Clergy Abuse Tracker More Pre-11/2002 Archives

The bishop's quandary
Prelate Wilton Gregory is more identified with reform than anyone else at the top of America's Catholic hierarchy. The question is how - and if - this prudent insider will use his power to buck the system.
Boston Globe
By Charles P. Pierce, Globe Staff
This is the way the weather comes. The dust rises. The grass waves. The corn shivers, and the trees shake. The sky lowers and it almost seems suspended on the quivering treetops, and then the weather arrives, all at once: rain and thunder, and lightning striking down in jagged veins until you can smell the ozone burning like a great unbridled fire at the heart of the sky. This is the way the weather comes, swift and sudden, its momentum ceaseless and inexorable, hammering down on the barns and bean fields of southern Illinois, down on the city of Belleville, thrumming off the copper roof of the cathedral from every direction that the wind can bring it down.
Through the stained-glass windows depicting hero priests being scalped by wild Indians, the lightning flashes in deeper colors. The thunder is a distant, choral counterpoint to the singing of a line of priests, walking slowly up the center aisle toward the altar. They've come to honor with a liturgy older priests, some of whom have served for 60 years. The bishop of Belleville will preside over the Mass, and he is in fine voice this evening, singing past the thunder and the steady, percussive rain. As he turns up the center aisle, the bishop winks at a camera crew from Chicago that has come to tape a story about him, because the bishop of Belleville is not just any bishop anymore.
Wilton Gregory stands out in the procession, and not simply because of the accouterments of his office, and not simply because of the touch of kente cloth that adorns both his miter and the stole that drapes his shoulders. Consecrated a bishop when he was only 35 years old, today, at 54, he's a generation younger than several of the priests whom he is honoring. His face is round and animated, and there is still a sort of roll to his walk. Also, he's African-American, and this line of priests is whiter than the Politburo ever was. And he stands out because he is the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has made him the public face on the greatest crisis the Roman Catholic Church has known since the days in which it was saddled with two popes who hated each other.
Gregory has watched the scandal of clerical sexual abuse run through the church like an underground fire, breaking to the surface here and there until it erupted into a general conflagration over the past year. In the mid-1980s, Gregory saw his mentor, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, develop one of the first policies to deal with the crimes of the clergy and vainly urge it upon the church at large. (He even saw Bernardin, now deceased, himself falsely accused of sexual abuse and survive only because he confronted the charges openly.) In 1993, when Bernardin sent him to Belleville, Gregory walked into a rat's nest of baroque sexual corruption, highlighted by a burglary carried out at one priest's home by a male prostitute from whom the priest regularly received massages in the nude.



posted by Kathy Shaw on 7/21/2002 08:14:26 PM

BOSTON (Mass.)
Law rallies youth, but mum on reform group
Boston.com
By Steve Leblanc, Associated Press,
BOSTON -- Ted Heneberry may not look like a pilgrim, but the lanky 17-year-old high school student clearly sees himself as a defender of his Catholic faith.
Heneberry spent Sunday preparing for the church's World Youth Day in Toronto and rebuffing critics who said Cardinal Bernard Law failed to respond swiftly enough to the church's child sex abuse scandal.
"Most of us just want the fuss to go away. We just want to worship and pray without people from the outside telling us what's wrong," Heneberry said after Mass at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston. "I don't think I've changed because of this. I don't think the youth of the archdiocese have changed."


posted by Kathy Shaw on 7/21/2002 08:09:30 PM

BOSTON (Mass.)
Watch out, Law: The church ladies are now after you
Boston Herald
by Margery Eagan
If his moles reported back truthfully to Bernard Cardinal Law last night, the archbishop of Boston did not sleep well.
What began at the Hynes Convention Center yesterday was the radicalizing of the gray-haired and sensibly shod, of middle-aged and older white, suburban, bred-in-the-bone Catholics from well-heeled parishes in Newton and Wellesley, Winchester and Hingham, Lexington and Medfield.
Catholics whose decades of generosity has kept the weekly collection respectable and archdiocesan accounts sound.
Catholics who grew up pre-liberalizing Vatican II, when missing Latin Mass on Sunday meant damnation, when everyone knelt open-mouthed for Communion - God forbid the faithful should touch the host! When Father So-and-So walked on water, and everybody kissed the bishop's ring, and Holy Mother the Church could never, ever be wrong.
I guess the sensibly shod have a new perspective.


posted by Kathy Shaw on 7/21/2002 08:02:14 PM
WORCESTER (Mass.)
Handling of Whitcomb case outlined
Worcester Telegram & Gazette
By Kathleen A. Shaw
Telegram & Gazette Staff
WORCESTER-- The Central Association of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ, in letters sent to all Congregational Churches in Central Massachusetts, has defended its handling of allegations of impropriety against the Rev. Donald D. Whitcomb of First Congregational Church, Paxton.
The Rev. Paula Elizabeth, chairman of the Central Area Church and Ministry Committee, said the association attempted to resolve the issues quietly, but “the local church chose to bring it to the attention of the media.” News of the church investigation appeared in newspapers, radio and television, she said.
The allegations investigated included one incident of sexual misconduct, which was not corroborated and not acted on; allegations that the minister was present on youth retreats where alcoholic beverages and marijuana were used, and that he provided alcoholic beverages; and that he abrogated professional responsibility and violated certain boundaries expected of a minister, including paying young church vergers on his own and being alone with them.
Members of the Paxton church held a meeting July 11 and vented their dissatisfaction with the process used by the association and discussed leaving the UCC. Church leadership is appealing the association's findings.
The Rev. Nancy Taylor, minister and president of the Massachusetts Conference, said Friday that her only role was to appoint two members to the Response Team that conducted the investigation. The issue was handled by the local association, and she was not privy to what transpired, she said.
The Congregational churches, by design, handle these things at the local level, she said.
“We are not hierarchical,” she said.


posted by Kathy Shaw on 7/21/2002 07:58:16 PM

Clergy Abuse Tracker More Pre-11/2002 Archives