Friday, July 2, 2010

Western secularists sun themselves, apparently indifferent to the self sinking of the good ship
Vatican.

The New York Times, that Vatican styled bastion of Anti Catholicism, has another must read article on the history of the Vatican's handling of clerical sexual abuse. The following is an excerpt and deals with a meeting in Rome between bishops of English speaking countries and the multitude of Vatican dicastery heads who were involve in cases of clerical sexual abuse. The most important parts about this meeting is it took place in 2000, two years before the Boston scandal and that the CDF was aware of the fact that they had jurisdiction over all cases of clerical sexual abuse since the issuance of a 1922 instruction.


Frustrations Boil Over

The visiting bishops had reached the boiling point. After flailing about for 20 years, with little guidance from Rome, as stories about pedophile priests embroiled the church in lawsuits, shame and scandal, they had flown in to Rome from Australia, Canada, England and Wales, Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, the United States and the West Indies.

Many came out of frustration: the Vatican had too often thwarted bishops’ attempts to oust pedophile priests in their jurisdictions. Yet they had high hopes that they would make the case for reform. Nearly every major Vatican office was represented in the gathering, held in the same Vatican hotel that was built to house cardinals electing a new pope.

“The message we wanted to get across was: if individuals are to hide behind church law and use that law to impede the ability of bishops to discipline priests, then we have to have a new way of moving forward,” said Eamonn Walsh, auxiliary bishop of Dublin, one of 17 bishops who attended from overseas. (He was one of several Irish bishops who offered the pope their resignations last year because of the abuse scandal, but his has not been accepted.)

Yet many at the meeting grew dismayed as, over four long days in early April 2000, they heard senior Vatican officials dismiss clergy sexual abuse as a problem confined to the English-speaking world, and emphasize the need to protect the rights of accused priests over ensuring the safety of children, according to interviews with 10 church officials who attended the meeting.

Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, then the head of the Congregation for the Clergy, set the tone, playing down sexual abuse as an unavoidable fact of life, and complaining that lawyers and the media were unfairly focused on it, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. What is more, he asked, is it not contradictory for people to be so outraged by sexual abuse when society also promotes sexual liberation? (At this point in time the Vatican was well aware of the fact that clerical abuse was not just a problem of Western sexual culture. They had real problems in Africa and South America which included openly married priests and other priests using convents as AIDS free brothels. The West was a problem because of it's legal code and media freedom, not it's liberal sexuality.)

Another Vatican participant even observed that many pedophile priests had Irish surnames, a remark that offended delegates from Ireland.

“Prejudices came out,” said Bishop Robinson of Australia. “There were some very silly things said at times.”

Though disappointed, the visiting bishops were not entirely surprised.

“It wasn’t that there was bad will in Rome,” Bishop Walsh said. “They just didn’t have the firsthand experience that the dioceses were having around the world — experience with the manipulative, devious ways of the perpetrators. If the perpetrator said, ‘I didn’t do it,’ they would say, ‘He wouldn’t be telling a lie, he has to be telling the truth, and he’s innocent until proven guilty.’ ” (I beg to differ. The Vatican has plenty of experience in manipulative, devious ways.")
An exception to the prevailing attitude, several participants recalled, was Cardinal Ratzinger. He attended the sessions only intermittently and seldom spoke up. But in his only extended remarks, he made clear that he saw things differently from others in the Curia.

“The speech he gave was an analysis of the situation, the horrible nature of the crime, and that it had to be responded to promptly,” recalled Archbishop Wilson of Australia, who was at the meeting in 2000. “I felt, this guy gets it, he’s understanding the situation we’re facing. At long last, we’ll be able to move forward.”

Clarity Comes in a Letter

Even so, the meeting served as much to expose Cardinal Ratzinger’s inattention to the problem as it did to showcase his new attitude.

Archbishop Wilson said in an interview that during the session he had to call Vatican officials’ attention to long-ignored papal instructions, dating from 1922, and reissued in 1962, that gave Cardinal Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, previously known as the Holy Office, sole responsibility for deciding cases of priests accused of particularly heinous offenses: solicitation of sex during confession, homosexuality, pedophilia and bestiality.

Archbishop Wilson said he had stumbled across the old instructions as a canon law student in the early 1990s. And he eventually learned that canonists were deeply divided on whether the old instructions or the 1983 canon law — which were at odds on major points — should hold sway.
If the old instructions had prevailed, then there would be no cause for confusion among bishops across the globe: all sexual abuse cases would fall under Cardinal Ratzinger’s jurisdiction.

(The Vatican has recently insisted that Cardinal Ratzinger’s office was responsible only for cases related to priests who solicited sex in the confessional, but the 1922 instructions plainly gave his office jurisdiction over sexual abuse cases involving “youths of either sex” that did not involve violating the sacrament of confession.)

Few people in the room had any idea what Archbishop Wilson was talking about, other participants recalled. But Archbishop Wilson said he had discussed the old papal instructions with Cardinal Ratzinger’s office in the late 1990s and had been told that they indeed were the prevailing law in pedophilia cases.


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I can't help but wonder if Cardinal Ratzinger allowed the confusion to continue for so long because he prioritized clerical sexual abuse as a much lower priority for the CDF than hunting out theologians, disciplining bishops and national bishops conferences, and advising JPII on his multiple and continuous teaching letters and encyclicals. In other words the CDF under Cardinal Ratzinger was too busy building his and JPII's autocratic version of Catholicism to deal with the fact it was rotting to death from the very clerical system they were so busy shoring up. This is akin to undergoing cosmetic plastic surgery when one has terminal cancer.

I'm sure the Times will be taken to task for this latest infusion of Anti Catholicism. It's much easier to throw stones than to refute the facts. There is real rot in the Vatican, and to distract us from noticing that, we are getting another cosmetic face lift with another of Benedict's liturgical motu proprios. Another dose of Vatican reformist kool aid is not going to make the clerical abuse scandal magically disappear. It's just another sign of the same kind of power dynamic that any abuse is always about.

For a brilliant analysis of the linked John Allen report check out Bill Lyndsey's commentary. It sure is beginning to look more and more like the Vatican ship is sinking in the West.


6 comments:

  1. I just left a really long comment on Bill's blog - which Colleen has linked to at the end of this post. I've tried to lay out what seems really "off" about the way Benedict is behaving and speaking. And how we came to be adult People of God via Vatican II. (which I personally recall as a whole lot more than just liturgical change... more actually about liberating people through providing scripture in understandable language with good commentaries as well as affirming the Eucharist and Liturgy of the the Hours as FOR the People of God (not the people FOR the liturgy or FOR the clergy).

    It is so frustrating when someone wants to control not only the conversation but the language to be used and even the topics to be discussed. And that's what the Pope is trying to do!!!! Really grates on me!!

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  2. Well in the past he could control the conversation and the language used, as did his predecessors. The world has changed.

    We had a little shindig up here in Toronto called the G20 summit. Everything was designed to keep the leaders behind closed doors.

    In a free society and a democracy like Canada people have three of the fundamental freedoms to express themselves and influence their elected representatives: freedom of expression, the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of association.

    They assembled a police force 6 times larger than our military force in Afghanistan, spent more on security in a weekend than they do in a year to police Toronto, suspended constitutional rights and kept reporters away from the actual meetings.

    That's similar to the Vatican's mentality. If you aren't one of us you're a terrorist/heretic or terrorist/heretical sympathizer.

    What a very sad development in our world. Our leaders, representatives, elites of every description are deathly afraid of the people. Their fear originates with their loss of traditional authority.

    You just can't sweep things under the carpet any more. The Vatican probably thought that they could minimize their losses by just spreading the damage around.

    Thanks for mentioning the Syllabus of Errors in the last comment section. I wasn't familiar with this document. Some of the items are somewhat humorous. We have archaic laws here in Ontario, like the requirement of innkeepers to provide accommodation for your horses. But the Curia's mindset still seems to be closer to Vatican 1 than Vatican 2 lately. Depressing

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  3. Hello Colkoch,

    I am the proverbial gift horse and I am now gifting you with the Vatican's worst nightmare, now realized.

    The Vatican is being set up for a much bigger fall than most are expecting. Here's an early peak. Some amazingly damaging information about pivotal religious assertions is about to become widely available and understood. This child abuse scandal is merely proof of their absolute lack of veracity, before the real controversy is unsealed.

    Following is a link to a draft-preview of my upcoming new book for parties like yourself, who are more likely to make good use of the information. The next update is due out later this week.

    Please excuse the ads on this site, it's a free file storage site and I'm not ready to post it to E-Book sites until it's done. 

    Finishing the Mysteries of Gods and Symbols

    Peace and Wisdom,

    Seven

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  4. Interesting you posted Seven. I had already read your ebook before your comment posted here.

    Your information is not entirely original but you do cite your sources and your extrapolations of the data are unique, but a number of them were not unfamiliar to me personally.

    We may in fact be aligned in the same task, but I'm not interested in promoting any more self proclaimed 'saviors'. The issue isn't that humanity needs more 'saviors' reincarnated or not. The issues are understanding we are far more than we are taught to think we are, and secondarily, just how potent what we are taught to think is in destroying our understanding of who we really are.

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  5. "The Vatican is being set up for a much bigger fall than most are expecting. Here's an early peak. Some amazingly damaging information about pivotal religious assertions is about to become widely available and understood. This child abuse scandal is merely proof of their absolute lack of veracity, before the real controversy is unsealed.'

    I have not yet read the linked document & do not need to. Regardless of any good intentions on the authors behalf, this much needs to be said:

    Opus Dei is the 'Anti-Gospel' of which Christ warned. They have been both cloaking themselves in "orthodoxy' as well as enabling (seeming) external writings & movements (i.e. organized atheism) as well as aspects of pop culture, for one simple overall aim:

    To destroy religious faith. Thus the multitides of methods & ideologies employed. As well as more then a few useful idiots - even if some were well intentioned or ignorant of their penultimate paymasters. Also, many good, decent & innocent souls are taken in, unwittingly.

    One must begin to see through the smoke screen. The sex abuse scandals are nothing new & were known of 1000 years ago. Ponder the VERY heavy amount of Opus Dei membership, corporate ownership, boardroom control over mass media.

    Do you not think that the Vatican would have the power to keep it silent yet? True, the 'things spoken in secret are now being shouted from the mountain top'. As even the Devil must serve God.....

    This is ALL being done to undermine personal faith in God. To completely sever the spiritual mooring of the vast bulk of humanity. To leave them defenseless before the Deceiver.

    This is all in Scripture. To deny this is to deny spiritual Reality, as well as to call Christ a liar, as HE prophecied it. WE must open our Eyes to what is before us & See clearly. Ask the Holy Spirit for guidance & it will be given to those who ask sincerely.

    Why would Opus Dei want the Vatican to fall?

    Ponder then the more important question: WHY WAS OPUS DEI SET UP AS A LITERAL PARALLEL CHURCH?

    OD has long since seized literal control of the Vatican & every diocese.

    With all due respect, I would ask one & all to THINK outside the box for a moment & see this present reality.

    Satan wishes to sieve us all; and this is the main line of attack at present.

    N.B. nothing I have said here should be construed in ANY way as support for the Imperial Papacy, Ratzginer, or the Vatican construct itself. I am pointing to a very useful buy empty 'stage set'.


    Anon Y. Mouse.

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  6. I do not need to read the linked article, provided by the commenter. It is irrelevant anyway, as all you need to know was foretold by Christ in the Scriptures.

    The sex scandals have been going on for over 1000 years. Fact! The Vatican did & does have the power to keep it secret. So why was it unveiled?

    "what was said in secret shall be shouted from the mountain top".

    Opus Dei has vast control & means of influence in the mainstream media. To deny this is to deny reality of the power of Mammon. Yet, in reference to the quote above....even the Devil must serve God. Even if this mean fulfilling prophecy of their own self-destructive demise.

    Opus Dei is the 'anti-Gospel' of which Christ warned. Cloaked in the garb of 'orthodoxy' they have used Liberal AND conservative elements to their own selfish ends - often pitting them against each other.

    They desire to destroy faith in persons, universally. This will include the destruction of the Vatican itself - which they invaded & have controlled now for some years. And every diocese.

    But why would they want to destroy what they now de facto control, the oldest, wealthiest & largest corporation on earth?

    Ask yourself this question: WHY WAS OPUS DEI SET UP AS A PARALLEL CHURCH?

    Once you understand this & realize they have complete control (ownership) of the unbelievable wealth of the church, you will come to realize that the 'costume' becomes quite expendible. Once it has served its purpose.

    Anon Y. Mouse

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