RE: Damned Pervert Priests - and other assorted Holy Scumbags
April 25, 2023 at 12:20 am
(This post was last modified: April 25, 2023 at 1:30 am by Fake Messiah.)
Vatican commission for the protection of minors is all about spin
At times it is difficult to believe anything other than that Rome is being willfully stupid when it comes to its dealings with clerical child-sex abuse. This repeated failure, inevitably, prompts recall of Einstein’s much-quoted definition of stupidity, even insanity — doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
That’s how it may look, but Rome’s serial “mishaps” in this area are neither stupid nor insane. They are about protecting itself above all while obscuring that reality through spin.
Fr Hans Zollner is a German Jesuit and one of the few figures at the Vatican with credibility where the abuse issue is concerned. He resigned from the commission last month and gave his reasons last week at a press conference in Rome. The commission, he said, had yet to take seriously the principles of “transparency, compliance and responsibility” and that there were people in the church, who “for personal or emotional reasons, create obstacles” in the fight against abuse.
It was “a continuous impression on the part of victims that they are not listened to”, he said, and that “many victims no longer expect anything” from the church.
In short, the commission has become a joke, presided over by an ineffectual Cardinal O’Malley, its president since 2014.
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/...-the-mark/
Abused by 3 Norbertine priests as a child, he's breaking his silence a half century later
The abuse began in 1965, when Mike Bielmeier was 12 years old.
The abusers would follow Bielmeier into a tunnel connecting St. Willebrord Church to its school, convent and rectory. They would call him into one of the many side rooms, or send another altar boy to fetch him.
Either John Kohnke or David Rondou or Joseph Rohlinger — all Norbertine priests at the time — would assault him, Bielmeier said in an exclusive interview with the Green Bay Press-Gazette, part of USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.
Whispers followed a few of the Norbertines; some students knew which ones to avoid. But Bielmeier was too naive, and priests at the time were seen as unquestioned authority figures.
Before Bielmeier turned 13 in February 1966, he said, he had been raped multiple times in various settings, from cars in the driveway of his family home to the St. Willebrord Church choir loft, and experienced his first of many dissociative episodes.
By the time he came forward, first to his sister in 2020, and then to the Wisconsin Department of Justice in January 2022, his abusers had long been deceased. All three already were on a list released by the Norbertine order in 2019 of 22 priests with credible abuse allegations against them.
As of last week, the Wisconsin DOJ Clergy and Faith Leader Abuse Initiative has received 248 completed reports to its toll-free tip line and online reporting tool.
"The Norbertine order knew that John Kohnke was a pedophile because he had been kicked out of the Archdiocese of Montana," Bielmeier said.
The first time Kohnke, then an assistant pastor for St. Willebrord Parish, violated Bielmeier was in the church choir loft, Bielmeier said. Kohnke had selected him to do summer work at the parish. The summer job paid well by a kid's standard, and his family needed the money — which the priest knew.
Alone in the loft, Kohnke kissed him, groped his genitals, pressed his erection against him, Bielmeier said. The boy already had been fondled and hugged by the other priests; this went way beyond. Kohnke told him he was special.
"My heart was pounding; my thinking was confused. I felt nauseous but not faint," Bielmeier wrote in his journal. "I closed my eyes and simply sat in silence until a degree of composure returned ... and (I) headed home."
From then on, he said, every new encounter with Kohnke, whether in the choir loft, the sacristy, the furnace room or the boys' locker room, came with a new escalation, increasing the intensity and degree of abuse.
A few disturbing memories still stand out. Bielmeier remembers sitting in the passenger's side of Kohnke's Norbertine-issued car in the parking lot of the now-defunct Prange Way Discount Store, arguing with Kohnke over an errand the priest wanted the boy to run. After abusing him, Kohnke had slid him money and asked Bielmeier to buy him Hai Karate cologne, a scent that always brought him back to the choir loft, where he first understood he was powerless against Kohnke's advances.
It dawned on Bielmeier for the first time that Kohnke was abnormal and potentially dangerous — not the leader nuns worshipped "like he was one of the demigods."
He said he later learned that Kohnke was already under suspicion because a child had come forward to report he had exposed himself.
From then on, Bielmeier avoided Kohnke at all costs. The priest would quietly be moved to Texas, where he became a chaplain and taught students at Incarnate Word College in San Antonio, in 1969.
It wouldn't be until 1974 that he Kohnke would be arrested for oral copulation of a minor in California, in addition to two other arrests for lewd behavior in a bathroom. Even after his arrests, he would work in multiple parishes. He died in 1987.
https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/sto...126385007/
At times it is difficult to believe anything other than that Rome is being willfully stupid when it comes to its dealings with clerical child-sex abuse. This repeated failure, inevitably, prompts recall of Einstein’s much-quoted definition of stupidity, even insanity — doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
That’s how it may look, but Rome’s serial “mishaps” in this area are neither stupid nor insane. They are about protecting itself above all while obscuring that reality through spin.
Fr Hans Zollner is a German Jesuit and one of the few figures at the Vatican with credibility where the abuse issue is concerned. He resigned from the commission last month and gave his reasons last week at a press conference in Rome. The commission, he said, had yet to take seriously the principles of “transparency, compliance and responsibility” and that there were people in the church, who “for personal or emotional reasons, create obstacles” in the fight against abuse.
It was “a continuous impression on the part of victims that they are not listened to”, he said, and that “many victims no longer expect anything” from the church.
In short, the commission has become a joke, presided over by an ineffectual Cardinal O’Malley, its president since 2014.
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2023/...-the-mark/
Abused by 3 Norbertine priests as a child, he's breaking his silence a half century later
The abuse began in 1965, when Mike Bielmeier was 12 years old.
The abusers would follow Bielmeier into a tunnel connecting St. Willebrord Church to its school, convent and rectory. They would call him into one of the many side rooms, or send another altar boy to fetch him.
Either John Kohnke or David Rondou or Joseph Rohlinger — all Norbertine priests at the time — would assault him, Bielmeier said in an exclusive interview with the Green Bay Press-Gazette, part of USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin.
Whispers followed a few of the Norbertines; some students knew which ones to avoid. But Bielmeier was too naive, and priests at the time were seen as unquestioned authority figures.
Before Bielmeier turned 13 in February 1966, he said, he had been raped multiple times in various settings, from cars in the driveway of his family home to the St. Willebrord Church choir loft, and experienced his first of many dissociative episodes.
By the time he came forward, first to his sister in 2020, and then to the Wisconsin Department of Justice in January 2022, his abusers had long been deceased. All three already were on a list released by the Norbertine order in 2019 of 22 priests with credible abuse allegations against them.
As of last week, the Wisconsin DOJ Clergy and Faith Leader Abuse Initiative has received 248 completed reports to its toll-free tip line and online reporting tool.
"The Norbertine order knew that John Kohnke was a pedophile because he had been kicked out of the Archdiocese of Montana," Bielmeier said.
The first time Kohnke, then an assistant pastor for St. Willebrord Parish, violated Bielmeier was in the church choir loft, Bielmeier said. Kohnke had selected him to do summer work at the parish. The summer job paid well by a kid's standard, and his family needed the money — which the priest knew.
Alone in the loft, Kohnke kissed him, groped his genitals, pressed his erection against him, Bielmeier said. The boy already had been fondled and hugged by the other priests; this went way beyond. Kohnke told him he was special.
"My heart was pounding; my thinking was confused. I felt nauseous but not faint," Bielmeier wrote in his journal. "I closed my eyes and simply sat in silence until a degree of composure returned ... and (I) headed home."
From then on, he said, every new encounter with Kohnke, whether in the choir loft, the sacristy, the furnace room or the boys' locker room, came with a new escalation, increasing the intensity and degree of abuse.
A few disturbing memories still stand out. Bielmeier remembers sitting in the passenger's side of Kohnke's Norbertine-issued car in the parking lot of the now-defunct Prange Way Discount Store, arguing with Kohnke over an errand the priest wanted the boy to run. After abusing him, Kohnke had slid him money and asked Bielmeier to buy him Hai Karate cologne, a scent that always brought him back to the choir loft, where he first understood he was powerless against Kohnke's advances.
It dawned on Bielmeier for the first time that Kohnke was abnormal and potentially dangerous — not the leader nuns worshipped "like he was one of the demigods."
He said he later learned that Kohnke was already under suspicion because a child had come forward to report he had exposed himself.
From then on, Bielmeier avoided Kohnke at all costs. The priest would quietly be moved to Texas, where he became a chaplain and taught students at Incarnate Word College in San Antonio, in 1969.
It wouldn't be until 1974 that he Kohnke would be arrested for oral copulation of a minor in California, in addition to two other arrests for lewd behavior in a bathroom. Even after his arrests, he would work in multiple parishes. He died in 1987.
https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/sto...126385007/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
