Mitchell on Keeley on McCormack
For Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, as is too often the case, the St. Agatha business comes down to “race and class.” But she does give lots of space to reader Bob Keeley, a St. Barnabas parishioner, he told her — but also a head-over-heels advocate and worker for his old parish, St. Felicitas, in a failed attempt to save it in the past year — and his impassioned defense of priests in ghetto rectories and particularly his objections to what he considers “journalistic overkill of a fine young priest.”
Keeley gives a run-down of a priest’s day:
"After five hours of sleep; get up at 5 to run to the hospital before you come back to say mass ... hand out a cup of coffee or a set of food stamps ... help take a kid back into class who really is a pain in the but (sic) ... talk with the kid who has had no sleep himself and is ashamed because he didn't have a decent pair of pants to wear to school today ... help a mom with a rental payment, a gas bill or car fare to work; counsel with the 12 step program men and women; drive a victim to the hospital; three hours later return with a family member when the first person -- the victim -- is about to die and the family just got the call; fight the hospital to take the victim in when he/she doesn't have an insurance card; it is too late to go to Dr. Prieto's health center or to Stroger; take a gun away from a distraught teen; call the police and be called a traitor by the family; drive a mom to find furniture and haul it home in the back of your ten-year-old car; read the three readings for next week's Sunday services and then write a sermon that makes sense when the church's front lobby will be filled with vultures/excuse me reporters who only want to talk with you about your personal imperfections ..."
“You get his point,” says Mitchell, who concedes the hard-working part, adding inexplicably, “But not every low-income person is looking for a handout.” She goes further, also inexplicably:
Indeed, Keeley's characterization of the low-income Catholics got under my skin in the same way the portrayal of Hurricane Katrina victims got under my skin. Poverty is viewed like a fatal disease when it isn't.
Why is the charity undeserved?
Moreover,
why should pastoral duties, when provided toward those who live in the inner city, be looked upon as undeserved charity?
It’s a mystery how she got that out of Keeley’s comment.
At length, she gets closer to the issue at hand, declaring, as if the opposite has been said, that poor people’s claims deserve consideration, which she derived from Keeley’s allowing (fecklessly) only that McCormack may have "made a bad mistake,"
"But don't make him out to be the king kong of bad guys in the world and within the context of three days of news coverage slaughter the guy all over Douglas Boulevard," Keeley wrote [unfortunately].
To which Mitchell:
Sorry, but my biggest concern is not McCormack's sullied reputation,
Mine neither.
Cardinal at St. Agatha
At meeting with St. Agatha parishioners, here and here, Cardinal George repeated something he’d said before, that all he knew of Fr. Dan McCormack as sexual abuser (predator) last August was that he’d been questioned by police, which was not enough to get him out of the rectory. Why not? is the question, of course. In this day and age of sexual predators and increased awareness of them?
It’s no different in Crown Point, Ind., where Fr. McCormack has helped celebrate Mass at St. Mary’s Church in connection with baptism and first communion “in recent years” and no investigation is planned by the Gary diocese.
"We act when we're given a claim or an allegation," said a priest spokesman. "We don't presume to find those out unless contacted. Then we investigate them diligently."
This is madness. That diocese should be all over St. Mary’s, looking for trouble.
George speaks
Sun-Times woman Falsani does Cardinal George a big favor with her lead today:
Somberly, in a voice tempered by pain and contrition, Cardinal Francis George for more than an hour Saturday afternoon answered questions from reporters for the first time about the Rev. Daniel McCormack, a Chicago priest who was charged last week with sexually abusing two boys.
“The sins of priests and bishops destroy the church,” George said quietly, his eyes cast down at the podium standing between him and phalanx of reporters at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago’s Pastoral Center on East Superior. “That is what we’re seeing.”
The cardinal-archbishop praised a nun for coming forward with an allegation against McCormack from 2000, expressed grief for the priest’s wounded flock and acknowledged inadequacies in the way priest’s case was handled.
“I’m worried,” he said. “I’m worried about the children. I’m worried about a lot of things.”
That’s what we’ve been waiting for: George looking and sounding worried and saying just those things “in a voice tempered by pain and contrition.”
He had spent Friday night after returning from the hospital going over news accounts, then deciding to meet the press Saturday morning. In one fell swoop, he seems to have risen above bureaucratic ineptitude such as his over-shoulder-looking staff seems good at, presenting himself less the classroom lecturer and more the pastor.
A lawyer for Lutheran bishops faced with similar problems, though dealing more with pastors and adult women parishioners in counselling sessions gone awry, told me some years back that the clincher for closing a case was heartfelt apology by the bishop. People weren’t looking for money. They were looking for appreciation of their plight shown by the uniquely positioned top churchman.
Cardinal on defense
Very strange comment by Cardinal George, that it’s wrong that one should be “punished” because of a story that has not been investigated. Isn’t the issue whether potential victims should be protected?
That’s Illinois Appellate Court Judge Anne Burke’s position. She headed the National Review Board, a lay watchdog group. Kids come first, she said. Get the guy out of the rectory for their sake. Don’t insist on criminal indictment-style evidence. George doesn’t get it, she said: "He's never had the intent, I think, to abide by [the zero-tolerance policy] other than in words. I'm hoping this is at least a wake-up call."
I’m on Burke’s side. It’s been the rare cleric who has not join the circling of wagons in this matter. The subculture stays with its own. Married with kids means shut up, make no demands.
Another thing: Why is George gallivanting (not too strong a word) around the world (a) to give a speech in New Zealand, (b) to confab with his fellow Oblattes of Mary Immaculate (hence his O.M.I.) in Thailand, and (c) to give a speech at the pope’s behest in Rome?
He apparently signed off on the non-removal of the priest in August, when police investigation (!) had found cause to prosecute but could not convince prosecutors. As Burke told Chi Trib, “Many times an allegation for assault of a minor doesn't always rise to criminal conduct that is going to be indictable. That doesn't mean it didn't happen.” Why does George not get this? It’s time like this when celibacy looks bad: we have confirmed bachelors reacting to this stuff. Is that good for the church?
Not that George has been reluctant to defenestrate and isolate priests “for allegations of abuse -- some decades old -- that were never criminally prosecuted,” as Burke noted. But these had not done it on George’s watch. Now he looks responsible and is appropriately defensive of priests’ rights.
Indeed, a conservative Catholic commentator, editor of First Things, writing in Weekly Standard, recently noted that George and one other bishop are the only ones who seem ready to enter the public sphere as Catholic spokesmen in the U.S., where bishops are lying low these days, both of them being untouched by the cover-up scandal. George may brazen this one out, but unfortunately he is now besmirched, by his defensiveness if nothing else.
Nun's tale
Such a horror-filled story! The priest fills every category for the Going My Way ideal — seminary mentor living with sems, beloved pastor in black parish, one of big family including his brother the cop whom he’s living with now, popular preacher, etc. — and such accusations! Horrible.
The latest is in Chi Trib and Sun-Times but much moreso in the latter, where the hard-working Cathleen Falsani and Frank Main team for page-one story about the nun who reported this priest in 2000 but got nowhere, she says. Read about it and weep, all ye Catholics and sympathizers, noting some chilling aspects.
The local bishop offered Fr. McCormack as a mass-sayer for the school children noting that he “misses celebrating mass with children.” But once by chance he was alone with the kid, the devil within him struck, we read: The boy, a 4th-grader, said he wanted to be an altar boy and asked if he could learn how to be one. To which the priest replied “Oh sure, but I need to measure you. Take down your pants,” the nun said the boy’s mother told her.
The nun confronted McCormack, who wouldn’t say he didn’t do it, repeating that he had used “very poor judgment.” She hand-delivered a letter to the Catholic school office detailing what she knew. No trace of it remains.
Read the rest of the dreadful account, which I introduce in fairly restrained manner with emphasis on Catholic horror. But simmering below the surface of what I say is extreme indignation. Let it go at that.
Wheaton College prof fired for converting
"I was sad to be leaving my colleagues and students and an institution I valued very highly," said [Joshua] Hochschild, 33. "But I support in principle the right of the institution to have exclusive hiring policies. Not every institution is a liberal democracy. We both agreed that Wheaton has a right to exclude Catholics if it wants to. We both agree there are significant differences between what a Catholic believes and what a Protestant believes. Our significant difference was over whether the statement of faith was an effective way of implementing a policy of excluding Catholics."
Wheaton College prof fired for converting.
That’s the prof fired by Wheaton College for being Catholic. It’s a Catholics-need-not-apply situation that makes sense.
The Free Republic sidebar quote is much to the point also:
*"Heck, I want Catholic universities to fire the atheists, feminists, and communists who have taken over. I can't exactly fault Wheaton for taking similar measures to preserve their identity, though I do think it's their loss."
