Betrayal Quotes

“Church paid more than $3 billion to settle abuse complaints between 1950 and 2015. In Boston, the archdiocese paid $154 million to settle with 1,230 victims from 2002 through June 30, 2014, the most recent figures available. Between 2004 and 2015, twelve dioceses nationwide filed for bankruptcy protection.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“Many pointed out that celibacy, although valued from the earliest days of Christianity and first mandated in the fourth century, was widely enforced only starting in the twelfth century. Defenders of celibacy have described it as a gift, a charism, a witness to sanctity. But critics have noted that celibacy was legislated to avoid the problem of Church property being passed along from a priest to his children.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“I’ll never forget when I was a vocation director, and a college student asked me, ‘What do you do when you get an urge?’ as if no one else would control it but a priest,” Burns said. “Everyone is called to holiness, particularly in their sexual life. How do we manage our sexual desires? By being people of integrity, with respect for other people’s sexuality, and for our own sexuality. Celibacy is a gift we give, in order to live out a service of life for others. It is a call from God. We are meant to be celibate men, working to build a Kingdom, here and now.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“You were taught that even when the charism of celibacy and chastity is present and embraced, the attractions, the impulses, the desires will still be present. So the first thing you need to do is be aware that you are a human being, and no matter how saintly or holy you are, you will never remove yourself from those passions. But the idea was making prudent choices. You just walk away. Celibacy is a radical call, and you’ve made a decision not to act on your desire.” Today, seminaries say they screen applicants rigorously. In Boston, for example, a young man must begin conversations with the vocations director a year before applying for admissions, and then the application process takes at least four months. Most seminaries require that applicants be celibate for as long as five years before starting the program, just to test out the practice, and students are expected to remain celibate throughout seminary as they continue to discern whether they are cut out to lead the sexless life of an ordained priest. Some seminaries screen out applicants who say they are sexually attracted to other men, but most do not, arguing that there is no evidence linking sexual orientation to one’s ability to lead a celibate life. The seminaries attempt to weed out potential child abusers, running federal and local criminal background checks, but there is currently no psychological test that can accurately predict whether a man who has never sexually abused a child is likely to do so in the future. So seminary officials say that in the screening process, and throughout seminary training, they are alert to any sign that a man is not forming normal relationships with adults, or seems abnormally interested in children. Many potential applicants are turned away from seminaries, and every year some students are forced out. “Just because there’s a shortage doesn’t mean we should lessen our standards,” said Rev. Edward J. Burns,”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“What you did to us—and to me specifically—was wrong, and you had no right to do that.’” The priest stared unblinkingly into Blanchette’s eyes, waiting but unprepared for what came next. “‘Having said that, it brings me to the real reason I’ve come here. The real reason I’ve come here is to ask you to forgive me for the hatred and resentment that I have felt toward you for the last twenty-five years.’ When I said that, he stood up, and in what I would describe as a demonic voice, he said, ‘Why are you asking me to forgive you?’ And through tears I said, ‘Because the Bible tells me to love my enemies and to pray for those who persecute me.’” Blanchette said Birmingham collapsed as if he’d been punched in the chest. The priest dissolved into tears, and soon Blanchette too was crying. Blanchette began to take his leave but asked Birmingham if he could visit again. The priest explained that he was under tight restrictions at the rectory. He said he had been to a residential treatment center in Connecticut, and he returned there once a month. He was not allowed to leave the grounds except in the company of an adult. Blanchette would not see the priest again until Tuesday, April 18, 1989, just hours before his death. Blanchette found his molester at Symmes Hospital in Arlington and discovered the priest—once robust and 215 pounds—was now an eighty-pound skeleton with skin. Morphine dripped into an IV in his arm. Oxygen was fed by a tube into his nostrils. His hair had been claimed by chemotherapy. The priest sat in a padded chair by his bed. His breathing was labored. “I knelt down next to him and held his hand and began to pray. And as I did, he opened his eyes. I said, ‘Father Birmingham, it’s Tommy Blanchette from Sudbury.’” He greeted Blanchette with a raspy and barely audible, “Hi. How are ya?” “I said, ‘Is it all right if I pray for you?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I began to pray, ‘Dear Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, I ask you to heal Father Birmingham’s body, mind, and soul.’ I put my hand over his heart and said, ‘Father, forgive him all his sins.’” Blanchette helped Birmingham into bed. It was about 10 P.M. He died the next morning.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“As the scandal spread and gained momentum, Cardinal Law found himself on the cover of Newsweek, and the Church in crisis became grist for the echo chamber of talk radio and all-news cable stations. The image of TV reporters doing live shots from outside klieg-lit churches and rectories became a staple of the eleven o’clock news. Confidentiality deals, designed to contain the Church’s scandal and maintain privacy for embarrassed victims, began to evaporate as those who had been attacked learned that the priests who had assaulted them had been put in positions where they could attack others too. There were stories about clergy sex abuse in virtually every state in the Union. The scandal reached Ireland, Mexico, Austria, France, Chile, Australia, and Poland, the homeland of the Pope. A poll done for the Washington Post, ABC News, and Beliefnet.com showed that a growing majority of Catholics were critical of the way their Church was handling the crisis. Seven in ten called it a major problem that demanded immediate attention. Hidden for so long, the financial price of the Church’s negligence was astonishing. At least two dioceses said they had been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy after being abandoned by their insurance companies. In the past twenty years, according to some estimates, the cost to pay legal settlements to those victimized by the clergy was as much as $1.3 billion. Now the meter was running faster. Hundreds of people with fresh charges of abuse began to contact lawyers. By April 2002, Cardinal Law was under siege and in seclusion in his mansion in Boston, where he was heckled by protesters, satirized by cartoonists, lampooned by late-night comics, and marginalized by a wide majority of his congregation that simply wanted him out. In mid-April, Law secretly flew to Rome, where he discussed resigning with the Pope.”
― The Investigative Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis In the Catholic Church: The Findings of the Investigation That Inspired the Major Motion Picture Spotlight

“That betrayal may not be a chargeable offense in a court of law. But there is no statute of limitations on its impact. And there should be no forgetting.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“But after Cardinal J. Francis Stafford, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Laity, told the New York Times that he expected celibacy to be discussed at the gathering of U.S. cardinals in Rome, the Pope quickly shot down that possibility. “The value of celibacy as a complete gift of self to the Lord and his Church must be carefully safeguarded,” the Pope told a group of visiting Nigerian bishops.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“the proscription against married Roman Catholic priests is not doctrinal and could be changed if a pope were so inclined. “I have no problems with celibacy withering away,” said Archbishop Keith O’Brien, president of the Scottish Bishops’ Conference. “There is no theological problem with it ending. The loss of celibacy would give liberty to priests to exercise their God-given gift of love and sex rather than feeling they must be celibate all their lives.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“priestly requirement for celibacy—a life without sexual activity of any kind, including masturbation—is not an ancillary part of the job. “The message pretty much is that celibacy is an absolute requirement,” said King. “Everyone has urges. Married people have the same struggles fundamentally. They get to have sex, but they don’t get to have sex with everybody else and still be faithful to their commitment. There isn’t a person alive who isn’t a sexual human being. But we have to manage it in healthy ways. In many ways, married people struggle with this as much as we do. Celibacy is a gift, but it’s not something that most people are cut out for.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“Some raised a more practical concern, arguing that if Rome really wanted to empty seminaries of gay men—a proposal under consideration at the Vatican—it would face more empty rectories and more barren altars. Some Church experts estimate that from 30 percent to fully one half of the forty-five thousand U.S. priests are gay. “If they were to eliminate all those who were homosexually oriented, the number would be so staggering that it would be like an atomic bomb. It would do the same damage to the Church’s operation,” Sipe said. “And it’s very much against the tradition of the Church. Many saints had a gay orientation. And many popes had gay orientations. Discriminating against orientation is not going to solve the problem.” But the issue was now on the table. At the Vatican meeting, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Illinois, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told reporters that he was concerned about the increasing number of gays in the priesthood. “One of the difficulties we do face in seminary life or recruitment is when there does exist a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexual men think twice” about joining the priesthood for fear that they’ll be harassed. “It is an ongoing struggle. It is most importantly a struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men [and] that the candidates that we receive are healthy in every possible way—psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.” And Cardinal Adam J. Maida of Detroit argued that clergy sexual abuse is “not truly a pedophilia-type problem but a homosexual-type problem.… We have to look at this homosexual element as it exists, to what extent it is operative in our seminaries and our priesthood and how to address it.” Bishops need to “cope with and address” the extent of a homosexual presence in Catholic seminaries, he said. Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua of Philadelphia said he wouldn’t let gay men become priests. “We feel that a person who is homosexually oriented is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood even if he has never committed any homosexual act,” he said.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“Sipe called the priesthood a “homosocial culture. All the values within the culture are male, and the reason there has been such a tolerance across the board of sexual activity by priests or bishops is that there is a boys-will-be-boys atmosphere. It’s kind of a spiritual fraternity—like a college fraternity, but with a spiritual aura around it.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“Irish and Italian kids were taught in Catholic schools that the Jews killed Jesus Christ. Such teachings encouraged anti-Semitism. Gangs of Catholic boys would seek revenge on Jewish kids.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“Medeiros managed to alienate the heart of the archdiocese, the mostly Irish and Italian working class of Boston, by ordering that any student suspected of being part of the “white flight” to avoid court-ordered desegregation of the city’s public schools was not to be allowed into Catholic schools. Medeiros’s directive was largely ignored. The archdiocese’s schools swelled in numbers, and many Boston Catholics swelled in resentment, seeing Medeiros as unfairly judging them as racist when many simply wanted to avoid the chaos of busing that no one in the wealthy suburbs had to endure. Thomas”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“When Italians and then Poles and other Eastern Europeans followed the Irish, they became part of an American Catholic Church that was, in essence, an Irish church. As Boston Globe reporter Maureen Dezell noted in her book Irish America: Coming into Clover, 90 percent of men enrolled in American seminaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century had Irish names, while by 1900 three quarters of the American Catholic hierarchy was Irish. (Even by the 1990s, when Hispanics emerged as the biggest ethnic group in the American Catholic Church, and the Irish made up only 15 percent of the laity, a third of the priests and half of the American bishops were of Irish descent.)”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“But with assimilation, with the educational and financial success of successive generations, the average Catholic’s need of the Church is not social or political, it’s moral and spiritual.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“There’s no Martin Luther here,” he said, “and whether the Vatican pays attention, who knows?” It wouldn’t be easy. “We’re dealing with a medieval organization, an organization that represented authority to my grandparents and other immigrants. It was an organization that was respected because it educated them, it gave them a place in the New World, it gave them an identity.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“Of the allegations leveled at hundreds of living priests across the country, only a handful were liable for prosecution because the statute of limitations had expired in so many cases. But the inability of prosecutors to bring charges was hardly a vindication of the Church. Norfolk”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“the setting in the rectory was stunning. We sat down to a fully set table, with fine china and crisp, white linen. Whenever the monsignor wanted anything, he would ring a little silver bell and this old housekeeper would come shuffling in, like a servant. Every time I tried to engage the monsignor in some serious discussion, he would pick up that bell and ring it, and the little old woman would come in to deal with his every whim. And so I’m sitting there, not only stunned at the level, the position in life, that they held themselves at, but how we in the Church allowed them to do this, that no one was saying, ‘Hey, this is wrong. These guys shouldn’t be living like this while the nuns don’t have health insurance.’ But what I realized that day, as the monsignor kept ringing that bell, was how distant, how aloof, how detached the hierarchy of the Church had become. They lived separate lives, completely disconnected from the lives of the laity, and we had allowed it to happen.” Eventually,”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“The deference that politicians, police, and prosecutors showed the Catholic Church (to which most of them belonged) mirrored a deference shown in the wider society. But the extent of the sexual abuse that spilled out after the Geoghan case, especially the Church’s efforts to buy the silence of the victims, shook to the core even the most devout Catholics in law enforcement and politics. A culture of deference that had taken more than a century to evolve seemed to erode in a matter of weeks. In other parts of the United States, there was a similar change in the way secular power viewed Church authorities. On Long Island, in Cincinnati, and in Philadelphia, district attorneys convened grand juries to investigate the role Church officials may have played in the scandal. Many”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“Pope John Paul II, in his Easter 2002 letter, decried “the sins of some of our brothers.” In April he summoned the U.S. cardinals to the Vatican for an emergency meeting, where he called the sexual abuse of children by priests a “crime.” AFP”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“Financial settlements with victims of abuse have put an increasing strain on Church finances. Nationally, the Church paid more than $3 billion to settle abuse complaints between 1950 and 2015. In Boston, the archdiocese paid $154 million to settle with 1,230 victims from 2002 through June 30, 2014, the most recent figures available. Between 2004 and 2015, twelve dioceses nationwide filed for bankruptcy protection.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“They include only those complaints that the conference deemed “not implausible” or “credible,” and none for 2003, the year after the scandal exploded in Boston and throughout the country. In Boston, during the same period, 249 priests were accused of sexual abuse by 1,476 people, according to BishopAccountability.org.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“In May, another UN panel, the Committee against Torture, criticized the Vatican anew—for failing to report accused priests to police, and for not ensuring compensation for victims. The committee, monitoring Rome’s compliance with an international treaty prohibiting torture, found that the sexual abuse of victims by priests itself amounted to torture. It praised the guidelines adopted by the Church in 2011 instructing its hierarchy to cooperate with civil authorities, but said it was concerned that the Vatican continued to “resist the principle of mandatory reporting.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“The Vatican largely rejected the findings of the UN’s Committee on the Rights of the Child, arguing that while it had ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child it was responsible for enforcement only within Vatican City, not among its denominations globally.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“celibacy was legislated to avoid the problem of Church property being passed along from a priest to his children.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“It isn’t just the cardinal; it’s the way we operate,” Bullock said. “There are structural issues. What is it that has made us priests be so supine, and unwilling to stand up and take risks? To speak out when something awful is happening, and not to cover up? To name things for what they are? The leadership has not protected children, and we have not protected children.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“All over the country, bishops broomed out of churches those priests who had once been accused of misconduct. Numerous bishops, including Cardinal Law, began voluntarily turning over to prosecutors the names of dozens of priests accused of abuse. In many states, such a step was already mandatory; others, including Massachusetts and Colorado, were poised to make it so. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops agreed to devote its June 2002 meeting, in Dallas, to the issue of clergy sexual abuse and was ready for the first time to approve mandatory rules for all 194 dioceses in the United States, a step the bishops’ conference had resisted for nearly two decades. The new requirements would likely insist that all priests who sexually abuse minors be removed from ministry and be reported to prosecutors, that dioceses reach out to victims, and that Church workers be trained to recognize and report indications that a child might have been harmed.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight

“Rev. Robert J. Carr, parochial vicar of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, where Law says Mass whenever he is in town, reported getting catcalls from construction workers as he walked back to his rectory after celebrating Mass for prisoners at the Nashua Street Jail. Rev. Robert Bowers, the Charlestown pastor, recalled a Halloween party at which someone came dressed as a pedophile priest. “Now, when you look out at an audience, it crosses your mind, ‘What do they think of me?’” said Monsignor Peter V. Conley, pastor of St. Jude’s Church in Norfolk, a suburb southwest of Boston. “I know a priest who stood outside of his rectory and a car slowed down and a guy yelled out, ‘Hey, pedophile!’ He was in a funk for days.”
― The Boston Globe, Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church: The findings of the investigation that inspired the major motion picture Spotlight