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You can’t make this stuff up.

A Pennsylvania company makes and sells statues of Joe Paterno, the now-disgraced, widely-disgraced but still-beloved-by-some-Penn-Staters football coach who (among others) didn’t take sufficient steps to act on abuse suspicions about Jerry Sandusky.

The same company also make and sell statues of Pope Francis. http://articles.philly.com/2015-08-31/news/66037037_1_sandusky-disclosures-jerry-sandusky-penn-staters

And a Duquesne Brewing Co. executive Mark Dudash, which produces something called Joe Paterno beer, believes his unexpectedly high sales are attributable to “a guardian angel up in heaven somewhere.”

When will we stop praising, honoring and rewarding powerful men who ignore, hide or enable heinous crimes against kids?

By David Clohessy

It may feel that way, but you’re NOT powerless

“I can’t prosecute. I can’t sue. I’m powerless.”

We hear some version of this from a survivor nearly every day.

It’s a horrible feeling: powerlessness.

It’s especially horrible if you’ve felt it before, when you were being abused.

By David Clohessy

Hundreds and hundreds of abuse survivors have talked with me over the past quarter century about their tough, tough struggles with addictions. So I took no pleasure when I read that the former second-highest ranking Vatican official was arrested in Hawaii on drunk driving charges.

But news reports identify Cardinal William Levada (an LA native who headed dioceses in Portland Oregon and San Francisco) as “the highest ranking American in the Vatican” at one point.

That’s true of course. But he was also head of the CDF, the church bureaucracy that enforces doctrine.

And before he was promoted to this post, he pulled perhaps the most hypocritical legal maneuver I’ve ever seen (and that’s saying a lot).

Here’s ex-LA Times journalist Bill Lobdell’s report:

By David Clohessy

In a lot of ways, the new Fr. Manuel Gallo Espinoza case is much like the Fr. Joseph Jeyapaul case. But it’s worse.

Fr. Jeyapaul generated international headlines when he was pled guilty this summer – after a long, hard extradition process - to sexually assaulting a Minnesota girl in the Crookston diocese. (Thanks to the courage of another victim, Megan Peterson.)

Two remarks by Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki show just how deceptive and callous he is.

First, he said “Nothing can be enough to restore, basically, what was lost to the victims."

Lost? We didn’t “lose” our childhoods and faith and trust and joy. They were stolen from us by clerics who committed and concealed heinous crimes.

http://www.620wtmj.com/news/local/Archbishop-Listecki-on-Sex-abuse-Scandal--320733221.html

Second, he pledged to “take a look at” removing the bas-relief in the cathedral showing disgraced and resigned Archbishop Rembert Weakland alongside children.

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2010/01_02/2010_01_11_MilwaukeeJournalSentinel_DelayedJustice.htm

Take a look at? Listecki claims he wants healing. Then why delay removing cathedral showing disgraced Archbishop Rembert Weakland alongside children? We'll never know how many kids were hurt on Weakland's watch because he shrewdly and consistently hid predator priests and his own expensive, hurtful sexual misdeeds.

by David Clohessy

Bankruptcy “is the best way to fairly and equitably compensate victims. . .ensuring that all are treated equitably.”

Milwaukee Catholic Archbishop Jerome Listecki, June 2011

http://www.citypages.com/news/milwaukee-archdiocese-declares-bankruptcy-and-blames-priest-sexual-predators-6573135

“575 individuals came forward. 240 of them will get nothing. And 92 others will get about $2,000 each.”

National Catholic Reporter, August 2015

http://ncronline.org/news/accountability/milwaukee-archdioceses-settlement-plan-stuns-sex-abuse-victims

Who would have thought that the highest ranking politician in the UK, the third highest ranking politician in the US and “America’s dad” would all be accused of sexual violence?

I’m referring of course to ex-Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath, ex-House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Bill Cosby.

It’s possible that at some point in your life, someone you know will be accused of raping an adult or abusing a child. It’s likely that every bone in your body will cry out “No! He could NEVER do such a thing.”

Then pause before you utter that thought, and ponder the millions who have been shocked over – and wrong about – allegations of sexual crimes against the popular and powerful. 

The other day, President Obama said he couldn’t revoke Bill Cosby’s Presidential Medal of Honor. But I’d humbly like to tell the president: “You ain’t powerless.”  

Have bishops “narrowed” their “privacy zones?”

Reuters reports “Bill Cosby's forthright views on black parenting came back to haunt him this week when a U.S. judge called the comedian a ‘public moralist’ who had lost the right of personal privacy in a 2005 civil sexual assault case.”

by David Clohessy

Two notorious serial predator priests have been back in the news recently. Both assaulted dozens of kids. Both were shielded, for decades, by complicit colleagues and supervisors. Their horrific crimes, though they took place years ago, should not go unnoticed.

1.One of Iowa’s most notorious child molesting clerics, Fr. James M. Janssen, has passed away. He reportedly abusing many boys, often along with other pedophile priests Fr. Francis Bass, Fr. Theodore Anthony Geerts, and Fr. James W. Murphy, and of pimping his victims to Bass, Murphy and Fr. William Wiebler.

http://qctimes.com/news/local/obituaries/james-janssen/article_81644cf9-ff7f-50ab-87a9-ea7709fe1fd9.html