Pope implicated: Wisconsin priest/molester cover-up

[Simulist]

It's the good-hearted, sweet Catholic people who go to Mass still despite all of this -- they are the people who have the power in their hands to get the Vatican on its knees and confess. . . . How these people can do that is by refusing to go to Mass, boycott them until they actually come to their knees and confess. . . .

I'm have mixed feelings about this. The Catholic Church does do many very good works that would surely suffer if there were a boycott. On the other hand, the Vatican seems to be more interested in property than good works. There must be some other way around this conundrum.

And I have mixed feelings about all the mixed feelings I still hear on this topic.

Holy mackerel, is there no end to the hand-wringing that goes on where child rapists are concerned in the Catholic Church and with their enablers in the Catholic hierarchy?!? But the hand-wringing continues "because the Catholic Church does so much good, too" — you know, in addition to all the child rape it covers up.

"Good people" would drive these guys and their enablers from the temple with a whip! How many mixed feelings did the Carpenter have just because the "money changers" gave some of their take to charity? Not many, I would presume.

Yes, on the one hand there are "good people" in the Catholic Church (and a number of fairly toxic people, too, for that matter), and the lot of them do a commendable amount of charitable work that would no doubt suffer were a successful boycott implemented.

On the other hand, what the hell are truly "good people" still doing — doing anything at all — under the aegis of an organization with such a disreputably rotten record and a downright criminal history? A number of terribly corrupt institutions throughout human history have done a noticeable amount of good in their communities, too — but the overall effect of those institutions was evil.

Some people have this crazy idea about organizations that perpetrate lots of evil: that they never do any good. Well, that is crazy — because of course largely evil organizations also do good things: otherwise, how else do they manage to maintain their position which enables them to perpetrate their evil?

I used to do a lot of work for Catholic Charities when I was still Catholic. Catholic Charities is a good organization, overall. But, at a certain point, I had to face up to the fact that I was lending a hand in placing a "smiley face" on an even larger organization that continues (unrepentantly!) to hurt many, many people in this world.

And it isn't like this is a new development, either.

How many people did the Catholic Church butcher in the Middle Ages? Thousands? Millions? There are varying estimates. And now there is proof that the Church hierarchy has been covering up for child rapists in the priesthood and for itself.

No other organization on earth would get such a pass as the Catholic Church has been given! — nor should it.

[Jeff]

Editorial cartoon in today's Globe and Mail:

[cptmarginal]

Ah, memories...

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4658963&page=1

Before he became pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became upset when ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross asked him a question in 2002 about the delay in pursing sex abuse charges against a senior leader of the Catholic church.

Priestly Sin, Cover-Up - Powerful Cardinal in Vatican Accused of Sexual Abuse Cover-Up
Controversial Catholic Group Alleges Critics Stole Inside Info

A trusted ally of Pope John Paul II has been accused of sexually abusing boys a half-century ago at an elite seminary for the Catholic Church.

The alleged victims say the Vatican knew of the allegations against Father Marcial Maciel and chose not to pursue them.

In fact, the pope has continued to praise 82-year-old Maciel, a Mexico native, as an effective leader of Catholic youth, despite detailed allegations sent to the Vatican four years ago saying the man was also a long-time pedophile.

Maciel denies the charges and said the men made them up only after leaving the Legion of Christ.

Maciel is the founder of the little-known but well-connected and well-financed Legion of Christ which has raised millions of dollars for the Church. Operating in the United States and 19 other countries, the Legion of Christ recruits boys as young as 10 years old to leave their families and follow a rigorous course of study to become priests.

"I think Father Maciel is one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church today and also arguably the most mysterious," said Jason Berry, author of Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children.

Former members of the order, known as Legionaries, have formed an online community to discuss, among other things, the sexual abuse allegations against the founder, Father Marcial Maciel.

Last year, the Vatican asked Maciel to give up all of his ministry appearances following accusations that decades ago he molested young priests in training.

The Legion has filed a complaint against one of the organizations, Regain Inc., and its president, a former Legionary, John Paul Lennon.

The complaint alleges that "private and proprietary materials have been stolen" and posted on the organization's Web site "as part of a concerted effort to wage a malicious disinformation campaign against the Legion." The items the Legion is seeking include private letters of Maciel's. The Legion estimates the material is worth $750,000.

Along with seeking the seizure of the property, the Legion is also requesting information related to the identities of individuals who have used the message boards using screen names.

Last week, a judge ruled that Lennon must turn over any property of the Legion's within 14 days, following a pre-trial seizure petition by the Legion.

"There was nothing criminal here," Lennon told the Blotter on ABCNews.com. Lennon said some documents circulating among the ex-Legionary community had been posted online, but as far as he knew, nothing was obtained improperly.

He equated the Legion's search for the identities of those posting on the discussion board to McCarthyism.

"It's a witch hunt," he said. "It is proving that the Legion is a cult which controls information, stifles freedom of expression and goes after dissenters."

Might as well toss these in for good measure:

Confidential letter reveals Ratzinger ordered bishops to keep allegations secret
Pope seeks immunity over sex abuse suit

Pope's brother Georg Ratzinger linked to child abuse claims
Pope Had Role in Moving Molesting Priest, Church Says

How much more obvious can it be that he is personally connected to this?

[cptmarginal]

"A trusted ally of Pope John Paul II has been accused of sexually abusing boys a half-century ago at an elite seminary for the Catholic Church. "

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/art ... l?id=86610

Why Pope John Paul II Whipped Himself
New book reopens questions on self-denial and "what is lacking in Christ's afflictions."
Collin Hansen | posted 2/08/2010 09:11AM

Pope John Paul II projected a warm, grandfatherly image to the adoring public who flocked en masse to hear his homilies or watched on TV from home as he traversed the globe. So there was no small shock when a recent book revealed that the pope, who died in 2005, whipped himself with a belt and sometimes lay prostrate all night on the floor.

[chiggerbit]

I believe that Maciel not only was accused of pedophilia, but also fathered something like six children off of more that one female. I'm unclear how old the females were, could possibly have been adults.

[cptmarginal]

I believe that Maciel not only was accused of pedophilia, but also fathered something like six children off of more that one female. I'm unclear how old the females were, could possibly have been adults.

Holy shit! I was just posting those links from a collection I made recently from Google News searches; I had no idea about this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/world ... egion.html

*edit* I'm gonna make a separate thread for Maciel so as not to hijack this one completely

[Jeff]

From The Sunday Times
March 28, 2010
Holy Father, I can stay no longer in this Church of Disgust

India Knight

My daughter was baptised into the Roman Catholic faith when she was two months old. She is now six, and should really be gearing up for her first communion. The fact that she isn’t is down to one factor: the parish priest at the local church was suspended, pending investigations into allegations of child abuse.

He was eventually cleared of all charges, which was nice for him but didn’t really work for me because I don’t want any of my children left alone with adult men in any context where the words “child abuse” are hovering in the air. In recent years that context has, sadly, broadened to include the entire church.

To be blunt about it, my daughter was baptised because we feared she might die — she had complicated open-heart surgery a few weeks after she was born, and for some reason I found the sacrament intensely comforting. Beautiful, too.

Her father, a cradle Catholic, lost patience with his childhood faith long ago. I’m only nominally Catholic — my (late) father was pathologically anti-clerical, which makes me wonder what happened in his childhood to make him hate priests quite so much, and my mother, although educated by nuns, is nominally a Muslim.

But I was born into an otherwise Catholic family, and baptising your child into the faith is what you did when I was born. My mother then remarried another lapsed(ish) Catholic; my sisters went to a convent school. None of us was exactly what you would call religious, to put it mildly.

Nevertheless, there were aspects of Catholicism that I loved, and not only because they made me good at reading religious paintings (this is why RE lessons are so important — never mind God; feel the culture). They were mostly all the things people make fun of and call superstitious: the ceremony, the ritual, the saints, the relics, the Latin, the grace.

I went to Lourdes and Knock and Medjugorje — once each — and dragged along friends who observed the whole thing with amazed, incredulous hilarity (“You can’t seriously believe ... ?”) but I always found myself moved. I went to a particular church in the Rue du Bac whenever I was in Paris, because of St Catherine Labouré, who had always answered my calls for intercession, especially ones concerning my daughter. I’ve probably lost you right there — but never mind, because at this point they’ve lost me, too.

It is simply not possible, having read the papers or watched the news over the past couple of weeks, to stick with the programme. Like many of my generation, I could hardly be described as a good, or even decent, Catholic, but I’d managed to hang on in there, in the vaguest way imaginable.

Vague because it’s hard to pay lip-service to a faith that you feel hates you; a faith that would rather let you die in childbirth than have an abortion, won’t let you take the contraception necessary to prevent said abortion, hates gay people despite having many homosexual priests; a faith that talks ignorant nonsense about HIV and Aids, that would rather watch people die in Africa than let them use a condom; a faith that is unbelievably slow to say sorry about the fact that some of its members are habitual rapists of children.

I mean, you know, at some point you just give up. Not one of these things is defensible taken individually. Collectively, they are beyond comprehension.

A faith based on central authority and infallibility must understand that failure immediately to condemn the rape of children — in Ireland, in America, in Austria, in Germany, in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Brazil, so far — is essentially to allow it.

The Irish may have got a letter from the Pope last week, but it’s a pitiful drop in an ocean that has turned into a cesspool. Benedict XVI is now personally accused of failing to take action against a serial paedophile, Father Lawrence Murphy, who worked at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin from 1950 to 1974 and who is said to have abused 200 deaf boys. It has been alleged that Murphy avoided justice after an intervention by Cardinal Ratzinger, now the Pope. Murphy was moved to another parish in 1974 and spent his final two decades working with children. He died in 1998, still wearing his dog collar.

The New York Times has documents showing that Archbishop Rembert Weakland, then Archbishop of Milwaukee, twice wrote to Ratzinger requesting that Murphy be defrocked. Ratzinger did not reply. There was a canonical trial but it was halted when Murphy said he had repented and was in poor health.

This makes me want to be ill, as does a 1962 document that Ratzinger updated in 2001, when he was the Vatican’s head of doctrine. It’s about priests who are accused of sexual relationships with children. The 2001 instructions read: “Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret.”

Meanwhile, in Munich, one Father Peter Hullermann was convicted of molesting boys in 1986. Victims have complained that repeated warnings were ignored over decades of abuse. In 1980, the Pope was the Archbishop of Munich, overseeing the archdiocese in which Hullermann was given a few days of treatment and then told he could return to work. The Munich archdiocese said earlier this month that “bad mistakes” had been made, but that officials subordinate to Ratzinger had made them.

Unfortunately, a memo in the possession of The New York Times shows that the future pope not only led a meeting on January 15, 1980, approving the transfer of the priest to his district, but that he was kept informed about his later reassignment.

There is plenty more where this came from: stories about abuse of the vulnerable by priests have become a kind of background drone to society. I know that many, perhaps even most, priests are decent and honourable people, but it’s no good. When the head of 2 billion Catholics, the infallible heir to St Peter, is personally implicated in some of this stuff, it’s time to give up the ghost, at least for me.

Religion — all religion, not just Catholicism — is supposed to be good for the soul, but everything I’ve written about here pollutes mine. You can’t take lessons in morality from people who disgust you.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 078888.ece

[chiggerbit]

From Jeff's article above:

This makes me want to be ill, as does a 1962 document that Ratzinger updated in 2001, when he was the Vatican’s head of doctrine. It’s about priests who are accused of sexual relationships with children. The 2001 instructions read: “Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret.”

(Somewhat dated article below.)


http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org ... 080703.htm

BREAKING NEWS This week's stories | Home Page
Posted Thursday, August 7, 2003 at 2:45 p.m. CST

1962 document orders secrecy in sex cases
Many bishops unaware obscure missive was in their archives

By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.

Rome

A 1962 Vatican document ordering secrecy in cases of sexual misconduct by priests is not, according to canon lawyers, a "smoking gun" providing evidence of a cover-up of sex abuse orchestrated by Rome.

Civil attorneys handling lawsuits against the Catholic church have pointed to the document as evidence of obstruction of justice.

For one thing, canon lawyers say, the document was so obscure that few bishops had ever heard of it. For another, they say, secrecy in canonical procedures should not be confused with refusal to cooperate with civil authorities. The 1962 document would not have tied the hands of a bishop, or anyone else, who wanted to report a crime by a priest to the police.

The 39-page document, titled in Latin Crimen Sollicitationis, was issued in March 1962 by the Holy Office (today the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith). It established a procedure for canonical cases in which priests were accused of abusing the confessional to sexually proposition penitents. Four concluding paragraphs extend the procedure to the crimen pessimum, or "worst crime," meaning homosexual acts contrary to a priest's celibate commitment. The document was not designed to address sexual abuse of minors, but would include many such violations.

Paragraph 11 of the document stipulates that such cases are covered by the "secret of the Holy Office," today known as pontifical secrecy, the strictest form of secrecy in church law. Excommunication is prescribed for anyone who violates this secrecy.

The document was itself to be kept secret. Instructions on Page One direct that it be stored in the secret archives of each diocese, and that it not be published or commented upon. Msgr. Thomas Green, canon law expert at The Catholic University of America, told NCR Aug. 4 that unlike most church legislation, Crimen Sollicitationis was never published in the official Vatican bulletin Acta Apostolicae Sedis.

The document recently came to light because it was referenced in a footnote to a May 18, 2002, letter from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Vatican's doctrinal congregation, to the bishops of the world regarding new procedures for sex abuse cases.

Boston attorney Carmen L. Durso sent a copy of the document July 28 to U.S. Attorney Michael J. Sullivan, arguing that it may prove the Catholic church has been obstructing justice.

"This document may provide the link in the thinking of all of those who hid the truth for so many years," Durso said, as quoted by the July 29 Worcester Telegram and Gazette. "The constant admonitions that information regarding accusations against priests are to be deemed 'a secret of the Holy Office' may explain, but most certainly do not justify, their actions," Durso told the federal attorney.

Oblate Fr. Francis Morrisey of St. Paul University in Ottawa, Canada, told NCR Aug. 4 that he doubts the document had such an effect, because few bishops knew Crimen Sollicitationis even existed.

"The document was so secret that it couldn't even be mentioned," Morrisey said. "I'm inclined to believe that most bishops were unaware of its existence and contents until a situation arose, and so it never crossed their mind to take cover under this text."

Crimen Sollicitationis dealt with canonical cases against a priest that could lead to removal from ministry or expulsion from the priesthood. Its imposition of secrecy thus concerned the church's internal disciplinary process. It did not, according to canonical experts, prevent a bishop or anyone else from reporting a crime against a minor to the civil authorities.

"Of course, a bishop couldn't use this document to cover up denunciation of an act of sexual abuse," Morrisey said. "The document simply wasn't made for that purpose."

Green said the document was issued by the Holy Office because it had responsibility for dealing with "serious violations of the sacrament of penance."

Canon lawyers told NCR that secrecy in canonical cases serves three purposes. First, it is designed to allow witnesses and other parties to speak freely, knowing that their responses will be confidential. Second, it allows the accused party to protect his good name until guilt is established. Third, it allows victims to come forward without exposing themselves to publicity. The high degree of secrecy in Crimen Sollicitationis was also related to the fact that it dealt with the confessional.

Those motives for confidentiality, experts say, must be distinguished from a widespread "mentality" that sought to protect the church from scandal by not reporting sexual abuse by priests to the police. As a matter of canon law, the obligation of secrecy in canonical cases does not prohibit a bishop or other church officials from reporting crimes to the proper authorities.

Conflicts may arise, however, if civil authorities seek access to the secret acts of canonical procedures.

That Crimen Sollicitationis was not designed to "cover up" sex abuse, canonists say, is clear in paragraph 15, which obligates anyone with knowledge of a priest abusing the confessional for that purpose to come forward, under pain of excommunication for failing to do so. This penalty is stipulated, the document says, "lest [the offense] remain occult and unpunished and always with inestimable detriment to souls."


Canon lawyers also note that pontifical secrecy is hardly reserved to sexual abuse. Under a Feb. 4, 1974, instruction Secreta Continere, pontifical secrecy covers: 1) Documents for which pontifical secrecy is expressly indicated; 2) Affairs dealt with by the Secretariat of State under pontifical secrecy; 3) Doctrinal denunciations and publications of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as well as its investigations; 4) Extrajudicial denunciations of crimes against the faith or against morals, and crimes against the sacrament of penance, as well as the procedures leading to these denunciations; 5) Acts by Vatican representatives relative to matters covered by the pontifical secret; 6) Creation of cardinals; 7) Nomination of bishops, apostolic administrators and other ordinaries with episcopal power, and the procedures related to these appointments; Nomination of superiors and other major officials of the Roman curia; 9) Codes and coded correspondence; 10) Affairs and practices of the pope, of the chief cardinal or archbishop of a dicastery and of pontifical representatives.

[chiggerbit]

Pdf of document here:

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/O ... inales.pdf