N.B. This video broadcast apparently aired on August 3rd (yesterday). The print article is not dated. I learned about this event just a few hours ago and will follow up further later on. MMS ( 8/4/21, 1:30 p.)
Nicholas DiMarzio has a hideously unscrupulous record of opposing Child Victims Act and Statute of Limitations reform in New York State. He resorted to thuggish, maniacal and well-documented means to block this legislation. He forbade Catholic advocacy groups like VOTF (Voice of the Faithful) which were formed following/in response to the John Jay and Boston Globe Spotlight reports, which chronicled widespread clergy child rape, from meeting on Brooklyn Diocese property. DiMarzio is about to be hit with an avalanche of cases in his diocese which is likely, at the very least, to highlight his failure to remove predators from ministry. DiMarzio was sent, in Cardinal Timothy Dolan’s stead (Why? I have ventured a theory or two elsewhere on Indie Theology.) to investigate and report on one of the notoriously dirty dioceses, the Diocese of Buffalo in New York State, in 2019. DiMarzio’s report, submitted just before the New York Attorney General released results from her investigation of the Diocese of Buffalo (Her report identified three alleged child rape accessories/accomplices in miters.) has still yet to be made available to the public. Immediately upon completion of that Apostolic Visitation to Buffalo, DiMarzio got slammed with the first of two sets of complaints from survivors/victims, both represented by Attorney Mitch Garabedian of Boston Globe Spotlight fame. Both survivors claim that DiMarzio raped them on multiple occasions, more than four decades ago, while serving as a priest in a parish in the Archdiocese of Newark. DiMarzio should have been removed from ministry in November of 2019 when those allegations were made and he became the submject of a Vatican Vos Estis probe. Ironically perhaps, DiMarzio submitted his resignation (as is customary for all bishops to do as they turn 75) four months before being accused of the two sets of sexual assault. So DiMarzio had already resigned when the accusations became public. Only the pope can remove a bishop, and only a pope can accept a bishop’s resignation. It is important to note that Pope Francis has made the choice to leave this prelate in ministry.
This week, DiMarzio who most Catholic parents would likely agree should not be anywhere near a child, paid a visit to a “Boy Scout Camp” as the “NET TV” Brooklyn Diocese publication called it despite that girls are enrolled in the camp.
Watch the footage. It’s incredible.
Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, a former Boy Scout and scout leader before he entered the seminary, traveled 120 miles to Ten Mile Island Boy Scout Camp on Aug. 3.
The scout’s motto is be prepared – and they sure were. They welcomed their guests with the perfect camp meal: sloppy joes, tater tots and chocolate pudding.
Boys and girls at Ten Mile River Scout Camps are enjoying a classic wilderness lunch and a visit from the bishop of Brooklyn.
“I’m really grateful for that, because he traveled all the way over here to see us and to be with us,” said Girl Scout Victoria Pena. “So it’s just amazing.”
It is amazing. It’s amazing that DiMarzio’s press people are willing to divulge the bishop’s history as a scoutmaster. If I were DiMarzio’s press person, that is the last piece of new information I would want to share with the Catholic public. The only organization that really rivals the institutional Roman Catholic Church in its willingness to allow men driven to violate children to rape amok is the Boy Scouts of America. One might think of this convergence of two institutions with horrific child sexual assault track records as a kind of momentary marriage of “two houses alike in dignity” — (or, obviously, in lack thereof).
Thinking of DiMarzio, who should have been removed from ministry — especially any ministry that would bring him into contact with children — eating Sloppy Joes in the mess hall with the kids — is literally nauseating.
A couple of further observations about his.
The tone deafness involved herein suggests a level of arrogance that all advocates for children should find alarming. These bishops think they are invulnerable. Nicholas DiMarzio and his handlers believe that God is on their side even in the cover up of wide-scale child rape. That the prelate in the center of this shit show is allegedly an Opus Dei adherent matters, because willingness to embrace an “ends justify the means” orientation toward actions taken in the service of integralism, dominionism , and protecting the institutional church from scandal, is an integral aspect of Opus Dei’s philosophy and approach to evangelization. Integralists seek to bring secular law in line with Catholic law. Catholic dominionists believe the world needs to be converted to Catholicism. These are Opus Dei values we have been seeing in play in our (United States) government for a while now.
It is likely that DiMarzio, his special friend the monsignor, Kiaran Harrington, Vicar for Communications in Brooklyn and “national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies,” Harrington, DiMarzio’s former secretary, runs the “if we build it the rich foks will come” see the goal of “putting out into the deep” as sufficient to justify the paving over of DiMarzio’s long and steadfast track record of endangering children whether in his capacity as accessory, accomplice or perpetrator.
MMS 8/4/21 Brooklyn 1:40 p
updated 5:05 p 8/4/21