Tonight's "Vermont This Week"

That's what it looks like from the "far-left" panelist seat on the "Vermont This Week" set at Vermont Public Television at Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester.

In fact, that's exactly what it looked like at the taping at 3:30 this afternoon with Sweet Sue Allen, currently the editor of the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus on the left, filling in for WPTZ-TV's Stewart Ledbetter, the regular host. Then that's Freeps Statehouse/political writer Nancy Remsen next to Susan and John Flowers from Middlebury's Addison Independent next to Nancy.

With things kind of day-to-day in Freyne Land due to chemotherapy, I can't predict just how things will go, but I was in great shape today. Pumped up. Delighted to be on the program with Sue Allen, who I've known since the Reagan Era when she landed at the Freeps [and tangled with when she was Ho-Ho's esteemed press secretary during his gubernatorial chapter]. And also excited about the opportunity to confront a bit of the Freyne Past - the Roman Catholic Church.

It's been front-page news all week -  the big civil lawsuit that began in Burlington in which a former Vermont altar boy is suing the Vermont Roman Catholic Diocese for damages due from being sexually assaulted by a Vermont parish priest way back in the 1970s.

Sam Hemingway at the Freeps and Brian Joyce at WCAX-TV have been all over it.

Yours truly has deliberately avoided this one, not because I was molested by a priest, but because when I walked out the door at Maryknoll 's college seminary in Glen Ellyn,  Illinois in early June of 1969,  I also walked out the door on the Roman Catholic Church. Quite simply, I was no longer believing it all anymore. And I could not accept the answers I got when I dared to asked questions.

Though the church-lawsuit story wasn't on the original VTW headline list Producer Joe Merone e-mailed out around noontime, yours truly insisted we address it.  It's reality and that's supposed to be the business we're in, right? 

Especially when you have Susan Via, a top prosecutor from the 1980s, testifying that Roman Catholic Bishop John Marshall had told her boss,  Roman Catholic States Attorney [and now judge] Mark Keller, a Notre Dame grad,  it would be "a sin of scandal" if he opened a criminal investigation into the child-molesting priest's conduct.

Give me an effing break!

That's NEWS.

And it's also a dramatic window into the religious establishment of the past, and the power once enjoyed by it's priests, monsignors and bishops, who were experts in the world of sin, eh?

Comments

[Insomniac]

Amazing these people call themselves Christians.

the Judge Mark Keller might be worse than the States Attorney Mark Keller: It seems he is absolutely notorious for wasting tax-payer money putting non-violent offenders in our already over-crowded prison system.

In my week of prison I had this conversation probably a dozen times:
"you're here for pot?! bullshit."
"No, I got judge Keller"
"Ohhhhh, yeah, that guy blows, sorry man"

Another conversation; this one with a guard who works in the courthouse:

"what are you even doing here?"
"I don't know but I'm pretty sure Judge Keller doesn't believe in rehabilitation, that or he thinks jail is good rehab"
"Yep, you'd be right, I'm pretty sure he doesn't even believes in addiction"

A week in prison costs Vermont taxpayers $827.

Guess we shouldn't be surprised that the DOC has a larger budget than the Department of Education and required an emergency cash supplement from the legislature last session.

Thanks Judge Keller.