“It appears that Cardinal Mahony, who has a history of protecting sexual predators in the Church, will be further implicated as more documents are released.” – Joelle Casteix
In the same week that Jewish ultra-Orthodox counsellor Nechemya Weberman was sentenced to 103 years in prison for sexually abusing a teenage girl in 2007, documents were released this past Monday showing that Catholic religious leader Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Los Angeles Archdiocese knowingly conspired with other church officials to protect priests who were known to have sexually abused children in the 1980s.
The LA Archdiocese, which is the nation’s largest, had been fighting to keep the documents secret since 2007 when a $660 million dollar judgement was awarded to 500 victims of church sexual abuse. A recent LA superior court judge’s ruling however, ordered the release of 30,000 documents naming the paedophile priests despite the Church’s pleas to protect their privacy.
Although all the documents have not yet been released, the ones which have, provide proof that Mahony and Monsignor Thomas J. Curry acted to protect Monsignor Peter Garcia who had bound and raped an 11-year-old boy and sexually abused more than a dozen other boys.
Mahony requested that Garcia not be sent to a Church run paedophile treatment centre because the therapists there are legally bound to report paedophiles to the police. Garcia had specifically targeted boys who were from undocumented families and threatened at least one of them with deportation if the parents dared to speak of what had happened.
Although it appears that Mahony, who has a history of protecting sexual predators in the Church, will be further implicated as more documents are released, legal experts are saying that lawyers may have difficulty charging him due to a statute of limitations on obstruction of justice.
The now retired Archbishop Mahony has apologized for his actions and said, “I have a 3×5 card for every victim I met with on the altar of my small chapel. I pray for them every single day. As I thumb through those cards I often pause as I am reminded of each personal story and the anguish that accompanies that life story.” – Uprising, 24 January 2013
» Joelle Casteix, western regional director of SNAP, Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish counsellor gets 103 years in prison for sexually abusing under-age girl – Pervaiz Shallwani
A prominent ultra-Orthodox Jewish counsellor was sentenced to 103 years in prison in the sexual abuse of a teenage girl in the insular Brooklyn community.
Nechemya Weberman, 54 years old, was found guilty in December on 59 counts of sexual abuse and child endangerment, the most serious that he sexually abused the young woman for three years beginning when she was 12.
The victim, now 18, spoke for five minutes Tuesday, at times crying as she read from a prepared statement.
“I clearly remember how I would look in the mirror,” she said. “I saw a girl who didn’t want to live in her own skin, a girl whose innocence was shattered, a girl who couldn’t sleep at night because of the gruesome invasion that had been done to her body,” she told the judge.
She described herself as “a sad girl who wanted to live a normal life, but instead was being victimized by a 50-year-old man who forced her to perform sickening acts again and again.”
“I saw a girl who had no reason to live,” she said. “I would cry until my tears ran dry.”
She hoped that her coming forward “sets a precedent” and would give strength to other victims in the community.
Following the two-week trial that put a sharp focus on the Satmar Hasidic community, Weberman faced up to 117 years in prison.
Weberman who maintains his innocence did not address the judge before being sentenced, simply saying “no thanks,” when given the opportunity.
He looked towards his supporters, smiled and nodded as he was led away on handcuffs.
His attorneys plan to appeal the verdict and sentence.
There was no physical evidence presented at the trial, but both the victim and Weberman took the stand. Prosecutors portrayed Weberman as an unlicensed counsellor who used his position in the community to gain access to young women deemed problems for violating the modesty rules of the tight-knit community.
The victim testified that she was first taken to see Weberman in 2007 after she was caught text messaging a boy, wearing skirts that aren’t long enough and otherwise being singled out at her school. She accused Weberman by name in 2011, saying he abused her at every single session.
Weberman’s attorneys, though, spent four days cross-examining the victim in an attempt to discredit her testimony. On the stand, Weberman said he “never ever” abused her.
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes — who has said prosecuting ultra-Orthodox Jewish cases can be more difficult than organized crime cases – said after the verdict that there were other victims of Weberman who had either opted not to press charges or who had passed the statute of limitations. – Wall Street Journal, 22 January 2013
» Pervaiz Shallwani is a Brooklyn-based journalist and classically trained cook whose work straddles the worlds of food and hard news. Sometimes, the two cross paths. He co-hosts the New York CHOW Report on NY1, and writes frequently for The Wall Street Journal.
LA sex abuse victims demand justice
Jewish counsellor sentenced to 103 years
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Cardinal Mahony relieved of duties over handling of sex abuse cases – Harriet Ryan and Victoria Kim – Los Angeles Times – 1 February 2013
The public censure of Mahony, one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church, was unparalleled, experts said. (Genaro Molina, Los Angeles Times / December 10, 2012)
In a move unprecedented in the American Catholic Church, Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez announced Thursday that he had relieved his predecessor, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, of all public duties over his mishandling of clergy sex abuse of children decades ago.
Gomez also said that Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Curry, who worked with Mahony to conceal abusers from police in the 1980s, had resigned his post as a regional bishop in Santa Barbara.
The announcement came as the church posted on its website tens of thousands of pages of previously secret personnel files for 122 priests accused of molesting children.
“I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil,” Gomez wrote in a letter addressed to “My brothers and sisters in Christ.”
The release of the records and the rebuke of the two central figures in L.A.’s molestation scandal signaled a clear desire by Gomez to define the sexual abuse crisis as a problem of a different era — and a different archbishop.
“I cannot undo the failings of the past that we find in these pages. Reading these files, reflecting on the wounds that were caused has been the saddest experience I’ve had since becoming your Archbishop in 2011,” Gomez wrote.
The public censure of Mahony, whose quarter-century at the helm of America’s largest archdiocese made him one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church, was unparalleled, experts said.
“This is very unusual and shows really how seriously they’re taking this. To tell a cardinal he can’t do confirmations, can’t do things in public, that’s extraordinary,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and Georgetown University fellow.
An archdiocese spokesman, Tod Tamberg, said that beyond canceling his confirmation schedule, Mahony’s day-to-day life as a retired priest would be largely unchanged. He resides at a North Hollywood parish, and Tamberg said he would remain a “priest in good standing.” He can continue to celebrate Mass and will be eligible to vote for pope until he turns 80 two years from now, Tamberg said.
The move further stained the legacy of Mahony, a tireless advocate for Latinos and undocumented immigrants whose reputation has been marred over the last decade by revelations about his treatment of sex abuse allegations.
Before Gomez’s announcement, Mahony had weathered three grand jury investigations and numerous calls for his resignation. He stayed in office until the Vatican’s mandatory retirement age of 75. No criminal charges have been filed against Mahony or anyone in the church hierarchy.
Terrence McKiernan, president of bishopaccountability.org, said that in a religious institution that values saving face and protecting its own, Gomez’s decision to publicly criticize an elder statesman of the church and his top aide was striking.
“Even when Cardinal [Bernard] Law was removed in Boston, which was arguably for the same offenses, this kind of gesture was not made,” he said.
Law left office in 2002 amid mounting outrage over his transfer of pedophile priests from parish to parish, but the church presented his departure as of his own accord and he was later given a highly coveted Vatican job in Rome.
Bishop Thomas J. O’Brien of Phoenix relinquished some of his authority in a deal with prosecutors to avoid criminal charges for his handling of abuse cases, but he kept his title and many of his duties. A Kansas City bishop convicted last year of failing to report child abuse retained his position.
The Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer and Dominican priest who has testified across the nation as an expert witness in clergy sex abuse cases, said the Vatican would have “absolutely” been consulted on a decision of this magnitude.
“This is momentous, there is no question,” he said. “For something like this to happen to a cardinal…. The way they treat cardinals is as if they’re one step below God.”
Gomez’s decision capped a two-week period in which the publication of 25-year-old files fueled a new round of condemnation of the L.A. archdiocese. The files of 14 clerics accused of abuse became public in a court case last Monday. They laid out in Mahony and Curry’s own words how the church hierarchy had plotted to keep law enforcement from learning that children had been molested at the hands of priests.
To stave off investigations, Mahony and Curry gave priests they knew had abused children out-of-state assignments and kept them from seeing therapists who might alert authorities.
Mahony and Curry both issued apologies, with the cardinal saying he had not realized the extent of harm done to children until he met with victims during civil litigation. “I am sorry,” he said.
Victims called for new criminal investigations and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said it was reviewing the newly released files.
At the same time, a five-year battle over the release of confidential church records on abuser priests was drawing to a close. Under the church’s 2007 settlement with more than 500 victims, the archdiocese was required to hand over the personnel files of every cleric accused of abuse.
The church waged unsuccessful battles to keep much of the material secret and later to ensure that the names of Mahony, Curry and other church employees were blacked out.
On Wednesday, church lawyers abruptly announced they planned to provide victims’ lawyers with unredacted files that included the names of everyone in supervisory roles. On Thursday afternoon, a judge signed a final order requiring the archdiocese to hand over the files within three weeks.
An hour later, a spokesman for the church released Gomez’s statement and the files were posted on the archdiocese website.
McKiernan of bishopaccountability.org noted that Mahony will keep the title of “archbishop emeritus” and suggested his removal from public life was primarily an effort to blunt the wave of criticism likely to follow the file release.
“They are trying to gain control of what is truly a devastating time for them,” he said.
The files released Thursday contained additional evidence of attempts by Curry and Mahony to stymie police investigations.
In a 1988 memo about Father Nicolas Aguilar-Rivera, a Mexican priest accused of molesting more than 20 boys during a nine-month stay in Los Angeles, Curry expressed a desire to keep a list of parish altar boys from investigators.
“The whole issue of our records is a very sensitive one, and I am reluctant to give any list to the police,” Curry wrote.
At the bottom of the memo, Mahony replied: “We cannot give such a list for no cause whatsoever.”
The police charged Aguilar-Rivera, but after receiving a warning from Curry, he went to Mexico. He remains a fugitive.
In some memos, archdiocesan officials appeared concerned only with the church’s reputation and displayed little sympathy for the victims of abuse. In a 1990 note about Father George Neville Rucker, who authorities believe molested 30 children, an unidentified church official wrote that three women had contacted the archdiocese alleging that the priest molested them decades earlier when they were children.
“One of these days, they may happen to meet and all hell will break loose,” the official wrote.
Times staff writers Ashley Powers, Hector Becerra, Jack Leonard, Robert Faturechi and Abby Sewell contributed to this report.
harriet.ryan@latimes.com
victoria.kim@latimes.com
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Tribals protest against Christian missionaries operating in their villages.
Calvary Chapel’s Tangled Web – Davis Sessions – The Daily Beast – 27 January 2013
Read this article to understand how the new Evangelical churches operate in the US. India has thousands of these churches imported from the US, whose corrupt priests and pastors do as they please without interference from government authority–indeed, they are facilitated by anti-Hindu governments both at the Centre and in the States. Evangelical churches have virtually destroyed the village cultural homogeneity of Andhra Pradesh and are quickly doing the same in Tamil Nadu. – Editor
A pastor whose family was murdered in New Mexico belonged to a large association of Evangelical churches that, critics allege, stands behind misbehaving pastors and looks away when they are accused of sexual abuse and other misdeeds. – David Sessions
Greg Griego, who was slaughtered along with his wife and children, allegedly by his 15-year-old son, Nehemiah last week near Albuquerque, was a beloved minister. A born-again gang member, he seemed to serve anywhere he would be had: as a minister in Albuquerque’s fire department, at a detention center, and in the prison ministry at Calvary Albuquerque, a megachurch affiliated with the Calvary Chapel network of over a thousand similar churches. After allegedly committing the horrific crimes, Nehemiah reportedly spent hours hanging around Calvary Albuquerque, telling church members his family died in a car accident.
The Albuquerque massacre wasn’t the first time lately that a Calvary Chapel-affiliated church found itself part of a grim news cycle. Calvary is one of several large evangelical denominations beginning to draw national attention as lawsuits pile up over abuses allegedly covered up by pastors and church leaders. Over the past decades, Calvary has been plagued with accusations ranging from unaccountable leadership to covered-up sexual abuse, raising questions similar to those faced by Roman Catholic hierarchy about what kind of role the church’s top leaders were playing behind the scenes.
Unlike the centralized, bureaucratic Catholic church, some upstart evangelical denominations have less explicit authority structures that remain opaque even to members. Because networks of churches like Calvary Chapel and Sovereign Grace often have an ostensibly informal relationship with the flagship church, denominational leaders can find themselves in the difficult position of having to take responsibility for the abuses of an affiliate church—or, more often, refusing to do so.
This tension is especially acute in Calvary Chapel, where pastors are given a great deal of individual authority, but it seems have sometimes found senior Calvary leaders asserting their prerogative in doctrinal, financial or administrative matters. Turned off by the micromanaging he saw in other evangelical denominations, Chuck Smith, Calvary’s founder, developed a church model based on near-absolute sovereignty of the senior pastor. “I feel my primary responsibility is to the Lord,” he explained to Christianity Today in 2007. “And one day I’m going to answer to him, not to a board of elders.” Though Smith described church budgeting as a collective process to Christianity Today, Calvary Chapel pastors have little requirement to disclose church finances to members or even other leaders, according to other Calvary members who say they were given the cold shoulder when they asked for more information.
Though Smith’s Calvary “distinctives” (PDF) exalt the authority of individual pastors, Calvary churches are never completely exempt from meddling by Smith or other powerful figures in the movement. One of those figures is Skip Heitzig, the founding pastor of Calvary Albuquerque, and perhaps the most prominent public face of the evangelical community’s mourning of Greg Giego, who also served as a pastor there.
The story of Heitzig’s exit and return from Albuquerque is a perfect example of how “independent” Calvary churches can be quite entangled with the larger movement, both structurally and financially. When Heitzig departed to pastor another Calvary church in California, he chose Pete Nelson as his successor. Heitzig remained on the board of Calvary Albuquerque, and with the help of other board members who did not live in New Mexico but were also powerful Calvary leaders tried to force financial decisions on the Albuquerque church, according to the Christianity Today report.
Critics allege that Calvary leaders intervene in disputes, especially involving its financial assets, and then claim no affiliation when their underlings are accused of covering up misdeeds.
Heitzig attempted to create a “mega-board” that would place the Albuquerque church and its two radio stations under his own management, according to Christianity Today. Nelson eventually resigned, citing Heitzig’s attempts to concentrate power in his own hands and push out dissenters. A group of five church members, including a professor at the University of New Mexico, created a group to call for increased accountability from the church’s leadership. Greg Zanetti, a former church elder and general in the New Mexico National Guard, also went public with accusations that Heitzig had moved expensive stage equipment from Albuquerque to his new church in California, and had forced Calvary Albuquerque to subsidize Heitzig’s money-losing radio program.
Nelson’s departure led to an uproar in the Albuquerque church, with nearly 2,000 members signing a petition supporting Nelson, and others publicly questioning Heitzig’s lack of financial accountability. Heitzig resigned from the Albuquerque board—with his supporters reportedly handing him a severance of over $300,000—only to return as senior pastor a year later. Heitzig denied (PDF) the accusations of abusing his authority.
Chuck Smith has injected himself into conflicts in other Calvary churches, almost always on the side of authorities accused of abuses. According to the Christianity Today investigation, Smith protected several Calvary pastors who were accused of having affairs and sexually harassing women on the grounds that they were “great Bible teachers” who would be “totally destroyed” if they weren’t helped by the church. Smith re-hired at least two leaders who had been fired by other Calvary churches for sexual misconduct. According to Christianity Today, another employee of one of Smith’s churches in California, who was arrested for having sex with a 15-year-old girl, had already been fired from a different ministry at Smith’s church for having sex with a woman on church property. Smith denies that the employee’s initial firing was sex-related, but several leaders and pastors confirmed it to Christianity Today.
Back in 1994, according to reports in Christianity Today and the Los Angeles Times, Smith intervened when a Calvary church in Idaho wanted its pastor, Mike Kestler, to take a leave of absence amid multiple accusations of sexual harassment from female members. Kestler was, at the time, a star player in Calvary’s growing radio network. Smith finally said he believed the charges when the pastor was sued a decade later by Lori Pollit, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader who claimed Kestler had fired her from a job at the radio network when she refused his sexual advances. Smith funded the cheerleader’s lawsuit, leading to an epic legal battle between Smith and Kestler over the radio network. Smith eventually offered to settle, and Kestler still runs the network.
The accusations kept getting tawdrier, and still, Calvary has seemed willing to stand behind its men. In 2010, Alex and Paul Grenier, two sons of a Calvary pastor in Visalia, California, alleged that their stepfather, Bob Grenier, had horrifically beaten and abused them as children. They claimed they were not allowed to see the police report they filed because their father, who works as a police chaplain, had clout with local law enforcement. When the report was finally disclosed by court order, Alex and Paul told the Fresno Bee that their accounts of the abuse to police had been “watered down” to make them appear less incriminating. Bob Grenier sued Alex in 2012, accusing him of mounting “cyber-bully hate campaign” and libeling him on the internet. In the filing, Grenier denies allegations that he sexually molested Paul and that he stole money from his church. According to Smith, he has also denied physically abusing his stepsons.
Alex Grenier has published an account of a meeting with Smith and a Calvary lawyer, in which Smith and other Calvary officials denied any affiliation with or responsibility for Bob Grenier’s behavior. In the blog post, Alex wrote that despite their supposed “independence,” other Calvary pastors have had their official affiliation with Calvary revoked over theological differences. Responding to a suit against several local churches in Arizona, Calvary lawyers argued (PDF) that the Arizona court lacked jurisdiction in the case because of Calvary’s “ecclesiastical structure”—namely, that Calvary churches were accountable to the central organization and that the ones accused in the suit were already involved in a “disciplinary process” within the Calvary structure.
In July 2012, Smith dissolved Calvary’s central organization and divided up Calvary’s churches under regional leadership (though Calvary retains a central “leadership council.”) Smith commented publicly on the Grenier case in a radio confrontation in which he accused Alex of “doing his best to bring down the work of God through the Calvary chapels because he’s got a bee in his bonnet.” Smith said that he had examined the materials Alex provided, but could not find proof of his stepfather’s abuse. On the same program, Smith said, “I don’t have any authority over [Bob Grenier] anyhow.”
Meanwhile, Smith’s Calvary Chapel Outreach Mission, which at the time acted as the denomination’s central organization, was denying its responsibility in an even more sordid legal battle. In 2011, four young men sued both a Calvary church in Idaho and Smith’s “mothership” in Costa Mesa, alleging that Calvary leadership had protected a pedophile youth minister who molested them as boys. The suit reportedly claimed that the accused pedophile, Anthony Iglesias, had been previously removed from a Calvary ministry in California and sent home from a Thailand mission trip for sexual misconduct with boys, and that the churches allowed him continued access to children despite knowing his history. One of the accusers alleged that when his parents approached Robert Davis, the senior pastor of the Idaho church, about Iglesias’ inappropriate contact with their son, Davis said, “Yeah, we knew. That’s why we pulled him out of Thailand.”
Iglesias was convicted of molesting two of the plaintiffs, but their case against Calvary was dismissed. (The young men’s lawyer, Tim Kosnoff, told The Daily Beast that he would never take a sex abuse case in Idaho again because the state’s court system is “very hostile to sexual abuse victims and very friendly to perpetrators and institutions that enable them.”) Other Calvary pastors have been removed when they were convicted of similar crimes. In 2011, Dino Cardelli, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel Arcata was convicted of sexually abusing his two stepdaughters; later in the year, after pastor Christopher Raymond Olage was arrested for allegedly molesting an 8-year-old girl and keeping child pornography on his computer, the Calvary name was dropped from the website of his church in Buena Park, California. Olage pled not guilty and the case is currently pending.
In the Iglesias case, the central Calvary organization again reportedly played the “no authority” card, arguing that there was no connection between Calvary Chapel Outreach Fellowship, the central organization, and the Idaho affiliate. Grenier and other church critics have argued that this fits a pattern: Calvary leaders intervene in disputes, especially involving its financial assets, and then claim no affiliation when their underlings are accused of covering up misdeeds.
Clearly, Smith and other Calvary leaders are able, at the very least, to put pressure on affiliate churches to investigate wrongdoing, or get rid of abusive leaders. But Smith only seems to have the response he gave Alex Grenier in their radio confrontation: “We did everything we could.”
>> David Sessions covers religion for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He has written for Slate, Politics Daily, New York, The Daily and others. He is the founding editor of Patrol, a blog about religion and politics.
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