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/
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BHARATA BHARATI 