Catholic Priest Accused of Raping Boy at Gunpoint

Well, this beats all!

by Kilian Melloy
Monday Apr 12, 2010

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A Texas priest is accused of forcing a teen boy into sex at gunpoint, reported local newspaper The San Antonio Express-News on April 9.
Fr. John M. Fiala was a parish priest in Rocksprings, a community in the San Antonio area, when he allegedly subjected a teenager in his parish to repeated episodes of sexual abuse, according to a suit that has been brought against outgoing Archbishop José Gomez, who is accused of covering up the abuse. Gomez is slated to assume the position of Archbishop of Los Angeles as of May, the paper reported.

In a statement, Gomez, who has been the Archbishop in San Antonio for five years, said that no sex abuse allegations had been raised on his watch. Officially, the police only heard an "interference with child custody" complaint against Fiala. But the suit alleges that Fiala abused the boy over the course of eight months in 2008, and says that in some instances Fiala bribed the boy, now 18, with gifts--including a car--while in other cases he assaulted the youth at gunpoint. The abuse allegedly took place frequently, up to twice per month. The suit also alleges that Fiala made threats against the youth and his family in an attempt to keep him quiet.

According to the article, the young man’s mother had grown suspicious and reported to the Archdiocese on numerous occasions that she thought her son was being abused by Fiala. She was allegedly told to go to the police. Gomez, meantime, removed Fiala from his duties in October of 2008, according to the Archbishop’s statement. Gomez also said that he alerted the parishes at which Fiala had previously been posted. But the archdiocese did not act on any reported sexual misconduct; rather, it was the complaint of "interference with child custody" that triggered the archdiocese’s actions, the article said.

Head administrator for the archdiocese Fr. Martin Leopold cited policies that have been put into place since the start of the global pedophile priest scandal, saying, "In the last five years, we’re blessed to not have had any allegations of new abuse."

"Bishops are so quick to say that they have made changes," the president of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), David Clohessy, said. "And the ones to pay the price are the young victims." Clohessy said that the case mirrored other cases in which bishops allegedly knew of perpetrator priests, but covered up their activities.

Fiala’s whereabouts are unknown, but he’s thought to be living in Nebraska, his home state, the article said. During his career, Fiala has been posted to parishes in several states, noted the article. The young man’s lawyer, Tom Rhodes, said that was "a pretty good red flag" that church officials may have known of instances of abuse perpetrated by Fiala and worked to cover them up by shuffling him from assignment to assignment.

"One of the issues in this case is he had numerous transfers and periods of no assignments at all," said Rhodes.


Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.

Let The Sun Shine In......

A minute of news, in case you missed it.

Submitted by meg on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 9:00am.

• Barbara's Daily Buzz

BARBARA'S DAILY BUZZFLASH MINUTE


Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Repuglicans, every last mother's son of them:
George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent': 

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq

They aided and abetted terrorism by incarcerating innocent men, by torturing innocent men and giving innocent men reason to want retaliation. I say yes, I want my country back, back from the Repuglicans who stole the very essence of America, they stole everything this country stands for: truth, justice, and the rule of law!

This of course adds credence to that supposed "conspiracy theory" that Iraq was the key to their plan for world domination. History will prove Richard Nixon was but a passing irritation when compared to Bush/Cheney and the rest of the gang of Repuglicans!  

To all those crazy Repuglicans who supported every Bush/Cheney move, including torture and abuse, and who want America to fail today, all those just-say-NO sons of treason, I say: Go to hell, where you belong. Do your damage elsewhere because I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!

---

And now you know how and why pedophilia runs rampant and is ignored in the Catholic Church, all because the 13 year old altar boys wanted it:

"There are 13 year old adolescents who are under age and who are perfectly in agreement with, and what’s more wanting it, and if you are careless they will even provoke you."

...That's Spanish Bishop Bernando Alvarez coming to the defense of Catholic priests who've raped children — but they only raped the slutty ones, the ones who wanted it, so it's all good.

Blaming the victim is not going to absolve the sins of priests, bishops, cardinals and popes, neither those who raped the children, nor those who covered it up.

---

This is what has happened in Cardinal Ratzinger now Pope Benedict's Catholic Church:

Church Secrets: Abusive Memphis priest reassigned rather than reined in: A troubled traveler, keeper of the faith had secretive past...

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At least one CNN host isn't cuddling up to the tea-bagger right-wing nuts:

Sarah Palin takes a break from shooting wolves to appear at Michele Bachmann rally. You know, you have to love these two. They`re like the Lucy and Ethel of the lunatic fringe.

 Hooray for Joy Behar, a sensitive woman with truly discerning taste!

---

Proof positive mainstream corporate media is not -- I repeat: is not liberal -- from the Washington Post:

Two Republican stars -- Palin and Bachmann -- align for first time

Er, I'd hardly call them "stars." More like meteorites that will destroy this earth if they ever connect! Do we really want to go the way of the dinosaurs so many years ago, do we really want extinction, do we really want the Armageddon these two "lunatic fringe" seek so fervently?

BARBARA'S DAILY BUZZFLASH MINUTE

Let The Sun Shine In......

Should There Be an Inquisition for the Pope?

 Is The Roman Catholic Church an arm of the Republican party? They certainly have the same play-book. Spin , spin, spin, no matter how unholy the crime.

 

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It doesn’t seem right that the Catholic Church is spending Holy Week practicing the unholy art of spin.

Complete with crown-of-thorns imagery, the church has started an Easter public relations blitz defending a pope who went along with the perverse culture of protecting molesters and the church’s reputation rather than abused — and sometimes disabled and disadvantaged — children.

The church gave up its credibility for Lent. Holy Thursday and Good Friday are now becoming Cover-Up Thursday and Blame-Others Friday.

This week of special confessions and penance services is unfolding as the pope resists pressure from Catholics around the globe for his own confession and penance about the cascade of child sexual abuse cases that were ignored, even by a German diocese and Vatican office he ran.

If church fund-raising and contributions dry up, Benedict’s P.R. handlers may yet have to stage a photo-op where he steps out of the priest’s side of the confessional and enters the side where the rest of his fallible flock goes.

Or maybe 30-second spots defending the pope with Benedict’s voice intoning at the end: “I am infallible, and I approve this message.”

Canon 1404 states that “The First See is judged by no one.” But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as my dad used to say. Somebody has to tell the First See when it’s blind — and mute — to deaf children in America and Italy.

The Vatican is surprised to find itself in this sort of trouble. Officials there could have easily known what was going on all along; archbishops visiting Rome gossip like a sewing circle. The cynical Vatican just didn’t want to deal with it.

And now the church continues to hide behind its mystique. Putting down the catechism, it picked up the Washington P.R. handbook for political sins.

First: Declare any new revelation old and unimportant.  

(Child sexual abuse is never old news to the victim.)

At Palm Sunday Mass at St. Patrick’s, Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York bemoaned that the “recent tidal wave of headlines about abuse of minors by some few priests, this time in Ireland, Germany, and a re-run of an old story from Wisconsin, has knocked us to our knees once again.”

A few priests? At this point, it feels like an international battalion.

A re-run of an old story? So sorry to remind you, Archbishop, that one priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who showed no remorse and suffered no punishment from “Rottweiler” Ratzinger, abused as many as 200 deaf children in Wisconsin.

Archbishop Dolan compared the pope to Jesus, saying he was “now suffering some of the same unjust accusations, shouts of the mob, and scourging at the pillar,” and “being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo.”

Second: Blame somebody else — even if it’s this pope’s popular predecessor, on the fast track to sainthood.

Vienna’s Cardinal Christoph Schönborn defended Pope Benedict this week, saying that then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s attempt in 1995 to investigate the former archbishop of Vienna for allegedly molesting youths in a monastery was barred by advisers close to Pope John Paul II.

Third: Say black is white.

In his blog, Archbishop Dolan blasted church critics while stating: “The Church needs criticism; we want it; we welcome it; we do a good bit of it ourselves,” adding: “We do not expect any special treatment. ...so bring it on.” Right.

Fourth: Demonize gays, as Karl Rove did in 2004.

In an ad in The Times on Tuesday, Bill Donohue, the Catholic League president, offered this illumination: “The Times continues to editorialize about the ‘pedophilia crisis,’ when all along it’s been a homosexual crisis. Eighty percent of the victims of priestly sexual abuse are male and most of them are post-pubescent. While homosexuality does not cause predatory behavior, and most gay priests are not molesters, most of the molesters have been gay.”

Donohue is still talking about the problem as an indiscretion rather than a crime. If it mostly involves men and boys, that’s partly because priests for many years had unquestioned access to boys.

Fifth: Blame the victims.

“Fr. Lawrence Murphy apparently began his predatory behavior in Wisconsin in the 1950s,” Donohue protested, “yet the victims’ families never contacted the police until the mid-1970s.”

Sixth: Throw gorilla dust.

Donohue asserts that “the common response of all organizations, secular as well as religious,” to abuse cases “was to access therapy and reinstate the patient.” Really? Where in heaven’s name does that information come from? It’s absurd.

And finally, seventh: Use the Cheney omnipotence defense, most famously employed in the Valerie Plame case. Vice President Cheney claimed that his lofty position meant that the very act of spilling a secret, even with dastardly intent, declassified it.

Vatican lawyers will argue in negligence cases brought by abuse victims that the pope has immunity as a head of state and that bishops who allowed an abuse culture, endlessly recirculating like dirty fountain water, were not Vatican employees.

Maybe they worked for Enron.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Let The Sun Shine In......