Clergy abuse victims meet on Boston anniversary

[rug]

Friday, January 6 2012 | 6:02 p.m. CST
By JAY LINDSAY, Associated Press

BOSTON - Dozens of clergy sex abuse victims are gathering in Boston to mark a decade since the abuse crisis broke and devastated Roman Catholics and their church nationwide.

The conference this weekend coincides with the 10th anniversary of a Boston Globe story that began a stream of revelations about abusive priests and church leaders who failed to stop them.

An organizer said clergy sex abuse victims make up about two-thirds of the 120 people signed up for the conference at a Boston hotel.

The conference aims to encourage victims to help expose abuse, through such steps as publicly telling their stories.

http://www.columbiamissourian.com/wire/article/448414/

This site was founded 17 months later:

http://bishopaccountability.org/

And this, in my view, is one of the worst:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Shanley

He will turn 80 in prison in three weeks.

[LAGC]

1. This part kind of bothers me:

From your last Wikipedia link:

In February 2005, Shanley was found guilty of indecent assaults and the rape of a male minor and received a sentence of 12 to 15 years in prison. Shanley's case remains controversial because the allegations of abuse came only after the victim (now an adult) alleged that he "recovered" memories of the abuse from approximately 20 years earlier. The notion of "repressed memory" is highly controversial and has been excluded from several courts of law.[5] The manner in which the accusations against Shanley arose and enormous attention in the media also have given rise to questions about the validity of the convictions

I've always wondered how many "opportunists" might be taking advantage of the Catholic sex abuse scandal to try to cash in on their misfortune.

I'm not trying to minimize or downplay the seriousness of the scandal here -- clearly abuse did happen, I don't think all these survivors just made shit up and came out of nowhere, but I do have to wonder if there aren't a few unsavory types jumping on the band-wagon and possibly claiming abuse when it never happened, just to try to steal some of the settlement money out of the church.

Of course, I'm not shedding any tears for all these diocese that went bankrupt -- clearly they reaped what they sowed, even if some free-loaders happened to ride on all the real victims' coat-tails.

[rug]

2. It's a bad conviction but it's pretty clear he had been doing this for decades.

Convictions based on repressed memories are shaky at best. They were unable to try him for most of his victims for many reasons, including statutes of limitations and inadmissible evidence. They tried him in this case on poor evidence but his crimes go back to his seminary days.

Unlike John Geoghan, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Geoghan , who was truly a mentally ill, compulsive pedophile, Shanley continued with an arrogance and twisted rationale to justify his appetites. He relished the publicity and his role as a "street priest" to runaways, all the while befriending and abusing them. He makes Bruce Ritter, the disgraced founder of Covenant House, look pale in comparison.

The human damage wreaked by these people, and their enablers, is incalculable. I hope all effected by these horrors, including the perpetrators, can find a way to some measure of peace in this life.