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  New Miami Archbishop Pledges Zero Tolerance, but Faces Accusations of Mishandling Abuse Cases

By Lona O'connor
Palm Beach Post
April 21, 2010

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/new-miami-archbishop-pledges-zero-tolerance-but-faces-595130.html

Wenski gave the first $1,000 donation to kick off the Save Our School campaign, a fund-raising event this year to raise money to keep the school from closing. He also drove down to the school on a Harley-Davidson in May to administer First Communion.

In a Holy Week homily on April 1, Orlando Bishop Thomas Wenski made a clear statement of his policy on sexual abuse to the assembled priests of his diocese: "We need to understand what we're talking about. We're talking about betrayal. When you're entrusted with a child and you do things to that child, you are Judas."

But less than a week after Wenski's warning to the priests, his Orlando diocese announced a financial settlement with a woman who said she was stalked and sexually harassed by a priest in the diocese in 2004. The case occurred on Wenski's watch.

Wenski, 59, takes over as Archbishop of the Miami Archdiocese on June 1, replacing Archbishop John C. Favalora, who is retiring.

Wenski has been hailed as the perfect prelate for that diverse flock of about a million Catholics in Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties.

He is fluent in Creole and Spanish and an accomplished administrator returning to the place where he was ordained and served as a priest and an auxiliary bishop for two decades.

Among his duties as archbishop is to protect his people from sexual predators.

But on Wednesday, in a phone interview, the head of an advocacy group for survivors of priestly abuse called Wenski's speech "rank hypocrisy" in light of cases that suggest Wenski's handling of priestly sexual abuse in the Orlando diocese was questionable. The allegations against Wenski mirror those that have dogged his superior, Pope Benedict XVI, over how Benedict handled a sexual abuser priest in his Munich diocese when he was a cardinal there.

The pope named Wenski to the Miami post.

Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando speaks during a news conference at the Archdiocese of Miami where he was named as the replacement for Miami Archbishop John Favalora who is retiring, in Miami Tuesday, April 20, 2010.
Photo by Lynne Sladky

Victims' advocates like David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, say that a deliberate veil of secrecy about sexual-abuser priests extends to the highest levels of the Catholic Church.

"We are distressed by Wenski's deception, delay and recklessness in several recent cases, especially a recent one involving an alleged rape by a priest and a seminarian," Clohessy wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

A statement released by the Orlando diocese on Wednesday afternoon said that Wenski followed all the proper procedures in investigating cases of alleged sexual abuse. A Miami Archdiocese spokeswoman declined to comment.

By all accounts, Wenski is a clergyman of great skills and sensitivity, dedicated to the poor and downtrodden, the right man to solve the problems of the Miami Archdiocese, including poverty, fewer churches and less money to run one of the largest organizations in Miami-Dade County, including 100 parishes and 63 schools.

But the day after Wenski's appointment to Miami, Clohessy's group issued a statement outlining cases in the Orlando diocese where, the organization charges, Wenski mishandled cases of abuse by priests.

Among the SNAP accusations is that Wenski removed the Rev. Carlos Bedoya from the priesthood in November 2006, a month after a Volusia County sheriff's report revealed that Bedoya had participated in sexual battery against a man in 2006. SNAP claims Wenski knew about the criminal charges against Bedoya for weeks, but wrote parishioners in November 2006 that Bedoya left for personal reasons. In 2007, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Wenski wrote Bedoya's parishioners that Bedoya was "on administrative leave to afford him time to address personal issues that have recently arisen."

Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando, right, hugs Resilia Luciene, left, after a news conference where he was named as the replacement for Miami Archbishop John Favalora who is retiring, at the Archdiocese of Miami in Miami Tuesday, April 20, 2010.
Photo by Lynne Sladky

At the time, SNAP wrote to Wenski, questioning his handling of the Bedoya case. Wenski wrote back saying that based on the information provided to him when the accusations surfaced and the presumption of innocence, "I believe that my actions have been appropriate," according to the Orlando Sentinel. In June 2007, prosecutors dropped charges against Bedoya, citing insufficient evidence for them to proceed.

Then, four days after Easter, the Orlando diocese announced the financial settlement of another case, with a female victim of the Rev. Wladyslaw Gorak, a priest who disappeared from his Newark, N.J. church, changed his name to Walter Fisher, and resurfaced three months later as a parish priest in Lakeland, where he stalked and attacked the woman in her home in 2004.

According to court documents, the Orlando diocese did not check Gorak's credentials until several months after he was assigned to the Lakeland parish. Then Newark Bishop Arthur J. Serratelli sent a letter to Orlando saying that Gorak had "good moral character," though he had attacked women in New Jersey, the lawsuit said. Gorak pleaded guilty in 2007 to charges of burglary, assault and stalking and was sentenced to four years of probation.

Wenski said Wednesday that the Orlando diocese has had a zero-tolerance policy against sexual abuse, in place since the early 1990s. The Miami diocese put in place a zero-tolerance policy in 2002, in line with directives from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Born in West Palm Beach to a Polish immigrant father and a Polish-American mother, Thomas Wenski grew up in Lake Worth and attended Catholic school at his home parish, Sacred Heart. He studied at St. John Vianney Minor Seminary in Miami-Dade and then at St. Vincent de Paul Major Seminary in Boynton Beach.
Photo by Richard Graulich/The Palm Beach Post

Wenski, who was born in West Palm Beach and attended Sacred Heart Catholic School in Lake Worth before entering a Miami seminary at the age of 13, is well known in South Florida for decades of service to the poor, especially the Haitians he pastored for years. In the early 1980s, he was at the forefront of efforts to restore the religious and civil rights of Haitian immigrants interned at the Krome Detention Center in Miami-Dade County.

On Wednesday, in a phone interview, he defended his pontiff's handling of the sexual abuse crisis, pointing out that Benedict also removed the controversial head of the Legion of Christ, a Mexican religious organization whose members take vows of poverty, obedience and chastity, after a woman claimed the Legion's founder, Marcial Maciel, fathered her six children.

"We can never dismiss the pain of the victims," Wenski said in a Wednesday interview. "But I think the Catholic Church today perhaps has done more than any other similar institution. Child sexual abuse is not a Catholic problem, it's a societal problem that affects almost every institution, every country and every family in the world. Obsessing on the story of the Catholic Church, and reprinting horror stories that happened 30 years ago, doesn't help other faith communities to learn from this."

 
 

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