A Wisconsin bishop drives drunk in the middle of the day, plows down a pedestrian, kills her.
A local bishop faces a tentative charge of homicide by intoxicated driving after a crash Sunday that killed a 52-year-old woman, according to Sun Prairie police and a local pastor.
Bruce H. Burnside, 59, of Madison, was arrested after he allegedly hit a female pedestrian at the northbound off-ramp of Highway 151 at Windsor Street in Sun Prairie. …
Rev. David Berggren of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Sun Prairie confirmed Sunday evening that Burnside is bishop for the South-Central Synod of Wisconsin of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Burnside, a former pastor at St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church in Monona, was elected bishop in 2007. He is up for re-election in May, Berggren added.
Oh no, you don’t think the killing of a pedestrian will hurt Burnside’s re-election chances, do you?
TorrentFreak’s been looking at the BitTorrent video-downloading from the small pool of downloaders in Vatican City, and they’ve reported in with the Vatican’s favorite pornography:
You can type any of these titles into a search engine and see for yourself what titillates the men of the Holy See.
As a public service, and because I speak just enough German to be dangerous, I’ll translate the description and tags of movie number 14 for you:
“Bondage sado-masochism — Female slave punished in dark hobby dungeon teen games with shackles.”
If you’d been in St. Augustine, Florida, on Saturday, you could have glimpsed Catholic priest Father Gilbert Medina peacock-strutting through the pretty streets, dressed as the Spanish invader Juan Ponce de León.
Father Medina was proud to do his part to celebrate the discovery of Florida by Ponce de León five hundred years ago, a feat that the priest and his posse re-enacted by planting a flag in a seemingly random flower bed in a local park. His pride, he said, was bolstered by his Catholic faith, just as the 16th-century explorer had found spiritual satisfaction in bringing his Catholic faith to the New World.
As Father Medina told the local news team — watch the video, below — he viewed his re-enactment of the conquistador’s supposed triumphs as “an opportunity to connect myself to Catholic history.” But when he donned the replica Spanish helmet, his vision was grander than that. He also hoped, he said, to inspire people, to whet their appetites for history, to make them delve into books and look up historical events on the Internet, and thus “explore the world.”
So I did that, as it seemed to me that Father Medina’s assessment of Ponce de León was a bit rosary rosy.
That’s not uncommon among followers of the faith. When you check out the Catholic Encyclopedia, the entry on Ponce de León uses the most wonderful euphemisms. During his conquests of the Caribbean and beyond, Ponce didn’t slaughter the natives; he “reduced” them. He didn’t wage war on indigenous tribes or brutalize uppity slaves; he had “encounters” with them.
Other sources, which I read thanks to Father Medina’s kind encouragement, provide perhaps a fuller account of Ponce’s record.
Back on his island [Puerto Rico], Ponce de León parceled out the native Taínos amongst himself and other settlers using a system of forced labor known as encomienda. The Indians were put to work growing food crops and mining for gold. Many of the Spaniards treated the Taínos very harshly and newly introduced diseases like smallpox and measles took a severe toll on the local population. By June 1511 the Taínos were pushed to a short-lived rebellion, which was forcibly put down by Ponce de León and a small force of troops armed with crossbows and arquebuses [early firearms].
Encomienda, which comes from the Spanish verb for “to entrust,” has a nice ring to it, but that didn’t keep the natives from being treated worse than dogs.
The difference between encomienda and slavery could be minimal. Many natives were forced to do hard labor and subjected to extreme punishment and death if they resisted.
Ponce de León carried a contract from his king “to settle the Islands of Bimini and the lands discovered.” This contract stated that the native people must be given the option of becoming serfs or, when they didn’t comply, they could be taken as slaves.
It’s good to have options.
The Spanish conquistadors carried with them a religion whose defining symbol is an image of intolerance and torture — the cross. … Their method of gaining control of their lives was through the accumulation of personal wealth and by the subjugation of others.
Sure, but that still does not get to the heart of the Ponce de León legacy. The explorer’s enthusiasm for spreading Catholicism and his callous treatment of his enslaved inferiors were as legendary as evidence of his vaunted accomplishments is flimsy and even fake. Most notably, by 1513, the year he “discovered” Florida, the peninsula had in fact seen so many Europeans that some native Americans greeted him in Spanish.
I’ll quote from the recent New York Timesarticle “Ponce de León, Exposed”:
Contrary to what our school books taught us, Ponce did not discover Florida. He never did much of anything here except get himself killed. …
Ponce never went anywhere near St. Augustine, the city where he is said to have discovered the Fountain of Youth. … Ponce was after gold, but Florida had none to be found. He left and might never have returned but for the news that Cortés had found gold in Mexico. In 1521 Ponce — envious, vigorous, avaricious — made the fatal mistake of trying his Florida luck again.
After sustaining an arrow wound to his leg, which led to an infection,
…he died of fever in Havana, having discovered nothing, founded nothing and achieved nothing.
The Spanish never named anything after Ponce de León.
In America, we often enjoy myth-making more than truth-telling — a bit like Chicagoans invented deep-dish pizza (which, I hasten to add, is tasty enough) and pretend it’s Italian food. We treat history as some cheap fake of an imitation of a facsimile, a theme-park-ready cubic zirconium version of truth that lets us substitute slavery for bravery and plunder for pluck.
Pay no mind to the bodies, make way for the Walt Disney Company. Stuff those skeletons into the closet, here comes the Catholic Church. It’s perfectly understandable, and perfectly depressing, all at once.
As we’ve seen, France’s highest Jewish religious authority, Grand Rabbi Gilles Bernheim, got in hot water last week when it emerged that he’d
• plagiarized a deceased author, then
• tried in vain to make it seem that the dead guy had plagiarized him, then
• blamed the whole affair on either a careless student assistant or a ghostwriter.
Bernheim’s Who’s Who entry, based on information he provided, says he was awarded from Sorbonne University an “agrégation de philosophie”, a prestigious but extremely difficult to obtain achievement that permits the teaching of philosophy in French institutions. However university “agrégation” lists from 1972 to 2000 have no entry for Bernheim. The head of the association managing the lists, Blanche Lochmann, said the Grand Rabbi’s name was not in the agrégation lists kept by the French education ministry either.
“It is very difficult for a public figure to try to fool people as to whether he has an agrégation,” she said. “This is the first instance that is so blatant.”
Bernheim’s spokesman, Rabbi Moche Lewin, told AFP that the Grand Rabbi was not available to respond to the latest developments in the scandal.
The health department could take no action against the rabbi who performed the circumcision, because the parents would not reveal his identity.
So: Not only did the Yahweh-fearing couple not bother to prevent its own child from contracting herpes (the circumcision practice, and the virus it transmitted, has already killed two infants, and caused brain damage in two more); Mommy and Daddy feel they must now protect their bloodsucking holy man at the expense of other children who may well die or suffer from lifelong medical consequences.
About two-thirds of boys born in New York City’s Hasidic communities are circumcised in the oral suction manner, according to Rabbi David Zwiebel, executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America.
The number of young victims may be under-reported; there are credible allegations from within the Jewish community that hospitals like New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center habitually suppress the real number of circumcision-related herpes infections.
Meanwhile, New York City’s Health Department says its hand are tied. The department has been fighting to implement a measure aimed at having Jewish parents sign a consent form for a ritual circumcision. The piece of paper would inform the parents of the risks, and make them acknowledge that they’re aware of what might happen. Never mind that children as young as eight weeks will continue to die even if such forms are presented and signed.
But as weak and ineffectual as the consent-form initiative is, various rabbis oppose it “on religious grounds.”
“This is the government forcing a rabbi practicing a religious ritual to tell his congregants it could hurt their child,” Rabbi David Niederman, executive director of the Hasidic United Jewish Organization of Williamsburg, told ABCNews.com. “If, God forbid, there was a danger, we would be the first to stop the practice.”
Except that they’re fucking not, as more tiny corpses may soon attest.
We learned last week that 67-year-old Bikram Choudhury, the guru and promoter of “hot yoga,” is being sued for sexual harassment, discrimination, and defamation. Former student Sarah Baughn says Choudhury was her hero until he began propositioning her rather relentlessly. She accuses him of pressing his body against hers while adjusting her pose in classes, whispering sexual innuendos into her ear, ordering her to kiss him in front of other trainees, and assaulting her in a hotel room in Mexico.
Baughn says she resisted his advances. He found others easier to enthrall: Choudhury makes fawning students brush his hair, give him massages, and invites them to have sex with him, according to Baughn.
This weekend, former Choudhury acolyte Benjamin Lorr provides some insights into the yogi’s cult ardent following. Lorr wrote a book about extreme yoga and the physical and spiritual pains its followers endure on the path to enlightenment.
In an article in the Daily Beast, he calls Choudhury “a dark prince of America yoga” who approaches his students “in Speedo and Rolex, barking orders at his following of millions (19 studios in New York City alone) as they struggle to contort to his demands.” Lorr says the master “charges upward of $11,000 to attend his trainings. He has 40 Rolls Royces in his garage.”
Trappings of obscene wealth aside, let’s ponder the similarities between sex abuse allegation from one cult or religion to the next. Lorr writes:
“Observing emotions,” “working through pain,” “refusing to become a victim” — all potent pieces of advice, cornerstones of a yoga practice built on personal empowerment — can easily be turned into weapons of silence. At the same time, community exhortations to just “focus on the positives” and “remember all the good he has done” provide the justification for their use.
That second part, at least, is how it seems to work in many Christian churches, too.
In Choudhury’s case, the alleged sexual harassment seems to go hand in hand with verbal abuse.
“He once shouted at me, ‘Hey you! Do you have boobs or do you have a dick? I can’t see it!’ ” recalls Naveed Abidi, the owner of a Chicago-based Bikram yoga studio who studied under Choudhury five years ago. He’s still a fan, and an avid defender of the man, because the insults are made with good intentions: “The reason he’s saying it is he just wants to have people get over their egos.”
Calling students all kinds of names, then, is all in a day’s work for the millionaire teacher of ancient yogic truths? Abidi confirms it:
“Every [yoga] teacher knows that Bikram calls his wife bitch. People who know Bikram know it’s nothing new. If he calls you a bitch, you should be happy he’s calling you something.”
Previous yoga-world scandals here, here, and here.
[photo by Rebecca Greenfield via the Daily Beast; tip of the miter to Erik Sherman]
Catherine Deveney, in the Guardian, neatly identifies two key factors that explain how the Catholic sex-abuse scandals could become so widespread, endemic, and lasting:
The first is “scandalising the faithful”. Traditionally, the hierarchy believed the greatest sin was shaking the faith of Catholic congregations. Protecting them meant concealing scandal. Adopting that as your moral standpoint means anything goes. You can cover up sexual misconduct from those you demand sexual morality from. You can conceal financial corruption from those who put their pounds in the collection plate. You can silence the abused and protect the abuser. Guilt about sacrificing individuals is soothed by protecting something bigger and more significant – the institution.
The second concept is “clericalism”, a word used to describe priests’ sense of entitlement, their demand for deference and their apparent conformity to rules and regulations in public, while privately behaving in a way that suggests the rules don’t apply to them personally. (O’Brien was, in that sense, a classic example.) The Vatican is an independent state; the Holy See a sovereign entity recognised in international law and governed by the Pope. The Nunciature operates like government embassies in different countries worldwide. It is even governed by its own rules: Canon Law. All this contributes to the notion that the church can conduct its own affairs without interference or outside scrutiny. It demands a voice in society without being fully accountable to it.
Although the North Carolina House of Representatives killed a bill Thursday that would have paved the way for establishing an official state religion, a new national HuffPost/YouGov poll finds widespread support for doing so.
The new survey finds that 34 percent of adults would favor establishing Christianity as the official state religion in their own state, while 47 percent would oppose doing so. Thirty-two percent said that they would favor a constitutional amendment making Christianity the official religion of the United States, with 52 percent saying they were opposed.
Five Egyptians were killed and eight wounded in clashes between Christians and Muslims in a town near Cairo, security sources said on Saturday, in the latest sectarian violence in the most populous Arab state. … Four Christian Copts and one Muslim were killed when members of both communities started fighting and shooting at each other.
Residents said the violence broke out on Friday when a group of Christian children were drawing on a wall of a Muslim religious institute. A Reuters reporter saw what looked like a swastika drawn on the wall, which Muslim residents said had offended them because it looked like a cross.
Hundreds of thousands of Islamists rallied in Dhaka on Saturday after staging a “long march” to the Bangladeshi capital to demand the execution of atheist bloggers for allegedly defaming Islam. It was the latest protest to rack Bangladesh, deepening tensions between secularists and the largest Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, whose leaders are under trial for crimes committed during the country’s 1971 war of independence.
The Islamists converged on Dhaka’s main commercial hub to protest against what they said were blasphemous writings by atheist bloggers, shouting “God is great — hang the atheist bloggers”.
“In spite of America’s best doctors, meds, counselors, and prayers for healing, the torture of mental illness never subsided,” mega-church pastor Rick Warren wrote today, after his 27-year-old son Matthew took his own life.
Our thoughts and wishes of strength go to all of Matthew’s loved ones, especially his family.
Eleven years ago, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted “zero tolerance” guidelines for dealing with sexually abusive clergy members. The guidelines were issued to help restore faith in the Church’s tattered image.
Many priests and their protectors and enablers seem not to have gotten the memo. The Chicago Tribuneexamines a few local cases of priests who, despite a record of inappropriate touching and worse, never came close to being disciplined, much less terminated, much less turned over to the police. Here is the opening section of the article:
When Will County sheriff’s deputies found the Rev. William Virtue sneaking into a private quarry in 1986, police records state that the Roman Catholic priest had blankets, two six packs of beer and a 10-year-old boy with him. He fled on foot when officers arrived, leaving the child behind.
Dammit, why couldn’t the Rev. Virtue’s first name have been Richard? Dick Virtue would have been perfect.
Authorities took Virtue into custody after he returned to his car but later released him without charges because the boy’s mother said she had given her son permission to go swimming with the priest. Still, a deputy forwarded the report to Joliet Diocese officials who put it into Virtue’s personnel file — which already contained several accusations involving inappropriate behavior with underage boys.
The arrest report would remain tucked away for 20 years as Virtue continued to have contact with youths, and even after a seemingly repentant Joliet Diocese pledged in 2002 to improve its handling of sex abuse cases and held up guidelines approved by American bishops as proof of its commitment to transparency and victims’ needs.
Virtue’s personnel file, which contains 500 pages of letters, memos and reports, reflects the struggles the church faced since its public vow to better protect children after a bruising, national sex abuse scandal. Records obtained by the Tribune reveal several instancesin which the diocese’s handling of abuse allegations contradicted those promises, adding to concerns about the overall efficacy of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People that U.S. bishops signed amid fanfare.
There can be little doubt that this story has repeated itself, and is repeating itself today, all over the Catholic world. See also here, and here, and here.
The wonderful part for the abusers is not only that they keep their jobs and keep getting paid (essentially by the very parishioners whose children they assault with their saintly cocks). It is not even that they keep getting access to molestable boys and girls, though I’m sure the padres appreciate that very much. No: the sweetest advantage of being a Christian abuser is that you get to enjoy the fruits of your redemptive faith, which holds that you will sit at the feet of the Heavenly Father for eternity if only you mutter a few apologetic prayers about your child-fucking ways.
Say “Forgive me Father, for I have sinned”… and before too long, your slate is wiped clean.
The Catholic doctrine of forgiveness, as warm and fuzzy as that word sounds, is the very article of faith that makes unending child abuse possible. If there’s no misdeed that can’t be erased by prayerfully showing penitence to Jesus, who already blotted away your sins by dying for them, then no heavenly consequences will likely ensue. Real contrition and self-improvement are, evidently, for suckers.
