{"id":7299,"date":"2004-05-12T08:15:45","date_gmt":"2004-05-12T08:15:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/changes.html"},"modified":"2004-05-12T08:15:45","modified_gmt":"2004-05-12T08:15:45","slug":"changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/changes.html","title":{"rendered":"Changes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Springfield bishop dissolves fund giving support to abusive clerics, removes priest critic from presbyteral council<\/a><\/p>\n

McDonnell said he had spoken to donors and they had agreed that the money should be used to provide scholarships for students in Catholic schools.<\/p>\n

The fund was established last fall by Bishop Thomas Dupre, who abruptly announced his retirement as head of the diocese in February amid allegations that he had molested two altar boys while a parish priest in the 1970s. Dupre and his lawyer have declined to comment on the allegations which are now being investigated by a grand jury.<\/p>\n

The fund paid the living expenses of priests who were accused of sexual misconduct and removed from their ministerial duties.<\/p>\n

One of the sharpest critics of the fund was the Rev. James Scahill. His East Longmeadow parish has been withholding a portion of its weekly collections to protest continued diocesan support for Richard Lavigne, a defrocked priest who was convicted in 1992 of molesting two altar boys.<\/p>\n

McDonnell removed Scahill from the 18-priest Presbyteral Council Tuesday after the two exchanged words over Scahill’s public criticism of the new bishop. Scahill said McDonnell was taking too long to decide whether to continue to provide financial aid to Lavigne.<\/p>\n

“The Presbyteral Council is meant to be an advisory group to the bishop, not an adversarial one,” McDonnell said in a prepared statement, characterizing Scahill’s public statements as “personal attacks.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Springfield bishop dissolves fund giving support to abusive clerics, removes priest critic from presbyteral council McDonnell said he had spoken to donors and they had agreed that the money should be used to provide scholarships for students in Catholic schools. The fund was established last fall by Bishop Thomas Dupre, who abruptly announced his retirement…<\/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-7299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nChanges - 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\/2004\/05\/changes.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Changes - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Springfield bishop dissolves fund giving support to abusive clerics, removes priest critic from presbyteral council McDonnell said he had spoken to donors and they had agreed that the money should be used to provide scholarships for students in Catholic schools. 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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\/7299","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=7299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}