New Zealand Conservative

When millions of dollars are handed out in settlement of sex abuse cases involving thousands of people, it is increasingly likely that some priests will be the victims of false accusations. Rev. Gordon MacRae is one of them. On September 23, 2012, Rev. Gordon MacRae will mark eighteen years in a cell in the New Hampshire State Prison. Father MacRae is 59 years old. The crimes for which he was accused and convicted are claimed to have occurred when he was between 25 and 30 years old. Brought with no evidence or corroboration whatsoever, the claims were accompanied by lawsuits settled by his Diocese for hundreds of thousands of dollars despite evidence of fraud. [ link ] People riding the money bandwagon is very common on court actions involving massive settlements: After the disastrous 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, damage and loss settlements by British Petroleum (BP) have swelled to $8.5 billion. In the wake of those settlements, however, federal prosec...

The Media Report website posted last week that the Philadelphia priest who was found guilty last year and jailed, may have been imprisoned for a crime that never happened. The conviction of Philadelphia's Msgr. William J. Lynn last June was historic and widely trumpeted by an overheated media, as Lynn became the first member of the Catholic hierarchy to be found guilty in a criminal court for endangering children. And the sole reason Lynn sits in jail today is because former priest Edward Avery had pleaded guilty to sexually violating a 10-year-old boy in the late 1990s. Prosecutors claimed that Lynn should not have placed Avery into a ministry assignment because the priest had a prior abuse accusation dating back to the 1970s. Had Lynn kept Avery out of public ministry, prosecutors charged, he would not have been able to abuse the 10-year-old. But in a truly shocking development , Avery took the witness stand today in a Philadelphia courtroom and recanted under o...

Now that's an image of a priest that you don't get often! Though, in these times, not a bad idea. I'll be learning how to do it myself at some point in the not too distant future. Related link: A day with S.W.A.T.