Protect The Guilty Now, Pay At Leisure Later
by Thomas A. Droleskey
Monsignor William T. Lynn, who was found guilty on June 22, 2012, by a jury in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of endangering children for his role in seeking to protect clerical abusers, was sentenced on July 25, 2012, to three to six years in prison, receiving a stern reprimand from from the judge who pronounced the sentence, Judge M. Teresa Sarmina:
“You knew full well what was right, Monsignor Lynn, but you chose
wrong,” Judge M. Teresa Sarmina of Common Pleas Court said as she
imposed the sentence, which was just short of the maximum of three and a
half to seven years. Monsignor Lynn must serve at least three years
before he is eligible for parole.
Monsignor Lynn, 61, was found guilty on June 22 of child endangerment
after a three-month trial that revealed efforts over decades by the Philadelphia archdiocese to play down accusations of child sexual abuse and avoid scandal. He
was acquitted of conspiracy and a second child endangerment charge.
Monsignor Lynn served as secretary for clergy for the 1.5 million-member
archdiocese from 1992 to 2004, recommending priest assignments and
investigating abuse complaints. During the trial, prosecutors presented
evidence that he had shielded predatory priests, sometimes transferring
them to unwary parishes, and lied to the public to avoid bad publicity
and lawsuits.
The conviction of a senior official, followed by a prison sentence, has
reverberated among Catholic officials around the country, church experts
said.
“I think this is going to send a very strong signal to every bishop and
everybody who worked for a bishop that if they don’t do the right thing,
they may go to jail”
said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock
Theological Center at Georgetown University. “They can’t just say ‘the
bishop made me do it.’ That’s not going to be an excuse that holds up in
court.”
In a three-minute statement before sentencing, Monsignor Lynn, dressed
in a black clerical shirt and white collar, said: “I have been a priest
for 36 years, and I have done the best I can. I have always tried to
help people.”
Turning toward relatives of an abuse victim in the courtroom, he said, “I hope someday that you will accept my apology.”
But he did not comment on the broader accusations that he put children
at risk by repeatedly protecting “monsters in clerical garb,” as Judge
Sarmina described it at the hearing.
The sentence was a victory for the Philadelphia district attorney, R.
Seth Williams, who said outside the courtroom, “Many people say that the
maximum still would not have been enough.”
Monsignor Lynn’s lawyer, Thomas Bergstrom, called the sentence
“unbalanced.” Last week, the defense argued that a long prison sentence
would be “merely cruel and unusual.”
Prosecutors argued that the gravity of Monsignor Lynn’s crime — giving
known sexual predators continued access to children, causing lifelong
anguish and damage to some — was “off the charts.”
Monsignor Lynn’s lawyers said they would appeal the conviction, saying that the child endangerment law at the time did not apply to supervisors and that the judge erred in allowing testimony about
accusations that were beyond the statute of limitations.
In a statement Tuesday,
the Archdiocese of Philadelphia said that its procedures for protecting
children had improved significantly since “the events some 10 years ago
that were at the center of this trial.”
It acknowledged “legitimate anger in the broad community toward any
incident or enabling of sexual abuse.” But it also described the
sentence as overly harsh, saying “fair-minded people will question the
severity.” (Philadelphia Church Official Is Sentenced to 3 to 6 Years in Prison.)
Overly harsh? Not really.
Overly harsh?
No, the apostates who serve as "bishops" and their chancery factotums in the counterfeit church of conciliarism have skated while they indemnified known clerical abusers and sought to demonize and persecute their victims, using various methods of personal and legal intimidation to protect the "institution" and their nonexistent "reputations" while offending God daily by staging the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service and by promoting false ecumenism and the other falsehoods of the "Second" Vatican Council. Although Monsignor Lynn was carrying out the instructions given him by the late Anthony "Cardinal" Bevilacqua, who was
Anthony "Cardinal" Bevilacqua, he stood guilty before God long before he was convicted in Common Pleas Court in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, thirty-nine days ago now. He could have refused to obey Bevilacqua, who continued the policies of his own predecessor, John "Cardinal" Krol, who served as the "king maker" at the conclave that chose Karol "Cardinal" Wojtyla as the third head of the counterfeit church of conciliarism on Monday, October 16, 1978, and who was the conciliar archbishop of Philadelphia from February 11, 1961, to February 11, 1987. Monsignor Lynn chose not to do so. He chose to play the old clericalist game of protecting the guilty while seeking to punish and demonize innocent victims.
Overly harsh?
Countless numbers of souls have been lost to the Catholic Faith as a result of these scandals. Countless more souls have been lost to the Catholic Faith because of the hard feelings engendered by one cover-up after another and by thuggish methods of intimidation that would make a member of a Mafioso crime family blush with shame. One of those involved in the Philadelphia cover-up was an auxiliary "bishop" named Joseph Cistone, who tried to silence a nun who was seeking to warn parishioners in a conciliar parish about a clerical abuser Cistone sought to protect. Cistone's role in this was recounted in a 2005 grand jury report. Despite his very public role as an "enforcer" of silence about known predators who had in the past and would in the future abuse unsuspecting Catholics, Cistone was appointed on May 20, 2009, as the "bishop" of Saginaw, Michigan, by a man who has dirtied his own priestly hands directly in the cover-up and protection of clerical abusers, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the great "restorer of Tradition," you understand.
Overly harsh?
How many victims of clerical abusers, having lost the Faith and, without access to true priests to guide them or true sacraments to sanctify them, have committed suicide as a result of being abused bodily and spiritually by predators and then suffering victimization at the hands of clerical thugs? The epidemic of suicides as international in scope as the scandals themselves. Indeed, one man, forty-five years of age, in New South Wales, Australia, took his own life just this past week after being in "too much pain" to deal with the horror of what had happened to him (see John Pirona's body found, victim of pedophile presbyter).
Overly harsh?
Protect the guilty now pay at leisure later.
Countless articles (see, among many others, Of Worldwide Scope, Always Evading Root Causes, Swinging Clubs To Protect The Club, Surely He Jests, "Canonizing" A Man Who Protected Moral Derelicts, More Than A Matter of Legality, Audio Presentation: Scandal In a Church of Apostasy.WMA, "Fall Guys" Aren't Usually "Stand-Up Guys", Apologizing to Everyone Save For God Himself, Not Going Down With the Conciliar Ship, Touchy, Touchy, Chastisements Under Which We Must Save Our Souls, part two, Not So "Deplorable" After All, and Future Home of the "Reform of the Reform", Ratzinger's Revolution Unravels, part two, Nearly A Decade After Law Was Broken) on this site have recounted the sordid history of how conciliar officials around the world, starting in the Vatican itself, have indemnified known abusers and fostered an atmosphere conducive to the recruitment, promotion and protection of those inclined to the commission of perverse sins against nature, which is in and of itself a disqualification for holy orders, leaving aside for present purposes the fact that there are no true holy orders in the counterfeit church of conciliarism. Conciliar official after conciliar official has accepted an "orientation" in the direction of perversity as a legitimate basis of human self-identification and thus of a "group" within what they think is the Catholic Church to which great "sensitivity" must be shown. This "sensitivity" has been fostered in any number of ways, starting with the effeminacy of many conciliar Divine Justice upon those who remain unrepentant in their sins.
One of those who has fostered "sensitivity" to the "gay community" is the newly appointed "archbishop" of San Francisco, Salvatore Cordileone, who has been the conciliar "bishop" of Oakland, California, since May 5, 2009. Despite the great praise "Bishop" Cordileone has gotten from some quarters because he has staged the modernized version of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition on a few occasions, the truth is that Salvatore Cordileone is an apostate who believes in one conciliar falsehood after another, a man who has undermined and assaulted the innocence and purity of children by means of his approval of classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandment, a man who said not a word when his diocesan newspaper printed a promotion and an advertisement in behalf of a book written by a well-known apologist for the "homosexual collective," "Father" James A. Schexnayder. Mrs. Randy Engel tried to set the record straight on a "conservative" website that goes bananas every time an alleged "hard liner" is appointed to take the place of an "ultra-progressive" such as the now retired conciliar "ordinary" of San Francisco, George "I love Brokeback Mountain" Niederauer:
On September 5, 2011, the Diocese of Oakland's official
newspaper The Catholic Voice carried a promotion and ad for homosexual
Father James A. Schexnayder's new book Setting the Table: Preparing Catholic
Parishes to Welcome Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People and Their
Families.* The staff report titled "New book aids parishes in
ministering to gays," stated that "The book manuscript was read by
Bishop Salvator J. Cordileone, who made suggestions which Father Schexnayder
followed." As I pointed out in my book review of "Setting the
Table," for Catholic Family News (Nov. 2011), the book is, in fact,
a handbook and guide for the "queering of Catholic parishes" written
by a "gay"priest/activist in good standing with the Diocese of
Oakland, California, under at least three consecutive bishops, John S. Cummins,
Allen H. Vigneron, and Bishop Cordileone.** The language of the text is
"gayspeak." When it comes to promoting the ideology of the Homosexual
Collective, the author unabashedly adheres to the strict party line. There is
even a promotion of the Stonewall Inn riots of June 1969. The question that
Catholics should ask themselves is not "How can Bishop Cordileone be so
clueless when it comes to understanding and opposing the Homosexual Collective?"
but rather, "Does any bishop have the RIGHT to be as clueless as the
bishop obviously is regarding the dangers of sodomites and other sexual
perverts to State and Church and still put himself forward as a leader
and defender of his new San Francisco flock which has been under siege by the
Homosexual Collective for many decades now?" Randy Engel, author, The Rite
of Sodomy. *Setting the Table, $15 including mailing. Order from CALGM, 1798 Scenic Ave., Berkeley,
CA 94709. ** Book review reprinted by Renew America at http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/engel/111217 ).
The clueless types who never learn that they are Still Hunkered Down In Mindanao (And In The Wrong Church) keep deluding themselves into thinking that what they think is the Catholic Church is going to be restored by men such as Salvatore Cordileone.
Alas, men who offend God by staging the Protestant and Masonic Novus Ordo service are the problem, not the solution.
Men who offend God by promoting false ecumenism and by participation in "inter-religious" "prayer" services are the problem, not the solution.
Men who offend God by promoting the heresy of religious liberty as the foundation to oppose perverse conceptions of marriage under cover of the civil law and the "contraception" health insurance mandate of Barack Hussein Obama are the problem, not the solution.
Men who deny the very nature of God by embracing a concept of dogmatic truth under a new slogan, "the hermeneutic of continuity," that has been anathematized solemnly and condemned by at least three true popes (Popes Pius IX, Saint Pius X and Pius XII) are the problem, not the solution.
Men who permit any kind of classroom instruction in matters pertaining to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments are the problem, not the solution.
Men who believe that those who lend legitimacy to human self-identification on the basis of an inclination to and/or persistence in perverse sins against nature are the problem, not the solution.
And those clueless cheerleaders in the ranks of "conservatives" and traditionally-minded Catholics in the conciliar structures (and, yes, I was one of them for far, far too long) will discover that they will have to pay a terrible price later for their promoting men who actually enemies of the Divine Redeemer's Deposit of Faith and His Social Kingship over men and their nations and thus mortal threats to the souls of those who believe them to be what they are not, officials of the Catholic Church.
Then again, of course, God is merciful. He knows that those who keep believing that the next "papal" appointment is going to "solve" a problem that stems from the falsehoods of conciliarism itself do not have access to the wellsprings of Sanctifying Grace as they are not served, at least for the most part, by truly ordained priests and thus do not have true Masses at which to worship God and to have the scales covering their eyes removed once and for all.
It is not enough for a putative "bishop" to be "pro-life" and to show up once a month leading Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary in front of an American killing center.
It is not enough for a putative 'bishop" to show his "affinity" for the modernized version of the Immemorial Mass of Tradition.
One who believes himself to be a true and valid Successor of the Apostles must adhere to the totality of the Catholic Faith as It has been received from the Divine Redeemer Himself and taught by Holy Mother Church from time immemorial without any alteration or shadow of change without any exception, deviation or reservation whatsoever Those who do deviate from the Faith in just one thing, no less many things, are not Catholic and it is offensive to pious ears to hear such men described as "worthy" "bishops" as they are nothing other than wolves in shepherds' clothing.
God alone knows the subjective state of souls. Granted. It is far past time, however, for wishful thinkers in the conciliar structures to recognize that those who fall from the Catholic Faith in one thing fall from It in Its entirely and that they must flee from such false shepherds while praying for their conversion to Catholicism.
The spiritual robber barons of concilairism have promoted and enabled grievous sins that offend God and deceive souls, leaving many in states of error, if not worse, until the point of their deaths.
