A drawing from J. Gill illustrating the third part of the secret of Fatima, taken from the book of Sister Lucia of Fatima, “Calls from the Message of Fatima”.Pope knew about Church abuse all along?
Clerical Whispers - 3/9/2010While German authorities are seeking to break the Catholic Church's “wall of silence” on child molestation, Catholic reformers turn to Pope Benedict XVI for answers. (Not answers, accountability. We have a pretty good idea about the answers.)
Sexual abuse of child pupils at several German Catholic schools, including a monastic boarding school in Bavaria, have sparked a nationwide scandal with more than 150 ex-students coming forward with allegations of suffering abuse during the 1970s and 80s.
In a German radio interview on Monday, Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger criticized a 2001 Vatican directive requiring even the most serious abuse cases to be first investigated internally, saying it had erected a "wall of silence," around the issue.
Recent media revelation about the sexual and physical abuse of former choirboys of the famous Regensburger Domspatzen choir, which was once headed by the Pope's brother Georg Ratzinger, has turned the spotlight to Rome.
The sexual abuse dates back to the 1960s. Ratzinger, who led the choir from mid-60s to mid-90s, has denied any knowledge of the abuse, and has promised to testify, should a case be built around the abuses.
The choir's director and composer has unveiled terrible details of how as a choirboy, he saw the boarding school's director at the time "come into the dormitory at night and pick out two, three of us boys to take back to his apartment."
A spokesman for the "We are the Church" movement, Christian Weisner, urged the Pope to publicly state what he knew about the abuse by clerics in the Bavarian city of Regensburg during his 1977-1982 term as bishop there.
"From 1977 to 1981 Joseph Ratzinger was the bishop of Munich and Freising, so he must answer the question about what he knew then and what he did about it," Weisner told DAPD news agency.
He said that the senior officials in the church leadership could not have been unaware of the abuse, calling on authorities to take action.
The Pandora's box opened in January, when the student's complaints of abuse at a prestigious Berlin college in the 70s-80s were made public for the first time.
Decades of silence have rendered most of the cases untouchable due to a lapsed statute of limitations. A majority of individuals involved in the scandal can no longer be prosecuted.
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I can't help but reflect that in the third secret of Fatima it is reported that a cleric, dressed in white and climbing a hill, is hit by arrows as he leaves a trail of slain attendants in his wake. Some Fatima followers insist that the cleric dressed in white was JPII and the arrow was the bullet of Ali Agca. If one prefers a literal interpretation, I suppose this incident could certainly fit.
Most visions however, are metaphorical visual stories which point more towards attitudes and consequences than one time literal temporal events. It seems more likely, to me anyway, that the third vision of Fatima refers to the clerical scandal of child sexual abuse and it's gutless cover up. Nothing has impacted the moral authority of Mary's Church with any where near the same damage as clerical sexual abuse. Certainly not the assassination attempt on JPII. It may be that JPII was saved precisely so the third secret would not be misinterpreted and it's warning missed.
The arrows are getting very close to Benedict. That should come as no surprise because Benedict is in many ways a focal point for the Vatican strategies of stone walling, priest shuffling, silence, and re victimizing victims. There have been a lot of clerical attendants left on the long hill of clerical abuse as the procession of accountability keeps winding towards the top. In the meantime, Mary weeps for her children.
Here is a translation of the third part of the secret revealed at the Cova da Iria-Fatima on July 13, 1917, as written by Sister Lucia:
I write in obedience to you, my God, who commands me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine.
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand. Flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire, but they died out when they came in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from Her right hand. Pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: “Penance, Penance, Penance!”
And we saw, in an immense light that is God, “something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it,” a Bishop dressed in white. “We had the impression that it was the Holy Father.”
Other Bishops, priests, men and women religious went up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork tree with the bark. Before reaching there, the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins, and half trembling with halting steps, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way. Having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big cross, he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died, one after another, the other Bishops, priests, men and women religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the cross, there were two Angels, each with a crystal water can in his hand in which they gathered up the blood of the martyrs, and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.
