{"id":1126,"date":"2005-10-14T09:17:24","date_gmt":"2005-10-14T09:17:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/enablers-row.html"},"modified":"2005-10-14T09:17:24","modified_gmt":"2005-10-14T09:17:24","slug":"enablers-row","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/enablers-row.html","title":{"rendered":"Enablers’ Row"},"content":{"rendered":"

As described by Philly commentor Gerard E., noting this story in today’s Philadelphia paper:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Though Krol is dead and Bevilacqua retired, many lesser-known administrators – "enablers" who helped craft the subterfuges or carry them out, according to the grand jury – remain in church posts around the region. Some are pastors. Two are bishops. All remain in good standing, with sanctions against them unlikely.<\/p>\n

One is said to have issued instructions to never tell people with abuse complaints that their accusations were believed, according to the report. Today, he is the bishop of Allentown.<\/p>\n

Another learned in 2002 that a child-molesting priest had surfaced as a teacher in a local public school, and alerted no one. In 2004, that official was consecrated as an auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese.<\/p>\n

A third arranged the transfer of an abuser priest to an outlying area where "his scandalous action may not be known." Today, that now-retired administrator lives in a large parish in Yardley, where he regularly says Mass and gives homilies.<\/p>\n

The public uproar over the massive report targeted Krol, Bevilacqua, and, to an extent, Bevilacqua’s top lieutenant, Msgr. William Lynn. But the names of other officials run through the report as well, all implicated in a variety of actions or inactions in response to abuse complaints.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s the way the system works. Or has.  Radically and courageously following Christ is not important to Church bureaucrats. If it were, they wouldn’t be Church bureaucrats, after all. What has been important is maintaining image: maintaining the institution’s image, as well as the image of individual priests. Not only maintaining the image of those priests, but keeping their egos intact and, dare we say, keeping them quiet. We can only hope that the price paid now has been high enough that this is changing. Judging from the continued obfuscations and self-justifying cries emanating from both coasts, it doesn’t seem as if the lesson has been learned quite yet.<\/p>\n

(There are a number of links on the left of that story to individual cases of enabling and secrecy).<\/p>\n

On an another, cheerier note, do read this story about one of the DA’s who was on the task force. God writing straight with crooked lines, indeed:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Spade grew up in a devotedly religious Lutheran household. There was weekly mass, Sunday school and the altar boy guild. The investigation had a surprising effect on Spade’s faith. <\/p>\n

"It reaffirmed that general idea that power corrupts," he says, "but in talking to so many Catholic priests and theologians and having to read Cannon Law, I actually became drawn to Catholicism." <\/p>\n

He began attending Catholic mass. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As described by Philly commentor Gerard E., noting this story in today’s Philadelphia paper: Though Krol is dead and Bevilacqua retired, many lesser-known administrators – "enablers" who helped craft the subterfuges or carry them out, according to the grand jury – remain in church posts around the region. Some are pastors. Two are bishops. All…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nEnablers' Row - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/enablers-row.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Enablers' Row - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"As described by Philly commentor Gerard E., noting this story in today’s Philadelphia paper: Though Krol is dead and Bevilacqua retired, many lesser-known administrators – "enablers" who helped craft the subterfuges or carry them out, according to the grand jury – remain in church posts around the region. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}