The Gates Of Hell
Swinging Open A Little Wider
Camp Ped: Expansions and Closures
'Double Life' Of Vatican's Gay Priests
...Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities (Rev. 18:2-5).
'Double Life' Of Vatican's Gay Priests
July 24, 2010
'Double Life' Of Vatican's Gay Priests
Paddy Agnew in Rome-The Irish Times
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0724/1224275392905.html
NOT FOR the first time in recent months, an Italian media source yesterday revealed embarrassing details of a flourishing gay “scene” within the Holy See in Rome. Carmelo Abbate, an undercover reporter from weekly news magazine Panorama, provides in its latest issue graphic detail of a month-long series of gay parties and brief encounters in and around the Holy See, featuring openly gay priests. Abbate, who introduced himself into the community thanks to an (unnamed) gay friend, begins his latter-day Decameron with a party in the Testaccio area of Rome.
He and his friend were invited to the party by a French priest, referred to as Fr Paul, whom the friend claims he first met in a sauna. After watching two semi-naked, oiled and muscular gay dancers go through their routine, Fr Paul climbed up on stage for what the reporter calls a session of “Dirty Dancing For Three.” That first night ended with Fr Paul spending the night with Abbate’s friend. The Panorama article is accompanied by clandestine photos allegedly depicting the said Fr Paul in striped boxer shorts in the friend’s bedroom on the morning after.
The article goes on to detail homosexual encounters with two other Rome-based priests, “Carlo” and “Luca,” passionate encounters that are also photographically documented. After sex, Fr Luca, for example, proudly shows off his clerical vestments, walking around the bedroom half-naked. Fr Carlo claims that “98 per cent” of the priests he knows are homosexuals. The reporter’s friend says he knows many priests who frequent gay spots such as the Coming Out bar near the Coliseum. Fr Paul and the friend begin a relationship via affectionate text messages. At one point the priest explains he has “to say Mass this evening at six o’clock but I’ll say a prayer for you, if you like.” At the Testaccio party, a Sardinian claims he has come to Rome just for the party, and asks: “Did you meet Fr Paul when you went to confession?”
There was no official Vatican response to the Panorama article yesterday, but the pope’s man in the diocese of Rome, namely the vicariate of Rome, Cardinal Agostino Vallini, issued a statement condemning the “double life” of certain priests and adding: “Coherence calls for them to come clean. We do not wish them any ill but we cannot accept that because of their behaviour, the honour of all priests is besmirched.” Sergio Rovasio, secretary of the radical group Certain Rights, said: “Finally, a piece of investigative journalism which documents something which anyone who frequents gay spots in Rome knows only too well – namely, there are a lot of priests who attend these places and who have sexual encounters without seeming to be minimally worried by the evident hypocrisy of what they preach by day and what they do by night.” Last March the Vatican was shaken by media reports claiming disgraced papal gentleman Angelo Balducci, now in prison, had been active in a gay prostitution ring which also involved subsequently dismissed Vatican chorister Chinediu Thiomas Ehiem.
Camp Ped: Expansions And Closures
Aug. 15, 2002
By Ron Russell
Los Angeles New Times
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news/2002_08_15_Russell_CampPed.htm
Nestled in a scenic canyon 60 miles north of Albuquerque, next to the ruins of a 17th century Spanish mission, the Father Fitzgerald Center, as the Jemez Springs retreat is formally known, lies secluded among 2,000 acres that have belonged to the Paracletes for more than half a century. The order's founder, Father Gerald Fitzgerald, a former military chaplain, chose the spot in 1947, the year reports of "flying saucers" made the New Mexico town of Roswell famous and, just over the mountains, the U.S. government was settling the secret atomic city of Los Alamos. Fitzgerald's was a noble idea: to provide a refuge for priests having difficulties with their vocations, mainly alcoholics and those suffering from depression who couldn't cope and had nowhere else to go. At its peak in the '70s and '80s more than 1,000 clerics a year spent time there, soaking in its mineral baths and inhaling the clear air for a few weeks or months at a time. Ironically, Fitzgerald had wanted nothing to do with clerical child abusers, holding the view that they were incurable and should be forcibly removed from the priesthood. In 1965, after losing a battle within the order to devote one of the several communal halls at the facility to pedophile treatment, Fitzgerald left in disgust, accepting a new assignment in Italy for the remaining four years of his life.
Amazingly, before the momentous decision to introduce child-abusers at Jemez Springs, officials of the order briefly considered buying a remote Caribbean island where banished pedophile clerics from throughout the United States could be sent. Few Roman Catholics, much less anyone else, knew about the psychosexual treatment offered there. Jemez Springs, along with a handful of smaller treatment facilities in the Northeast and elsewhere, operated in strictest secrecy. For a while, at least, even locals were in the dark. "The retreat used to invite the local kids to come use the pool during the summer," recalls Jay Nelson, 50, of Albuquerque, who spent summers as a child at his family's vacation cabin near Jemez Springs. "They'd tell the parents, "Send them down. We'll watch them.'" Although there was opposition at first, residents who've long relied on the business generated by the retreat, came to tolerate Camp Ped, he says. Once, when a local parish priest, himself a Paraclete, complained to officials that clerics from the treatment center were making eyes at some of his altar boys, "they packed him off to a new assignment immediately," Nelson says.
From the outset, Camp Ped was a disaster. Even Father Peter Lechner, acknowledges that mental-health professionals were ill-equipped in the early years of the retreat to deal with molesters. But its problems went beyond merely the limits of medicine. "They may have had competent outside professionals working with the priests, but there was a disconnect in the way the "patients' wound up being shuffled through there and back into active priesthood," says Schoener, the clinical psychologist. He and others suggest that Camp Ped operated in a kind of netherworld between vacation retreat and treatment center. Considering its dismal track record, as exemplified by scandals involving numerous of its priestly alumni, Mahony and other bishops appear to have sent their bad-boy priests there to get them out of their hair rather than to treat them.
There's no denying the Paracletes' proclivity for giving pedo-priests a clean bill of health, and bishops' propensity for welcoming such priests back and foisting them on unsuspecting parishioners. Take the notorious Father James Porter, for example. A three-time Camp Ped veteran, the Massachusetts native was finally sentenced to prison in the early 1980s after molesting more than 100 boys at parishes in the Northeast, Midwest and Southwest. In 1967, the staff at Jemez Springs saw "real hope" for Porter's rehabilitation and recommended that he be allowed to conduct mass on a trial basis at several churches in New Mexico while receiving treatment. But not long after filling in for a vacationing priest in the town of Truth or Consequences, Porter returned to his old ways, molesting at least six children, including a boy confined to a full-body cast in a hospital.
Ever optimistic, a few months later the staff gave him another probationary assignment, this time in Houston, where he molested more children before he was shipped back to New Mexico. Incredibly, in 1969, Porter was cleared for release from Camp Ped and on the recommendation of the Paracletes was assigned to a parish in Bemidji, Minnesota, where he resumed molesting children. The Minnesota bishop who had agreed to take him had no clue as to his long sordid record when he showed up there. Astonishingly, a letter from the Paracletes, a copy of which was obtained by New Times, simply says that he had suffered a nervous breakdown. "During the throes of his illness he did have some moral problems which were, from all appearances, the result of his illness, something for which he was not responsible. Now, having recovered, he gives every sign of having the former problems under control," the letter says.
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The author of that letter and other glowing reports about Porter and fellow priests who molested during furloughs from Jemez Springs during its early days was Father John B. Feit, who became the superior in charge of the psychosexual treatment program after only two years there. Feit, who had no professional training other than in theology, exemplifies all that was wrong with Camp Ped, not to mention the cynicism—or incompetence—of bishops who sent their priests there. Incredibly, Feit had switched from another religious order to join the Paracletes in 1962, just months after pleading "no contest" to a reduced charge of assault while a priest in Texas. A 20-year-old school teacher had accused him of attempting to sexually assault her as she knelt to pray inside a church in Edinburg, Texas, where he was the pastor, in 1960.
What's more, Feit had been a suspect—although no charges were filed against him—in the murder of a 25-year-old South Texas beauty queen. Three days after she went missing, the woman's partially clad body was found in a drainage ditch near the same Edinburg church, barely a month after the assault on the teacher. Irene Garcia had been raped and suffocated. Garcia's car was found parked at the church, where Feit, who had heard her confession, was the last known person to have seen her alive. "It pains me even now that the person who killed that girl was never brought to justice," retired McAllen, Texas, police officer W.L. "Sonny" Miller, now 70, tells New Times. Miller reviewed the evidence at the request of a now-deceased police chief in the 1970s. Four polygraph tests administered to Feit were "inconclusive," and for lack of physical evidence no charges were brought in the case against anybody, he says.
Garza's clothing and other items remain in an evidence locker at the McAllen Police Department. Miller has pushed in vain to have authorities use DNA testing, which wasn't available at the time of the murder, to revive the investigation. "It's the only right thing to do," he says. Feit, now 69, left the priesthood years ago and works for a Catholic charity in another state. He did not respond to interview requests from New Times, but he told the Brownsville Herald newspaper—which cited the four inconclusive polygraph tests—that he had had nothing to do with the Garcia slaying. He also said he would never have pleaded to the earlier charge if, at the time, he had known what a no-contest plea suggested.
Yet, sadly, the Feit era wasn't an aberration. Camp Ped's track record continued to be the source of tragedy—and the butt of jokes by critics of the bishops' failed rehabilitation model—until it closed in 1994. The case of Father Andrew Christian Anderson of Huntington Beach is typical of the program's failure. In 1986, the popular pastor was convicted of 26 counts of molesting four altar boys. An Orange County superior court judge sentenced him to five years' probation on condition that he complete long-term treatment at Jemez Springs. After the slap-on-the-wrist ruling, Anderson was smothered in hugs from dozens of still-loyal parishioners who had crowded into the courtroom. Mahony protégé John Steinbock, bishop of the Diocese of Orange at the time (and now Fresno's bishop) adopted a wait-and-see attitude, saying he would decide Anderson's future as a priest after the therapy. Anderson went off to Jemez Springs for treatment, followed by six months at a Paraclete halfway house in Albuquerque. In 1990, just two months after leaving the house to live on his own, Anderson was arrested after dragging a 14-year-old boy off a downtown Albuquerque street and molesting him.
Due in no small part to Camp Ped's priestly patients having molested children across New Mexico during furloughs (a practice unchecked since the Porter days), by 1994 the Archdiocese of Santa Fe had become ground zero in an explosion of clerical sex-abuse cases. The archbishop at the time, Robert Sanchez, had appointed a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the Jemez Springs problem, but it was too little, too late. It didn't help that Sanchez became embroiled in a sex scandal in 1993 after at least five women came forward to say they had had affairs with him, including the daughter of a wealthy New Mexico family that had conducted an annual fund-raiser named for Sanchez. Facing nearly 200 lawsuits and more than $50 million in damages, the archdiocese was forced to sell off choice real estate. Even so, it would have likely gone into insolvency if not for help from the national bishops' conference, spearheaded by Mahony, which chipped in some pricey New Mexico property of its own that the archdiocese sold to pay its remaining legal bills.
The lawsuits guaranteed Camp Ped's demise. But Lechner, the head of the Paracletes, acknowledges that psychosexual treatment probably would have been discontinued even if litigation hadn't finished it off. "Jemez Springs became undesirable [as a place to go] for many priests," he laments. "With all the publicity, more and more priests resisted going there for any reason for fear they would be branded as pedophiles." (He refused to say how many of the estimated three-dozen priests being treated at the Paracletes' St. Jean Vianney Renewal Center outside St. Louis have psychosexual problems.)
It's an image that refuses to die. Just last month, Lechner announced that after half a century, the Paracletes will shutter the Jemez Springs retreat entirely in December. But, already, there is speculation that it may end up as a permanent dumping ground for child-molesting priests. Under the watered-down "zero tolerance" policy adopted in June by American bishops—but not yet approved by Rome—abusive clerics are to be removed from "active ministry" but kept on church payrolls. "I really can't comment on whether that will happen," Lechner says. "All I can say is, I hope not."
Expansion
The order expanded to operate a total of 23 facilities at its peak. In the U.S., these included the original center at Jemez Springs, NM as well as facilities in Dittmer, MO and Nevis, MN. In addition, the order opened centers in Italy, England; Scotland, France, Africa, South America, and the Philippines. The Servants of the Paraclete also operated a novitiate in Randolph, VT until 1971. Its current novitiate is located in Jemez Springs, approximately one mile from the mother house.
Later History
The Very Reverend Joseph McNamara, s.P. was elected to succeed Father Gerald as the second Servant General. In 1981, The Very Reverend Michael E. Foley, s.P. was elected to serve as the third Servant General. In 1987, Liam J. Hoare, s.P. was elected as the fourth Servant General.
In the 1990s, after a series of lawsuits related to sexually abusive priests that had been treated at its centers, the order closed most of their centers (due to lawsuits that bankrupted the “church.” They have since consolidated their holistic programs to St. Michael's in St. Louis, MO and to Our Lady of Victory Trust in Gloucestershire, England. In 1998, the Gloucestershire center ended its ministry to priests who had committed sexual abuse. The Servants of the Paraclete also sponsors a long-term residential facility for priests and Brothers at Vianney Renewal Center in Dittmer, Missouri where the primary emphasis is on community living.
Today the Servants of the Paraclete are an international religious community founded by Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald s.P. in 1947 with a specific ministry to serve fellow priests and brothers who are facing particular challenges in their vocations and lives. We are located near St. Louis, Missouri, and continue to offer the St. Michael’s Renewal Program, a carefully integrated program for growth and healing, and Vianney Center, a residential faith community for priests and brothers who wish to live their vocation at its core of prayer and fraternity. http://www.theservants.org/
Rev. Liam Hoare’ s.P., Vianney Residence
Rev. Benedict Livingstone s.P., St. Michael’s Program
Dr. Robert Furey, PhD, Clinical Director
...Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities (Rev. 18:2-5).
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