RE: Damned Pervert Priests - and other assorted Holy Scumbags
June 20, 2023 at 8:33 am
(This post was last modified: June 20, 2023 at 8:34 am by Fake Messiah.)
A New Orleans priest confessed to abusing children. He returned to work and was never charged
Three days after the Feast of All Saints in 1999, Lawrence Hecker confessed to his superiors at the archdiocese of New Orleans that he had either sexually molested or otherwise shared a bed with multiple teenagers whom he met through his work as a Roman Catholic priest.
The roughly 15-year period, beginning in the mid-1960s, during which the admitted conduct unfolded “was a time of great change in the world and in the church, and I succumbed to its zeitgeist”, Hecker said in a two-page statement which he gave to local church authorities serving a region with about a half-million Catholics. “It was a time when I neglected spiritual direction, confession and most daily prayer.”
Hecker’s admission – less than two months after he had been chosen to receive the honorary title of “monsignor” – followed the decision of one of his victims to come forward to the archdiocese. The organization responded by sending Hecker to an out-of-state psychiatric treatment facility which diagnosed him as a pedophile who rationalized, justified and took “little responsibility for his behavior”.
The facility also determined that Hecker – despite the vow of celibacy that Catholic clerics take – had previously engaged in a sexual encounter with a grown man who had an unspecified mental disability and to whom the priest was ministering. It recommended that the archdiocese prohibit Hecker from working with children, adolescents or other “particularly vulnerable” people.
Hecker, however, did not stop working until the church allowed him to retire in 2002. That year, the archdiocese of Boston had been exposed as having covered up the widespread sexual abuse of children by its clerics, setting off a scandal resulting in worldwide church reforms, including promises of transparency for the sake of protecting minors and attaining justice for molestation victims.
Law enforcement authorities have never charged Hecker – now 91 years old – with a crime, even though the number of his accusers has only grown with the passage of time.
Despite openness policies that the Catholic church implemented after the 2002 scandal in Boston, New Orleans’s archdiocese did not publicly acknowledge that Hecker was a predator until 2018. That year, the archdiocese released a list of dozens of priests and deacons whom it considered to be strongly suspected of sexually abusing minors – including Hecker.
The documents establish that New Orleans’s last four Catholic archbishops – the first of whom took office in the 1960s – had substantial reason to believe that Hecker was a child molester. Three stayed silent, and the current one waited several years before acknowledging that Hecker preyed on children.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/j...hild-abuse
'I hope they all burn in hell': Survivors speak out on rape by Catholic priests in Baltimore
Four survivors shared their stories more than 50 years after they were brutally physically and sexually assaulted by priests and bishops at an all-girls Catholic high school in Baltimore.
Video in the link
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/0...rig-aw.cnn
Three days after the Feast of All Saints in 1999, Lawrence Hecker confessed to his superiors at the archdiocese of New Orleans that he had either sexually molested or otherwise shared a bed with multiple teenagers whom he met through his work as a Roman Catholic priest.
The roughly 15-year period, beginning in the mid-1960s, during which the admitted conduct unfolded “was a time of great change in the world and in the church, and I succumbed to its zeitgeist”, Hecker said in a two-page statement which he gave to local church authorities serving a region with about a half-million Catholics. “It was a time when I neglected spiritual direction, confession and most daily prayer.”
Hecker’s admission – less than two months after he had been chosen to receive the honorary title of “monsignor” – followed the decision of one of his victims to come forward to the archdiocese. The organization responded by sending Hecker to an out-of-state psychiatric treatment facility which diagnosed him as a pedophile who rationalized, justified and took “little responsibility for his behavior”.
The facility also determined that Hecker – despite the vow of celibacy that Catholic clerics take – had previously engaged in a sexual encounter with a grown man who had an unspecified mental disability and to whom the priest was ministering. It recommended that the archdiocese prohibit Hecker from working with children, adolescents or other “particularly vulnerable” people.
Hecker, however, did not stop working until the church allowed him to retire in 2002. That year, the archdiocese of Boston had been exposed as having covered up the widespread sexual abuse of children by its clerics, setting off a scandal resulting in worldwide church reforms, including promises of transparency for the sake of protecting minors and attaining justice for molestation victims.
Law enforcement authorities have never charged Hecker – now 91 years old – with a crime, even though the number of his accusers has only grown with the passage of time.
Despite openness policies that the Catholic church implemented after the 2002 scandal in Boston, New Orleans’s archdiocese did not publicly acknowledge that Hecker was a predator until 2018. That year, the archdiocese released a list of dozens of priests and deacons whom it considered to be strongly suspected of sexually abusing minors – including Hecker.
The documents establish that New Orleans’s last four Catholic archbishops – the first of whom took office in the 1960s – had substantial reason to believe that Hecker was a child molester. Three stayed silent, and the current one waited several years before acknowledging that Hecker preyed on children.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/j...hild-abuse
'I hope they all burn in hell': Survivors speak out on rape by Catholic priests in Baltimore
Four survivors shared their stories more than 50 years after they were brutally physically and sexually assaulted by priests and bishops at an all-girls Catholic high school in Baltimore.
Video in the link
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2023/0...rig-aw.cnn
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"
