Spiritual Adviser to Mother Teresa Gets 25-Year Sentence for Sex Crimes

Spiritual Adviser to Mother Teresa Gets 25-Year Sentence for Sex Crimes
Feb. 14, 2009
By Jim Kouri

(Information for the following was provided to the National Association of Chiefs of Police by the Department of Homeland Security.)

A defrocked Catholic priest who once served as a spiritual adviser to Mother Teresa was sentenced in Chicago on Wednesday to 25 years in federal prison for sexually molesting a boy on several interstate and international religious retreats.

This sentence resulted from an investigation conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois.

Donald J. McGuire, 78, from Chicago, was sentenced Feb 11 by U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer to 325 years in prison. Judge Pallmeyer stated in court that she exceeded the federal sentencing guidelines to send a message to those who think they can abuse their positions of power in the community.

<snip>

Numerous victims and their families were present in court and described how McGuire's abuse had robbed them of their innocence and ruined their lives. Some victims described suffering years of depression as a result of the abuse, while others confronted McGuire and demanded an apology for abusing his position of authority.

<snip>

"For a priest to abuse his position of trust in the community against innocent children is despicable," said Gary Hartwig, special agent-in-charge of the ICE Office of Investigations in Chicago. "All children have an absolute right to grow up free from the fear of sexual exploitation. Today's sentence shows that ICE will go the extra mile to protect the innocence of the most vulnerable segment of our society - our kids."

More:
http://www.huntingtonnews.net/national/090214-kouri-nationalsexcrimes.html

For example, is there a relationship between gender and sentencing, marital status and sentencing, or religious affiliations and sentencing?

I am sure this is choice info for law firms - just curious as to what profiles attorneys might look for in a case like this.

I am completely comfortable with the length of this sentence. If doubled, I would still be comfortable.

convicted child abuser, with no evidence whatsoever that she knew or condoned or covered up such behavior. It is a footnote to this story, at best, that this priest at one time advised (whatever that means) Mother Teresa. The hallmark of child sex abuse is SECRECY. It is a furtive activity. And while bishops have been known to cover it up, once they found out about it, there is absolutely no evidence presented here, or anywhere, that Mother Teresa was in any position to know about this, had any part in covering it up, or would have covered it up, had she known. The headline is scurrilous.

her a child molester? Does that mean that her memory and her convent, with nuns who devote their lives to the poorest of the poor, deserve this headline? It is inexcusable.

You know he hung out with that dude on that board, remember? Gee, I can't remember his name, but it sure shows something bad about Obama's character.

:sarcasm:

a sad day, indeed. I doubt it ever happened though.

even her belief in God -- her writings confirm she struggled with these issues. Why would she not have occasion to need a spiritual advisor?


:shrug:

Link?

Often are filled with deep doubt also. It is part and parcel of the Spiritual path.

Deep doubt faith and insight often go hand in hand.

That's my point, why are you so certain she would never need a spiritual advisor?

Teaching the world's poorest people not to use birth control is unconscionable, especially when she was so uncertain of her own religious justification for it.

I wish there was a Hell, so she could burn in it.

The world does not know, or does not want to know the real Mother Theresa.

Okay, I made that one up.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

I don't know why you would assume she never had use for any guidance. Just because people are amazing at doing a particular thing doesn't mean they never need guidance in anything else.

Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith
By David Van Biema Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007


Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
— Mother Teresa to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, September 1979

On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cross, God had " himself the hungry one — the naked one — the homeless one." Jesus' hunger, she said, is what "you and I must find" and alleviate. She condemned abortion and bemoaned youthful drug addiction in the West. Finally, she suggested that the upcoming Christmas holiday should remind the world "that radiating joy is real" because Christ is everywhere — "Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive."

Yet less than three months earlier, in a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. "Jesus has a very special love for you," she assured Van der Peet. "{But} as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have free hand."

The two statements, 11 weeks apart, are extravagantly dissonant. The first is typical of the woman the world thought it knew. The second sounds as though it had wandered in from some 1950s existentialist drama. Together they suggest a startling portrait in self-contradiction — that one of the great human icons of the past 100 years, whose remarkable deeds seemed inextricably connected to her closeness to God and who was routinely observed in silent and seemingly peaceful prayer by her associates as well as the television camera, was living out a very different spiritual reality privately, an arid landscape from which the deity had disappeared.

And in fact, that appears to be the case. A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book's compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, "neither in her heart or in the eucharist."

More:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

and books evdently have scant if any understanding of the economy of the Christian's spiritual life.

Only "loony toons" like C. Hitchens and wildest fringe of American atheists failed to see her extraordinary sanctity. For the latter decades of her life Mother Theresa was feted virtually everywhere by everyone. But had she succumbed to the adoration she would not have turned down offers of money and new vehicles for her nuns, and had she been of a more intellectual cast of mind, she would probably have "sold out" on some basic Christian precepts for cheap popularity. Those who revered her did so for the right reasons.

However, it works like this: one way or another, the deeper a Christian's spiritual life, the heavier the trials and crosses he/she will have to suffer. Everything else, everything outward about her life, seemed to be working liked magic, so where else was God going to find ways to try her faith and enable her to share in his redemptive suffering? She wasn't going to suffer for her political astuteness, was she. It was a lacuna in her otherwise extraordinary sanctity, but she was a child of her time and background. And few who are politically astute seem to retain much idealism when they've become comfortably affluent. And of those who do, none could hold a candle to her.

As a matter of fact, I read that on her death-bed, she was plagued by what spiritual attacks of great ferocity, so much so that she was asked if she would like to be exorcised, to which she acquiesced. And she eventually died in the great peace she deserved.

She lived on a handful of rice a day, and slept two hours on a table top. I met her once and worked with her nuns, too. People have been talking on here about toilet paper in a post-apocalyptic economic landscape. Her nuns used newpspapers cut into squares and their convent wasn't a "stately home" or rather grand mansion, as has been the norm until quite recently, it was a small terraced house in a non-affluent part of Kilburn, the good old Irish quarter of West London. I think, the main one.

I won't be responding to more nonsense about her.