February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Irish American priest and author the Rev. Andrew Greeley lashed out at the Catholic hierarchy in a review of a book dealing with the church’s ongoing pedophile scandal.
In a review of “Betrayal: the Crisis in the Catholic Church,” Greeley called Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law and New York’s Cardinal Edward Egan “notorious and public sinners” for having simply reassigned pedophile priests to other parishes.
The book review, published in the Boston Globe, also lauded that paper for playing a leading role in exposing the rash of pedophile cases.
The book was written by the Globe’s investigative reporting team, which, together with the rival Boston Herald and the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, has been in the forefront of reporting the pedophile scourge.
The Chicago-based Greeley stated in the review that the book had done the Catholic Church an “enormous favor.”
“It has forced reform on a reluctant Catholic hierarchy. It has revealed to the Catholic laity the ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and insensitivity of the hierarchy,” Greeley wrote.
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Greeley took a hard swipe at both Law and Egan in his review: “Only God knows the consciences of Law and Egan and other clueless leaders. However, in the objective order, if it is a sin to abuse children, it is a sin to cooperate in that abuse. If the reassignment of priests . . . with full knowledge of what they had done was not cooperation in that abuse, nothing might be. The responsible cardinals are, in the objective sense, notorious and public sinners.”
Gilman calls it quits
New York Rep. Ben Gilman will quit Congress when his term ends later this year. The co-chair of the Ad Hoc Committee for Irish Affairs announced his intention to retire before a packed room of supporters in his New York district last week.
Gilman’s retirement is a reluctant one. A redistricting plan drawn up by legislators in Albany will result in a carving up of his congressional district.
That district includes all of heavily Irish Rockland County.
Had he chosen to run for reelection in November, Gilman would have been forced to face fellow Republican Rep. Sue Kelly in a primary.
A separate effort by Democrats to lure Gilman across party lines failed to take flight.
Gilman was one of the most active members of the House of Representatives on Ireish issues over the last decade and presided over a number of congressional hearings on Northern Ireland.
Lavender gets some green
The Irish gay activist group, Lavender & Green Alliance, has been awarded a $10,500 grant toward the production of an oral history video documentary.
The grant was presented to LGA founder Brendan Fay at a recent ceremony by Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields.
The grant was one of 19 totaling $250,000 awarded to grassroots organizations in Manhattan by Manhattan Neighborhood Network, the borough’s public access cable TV network.
The Lavender and Green Alliance, which describes its role as being dedicated to supporting and honoring the lives of Irish and Irish-American lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, received the money to fund a video entitled “From Silence to Speech.”