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April 2, 2002
Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah
Steve
Perry
Let's
Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer
April 1, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action
Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out
Molly
Secours
Tennessee's
Kangaroo Court
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
March 24/30, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
The Year
of the Yellow Notepad:
Plagiarism and History
Rep. Ron Paul
Slavery and the Draft
Fidel
Castro
A
Better World is Possible
Edward Said
What Price Oslo?
José
Saramago
Justice
and Democracy Denied
Azmi Bishara
Talking to Tanks
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Clearcutting
Montana
Alexander Cockburn
50 Years of James Bond
Wilhelm
Reich
Gethsemane
Claud Cockburn
The Horror of It All
Dave Marsh
What's
Playing at My Houe
David Vest
Remembering Tammy Wynette
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Waylon
Jennings:
an Honest Outlaw
March 23, 2002
Mokhiber/Weissman
A
Corporate Lawyer
Speaks Out
Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy
Brian
J. Foley
Does
Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?
Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire
James
Packard Winkler
Occupation
and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel
M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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April 2, 2002
American Journal
The Sins of the Church
By Alexander Cockburn
The ripe tones of Archbishop Mahoney of Los Angeles
filled my house last week, courtesy of National Public Radio.
Mahoney spoke of his horror, his shame at the stories of priest
abuse. He apologized to the victims. The mellifluous sanctimony
of his penitence filled the room with such extreme unction that
I burst out laughing. What a surprise it all is! Priests hitting
on altar boys! Priests molesting children. We're shocked, shocked!
"Rum, sodomy and the lash"
was Winston Churchill's famous itemization of the finest traditions
of the British navy. With the Church we can maybe exclude the
rum and, for the lash, substitute contrition and forgiveness.
When Oscar Wilde was packed off to Reading
Jail in 1895 for sodomy, the railway trains to Brighton and Dover
were soon replete with panicked gays fleeing England to Paris.
Hundreds of Catholic priests here, many of them in retirement,
must be asking themselves whether it might be prudent to remove
themselves from the jurisdiction until the heat dies down.
It was bound to happen. Five years ago
a senior dignitary in the Roman Catholic hierarchy confided that
over the previous decade the Church had paid out over a billion
dollars in out-of-court settlements as well as court fights on
priest abuse cases.
On the old way of doing business someone
molested by a priest 20 years earlier would read of a big settlement
and contact an attorney with experience in the field. In the
Bay Area it's been Michael Meadows. Then, if the case looked
as though it had merit, Meadows would push forward, and sooner
or later be in communication with the Church's lawyers who would
either settle out of court for some hefty sum in the high hundreds
of thousands or low millions. Or the Church would fight it, and
often go down in court. The Church would pay the legal bills,
and the Church would keep the priests on the payroll.
So now the Church is cutting the priests
lose, because it can't afford the money drain. Of course the
Church will still face suits from people molested by priests,
but they won't fight the cases and they won't keep them on the
payroll. Big savings right there.
Anyone with any knowledge of these cases
knows perfectly well that this is no matter of a few rotten apples
in the barrel.
Sometimes, hearing about one priestly molester after another
one has the impression that not only has the Catholic church
has been the prime sanctuary for repressed gays for the past
several hundred years but that there isn't a priest alive that
hasn't at some point made advances to a altarboy or boy scout.
At least in the Middle Ages they got off with the nuns, or in
the nineteenth century when they could afford domestics, the
maid.
And certainly the Church has protected
these priests, moved them around the country, away from an area
where their activities had become known. The Church has some
very dingy closets to clean out.
That being said, the witch-hunt atmosphere
is very disagreeable and getting worse. Years of prison time
seems out of line with what the Boston priest actually did. The
same NPR program featuring Mahoney had the story of two priests
in northern Maine, driven from their parishes by the diocese,
against the desires of the congregation, who knew their pasts,
felt comfortable with them.
But on some sexual matters Americans
are unforgiving, demanding that people convicted of violent sexual
crimes stay behind bars not just for ten or fifteen or twenty
years, but for ever. The same society sends young non-violent
offenders off to prison where the near-to-absolute certainty
is that they will be raped, and many of them thus rendered into
psychopathic time- bombs.
The church protected its priests. The
state of California, the governor, the prison union, and we the
people in the form of the jury, stood by the prison staff at
Corcoran responsible for conditions under which a man was put
in a cell with a violent convict who raped him repeatedly over
a period of two days. The society that has designed our gulag
rape factories shouldn't get on too much of a moral high horse
about the Catholic Church's moral delinquencies.
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