David v. Goliath: Standing up to Anti-Catholic Bias in the News
. . . Another published letter by Bernice Durbin of Crossville, Tennessee concluded that Catholic priests "don't deserve First Amendment protection." I could not believe I was reading this in the nation's second largest daily newspaper. Could you imagine the backlash if USA Today gave a platform to someone declaring that Jews, or Muslims, or African Americans no longer deserve First Amendment rights and freedoms? As I wrote in “Honoring Father Norman Weslin,” those who have claimed to advocate for victims – some real, but many feigned – have created a whole new set of victims by dismantling the freedoms and civil liberties of a single class of citizens: accused Catholic priests. The outcome of the trial of Monsignor William Lynn in Philadelphia is the result. . . .
Thy Brother's Keeper: Why Wrongful Convictions Should Matter to You
. . . I was sitting in a county jail awaiting sentencing to prison. I was cut off from everyone. My Diocese would not even accept my collect calls. My own lawyers told me I had no choice. What meager assets I had were exhausted on the first trial. So, post-trial, I entered into what I called - then and now - "a negotiated lie." It was a lie that was extorted from me, but the lie was not mine alone. If you've read my post, "The High Cost of Innocence," you know that even then the pressure never ended. Prison itself has any number of sanctions to further punish those who do not admit guilt. I spent five years confined to a cell housing seven other prisoners because I would not admit guilt. The notion that men in prison always claim to be innocent is a myth. There are dire consequences for such a claim. . . .
Pre-Apocalyptic Prison Paranoia
. . . But not everyone was spared. Like many prisoners, a man in the next cell block already had some issues with paranoia. On New Year's Eve, 1999, he became convinced somehow that Y2K would destroy all computer records - including prison records - and chaos would ensue. Someone fed his paranoia with a tale that if all society and laws break down, and anarchy takes their place, the government has a plan to execute all the prisoners with poison gas. Many prisoners are convinced that every governor has just such a plan hidden in his desk drawer. So the prisoner spent the night with a needle and thread sewing his lips and eyelids shut to keep the expected poison gas from penetrating. No one could figure out how he managed to stitch that second eyelid closed, but he did. . . .
Sticks and Stones: My Incendiary Blog Post on Catholic Civil Discourse
. . . In the online world, we can be anyone or no one at all. We can light fires with our words, or we can fan an inferno lit by someone else. We are free to write with the assurance that no one out there knows who we are, or can suspect what is truly in our hearts. We can strip the Beatitudes from our soulful existence, and let anger and disdain run amok. We can take a rumor and run with it without ever stepping for a single moment into the shoes of the subjects of our contempt. We can delude ourselves into kneeling before God with thanks that we are truly unlike that tax collector over there on the other side of the Church. We can pat ourselves on the back believing that his sin, now in the open, is so much worse than our own, still hidden behind the veil of cyberspace - hidden from everyone but God. . . .