also no coincidence that the lurid stories of priestly sex abuse and papal complicity rose to a frenzy in the U.S. in the same weeks that tax-payer funded abortion was being argued in the Obama health care bill. Writer and art historian Elizabeth Lev made this same point in a brilliant essay on PoliticsDaily.com entitled “In Defense of Catholic Clergy (Or Do We Want Another Reign of Terror?)” Ms. Lev cited English statesman, Edmund Burke’s 1790 commentary on Catholic witch hunts during the French Revolution: “What would Edmund Burke make of the headlines of the past few weeks …? In 1790, Burke answered … ‘It is not with much credulity I listen to any when they speak evil of those they are going to plunder.’ What would he think of the insistent attempt to tie [a] sexual abuser to the Roman pontiff himself through the most tenuous of links … as the present sales of Church property to pay settlements swell the coffers of contingent-fee lawyers and real estate speculators …?” . . .
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on March 9, 2010 · 5 comments
. . . As a result of availability bias, humans tend to replace their beliefs with the crowd’s beliefs simply because a proposition has been repeated in the media and presented as widely believed. We are subjected to subtle cues of social pressure every day in marketing that convince many people to purchase things they don’t really need. We also face subtle cues and social pressure in the daily bombardment of news stories that cause many people to believe something based solely on its prevalence in the media. It is indeed possible that Michael Jackson and many Catholic priests became the subjects of classic, media-fueled availability bias. . . .
At the Twilight’s Last Gleaming: The Fate of Religion in America
by Fr. Gordon J. MacRae on November 10, 2010 · 9 comments
. . . It’s time for a revolution, and it should be a revolution of real faith in a modern world that values it not. It isn’t going to be easy. But before we all sign up for remedial CCD classes, the bad news was offset just a bit by the reality that the United States as a whole flunked the test, and Catholics came out just three percentage points behind the national score of 50% – a solid “F.” Other Christian denominations fared just slightly better than Catholics – but still flunked. Jews and Mormons both passed, though just barely, with scores slightly under the atheists. Weighing everything, my own conclusion is that the problem with religion in America isn’t religion – it’s America. Catholics should remember the value of being counter-cultural. . . .
{ 9 comments }