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Finally the media realizes that there is a very long paper trail that goes back decades documenting the Catholic Church’s hierarchy was well aware of its little rape and molestation problem and did nothing except keep matters secret and play the “shuffle the priest around” game. While children were being raped by the “loving” spiritual leaders in their communities, Pope Paul VI was notified about the ritual abuse — that was in 1963.
The head of a Roman Catholic order that specialized in the treatment of pedophile priests visited with the then-pope nearly 50 years ago and followed up with a letter recommending the removal of pedophile priests from ministry, according to a copy of the letter released Wednesday.In the Aug. 27, 1963 letter, the head of the New Mexico-based Servants of the Holy Paraclete tells the pope he recommends removing pedophile priests from active ministry and strongly urges defrocking repeat offenders.
The letter, written by the Rev. Gerald M.C. Fitzgerald, appears to have been drafted at the request of the pope and summarizes Fitzgerald’s thoughts on problem priests after his Vatican visit.
…The letter proves that Vatican officials knew about clergy abuse decades ago and should have done more to protect children, said Tony DeMarco, an attorney for clergy abuse victims in Los Angeles.
And knowledge of the problem goes back even further than that. The NYT has a letter to a bishop that is dated Sept 12, 1952.
With Bill Donohue taking his pedophile defense publicity tour around the cable channels, the wheels are coming off of his wagon. Even the Vatican is circling its wagons around Papa Ratzi, who most certainly knows about all of these documents under wraps. Why? He’s being named in a lawsuit and the plaintiffs seek to depose Benedict under oath.
Dragged deep into the clerical sex abuse scandal, the Vatican is launching a legal defence that it hopes will shield Pope Benedict XVI from a lawsuit in Kentucky.The Holy See is trying to fend off the first United States case that determines whether victims actually have a claim against the Vatican itself.
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 lawyer is seeking class-action status, saying there are thousands of victims across the country.
The Vatican is seeking to dismiss the suit before the Pope can be questioned or documents subpoenaed.
According to the AP , Vatican lawyers plan to argue:
- that the pope has immunity as a head of state;
- that American bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren’t employees of the Vatican;
- that a 1962 document is not the “smoking gun” that provides proof of a cover-up.
Like I said, the ton of documents that the NYT has posted can’t be shot down; it’s not just one smoking gun. It’s a rapid-fire machine gun of evidence. The complaint can be read here.
More I’m-not-sh*tting-you-level stories below the fold.It just doesn’t stop:
* Pope-appointed bishop accused of ritually beating orphaned children. The sadism of a “good friend” of the Pope is alleged. The Bishop of Augsburg, Walter Mixa, is accused of using a carpet beater on the bare behinds of victims as he screamed: ‘Satan is in you and I must drive him out.’ The former residents claimed that Catholic nuns who ran the home also hit children with brooms and wooden shoes.
* Vatican Official Defends Pope’s Handling of Case. This NYT piece, an interview with the anti-gay Vatican defender Cardinal William J. Levada, has so many examples of the delusional thinking inside the world of the pedophile priest enablers, that I don’t know where to begin.
He said The Times’s coverage had been “deficient by any reasonable standards of fairness.”Cardinal Levada said that although Father Murphy never faced judgment in a criminal or canonical court, the priest had not evaded it altogether.
“As a believer,” he wrote in his statement, “I have no doubt that Murphy will face the One who judges both the living and the dead.”
Basically, anything goes; you can escape earthly punishment for criminal deeds such as raping children, because God will getcha in the end. Case closed for these people.
In light of media reports that have questioned what Benedict knew about abuse cases, Cardinal Levada said, “Anyone can say, ‘Why didn’t you do this?’ ‘You could have done this better.’ That’s part of life, but certainly it’s not the case to say that he is deficient,” Cardinal Levada said.
Are you picking your jaws up off of the table yet? Hold that thought, let’s end with this spectacle.
The senior Vatican official said that the pope himself was “serene” in the face of news reports but probably upset on behalf of Catholics.
15 Comments
Rolls eyesIf this was anything other than the Catholic Church, the ringleader and all of his cronies would be sitting in a jail cell somewhere, getting ready to be extradited to the US for a criminal trial, and all of their holdings in the US confiscated under the RICO laws!
Absolutely rightMaybe, just maybe justice will be served and the pope will find himself in a prison getting just a little taste of what some of those kids went through.
Sick sick sickMy best friend has told me about being a student at a Catholic school in Quebec in the 1950s. One day while lining up to come in from recess, a younger girl slipped and fell on the ice. My friend stepped out of line to help her and for that the nuns forced her to strip and get in a bathtub where they proceeded to vigorously scrub her with a WIRE BRUSH in order to “scrub the sin” out of her. She says that it was that day, at age 7, that she became an ex-Catholic.
It isn’t just the child-raping priests, the entire culture of the Catholic church seems dedicated to abusing children, if not physically, then psychologically.
I recall reading about someone around 300 years ago who predicted a string of popes culminating in a final pope. When B16 was elected it was noted that according to the prophecy, he was the second last one. I can see how this could quite possibly be true. After Papa Ratzi resigns in utter disgrace or is carted off to jail, the next pope will wind down this completely corrupt organization and abolish the hierarchy.
Nothing lasts forever. Not even the One True Church.®
In the Catholic grade school I attendedit was standard practice for the nuns to whack “sinful” students on the head with hardcover textbooks. Two nuns in particular, Sr. Felicita and Sr. Mary Felix, took obvious glee in abusing and terrorizing kids that way. Parents who complained were told point-blank that if they pursued the matter or even contemplated a lawsuit, they and their families would be excommunicated.
The Catholic church is now and always has been a vile, brutal institution dressed up in gorgeous silk robes of piety.
Servants of the Holy Paraclete in New MexicoThis is definitely the order (or at least one of them) that has historically run retreats for priests who have been accused of molesting children.
I was unaware of the 1963 letter. My previous information on the subject indicated that 1986 was the year that bishops became generally aware that the practice of sending priests for a retreat, and then expecting them to go forth and sin no more, did not work.
This letter makes it clear that the head (and presumably the members) of the order running the New Mexico retreat house was fully aware of the recidivism rate by 1963. This makes me suspect that it is possible that bishops may have been aware at an earlier date than 1986, of the recidivism rate and the fact that this approach did not work.
Still, 1986 was the year that the National Conference of Catholic Bishops rejected a committee recommendation that the public be notified about priests who committed sexual abuse. It was this committee report and recommendation that has been the basis for my use of 1986 as “the year” the Catholic hierarchy became fully aware that shipping pedophile priests off o retreat before reassigning them to parishes was a failed plan.
Since we are now aware of a letter to Paul VI dating back to 1963, from the head of the order of priests most likely to know about the recidivism rate, it has become much more difficult for me to rely on the 1986 date as evidence for a general hierarchical awareness (even though they chose to reject the committee recommendation for openly confronting the pedophile problem at that time). Some bishops, at least, must have been aware that their standard approach was a failure at a much earlier date.
On the other hand, if I was cynical about this, I might think that even though the head of the order was clear in his 1963 letter to the pope, would he have been as open and forthright in his approach to his customers, the American bishops? Perhaps not = it would have cut into the order’s income stream.
No matter how I look at it, though, it has become a lot more difficult for me to continue being a partial apologist for the Church that threw me out a decade ago citing the same sort of stupid “avoiding a scandal in the Church” line they’ve used for decades, just applied to transsexual transition.
Now I have gone and read the 1963 letterAnd I’m back, in part, to being somewhat of an apologist. The head of the order does seem to think that first-time offenders would likely benefit from the “retreat and reassignment” route. The letter makes it clear that in the opinion of the writer, it’s the hardened recidivists who would not benefit. It really was not for another 23 years or so before it became clear that the recidivism rate, even for the first time offenders, was so high that the “retreat and reassignment” route was clearly not the right approach for any of these pedophile priests.
The series of letters also seems to indicate another, and still unjustifiable, motive of bishops for not defrocking these priests – and that is the increasing shortage of priests in the United States, as vocations to the priesthood went way down in the 1960′s. I am sure these bishops should rather have had their good priests riding circuit rather than keeping pedophiles in parish circulation – but I guess these bishops didn’t even begin to consider the moral evil they were continuing to perpetuate. The pain of the innocent victims cries out to heaven – and these bishops,at least those who are still around, should all be brought to justice.
But why didn’t they call the police?Why? Once they had knowledge of a felony there is no excuse for not bringing in civil authorities. I don’t really give a sh*t if they were defrocked or not. None of my business.
The Bishops are the agents of a foreign powerif they are not employees.
I am fine with that
Make them register as such
Right.“I am sure these bishops should rather have had their good priests riding circuit rather than keeping pedophiles in parish circulation – but I guess these bishops didn’t even begin to consider the moral evil they were continuing to perpetuate.”
The ultimate message here is that the church or its dependencies (e.g., influence, followers, and money) are more important than basic morality. That is, the idea is that if you can’t keep good priests in office, then the next best thing is to have abusive ones in office since having no one in office isn’t profitable.
Realistically,all churches are basically nothing less than corporations. There isn’t much difference between a church, a psychic hotline, and a tarot card reading. IMO, Ratzinger is nothing more than the CEO of an international mega-corporation that profits by playing to people’s imaginations.
Actually, they know for much longerIt’s just easier to link:
http://www.americablog.comcom/…
St. Basil the Great (330-379)
In Constantine’s generation, or from the beginging. When the church was established as Rome’s religion. Or the first time they had the power to get away with it.
typo in linkhttp://americablog.com/2010/04…
That is part of the equation that never made sense.The devil policy to make the victims and their families remain silent and forbidding them to go to the police, because it would “cause a scandal in the Church” if it was known that a priest might have abused a child – while I understand their reasoning, I think it was terribly faulty. The hierarchy should always have protected the flock from predatory shepherds – the wolves in shepherd’s clothing.
The belief that the pedophile priests could make a good confession, go on a retreat and resolve to sin no more, may have been compassionate in one way, is one of the things that allowed the bishops to make the evil choice in their reasoning – they thought they’d protect a “good priest who made a mistake” rather than encouraging a predator.
In doing so, at all times that they participated in, encouraged and directed the cover-ups, they failed the people.
I am with you on that “agents of a foreign power” thing.That was Cardinal LAw’s own argument.
It was, and I am willing to take them at their word. Which means no tax exemptionsince they no longer are a church, they are the consular establishments of the Vatican City State