This fall, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was just breaking free from fallout of a vast abuse scandal when the high-profile abuse scandal broke at Penn State University, adding new urgency to lawmaker efforts to reform state statutes of limitations in order to give victims more time to file civil claims against abusers. Those efforts will undoubtedly garner great support among citizens but they will also surely meet savvy well-managed resistance from the Church under new Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput, who orchestrated successful opposition to similar efforts in Colorado as Archbishop of Denver over the past half decade.

In the mid-2000s, when shamed archdioceses around the country had come to accept so-called window legislation and paid out tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements to adults who with the new laws were able to pursue justice for crimes visited upon them as children, Chaput almost single-handedly changed the course of the Church in America. He went all out to defeat similar bills in 2006 and 2008 in Colorado, setting the bar in 2006 when he directly appealed to the public and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on PR and political lobbying professionals.

People in pin-striped suits hired by the Colorado Catholic Conference leaked stories to sympathetic reporters and pressed hard on Catholic lawmakers to make the case for Chaput at the capitol. The archbishop gave interviews and wrote op-eds. He sent a formal letter opposing the legislation to be read by pastors during services throughout the archdiocese, a rare act, and had 25,000 postcards printed up for parishioners to fill out at mass and mail to lawmakers.

Chaput also launched a campaign targeting the state’s public schools, producing a list of public school teachers who had been charged with sex abuse and arguing that public schools not Catholic schools were the real site of criminal danger.

Chaput proved a master at hardball politics. His campaign was full of stretched facts and false equivalencies. Opponents outraged at his McCarthy style list of public school abusers, for example, pointed out that the public school criminals had been charged and tried but that their Catholic counterparts faced no such accountability. On the contrary, in parishes around the world, they had been shuttled away, accusations and evidence of crimes buried by Church authorities, which was the main reason advocates for victims were making the case for extending statutes of limitations. They also pointed out that public institutions were subject to open records laws that would prevent the kind of transparency dodging Church officials had engaged in for decades.

As Jeremy Roebuck reported this past August for the Pueblo Chieftan in a piece comprehensively revisiting the battle, Church lobbyists eventually “persuaded Colorado lawmakers to alter the bill to subject government groups to the same $700,000 damages limit that private institutions would now face. In so doing, the bill’s backers unwittingly opened the door to its demise…

“Teachers’ unions, lobbyists for local governments, and insurance companies soon joined the fight. And with mounting opposition from the capital’s most powerful interest groups, the bill that had sailed through committee months earlier suddenly was resoundingly voted down.”

The new sex-abuse legislation in Philadelphia is being proposed by Republican Rep Dennis O’Brien and Democratic Rep Louise Bishop, both members of the House Children and Youth Committee. The legislation will extend statutes of limitations and make it illegal for witnesses of abuse not to report what they have seen directly to law enforcement authorities.

In interviews since his transfer this summer, Chaput has said he doesn’t know why the Pope chose him to lead the flock in Philadelphia. Lawmakers there may soon come to think they know the answer based on practical experience.

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

A video posted Thursday captured angry Catholics protesting outside the mass held to install Chaput in his new position.

“We’re here to welcome Archbishop Chaput with an appropriate welcome, I think,” said one protester, “and that’s to ask him, Number One, to tell the truth; Number Two, to make survivors and their healing a priority; and, Number Three, to not to take any of the arrogance of the hierarchy and bring it to Philadelphia. ”

“I think [Chaput] should support the kind of legislation that protects children,” said another protester. “That would be a good start. Pennsylvania needs a law. There should be window legislation allowing these people to have a day in court.”

Chaput is not likely to support any kind of “window legislation,” or laws that would extend statutes of limitations in civil cases brought against clergy accused of sexual abuse– which is surely partly why Pope Benedict appointed Chaput to the position.

Chaput has established a strong record over the last decade of successfully guarding the Church against the fallout of sexual-abuse charges. He has shown personal compassion for victims and has moved swiftly to remove accused priests from public ministry. But he has also pushed back hard against legal efforts to hold the Church responsible for abuse, mainly by battling to prevent the kind of high-dollar payouts to victims made by the Church in recent years and that culminated, perhaps, in the hundred-million-dollar payouts that came in the late-2000s in California.

Indeed, Chaput’s scrappy efforts in opposing “window” legislation have become a model to Church leaders in the U.S. He is a modern prelate who gets dirty playing hardcore politics.

In opposing a Colorado same-sex civil unions bill last year, Chaput pressed his case against the bill from the pulpit and in essays that fudged the facts, a tactic Joelle Casteix, Western Regional Director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said he also used in opposing “window law” bills here.

In a blog post on the news of his appointment to Philadelphia, she sounded an alarm:

In 2006, when Colorado legislators tried to expand archaic statutes of limitations for victims of child sexual abuse, including a civil window for older victims, Chaput spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and used the pulpit to kill the legislation… While fighting a [2008 version of the legislation], Chaput played a game well known in politics: “I’m bad, but so are they.” To do this, his lawyers did a simple search of Colorado public school teachers who had been arrested for sexual abuse. Then they put the names in a list, publicized it, and claimed that Chaput had unearthed a scandal of molestation in the public education system.  The PR stunt was a slap in the face of clergy sex abuse survivors.  Why? Because the teachers on Chaput’s list were already exposed and  arrested, unlike the vast majority of the predator clerics in the Catholic church.  The teachers on Chaput’s list were not carefully hidden by their superiors, shuttled from parish to parish, covered-up by church officials, and allowed to molest more kids.

In fact, according to Bishop-Accountability.org, the leading database of documents chronicling the sex abuse crisis in the U.S. Catholic Church, Chaput has been less than forthcoming in naming accused clergy.  In 2004, when the first national John Jay study on abusive priests was released, Chaput fudged the math. He only reported diocesan priests and didn’t submit any information on religious order priests who – like himself – make up more than half of the priests in the diocese. (Chaput is a religious order priest, a Capuchin OFM).  Then, he only submitted the names of priests that the diocese had “confirmed” had abused kids, not the number of total accusations.

Chaput’s installment is the latest chapter in one of the most high-profile contemporary Church upheavals. The Philadelphia archdiocese has been doing major damage control since February, when a grand jury skewered Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali, his bishops and staff for retaining dozens of problem priests. It charged three priests and a Catholic school teacher with rape and a priest-administrator or monsignor with endangering children by only shuffling accused priests to different posts. The panel said the Church allowed nearly 40 suspected abusers to continue working.

The strain on internal relations at the archdiocese is a matter of public record. The head of the archdiocese panel on priest sex abuse last month responded angrily to criticism heaped on the panel by the grand jury. Ana Maria Catanzaro wrote at the Catholic magazine Commonweal that Rigali and his bishops “failed miserably at being open and transparent” with the panel and so panel members couldn’t perform genuine oversight and shouldn’t be made to carry blame.

“What will it take for bishops to accept that their attitude of superiority and privilege only harms their image and the church’s image?” she wrote.

In a video that introduces Chaput to Pennsylvanians, the archbishop sought to make the focus of the story of his installation wider than merely the sex-abuse controversy.

“Everybody’s talking about the problems Philadelphia has,” he said, “but that’s not who Philadelphia is… It’s very important for us to see [ourselves] as more than the problems we have.”

Another video, also posted last week, asks Chaput whether he believes “priests should be held to a higher standard.”

It’s an intimate piece, in which Chaput looks weary, his quiet and measured response conjuring the weight of the long slog ahead of him.

“Priests are human and they will sin,” he said. “But we also know God desires to use them as symbols of his presence among the church. So priests, when they accept the sacrament of ordination, they’re accepting responsibility to try very hard to be faithful to every teaching in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Reverend James Conley, auxiliary archbishop of Denver, was appointed apostolic administrator of the Denver archdiocese by Pope Benedict until he appoints a new archbishop. A spokesperson for the diocese told the Colorado Independent that that process could take roughly six months to a year to complete.

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Bennet didn’t speak last night as the return results trickled in, with Buck holding a shrinking lead over the course of hours and into the morning.

But Bennet spokesman Trevor Kincaid climbed the podium reluctantly at nearly 2 a.m. to say there were still 15,000 Denver ballots, 32,000 Boulder ballots and 5,000 El Paso County ballots to be tallied, in addition to provisional ballots. He said that given Bennet’s 3-to-1 edge among voters in Denver and 2-to-1 edge in Boulder, and the long-standing trend for provisional ballots to break majority Democratic, he was confident of victory.

By 7 a.m. major news outlets in the state had come to agree with those calculations.

The Denver Post declared Bennet the winner with 47.4 percent of the vote to Buck’s 47.0 percent, with 87 percent of the vote counted.

KDVR 7 News likewise declared for Bennet, whom KDVR is reporting has wracked up an 8,000-vote lead with 88 percent of the vote totaled.

The Colorado race cost well more than $45 million, the cash pouring in from a host of outside groups across the political spectrum that included labor unions and Karl Rove’s American Crossroads PAC, making it a poster contest for the system established over the course of years and pushed over the top by the U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United decision, which declared that attempts to limit corporate election spending amounted to restricting free expression. The political nonprofit groups that funnel corporate cash interpreted the ruling as an end to disclosure rules. The Senate race campaign ad wars that filled the airwaves in Colorado were roundly panned by citizens as ugly, exhausting and absurd.

But the Buck campaign relied heavily on outside spending, particularly the cash plunked down in the race by American Crossroads, which paid for ads and get-out-the-vote efforts on Buck’s behalf.

Indeed the Buck campaign drew notice early on in the long GOP primary race mostly for its anemic fundraising. Former Lt Governor Jane Norton, the GOP frontrunner for months, pulled down funds from major establishment backers and appeared ready to skate to victory over the lesser-known Buck.

But Buck was happy to surrender the “grasstops” early for the longterm support of the grassroots, which he gained in spades. Conservatives fired up by the large Tea Party movement in the state embraced him and lifted him onto the national stage in the general election contest against the well-financed Bennet.

Bennet was appointed to the Senate in 2009 by Governor Bill Ritter to fill the vacancy created when Pres. Obama chose Sen. Ken Salazar to head the Interior Department. Ritter told the Colorado Independent that he knew Obama placed a high priority on education and Ritter sought to leverage Bennet’s experience as superintendent of the Denver Public School system.

In a contentious year that saw the passage of health care reform legislation, where energetic partisanship gained the lion’s share of headlines, Bennet’s soft-spoken even perhaps mumblingly thoughtful expression was notable as a sort of anti-charisma charisma. His non-politician everyman’s frustration with the goings on in a Senate hobbled by arcane and antiquated rules struck a chord with his supporters.

Given the wave of GOP victories across the country this midterm election, the Bennet victory will no doubt be the focus of analysis for months if not longer.

Longtime GOP strategist Ford O’Connell, however, will not be surprised by the victory. He told the Colorado Independent last week that he thought Republicans have been covering over deep GOP infrastructure problems with Tea Party fireworks all year. “The Colorado [Republican] party is in disarray and the national party has fumbled the get-out-the-vote effort,” he said, adding that in the end, when it came to translating enthusiasm to crucial last-minute votes, Buck would be on his own.

“If Buck is waiting for the cavalry, he’ll be disappointed,” said O’Connell. “There is no cavalry for him.”

That seems to have been the case.

Colorado Democratic Party Chair Pat Waak told the Independent Tuesday night that she had never seen as much effort among staff and volunteers as she had this cycle.

“I feel very positive. We won the governor’s office, the state senate. There are a lot of races undecided in the State House. This [US] senate race is not over,” she said at around 1:30 a.m.

“Democrats are only a third of the electorate in this state and so that means our candidates appealed to Coloradans across the spectrum, even in the so-called wave year for the GOP.

“Our candidates, like Bennet and [Congressman Ed] Perlmutter, overcame millions in outside spending because they’re conscientious lawmakers. Democrats could have lost everything today but their work spoke to the interests of the people.”

If the margin ends up within a half a percentage point — it’s right on the cusp of that now — then state law will mandate a recount, but it may not necessarily come to that. Counties outside Denver like Boulder, which heavily favor Bennet, still have 30 percent of their vote to tally, while Arapahoe, which has thus far favored Bennet as well, has only reported 11 percent of its vote.

No race featured more outside money flowing in than Bennet v. Buck, but in the end the two sides battled largely to a draw. FEC reports show that both candidates faced a barrage of approximately $11 million of negative ads brought against them in the form of independent expenditures, making it one of the most negative races in the country. The pattern of big guns canceling each other out appeared to hold true in most Senate races from Pennsylvania to Illinois to Nevada, where Democratic Party spending was matched by GOP outside groups and the ultimate result was near parity.

Update 11:10 a.m.: With 88 percent of precincts reporting, Bennet has a lead of half a percent. It’s precarious — there’s an automatic recount if the margin of victory is under half a percent — but all of the ballots remaining to be counted are in four counties (Boulder, Arapahoe, Chaffee and San Miguel) where Bennet is currently leading, so it’s looking good for the incumbent.

“Hi, this is Governor Sarah Palin. I’m calling to ask that you and your neighbors vote for Tom Tancredo to be the next governor of Colorado on Tuesday,” Palin says in a robocall she recorded for the Tancredo campaign. “Tom is the right man for the job and he’ll fight for lower taxes, and he’ll stop growing government and start growing the economy, and we know he’ll continue working to end illegal immigration.”

Palin’s endorsements have been tracked more closely than those of any other politician — The Washington Post’s Palin Endorsement Tracker indicates it’s her 61st of the cycle — but beyond her personal win-loss record, many pundits argue that today’s results will have important implications for both the Tea Party and Sarah Palin’s standing within the Republican Party. The New York Times has a chart indicating that 138 candidates running for the House and Senate have Tea Party ties; the relative success or failure of those candidates tonight will speak to the kind of mandate the movement can claim and the size of any potential Tea Party caucus in Congress.

Beyond that, the outcomes of Senate races in Alaska, Delaware, Nevada and Colorado — each of which features an arch-conservative Tea Party candidate representing the Republican ticket — will play an outsize role in people’s and pundits’ minds when they ask whether the movement has helped or hurt Republicans win key seats this election cycle. Delaware is widely predicted to go to the Democrat Chris Coons, and if another of these races tips to the Democrat, one could make a legitimate case that the Tea Party kept Republicans from taking the Senate.

The ads, which will also run in Las Vegas and Denver, are meant to capitalize on anger by Latinos at a rash of harsh anti-immigration statements by Republican politicians. In addition to Arizona’s recent efforts to curb illegal immigration through its contested SB 1070 immigration law, Republican politicians have released a spate of ads attacking their opponents for immigration policy using images of Latinos, leading to charges of racism.

While Latinos largely identify as Democrats, recent nationwide polls indicate registered Latino voters have lower enthusiasm for this election than voters overall. Other progressive organizations have also rallied behind immigration causes to try to mobilize Latino voters. Immigrants rights groups purchased Spanish-language ads in a number of states tying the Republican Party to anti-immigrant fear-mongering.

“I’m sending you his picture, Mr. Mayor,” the man says to Hickenlooper. “Try to sleep at night knowing your policies contributed to his death.”

Ouch.

But there are some major problems with this message. For one, “sanctuary city” is a misnomer — no city in the U.S. prevents Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from enforcing immigration laws. In truth, the name delineates the extent to which police officers are instructed to get involved in immigration enforcement. While some cities have joined the 287 (g) program, which deputizes local officers to identify illegal immigrants, Denver has not. It also has yet to join Secure Communities, a fingerprint-sharing program between local law enforcements and federal immigration officials. These programs are not mandated by federal law, so Denver officials are within their rights to stay out of them. And they have reasons not to: Advocates of so-called sanctuary policies argue they increase public safety by expanding trust in police.

As for criminals: Denver’s police guidelines require officers to refer arrested illegal immigrants to ICE, which has promised to prioritize illegal immigrants considered dangerous. While backlogs have led ICE to release some detainees in recent months, it only does so if the illegal immigrant has a potential path to legal residency — disqualifying those with criminal records.

It’s tough to say why the man described in the ad was not deported. But to claim Denver shields criminals from federal immigration enforcement is simply untrue.

Here’s the ad:

Bennet and Romanoff

At a Democratic Party candidate forum and gala dinner party Friday night in Denver, Bennet played measured tones to Romanoff’s fiery call to battle.

“It is not enough for us to put a president of real courage, and vision, and talent and leadership in the White House — in a man like a man like Barack Obama — if those same qualities are not matched at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. That s why I am running for the Senate,” Romanoff declared.

“I recognize that it is easy to blame Republicans for all the problems we face now,” Romanoff said. “I can tell you there is no shortage of ammunition, but we are in charge now. We need to start acting that way.”

As usual, Romanoff attacked the role of corporate and special interest money in politics, saying that corporate money has “distorted and mangled our democracy.”

He said corporate money in politics is mostly responsible for lax regulations of the banking and insurance businesses and said the Gulf Coast oil spill would be handled differently if the oil companies were not such large contributors to political campaigns. He said corporate cash also stands in the way of meaningful progress on climate change.

He said any member of Congress willing to stand up to BP, Exxon or large financial services companies will have their votes “countered with millions of dollars of campaign advertising to throw you out of office.”

He added the recent Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to spend at will to influence elections was wrong and must be reversed.

“The problem just got a whole lot worse when the Supreme Court a few months ago took a look at America’s political landscape and reached the amazing conclusion that corporations don’t have enough power, so they figured out a way to give them more. They declared that corporations were the same as people and endowed them with the right to spend unlimited amounts of their own revenue to pay for campaign advertising. That decision will send a chill down the spine of every member of Congress who still has one,” Romanoff said.

“It is time for us to stand up and say corporations are not people and insurance companies and banking companies are not people. The only way things happen is if we force them to happen. There is very little incentive for members of Congress to change the rules that got them there.”

Bennet, who was appointed to fill Ken Salazar’s seat after Salazar was named Secretary of the Interior, previously served as chief of staff to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and superintendent of Denver Public Schools.

“I did not set out to create a career in politics,” he noted.

Speaking before Romanoff, he said Congress and President Obama have taken on the insurance companies to pass health care reform and have stood up to banks in order to enact credit card reform.

He said the real fight is not between him and Romanoff but between Democrats and the Republicans also vying for the seat.

“The real fight is with our opponents who want to eliminate the Department of Education, who want to let insurance companies discriminate on the basis of pre-existing conditions, and who want to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans,” he said.

Romanoff also called for party unity.

“I respect my opponent in this race. I will support him if he wins the nomination, and I would encourage you to do exactly the same,” Romanoff said of Bennet.

The Denver Democratic headquarters was vandalized last night, the long bank of windows that fronts the building smashed. Authorities reportedly apprehended the vandal but no details on his identity or motives so far have been released. [...]

7News Denver Channel quotes Democratic Party Chairwoman Pat Waak, who said she received a call from police at 2:54 a.m. notifying her of the attack.

“There is a poster up on the wall that is kind of anti-health care reform and I didn’t see it yesterday, so it begs the question whether that was part of it,” Waak said. “I know that tempers are really hot right now and they are being fueled. I would hope that people would take this at least as a sign that we need to have a little calmer debate about health care reform, which everyone needs right now.”

My attitude toward this is let’s get something. Let’s get the ball rolling. Let’s not have an argument between two poles. Let’s pick a middle course. Of course, the right wing and the insurance companies are already attacking the middle course. If there’s no public option we shouldn’t do anything. The last thing you want to do is pour a trillion dollars into something we already know doesn’t work right.

Also of note, Dean, a physician and a longtime advocate of a single-payer system, appears to have abandoned that approach due to political realities — much to the dismay of the left-leaning Colorado audience.

You can read Wendy’s write-up here.