UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
On Saturday, I said that in the near future I’d write more about the lie that the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops His Eminence Timothy Cardinal Dolan has told re: his knowledge of payoffs made to priests abusing minors in the Milwaukee archdiocese to encourage those priests to disappear quietly. When I planned to take up that topic this morning, I had thought that my comments would be Johnny-come-lately remarks, since Laurie Goodstein reported on this story in the New York Times on 30 May, and it has been in the news for almost a full week now.
But now, after having refused for five days to address the claims that he knew about payoffs to priests abusing minors in Milwaukee and has lied to the public about his knowledge of these payoffs, His Eminence finally broke silence just yesterday. Speaking to reporters after Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s cathedral (on the eve of a trip to Ireland to attend the International Eucharistic Conference next weekend), His Eminence chose to mount an attack instead of directly addressing the allegation that he has lied to the public.
As Brigid Bergen reports for the WNYC news blog, in his remarks yesterday, His Eminence attacked two bearers of the news that he has long had knowledge of payoffs to pedophile priests in the Milwaukee archdiocese and has lied about that knowledge. His Eminence attacked media reports–specifically, it would appear, Goodstein’s in the Times–as inaccurate and unfair. And he attacked the group Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests, SNAP, as lacking all credibility and peddling “groundless and scurrilous” charges against him to which he refuses to respond.
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