UNITED STATES
SNAP Wisconsin
Statement by Peter Isely, SNAP Midwest Director (Milwaukee)
CONTACT: 414.429.7259
After five days of silence, in remarks to the media this afternoon Cardinal Dolan, instead of explaining his actions of paying off pedophile priests to leave the priesthood while he was Archbishop of Milwaukee and then misleading the public about it in 2006, blasted the New York Times and the victim advocacy group SNAP, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.
It is not victim/survivors of predator priests in Milwaukee or the New York Times who publically confirmed, based on the official minutes of a meeting Dolan attended while the Archbishop of Milwaukee, that Dolan had authorized payments to child sex offender priests in order to be officially “laicized” and leave the priesthood. It was the Archdiocese of Milwaukee itself, including Dolan’s long time Milwaukee Chief of Staff, Jerry Topczewski. And it was confirmed several times, over several days. Presumably, Dolan does not consider that his former Archdiocese is making “groundless and scurrilous” charges about him? In fact, Dolan’s spokesperson said last week that Dolan “agreed” with the statements being issued by the Milwaukee Archdiocese.
But secretly paying off sex offenders to quietly leave the priesthood is not, as indefensible as that is, what is most damning about Dolan’s conduct. It is, rather, that he appears to have deliberately lied about it: to the public, to Catholics, and most egregiously of all, to victim/survivors of the very same predator priests he was paying off.
In 2006, when Dolan was confronted with evidence that he had implemented such a payout to notorious Milwaukee pedophile priest, Franklyn Becker, he loudly, unambiguously, and self-righteously denied that he had done so. “For anyone to assert” Dolan wrote in a statement at the time “that this money was a ‘payoff’ or occurred in exchange for Becker agreeing to leave the priesthood is completely false, preposterous and unjust.”
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