bugger: ME mid-14c., “heresy,” later “unnatural intercourse” with man or beast, “carnalis copula contra Naturam, & hoc vel per confusionem Specierum”.
- The Netherlands: More than 200 Catholics have until now reported sex assaults.
- Germany: Over 250 sex assault cases are under investigation. Austria: A series of accusations of sex abuse have surfaced recently.
- Ireland: Two reports in 2009 document sexual and physical abuse on a huge scale in Catholic institutions.
- USA: An independent commission in 2004 received 10,667 accusations of abuses by Catholic priests from 1950 to 2002.
- UK: A monk who ran a Catholic school was given 8 years prison for decades of child sexual abuse. Two other monks were convicted for sex assaults in 2007.
- Australia: In 2008, there were 107 convictions in sex abuse cases connected to the Catholic Church.
- New Zealand: There has been a series of accusations of sex abuses in Catholic schools.
- Canada: In 1989 a newspaper exposed sex abuse in a Catholic children home in Newfoundland, after which 300 previous children homes have reported sex abuses!
- Argentina: Brasil: Peru: the Philippines and Senegal have all reported similar cases. – Source: Norsk Telegram Byrå and DPA
- India: Zero Abuse!? (Do these ‘statistics’ suggest that all the pig-eating, wine-swilling Christian priests in the schools, seminaries & orphanages of the Indian subcontinent are celibate!?)
Of course the real cover-up is not in the US or Germany but here in India. Our Nehruvian secular press will not touch a child abuser or nun raper with a barge pole. They cannot because they and the electronic media are either Christian owned or Christian controlled or Christian something. We will never know exactly. Either about the media or what goes on in all those Christian orphanages and boarding schools. The media does not look and we don’t want to see. It is a conspiracy of convenience. (Un)fortunately there is the Internet and international TV channels, so we get informed anyway. But so long as the scandals stay in the US and Europe we are safe. The kids are safe too – they’re up in the hills at that famous boarding school with the Fathers you know…. – IS
SNAP – Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.
NYT – A Nope for Pope – Maureen Dowd
The New Indian Express, Chennai, 27 March 2010: Sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church has a long and dishonourable history. Long before the present uproar about the sexual abuse of children in its care, there were many sniggering references to the bambini of the more notorious popes of antiquity. Nor did this always refer to their illegitimate children; in some cases it was a reference to catamites. Given this background, sexual abuse should come as no surprise, but the sheer scale of continuing revelations is staggering.
The latest case involves the abuse of 200 boys in a Wisconsin school for the deaf. Before that was the truly horrifying tale from Ireland of decades of abuse. Thousands of children were the victims, and the church suborned the police into covering up the crimes. From Germany, the home of the Pope, 300 cases have been reported, and similar allegations are coming out of Austria, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland.
It is only recently that this tale of wholesale betrayal and subsequent cover-up has begun to come out. For a long time the church’s response was denial. It systematically aborted attempts to uncover the truth. When that did not work, the sort of apologies began. Pope Benedict XVI’s statement on Ireland expresses remorse and shame for the conduct of guilty Irish priest and prelates, but he ties in their behaviour with the uncertain morals of their times. Surely, this is the most egregious of defences, coming from an organisation that preaches a code for all time.
The story has troubling implications for the Third World, too. In Brazil three priests are under investigation for their conduct. There could be many more. It is impossible at this moment to say whether abuse happens in other countries as well, but one case from India is instructive.
Simon Palathingal, a Catholic priest of the Salesian order, was convicted in 2004 of sexually abusing a boy by a Wisconsin court. The abuse happened in the early 1990s. The same man was vice-principal of a prominent Chennai school in the late Seventies and Eighties. Given its record it is possible that the church knew of his leanings and did nothing.
If paedophile priests got away with their crimes in countries with robust legal systems, think how much easier it would be in India, with its endemic corruption. That is something for child rights activists to ponder as they struggle with the already Herculean task of protecting their charges from sexual predators.
The Daily Telegraph in The New Indian Express, Chennai, 26 March 2010: Vatican City: Pope Benedict XVI has been hit by fresh allegations that he was among a group of top Vatican officials that failed to defrock a US priest who allegedly molested up to 200 deaf boys. Church files obtained by The New York Times, which emerged as part of a lawsuit surrounding children in a school for deaf children in the Us state of Wisconsin, show direct correspondence from the accused priest to the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1996.
A trial against Reverend Lawrence C. Murphy was halted after he wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger directly to protest against possible punishment for the abuse, the Times said.
“I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood,” Murphy wrote to the future Pope, according to files. “I ask your kind assistance in this matter.” The documents contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger, but they show that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the Church from scandal.
Father Murphy died in 1998, still a priest, the newspaper said.
According to the paper, the Wisconsin Church documents show that three successive archbishops in the state were informed that Father Murphy was sexually abusing children but that the incidents were never reported to authorities, either criminal or civil.
The documents also 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.
They come amid a scandal over long running sex abuse involving Catholic clergy in several other countries, including Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The scandals have been inching closer to the Pope himself.
Times of India, Mumbai, 26 March 2010: Vatican City: Two Wisconsin bishops urged the Vatican office led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—now Pope Benedict XVI—to let them conduct a church trial against a priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys, but the Vatican ordered the process halted, Vatican documents show.
Despite the grave allegations, Ratzinger’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ruled that the alleged molestation had occurred too long ago and the accused priest, Rev Lawrence Murphy, should instead repent and be restricted from celebrating Mass outside of his diocese.
The New York Times broke the story on Thursday, adding fuel to an already swirling scandal about the way the Vatican in general, and Benedict in particular, have handled reports of priests raping children over the years.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, issued a statement noting that the case had only reached the Vatican in 1996, that Murphy died two years later.
Murphy worked at the former St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis from 1950 to 1975.
Documents obtained by two lawyers who have filed lawsuits alleging the archdiocese of Milwaukee didn’t take sufficient action against Murphy show that as many as 200 deaf students had accused him of molesting them, including in the confessional, while he ran the school. While the documents—letters between diocese and Rome, and summaries of meetings—are remarkable in the repeated desire to keep the case secret, they do suggest an increasingly determined effort by bishops to heed the despair of the deaf community in bringing a canonical trial against Murphy.
Ratzinger’s deputy, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, though, shut the process down after Murphy wrote him a letter saying he had repented, was old, and that the case’s statute of limitations had run out.
According to the documentation, in July 1996, then-Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland sent a letter seeking advice on how to proceed with Murphy to Ratzinger, who led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 until 2005, when he was elected pope. Weakland received no response from Ratzinger, and in October 1996 convened a church tribunal to hear the case.
In March 1997, Weakland wrote to the Vatican’s Apostolic Signatura, essentially the Vatican high court, asking its advice because he feared the statute of limitations on Murphy’s alleged crimes might have expired. Weeks later, Bertone told the Wisconsin bishops to begin secret disciplinary proceedings against Murphy according to 1962 norms concerning soliciting sex in the confessional.
But a year later, Bertone reversed himself, advising the diocese to stop the process. Bertone suggested that Murphy should instead be subject to “pastoral measures destined to obtain the reparation of scandal”.
The archbishop then handling the case, Bishop Raphael Fliss objected, saying in a letter to Bertone that “Scandal cannot be sufficiently repaired… without a judicial trial against Fr. Murphy”. – AP
Times of India, Mumbai, 14 March 2010: Vatican City: Germany’s sex abuse scandal has reached Pope Benedict XVI: His former archdiocese disclosed while he was archbishop a suspected paedophile priest was transferred to a job where he abused children.
The pontiff is also under fire for a 2001 Vatican document he penned instructing bishops to keep such cases secret. The revelations have put the spotlight on Benedict’s handling of abuse claims when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977-1982 and the prefect of the Vatican office till 2005.
Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, said the pope had expressed “great dismay and deep shock” over the scandal.
The Munich archdiocese admitted it had allowed a priest suspected of having abused a child to return to pastoral work in the 1980s, while Benedict was archbishop. The archdiocese said there were no accusations against the chaplain, known as H, during his 1980-1982 spell in Munich, where he underwent therapy for suspected “sexual relations with boys”. He moved to Grafing, where he was suspended in 1985 following new accusations. The following year, he was convicted. The Vatican spokesman, Rev Federico Lombardi, said the Munich vicar-general who approved the priest’s transfer had taken “full responsibility” for the decision.
The pope is also under fire for a 2001 Vatican letter he sent to all bishops saying all cases of sexual abuse of minors must be forwarded to his thenoffice, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that the cases were to be subject to pontifical secret.
Germany’s justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said the document shows the Vatican created a “wall of silence” around abuse cases. Lawyers for abuse victims in US have said the document shows the Catholic Church tried to obstruct justice. – AP
The Great Catholic Cover-up – Christopher Hitchens
Concerning the most recent revelations about the steady complicity of the Vatican in the ongoing—indeed endless—scandal of child rape, a few days later a spokesman for the Holy See made a concession in the guise of a denial. It was clear, said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, that an attempt was being made “to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse.” He stupidly went on to say that “those efforts have failed.” Continue article at http://www.slate.com/id/2247861/
Filed under: india | Tagged: benedict xvi, buggery, catholic church, celibacy, child abuse, child sex abuse, christianity, homosexuality, paedophile priests, roman catholic church, sodomy, vatican |
BHARATA BHARATI 
Times of India, Chennai, 7 April 2010
Charges of sex abuse in US false, says Ooty priest
by Shantha Thiagarajan
Udhagamandalam/Chennai: The Catholic Archbishop of Madras-Mylapore, Rev Malayappan Chinnappa, on Tuesday said the Ooty priest facing charges of sexual abuse of minor girls in the United States should face the investigations there.
Commenting on the case of Rev Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul, who is accused of sexually abusing two minor girls while serving at the diocese of Crookston in Minnesota in 2004, the Archbishop said, “Now the priest has to oblige, return to the US, if necessary, for further investigations. There is no way out.”
Meanwhile, Rev Jeyapaul, while bluntly denying the charges, said he did not even know one of the two accusers and that he was ready to go to the US, if he was wanted there, to prove himself innocent.
“I am not guilty and of course the allegations against me are false,” Jeyapaul told TOI. He said he had volunteered to serve in the US in 2004. Though his tenure with the US diocese was for three years, he returned to India in August 2005. Priest says he served in US only for 9 mths TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Udhagamandalam/Chennai: Rev Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul, who has put in 28 years of service, said that during his 12-month tenure in Minnesota, he had spent three months working with another pastor and served the parish people in the diocese only for nine months. “As my mother was ailing at that time, I was forced to come back to India,” he added.
Referring to one of the charges, he said, “With regard to the first case, I remember the girl who had come for confession with one of her friends. That is all I know about her.” In respect of the other charge, he said, “I don’t even know that girl. How can they charge me? I am ready to go to the US, if I am wanted, and prove myself innocent.” He alleged that money could be the motive behind the charge.
According to Jeyapaul, the US diocese asked him not to return and stopped communicating with him since 2005-end. It only communicated with the Vatican and the Ooty diocese. He was given a copy of the alleged charges by the Ooty bishop, the Most Rev A Amalraj.
However, Jeyapaul claimed that he had not even gone through the documents. “I responded to the Vatican only through our church lawyer. Only he went through the documents and replied accordingly. Even I don’t know the contents of the charges in the document.” Also, till date, he had no communication from the US authorities, he claimed.
According to Bishop Amalraj, the local diocese had not taken any action as the case was pending with the US diocese and Jeyapaul’s guilt was yet to be proved.
However, the priest was sent for spiritual counselling at Anjali Ashram in Mysore. The priest is currently working with four others in the bishop’s office, processing appointments of teachers for over a dozen church schools in the Ooty diocese.
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Times of India, Chennai, 6 April 2010
Priest accused of abuse in US working in Ooty;
Was Charged With Sexually Assaulting 14-Year-Old Girl
New Delhi: A Catholic priest charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota is working in his home diocese in India and has no plans to return to the US to face the courts, he and his bishop said on Monday.
Church documents obtained by the AP show the Vatican was alerted to the accusations against the Rev. Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul more than three years ago but did not respond. The priest has received only a minor punishment and is currently working in his bishop’s office processing teacher appointments for a dozen church schools in the diocese of Ootacamund in southern India. “We cannot simply throw out the priest, so he is just staying in the bishop’s house, and he is helping me with the appointment of teachers,” said the Most Rev. A. Amalraj, the bishop of Ootacamund. “He says he is innocent, and these are only allegations. … I don’t know what else to do.”
Amalraj emphasized that Jeyapaul was engaged in only “paperwork, nothing to do with the children or anything.” The main group of clerical abuse victims in the United States has scheduled a news conference for Monday in St. Paul, Minnesota, to draw attention to the Jeyapaul case and demand he be suspended and returned to face justice in the United States.
The group, Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, has been campaigning recently to draw attention to what it considers the Vatican’s complicity in cases of abusive priests being moved around dioceses to avoid criminal prosecution. The Vatican has denounced such accusations and has blamed the media for what it calls a smear campaign against the pope and his advisers. The Vatican has insisted Pope Benedict XVI takes such accusations seriously and cracked down on abuse in 2001 by ordering dioceses to inform the Vatican of all such cases. However, the Vatican hasn’t issued any guidelines requiring bishops to heed civil authorities, though it insists nothing in its directives precludes such cooperation.
Jeyapaul is now wanted on two counts of criminal sexual conduct stemming from accusations he assaulted a young, female parishioner in the fall of 2004 at the Blessed Sacrament Church in Greenbush, Minnesota, where he was working. Each charge carries a sentence of up to 30 years. According to the criminal complaint, the teenage girl accused Jeyapaul of threatening to kill her family if she did not come into the rectory, where he then forced her to perform oral sex on him and groped her in the fall of 2004. In a telephone call with The Associated Press, Jeyapaul denied the charges.
“It is a false accusation against me,” he said. “I do not know that girl at all.”
He said he had no intention of facing the charges, and Almaraj said the church had never discussed asking him to return to the US to appear in court. “No steps were taken. Nobody talked about that. Nobody asked about that,” Amalraj said. Officials at India’s foreign ministry were not available to discuss whether the US asked for Jeyapaul’s extradition. The two countries do have an agreement. At the time the accusations against Jeyapaul surfaced in 2005, the priest had returned home to visit his mother and officials in Crookston diocese told him he should stay in India, Jeyapaul said. AP
Crackdown On Priests
Church documents obtained by the AP show the Vatican was alerted to the accusations against the Rev. Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul more than three years ago but did not respond
The priest has received only a minor punishment and is currently working in his bishop’s office processing teacher appointments for a dozen church schools in the diocese of Ootacamund
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Sunday Times, Chennai, 14 March 2010
Pope Benedict allowed paedophile priest to stay as minister
Rome: With the emergence of reports that Pope Benedict allowed a paedophile priest to continue with the ministry, the Bishop of Rome has been drawn directly into the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal.
The priest, who was convicted of child abuse, was sent from Essen to Munich for therapy in 1980 on the approval of the Pope, who was then a cardinal, The Times reports. In 1986, the paedophile cleric, recognised as H, was given an 18-month suspended jail sentence and fined DM 4,000 (£1,800 today).
According to the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising, there had been no complaints against H during the therapy at a church community in Munich. It added that the decision to let him continue working in Grafing was taken by Gerhard Gruber, now 81, who was vicar general of the archdiocese.
An American group, Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said: “It boggles the mind to hear a German Catholic official claim that a credibly accused paedophile priest was reassigned to parish work without the knowledge of his boss, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger.” Six years later, the priest was given a suspended prison sentence for child sex offences. The archdiocese said he still works in Bavaria, with no known repeat violations.
The disclosure added to a widening scandal in Germany that had already come close to Pope Benedict’s brother Georg Ratzinger, a former choirmaster. However, Gruber was quoted by the paper as saying that the Pope was not aware of his decision because there were 1,000 priests in the diocese at the time and he had left many decisions to lower-level officials.
The first revelations emerged in January when an elite Jesuit school in Berlin admitted systematic sexual abuse of pupils by two priests in the 1970s and 1980s. Among other boarding schools implicated is one attached to the Domspatzen (‘Cathedral Sparrows’), Regensburg cathedral’s thousand-year-old choir which was run for 30 years by the pope’s older brother. Ratzinger, 86, said on Tuesday that the alleged sexual abuse in the 1950s and 1960s — before his time — was “never discussed”. A proliferation of abuse scandals across Europe has prompted deep soul-searching among church leaders, not least in Germany where 19 of the 27 dioceses have been implicated in allegations.
Zollitsch said after meeting with the pope on Friday: “I want to repeat here in Rome the apology that I made two weeks ago.” He also announced the creation of a watchdog to counter abuses. Pope Benedict meanwhile defended priestly celibacy, calling it “the sign of full devotion” and of an “entire commitment to the Lord.”
His comments came a day after Archbishop of Vienna Christoph Schoenborn called for an unflinching examination of the possible roots of child sex abuse by priests, saying it should include the issue of celibacy. – AGENCIES
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Video: The Pope is a Criminal – Christopher Hitchens
http://vodpod.com/watch/3325477-bill-maher-and-christopher-hitchens-gloat-about-catholic-church-child-abuse-scandals?pod=ishwarsharan
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Vatican offers 3 reasons it’s not liable for abuse
By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press Writer 1 hr 34 mins ago 31 March 2010
VATICAN CITY – Dragged deeper than ever into the clerical sex abuse scandal, the Vatican is launching a legal defense that it hopes will shield the pope from a lawsuit in Kentucky seeking to have him answer attorneys’ questions under oath.
Court documents obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press show that Vatican lawyers plan to argue that the pope has immunity as head of state, that American bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren’t employees of the Vatican, and that a 1962 document is not the “smoking gun” that provides proof of a cover-up.
The Holy See is trying to fend off the first U.S. case to reach the stage of determining whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself for negligence for allegedly failing to alert police or the public about Roman Catholic priests who molested children.
The case was filed in 2004 in Kentucky by three men who claim they were abused by priests and claim negligence by the Vatican. Their attorney, William McMurry, is seeking class-action status for the case, saying there are thousands of victims across the country.
“This case is the only case that has been ever been filed against the Vatican which has as its sole objective to hold the Vatican accountable for all the priest sex abuse ever committed in this country,” he said in a phone interview. “There is no other defendant. There’s no bishop, no priest.”
The Vatican is seeking to dismiss the suit before Benedict XVI can be questioned or documents subpoenaed.
The preview of the legal defense was submitted last month in U.S. District Court in Louisville. The Vatican’s strategy is to be formally filed in the coming weeks. Vatican officials declined to comment on Tuesday.
Plaintiffs in the Kentucky suit argue that U.S. diocesan bishops were employees of the Holy See, and that Rome was therefore responsible for their alleged wrongdoing in failing to report abuse.
They say a 1962 Vatican document mandated that bishops not report sex abuse cases to police. The Vatican has argued that there is nothing in the document that precluded bishops from calling police.
With the U.S. scandal reinvigorated by reports of abuse in Europe and scrutiny of Benedict’s handling of abuse cases when he was archbishop of Munich, the Kentucky case and another in Oregon have taken on greater significance. Lawyers as far away as Australia have said they plan to use similar strategies.
At the same time though, the hurdles remain enormously high to force a foreign government to turn over confidential documents, let alone to subject a head of state to questioning by U.S. lawyers, experts say.
The United States considers the Vatican a sovereign state — the two have had diplomatic relations since 1984. In 2007, U.S. District Court Judge John Heyburnrejected an initial request by the plaintiffs to depose Benedict.
“They will not be able to depose the pope,” said Joseph Dellapenna, a professor at Villanova University Law School an author of “Suing Foreign Governments and their Corporations.”
“But lower level officials could very well be deposed and there could be subpoenas for documents as part of discovery,” he said.
McMurry last week filed a new court motion seeking to depose the pope; Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, currently Vatican secretary of state but for years the pope’s deputy at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; Cardinal William Levada, an American who currently heads the Congregation; and Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Vatican’s representative in the U.S.
On Tuesday, McMurry filed a memorandum in support of his demand to question Benedict based on court documents unearthed last week detailing the role of the Congregation in shutting down a canonical trial for a Wisconsin priest who allegedly molested up to 200 deaf boys.
“These documents confirm that the CDF, under Pope Benedict XVI’s lead, discouraged prosecution of accused clergy and encouraged secrecy to protect the reputation of the church,” wrote McMurry, who represented 243 sex abuse victims that settled with the Archdiocese of Louisville in 2003 for $25.3 million.
Jeffrey Lena, the reclusive architect of the Vatican’s legal strategy in the U.S., is seeking to have the court rule on the Vatican’s other defenses before allowing the pope to be deposed, in hopes that the suit will be dismissed. In his filing, Lena noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has held that when a defendant enjoys immunity, a court shouldn’t allow a “discovery fishing expedition on claims that are baseless or speculative.”
Lena also has argued that the pope’s deposition would violate the Vatican’s own laws on confidentiality, and would set a bad precedent for U.S. officials.
“If Pope Benedict XVI is ordered to testify by a U.S. court, foreign courts could feel empowered to order discovery against the president of the United States regarding, for example, such issues as CIA renditions,” Lena wrote in a 2008 brief.
McMurry is eager to find out what the Vatican knew and did, in particular, about Rev. Louis Miller, who was removed from the priesthood in 2004 by the late Pope John Paul II. Miller pleaded guilty in 2003 to sexually abusing one of the plaintiffs in the Kentucky lawsuit and other children in the 1970s. He is serving a 13-year prison sentence.
In a deposition transcription obtained by The Associated Press, Miller said he had offered to resign as early as 1962 to his then-Archbishop John Floersh, and that two subsequent archbishops knew of his crimes but continued to keep him as a priest, moving him from parish to parish.
In explaining why he wanted to resign, Miller said: “I just knew that the crime was so horrendous in my own mind that I didn’t feel that I was worthy to remain a priest.”
But he said Floersh was “compassionate,” kept him on, and told him, “You will always be a good priest.”
Plaintiffs in the Kentucky suit contend that bishops are employees of the Vatican. That point is crucial to determing whether the Holy See can be held responsible for their behavior.
There’s a general consensus among legal scholars that an employee is someone who works for the employer, who controls the details of the work. Attorneys for the Vatican are expected to argue that diocesan bishops do not work for the pope, and that the Holy See does not exercise the day-to-day control over their work necessary to create an employment relationship.
Also crucial to the Kentucky lawsuit is the 1962 document “Crimen Sollicitationis” — Latin for “crimes of solicitation.” It describes how church authorities should deal procedurally with cases of abuse of children by priests, cases where sex is solicited in the confessional — a particularly heinous crime under canon law — and cases of homosexuality and bestiality.
McMurry argues that the document imposed the highest level of secrecy on such matters and reflected a Vatican policy barring bishops from reporting abuse to police.
Lena declined to comment Tuesday, but he has tried to shoot down McMurry’s theory by arguing that McMurry’s own expert witness, canon lawyer Thomas P. Doyle, has rejected theories that Crimen was proof of a cover-up.
The plaintiffs, Lena wrote in a 2008 motion, “fail to offer any facts in support of their theory that Crimen caused their injuries, nor indeed any facts that Crimen was ever in the possession of the Louisville archdiocese or used in Kentucky.”
McMurry insisted Tuesday that Crimen is a smoking gun.
“The fact is, this document and its predecessors make it an excommunicable offense to reveal any knowledge of allegations that a priest has sexually abused,” he said in an e-mail.
The existence of Crimen did not become publicly known until 2003, when a lawyer noticed a reference to the document while reading a 2001 letter written by Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
McMurry is seeking to subpoena Ratzinger’s letter, which instructed all bishops to send cases of clerical sex abuse to him and to keep the proceedings secret.
In 2008, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the go-ahead for Kentucky lawsuit to continue, ruling that an exception to sovereign immunity, which shields most foreign governments from U.S. lawsuits, should be applied.
The 6th Circuit eliminated most of the plaintiffs claims’ in its late 2008 ruling before returning it to district court.
(This version CORRECTS SUBS graf 21, to correct that reference is to one of the plaintiffs, sted defendants in the
Kentucky lawsuit.)
>>See Dr. Mrs. Hilda Raja’s comment on this article<<
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Take a look at this crime list compiled by The Rick A. Ross Institute: http://www.rickross.com/groups/clergy.html
If this list belonged to an individual or institution other than the Catholic Church, they would have been locked up a long time ago!
Indians who send their children to ’superior’ Catholic schools should think again and consider if the risks are really worth it.
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Rishi Kumar: Why do YOU waste time writing letters the the Deccan Chronicle! It is a Catholic-Congress newspaper and probably edited by Chinnappa himself. But its a good letter you have written nonetheless.
The Deccan Chronicle gave the Nithy sex scandal half a front page and they write opinion articles supporting M.F. Husain and publish photos of naked Devis, but nothing about the Pope sahib and his legion of perverts administering the sacraments to the faithful.
The Deccan Chronicle is observing holy week you know. Next Sunday Jesus gets resurrected (was he the older twin brother or was Thomas?). But there is no justice for the thousands of victims of the Jesus priests! So much for the universal moral authority of the Church. Jesus probably wishes he was still dead!
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IS why do you waste your time with this Thomas stuff. You know they can never admit that their tomb is empty!
I sent this letter to the Deccan Chronicle on March 3, 2010. They didn’t publish it. I see they are still not covering the Pope’s multitudinous sex scandals though the BBC’s Vatican correspondent has already suggested that the Pope may have to resign. So much for papal infallibility!
The Deccan Chronicle Editor
Chennai
Sir/Madam,
Re: Nithyananda sex scandal
Rishi Kumar
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IS why do you waste your time with this Thomas stuff. You know they can never admit that their tomb is empty!
I sent this letter to the Deccan Chronicle on March 3, 2010. They didn’t publish it. I see they are still not covering the Pope’s multitudinous sex scandals though the BBC’s Vatican correspondent has already suggested that the Pope may have to resign. So much for papal infallibility!
The Deccan Chronicle Editor
Chennai
Sir/Madam,
Re: Nithyananda sex scandal
Rishi Kumar
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Archbishop Chinnappa, who claims to be in possession of the bones of Apostle Thomas, is herewith reminded of the central teaching of Judas Thomas in the Acts of Thomas, that a Christian – indeed ALL Christians including those who are married – must remain celibate to obtain salvation. The Acts of Thomas also has Jesus, the twin brother of Judas Thomas, repeat the same teaching. The Acts of Thomas is quoted here, verses 11 to 13:
Of course this is not the teaching of Archbishop Chinnappa’s Church but then neither is telling lies about St. Thomas being buried in the Archbishop’s cathedral a teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Or is it?
We am interested in the contradictions of in the Archbishop’s position: The Acts of Thomas is the only document to suggest that St. Thomas came to India (all other documents follow the Acts in making this claim) and the Archbishop and his “researchers” use the authority of the Acts to substantiate your claim. Yet the Acts is obviously not an orthodox Christian scripture in that it teaches total sexual abstinence for Christians even when they are married. How does the Archbishop accept the vague geography of the Acts – India but which India and located where exactly? – when he must reject the scripture itself as being heretical and against orthodox Christian teaching?
Judas Thomas in the Acts didn’t have a special interest in little boys so far as we can remember (he cursed one in Andropolis to be eaten by a lion), but he did go after the royal women of King Mazdai’s* house, abduct them, dress them in sackcloth and ashes, and lock them up thus taking away their freedoms and liberty. So the claim that St. Thomas was a social reformer among the heathens of Mylapore also doesn’t stand scrutiny.
*Mazdai or Masdai (or Misdeus in Greek): In the Acts of Thomas he is the Zoroastrian king of an unnamed desert country who executes apostle Thomas for practicing black magic and abducting the royal women. Archbishop Chinnappa and his man on the Wikipedia page try to make him into a king of Mylapore.
Read the Acts of Thomas
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Archbishop Chinnappa, who claims to be in possession of the bones of Apostle Thomas, is herewith reminded of the central teaching of Judas Thomas in the Acts of Thomas, that a Christian – indeed ALL Christians including those who are married – must remain celibate to obtain salvation. The Acts of Thomas also has Jesus, the twin brother of Judas Thomas, repeat the same teaching. The Acts of Thomas is quoted here, verses 11 to 13:
Of course this is not the teaching of Archbishop Chinnappa’s Church but then neither is telling lies about St. Thomas being buried in the Archbishop’s cathedral a teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. Or is it?
We am interested in the contradictions of in the Archbishop’s position: The Acts of Thomas is the only document to suggest that St. Thomas came to India (all other documents follow the Acts in making this claim) and the Archbishop and his “researchers” use the authority of the Acts to substantiate your claim. Yet the Acts is obviously not an orthodox Christian scripture in that it teaches total sexual abstinence for Christians even when they are married. How does the Archbishop accept the vague geography of the Acts – India but which India and located where exactly? – when he must reject the scripture itself as being heretical and against orthodox Christian teaching?
Judas Thomas in the Acts didn’t have a special interest in little boys so far as we can remember (he cursed one in Andropolis to be eaten by a lion), but he did go after the royal women of King Mazdai’s* house, abduct them, dress them in sackcloth and ashes, and lock them up thus taking away their freedoms and liberty. So the claim that St. Thomas was a social reformer among the heathens of Mylapore also doesn’t stand scrutiny.
*Mazdai or Masdai (or Misdeus in Greek): In the Acts of Thomas he is the Zoroastrian king of an unnamed desert country who executes apostle Thomas for practicing black magic and abducting the royal women. Archbishop Chinnappa and his man on the Wikipedia page try to make him into a king of Mylapore.
Read the Acts of Thomas
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The New Indian Express, Chennai, 28 March 2010
Church, abused students square off on Italian TV
Three deaf men who say they were repeatedly sodomized and abused by priests as children confronted the church diocese on Friday about why it hadn’t punished their abusers.
The three men, first interviewed last year by The Associated Press, appeared on a prime-time talk show on Italy’s state-run RAI television, squaring off with the spokesman of the Verona diocese amid a swirling global sex abuse scandal that has inched closer to Pope Benedict XVI.
The former students haven’t gone to the police because the 10-year statute of limitations expired. They have asked the priests in question to waive the statute of limitations so a case can be opened, but to date none of them have.
The former students of Verona’s Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf refused to shake the hand of spokesman of the Verona diocese, the Rev. Bruno Fasani during the show.
One of the three, Dario Laiti, 59, said, “It’s a problem of justice.” Laiti has said he was sodomized repeatedly at the boarding school from the age of seven.
“We want justice for everything we went through, the suffering for all of our life,” said Gianni Bisoli, 61, another former student who says he was sodomized by and forced to perform oral sex on a dozen priests at the institute.
Bisoli, Laiti and 65 other former pupils signed a statement last year saying sexual abuse, paedophilia and corporal punishment occurred at the school from the 1950s to the 1980s. – AFP
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The New Indian Express, Chennai, 28 March 2010
Church, abused students square off on Italian TV
Three deaf men who say they were repeatedly sodomized and abused by priests as children confronted the church diocese on Friday about why it hadn’t punished their abusers.
The three men, first interviewed last year by The Associated Press, appeared on a prime-time talk show on Italy’s state-run RAI television, squaring off with the spokesman of the Verona diocese amid a swirling global sex abuse scandal that has inched closer to Pope Benedict XVI.
The former students haven’t gone to the police because the 10-year statute of limitations expired. They have asked the priests in question to waive the statute of limitations so a case can be opened, but to date none of them have.
The former students of Verona’s Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf refused to shake the hand of spokesman of the Verona diocese, the Rev. Bruno Fasani during the show.
One of the three, Dario Laiti, 59, said, “It’s a problem of justice.” Laiti has said he was sodomized repeatedly at the boarding school from the age of seven.
“We want justice for everything we went through, the suffering for all of our life,” said Gianni Bisoli, 61, another former student who says he was sodomized by and forced to perform oral sex on a dozen priests at the institute.
Bisoli, Laiti and 65 other former pupils signed a statement last year saying sexual abuse, paedophilia and corporal punishment occurred at the school from the 1950s to the 1980s. – AFP
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