Maryland Finds That for Hundreds of Clergy Abuse Victims, 'No Parish Was Safe'

Ruth Graham
Sat, November 19, 2022 

The attorney general of Maryland has identified more than 600 young victims of clergy sexual abuse over the course of 80 years in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, according to a court document filed Thursday.

The filing, which broadly outlines the attorney general’s findings, requests that a judge allow the release of the full report: a 456-page document detailing decades of clergy sex abuse in Maryland.

The new report marks a symbolic milestone in the long-running international abuse scandal that has shaken faith in the Catholic Church and led to some reforms and billions of dollars in settlements. The Baltimore report is one of the first major investigations completed by a state attorney general on sexual abuse in the church since a scathing report on six dioceses in Pennsylvania shocked Catholics across the nation in 2018. Colorado investigators issued their own report in 2019 on church abuse.

More than 20 state attorneys general have initiated investigations, most of which are still underway.

Baltimore is the first Catholic diocese established in the United States and is led by an influential archbishop, William Lori, who was elected this week as vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The scale of the abuse outlined is on par with other large abuse cases uncovered in lawsuits and other investigations in dioceses in Boston, Los Angeles, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

The Maryland report found that “no parish was safe,” according to the filing from the office of Attorney General Brian Frosh. Both boys and girls were abused, ranging in age from preschool to “young adulthood,” which a spokesperson for the attorney general said reached to age 18.

The filing says the archdiocese failed to report many allegations of “sexual abuse and physical torture” and neglected to remove accused priests from active ministry or even restrict their access to children. Some congregations and schools had more than one abusive priest there at the same time. “The sexual abuse was so pervasive that victims were sometimes reporting sexual abuse to priests who were perpetrators themselves,” the filing states. One congregation was assigned 11 abusers over 40 years.

“Reading the report in its entirety made me physically ill,” Frosh said. “We may be looking at the tip of the iceberg, but it’s a very big tip.”

In a letter to church members Thursday, Lori said, “We feel renewed shame, deep remorse and heartfelt sympathy, most especially to those who suffered from the actions of representatives of the very Church entrusted with their spiritual and physical well-being.” Lori has served in the role since 2012.

The report identifies 115 priests who have already been prosecuted for sex abuse or identified publicly by the archdiocese. Another 43 have not previously been identified publicly. Of those newly identified priests, 30 have died, indicating that 13 newly accused priests are still alive.

Frosh said many of the instances of abuse would have been categorized as misdemeanors at the time they were committed, which means the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution has expired. He said most of the claims in the report are clustered in the 1970s and 1980s, with some before and after.

The Maryland report is the result of a criminal investigation initiated by Frosh’s office in 2019. A grand jury issued a subpoena requesting all documents from the archdiocese over the past 80 years relating to allegations of sexual abuse by priests and the archdiocese’s response to those accusations.

The report requires a judge’s approval for it to be released publicly because it includes material from a grand jury, which is ordinarily kept secret. A spokesman for the Archdiocese said it will not oppose the motion to disclose. But it also said “the motion filed by the Maryland Attorney General does not reflect the Archdiocese’s current and decades-long strong pastoral response and handling of allegations of child sexual abuse.”

The Maryland probe follows a grand jury investigation of abuse in the Catholic Church in Pennsylvania that lasted from 2016-18 and resulted in a sweeping 800-page report documenting widespread abuse. That report accused more than 300 priests of sexual abuse over 50 years.

David Lorenz, director of the Maryland chapter of SNAP, an advocacy group for clergy abuse victims, said the Maryland report’s significance is “as big as Pennsylvania.” He pointed out that the report addresses only one of the three dioceses that cover the state of Maryland.

“Maybe this is a day of reckoning for the church,” Lorenz said. He said he had received two phone calls since Thursday from clergy abuse victims who had not previously revealed their abuse.

The sexual abuse scandal has vexed the Catholic Church for 20 years, since The Boston Globe documented the cover-up of widespread sexual abuse in Catholic settings in 2002.

The crisis has led to legal reforms, including the expansion or suspension of many state laws regarding the statute of limitations for filing abuse claims. But it has resulted in relatively few criminal prosecutions. Many cases that have been revealed this century took place decades ago, and the offenders have died or the statutes of limitations have expired.

© 2022 The New York Times Company

EK Janaki Ammal: The 'nomad' flower scientist India forgot

Published

IMAGE SOURCE,GEETA DOCTOR

Image caption,

Janaki Ammal was a pioneering Indian scientist

By Zoya Mateen in Delhi and Anbarasan Ethirajan in London

BBC News

In March, the magnolias begin blooming at Wisley.

For the next few weeks, rows of pink flowers dot the small town in Surrey in the UK, beckoning passers-by to stop and smell them.

Few know, however, that many of these blooms have Indian roots.

They were planted by EK Janaki Ammal, a scientist who was born in the southern Indian state of Kerala in the 19th Century.

In a career spanning almost 60 years, Janaki studied a wide range of flowering plants and reworked the scientific classification of several families of plants.

"Janaki was not just a cytogeneticist - she was a field biologist, a plant geographer, a palaeobotanist, an experimental breeder and an ethno-botanist and not in the least, an explorer," says Dr Savithri Preetha Nair, a historian who has researched the scientist's life for years.

It's difficult, Dr Nair says, to name even one Indian male geneticist from the time who adopted such cross-disciplinary methodology in their research.

"She talked about biodiversity as early as the 1930s."

• Why India forgot this freedom hero from the south

Janaki lived an inspiring life, but for decades, her work went largely unappreciated and her contribution to science was barely acknowledged.

But this year - which also marks Janaki's 125th birth anniversary - Dr Nair hopes to change that with an in-depth biography. The book, titled Chromosome Woman, Nomad Scientist: E.K. Janaki Ammal, A Life 1897-1984, was released earlier in November and is the product of 16 years of research spread across three continents.

It also marks, Dr Nair says, the beginning of "a grand project" of recovering stories about Indian women in science.

"Until now, published sources on women scientists have focused on Europe and North America," she says, adding that women from Asia and other regions "hardly figure anywhere".

IMAGE SOURCE,COURTESY OF THE JOHN INNES FOUNDATION

Image caption,

Magnolia kobus 'Janaki Ammal' flower, named after the Indian botanist

An extraordinary life

While Janaki's professional achievements were numerous, her family members say the way she lived her life was also inspiring.

"She thrived on human possibility," says Geeta Doctor, a writer and Janaki's grand-niece. "She was passionate about everything, completely liberated and always fixated on her work."

Janaki was born in Tellichery (now Thalassery) in Kerala in 1897. Her father, EK Krishnan, was a high court sub-judge in the Madras Presidency, an administrative subdivision in British India.

She grew up in privilege, in a large family that lived in a house called Edam, which Ms Doctor says was "the centre of Janaki's life".

The two-storey house had a grand piano, a sprawling library and spacious halls, its large windows overlooking a carefully-tended garden.

Janaki belonged to Kerala's Thiyya community, which is regarded as socially backward under the Hindu caste system.

But at Edam house, Janaki's life was far removed from any prejudices, Ms Doctor says.

That didn't mean she did not face caste discrimination in her life, she adds - but she never allowed it to stop her.

"If somebody displeased her, she would just move on."

IMAGE SOURCE,GEETA DOCTOR

Image caption,

Janaki spent many years in England

Touch of sweetness

After she finished school, Janaki moved to Madras (now Chennai) for higher education.

In 1924, she was teaching at a women's college when she received a prestigious scholarship from the University of Michigan in the US.

Eight years later, she became the first Indian woman to be awarded a doctorate in botanical science.

She returned to India shortly after, and taught botany in her home state before joining the Sugarcane Breeding Station at Coimbatore.

It was here that Janaki worked on cross-breeding sugarcane and with other plants to create a high-yielding variety of the crop that could flourish in India.

She was the first person to successfully cross sugarcane and maize, which helped in understanding the origin and evolution of sugarcane, Dr Nair says.

A particular hybrid she created, the historian adds, went on to produce many commercial crosses for the institute but she didn't receive credit for it.

In 1940 - just after World War Two had started - Janaki moved to London and joined the John Innes Horticultural Institution to continue her research.

The next few years were the most formative ones of her career. Five years later, she became the first woman scientist to be employed at the Royal Horticultural Society Garden at Wisley.

It was also a time of hardships and hard work - Britain was facing the brunt of the war and food supplies were heavily rationed.

"But Janaki was unfazed," Ms Doctor says. "When the bombs fell, she would just dive under the table or sleep under the bed - all in a day's work."

IMAGE SOURCE,COURTESY OF THE RHS LINDLEY COLLECTIONS

Image caption,

Janaki with her colleagues outside the laboratory at RHS Garden Wisley, 1947

This attitude extended to her personal life, she says.

"[The children of her family] were her equals and she expected us to keep up with her strict ways."

But there was a sweeter side to her as well.

Ms Doctor recalls that her grand-aunt gave them amazing books and took them on delightful picnics.

And she was always brimming with stories - about Kapok, the small black-striped palm squirrel that she had smuggled in her sari to keep her company in London; and her doll Timothy, who fascinated everyone at Edam.

Ms Doctor does not put dates to these memories - the past is simply the past - but she vividly remembers Janaki's strident personality and commanding presence; her vibrant yellow saris; and her "energetic yet subtle" ways.

"She enjoyed life in its minutiae and also the grand scheme of things, but with a rigorous scientific mind."

Dr Nair says that this was also evident in her work, which was not about one seminal revelation, but a series of small-scale discoveries which contributed "to the grand history of human evolution".

"The questions she asked were fundamental ones about plants and man."

IMAGE SOURCE,COURTESY OF THE RHS HERBARIUM

Image caption,

A Rhododendron specimen made by Janaki at RHS

Homecoming

In 1951, India's prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru asked Janaki to return to the country and help restructure the Botanical Survey of India (BSI).

Janaki, who was greatly inspired by the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, went immediately.

"But her male colleagues refused to take commands from a woman and her attempts to re-organise BSI were turned down," Dr Nair says, adding that Janaki was never entirely accepted at the institute.

This caused her great pain and she could never entirely recover from it. So she took refuge in exploring the country in search of new plants.

In 1948, Janaki became the first woman to go on a plant-hunting expedition to Nepal which, according to her, was the most unique part of Asia botanically, says Dr Nair.

When she was 80, the Indian government awarded her a Padma Shri, one of the country's highest civilian honours. She died seven years later, in 1984.

Ms Doctor says that even though Janaki did not receive the recognition she deserved, she never lost her passion for studying life.

"She would always say 'my work will survive' - and it did."

Dr Nair agrees.

"Janaki's life continues to be a blazing testament to intellectual integrity."

Rabindranath Tagore: When Hitler purged India Nobel laureate's paintings

Soutik Biswas - India correspondent
Sun, November 20, 2022 

Rabindranath Tagore was the first Indian to win a Nobel prize

They were five artworks in all, depicting birds and humans, and one of a girl in a red robe.

Painted in coloured inks and gouache by Rabindranath Tagore, India's most famous poet, they found a place in a leading museum in Berlin. Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel literature prize, had gifted the paintings to Germany in 1930.

Seven years later, the paintings were purged by the Nazi regime which had begun to classify some "inappropriate" art works as degenerate.

Hitler, a failed artist himself, believed post-impressionist modern art to be "evidence of a deranged mind" and ordered more than 16,000 artworks, including ones by Van Gogh and Man Ray, to be removed from German museums.

The Nazis considered such art "degenerate" and even staged an exhibition to ridicule them.

Degenerate art: The art the Nazis hated

There appears to be scant record of how and why Tagore's paintings were targeted in a notorious campaign by Hitler. Art historians speculate that it was easy for the Nazis to demonise his art because they were modernist by nature - Hitler once said that "anyone who sees and paints the sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilised".

Tagore visited Germany thrice - in 1921, 1926 and 1930. Two dozen of his books were already available in German translation. "Wherever he spoke, the halls were packed. The newspapers reported scuffles and regular fights by people who were refused entry," says Martin Kampchen, a German author who has translated Tagore's works. The local media hailed the Indian poet as the 'wise man from the East'; and a 'prophet, a mystic and a messiah'.

In 1930, a solo show carrying some 300 of Tagore's artworks travelled to Europe. More than 100 of his paintings were shown in Paris, and at least half of them at the National Gallery of Art in Berlin before the exhibition proceeded to London.

Five of Tagore's paintings are listed in a German inventory of 'degenerate art'

Until 1937, Tagore's paintings were housed in Berlin's baroque Crown Prince Palace, which also housed the National Gallery. When Hitler's purge began, a "deportation list from 15 October 1937 shows the five paintings listed amongst those of many famous expressionist painters which were removed from the palace and brought to a depot with restricted access in the city", according to art historian Konstantin Wenzlaff.

What exactly happened next still remains unclear.

A "degenerate art" inventory compiled in 1941-42 - later widely used to identify the provenance of paintings that went missing during the Nazi era - clearly lists the five paintings, loosely titled Mask, Portrait, Girl [in a red robe], Mask and Two Birds.

In pictures: Long-lost art unveiled in Germany

The confiscated works were listed alphabetically by artist and used symbols such as T (for exchanged), V (for sold) and X (for destroyed) for information on each painting.

In the case of Tagore, the inventory lists two paintings as exchanged and two as destroyed. The fifth one, Two Birds, was untagged in the list.

One of the purged paintings is housed in a museum in Munich, according to a German curator

Mr Wenzlaff has written that Tagore's works "disappeared" from the gallery and "have not been recovered so far".

Three paintings were to be returned to Tagore in 1939 - a letter from the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda apparently inquired about the exact address of the poet's heirs, even though he was alive at that time.

Art historian R Siva Kumar, who has researched Tagore's artworks extensively, believes that these three paintings were returned to Tagore in 1939 and the remaining two were lost.

The Nazi art hoard that shocked the world

But Oliver Kase, the chief curator of modern art at Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne museum, told me that one of the two paintings believed to be lost has been in the collection of The Bavarian State Painting Collections in the city since 1964.

Dr Kase describes the painting of a "half-shadowed head" as both "austere and dreamily spiritual" and an example of what was branded as "degenerate art" by the Nazis.

"I believe that is the only work by Tagore in a German public collection," Dr Kase says. The second painting was sold in an auction in October 1996 to a private collector in the UK, he adds.

"The three remaining works that were returned to Tagore [in India] are lost."

Hermann Goering and Adolph Hitler at an exhibition of 'degenerate art' put together by the Nazi party

Prof Siva Kumar believes he "might have seen one of the returned paintings" in the archives at Visva-Bharati, the university founded by Tagore in West Bengal's Shantiniketan town. Nilanjan Bandopadhyay, who runs the archive, told me that he does not know of this painting "off hand, and some visual reference would help".

Tagore began painting in his mid-sixties and ended up producing more than 2,300 artworks over a decade before he died in 1941.

"He always wanted to paint. He was doodling in his manuscripts. Around 1928, he was producing his first paintings," says Professor Siva Kumar.

The prodigious Bengali polymath - poet, novelist, teacher, philosopher, composer - drew imaginary animal figures, geometric patterns, female figures, self-portraits, landscapes and masks that looked like real people. Art historians believe Tagore's art was informed by his widespread exposure to Art Nouveau - the first self-consciously international modern art movement - and the more expressive ancient folk arts.

"What he did was to bring an idea of freedom into his art in India. In the 1930s US and UK had not yet warmed up to modern art. When Tagore was shown in Germany people compared his work to surrealists and expressionists," says Prof Siva Kumar. Until they were purged by the Nazis.

Humanity’s first cultural revolution and how can it help us today

Image via Shutterstock.

Deborah Barsky and
Independent Media Institute 

November 13, 2022

We live in a fast-moving, technology-dominated era. Happiness is fleeting, and everything is replaceable or disposable. It is understandable that people are drawn to a utopian vision. Many find refuge in the concept of a “return” to an idealized past—one in which humans were not so numerous, and animals abounded; when the Earth was still clean and pure, and when our ties to nature were unviolated.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

But this raises the question: Is this nothing more than a utopian vision? Can we pinpoint a time in our evolutionary trajectory when we wandered from the path of empathy, of compassion and respect for one another and for all forms of life? Or are we nihilistically the victims of our own natural tendencies, and must we continue to live reckless lifestyles, no matter the outcome?

Studying human prehistory enables people to see the world through a long-term lens—across which we can discern tendencies and patterns that can only be identified over time. By adopting an evolutionary outlook, it becomes possible to explain when, how, and why specific human traits and behaviors emerged.

The particularity of human prehistory is that there are no written records, and so we must try to answer our questions using the scant information provided for us by the archeological record.

The Oldowan era that began in East Africa can be seen as the start of a process that would eventually lead to the massive technosocial database that humanity now embraces and that continues to expand ever further in each successive generation, in a spiral of exponential technological and social creativity. The first recognizable Oldowan tool kits start appearing 2.6 million years ago; they contain large pounding implements, alongside small sharp-edged flakes that were certainly useful for, among other things, obtaining viscera and meat resources from animals that were scavenged as hominins (humans and their close extinct ancestors) competed with other large carnivores present in their environments. As hominins began to expand their technological know-how, successful resourcing of such protein-rich food was ideal for feeding the developing and energy-expensive brain.

Stone tool production—and its associated behaviors—grew ever more complex, eventually requiring relatively heavy investments into teaching these technologies to successfully pass them onward into each successive generation. This, in turn, established the foundations for the highly beneficial process of cumulative learning that became coupled with symbolic thought processes such as language, ultimately favoring our capacity for exponential development.

This had huge implications, for example, in terms of the first inklings of what we call “tradition”—ways to make and do things—that are indeed the very building blocks of culture. Underpinning this process, neuroscientific experiments carried out to study the brain synapses and areas involved during toolmaking processes show that at least some basic forms of language were likely needed in order to communicate the technologies required to manufacture the more complex tools of the Acheulian age that commenced in Africa about 1.75 million years ago. Researchers have demonstrated that the areas of the brain activated during toolmaking are the same as those employed for abstract thought processes, including language and volumetric planning.

When we talk about the Acheulian, we are referring to a hugely dense cultural phenomenon occurring in Africa and Eurasia that lasted some 1.4 million years. While it cannot be considered a homogenous occurrence, it does entail a number of behavioral and technosocial elements that prehistorians agree tie together as a sort of unit.

Globally, the Acheulian technocomplex coincides generally with the appearance of the relatively large-brained hominins attributed to Homo erectus and the African Homo ergaster, as well as Homo heidelbergensis, a wide-ranging hominin identified in Eurasia and known to have successfully adapted to relatively colder climatic conditions. Indeed, it was during the Acheulian that hominins developed fire-making technologies and that the first hearths appear in some sites (especially caves) that also show indications of seasonal or cyclical patterns of use.

In terms of stone tool technologies, Acheulian hominins moved from the nonstandardized tool kits of the Oldowan to innovate new ways to shape stone tools that involved comparatively complex volumetric concepts. This allowed them to produce a wide variety of preconceived flake formats that they proceeded to modify into a range of standardized tool types. Conceptually, this is very significant because it implies that for the first time, stone was being modeled to fit with a predetermined mental image. The bifacial and bilateral symmetry of the emblematic Acheulian tear-shaped handaxes is especially exemplary of this particular hallmark.

The Acheulian archeological record also bears witness to a whole new range of artifacts that were manufactured according to a fixed set of technological notions and newly acquired abilities. To endure, this toolmaking know-how needed to be shared by way of ever more composite and communicative modes of teaching.

We also know that Acheulian hominins were highly mobile since we often find rocks in their tool kits that were imported from considerable distances away. Importantly, as we move through time and space, we observe that some of the tool-making techniques actually show special features that can be linked to specific regional contexts. Furthermore, population densities increased significantly throughout the period associated with the later Acheulian phenomenon—roughly from around 1 million to 350,000 years ago—likely as a result of these technological achievements.

Beyond toolmaking, other social and behavioral revolutions are attributed to Acheulian hominins. Fire-making, whose significance as a transformative technosocial tool cannot be overstated, as well as other accomplishments, signal the attainment of new thresholds that were to hugely transform the lives of Acheulian peoples and their descendants. For example, Acheulian sites with evidence of species-specific hunting expeditions and systematized butchery indicate sophisticated organizational capacities and certainly also suggest that these hominins mastered at least some form of gestural—and probably also linguistic—communication.

All of these abilities acquired over thousands of years by Acheulian peoples enabled them not only to settle into new lands situated, for example, in higher latitudes, but also to overcome seasonal climatic stresses and so to thrive within a relatively restricted geographical range. While they were certainly nomadic, they established home-base type living areas to which they returned on a cyclical basis. Thus, the combined phenomena of more standardized and complex culture and regional lifeways led these ancient populations to carve out identities even as they developed idiosyncratic technosocial behaviors that gave them a sense of “belonging” to a particular social unit—living within a definable geographical area. This was the land in which they ranged and into which they deposited their dead (intentional human burials are presently only recognized to have occurred onward from the Middle Paleolithic). To me, the Acheulian represents the first major cultural revolution known to humankind.

So I suggest that it was during the Acheulian era that increased cultural complexity led the peoples of the world to see each other as somehow different, based on variances in their material culture. In the later Acheulian especially, as nomadic groups began to return cyclically to the same dwelling areas, land-linked identities formed that I propose were foundational to the first culturally based geographical borders. Through time, humanity gave more and more credence to such constructs, deepening their significance. This would eventually lead to the founding of modern nationalistic sentiments that presently consolidate identity-based disparity, finally contributing to justifying geographic inequality of wealth and power.

Many of the tough questions about human nature are more easily understood through the prism of prehistory, even as we make new discoveries. Take, for instance, the question of where the modern practice of organized violence emerged from.

Human prehistory, as backed by science, has now clearly demonstrated that there is no basis for dividing peoples based on biological or anatomical aspects and that warlike behaviors involving large numbers of peoples, today having virtually global effects on all human lives, are based on constructed imaginary ideologies. Geographical boundaries, identity-based beliefs, and religion are some of the conceptual constructs commonly used in our world to justify such behaviors. In addition, competition buttressed by concepts of identity is now being accentuated due to the potential and real scarcity of resources resulting from population density, consumptive lifestyles, and now also accelerated climate change.

On the question of whether or not the emergence of warlike behavior was an inevitable outcome, we must observe such tendencies from an evolutionary standpoint. Like other genetic and even technological traits, the human capacity for massive violence exists as a potential response that remains latent within our species until triggered by particular exterior factors. Of course, this species-specific response mode also corresponds with our degree of technological readiness that has enabled us to create the tools of massive destruction that we so aptly manipulate today.

Hierarchized societies formed and evolved throughout the Middle and Late Pleistocene when a range of hominins coevolved with anatomically modern humans that we now know appeared in Africa as early as 300,000 years ago. During the Holocene Epoch, human links to specific regional areas were strengthened even further by the sedentary lifestyles that developed into the Neolithic period, as did the inclination to protect the resources amassed in this context. We can conjecture the emergence of a wide range of sociocultural situations that would have arisen once increasing numbers of individuals were arranged into the larger social units permitted by the capacity to produce, store, and save sizable quantities of foodstuffs and other kinds of goods.

Even among other animals, including primates, increased population densities result in competitive behaviors. In this scenario, that disposition would have been intensified by the idea of accumulated goods belonging, as it were, to the social unit that produced them.

Bringing technology into play, we can clearly see how humans began to transform their know-how into ingenious tools for performing different acts of warfare. In the oldest toolkits known to humankind going back millions of years, we cannot clearly identify any artifacts that appear adequate to be used for large-scale violence. We don’t have evidence of organized violence until millions of years after we started developing tools and intensively modifying the environments around us. As we amplified the land-linked identity-based facet of our social lives, so did we continue to develop ever more efficient technological and social solutions that would increase our capacity for large-scale warfare.

If we can understand how these behaviors emerged, then we can also use our technological skills to get to the root of these problems and employ all we have learned to finally take a better hold of the reins of our future.


Author Bio: Deborah Barsky is a researcher at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and associate professor at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain, with the Open University of Catalonia (UOC). She is the author of Human Prehistory: Exploring the Past to Understand the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2022).