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About LinkBacksRTÉ News: Clergy sex abuse victims plan Rome protest
The blood on the pope's hands is beginning to drip.
RTÉ News: Clergy sex abuse victims plan Rome protest
The blood on the pope's hands is beginning to drip.
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep." - The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1
Actually this is a quite explosive story and happening now [March 25].Originally Posted by Q-Tours
The New York Times broke the story, adding fuel to an already swirling scandal about the way the Vatican in general, and Ratzinger in particular, have handled reports of priests raping children over the years. Today a group of clerical abuse victims provided the documentation to reporters outside the Vatican, where they staged a press conference to denounce Ratzinger’s handling of the case. During the conference, a policeman asked for identification and they were subsequently detained, police said.
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Newly-disclosed church records prove that the world’s two most powerful Catholic prelates [Ratzinger & Bertone] refused to rein in a serial predator even though three US bishops begged them to act. Because these documents are relatively recent, the crimes so egregious, the victims so vulnerable and the Vatican inaction so clear, this disclosure is particularly damaging to both.
Ratzinger & Bertone Failed To Act
I watched with glee, while your kings and queens, fought for ten decades for the gods they made.
Vatican Declined to Defrock U.S. Priest Who Abused Boys - NYTimes.comTop Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.
The Wisconsin case involved an American priest, the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who worked at a renowned school for deaf children from 1950 to 1974. But it is only one of thousands of cases forwarded over decades by bishops to the Vatican office called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, led from 1981 to 2005 by Cardinal Ratzinger. It is still the office that decides whether accused priests should be given full canonical trials and defrocked.
In 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger failed to respond to two letters about the case from Rembert G. Weakland, Milwaukee’s archbishop at the time. After eight months, the second in command at the doctrinal office, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican’s secretary of state, instructed the Wisconsin bishops to begin a secret canonical trial that could lead to Father Murphy’s dismissal.
But Cardinal Bertone halted the process after Father Murphy personally wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger protesting that he should not be put on trial because he had already repented and was in poor health and that the case was beyond the church’s own statute of limitations.
“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Father Murphy wrote near the end of his life to Cardinal Ratzinger. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.
The New York Times obtained the documents, which the church fought to keep secret, from Jeff Anderson and Mike Finnegan, the lawyers for five men who have brought four lawsuits against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. The documents include letters between bishops and the Vatican, victims’ affidavits, the handwritten notes of an expert on sexual disorders who interviewed Father Murphy and minutes of a final meeting on the case at the Vatican.
Looking forward to the Irish media reports...
Link to original documents.
http://documents.nytimes.com/reveren...case#document/
Last edited by sondagefaux; 25th March 2010 at 08:52 PM.
Don't hold your breath. Pravda-RTÉ generally don't like reporting anything negative about that monstrosity of a church unless they cannot get away with ignoring it.
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep." - The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1
Third lead item on BBC's news website.
BBC News - Pope accused of failing to act on sex abuse case
Comment from the BBC's Vatican correspondent.
Hardly a day goes by without new allegations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests somewhere in the world being reported in the media.
The Pope's spokesman defended Benedict, saying the Vatican department which the future pontiff was in charge of had not been informed of these latest allegations until 1996 - 20 years after the priest's victims first informed the police.
But the Vatican's rather lame excuse for lack of any action is that canon law, as Church law is called, "does not envision automatic penalties".
The Catholic Church teaches that paedophilia is a grave sin, but the evidence is that accused priests were usually moved to another parish rather than punished.
While the Pope is now promoting a policy of zero tolerance to clerical abuse, the suspicion remains that for many years he failed to react to the damning evidence which arrived on his desk.
Catholics turned off by recent sexual abuse scandels.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland...ch-115575.html
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