IN TODAY'S PACIFIC DAILY NEWS
In the AP story “Not all are pleased with the pope’s revolution” (Pacific Daily News, August 2, 2013), reporter Nicola Winfield displays the type of template-reporting one often finds in the mainstream media when it attempts to report on the Catholic Church.
Here is the link to the study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice as commissioned by the USCCB and referenced in the op-ed:
The Causes and Context
of Sexual Abuse of Minors by
Catholic Priests in the
United States, 1950-2010
Related links
- Good Bye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church
- A review of Good Bye, Good Men on CatholicCulture.org by Rev. John Trigilio, Jr., PhD.
- Newsweek, May 19, 2002: Gays and the Seminary
Following is an excerpt from a Wikipedia article, with sources, to the situation at St. John's Seminary in Camarillo, California, the seminary for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. The seminary is referenced in the PDN op-ed as "the Pink Palace". Note the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has paid out $660 million in damages so far for sexual molestation cases by its clergy and the cover up by its bishops. In March of 2013, the archdiocese agreed to pay out another $10 million to cover damages in four more cases.
Of the approximately 625 St. John's graduates to be ordained by the Los Angeles Archdiocese between 1950 and 2005, 65 had been accused by 2005 of molesting the underaged, reflecting a rate higher than what studies have found for U.S. priests in general. A seminary spokesman noted California's then-extended statute of limitations on molestation lawsuits, and suggested that a wave of publicity on molestation by priests had made their graduates targets of such accusations.[10] Four days after the Los Angeles Times reported this information, the paper ran a letter to the editor from St. John's rector Helmut A. Hefner. He stated that reforms had been implemented in the seminary, and that from 1985 to 2005, of the 155 priests ordained at St. John's Seminary for the archdiocese, 2 had been accused of sexual misconduct.[11]
Further, the lede to a 2002 Newsweek article entitled "Gays in the Seminary" opened by interviewing a recent alumnus: St. John's "may be one of the country's gayest facilities for higher education. Depending on whom you ask, gay and bisexual men make up anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent of the student body at the college and graduate levels."[12]
As a side note, my father and I went to the chancery in Los Angeles in 1978 to seek help with a situation in our parish in which a pastor was not only involved in a homosexual relationship, but was supporting his lover with church funds. We were told to "get out".
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