commend Andrew Cuomo and Teamsters Local 707 President Kevin McCaffrey for denying homosexual Greek Bettors their rights secured by NY Const. Art, 1, Sec. 3. New York State may marry homosexuals but it will be ....damned if it is going to let them bet at Nassau OTB while Andrew Cuomo may chose to be in church. Someday he thinks he will be king of the United States.
Following Resignation, Top British Cardinal Acknowledges Sexual Misconduct
By JOHN F. BURNS
Published: March 3, 2013
LONDON — Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric, Cardinal Keith
O’Brien, acknowledged Sunday that he had been guilty of sexual
misconduct, a week after he announced
his resignation and said he would not attend the conclave to choose the
next pope. The moves followed revelations that three current and one
former priest had accused him of inappropriate sexual contact dating
back decades.
Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images
Former Cardinal Keith O’Brien on Wednesday. He
stepped down last week after charges of inappropriate conduct by four
men.
Related
-
Top British Cardinal Resigns, a Day After Charges of ‘Inappropriate Acts’ (February 26, 2013)
Cardinal O’Brien, the head of the church in Scotland, is the
highest-ranking figure in the church’s recent history to make such an
admission.
“I wish to take this opportunity to admit that there have been times
that my sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected of me as a
priest, archbishop and cardinal,” Cardinal O’Brien, 74, said in a statement.
The statement stunned many in the Scottish church and beyond. Some said
the cardinal’s statement appeared to raise the possibility that the
undefined sexual activities he acknowledged may not be restricted to the
known allegations, the earliest of which relates to 1980. Ordained in
1965, he became an archbishop in 1985, but was not named cardinal until
2003.
Last weekend, The Observer newspaper reported the accusations of
impropriety with accounts from the four men. The first was a seminarian
when Cardinal O’Brien, then a priest, served as a powerful supervisory
figure in two Scottish seminaries. The others were young priests; it is
not clear exactly when in the 1980s they say they were subject to his
unwanted advances.
Initially, Cardinal O’Brien contested the allegations and said he was
seeking legal advice. But on Sunday, he offered a sweeping apology that
was, however, bereft of detail. “To those I have offended, I apologize
and ask forgiveness,” he said. “To the Catholic Church and the people of
Scotland, I also apologize. I will now spend the rest of my life in
retirement. I will play no further part in the public life of the
Catholic Church in Scotland.”
Many analysts saw the cardinal’s resignation and absence from the
conclave as a result of papal pressure, and British newspapers have
cited unidentified Vatican
officials as saying Pope Benedict — who stunned the world with his own
announcement on Feb. 11 that he would step down — had ordered the
cardinal to remove himself.
Benedict’s resignation, which he attributed to ill health and
exhaustion, took effect on Thursday, bringing an end to an eight-year
papacy overshadowed by scandals involving cover-ups of pedophilia and
other forms of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics.
The Vatican and more than a billion Catholics worldwide now await the
papal conclave this month, in which 115 cardinals will choose one among
their number as Benedict’s successor. He will inherit a crisis over
church governance that Vatican experts have described as one of the
legacies of the 85-year-old Benedict, a widely respected theologian
whose critics faulted him with failing to deal conclusively with the
sexual abuse scandals.
Analysts said that Cardinal O’Brien’s apology was bound to place a
shadow over the process. Even before his announcement on Sunday, it was
already seen as highly unusual that Cardinal O’Brien would not attend
the conclave, and several other cardinals accused of protecting abusive
priests have fought off pressure not to participate from advocates for
abuse victims.
The differing approaches across the Catholic world to handling the sex
abuse crisis are expected to be evident at the conclave. Bishops’
conferences in English-speaking countries have tended to adopt a more
aggressive, zero-tolerance policy in recent years, while more
traditionalist cardinals inside the Vatican and elsewhere in the
Catholic world have often closed ranks to defend fellow prelates.
Cardinal O’Brien was a powerful voice of the conservative orthodoxy on
homosexuality that characterized the papacies of John Paul II, who
elevated him, and Benedict. Abandoning the relatively tolerant approach
to the issue he had adopted in the years before he donned a cardinal’s
red hat, he condemned homosexuality as immoral, and as a “grotesque
subversion.”
His sudden downfall is a major crisis for the church in Scotland, where
most of the country’s 750,000 Catholics are of Irish ancestry and live
in the central belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh. As migrants or their
descendants, they suffered decades of discrimination.
“It’s possibly, in terms of the internal history of the Church, the
biggest crisis in the history of Scottish Catholicism since the
Reformation,” said Tom Devine, a prominent historian.
The four men who accused Cardinal O’Brien have not been identified
publicly, but the Observer reporter who broke the story, Catherine
Deveney, wrote Saturday that they had all identified themselves in the complaints forwarded to the papal nuncio.
She also addressed the mystery of why the accusations are only now
surfacing: until now, the men did not know of one another’s stories.
She said the former seminarian, whose story she had known “for years,”
had called her last month, and related that he had just had a
conversation with a priest who had divulged that the cardinal had
instigated an “inappropriate relationship.” Ms. Deveney said that two
other priests who said they had been approached by the cardinal were
“drawn in,” without saying how.
“I’d never wanted to ‘out’ Keith just for being gay,” said the former
seminarian, Ms. Deveney wrote. “But this was confirming that his
behavior toward me was part of his modus operandi. He has hurt others,
probably worse, than he affected me. And that only became clear a few
weeks ago.”
She laid out this timeline: The four made statements to the nuncio,
Archbishop Antonio Mennini, a few days before Benedict announced that he
was stepping down. The four men were told that Cardinal O’Brien would
still go to Rome.
Then, on Feb. 22, the cardinal made headlines by saying that the church
rules on celibacy should be reviewed. Ms. Deveney said the men learned
informally that the church objected to the comments, and that “the
cardinal would not go to Rome.”
“So did the church act because it was shocked by the claims against the
cardinal, or were they angry he had broken ranks on celibacy?” she
asked, noting that her article breaking the news — for which she had the
men’s statements in hand — came two days later.
The former seminarian, now married with children, said he had acted
because he was “disappointed” by what he described as a “lack of
integrity” by the church in reacting to the men’s original complaint to
the Vatican, Ms. Deveney wrote. He said the only response he had
received from church authorities had been in the form of a “cursory
e-mail” giving the numbers of counselors he could talk to who were based
“hundreds of miles” from where he lived.
Since the allegations became public, he said, the indifference of the
church had not changed. “There have been two sensations for me this
week,” he said. “One is feeling the hot breath of the media on the back
of my neck, and the other is sensing the cold disapproval of the church
hierarchy for daring to break ranks. I feel like if they could crush me,
they would.”
Walesa Draws Fire for Comments About Gay Rights
more in World
»
By MARCIN SOBCZYK
WARSAW—Lech Walesa, Poland's communist-era democracy campaigner, caused an uproar here by saying homosexuals shouldn't demand more rights and gay legislators should sit "behind a wall" in Parliament, words critics said put into question his legacy as a freedom fighter."They need to know they are a minority and adjust to smaller things instead of rising to the greatest heights, taking peak time, organizing the biggest provocations designed to spoil others or pick out people from the majority," he said of gay people in a television interview Friday night, adding that he refuses to accept public gay-rights marches that "coax my children and grandchildren."
Most of the Polish society opposes granting the increasingly vocal homosexual minority some of the rights married couples enjoy. According to opinion polls, most Poles oppose allowing same-sex couples to register their partnerships. Bans of gay-rights parades by then-Warsaw mayor Lech Kaczynski, which courts subsequently struck down, featured prominently in Mr. Kaczynski's successful presidential campaign in 2005.
A shipyard electrician, Mr. Walesa led Poland's trade unions that challenged the communist system in the 1970s and 1980s. For that, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. After communism fell in the former Soviet bloc in 1989, Mr. Walesa served as the country's president.
Mr. Walesa retired from active politics after he was voted out of office in 1995, but remains a resonant voice in the national debate. In recent years, he has supported Poland's ruling Civic Platform, whose leader, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, has this year urged the party's reluctant conservative lawmakers to support same-sex civil union legislation.
The growing visibility of gay people in Polish society, which has accompanied its democratic transition, led to the election of its first openly homosexual legislator in 2011. Robert Biedron, a gay-rights campaigner, won his seat with the support of nearly 17,000 people. He sits in the third row out of the 11 in the Sejm, lower house of parliament, right next to Anna Grodzka, Poland's first transsexual lawmaker. Both are members of the anticlerical Palikot Movement, an opposition party.
Mr. Biedron called the former president's remarks inappropriate.
"It's completely irresponsible for a public figure to use the kind of hate speech that some, perhaps most in the society are using," he said. "By using it, Lech Walesa, the symbol of freedom, shows a lack of respect for the Nobel Peace Prize."
He added Mr. Walesa's call to relegate him behind the parliament's wall ring of the practice of "a bench ghetto," segregation of Jewish students in classrooms of Poland's universities in the 1930s.
Mr. Walesa's son, Jaroslaw, a member of the European Parliament, joined critics, saying the 70-year-old former president acted on a reflex built into the people that grew up separated from the West with the Iron Curtain.
"What my father said is fundamentally wrong and damaging," he said in remarks posted online. "He is part of the older generation and, unfortunately, he presented an opinion characteristic of his generation."
Recent votes in Poland's Parliament have shown it has a firm conservative majority across party lines. In January, it rejected three bills seeking to allow same-sex couples to register their partnerships. In February, it ducked a vote that would have installed Ms. Grodzka, who was born a man, as a deputy speaker of Parliament.
Write to Marcin Sobczyk at marcin.sobczyk@dowjones.com
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LI Confidential
> Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
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