Each telling of the story has been flawed by anti-Catholic bias or ignorance of how things work in the Church, but each adds new perspective as well. At the same time, I followed the story first as a non-Catholic and then as a Catholic, so I've brought new perspectives of my own with each new version. The thing that stood out to me this time, which I may have missed in some way earlier, is that there were two priests assigned to Mercy Hospital in 1980 as hospital chaplains. One was Fr Robinson; the other was a Fr Rybicki. (I may not have the spelling right, since I'm going off the TV narration.)
The show interviewed a man who had been a security guard at the hospital in 1980 and knew all the figures involved, including Frs Robinson and Rybicki. He said that, although Fr Rybicki was a hearty man who could tell lots of jokes, he'd been an alcoholic who'd nevertheless turned his life around and seemed to have been making up for his earlier problems as a down-to-earth chaplain.
What I've learned since becoming a Catholic is that hospital chaplain is in fact more of a career path for men who aren't deemed suitable for parish work. Rybicki apparently had an earlier record that put him in that job. It sounds as though Robinson, although, a very quiet and unassuming man, may have had issues on his record that raised questions in his case as well. According to the Wikipedia link,
The case remained unsolved, with no new leads, until 2003 when police received a letter from a woman who claimed that Robinson had sexually abused her when she was a child in a series of Satanic ritual abuse that also involved human sacrifice. The woman, using the name "Survivor Doe", also filed a civil lawsuit against Robinson seeking financial damages for having been a victim of ritual abuse by Robinson and other adults dressed as nuns. The case was dismissed in 2011 due to having been filed too late.This complaint was apparently based on the somewhat squirrely theory of "recovered memory". On the other hand, according to the most recent TV show, investigators found a book on the occult hidden in Robinson's quarters during a search, as well as a letter opener later determined to have been the murder weapon. The pattern of Sister Pahl's wounds and position of other evidence was determined to have been consistent with Satanic ritual, and the timing of the murder, on the morning of Holy Saturday, might also have been consistent with that motive.
The takeaway I have from this most recent version of the case is that both Rybicki and Robinson appear to have been marginal priests for whom the diocese may have been hard put to find a productive assignment, and they wound up as hospital chaplains where the damage they could potentially do was limited. Nevertheless, although nobody connected with the diocese or the Jesuit order is in a position to shed light on any other personnel issues that may have arisen in the course of Robinson's career, it's fairly plain that this man should not have continued in the priesthood once questions arose, as I would guess that they did well before the murder.
The continuing problem I see is that while the Church in general is, however slowly and imperfectly, addressing the problems connected with stringing marginal priests along, Houston is in a very different class and has actively been recruiting and retaining men with uncertain backgrounds, some of whom are Protestant versions of the kind of Catholic priests who are banished to hospital chaplain jobs.
I'm increasingly convinced that the Church will, fairly soon, need to wind down the operations of the ordinariates. A major question will be what to do with the collection of marginal men it's accumulated in the course of this misguided effort.
