Childproof 25: Part I — Cardinal Dolan and the Next Generation Response to Sexual Molestation by Clergymen

Child's Face
March 12, 2012

http://thychildsface.blogspot.com/2012/03/childproof-25-part-i-cardinal-dolan-and.html

Passing the Torch: Bernard F. Cardinal Law (left) congratulates 18 February 2012 Timothy M. Cardinal Dolan of New York, who was inducted into the College of Cardinals by Pope Benedict XVI: a classic case of clerical cynicism and criminal cronyism. The scope of their involvement in the pedophile priest scandal has decimated the moral authority of the Roman Catholic Church worldwide.

Causing Scandal: Dolan (left) offers Rembert G. Weakland, his predecessor as archbishop of Milwaukee, the kiss of peace at his 2002 consecration at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. Weakland resigned the previous year due to revelations about his scandalous sex life. Auxiliary Bishop Richard Sklba observes. Dolan, as the 10th archbishop of Milwaukee, was promoted to New York, leaving the Wisconsin diocese to deal with 550 child molestation cases.

An Irish Tragedy chronicles the rise of Bishop Anthony J. O’Connell and the history of the pedophile priest crisis in the United States.

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan receives the pallium from Pope John Paul II during a ceremony in June 2003.

Rev. Gary P. Wolken: One of two St. Louis pedophile priests who shared Dolan’s St. Louis residence when he was an auxiliary bishop there. Dolan continues to protect Wolken and to lobby for this sexual predator’s early prison release.

Bishop Anthony J. O’Connell, Kenrick class of 1963, admits that he is a child molester. Come to the Stable/The Stephen Spalding Foundation has documented 16 cases to date involving O’Connell and the victimization of minors in his care as a faculty member and rector of St. Thomas Aquinas High School Seminary in Hannibal, Mo. Unlike the pedophile priests protected by Dolan, who have been convicted of sex crimes and sentenced to prison terms, O’Connell lives in luxury near Charleston, N.C., forced into early retirement.

Timothy M. Dolan — archbishop of New York, newly appointed to the College of Cardinals, and Prince of the Church — represents the next generation of accomplices protecting sexual predators employed by the Roman Catholic Church in the United States.

In the autumn of 2008, Dolan travelled from Milwaukee, Wisc., where he was the sitting archbishop, to St. Louis, Mo. He came home to visit an uncle hospitalized with a serious illness. There he saw a priest who criticized him in a face-to face meeting about his handling of the clergy child molestation scandal in St. Louis and Milwaukee.

Dolan and the Wolf Pack: A Priest Tells the Truth about Clergy Sex Abuse
In particular, this priest was concerned about Dolan's unwillingness to break with those who protect predator priests. Dolan responded with a derisive stare for this bold rebuke, offended that a lowly priest would accost someone of his stature.

This priest also chastised the St. Louis native for causing scandal by allowing Archbishop Rembert Weakland, O.S.B., to participate in his consecration ceremony of apostolic succession in Milwaukee. The peccadillos of the disgraced Benedictine monk, who paid out more than $450,000 in hush money to a vulnerable adult that he had molested for many years, cannot be whitewashed by the laying of hands by the successors of the Apostles (woe to him through whom scandal comes, according to Luke 17.1, 2).

Dolan's consecration as archbishop of Milwaukee was a perversion of truth, this priest noted. Further, he chastised Dolan for using his homily to gloss over Weakland's immorality with deceitful humor.

"You folks now how to do permanent damage to the lives of [children]: it is quite clear that you know nothing about how to fix it," this priest has stated in writing to you, Bishop Gaydos. "If I were to turn a [victim of clergy sex abuse] over to you now, I fear I might simply be tossing a badly wounded lamb to the Wolf Pack."

Dolan merely brushed the priest aside as an inconvenience. But by the end of his tenure in Milwaukee, Dolan commissioned a bronze plaque of Weakland surrounded by children: vainglorious commemoration within the walls of the Milwaukee cathedral that proved that this ecclesial evaluation accurate.

In effect, Dolan chose to sow discord and offense. He belittled gross indecency as a mere trifle. He repudiated victimization and sexual molestation as if it were a small thing to despoil and defraud the weak.

Dolan may have extolled Weakland's "virtue" in 2002, but five years later he attacked the San Francisco gay community and coerced Miller Brewery to end its sponsorship of the Folsom Street Fair. Another telling tale of this man's prevarication with the truth.

An Irish Tragedy: The Cult of Plausible Deniability
The meeting between bishop and priest occurred shortly after the publication of an insightful book about childhood sexual abuse and pedophiles priests in the United States; the role of the Irish church in this debacle; and the criminal conspiracy by church administrators to conceal the scandal.

The candid analysis of this historic failure to protect children and vulnerable adults from ordained sexual predators is encapsulated in An Irish Tragedy: How Sex Abuse by Irish Priests Helped Cripple the Catholic Church. The author, Joe Rigert, is an investigative reporter in Minneapolis, Minn., not only captures the essence of the sexual molestation crisis nationwide — with a special focus on Missouri's bishops — he also gives new life to those victimized as youngsters.

A Moral Absolute: Embracing the Legacy Cardinal Law to Protect Child Predators
Dolan's management of the church's child molestation scandal has become the new benchmark for this culture of denial and obfuscation: a rejuvenated sense of clerical self-righteousness and arrogance as it pertains to the American legal system. His attitude pushes the protection of children and vulnerable adults further down the scale of all reporting standards necessary for a safe society

For instance, he publicly supported the Rev. Bryan Kuchar, who was sentenced to three years in the St. Louis County Jail in Clayton following his August 2003 conviction on three counts of statutory sodomy. Kuchar was released into the custody of the archdiocese of St. Louis in August 2006 with the promise that he would be defrocked. He never expressed remorse for his crimes against children.

The Academy vs. Priestly Formation
Dolan's early education at Cardinal Glennon College — as with Bernard Cardinal Law's studies (1955-1961) at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Columbus, Ohio — is the bedrock of this self-serving attitude toward the law. It is a misperception of justice reinforced by training at the Pontifical North American College in Rome and the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., particularly for careerists like Dolan in pursuit of a degree in canon law and higher church office. As a result, the cult of plausible deniability, as far as pedophile priest are concerned, continues to flourish as if it were a Medieval rose garden.

Justin Cardinal Rigali of Philadelphia, as archbishop of St. Louis, tapped Dolan to restructure the seminary program there in the late 80's as Cardinal Glennon College/ Kenrick Seminary. With Rigali's approval, Dolan tossed out the Vincentians — The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Congregation of the Mission — who established the institution of higher learning in 1818 on the banks of the Mississippi River. Dolan replaced the 177-year-old curriculum with a fundamentalist regimen. He recruited a team of third-rate academics to staff the new Bible college cum school of theology.

In the meanwhile, Rigali established RECON, a residential facility for pedophile priests near St. Louis (a former boys ranch and boarding school owned and operated by the Rev. Bertin Miller, a Franciscan priest, who refurbished his property to accommodate this newly church-sponsored revenue stream and protect this brand of child molester).

Kenrick: A Regional Powerhouse Poised for Expansion and Control
The American hierarchy perceives the Glennon/Kenrick reformation as a revitalized training center for the next generation of clergy in the United States. Dolan used the re-varnished image of St. Louis seminary education to launch the next phase of his international career: rector of the North American College in Rome (1994-2001). Rigali's successor, Raymond L. Cardinal Burke, made Dolan an auxiliary bishop as the follow-up to his tenure at the North American. Dolan, in turn, continued to nurture his reputation as an expert on the priestly formation of Roman Catholic clergymen.

Kenrick alumni work in parishes in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, Tennessee, and other states throughout the Middle West.

Kenrick alumni also lead the dioceses of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo.(Robert W. Finn, who was a St. Louis auxiliary with Dolan), Kansas City, Kan. (Joseph F. Naumann), Fort Worth, Texas (Kevin W. Vann), Jefferson City, Mo. (John R. Gaydos, Carberry's last secretary and member, board of governors, Pontifical North American College in Rome), and Dolan from Milwaukee and now New York. Bishop Michael J. Sheridan of Colorado Springs, Colo., is a former St. Louis auxiliary bishop as well as a Kenrick alumnus and former faculty member.

George J. Lucas was promoted from rector to bishop of Springfield, Ill.; and, now, he is the archbishop of Omaha, Nebr. Bishop J. Terry Steib of Memphis is a former St. Louis auxiliary.

Cardinal Law engineered the rise of O'Connell, a member of the Kenrick ordination class of 1963. As a the key member of the Vatican's Congregation of Bishops, Law appointed O'Connell as the first bishop of Knoxville, Tenn. In 1998, O'Connell moved up in prestige as bishop of Palm Beach, Fla., with the help of his great friend.

And just as Cardinal Law once sent his students to study there when he was bishop of Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Mo. (1973-1984); so, too, his successor, James Van Johnston — O'Connell's Knoxville protégé — continues this tradition.

O'Connell's successor as the third bishop of Knoxville is Richard F. Stika, a member of the 1985 Kenrick ordination class.

Stika, a Rigali protégé, has staked his career on protecting pedophile priests such as Kuchar and Wolken, who were a year behind him in seminary. It should not be surprising, then, that Stika is a member of the USCCB Committee on Child and Youth Protection (of which Gaydos is an alumnus).

This member of the new generation of church management to protect pedophile priests has earned his stripes, or should we say cassock piping, as a leading figure in the St. Louis archdiocese. For example, as chancellor of the archdiocese of St. Louis, he coordinated the 1999 visit of John Paul II to Missouri.

Stika likes to joke that JPII is his spiritual grandfather, because the pontiff consecrated Rigali as archbishop of the Mississippi river town, and Rigali appointed the chancellor as bishop of Knoxville. It is amusing that the Knoxville diocesan website includes a page dedicated to Rigali in addition to contact information for the disgraced churchman.

Fabian W. Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., should be included in this mix because he has maintained and strengthened the culture established by his immediate predecessor, the legendary bishop Glennon P. Flavin (1967-1992) of St. Louis.

Bishop Flavin is known to have molested at least four young girls during his Missouri career (ordained a priest in 1941; auxiliary bishop, 1957-1967). The allegations are noteworthy in that Roman Catholic ritual was used to victimize these children.

Bishop Flavin (1916-1995) also is known to have associated with a number of predatory priests using religious ceremony as a guise to attack young girls. According to the victims, this group includes Msgr. Maurice F. Byrne, former St. Louis vice-chancellor; Msgr. George A. Lodes, who built and dedicated in 1978 Sainte Geneviève du Bois Church in Warson Woods, Mo.; and Msgr. Michael Owens.

Bishop Flavin's brother, Msgr. Cornelius J. Flavin, is the first pastor with who Dolan shared a rectory as a newly ordained priest. Dolan considers Cornelius Flavin (1909-1996) to be a modern-day Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, the 19th century French priest canonized 1925 by Pius XI and now known as the Curé D'Ars, patron of clergymen. How Cornelius Flavin dealt with his brother and his brother's associates is open to speculation in light of the fact that the archdiocese of St. Louis maintains control of documents that identify pedophile priests. But history tells us we can assume the obvious.

Religious Belief as Fetish
Cardinal Burke, who is still chairman of Kenrick's board of trustees, was appointed chief justice of the Vatican's supreme court in 2008. He is a leader of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest(Institutum Christi Regis Summi Sacerdotis), a reactionary organization similar to the Society of St. Pius X and the Legionnaires of Christ.

Burke also is affiliated with the New Liturgical Movement (NLM), whose acolytes betray an unnatural devotion to silk brocade, antique lace, and velvet buskins (sacerdotal slippers)and disguise their fetish for candlewick embroidery and goldwork needlepoint with militant devotion for Gregorian chant and music of the Renaissance. Frou-frou and lacey finery are not bad things, even though it is not uncommon for Burke's ecclesial ensemble costs as much as $30,000. As it is, Burke is now the Carrie Bradshaw of the American hierarchy and we must wonder at the so-called churchman who lives so extravagantly on someone else's money during our long-term economic peril and ignores sex crimes perpetrated against children.