The suspicions of Limerick rental shop owner Paul Flynn were raised earlier this year, when a local priest expressed an opinion about Oscar-winning historical drama Lincoln. When questioned about how he had managed to watch it seeing as the film wasn’t yet in cinemas or out to rent, the priest said “…we have a film club once a week and we watched it up at the monastery.”
When pushed by the investigative local business owner, the priest also confessed to multiple additional counts of pirating films before their commercial release,
Monsignor Penn Jones, of the Melbourne archdiocese, was first a director and then the chairman of Catholic Church Insurance. CCI helps determine how much money claimants are entitled to.
The Church said it didn’t learn of Jones’ molestations until 2004, nine years after he died.
The complaints against Msgr Jones included that he abused at least three young boys at summer camps in the 1960s, touching them in showers and raping at least one.
Msgr Jones was the school chaplain at Cathedral College in the ’60s, and had regular contact with choirboys when he was based at St Patrick’s Cathedral.
“Had there been knowledge of his abuse at the time of these appointments, they would not have been made,” CCI chief executive Peter Rush told the Herald Sun.
As best as I can piece together by following the web and Facebook trail, this happened tonight in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, about 20 miles from Tulsa.
A state chapter of Camp Quest, an organization that runs science camps where kids from secular and religious families mix, had planned a dinner and fundraiser at Oklahoma Joe’s, a local BBQ restaurant. The group communicated with the restaurant weeks ahead of time and made sure that all comers could be accommodated. Oklahoma Joe’s said sure, and even offered to donate 10 percent of the food and beverage proceeds.
Camp Quest Oklahoma then put up flyers and began promoting the dinner on social media, touting Joe’s as the place with the best ribs in the greater Tulsa area. The group was expecting about 50-60 diners/donors to show up.
Today, roughly an hour after the event started, owner Joe Davidson belatedly got wind of the fact that Camp Quest is run by secular people. That was enough to make him change his mind. On the spot, the restaurant canceled the fundraiser and put the following note on the door:
“Everyone except atheists?” asked Camp Quest supporter Nicole Cook on the group’s Facebook page, addressing Davidson and his note. “Is this legal? Do you kick out Jews?”
Those are good questions. I have a call in to both Mr. Davidson and to Camp Quest to try to get some answers, and will update this story if new and pertinent information becomes available.
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UPDATE, 11:45 p.m. EST: I just got off the phone with Cindy Cooper, Vice President of Camp Quest Oklahoma.
She confirmed the account above, and added that months ago, Camp Quest volunteers gave the restaurant camp literature and invited the management to visit the group’s website. Cooper also says that the flyer for the event was approved by Davidson’s wife; the flyer makes explicit mention of the organization’s humanist leanings.
That’s true, and that does make it unlikely that Joe Davidson was being completely truthful on Tulsa Fox23 News tonight, when he claimed that the group had misled him about its mission and background.
Though Cooper has already seen a backlash brewing against Oklahoma Joe’s since news of the conflict began filtering out in the early evening — with irate non-theists taking to sites as diverse as Reddit and Yelp to voice their displeasure — she predicts that the kerfuffle will benefit Oklahoma Joe’s.
“This is Oklahoma,” she says. “It’ll probably end up being played like ‘poor Christians being persecuted for their beliefs.’ It wouldn’t surprise me if Christians start visiting the restaurant just to take a stand, like they did with Chick-fil-A.”
The events of Monday night have left her and her colleagues a little rattled, but Camp Quest has no desire to become a pawn in the culture war, says Cooper. “We try to maintain a neutral image, because it’s not about us — it’s about the kids,” she says.
“By the way, we have plenty of Christian children as campers. It wouldn’t occur to us to discriminate against them. I wish it worked the same the other way around.”
Note: My call to Joe Davidson has not yet been returned.
UPDATE 2, 12:30 a.m.: Hemant Mehta has more, including quotes from Joe Davidson (via American Atheists) and, in the comments, an account by an eye witness — one of the Camp Quest diners.
Blogger Elie Fares gets all up in some clothing store’s grill about a T-shirt the store sells. This one:
He’s terribly upset, because he claims that “not even with the most out-of-the-box approaches [can it] not be considered as a distortion of many Christian icons of Mary.” He says this “demonizes religious holy figures” and that it is “unacceptable,” “revolting,” and “offensive.”
A retired Church of England priest from East Sussex goes on trial today (April 9) after pleading not guilty to a string of sex attacks on 18 girls and boys dating back more than 50 years. Canon Gordon Rideout, 74, is accused of committing 38 offences over an 11-year period between January 1962 and January 1973. At Lewes Crown Court in October, he denied 36 counts of indecent assault and two counts of attempted rape.
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.
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.
“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.
