“There are few authentic prophetic voices among us, guiding truth-seekers along the right path. Among them is Fr. Gordon MacRae, a mighty voice in the prison tradition of John the Baptist, Maximilian Kolbe, Alfred Delp, SJ, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
— Deacon David Jones
Cardinal Pell … Well, Well, Well …
The slow martyrdom of Cardinal George Pell began in Australia but ended in Rome on January 10, 2023. His resurrection continues from the ash heap of his good name.
The slow martyrdom of Cardinal George Pell began in Australia but ended in Rome on January 10, 2023. His resurrection continues from the ash heap of his good name.
January 7, 2026 by Father Gordon MacRae
Cardinal George Pell passed from this life unexpectedly on January 10, 2023. The official cause of death was a cardiac arrest in a Rome hospital after routine surgery for a hip replacement. His death came as a great shock to the many people around the world who prayed and worked for his release from prison on false charges of sexual abuse dating back decades. The false charges were exposed, and his wrongful conviction disposed of in a unanimous decision of the seven members of Australia’s highest court on Tuesday of Holy Week in 2020.
As I did every year for the life of this blog, I wrote a Holy Week post in 2020 that was published on the day after Cardinal Pell’s exoneration. My Holy Week post then was “Satan at the Last Supper: Hours of Darkness and Light.” Only later did I see connections in the symbolism within that post and what had been going on in Australia and Rome in regard to accusations against Cardinal Pell at that time. I never consciously intended the connection, but on the day previous to its publishing, Pell emerged from his darkness into a brighter Australian light. At the end of that same month, on April 29, 2020, I published “From Down Under, The Exoneration of George Cardinal Pell.”
There were some in Australia who refused to accept the findings of the High Court even though there was never any credible evidence against Pell. Some suggested that even if innocent, he should remain in prison to atone for the sins of other priests. One Australian commenter wrote on the Australia Wrongful Convictions Report site: “Why not just drop the Pell case? It is controversial. Besides, he is deceased. I suspect Pell is guilty.” So, in the eyes of some in Australia and beyond, actual evidence of guilt, or the lack thereof, means nothing. Guilt or innocence is purely an emotional affair depending upon the whims or prejudice of any person following the case. So why have trials, and why have appeals? It is a tragedy that Cardinal Pell spent 405 days in an Australia prison having his evidence-free guilt affirmed by two appellate courts before one, the Highest Court, came unanimously to its senses. And still, some in Australia would not accept that conclusion. It was left to the rest of the world to conclude that prejudice has a secure home Down Under. To its great credit, the Australia-based Wrongful Convictions Report courageously took up the High Court’s finding and reported on it justly. In “Week of Pell’s ‘Resurrection’” marking the first anniversary of Pell’s death, Andrew L. Urban, moderator of Wrongful Convictions Report, wrote
Within the space of a couple of days this week, several voices were heard in the public square ‘resurrecting’ the late Cardinal Pell, dismissing the notion that he was guilty of sexual abuse, a notion that some maintained even after the High Court’s 7-0 decision to quash that conviction.
On the first anniversary of Cardinal Pell’s death in Rome, this extraordinary case continues to make ripples in the law and society. In the law, it is prompting yet another call for the establishment of a Criminal Cases Review Commission. In society it is challenging those whose animosity and antagonism against Pell remain firmly in place, defying the High Court’s decision, referring to the verdict a result of a jury not “acting rationally.” It also brings to the forefront the conviction in December 2023 of Pell’s Vatican adversary, Cardinal Becciu on charges of embezzlement and money laundering.
On Friday, January 12, 2024 in Australia:
Former High Court justice Michael Kirby has described a new edition of Gerard Henderson’s book, Cardinal Pell, The Media Pile On & Collective Guilt, as “an important contribution to the efforts to establish a Criminal Cases Review Commission” in Australia.
Mr Kirby said basic evidence in the case showed “a very serious doubt was raised as to Cardinal Pell’s guilt”, adding: “Effective protections against miscarriages of justice must be there for all serious cases, even for a cardinal.”
The Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Anthony Fisher, marked the first anniversary of Pell’s death in Rome of a heart attack after hip surgery with the strongest Church statements yet about the Cardinal’s charges, conviction and imprisonment on sexual abuse charges and his later “unanimous High Court exoneration”.
At St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney on Wednesday, Archbishop Fisher said: “Following a media, political and police witch hunt, Cardinal Pell was tried and imprisoned for crimes he did not commit. Even after he was unanimously exonerated by the High Court he continued to be demonized by some.”
Archbishop Fisher told The Australian: “The Pell case was a serious miscarriage of justice. So far there has been no inquiry into the actions of the police or how the legal system managed to get this so wrong. Perhaps worst of all, there seems to be no mood in Victoria for a serious inquiry into the justice system.”
The Australian also reports that “A separate telephone tap has also revealed a conversation in which one person tells another ‘the highway is open to you’ after Pell was charged. Vatican investigators have been told money was sent to Australia to adversely affect the case against the Cardinal.”
On Wednesday January 10, 2024 in America:
Wrongfully convicted Fr Gordon J. MacRae writes from his prison cell in New Hampshire:
The case against Cardinal George Pell was …. influenced by nefarious machinations, including police and prosecutor corruption. This was at the heart of a curious incident related in Prison Journal (Volume 1, p. 329). At a pretrial hearing on Cardinal Pell’s false sexual abuse charges, among the most difficult charges to defend against, a Melbourne, Australia priest who was present in the court told Pell’s supporters that he prays that the prosecutor will “mess up his presentation.” When that actually happened, the priest reportedly said, “See, my prayers are working!” When Cardinal Pell was told of this he said, “I would have much preferred that he prayed for justice to be done.”
Those were the spontaneous words of an innocent man who believed that justice in this life is possible — even likely. The guilty on the other hand engage in any number of contrived machinations to do an end run around the law. When a defendant is innocent and there is no evidence supporting the charge, it is too often police and prosecutors who resort to machinations to do an end run around the law.
There is a vivid example of this on the same page of Pell’s Prison Journal cited above. Detective Sgt. Kevin Carson of the Ballarat, Australia Police Department produced a report claiming that sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Victoria — where Pell was facing trial — was responsible for forty-three suicides. After the shocking story was leaked to tabloid media, a parliamentary inquiry into the Church’s handling of sexual abuse was launched. An inquiry is similar to a grand jury report in the United States.
The police set up an investigation, but were able to identify only twenty-five of the forty-three named by Detective Carson. Of those twenty-five names, only sixteen had committed suicide. But only one of the sixteen had been assaulted by a member of the clergy. As Pell himself pointed out, “One is one too many, but one is not forty-three.” This tendency to “heighten the hype” lends itself to unfair trials and wrongful convictions, but it also lends itself to career advancement, a shamefully strong force in many of the U.S. grand jury reports on Catholic clergy.
In his analysis of the Cardinal Becciu trial in The Wall Street Journal …, Francis X. Rocca included the following paragraph:
“Around that time, [Pope] Francis made Australian Cardinal George Pell his finance chief and gave him sweeping powers. Pell unveiled new financial guidelines for the Vatican. But he clashed with the secretariat, which opposed his plans for a financial audit by an external auditing firm. Pell considered [Cardinal] Becciu his main opponent …. Other Vatican officials also lobbied the Pope against Pell’s changes. The Pope curtailed Pell’s powers and the external audit was cancelled. Pell later returned to Australia to face child sex abuse charges. He was acquitted on appeal and died” [on January 10, 2023].
In an October 15, 2023 published commentary on Mr. Rocca’s account in The Wall Street Journal, [Father MacRae] added some further context to the story:
“The part of this nebulous story that most troubles me is the decision of the Pope to listen to Cardinal Becciu and other Vatican officials who lobbied against Cardinal George Pell’s financial reforms even after [ the Pope] had empowered him to reform Vatican finances. Mr. Rocca does not speculate on the source of charges against Cardinal Pell in Australia — charges for which he was exonerated in a unanimous decision of Australia’s High Court. This was after he wrongly spent 400 days in prison. There are many who believe that there may have been a connection between these false charges and Cardinal Pell’s attempted reforms of Vatican finances. Pell himself suspected this.”
— “Week of Pell’s ‘Resurrection’” by Andrew L. Urban
Cardinal Pell, Post-Resurrection
His Eminence Cardinal George Pell, served just over 400 days and nights in an Australian prison before justice finally awakened and sanity finally set in. His guilty verdict was upheld in two attempts at appeal leaving people of just heart and mind around the world scratching their heads. I wrote an early post on this case from the point of view of someone for whom justice had also evaporated into mindless prejudice. My post was “Cardinal George Pell Is on Trial, and So Is Australia.”
On the day I write this, I mark 11,051 days in a U.S. prison for crimes that never took place. I do not know if Cardinal Pell was pressured into accepting a deal, but a deal presented to me was that I could leave prison in one year if I plead guilty. I refused the deal. I do not write this as a comparison of our woes. The number of days does not matter. Anything beyond a single day of wrongful imprisonment for fictitious crimes is, as Catholic League President Bill Donohue described it, a Travesty of Justice.
I rejoiced as justice and freedom were restored to Cardinal Pell, but the insults against him were not over. On January 10, 2023 he died from a heart attack after routine hip-replacement surgery. His body was returned to Australia for interment, and upon arrival it was discovered that some postmortem wounds were mysteriously inflicted upon his body. This magnified our grief, which may actually have been the point. This has never been explained.
But the final words on Cardinal Pell were not the lies of his detractors. It was one of the proudest moments of my life as a priest to learn that while I was writing about Pell from my prison cell in New Hampshire, he was simultaneously writing about me from his prison cell half a world away in Australia. The following excerpts are from his magnificent spiritual biography from the darkest days of his life. These excerpts are from his Prison Journal Volume 2 written in the dark days between his failed appeals and the final awakening of Australia’s High Court. These excerpts, played a small role in restoring his freedom. Today they also play a role in restoring mine:
Source: Prison Journal Volume 2, pp 57-60, Ignatius Press 2021, Entry of Friday, 2 August 2019:
“By a coincidence, today I received from Sheryl [Collmer], a regular correspondent from Texas, a copy of the 15 May 2019 post on the blog Beyond These Stone Walls written by Fr Gordon MacRae. The article was entitled, “Was Cardinal George Pell Convicted on Copycat Testimony?” Fr MacRae was convicted on 23 September 1994 of paedophilia and sentenced to sixty-seven years in a New Hampshire prison for crimes allegedly committed around fifteen to twenty years previously. The allegations had no supporting evidence and no corroboration.
“It is one thing to be jailed for five months. It would be quite another step up, which I would not relish, to spend another three years if my appeal were unsuccessful. But we enter another world with a life sentence. Australia is not New Hampshire, and I don’t believe all the Australian media would blackball the discussion of a case such as MacRae’s.
“The late Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, whom I admired personally and as a theologian, encouraged Fr MacRae to continue writing from jail, stating, ‘Someday your story and that of your fellow sufferers will come to light and be instrumental in a reform.’ Fr MacRae recounts the extraordinary similarities between the accusations I faced and the accusations of Billy Doe in Philadelphia, which were published in Australia in 2011 in the magazine, Rolling Stone. Earlier this year, Keith Windschuttle, editor of the quality journal, Quadrant, publicized the seven points of similarity, pointing out that ‘there are far too many similarities in the stories for them to be explained by coincidence.’ [See Keith Windshuttle, ‘The Borrowed Testimony that Convicted George Pell.’ Quadrant, 8 April 2019].
“The author of the 2011 Rolling Stone article was Sabrina Rubin Erdely, no longer a journalist, disgraced and discredited. In 2014 she had written, and provoked a storm which reached Obama’s White House, about ‘Jackie’ at the University of Virginia, who claimed she was gang-raped at a fraternity party in 2012 by seven men. As MacRae points out, ‘The story was accepted as gospel truth once it appeared in print.’ [Note: Rolling Stone later retracted the article in April, 2015]. Jackie’s account turned out to be a massive lie. A civil trial for defamation followed; the seven students were awarded $7.5 million in damages by the jury; and Rolling Stone was found guilty of negligence and defamation.
“The allegations behind the 2011 Rolling Stone article, published in Australia, have also been demolished as false by, among others, Ralph Cipriano’s ‘The Legacy of Billy Doe’ published in the Catalyst of the Catholic League in January-February 2019.
“No one realized in 2015, when the allegations against me were first made to police, that the model for copycat allegations, or the innocent basis for the remarkable similarities, was also a fantasy or a fiction.
“I am grateful to Fr MacRae for taking up my cause, as I am to many others. These include in North America George Weigel and Fr Raymond de Souza and here in Australia Andrew Bolt, Miranda Devine, Gerard Henderson, Fr Frank Brennan, and others behind the scenes.
“I will conclude, not with a prayer, but with Fr MacRae’s opening quotation from Baron de Montesquieu (1742) [from BTSW ‘About’],
‘There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.’”
— George Cardinal Pell, Prison Journal Volume 2, p. 57-60
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EPILOGUE BY FATHER GORDON MACRAE
There is a background story about the origin of the false charges against Cardinal Pell. It came out of the United States when a young con man was allowed to use a pseudonym, Billy Doe, to bring phony charges against several Catholic priests, one of whom died in prison. The story was propelled forward by Sabrina Rubin Erdely and Rolling Stone magazine. It has been exposed as fraudulent, including here at Beyond These Stone Walls in “The Lying, Scheming Altar Boy on the Cover of Newsweek.”
Thank you for reading, pondering, and sharing this important story. I have known many priests who have been falsely accused. In some of those cases the accusations fell apart and the heavy burden of false witness was removed from the nightmarish existence of those priests. Many were so scarred by the current process of American bishops that presumed the guilt of any priest accused and then banished them instantly from any ministry and even from living on any Church property. Once relieved from the burden of false witness most of these priests simply remained in silent exile rather than risk ever becoming targets again.
It was not so for Cardinal Pell. With his life and freedom restored he returned to Rome and spoke in every forum that would welcome him about the ordeal he endured and about what could make such an unjust situation more just. He wrote a letter to me in prison assuring me of his deeply felt concern and fraternal support. He wrote of his resolve to raise my case in Rome at every opportunity.
But he never got the chance. He died unexpectedly during routine hip surgery at a Rome hospital on January 10, 2023. Three days earlier on January 7, 2023 he preached his last homily to the Caritas in Veritates — Magnificat Dominium Community at San Giovanni Rotondo. That homily is our feature this week at Voices from Beyond.
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”
Bishop Peter A. Libasci Was Set Up by Governor Andrew Cuomo
Before he was himself accused New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a window in the civil statute of limitations spawning claims against a Catholic bishop.
Before he was himself accused New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law a window in the civil statute of limitations spawning claims against a Catholic bishop.
August 25, 2021
Back in 2010, I closely followed a story that appeared in most national news media outlets. It was about Bishop Eddie Long, a well-known preacher, TV evangelist, and pastor of a Baptist mega church in Georgia. He was accused of sexual assault in multiple lawsuits brought by three young adult males.
Unlike in nearly all similar claims against Catholic clergy, all three of the men, barely out of their teens, opted to allow their names to appear in media coverage. The story unfolded in stark contrast with similar claims against Catholic priests in other ways as well. Lawyers and victim advocates have explained away the sometimes decades-long gaps that have comprised 70-percent of the claims against priests. It is routinely claimed that accusers of Catholic clergy — the vast majority of whom were teens at the time of an alleged offense — may require decades to come forward due to the trauma inflicted on them. In contrast, the three young men accusing Bishop Eddie Long filed lawsuits within two years.
Bishop Long denied that the claims were true. Criminal charges were never filed so the claims were not investigated. The story came down to his word against theirs. When The Wall Street Journal published a 2010 account of Bishop Long’s vow to fight these claims, it was among the five most-read stories of that week at WSJ.com. Clearly, many in the news media presumed at first reading of the headlines that he was a Catholic bishop. The decision to fight the claims rather than simply settle thus stood out as a news story of its own.
In the end, however, Bishop Long and his congregation decided to settle the claims for an undisclosed sum in 2010. No one questioned their assertion that settlement of such claims is common and in no way should be seen as an admission of guilt or culpability. Beyond Bishop Long’s congregation, there were no deeper pockets to pursue. He simply resumed his ministry as though nothing had ever happened.
This could never happen when the accused is a Catholic priest. It was once explained to me by another bishop, Most Rev. John B. McCormack, formerly Bishop of Manchester, NH, that one of the hard lessons of the Catholic clergy abuse narrative is the fact that once a priest is accused, his legal interests and those of his bishop and diocese diverge. When I maintained my innocence against lawsuits that I knew were fraudulent, I was dropped as a defendant so I no longer had standing to challenge settlements.
The New Hampshire statute of limitations for lawsuits was six years then. (In 2020 the civil limitation statute was removed entirely.) The allegations against me were from twelve years earlier. My defense against the claims was that they never took place. The sole argument of my diocese was that the statute had expired so the lawsuits should be time barred. Judge Carol Ann Conboy ruled in Merrimack County Superior Court that the six-year statute begins to toll “only when a victim becomes aware” of a connection between a claim of abuse and a current injury.
My diocese opted to settle rather than appeal that dubious lower court precedent which has since evolved into a pattern of unquestioned mediated settlements in other claims against priests going all the way back to 1950. In many cases no lawsuit was even filed. In his once published resume, former Msgr. Edward J. Arsenault (now Edward J. Bolognini) claimed that he personally negotiated 250 settlements in allegations against NH priests.
Of interest, one NH lawyer told the news media that he personally obtained 250 settlements in claims against NH priests. In a 2002 media report he added,
“During settlement negotiations, diocesan officials did not press for details such as dates and allegations for every claim. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ [Attorney Peter] Hutchins said.”
— Mark Hayward, NH Diocese Will Pay $5 Million to 62 Victims, NH Union Leader, November 27, 2002
Manchester Bishop Peter A. Libasci
Misuse of the word, “credible” has been a source of injustice in the U.S. Church since 2002. Prior to the events described above, Bishop John McCormack told a lawyer and a media producer that he believed I was falsely accused and wrongly imprisoned. His statements were documented in a pair of independently sworn affidavits in 2001.
In 2002, after the USCCB adopted the Dallas Charter and “zero tolerance,” claims against me entered a category used by all bishops since. Once money changed hands, they became “credible.” I wrote of the fallout in “Our Tabloid Frenzy About Fallen Priests.”
What the bishops collectively mean by “credible” is not a standard of justice used in any other circumstance. It means no more than “possible.” If a priest and an accuser lived in the same parish or community 30, 40, 50 years ago, then a sexual abuse claim against the priest is “credible.” It is deeply unjust that bishops continue to use that term while knowing that the public and the news media wrongly interpret it as “substantiated.”
There has been a point of contention with my current Ordinary, Bishop Peter A. Libasci. In 2019, while under no pressure from anyone to do so, he published the names of 73 priests of this one diocese who, he says, were “credibly” accused. Many are deceased. This resulted in a pair of pointed articles by Ryan A. MacDonald: “In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List,” and “Our Bishops Have Inflicted Grave Harm on the Priesthood.”
Now Bishop Libasci has himself been “credibly accused.” On July 22, 2021, the New Hampshire Union Leader newspaper, in an article by Mark Hayward, reported, “NH Bishop accused of sexual abuse by an altar boy decades ago.” Whatever differences I have had with Bishop Peter Libasci and his published list, I was and am deeply saddened by this development. The accusation stems from 1983, the same year as the accusations against me. The lawsuit, filed in Suffolk County, New York, alleges that then Father Peter Libasci sexually assaulted a boy aged 12 to 13 “on numerous occasions” at a parish and Catholic school in Deer Park in the Diocese of Rockville Center, New York.
Bishop Libasci maintains through counsel that he is entirely innocent of these claims. I believe that he is in fact innocent. I do not find the claims to be credible at all, but I do not use that term in the same manner the bishops use it against priests. I will get back to this.
One of the claims from the now unnamed 50-year-old accuser is that he was assaulted in the sacristy while setting up for a Mass. That has all the earmarks of a “copycat” claim that is almost verbatim a claim in a different but much more notorious New York case, that of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. No one who knows Bishop Libasci could or should conclude that these claims are at all credible. It would be a grave injustice if such claims prevail without clear evidence.
However, that also leaves the matter in a conundrum. If that accuser lived in Deer Park, New York and attended that parish or school at the time Bishop Libasci was there, then this is more than enough for his fellow bishops to conclude — as they would in the case of any similarly accused priest — that the claims are “credible.” Bishop Libasci has not, at this writing, been removed from ministry by the Vatican. As unjust as that would be, any priest in the same circumstance would have been removed immediately.
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo
This is happening to Bishop Libasci and others with roots in the State of New York because in 2019, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo promoted and ultimately signed a bill that opened a window to allow civil claims to be filed even if they had been time barred by the statute of limitations. The window in which these claims could be filed expired on August 14, 2021. The Catholic bishops of the state of New York knew well what the result would be so they opposed the unjust bill.
Before signing it into law, Governor Cuomo accused the bishops and other Church officials of threatening politicians who did not support their opposition to the bill. In response to similar bills that were not passed in previous efforts, Cuomo said, “I believe it was the conservatives in the Senate who were threatened by the Catholic Church, and this went on for years.” Catholic League President Bill Donohue pointed out in “Cuomo Had A Different Standard for Priests,” Catalyst, April 2021,
“When teachers’ unions oppose a bill, it is called lobbying. When bishops oppose a bill, it is called a threat. Cuomo’s double standard, and his animus against the Catholic Church, could not be more plain.”
Governor Cuomo also promoted and signed a June 2020 bill that set a very low bar as a standard of evidence in claims of sexual abuse or harassment in the workplace. The New York Times reported that the legislation eliminates the state’s “severe or pervasive” standard. When signing the bill into law, Governor Cuomo said,
“The ongoing culture of sexual harassment in the workplace is unacceptable and has held employees back for far too long. This critical measure finally ends the absurd legal standard for victims to prove sexual harassment in the workplace and makes it easier for those who have been subjected to this disgusting behavior to bring claims forward.”
I once wrote a post entitled, “Be Wary of Crusaders! The Devil Sigmund Freud Knew Only Too Well.” It documented multiple stories of crusaders against sexual abuse who turned out to be guilty of the same sorts of offenses they were crusading against. It was the result of a combination of forces within the psyche in the form of two classic defense mechanisms described by the Father of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. From recent news accounts of his resignation to avoid a pending impeachment, Governor Cuomo seems to have been a textbook case for this.
As accusation after accusation emerged against Cuomo, he insisted on a presumption of innocence and his due process rights. He responded to the allegations with, “You can allege something. It might be true or it might not be true. You may have misperceived. There may be other facts.” All true, but when it came to allegations against priests — whether in the present or in the distant past — innocence was never a possible conclusion. As Catholic League President Bill Donohue observed in the link above,
“Cuomo showed no respect for the due process rights [of priests]. He was happy to sign legislation that gave rapacious lawyers out to sue the Church all the leeway they wanted.”
This is the Pandora’s Box our bishops opened with their use of the term, “credible” as a standard of evidence for removing priests. The current claims against Bishop Peter Libasci arose only because Governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law in New York a bill that takes advantage of the lowest possible standard of evidence to score lucrative windfall settlements from the Catholic Church.
According to the standard our bishops have adopted, however, those claims are as “credible” as many of the claims against the priests on Bishop Libasci’s published list. I would like to believe that Bishop Libasci may now, in hindsight and humility, rethink his decision to publish that list. Injustice, however, is often a bell that cannot be unrung.
Nonetheless, absent compelling evidence — and so far there is none — I firmly believe Bishop Peter Libasci is entirely innocent. I hope and pray that his good name is restored and he is delivered from this injustice.
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Update by Editor — September 8, 2024: In July 2024 it was announced in news media that the accuser of Bishop Peter A. Libasci has died in Rockville Centre, New York. The cause of death has not been public, but he would have been a man in his mid-fifties. This sadly leaves the case against Bishop Libasci unresolved both civilly and canonically.
Since then, the Diocese of Manchester under Bishop Libasci has revised its policy regarding accusations against Catholic clergy. Bishop Libasci has approved a new standard to be applied to cases of accusations against priests. The “credible” standard has been discarded within this Diocese. Now any priest merely accused, from however long ago, substantiated or not, will be removed from ministry and his name added to a public list of the accused. The Diocese has announced that financial compensation for all accusers will be arranged by “trauma-informed consultants.” This new standard will apply to all diocesan personnel, except apparently, Bishop Libasci himself.
To Fleece the Flock: Meet the Trauma-Informed Consultants
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please share this post. Please also pray for a just outcome for Catholic priests falsely accused, and for legitimate victims of sexual abuse and exploitation. Let us remember as we walk through this minefield that we are a Church.
You may also like these relevant posts:
In the Diocese of Manchester, Transparency and a Hit List by Ryan A. MacDonald
Our Bishops Have Inflicted Great Harm on the Priesthood by Ryan A. MacDonald
A Weapon of Mass Destruction: Catholic Priests Falsely Accused by Father Gordon J. MacRae, LinkedIn Pulse
Accused Priests Deserve Better by Catholic League President Bill Donohue (Catalyst, March 2020)
Bogus Charges Against Priests Abound by Father Michael Orsi, Ed.D., Ave Maria School of Law
The Exile of Father Dominic Menna and Transparency at The Boston Globe
As Father Dominic Menna, a senior priest at Saint Mary’s in Quincy, MA, was sent into exile, The Boston Globe’s role in the story of Catholic Scandal grew more transparent.
“I’m a true Catholic, and I think what these priests are doing is disgusting!” One day a few weeks ago, that piece of wisdom repeated every thirty minutes or so on New England Cable News, an around-the-clock news channel broadcast from Boston. I wonder how many people the reporter approached in front of Saint Mary’s Church in Quincy, Massachusetts before someone provided just the right sound bite to lead the rabid spectacle that keeps 24-hour news channels afloat.
The priest this hapless “true Catholic” deemed so disgusting is Father F. Dominic Menna, an exemplary priest who has been devoting his senior years in service to the people of God at Saint Mary’s. At the age of 80, Father Menna has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor.
There is indeed something disgusting in this account, but it likely is not Father Menna himself. He has never been accused before. Some of the news stories have not even bothered to mention that the claim just surfacing now for the first time is alleged to have occurred in 1959. No, I did not transpose any numbers. The sole accusation that just destroyed this 80-year-old priest’s good name is that he abused someone fifty-one years ago when he was 29 years old.
Kelly Lynch, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Boston, announced that Father Menna was placed on administrative leave, barred from offering the Sacraments, and ordered to pack up and leave the rectory where he had been spending his senior years in the company of other priests. These steps, we are told, are designed to protect children lest this 80-year-old priest — if indeed guilty — suddenly decides to repeat his misconduct every half century or so.
Ms. Lynch declined to reveal any further details citing, “the privacy of those involved.” That assurance of privacy is for everyone except Father Menna, of course, whose now tainted name was blasted throughout the New England news media last month. Among the details Kelly Lynch declines to reveal is the amount of any settlement demand for the claim.
Some of the fair-minded people who see through stories like this one often compare them with the 1692 Salem witch trials which took place just across Massachusetts Bay from Father Menna’s Quincy parish. The comparison falls short, however. No one in 1692 Salem ever had to defend against a claim of having bewitched a child fifty-one years earlier.
Archdiocesan spokesperson Kelly Lynch cited “the integrity of the investigation” as a reason not to comment further to The Boston Globe. Does some magical means exist in Boston to fairly and definitively investigate a fifty-one year old claim of child abuse? Is there truly some means by which the Archdiocese could deem such a claim credible or not?
Ms. Lynch should have chosen a word other than “integrity” to describe the “investigation” of Father Menna. Integrity is the one thing no one will find anywhere in this account — except perhaps in Father Menna himself if, by some special grace, he has not utterly lost all trust in the people of God he has served for over fifty years.
Transparency at The Boston Globe
The June 3rd edition of The Boston Globe buried a story on page A12 about the results of an eight-year investigation into the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Eight years ago, it was front page news all over the U.S. that the Los Angeles Archdiocese was being investigated for a conspiracy to cover-up sexual abuse claims against priests.
After eight years of investigation at taxpayer expense, California prosecutors reluctantly announced last month that they have found insufficient evidence to support the charges. That news story was so obviously buried in the back pages of The Boston Globe that the agenda could not be more transparent. The story of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is front page news only when it accommodates the newspaper’s editorial bias. That much, at least, is clear.
But all transparency ends right there. The Globe article attributed the lack of evidence of a conspiracy by Catholic bishops to the investigation being “stymied by reluctant victims.” Now, that’s an interesting piece of news!
The obvious question it raises is whether these claimants were reluctant to speak BEFORE obtaining financial settlements in their claims against the Archdiocese. If they are reluctant witnesses now, then, at best, it may be because the true goal of some has long since been realized and there is nothing in it for them to keep talking. At worst, the silence of claimants in the conspiracy investigation could be interpreted as an effort to fend off pointed questions about their claims. Perhaps prosecutors were investigating the wrong people.
I have seen this sort of thing play out before. Last year, a New Hampshire contingency lawyer brought forward his fifth round of mediated settlement demands against the Diocese of Manchester. During that lawyer’s first round of mediated settlements in 2002 — in which 28 priests of the Diocese of Manchester were accused in claims dating from the 1950s to the 1980s — the news media announced a $5.5 million settlement. The claimants’ lawyer was astonished that $5.5 million was handed over with no real effort at proof or corroboration sought by Diocesan representatives before they paid up and deemed the claims “credible.” The lawyer was quoted in the news media:
“During settlement negotiations, diocesan officials did not press for details such as dates and allegations for every claim. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“He and his clients did not encounter resistance from the Diocese of Manchester in their six months of negotiations. Some victims made claims in the last month, and because of the timing of negotiations, gained closure in just a matter of days.”
That lawyer’s contingency fee for the first of many rounds of mediated settlements was estimated to be in excess of $1.8 million. When the mediation concluded, the news media reported that at the attorney’s and his clients’ request, the diocese agreed not to disclose the claimants’ names or any details of their claims or the amounts they received in settlement. “No confidentiality was sought by the Diocese,” the lawyer declared.
In contrast, the names of the accused priests — many of whom were deceased and none of whom faced criminal charges — were repeatedly released and publicized throughout the news media. This process served one purpose: to invite new claimants against those same priests with assurances that their names would remain private and no real corroborating details would ever be elicited. It was clear that non-disclosure clauses were demanded by the contingency lawyer and his clients, though the diocese and its lawyers were eager to oblige as part of the settlement.
It is fascinating that the news media now blames “reluctant victims” for stifling an investigation into cover-ups in the Catholic Church. That is a scandal worthy of the front page, but we won’t ever see it there. If the news media now has concerns about the very people whose cause it championed in 2002, we won’t be reading about it in the news media. Transparency in the news media, after all, is a murky affair.
Transparency and the U.S. Bishops
Writer Ryan A. MacDonald has a number of contributions published on These Stone Walls. His most recent is, “Should the Case Against Father Gordon MacRae Be Reviewed?” I am told that Mr. MacDonald has an essay published in the June/July, 2010 issue of Homiletic & Pastoral Review entitled, ”Anti-Catholicism and Sex Abuse.” In the essay, the writer also recommends These Stone Walls to H&PR readers. Though I subscribe to the well respected H&PR, I have not at this writing seen the current issue.
Ryan MacDonald also has a letter published in a recent issue of Our Sunday Visitor (“Raising the Alarm,” June 13, 2010). Ryan makes a point very similar to one I made last month in “As the Year of the Priest Ends, Are Civil Liberties for Priests Intact?” Here is an excerpt from Ryan’s OSV letter:
“A number of courageous bishops have argued in opposition to retroactive application of revised civil statutes of limitations. Such revised statutes typically expose the Catholic Church to special liability while exempting public institutions.
“But I must raise the alarm here. As a body, American bishops lobbied the Holy See for retroactive extension of the time limits of prescription, the period of time in which a delict (a crime) exists and can be prosecuted under Church law …
“… Many accused priests now face the possibility of forced laicization with no opportunity for defense or appeal because our bishops have embraced routine dispensation from the Church’s own statute of limitations. The bishops cannot argue this point from two directions. Some have defended this duplicity citing that the delicts involve criminal and not civil matters. This is so, but these men are also American citizens, and the U.S. Constitution prohibits retroactive application of criminal laws as unconstitutional.
“Statutes of limitations exist in legal systems to promote justice, not hinder it. Our bishops cannot have it both ways on this issue.”
Ryan MacDonald made this point far better than I ever could. The issue for me is not just the obvious double standard applied when the spirit of Church law is set aside. The issue is one of fundamental justice and fairness, and what Cardinal Dulles called “The great scandal of the Church’s failure to support Her priests in their time of need.” Pope John Paul II said that the Church must be a mirror of justice. Let’s hope our bishops can respond to the public scandal of sexual abuse without perpetrating a private scandal of their own.
There are people in groups like S.N.A.P. and Voice of the Faithful who clamor for the Church to ignore the rights of priests in favor of an open embrace of “survivors.” It is always easy to deny someone else’s rights and restrict someone else’s civil liberties, and that, historically, is how witch hunts begin.
