CHUCKLES?

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

I guess you’ve never heard the expression, “When you’re in a hole, stop digging,” have you? Charles Bennisonwrites Bonnie Anderson:

Dear Bonnie:

While you wrote out of genuine love and concern for our church, your public response of September 1 to the letter from the witnesses in the June 2008 Ecclesiastical trial has hurt the Diocese of Pennsylvania, made my ministry more difficult, and is so misleading as to raise the question whether you actually read all of the trial evidence on which your statements are based.

Great opening there, big guy. Call her dumb. Next time you run into Anderson at GenCon or something, order her to fetch you a beer, chop, chop. Women love that.

The Review Court found absolutely no evidence that I am among those who, in your words, “have been complicit in maintaining a climate of silence and denial that has inhibited our efforts to end sexual abuse within our church.” Your letter expressing your “outrage that individuals in positions of authority” have done so, falsely and unjustly implies culpability on my part. In fact, there is nothing in my forty-two-year ordained ministry to indicate that I have ever covered up or looked the other way when I have learned of sexual abuse.

That’s funny. These folks here didn’t agree with you.

The lower court, the Court for the Trial of a Bishop, had called for Bennison’s deposition after it found that 35 years ago when he was rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Upland, Calif., he failed to respond properly after learning that his brother, John Bennison, was “engaged in a sexually abusive and sexually exploitive relationship” with a minor parishioner. At the time, John Bennison was a 24-year-old newly ordained deacon (later priest) whom Charles Bennison had hired as youth minister. The abuse allegedly lasted for more than three years from the time the minor was 14 years old.

Charles Bennison was found to have failed to discharge his pastoral obligations to the girl, the members of her family, and the members of the parish youth group as well as church authorities after he learned of his brother’s behavior. The court said that he suppressed the information about his brother until 2006, when he disclosed publicly what he knew.

ENS also reports that:

The review court agreed with one of the lower court’s two findings of misconduct, but said that Bennison could not be deposed because the charge was barred by the church’s statute of limitations.

So everyone who can read the English language and who isn’t hallucinatory knows that you skated on a technicality. But back to Chuckles. He sure is powerful sorry about everything that went down.

Beginning with the Church Attorney’s first interview of me in February 2007, moreover, I have consistently expressed my remorse over the abuse as “totally wrong,” and my sincere regret that I hired my brother, trusted him, and was not sufficiently circumspect to become aware of his behavior earlier than I did.

Even though he didn’t actually do anything wrong.

I do not think, however, that to demand of my brother, as I did, upon once having actual knowledge of his offense, that he report himself, or be reported by me, to our bishop, who then deposed him, can accurately be characterized, as it was by the Review Court, as “totally wrong.”

Wait a minute. You said up here that, “The Review Court found absolutely no evidence that I am among those who, in your words, “have been complicit in maintaining a climate of silence and denial that has inhibited our efforts to end sexual abuse within our church.” Now you disagree with the Review Court’s finding that your conduct was “totally wrong?” Which is it, Chuckles?

Such is a gross mischaracterization, too, of my honoring of the victim’s privacy when in her nineteenth year I learned what she had suffered, of my fidelity to her parents’ subsequent, decades-long request for confidentiality, and of my consistent openness to inquiry into her abuse by church authorities. My record as bishop demonstrates unequivocally that I have handled clergy sexual abuse cases appropriately.

Chuckie? If you commit some crime for which there is a statute of limitations and the police have overwhelming evidence against you but caught you the day after the statute of limitations runs out, you’ll never see the inside of a jail. But that doesn’t mean that you didn’t commit the crime.

The Review Court also found that, based on the statute of limitations, there never should have been a canonical proceeding against me.

The Review Court, however, also stated that you acted reprehensibly in this affair and that the only reason they overturned the conviction was that the statute of limitations had run out. Are you a functional illiterate or something?

The wisdom of such a provision was borne out by the fact that after the June 2008 trial evidence surfaced that demonstrated that all the witnesses either intentionally prevaricated or unintentionally misremembered key facts at the basis of their testimony.

With that one sentence, Charles Bennison stops being a joke and starts being a top-of-the-line piece of crap. Fact?! Got any empirical proof of that libel of yours, Chuckles? Because that’s precisely what it is; you just publicly called all the witnesses liars.

While there is not much that I’d like more than to see those folks haul your sorry ass into court over this, I doubt that they will. Because most people recognize this statement as the wildly-flailing, last-ditch defense of a “man” who’s going to have to hand over his miter and his hooked stick real soon.

The Review Court regrettably failed to advance the interests of justice by proceeding to weigh the merits of the charges after adjudging negatively the Trial Court’s improper decision on the stature of limitations.

Those stupid clods didn’t completely exonerate me! Me, that most exalted of beings, an Episcopal bishop! Once again, your statement really cuts the ground out from under that whole “The Review Court found absolutely no evidence that I am among those who, in your words, ‘have been complicit in maintaining a climate of silence and denial that has inhibited our efforts to end sexual abuse within our church,” vibe you had going early in this letter.

In your “prayer” that the House of Bishops will “prevail upon Bishop Bennison to resign, or undertake other measures that lead to Bishop Bennison’s removal from office,” and that we find the “means of dissolving the relationship between a bishop and a diocese that find themselves in untenable circumstances,” moreover, you fail to heed the Review Court’s warning that “Title IV courts must guard against allowing that exception [to the statute of limitations] to be used without proof of actual sexual abuse.

Which nobody anywhere is alleging.

This is especially true under circumstances where the exception is invoked not so much to deal with sexual abuse but, rather, as an effort to use events in the distant past when the Respondent was a priest to remove a bishop during current times of conflict within the diocese. To allow Title IV and the sexual abuse exception to the statute of limitations to be used in this manner diminishes the monumental efforts of the Church to address, punish and remove incidents of actual clergy sexual abuse.”

Want to know something, Chuckles? Lots and lots of liberal Episcopalians I’ve read want to toughen up those canons dealing with this issue precisely because on something as heinous as clergy sexual abuse, letting a bishop slide on a technicality pretty much dynamites those “monumental efforts of the Church to address, punish and remove incidents of actual clergy sexual abuse.”

Legislatures frequently give voice to public reaction to court decisions, and it is understandable that in the heat of this moment the House of Deputies, you as its President, and your Council of Advice, would entertain changes in our canon law. In all fairness to the Church, to the Diocese of Pennsylvania, and to me, I would hope that, as you do so, you will thoroughly review all the facts of this particular case and my life’s work, be exacting in your reading of the canons, and honor our governance established in a rule of law.

Give it up, Chuckles. Give it up now. While you still have a shred of dignity left.

Episocpalians? I know I left you in 2003 so you don’t care what I think anymore and that’s fine. Take this for whatever it’s worth. But until you find a way to run this slimebag, you have no right to lecture anybody at allabout sexual abuse.