Sunday, November 16, 2014

How sicko priests got away with it...

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But Buck was never arrested and he never went to jail. In part, because neither the recipient of his love note nor any of his other victims ever pressed criminal charges against him in the secular court. Neither did the archdiocese, even when it put Buck on watch shortly after the girl’s mother complained in 1984. His dossier includes an internal memo dated several weeks after the letter was discovered that says: “parents upset about a priest 39 keeping company with a girl… showed a letter … sick….” He was removed in 2002 when the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People was adopted by all dioceses of the American Catholic church.

Today, Buck is on a pension, apparently living at the Cardinal Stritch Retreat House in suburban Chicago, which is the last known address for him and a handful of the other priests listed in the Chicago cache of offenders. When he was removed from ministry, he was ordered to a life of prayer, but the Cardinal Stritch Retreat House, as a place of penance, is no hardship post; it is a nature preserve with 900 acres of forest and water, according to its website.

If Buck and priests like him had been teachers, doctors or plumbers, it wouldn’t have mattered if the victims had the courage to cooperate with police; the letter could easily have been enough to convict, according to victims’ rights groups who say clergy get special treatment in the eyes of the law. In other words, if he weren’t a priest, he could well be in jail today.

Many of the clerical abuse cases and cover-ups exposed in the Chicago files mirror similar crime caches released by other dioceses in recent years. They are meant to show that the Church has adopted a new line of transparency on clerical sex abuse. The Vatican under Pope Francis has taken some particularly positive steps towards even greater transparency, starting with a special commission Francis assigned in December to address the problem of clerical sex abuse. Last week, Francis assigned another special commission. This one is meant to help speed up the appeals processes by priests who say they have been wrongly convicted of sex abuse by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, essentially securing a definitive conviction or overturning guilty verdicts much faster. Full story...

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