A bishop counsels a distraught layman

I spoke the other day to Steve Sandifer, a lawyer and Catholic layman in Lancaster, a southern Dallas suburb, who had been received into the Church by Fr. Art Mallinson. Shortly thereafter, Sandifer said he learned about Fr. Mallinson's involvement in the lewd, semi-pornographic St. Sebastian's Angels website. Scandalized, Sandifer went straight to Bishop Joseph Galante, at the time the coadjutor bishop in Dallas, to register his shock and anger. This was 2002.

Sandifer told me that Bp Galante assured him their conversation would be in confidence. Sandifer alleges that when he explained his objections about St. Sebastian's Angels to the bishop, that Bp Galante defended Fr. Mallinson, and said the priest hadn’t done anything wrong. Sandifer claims that the bishop further said that Fr. Mallinson had assured him that he was no longer part of that site, and that was that. The bishop allegedly told the new convert that he was, in Sandifer's words, "making a mountain out of a molehill."

Not satisfied with this, Sandifer went to Fr. Mallinson’s rectory to confront him. Sandifer said Mallinson greeted him by saying, “I’ve been expecting you. Bishop Galante told me you’d spoken with him.”

I contacted Bishop Galante's office in Camden, NJ, and through a spokesman asked the bishop for comment on Sandifer's allegations. I also told the spokesman I wanted to know why Bishop Galante chose to leave Fr. Mallinson in the parish after his involvement with St. Sebastian's Angels became a public scandal (other bishops removed their SSA priests from ministry). I heard back from the diocesan spokesman today. He said, "The bishop doesn't believe it would be appropriate to speak on a personnel matter that's before another diocese."

Fair enough. That's his right. I repeat the Sandifer story here because unlike so many laymen who tell these kinds of stories, he was willing to put his name to it, to speak on the record. Without him explaining his reasoning, we can only speculate as to why Bp Galante left Mallinson in the parish -- and Sandifer's claim that Galante minimized the seriousness of what Mallinson did with the website is unrefuted. Still, over and over in the sex abuse scandal, there were instances of bishops minimizing the seriousness of sexual misconduct on the part of priests, and telling laymen they were making mountains out of molehills. And the bad priests were left in place.

Laymen did complain, over and over. And it did them no good. They were told that they were the ones with the problem.

UPDATE: Speaking to a point Erin Manning makes in the comboxes, here's the English-born Catholic priest Fr. Dwight Longenecker, on why he's glad he left the UK. This part reminded me of Erin's comment below:

There were a few hot spots in the English Catholic Church--but the emphasis is on the 'few', and the ones that were alive were consistently ignored, marginalized and excluded by the Catholic powers that be.

Bishop Galante apparently dismissed this new convert, who actually gave a damn about the integrity of the Church he had chosen, in favor of this morally corrupt priest. As Erin points out, and Fr. Dwight, this is not a one-off thing.