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The Great Catholic Cover-Up


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THE GREAT CATHOLIC COVER UP

The pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it.

 

by Christopher Hitchens

 

On March 10, the chief exorcist of the Vatican, the Rev. Gabriele Amorth (who has held this demanding post for 25 years), was quoted as saying that "the Devil is at work inside the Vatican," and that "when one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' in the holy rooms, it is all true—including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia." This can perhaps be taken as confirmation that something horrible has indeed been going on in the holy precincts, though most inquiries show it to have a perfectly good material explanation.

 

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."

 

He was wrong twice. In the first place, nobody has had to strive to find such evidence: It has surfaced, as it was bound to do. In the second place, this extension of the awful scandal to the topmost level of the Roman Catholic Church is a process that has only just begun. Yet it became in a sense inevitable when the College of Cardinals elected, as the vicar of Christ on Earth, the man chiefly responsible for the original cover-up. (One of the sanctified voters in that "election" was Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, a man who had already found the jurisdiction of Massachusetts a bit too warm for his liking.)

 

There are two separate but related matters here: First, the individual responsibility of the pope in one instance of this moral nightmare and, second, his more general and institutional responsibility for the wider lawbreaking and for the shame and disgrace that goes with it. The first story is easily told, and it is not denied by anybody. In 1979, an 11-year-old German boy identified as Wilfried F. was taken on a vacation trip to the mountains by a priest. After that, he was administered alcohol, locked in his bedroom, stripped naked, and forced to suck the penis of his confessor. (Why do we limit ourselves to calling this sort of thing "abuse"?) The offending cleric was transferred from Essen to Munich for "therapy" by a decision of then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, and assurances were given that he would no longer have children in his care. But it took no time for Ratzinger's deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, to return him to "pastoral" work, where he soon enough resumed his career of sexual assault.

 

It is, of course, claimed, and it will no doubt later be partially un-claimed, that Ratzinger himself knew nothing of this second outrage. I quote, here, from the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a former employee of the Vatican Embassy in Washington and an early critic of the Catholic Church's sloth in responding to child-rape allegations. "Nonsense," he says. "Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He's the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he's trying to do, obviously, is protect the pope."

 

This is common or garden stuff, very familiar to American and Australian and Irish Catholics whose children's rape and torture, and the cover-up of same by the tactic of moving rapists and torturers from parish to parish, has been painstakingly and comprehensively exposed. It's on a level with the recent belated admission by the pope's brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, that while he knew nothing about sexual assault at the choir school he ran between 1964 and 1994, now that he remembers it, he is sorry for his practice of slapping the boys around.

 

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" (formerly known as the Inquisition). In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office … under the penalty of excommunication." (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offense could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! (See, for more on this appalling document, two reports in the London Observer of April 24, 2005, by Jamie Doward.)

 

Not content with shielding its own priests from the law, Ratzinger's office even wrote its own private statute of limitations. The church's jurisdiction, claimed Ratzinger, "begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18th year of age" and then lasts for 10 more years. Daniel Shea, the attorney for two victims who sued Ratzinger and a church in Texas, correctly describes that latter stipulation as an obstruction of justice. "You can't investigate a case if you never find out about it. If you can manage to keep it secret for 18 years plus 10, the priest will get away with it."

 

The next item on this grisly docket will be the revival of the long-standing allegations against the Rev. Marcial Maciel, founder of the ultra-reactionary Legion of Christ, in which sexual assault seems to have been almost part of the liturgy. Senior ex-members of this secretive order found their complaints ignored and overridden by Ratzinger during the 1990s, if only because Father Maciel had been praised by the then-Pope John Paul II as an "efficacious guide to youth." And now behold the harvest of this long campaign of obfuscation. The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that.

 

LINK

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I find it hard to read articles like this. As inhabitants of this planet I don't think many of us have any real clue as to who or what the being is that created us or who it is that we should worship. We are, after all, fallable beings. No one is any more holy than the next guy standing in line to get his licence plates. Any fighting or killing over any religion is absolute idiotacy.

 

I'm in no hurry to leave this world, in fact at this point in my life I want to hang around as long as I can, but when I do pass on I hope I get to hang around the "Pearly Gates" for awhile and watch your faces when you follow me and realize that the 'Supreme Being' is a 7 year old alien kid and the 'Prince of Darkness' is his 5 year old sister.

T_O_B

:sarcasm:sarcasm:sarcasm

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I'm in no hurry to leave this world, in fact at this point in my life I want to hang around as long as I can, but when I do pass on I hope I get to hang around the "Pearly Gates" for awhile and watch your faces when you follow me and realize that the 'Supreme Being' is a 7 year old alien kid and the 'Prince of Darkness' is his 5 year old sister.T_O_B

 

What if God is a Colorado Buffalo fan? :ahhhhhhhh :ahhhhhhhh :ahhhhhhhh :ahhhhhhhh

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I find it hard to read articles like this. As inhabitants of this planet I don't think many of us have any real clue as to who or what the being is that created us or who it is that we should worship. We are, after all, fallable beings. No one is any more holy than the next guy standing in line to get his licence plates. Any fighting or killing over any religion is absolute idiotacy.

 

I'm in no hurry to leave this world, in fact at this point in my life I want to hang around as long as I can, but when I do pass on I hope I get to hang around the "Pearly Gates" for awhile and watch your faces when you follow me and realize that the 'Supreme Being' is a 7 year old alien kid and the 'Prince of Darkness' is his 5 year old sister.

T_O_B

:sarcasm:sarcasm:sarcasm

 

:lol: TO that was classic! That seems more possible than 72 virgins! I kid, I kid... to one its own, just making light of life's greatest mysteries!

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I'm in no hurry to leave this world, in fact at this point in my life I want to hang around as long as I can, but when I do pass on I hope I get to hang around the "Pearly Gates" for awhile and watch your faces when you follow me and realize that the 'Supreme Being' is a 7 year old alien kid and the 'Prince of Darkness' is his 5 year old sister.T_O_B

 

What if God is a Colorado Buffalo fan? :ahhhhhhhh :ahhhhhhhh :ahhhhhhhh :ahhhhhhhh

 

Couldn't be, God is infallable.

T_O_B

  • Fire 1
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Now I'm not a Catholic and the cynic in me would love to be able to agree with this article. But as noted by opponents in the comments, it seems the author has a bit of an issue with the facts. Which may not be surprising given the overwhelmingly uneven tone of the article. Slam, slam, slam. Sometimes that's merited but often you find sacrifices are made for the sake of advancing one side of an argument.

 

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0325.htm

 

"Biased" as these sources may be, it's a much more rigorous and well-referenced treating of the same documents discussed in the Slate article. Looking through the response piece I linked above, I really feel that the Slate article has been thoroughly demolished, as much as that wasn't what I was wanting to find.

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Slate article or no slate article (and let me be clear I wouldn't put it past Hitchens to, er, stretch things a bit), the Catholic church is knee deep in sh#t over the pedophilia issue. Not that religiosity––at least Christian religiosity––isn't on the way out already in the West, but from what I've read the Roman church is asset rich and cash poor. Ireland has had to close down a number of seminaries that used to feed the world with priests. And public trust has fallen markedly thanks to this scandal. For me, my own blood was positively a-boilin' when I watched the documentary Deliver Us From Evil which traced a California priest's campaign of molestation and child rape from parish to parish, all with the knowledge and complicity of his superior. And this sort of thing is happening all over the world.

 

And, if your blood isn't chilled already, almost 80% of all abuse cases go unreported.

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Its sad what truely does happen behind the secnes of the Church. Very devilish...

 

but as a Catholic, it baffles me that the only church to ever be singled out is the catholic church(i know there the top of the pyramid, and easy to pick on).... But child molestation in general is horible, so why make it a religious issue? That just seems to distract from the main objective -to put an end to ALL of it, not just in the vatican-. Beyond that, the Catholic church is far from the only church to have these demons in their closets..... Im not saying don't call-out the Catholic church, but i am saying, call-out all the churches, all the politicians, all the chimo's in the states, all the slave trafficers around the world, ect.... just my 2cents....

 

Im also disheartend when its made into a religious issue, because it underminds the entire church, which at its basic principals is a good religion....

 

 

 

PS. God's a Husker fan.... TO anyone?

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Its sad what truely does happen behind the secnes of the Church. Very devilish...

 

but as a Catholic, it baffles me that the only church to ever be singled out is the catholic church(i know there the top of the pyramid, and easy to pick on).... But child molestation in general is horible, so why make it a religious issue? That just seems to distract from the main objective -to put an end to ALL of it, not just in the vatican-. Beyond that, the Catholic church is far from the only church to have these demons in their closets..... Im not saying don't call-out the Catholic church, but i am saying, call-out all the churches, all the politicians, all the chimo's in the states, all the slave trafficers around the world, ect.... just my 2cents....

 

Im also disheartend when its made into a religious issue, because it underminds the entire church, which at its basic principals is a good religion....

 

 

 

PS. God's a Husker fan.... TO anyone?

 

God may be a Husker fan.

 

But She hates all Religions.

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  • 2 weeks later...

One of the stronger allegations which has recently led to an effort in England (partially by Hitchens himself) to have the Pope arrested stems from a letter written by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now the Pope, to one of his bishops pertaining to a certain molestation case and the handling of it. Here is the text of the letter.

 

Most Excellent Bishop

Having received your letter of September 13 of this year, regarding the matter of the removal from all priestly burdens pertaining to Rev Stephen Miller Kiesle in your diocese, it is my duty to share with you the following:

 

This court, although it regards the arguments presented in favour of removal in this case to be of grave significance, nevertheless deems it necessary to consider the good of the Universal Church together with that of the petitioner, and it is also unable to make light of the detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner.

 

It is necessary for this Congregation to submit incidents of this sort to very careful consideration, which necessitates a longer period of time.

 

In the meantime your Excellency must not fail to provide the petitioner with as much paternal care as possible and in addition to explain to same the rationale of this court, which is accustomed to proceed keeping the common good especially before its eyes.

 

Let me take this occasion to convey sentiments of the highest regard always to you.

 

Your most Reverend Excellency

 

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

 

The bolded portion above is in part what is causing the recent firestorm, as it seems to indicate some effort on the part of the now-Pope to save face and protect the church over the wellbeing of a child. No one can say for sure how deep this goes or whether or not there is a direct effort to silence or intimidate parishoners, but from the evidence I've seen the Roman church's method of dealing with the worldwide phenomena of rape and torture of children has been less than satisfactory.

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