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  Code Words, Cover-up: Gallup Clergy Sex Abuse File Now Online

By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Gallup Independent
April 21, 2011

http://www.bishop-accountability.org/news5/2011_04_21_Hardin_Burrola_CodeWords.pdf

[See the Hageman file.]

[full text]

It's all about code words, according to Patrick J. Wall. Wall, a canon lawyer and former Catholic priest and Benedictine monk, was in Winslow on Wednesday talking about the diocese of Gallup's recently released personnel file on the late Clement A. Hageman, whom diocesan officials have admitted was a pedophile priest.

The 156-pages of documents, while filled with references to the priest's chronic alcoholism, are also filled with church code words for sexual abuse, Wall said. Some of those references aren’t even subtle - "guilty of playing with boys" and the Latin phrase "cum pueris," which means "with boys" – while others are more euphemistic - ''the other trouble," "old transgressions,” and "his difficulty."

"There's enough in this file you could write a whole story alone on code words,"

Wall said

 
 

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