And is your opinion based on any objective fact?
What is interesting regarding the news stories, is that the Sisters of Bethany have been intending to close that house for a couple of years, now, putting it off, apparently, simply because they did not get the new house built in Oxnard (where they, not the Archdiocese owns the property). The Superior General of the order has also indicated that if they cannot use the Oxnard property in time, their other house in Los Angeles, proper, has room for the sisters to stay until the Oxnard property is developed.
Actually, no. This is the way that the RCC has operated for several hundred years. Diocese and the bishops, (actually, metropolitans), who administer them are very much independent agents within the church. There are ecclesiastical rules that they must follow, but the ownership of property is a local matter.
I have not seen any evidence of this. If the Vatican was ordering the bishops to move and hide the pedophiles, then why did not the Vatican order the US Council of Catholic Bishops to rescind their resolutions in 1989 and 1993 that directed the local bishops to get pedophiles out of parish ministry and to cooperate with local authorities in investigations. It is a tragedy, as well as a crime, that so many bishops did not follow those directives, (a result of their effective independence that prevented any enforcement of the USCCB resolutions). However, given the large number of diocese where the resolutions of 1989 and 1993 were followed, where is the evidence that the Vatican was telling those diocese that they had to move and hide priests?
There are around 262 diocese in the U.S. I do not know the numbers of diocese that implemented good policies vs diocese that acted unethically, although my casual reading of reports when the Boston situation made national news was that at least two thirds of the diocese had cleaned up their behavior by 1993. I do not know of any official tally, one way or another.
I think the main difference here is that priests aren’t “deprived” of women in the same sense as a man in prison, so even if it’s true that any man will go after a child if he has no other sexual outlet (which I tend to doubt), a priest still has a choice of outlet…he could just as easily go after a woman as a child. The woman doesn’t even need to know he’s a priest…half the priests I know don’t wear a collar most of the time, anyway.
Actually, she may have indeed expected just that, and reasonably so. I am not Catholic and not “up” on what sisters were lead to expect back in the day, but it was my understanding that if they were there for the Order for a lifetime, the Order would be there for them.
Is that not so?
Just like many corporations that have fairly autonomous subsidiaries that does not make them independent of the main corporation.
EJsGirl, I have no idea how large the Order these nuns belong to might be - but simply expecting that they’ll always have a home with the Order doesn’t mean that their home will always be in the same building. Most Orders I’m familiar with have many buildings to their names, and as the Orders shrink, they’ve been consolodating buildings.
For that matter, locally the Carmelites nearly had to give up their Abbey, and move into the Sisters of St. Joseph motherhouse. It wasn’t that the Order was abandoning them, it was simply an evaluation of the monies it would need to put the building back into code, and that the nuns were all of such advanced years that having younger persons around to help, in emergencies, was considered prudent.
A far more accurate analogy would be a franchise arrangement.
I keep thinking back on the way the Vatican cleaned house on the liberation theologists when I hear about how helpless the Vatican is wrt its “subsidiaries.”
The Vatican has a lot more authority to declare that a specific theologian is not to be permitted to teach a class in theology at a Catholic university than it has to order a bishop to take specific actions.
And the Vatican is not “helpless” in the case of the bishops, but there is a lot more bureaucracy involved. A theologian publishes a book that the whole world can read, and there is specific evidence that his teaching does not conform to official doctrine. A bishop ignores the resolution of his fellow bishops and slides a molestor around the diocese with no audit trail, the whole point of his effort is to behave secretly.
It was completely wrong of whomever in the Vatican gave Cardinal Law of Boston a quick getaway after he resigned. He should have been required to stand and face whatever consequences the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decided to pursue. However, prior to his exposure, I really doubt that there was any complicity of knowledge between the Vatican and Cardinal Law–and I am very sure that he was not acting on the orders of the Vatican in the case of Fr. Geoghan and in similar cases.
Parish priests (and bishops) do not normally take any vow of poverty.
Generally, only monks and nuns do that. And even then, that is not true of all orders, just most of them.
When it comes to looking heartless over evictions, that archdiocese has nothing on the Salvation Army:
*
"One of the nation’s best know charities is coming under fire for forcing people onto the street.
The Salvation Army is evicting people from two of its buildings in New York.
The non-profit organization wants to sell the buildings. The plan, however, is not getting everyone’s support.
The Salvation Army, which is the second largest charity group in the country, is quietly evicting nearly 200 women from the pair of 18-story buildings.
Many of the residents at the Ten Eyck-Troughton Residence on East 39th Street and the Parkside Evangeline at Gramercy Park are elderly and low income. They say lawyers hand delivered 30-day eviction notices on Tuesday.
Both buildings were originally donated to the Salvation Army decades ago specifically to provide housing for women of modest income. They are now each expected to fetch in the $100 million ballpark, and Salvation Army officials say the money will be re-deployed to do more good.
Residents claim officials from the charity have been harassing them for months and have already scared several long-term tenants into move out.
“We’re all being harassed,” said Princess Usanga, president of the Parkside Tenants’ Association. “Some of these women have been here for 20 and 30 years. Where will they go?”*
But you don’t know that there was no complicity, any more than I know there WAS complicity. And I would say the rather blatant shielding of Cardinal Law from the consequences of his misdeeds is a clue that points toward complicity, rather than away from it.
I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school with Franciscan nuns as teachers, our parish priests were TOR (Third Order Regular, Franciscans) and both of those DO take vows of poverty.
Vows of poverty don’t necessarily mean you have to live like beggars (though that was probably the original intent in Francis’s mind when he started the order). It only means that you don’t own anything. The Franciscan priests at our home parish lived modestly, but not lavishly. The trick is that the rectory, the cars, the furnishings, the food…it belonged to the parish. The priests were allowed to use them, because they were working for the parish.
The nuns, of course, lived even more modestly (isn’t that usually the way?), in a convent attached to the school itself.
I didn’t think it meant that they were expected to live like beggars, but I understand the bishop’s residence to be fairly lavish. I’ve never seen it, so I could be wrong - but the article seems to state that a sale of the bishop’s residence would generate far more money that the convent.
It has been a very long time since I have known anyone who was a practicing Catholic. I was under the impression that all transfers/promotions had to be approved by the Vatican. If I am wrong I humbly apologize for my mistake.
I advise people go to the link for the rest of the story. I also wonder what has happened since this story broke back in January.
FWIW, the Archdiocese of Boston sold the Archbishop’s residence (with a bunch of attached land) for $99 million back in 1994, and sold the rest of the Brighton property earlier this year for $65 million. It was all sold to Boston College, which is basically across the street from the archdiocese property. So it’s certainly possible for a diocese to sell off some of its flagship properties, and move its administrative functions elsewhere.
Strikes me more as a franchise than a subsidiary…
The case is still hung up in the courts. The state Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that the S.A. could not be held to rent stabilization laws since it was operating the buildings as a charitable function, and said the evictions could go ahead. A hearing on an appeal is scheduled in November.
More here.
In the case of Law, a guy who was already retired (even if under duress) was given a place to live out his old age. I am not even sure that Massachusetts had a statute under which he could have been effectively prosecuted (although I am upset that the Vatican gave him that out, in any case).
Against giving exactly one retired bishop a home in Italy, we have the fact that the Vatican never challenged the resolutions of the USCCB that demanded different actions, has imposed no sanctions on the two thirds or more diocese in the U.S. who have not been hiding and shifting pedophiles for over a decade, and has provided no similar “protection” to the archbishops of Los Angeles, St. Louis, or any of the other high profile diocese that have been guilty of continuing to shift and hide pedophiles subsequent to 1993.
So, yes, our positions have exactly equal weight on this topic.
No, they don’t. Your handwaving away of the sanctuary given Law by the Vatican doesn’t make it not so. And the Vatican may not have offered other protection for archbishops because they realized they were in a pit and it was time to stop digging.