Bishops were warned of abusive priests
1957 letter: "These men, Your Excellency, are devils, the wrath of God is upon them
Mar. 30, 2009
By Tom Roberts
As early as the mid-1950s, decades before the clergy sexual-abuse crisis broke publicly across the U.S. Catholic landscape, the founder of a religious order that dealt regularly with priest sex abusers was so convinced of their inability to change that he searched for an island to purchase with the intent of using it as a place to isolate such offenders, according to documents recently obtained by NCR.
Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paracletes, an order established in 1947 to deal with problem priests, wrote regularly to bishops in the United States and to Vatican officials, including the pope, of his opinion that many sexual abusers in the priesthood should be laicized immediately.
Fitzgerald was a prolific correspondent who wrote regularly of his frustration with and disdain for priests "who have seduced or attempted to seduce little boys or girls." His views are contained in letters and other correspondence that had previously been under court seal and were made available to NCR by a California law firm in February.
Read copies of letters Fitzgerald exchanged with U.S. bishops and one pope.
Fitzgerald's convictions appear to significantly contradict the claims of contemporary bishops that the hierarchy was unaware until recent years of the danger in shuffling priests from one parish to another and in concealing the priests' problems from those they served.
....
rest artikel NCR
Priest treatment unfolds in costly, secretive world
Psychiatrists, church trade misdeed charges
By Ellen Barry, Globe Staff, 4/3/2002
As far as his parishioners knew, the Rev. Jay Mullinwas on ''sick leave,'' and would be absent from his Plainville pulpit until he felt better.
In truth, he had crossed over into a secretive world of church-funded psychiatry.
...
....
Since the 1970s, psychiatrists at these facilities have treated accused priests with one-on-one therapy, feminizing hormones, and sex addiction support groups. They sent their reports to bishops, estimating the risk of a relapse, then released the priests.
Such treatment is typically paid for by the diocese, and has cost the church at least $50 million over the last 25 years, estimated A. W. Richard Sipe, a psychologist and ex-priest who treated clergy for 40 years.
A few, like Geoghan, were treated again and again, at numerous centers, and each time slid back into their predatory behavior. Victims, especially those who were molested after the priest had completed treatment, are beginning to wonder exactly what was going on inside the costly psychiatric centers.
''No institution can police itself,'' said David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests. ''If the church wants to restore trust, leaders should be more open about these treatment facilities. If chemical companies said, `Just trust us - send us your dioxins; we'll clean them up,' the public would be wary.''
The centers denied repeated requests by the Globe for visits, citing privacy rules.
Psychiatrists from Johns Hopkins University and McLean Hospital who have worked with priests at the behest of the church said they believed chuch authorities had made good-faith efforts to enlist the nation's top specialists in the slippery, ever-changing field of treating sexual disorders.
But two weeks ago, psychiatrists at the Institute of Living in Hartford accused church leaders of intentionally disregarding their clinical advice, sometimes with disastrous results. The institute, a secular psychiatric hospital situated on a leafy 35-acre campus, had developed a specialized program for treating clergy, and had been seeing a handful of priests every year.
The two-decade relationship was shaken after New York Cardinal Edward Egan cited the institute's psychiatric reports to justify his decisions to return priests to the ministry, where some reoffended. Top psychiatrists then told reporters at The Hartford Courant that church leaders had used psychiatrists' advice as cover to rush potentially dangerous priests back into ministry.
''I found that they rarely followed our recommendations,'' said Leslie Lothstein, director of clinical psychology at the institute. ''They would put [priests] back into work where they still had access to vulnerable populations.''
Lothstein's comments mark a new chapter in the relationship between the church and psychiatrists. As recently as 1952, the church was so resistant to behavioral sciences that a Vatican official declared it a sin to undergo psychoanalysis. But in treating priests, the church has leaned increasingly on psychiatry, funding six-month stays for priests even as managed care cut psychiatric stays to a week for most Americans.
It has not been a perfect collaboration. In the last few months, critics have blasted church officials for ignoring sexual abuse charges. Some insiders, like Egan, have suggested that part of the blame should be spread to psychiatrists who routinely provided them with independent evaluations.
Seven years ago, Minneapolis psychologist Gary Schoener got a call from a rattled John Roach, archbishop of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Roach asked Schoener to review records the archdiocese had received from the centers that had been treating priests: the St. Luke Institute, the now-defunct House of Affirmation, and the Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico.
''The archbishop said, `For God's sake, are we getting bad advice?''' Schoener recalled. ''Are they using the wrong tests? Are they misinterpreting them? Is one of the centers better than the others?''
Schoener reported back a few weeks later. He had been impressed by the psychiatric reports, which he said would pass muster in secular hospitals. But he faulted the centers for accepting the church's investigations at face value, for failing to contact victims, and for leaving responsibility for follow-up to the priest's diocese.
In short, the psychiatrists were working for the church. They ''wanted to be liked,'' Schoener said.
''The mindset of these folks was to get him back there, that somehow the guy was fixable,'' said Schoener. ''They are a key part of the mistake.
''It's not that I don't blame the church. I blame them both.''
'We just get an intuition'
The treatment centers had been born in a rush of Christian compassion. On a blustery night during the depths of the Depression, the Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald heard a knock on the back door of his rectory in Brighton and gave food and a coat to a beggar who, as he walked into the dark, turned around and said he, too, was once a priest.
That was the genesis of the Brothers of the Paraclete, a religious order whose mission was to care for troubled priests. In 1947, in New Mexico, Fitzgerald opened a retreat for troubled or alcohol-abusing priests.
Sexual misconduct was not part of the mission then. When Fitzgerald was asked about treating child molesters, he recommended buying a small Caribbean island and isolating them there, said the Rev. Peter Lechner, the current servant general of the Brothers of the Paraclete. By the mid-1960s, though, the Paraclete retreat began welcoming an increasing number of pedophiles and, more commonly, ephebophiles, or adults who are sexually aroused by pubescents, usually males, Lechner said.
Throughout the 1960s, sexual disorders were treated through psychoanalysis, and the Paraclete Center lagged behind even in that. It wasn't until the 1970s that Jemez Springs began to ''approach modern standards,'' Lechner said, with regular therapy and an in-house psychiatrist. In 1976, the Paracletes opened the first treatment center in the world for psychosexual disorders; by 1995, according to a deposition, psychiatrist Jay Feierman had consulted with 1,000 priests about sexual disorders.
......
.....
'They kept the transgressions silent'
Psychiatrists have been mostly silent about the treatment they provided to offenders. Lothstein, from the Institute of Living, would not return phone calls for this article, nor would authorities at St. Luke and the St. John Vianney Center, which is run by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Some psychiatrists have come to the defense of the church. Lechner, head of the Paraclete Center, and Dr. Donna Markham, president of Southdown Institute, both said church leaders have been forthcoming with case histories and compliant with their recommendations.
Others said even specialists may have dispensed bad advice.
''The missing link in this story as I know it is that there have been substantial efforts on the part of the church to deal with some of this through therapeutic channels,'' said Philip Levendusky, a Harvard Medical School associate professor and McLean Hospital psychiatrist who for two years in the late 1990s oversaw an eight-bed residential program for priests with sexual disorders.
''They did go to the top of the ladder. They weren't going to facilities that would put a religious spin on [sexual disorders]. They went to really legitimate assessment facilities.''
Others, though, said the church has manipulated psychiatric expertise.
Sipe treated clergy at Seton Psychiatric Institute and served on the board of St. Luke Institute for two years. He said the earnest efforts of good therapists have fallen on deaf ears for three decades.
''Psychiatry and psychotherapy has been misused by the church in this crisis,'' Sipe said. ''Bishops oftentimes did not give the whole story, but kind of dumped the priests there and just let the psychiatrists `puzzle it out themselves.'
They kept the transgressions silent under the guise of confessional material.''
Then, he said, there were errors of compassion.
''Psychiatrists are kind of hopeful people,'' Sipe said. ''As clinicians and as clergymen, we don't tend to give up on people.''
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 4/3/2002.
Then, he said, there were errors of compassion.
bron, één van de vele artikelen in bishop-accountability.org
1957 letter: "These men, Your Excellency, are devils, the wrath of God is upon them
Mar. 30, 2009
By Tom Roberts
As early as the mid-1950s, decades before the clergy sexual-abuse crisis broke publicly across the U.S. Catholic landscape, the founder of a religious order that dealt regularly with priest sex abusers was so convinced of their inability to change that he searched for an island to purchase with the intent of using it as a place to isolate such offenders, according to documents recently obtained by NCR.
Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paracletes, an order established in 1947 to deal with problem priests, wrote regularly to bishops in the United States and to Vatican officials, including the pope, of his opinion that many sexual abusers in the priesthood should be laicized immediately.
Fitzgerald was a prolific correspondent who wrote regularly of his frustration with and disdain for priests "who have seduced or attempted to seduce little boys or girls." His views are contained in letters and other correspondence that had previously been under court seal and were made available to NCR by a California law firm in February.
Read copies of letters Fitzgerald exchanged with U.S. bishops and one pope.
Fitzgerald's convictions appear to significantly contradict the claims of contemporary bishops that the hierarchy was unaware until recent years of the danger in shuffling priests from one parish to another and in concealing the priests' problems from those they served.
....
rest artikel NCR
Priest treatment unfolds in costly, secretive world
Psychiatrists, church trade misdeed charges
By Ellen Barry, Globe Staff, 4/3/2002
As far as his parishioners knew, the Rev. Jay Mullinwas on ''sick leave,'' and would be absent from his Plainville pulpit until he felt better.
In truth, he had crossed over into a secretive world of church-funded psychiatry.
...
....
Since the 1970s, psychiatrists at these facilities have treated accused priests with one-on-one therapy, feminizing hormones, and sex addiction support groups. They sent their reports to bishops, estimating the risk of a relapse, then released the priests.
Such treatment is typically paid for by the diocese, and has cost the church at least $50 million over the last 25 years, estimated A. W. Richard Sipe, a psychologist and ex-priest who treated clergy for 40 years.
A few, like Geoghan, were treated again and again, at numerous centers, and each time slid back into their predatory behavior. Victims, especially those who were molested after the priest had completed treatment, are beginning to wonder exactly what was going on inside the costly psychiatric centers.
''No institution can police itself,'' said David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests. ''If the church wants to restore trust, leaders should be more open about these treatment facilities. If chemical companies said, `Just trust us - send us your dioxins; we'll clean them up,' the public would be wary.''
The centers denied repeated requests by the Globe for visits, citing privacy rules.
Psychiatrists from Johns Hopkins University and McLean Hospital who have worked with priests at the behest of the church said they believed chuch authorities had made good-faith efforts to enlist the nation's top specialists in the slippery, ever-changing field of treating sexual disorders.
But two weeks ago, psychiatrists at the Institute of Living in Hartford accused church leaders of intentionally disregarding their clinical advice, sometimes with disastrous results. The institute, a secular psychiatric hospital situated on a leafy 35-acre campus, had developed a specialized program for treating clergy, and had been seeing a handful of priests every year.
The two-decade relationship was shaken after New York Cardinal Edward Egan cited the institute's psychiatric reports to justify his decisions to return priests to the ministry, where some reoffended. Top psychiatrists then told reporters at The Hartford Courant that church leaders had used psychiatrists' advice as cover to rush potentially dangerous priests back into ministry.
''I found that they rarely followed our recommendations,'' said Leslie Lothstein, director of clinical psychology at the institute. ''They would put [priests] back into work where they still had access to vulnerable populations.''
Lothstein's comments mark a new chapter in the relationship between the church and psychiatrists. As recently as 1952, the church was so resistant to behavioral sciences that a Vatican official declared it a sin to undergo psychoanalysis. But in treating priests, the church has leaned increasingly on psychiatry, funding six-month stays for priests even as managed care cut psychiatric stays to a week for most Americans.
It has not been a perfect collaboration. In the last few months, critics have blasted church officials for ignoring sexual abuse charges. Some insiders, like Egan, have suggested that part of the blame should be spread to psychiatrists who routinely provided them with independent evaluations.
Seven years ago, Minneapolis psychologist Gary Schoener got a call from a rattled John Roach, archbishop of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Roach asked Schoener to review records the archdiocese had received from the centers that had been treating priests: the St. Luke Institute, the now-defunct House of Affirmation, and the Servants of the Paraclete in New Mexico.
''The archbishop said, `For God's sake, are we getting bad advice?''' Schoener recalled. ''Are they using the wrong tests? Are they misinterpreting them? Is one of the centers better than the others?''
Schoener reported back a few weeks later. He had been impressed by the psychiatric reports, which he said would pass muster in secular hospitals. But he faulted the centers for accepting the church's investigations at face value, for failing to contact victims, and for leaving responsibility for follow-up to the priest's diocese.
In short, the psychiatrists were working for the church. They ''wanted to be liked,'' Schoener said.
''The mindset of these folks was to get him back there, that somehow the guy was fixable,'' said Schoener. ''They are a key part of the mistake.
''It's not that I don't blame the church. I blame them both.''
'We just get an intuition'
The treatment centers had been born in a rush of Christian compassion. On a blustery night during the depths of the Depression, the Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald heard a knock on the back door of his rectory in Brighton and gave food and a coat to a beggar who, as he walked into the dark, turned around and said he, too, was once a priest.
That was the genesis of the Brothers of the Paraclete, a religious order whose mission was to care for troubled priests. In 1947, in New Mexico, Fitzgerald opened a retreat for troubled or alcohol-abusing priests.
Sexual misconduct was not part of the mission then. When Fitzgerald was asked about treating child molesters, he recommended buying a small Caribbean island and isolating them there, said the Rev. Peter Lechner, the current servant general of the Brothers of the Paraclete. By the mid-1960s, though, the Paraclete retreat began welcoming an increasing number of pedophiles and, more commonly, ephebophiles, or adults who are sexually aroused by pubescents, usually males, Lechner said.
Throughout the 1960s, sexual disorders were treated through psychoanalysis, and the Paraclete Center lagged behind even in that. It wasn't until the 1970s that Jemez Springs began to ''approach modern standards,'' Lechner said, with regular therapy and an in-house psychiatrist. In 1976, the Paracletes opened the first treatment center in the world for psychosexual disorders; by 1995, according to a deposition, psychiatrist Jay Feierman had consulted with 1,000 priests about sexual disorders.
......
.....
'They kept the transgressions silent'
Psychiatrists have been mostly silent about the treatment they provided to offenders. Lothstein, from the Institute of Living, would not return phone calls for this article, nor would authorities at St. Luke and the St. John Vianney Center, which is run by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Some psychiatrists have come to the defense of the church. Lechner, head of the Paraclete Center, and Dr. Donna Markham, president of Southdown Institute, both said church leaders have been forthcoming with case histories and compliant with their recommendations.
Others said even specialists may have dispensed bad advice.
''The missing link in this story as I know it is that there have been substantial efforts on the part of the church to deal with some of this through therapeutic channels,'' said Philip Levendusky, a Harvard Medical School associate professor and McLean Hospital psychiatrist who for two years in the late 1990s oversaw an eight-bed residential program for priests with sexual disorders.
''They did go to the top of the ladder. They weren't going to facilities that would put a religious spin on [sexual disorders]. They went to really legitimate assessment facilities.''
Others, though, said the church has manipulated psychiatric expertise.
Sipe treated clergy at Seton Psychiatric Institute and served on the board of St. Luke Institute for two years. He said the earnest efforts of good therapists have fallen on deaf ears for three decades.
''Psychiatry and psychotherapy has been misused by the church in this crisis,'' Sipe said. ''Bishops oftentimes did not give the whole story, but kind of dumped the priests there and just let the psychiatrists `puzzle it out themselves.'
They kept the transgressions silent under the guise of confessional material.''
Then, he said, there were errors of compassion.
''Psychiatrists are kind of hopeful people,'' Sipe said. ''As clinicians and as clergymen, we don't tend to give up on people.''
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 4/3/2002.
Then, he said, there were errors of compassion.
bron, één van de vele artikelen in bishop-accountability.org
Zie de berichtgeving rond overlijden Jan ter Laak. They wanted to be liked.
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