I confess to not watching or listening to ANY local news. Perhaps it's because I WAS local news for too long of a time, and perhaps because it has cost me too much. Thus, for better or for worse, I have little interest in most of what goes on locally anymore.
The only time I am aware of anything is when someone "tags" me in a post or sends me a link to something they think I may want to know about. Such was the case with a recent Kandit News post, wherein the host, spends most of the last half of the newscast addressing our "horrific" (the word was used by the Associated Press) clergy sex abuse scandal.
Around 26 minutes or so into Kandit's newscast, the host, Troy Torres, plays Patti Arroyo's interview with me from a few days ago. And around 42:00, Mr. Torres talks a bit about his personal case against the archdiocese and notes that he believes that "at least as of 1994" there was a conspiracy between the Government of Guam and the local Catholic leadership to keep quiet in this diocese what Pope Benedict once called "the filth in the Church."
NOTE: Torres attempts to finger the "Calvo's," and his well known animosity towards that name is obviously at work here, but it wasn't the "Calvo's" who owned the house near San Francisco that Apuron was found hiding in January 2017.
Mr. Torres is probably right. As I pointed out in a recent address to the Rotary Club of Guam, stats show that as of 2013, when I did the research, Guam's "child maltreatment rate" (i.e. child abuse and neglect) was nearly double the national average. And as this sad fact is in the news almost daily, it's a fact we don't need a study to tell us about.
So, the problem is NOT just "in the Church." But then nor is it just with Guam. National studies show that children who suffered abuse (usually sexual) were almost always abused by a family member or someone known to the family.
However, with Guam, there is the multiplier effect that is the descendant of a culture (perhaps Spanish) that, in the interest of not bringing shame upon the family, "the family" chooses to shame the child and not the abuser (and especially if the abuser wore a collar or a mitre).
This fact was attested to by a mother who tearfully testified at one of the public hearings for the bill to lift the civil statue of limitation on sex crimes against minors, confessing to not believing and even punishing her son who had told her what "Fr. Apuron" had done to him. A brother of the now-deceased victim later corroborated the story.
After Torres recounts a bit of his own case against the archdiocese, he quotes a certain archdiocesan official who, after labeling him a "moth...fu..." quotes the official as saying "...the archdiocese will not engage with you..., etc." Torres then proceeds with more profanity and more fun at the expense of the official, who "engaged" the very person he said the archdiocese would not "engage."
I'm not sure if Kandit News (aka Troy Torres) learned this little trick from JungleWatch, but, back in the day, in our efforts to out Apuron and all the disease that was festering in the halls of the chancery, we did precisely what Kandit News did: provoked archdiocesan "officials" to respond. We then ran with those responses, put them on this blog, and ultimately, what they themselves said, led to their own downfall.
Torres tell us that he wrote back to this "moth...fu.." etc. etc. etc. and he labeled the Catholic leadership "pedophiles and pedophile defenders." I've addressed this elsewhere, but so long as the really bad guys can keep us thinking that this is about "pedophiles," then they will keep us shooting at an enemy that is not there while the real enemy is already within the gates.
In short, clinically "pedophilia" is a disorder wherein adults of either sex are inordinately attracted to prepubescent children (i.e. nine years old or less). However, as demonstrated by the 2002 John Jay College of Criminal Justice Study, only 6% of the clergy's victims were prepubescent. 94% were adolescents or older. In fact, 'seminarians" were reportedly the favorite sex partners of the now disgraced Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington D.C. and one of the Church's most influential prelates. You get the picture. While legally still "children," biologically, almost all of the victims were adults.
But let me get on to the point of this post.
In response to what the "moth...fu..." from the chancery wrote Mr. Torres, Torres proclaims that, though he had been going to Mass recently, he "obviously ain't going back to Mass, not in the Catholic Church, but however, that doesn't mean I've lost my faith in Christ, that doesn't mean I don't believe, I just need somewhere to go."
Here Torres gives voice to the real issue. For most of us, in our heart of hearts, we know we are going to die and face The Judgment. We know there is a Heaven and we know there is a Hell. But, even short of that, we at least know that we are loved by a "someone," and barring complete abdication of our hearts and minds to Satan, we are irresistibly drawn to that Love. Thus, St. Augustine wrote: "our hearts are restless O Lord until they rest in you."
What Torres is attempting to give voice to is man's deepest need: to WORSHIP.
Torres can't be faulted for thinking he can do this in some other "church." Torres, like most Catholic kids even since I was in Catholic School (1969) have not only been filled with the most obscene crap under the guise of "religion class," but, like Torres, many of us (including me) were groomed as sex objects for at least two generations of satanic infiltrators. (Read Goodbye Good Men if you want to know more.)
But specifically to answer the quandary of Mr. Torres, since it is on the minds of so many (i.e. "I just need to go somewhere...") To go elsewhere is to let the Devil win. It doesn't matter how Satan separates you from the Body of Christ. It only matters that he does.
At my recent address to the Rotary Club of Guam, I was asked pretty much the same question in other words, i.e. what do I say to people who are losing their faith over this. I was ready for the question only because I get it a lot. And my answer is ALWAYS: "You don't leave Jesus because of Judas," and that "bad priests (and bishops) started with Judas...and Jesus himself picked him!"
I fleshed out my answer a bit by paraphrasing something the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen often said, i.e. that we can know the True Church by where Satan spends most of his time. I quipped that Satan isn't spending a lot of time on the Baptists these days.
The bottom line is that Jesus said "DO THIS." And as far as I know, for better or worse, there is only one place where the "THIS" is done.
