I KNOW PREJUDICE WHEN I SEE IT

My family moved from Naples, Italy to Atlanta, Georgia in 1957. The first time I saw prejudice was on the city bus. My mother and I took the bus that stopped behind our apartment downtown several times a week. The blacks had to sit at the back of the bus, whites up front.

When we moved to Augusta in 1960, I learned how to read and I would ask my father why there was a "whites only" sign on the laundromat near our home, at water fountains, restaurants and bathrooms. He told me white people were afraid of blacks.

What was this fear? Prejudice is built on fear and paranoia. Whites feared black's sexuality, size, color and culture. Whites fear their southern slang, excitability and emotions. Whites fear their criminal records, after all the prisons were filled with a disproportionate number of blacks convicted of rape, theft and murder. Whites feared their lifestyle and poverty.

While we haven't come far enough, we've come a long way baby, but a new prejudice is developing and is starting to entrench itself in the Church and outside of the Church and it is a prejudice against priests out of a fear of priests, their lifestyle, their sexuality and the fact that a small percentage of them have committed mortal sins and crimes against children and a culture of so-called clericalism that has allowed for it.

Now those who fear priests are taking matters into their own hands and developing a new form of lynching not directed at the perceived crimes of blacks but toward priests. It is a high tech form of lynching and those who promote it are like the racists of the south that I describe above. The problem, like with all racism, is that they think they are actually doing good. Read on:

Sunday June 19, 2011
VICTIMS' GROUPS OPPOSE RIGHTS FOR PRIESTS

Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the three most prominent so-called victims' groups:

BishopAccountability, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and the National Survivors Advocates Coalition (NSAC) are so consumed with their agenda that they are ready to throw the constitutional rights of accused priests overboard.

Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz expressed his concerns this week that unscrupulous lawyers may try to plunder the bishops' conference for making commitments on how best to handle accused priests. For merely raising this concern, SNAP urged Catholics in his diocese to stop making contributions. Last month, when a case against the Louisville diocese was thrown out, SNAP lashed out at the judge for dismissing it on the basis of a technicality. The technicality? The First Amendment.

BishopAccountability said this week that priests should be removed from ministry before the accusation is investigated. Similarly, SNAP said this week, "We strongly and repeatedly beg people to call authorities—police and prosecutors—with any information or suspicions no matter how small or seemingly insufficient." Here's a good one: after typing "rights of priests" in the search engine of NSAC, the first article to appear calls for the suspension of rights for accused priests.

When an innocent Jesuit priest was recently nominated to be the House Chaplain, both SNAP and NSAC opposed him simply because some accused priests belong to his religious order.

BishopAccountability openly admits that it does not verify allegations made against priests before listing information on its website. That includes Father Charles Murphy, who died last weekend after being victimized by two bogus lawsuits against him that went nowhere. Worse, after NSAC ripped a columnist who pointed out what a travesty the Murphy case is, it concluded, "Perhaps Rev. Murphy was an innocent man, poorly treated." It just doesn't get much lower than this.