BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

I don't know what time the Forum's server/host/whatever finally came on again but I kept trying till 2 a.m. today since it went offline in mid-afternoon yesterday.... This has been happening too often in the past two years,more than I ever remember it happening in the five years before that (PAPA RATZINGER FORUM and BENEDETTO XVI FORUM are both on leonardo.it - and it's very worrisome and really annoying and oh-so-inconvenient.... Will try to catch up now... Since I didn't have a chance to post the full translation of the Pope's Angelus messgae yesterday, I will start with a re-pot of the Angelus that includes the translation and more photos from Vatican Radio...





ANGELUS, 2/5/12



The Pope reflects on illness
and the role of faith
Adapted from





St Peter’s Square presented an unusual winter scene this Sunday as a blanket of snow covered the ground and monuments.

Pope Benedict was wrapped up in a winter coat as he greeted the estimated 10,000 faithful gathered for the Sunday Angelus prayer.

In English, he said: “In the Gospel this Sunday, we learn of the healing that Jesus brought to many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another. We commend to him all those known to us who are in need of healing and we ask him to take away our own hardness of heart, so that we may respond more generously to his love.”

In his main remarks, the Holy Father describe disease as “a sign of Evil in the world and in man”, noting that in sickness, "you can experience the attention of others”, but "you also have the chance to give attention to others."

The Pope then reminded the faithful that Saturday, February 11, the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, is also the Church's World Day for the Sick.

This Angelus was distinguished by the annual gathering of the Italian Movement for Life, with their characteristic green balloons, as the Church in Italy celebrates its annual Day for Life to promote protection of the unborn.



Here is a full translation of the Holy Father's words:

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Dear brothers and sisters:

The Gospel this Sunday presents us with Jesus healing the ill: first, the mother-in-law of Simon Peter who was in bed with a fever, and the Lord, taking her hand, healed her and asked her to get up. Then he healed all those who were ill in Capharnaum, those tried in the body, mind and spirit, and he “healed many…and cast out many demons” (Mk 1,34). all who were sick or possessed with demons.

The four evangelists agree in attesting that the liberation from sickness and infirmities of every kind constituted, along with his preaching, the principal activity of Jesus in his public life. In fact, illnesses are a sign of the action of Evil in the world and in man, while the healings demonstrate that the Kingdom of God, God himself, is near.

Jesus Christ came to defeat Evil at its root, and the healings are an earnest of his victory, obtained through his death and resurrection.

One day, Jesus said: “It is not the healthy who need physicians, but the sick” (Lk 2, 17). On that occasion, he was referring to sinners, for whom he had come to call and to save. Monetheless, it is true that illness is a typical human condition, when we experience strongly that we are not self-sufficient but that we need others.

In this sense, we can say paradoxically that illness could be a salutary time during which we can experience the attention of others and give our attention to others!

Of course, illness is always a trial and it can be long and difficult. When healing does not come and suffering is prolonged, we can feel crushed, isolated, and our existence seems depressed and dehumanized.

How should be react to this assault of Evil? Certainly, with appropriate cures – medicine in recent decades has made giant steps forward, for which we are grateful – but the Word of God tells us that there is a decisive and fundamental attitude with which to face illness, and this is faith in God, in his goodness. Jesus always said to those he healed: “Your faith has saved you” (cfr Mk 5,34-36).

Even in the face of death, faith makes possible that which is humanly impossible. But faith in what? In the love of God. That is the true response which will defeat Evil radically.

Just as Jesus faced the Devil with the power of love that comes to him from the Father, we too can face and defeat the trial of illness if our heart is immersed in God.

We all know persons who endured terrible sufferings because God gave them profound serenity. I think of the recent example of Blessed Chiara Badano, who was truck in the flower of her youth with an incurable illness – but all who came to visit her received light and confidence from her.

Still, in illness, we all need human warmth – to comfort a sick person, a sincere and calm closeness counts more than words.

Dear friends, next Saturday, February 11, feast of Our Lay of Lourdes, is the World Day for the Sick. Let us be like the people in Jesus’s time: let us spiritually present to him all the sick, confident that he wants them to be whole and that he can heal them.

And let us invoke the intercession of the Madonna, especially for those who suffer most and are abandoned. Mary, Health of the Sick, pray for us.


After the prayers, he said:

Today in Italy, we observe the Day for Life, which was begun to defend unborn life and has since been extended to all the phases and conditions of human life.



This year, the message of the Italian bishops is on the theme, “Young people open to life”. I join the Pastors of the Church in Italy in affirming that true youth is realized in welcoming, loving and serving life.

I am happy for the meeting that took place in Rome yesterday under the auspices of the Schools of Obstetrics and Gynecology of all the Roman universities to reflect on the topic, “Promotion and protection of nascent human life”, and I greet Mons. Lorenzo Leuzzi [director of the diocesan department for pastoral ministry in the universities, and recently named to become an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Rome], along with the professors and young people present today in St. Peter’s Square. Welcome,a nd thank you for your presence.


In English, he said:

I offer greetings to all the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors present for today’s Angelus. In the Gospel this Sunday, we learn of the healing that Jesus brought to many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another. We commend to him all those known to us who are in need of healing and we ask him to take away our own hardness of heart, so that we may respond more generously to his love. May God bless all of you!


Finally, addressing Italian pilgrims, he said:

I especially greet the faithful who have come from Perugia, and the many families who have decided to come here today despite the winter weather. May this visit to the Tomb of St. Peter reinforce your faith and constancy in the Christian faith. I wish everyone a good Sunday. The snow is beautiful but spring will be here soon. Best wishes...

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Monday, February 6, Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Left, Memorial to the martyrs in Nagasaki.
SAINTS PAULUS MIKI and COMPANIONS (d Nagasaki, 1597), Martyrs
After Francis Xavier brought Christianity to Japan in 1549, the faith grew so fast that by the end of the century, there were an estimated 300,000 Christians in Japan. However, the Japanese government feared the influence of the Jesuits, and persecution of Christians started soon afterwards. In 1597, Paulus (born around 1562), by then a Jesuit brother, along with two other Jesuit brothers, six Spanish Franciscan missionaries, and 17 Japanese laymen including 3 boys, were arrested and forced to march from Kyoto, the imperial capital, to Nagasaki, where they were put to death by crucifixion on what is now called Martyrs Hill, then stabbed in the heart to ensure death. Paulus is remembered for preaching his faith in Christ even from the Cross. He and his 25 fellow martyrs were canonized in 1862 - the first of many Japanese Christian martyrs. The faith would not return to Japan until 1880, when returning missionaries were surprised to find a thriving underground Christian community.
Readings for today's Mass: usccb.org/bible/readings/020612.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

The Holy Father met with

- H.E. Madame Laurence Argimon-Pistre, Chief of Delegation of the European Union, who presented her credentials.

- Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops (weekly meeting).





- Some Italian commentators yesterday, including Andrea Tornielli, concluded that the statement issued by the Vatican Press Office on Saturday, in which the present and immediate past leadership of the Vatican City State Governatorate publicly refuted accusations of financial irregularities made by former Governatorate Secretary-General Carlo Maria Vigano, now Nuncio to Washington, was most likely approved by the Pope when he met with Cardinal Giovnani Lajolo, immediate past president of the Governatorate, earlier last week.

The refutation was rather thorough, citing the results of an internal inquiry made into Vigano's various accusations, in an unusual, if not rare, public rebuke of a high-ranking Vatican official.

IMHO, the Holy Father was badly served by whoever advised him - one imagines the Secretary of State - to name Mons. Vigano to the Vatican's premier diplomatic post after it was decided that it would be unproductive to keep him on at the Governatorate because of the bad blood created between him and the department heads and staff. Sure, assigning him to Washington would keep him at a geographical distance, but what qualified him particularly for that post anyway? His career resume does not look particularly brilliant, having spent much of his life in the Vatican diplomatic service as a penpushing administrative bureaucrat in the SecState home office.

I looked up his biodate in Wikipedia: He joined the Vatican diplomatic service in 1973, five years after his ordination as a priest, and he was assigned to work in the missions in Great Britain and Iraq. From 1978-1979, he held an unspecified desk job at the Secretariat of State, and in 1989, was named special envoy to the Council of Europe. In 1992, he was named Nuncio to Nigeria, where he stayed till 1997, and was then recalled back to the home office, apparently as head of the Personnel Department at SecState for the next 11 years. Combined with his 11 years at SecState before he was named to Nigeria, that's 22 years of bureaucratic plodding, most of it under Cardinal Angelo Sodano as Secretary of State - certainly long enough to carve a niche for himself in that dicastery's infamous bureaucracy, especially being head of Personnel for 11 years! No wonder we never heard of him before he made his career discontent public last year.

He was named Secretary-General of the Governatorate in July 2009, formally leaving the post in September 2011 (months after his now infamous May 8 letter to Cardinal Bertone and July 11 letter to the Holy Father protesting his reassignment from the Governatorate and then asking for some time before he was given his new assignment so that "it would not look like a punishment'!.

[Since one commentator in the Anglophone media has brought it up, a 2009 report by Abbe Barthe, a French cleric who is 'well-connected' at the Vatican, cited Vigano as one of the minor names, along with Vigano's monsignor-nephew who heads the SecState department overseeing L'Osservatore Romano, as among the known Vatican bureaucrats openly working against Benedict XVI.

The reason I never bothered to post that report at the time - or even pass it on - is that the whole thing read like a gossip column rater than a reliable report. While Barthe mentioned Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, then head of the Congregation for bishops, and the retired arch-liberal Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, as the ringleaders of this supposed anti-Benedict fringe (both said to be working with their former boss, Cardinal Angelo Sodano), Barthes also included Cardinal Hummes (then head of Clergy), Cardinal Levada and Mons. Fernando Filoni, who was Bertone's Sostituto till he was named to head Propaganda Fide when Cardinal Dias retired last year. Dias himself was in Barthe's anti-Ratzinger list, along with Cardinal Dario Castrillon-Hoyos.

By consensus, Re and Silvestrini have always been considered anti-Benedict, but Cardinals Levada, Dias and Castrillon-Hoyos??? Both Levada and Dias were among Benedict XVI's first Curial appointments, and there has been no evidence nor even gossip that they ever worked against the Pope, and as for Castrillon-Hoyos, as unpopular as he may have become since the Williamson case, he had worked closely with Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI in Ecclesia Dei since that Commission was formed in 1988 and he was named to head it. Cardinal Hummes, too, was named by Benedict XVI to the Curia, but although he had a reputation as a liberal, Italian Vaticanistas never suggested he was working against the Pope, unlike Mons. Filoni, who was often described in their gossip reports as the head of the anti-Ratzinger bureaucrats at SecState. And yet, Benedict XVI recalled him in 2006 from the Philippines where he was Apostolic Nuncio to be the #2 man at State, named him last year to Propaganda Fide, and will soon make him a cardinal.

I cite Barthes's speculations now only to give an idea of the intrigue and gossip that characterize the way Vatican internal politics continues to be reported....]

- In the reporting of the Vigano case, I cannot understand why other than Marco Ansaldo in La Repubblica yesterday, no other Vaticanista - not even Tornielli - has even said that the honorable thing for Vigano would be to submit his resignation now because it is unseemly and untenable for the Nuncio to the United States to have written the letters he did in the tone and manner that he did, and especially after the public rebuke represented by the Governatorate note of Saturday.

No generic God
We need to trust that God is present in history.
We are not calling all the shots.
By James V. Schall, S.J.

February 5, 2012

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We do not need a generic, indefinite god but rather the living, true God who unfolds the horizon of men’s future into a prospect of firm, well-founded hope, a home rich in eternity that enables us to face the present courageously in all its aspects.”
— Pope Benedict XVI
To university students of Rome
December 15, 2011

---

I.

Just before Christmas every year, the Holy Father has a meeting with local university students in Rome. This year’s talk was centered about a passage in James (5:7) about patience.

Essentially, patience is on the side of letting things happen in their own due time. We often wonder why God does not do things in a more tidy and speedy fashion. We set up our standard and wonder why God does not conform to it.

“There are many people in our time, especially among those you meet in university lecture halls, who voice the question of whether we should await something or someone, whether we should await another messiah, another god…”

The implication is that the Messiah we have been given has not come through for us. We must look about, perhaps make our own redeemer. It is quite interesting to read that these impatient folks populate university lecture halls. We might speculate: why?

Everyone knows that university professors (and sometimes politicians) are constantly tempted to invent their own world in order to explain their private theory about how things should be. This Christian idea of receiving a revelation and waiting for the plan of God to unravel is much too inefficient. There has to be a speedier way.

The trouble with such theories is that, once they are in effect, we end up gazing into the face of the professor and not into the Face of God.

We are created ultimately to behold God “face to face.” But salvation comes to us in God’s way and time, not ours. The meaning “in the depth of life and history” is that seeing the face of the Lord requires “patience, fidelity and constancy in seeking God and openness to him that he reveals his Face.”

It is a subtle temptation, to compare what God does to what we think, if we were He, He ought to do.

Our individual question becomes: “Where can my search find the true Face of tis God?” The more basic question is: “Where does God himself come to meet me, showing me his Face, revealing its mystery to me…?”

Looked at from this angle, we do not demand that God follow our terms. How we are to meet Him has been explained to us. We do not set the terms. Thus, we have room for patience, a patience that does not presume to set our parameters to God’s action.

If we look at our tradition, we realize that within it, “the certainty of the world’s great hope is given to us that we are not alone and we do not build history by ourselves.” We need to trust that God is present in history. We are not calling all the shots. We cannot put our hope on what is immediate.

Many put all their hope “in immediate, in a purely horizontal perspective or in projects that are technically perfect but far from the most profound reality, the one that gives the human person the loftiest dignity, the transcendent dimension, that of being a creature in the image and likeness of God and of carrying in our heart the desire to rise him.”

II.

Benedict frequently returns to the reality of the Incarnation. When we speak of God, we often have to use analogies or similitudes. The case of Christ is different. He was among us, at a given time and place. People saw Him, wrote about Him, and remembered Him. He was not a fantasy or an ideal form.

“God, in the Incarnation of the Word, in the incarnation of his Son, experienced the time of human beings, their growth, their action in history.” We often underestimate the significance of this fact. The Son of Man, the Son of God, actually lived in time, at a definite, known period of time.

If God the Father, who created the world in the Word, sent this Son into the world, that fact is the most significant thing that has ever happened in the history of man in this cosmos. It not only says that the world is God’s creation and worth God’s immediate attention, it also recounts that this same Word was, in His manhood, crucified by men.

We can speak of God’s patience from that point. The patience of God awaits the human actions that acknowledge sins and recognizes their relation to this Crucifixion of the Son of god.

“Being persevering and patient means learning to build history together with God, because it is only by building on him and with him that the construction is firmly founded, not exploited for ideological ends, but truly worthy of the human being.”

How to “construct” worlds “worthy” of human beings? The answer is that we first have to remember how it is that we began and for what we are intended. We do not call ourselves into existence. We do not redeem ourselves.

“Our existence is no longer left to the impersonal forces of natural and historical processes; our house can be built on the rock; we can plan our history, the history of humanity, not in Utopia but in the certainty that the God of Jesus Christ is present and goes with us.” Again we have here the contrast of the Utopias of the professors and the patience of God, the way of God.

The Pope finally “invites” the students to seek the real “Face of God.” “Seeking the Face of God is the profound aspiration of our heart and is also the answer to the fundamental question that continues to surface ever anew in contemporary society.”

God is close to everyone; no one is excluded who does not choose to be excluded.

The Pope ends with a brief prayer: “Your Face, Lord, do I seek. Come, do not delay.” We have here both a patience and an awareness of what it is that we seek.

We can reject the Face of God seen in Christ to replace it with our own constructions. Many insist that this taking charge is what we should be doing. They have given God time to correct things. He has failed. Or so they tell us.

They give us another “face” to see. It is not the Face of God. It is but our own face to gaze on forever. It is an omen of despair that we are offered. Many will choose themselves.

But it is the Face of God that they seek. Their lack of patience deceives them. They end up with the couple in Genesis who wanted themselves to have the power to define good and evil rather than discover it in the Face of God who walked in the Garden.

One is never quite sure what to expect of Mons. Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin, who last year, gave an interview to the New York Times's Catholic-born but Catholic-bashing Maureen Dowd of Irish descent, in which he made it appear that everyone else, including the Vatican, had been dodging the priest-abuse issue in Ireland except for him. Now, he gives this interview in which he says the Pope has been invited to the IEC in Dublin but he, Martin, thinks it is not yet time for the Pope to come to Ireland... Even in our ordinary interpersonal relations, it is totally inappropriate and senseless to say "I'm inviting you over for this special occasion, but I don't think you should accept!"

Pope 'considering' Irish visit
but Dublin bishop questions timing
by Kitty Holland

February 5, 2012

Pope Benedict would visit Ireland “soon, rather than later” and was “actively considering” an invitation from the Irish Catholic Church, the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.

Dr Martin also said, however, that the Irish Church was not ready for a papal visit. [Then why did they invite the Pope at all? Mons. Martin is mixing up apples and oranges here. The Pope's invitation is specifically for the International Eucharistic Congress, which he would conclude with a Mass, and would be one-day flying visit at most. It would also be a circumstantial visit that is far from being a full-fledged apostolic visit to Ireland, and would have nothing to do, strictly, with the problems that the Church of Ireland still has to work out!]

Speaking on RTÉ radio today, in advance of the 50th International Eucharistic Congress which takes place in Dublin in June, he said the Pope had been invited. [And what about an invitation from the Irish government itself? Would it not be necessary, or does it not count if the Pope is only coming for a single event in one place????]

“We haven’t got a response. He did say to me that he would be open to coming but he said, and this I agree with, that his coming would have to fit into the overall timetable of the renewal of the Church in Ireland.

“Short-circuiting that programme wouldn’t bring the benefits that a papal visit would bring and I am not sure that we are at that stage yet.”

[Assuming the Pope made the above statements, was it right for Mons. Martin to have anticipated his response in this way - seemingly closing off the possibility, instead of letting the Vatican announce the Pope's decision?]

He said in the wake of the sexual, emotional and physical abuse scandals in Catholic-run institutions and the subsequent fall in Mass attendances, the Church here was in need of radical renewal and reform. This process would have to be further progressed before a papal visit would be of significant benefit. [Yes, if the visit were to be a specifically apostolic visit to Ireland, rather than a ceremonial closure of an international Church event that just happens to be taking place in Dublin!]

“We have to see and understand ourselves where we want to go with the Catholic Church. I think a papal visit will only have a significance when many of these issues of our past are fully addressed.”

Asked when the Pope might visit, Dr Martin said he didn’t know, “but I would say soon rather than later. When Pope John Paul came to Ireland the notice was very, very limited.

Asked whether he was expecting the Pope to visit for the Eucharistic Congress he said: “I have plan A and Plan B.”

The Congress will take place over eight days from 10th to 17th June with events at the RDS. Up to 25,000 people per day are expected, about half of them from overseas. The theme will be The Eucharist: Communion with Christ and with one another .

The Congress is an international gathering which takes place every four years in different locations of the world. It was last held in Ireland in 1932.

Volume 3 of JESUS OF NAZARETH
to be published in September


VATICAN CITY, Feb. 6 (Translated from ANSA) - Benedict XVI is completing his draft on the third volume of JESUS OF NAZARETH which will be dedicated to the birth, infancy and pre-public life of Jesus.

Publication is expected to be in September, following translation to be done initially in 12 languages. The Holy Father writes his books in German.


And here's one of the articles from Sunday that I failed to post because of our offline emergency...




LOTW in Arabic well-received
by Arab intellectuals
by Archbishop Edmond Farhat
Apostolic Nuncio to Lebanon
Translated from the 2/4/12 issue of


Editor's Note: Nour al-Aalam in Arabic means 'Light of the world' and is the Arabic title of the 2010 book-length interview between Pope Benedict XVI and German journalist Peter Seewald which has been sold in all the Arabic-speaking countries from Morocco to Iraq since December 2011. First presented in Lebanon, at the annual Beirut Arab Book Fair, the Arabic edition is published by Al Farabi. Mons. Farhat, who is Lebanese, provided editorial supervision. The book cover contains the colors yellow, white and red - that puts together the colors of the Vatican and Lebanese flags.

In Beirut last December, an entire day was dedicated at the Book fair to the presentation of the book at the annual international fair for books in Arabic. At the morning and afternoon sessions, introductions and commentary by local lecturers were supplemented by the interventions of Don Giuseppe Costa, SDB, director of the Vatican publishing house LEV, and Carmelite Fr. Edmond Caruana, another LEV editorial executive.

The day devoted to Noor al-Alaam started with a round-table discussion at the Catholic Information Center and ended with a presentation at the Vatican pavilion in the Fair itself.

Maronite Patriarch Bechara Boutros Rai was represented in the morning by one of his vicars-general, the new bishop Mons. Hanna Alwan; and in the afternoon session by the dean of vicars, Mons. Roland Abou Jaoudé, and Mons. Tanios Khoury, emeritus bishop of Sidon.

In both sessions, speakers said that Arab intellectuals have welcomed the book as an aid to dialog with Islam.

In the morning session, Mons. Paul Matar, Maronite Archbishop of Beirut, said it was 'an honor and a blessing' for him to start his new task as officer for social communications of the Lebanese bishops' conference, by presenting Benedict XVI's book.

He described it as a valuable panorama of the most important questions facing the Church in today's difficult circumstances.

"Christ promised Peter, the first Pope, that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church," said Mons. Matar, "In this book, the present Pope confronts with courage and frankness all the questions that concern the Church today. Its publication in Arabic is a unique event". [Is it the first book by a Pope to be published in Arabic? Someone should underscore that specifically! I tried to search online for whether any of John Paul II's books were translated to Arabic but I could find none. If I knew Arabic and had an Arabic keyboard, I would have trawled the Net in Arabic.]

Fr. Antoine Chbeir, the principal translator of the book to Arabic, pointed out that the numerous subjects and issues tackled by the Pope reveal the vastness of the Church's mission "to bring God to men, to tell us the truth, and to confirm us in our hope".

The Druze Sheik Sami Aboul Mouna that many of the ideas and reflections expressed by Benedict XVI in the book clearly explain what he was saying the Regensburg lecture in 2006.

Beyond all the misinterpretation and exploitation of the Regensburg lecture, he said, the true message from Benedict XVI to the Muslim world is that any dialog must begin with the clear rejection of violence by any man of religion.

Unable to attend because of illness, Sunnite imam Moukhlee al-Geddah's intervention was read for him. In it, he said that the publication of Noor al-Alaam in these difficult days is a sign of pacification from the highest Christian leadership to the Muslim world: that Benedict XVI speaks not just of reciprocal openness but above all, of his opinion of inter-religious relations in general and with Islam, in particular; that he encourages a dialog between faith and reason; that he speaks of faith in relation to current topics and developments; that the Pope poses two great challenges to believers, Christian as well as Muslim - their attitude to violence, and the relationship between faith and reason.

Finally, the Greek Orthodox priest Elie Ferell said: "His Holiness wishes to illuminate the way of peace, not to ignite the fuse of war". Pointing out how a pluralistic society like that of Lebanon is most responsive to the idea of peaceful coexistence and dialog, he said that "the Holy Father obviously wishes to maintain dialog among religions while preserving the valuable role of Christians in the Middle East".

The afternoon session was moderated by Prof. Raymond Farhat, emeritus dean of the faculty of law at the University of Beirut. Fr. Costa presented the various language editions of the book and said that the total sales so far have surpassed 1.2 million.

The editor of the Lebanese daily As Safyr, Talal Selman, a Shiite, congratulated Peter Seewald for his unique opportunity to interview the Pope.

"Reading this conversation, of such great importance and global significance," he said, "I could not help feeling some envy that such a relatively young journalist was able to get this interview with such an eminent universal figure - one who has firm convictions and profound faith, who carries the weight of a sublime mission, but is sensitive and open to current issues, who is able to understand the signs of the time in various sectors of society".

"It's true Popes do no descend from heaven," he said (using an expression from Seewald), "but faith in divine revelation elevates man towards perfection and opens horizons that reason cannot reach by itself alone".

The third discussant was Ambassador Fouad Turk, a Greek Catholic, who presented a synthetic overview of the topics covered by the Pope in the interview.

"It is truly extraordinary," he said, "to almost 'watch' Benedict XVI explain his ideas and positions on every question placed to him, including those about the crises of modern societies - how he brings up with clarity and courage the moral and human principles and values that should regulate peace and security among peoples. And the Pope is so right to say he is not the successor of Constantine but of the fisherman of Galilee, who must nonetheless watch over the vital relationship between faith and reason".

P.S. The book makes an excellent preparation for Benedict XVI's expected visit to Lebanon this year.



More B16 'book news
Translsted from the 2/5/12 issue of


On Tuesday morning, February 6, a special display of Benedict XVI's books was opened at the Libreria Internationale Benedetto XVI - the newest of three sales centers of the Vatican publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana on Piazza Pio XII just off St. Peter's Square.

[The other two are the original one, named after John Paul II, in the Charlemagne wing of the Bernini Colonnades, and the second the one named for Paul VI in the ground floor of the Propaganda Fide headquarters on Piazza Spagna.]

For the occasion, LEV also unveiled a bas relief of Benedict XVI's coat of arms as the identifying feature of this branch.


LEV Director Fr. Costa, left, and Mons. Xuereb, right.

Mons. Alfred Xuereb, one of the Pope's private secretaries, represented the Holy Father and conveyed to LEV officials the Pope's 'heartfelt appreciation' for the gesture.

Mons. Xuereb said:
"The Holy Father is profoundly grateful for the tireless work of LEV in promoting the Magisterium of the Church and in helping to spread Christian culture ever more solidly in our day.

"He is particularly happy about the encounters promoted in various Italian universities recently to reinforce the dialog between faith and science."

After conveying to LEV officials and personnel of the bookstore the Holy Father's blessing.

Personally, Mons. Xuereb expressed pleasure that the bas-relief carved in stone came from his native land, Malta. Fr. Don Costa, director of LEV, had explained in his opening remarks that he had appreciated the bas-relief when it was used at a presentation of JESUS OF NAZARETH in Rabat, Malta, and thought it would be an appropriate feature for the Benedetto XVI Bookstore in Rome.

The Apostolic Nuncio to Malta, Archbishop Tommasso Caputo, gladly presented him with the bas relief.

Present at the ceremony were Cardinal Raffaele Farina, Archivist-Librarian of the Hpoly Roman Church; Archbishop Edmond Farhat, Nuncio to Lebanon; Mons. Giuseppe Antonio Scotti, president of teh LEV Board of Directors; Fr. SErgio Pellini, newly-named director general of Tipografia Vaticana (the Vatican printing press)[ and Fr. Edmond Caruana, LEV editorial executive.

Those present were given a copy of the artistic edition of La preghiera dei salmi ((Prayer in the Psalms) based on the Holy Father's recent catecheses on these prayers, released for the first time yesterday.

The Holy Father's message
to the symposium on abuse

February 6, 2012

The following message was written in English....

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From the Vatican, 30 January 2012

The Very Reverend François-Xavier Dumortier, S.J.
Rector
Pontifical Gregorian University

Dear Father Dumortier,

The Holy Father sends cordial greetings to all the participants in the Symposium "Towards Healing and Renewal", taking place from 6 to 9 February 2012 under the auspices of the Pontifical Gregorian University, and he assures you of his prayers for this important initiative.

He asks the Lord that, through your deliberations, many bishops and religious superiors throughout the world may be helped to respond in a truly Christ-like manner to the tragedy of child abuse.

As His Holiness has often observed, healing for victims must be of paramount concern in the Christian community, and it must go hand in hand with a profound renewal of the Church at every level. Our Lord reminds us that every act of charity towards even the least of our brethren is an act of charity towards him (cf. Mt 25:40).

The Holy Father therefore supports and encourages every effort to respond with evangelical charity to the challenge of providing children and vulnerable adults with an ecclesial environment conducive to their human and spiritual growth.

He urges the participants in the Symposium to continue drawing on a wide range of expertise in order to promote throughout the Church a vigorous culture of effective safeguarding and victim support.

Commending the work of the Symposium to the intercession of Mary, Mother of the Church, he gladly imparts his Apostolic Blessing to all the participants, as a pledge of strength and peace in the Lord.

Yours sincerely in Christ,

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, S.D.B.
Secretary of State

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Cardinal Levada tells symposium:
Benedict XVI merits thanks, not attacks,
for dealing with sex abuses by priests
By FRANCES D'EMILIO


ROME, February 6 (AP) - A top American cardinal on Monday defended Pope Benedict's handling of sexual abuse cases by clergy, saying he should be praised not criticized, as advocates for abuse victims demanded that the Vatican release its secret files on pedophile priests.

Cardinal William Levada told a Vatican-backed symposium on safeguarding children that Benedict had been "instrumental" in implementing standards to crack down on pedophile clergy as well as supportive of U.S. bishops' efforts to fight the abuse.

Before becoming Pontiff, Benedict held Levada's job as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church office ensuring doctrinal purity and, in recent decades, also shaping the Holy See's policies on handling abuse cases involving clergy.

As the symposium's keynote opening speaker, Levada lamented that the Pope "has had to suffer attacks by the media over these past years in various parts of the world when he should receive the gratitude of us all, in the Church and outside it." The Vatican released copies of the speech.

SNAP, a U.S-based support and advocacy group for those abused as minors by clergy, was dismissive of the four-day, closed-door gathering.

"True change and child protection comes through accountability from secular authorities," a SNAP official, Joelle Casteix, said in a statement. "Until we have that, we must see Rome's meeting for exactly what it is: cheap window dressing."

She contended the Vatican "still cannot do the simplest, cheapest, and most child-friendly action possible: Make public decades of secret files on clergy sex offenders and enablers."

SNAP and other victims' groups have contended that Roman Catholic church leaders, both in dioceses, religious institutions and at the Vatican, have systematically protected or covered up the abuse, including by shuttling pedophile priests from parish to parish.

[NOTE THAT BEFORE EVEN DESCRIBING WHAT THE SYMPOSIUM IS, D'Emilio proceeds with four paragraphs of criticism from SNAP! That's supposed to be 'fair and balanced' reporting????]

Levada in his speech acknowledged some shortcomings in the church's handling of abuse.

"The more than 4,000 cases of sexual abuse of minors reported to the CDF (the congregation on doctrine) in the past decade have revealed, on the one hand, the inadequacy of an exclusively canonical (or canon law) response to this tragedy, and on the other, the necessity of a truly multifaceted response," he said.

Benedict, in a message sent to the symposium on his behalf, urged participants to "continue drawing on a wide range of expertise in order to promote throughout the church a vigorous culture of effective safeguarding and victim support."

Addressing the gathering later this week will be German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who heads the Munich diocese, which Benedict led before his transfer to the Vatican 30 years ago. Benedict's tenure as Munich archbishop has come under scrutiny since a pedophile priest in that diocese was allowed to resume pastoral work while being treated. [AP is dutybound to say that investigation by them and other media organizations have been unable to show any wrongdoing, or even the appearance of wrongdoing by Cardinal Ratzinger in the matter of the priest who came to Munich for psychiatric care during Cardinal Ratzinger's final year as Archbishop of Munich, was given pastoral duties by the Diocese without the archbishop's knowledge; several years later, in the 1990s, long after Cardinal Ratzinger had left Munich, the priest was tried, found guilty and convicted of committing sexual offences again, but then inexplicably returned to pastoral work afterwards.]

The number of people leaving the Catholic church in Germany has jumped in recent years as the abuse scandal widened there.

Levada last year urged all bishops conferences worldwide to develop guidelines for dealing with cases of sexual abuse of minors by clergy.

"Even those of us who have been dealing with this issue for decades recognize that we are still learning, and need to help each other find the best ways to help victims, protect children, and form the priests of today and tomorrow to be aware of this scourge and to eliminate it from the priesthood," Levada told the symposium.

An Irish woman raped as a teen by a priest in a Dublin hospital will be speaking Tuesday at the meeting. The woman, Marie Collins, urged Benedict last week to publicly seek forgiveness for Church leaders who put loyalty to their institution ahead of safety of children. [The Holy Father has already expressed this several times on behalf of the Church and its erring members - it's the turn of the individual bishops to make a public apology!]

Among participants at the symposium dedicated to fostering healing are Cardinal Sean Brady, the primate of Ireland's 4 million Catholics. Brady, who in 2010 admitted he helped to conceal the crimes of a serial rapist-priest from Irish authorities in the mid-1970s, has rejected calls to resign.

[Once again, AP chooses to misrepresent what Brady did: As a young priest asked by his bishop to question two boys who said they had been abused by a priest, he asked the boys to sign a form saying they would not discuss the case in public. This was SOP in the Church of Ireland at the time, at which time, the government of Ireland did not require mandatory reporting of such crimes, nor does it now. More importantly, the offending priest (member of a religious order) was dismissed by the bishop from the diocese. On the other hand, there have since been explicit directives to the bishops of the world to comply with applicable civilian laws with regard to reporting such crimes.]

Next week, Benedict will raise 22 churchmen to the rank of cardinal, including a former bishop of Savona, Italy, who abuse victims allege failed to act for years on accusations of pedophile cases in that diocese. Monsignor Domenico Calcagno currently heads a Vatican office.

Francesco Zanardi, a victim, last year walked 550 kilometers (340 miles) from Savona to the Vatican to unsuccessfully demand a papal audience. He said Monday the local abuse survivor group is petitioning the Pope to suspend Calcagno's nomination to cardinal.

A Savona priest recently received a year's suspended sentence by an Italian court in a plea bargain after being accused of abusing dozens of minors. [I need to check out these statements about Calcagno.]

We can only be thankful that Cardinal Levada used the opening of the symposium to say what he did in behalf of the Pope - it was the perfect occasion to make the statement and to make sure it gets the attention and the headlines that is now deservedly has.

As I reasoned out in an earlier post, I am convinced that the Holy Father must have asked the heads of the Curia to desist from engaging the media in polemics whenever the latter come out with stories seeking to implicate Cardinal Ratzinger/Benedict XVI himself directly or indirectly in sex abuse cases and/or their cover-up. They would simply aggravate the PR situation and lend themselves to more aggressions from the Pope's detractors that would always have been played up more than any 'defense' the prelates could put up.

Obviously, the Pope knows that truth, the best defense, is on his side, and that he's not in a PR war - even if we live in a PR-driven world - simply because the Vicar of Christ is above that. Besides, the PR war can and should be waged in other ways, and not necessarily by the Vatican, than meeting fire with fire when you know the odds are loaded against you.

Cardinal Levada made an exception in 2009 with his lengthy factual exposition of the facts relating to the Milwaukee priest when the New York Times sought to crucify Cardinal Ratzinger for 'failing to defrock' a priest accused on abusing hundreds of boys in the 1950s-1970s, before the cardinal ever came to Rome. In 1994, when the case was brought to the attention of the CDF, the priest had been retired more than 20 years, forced to retire by the diocese in the early 70S because of the accusations against him, which were investigated by the Milwaukee police who found no actionable case against the priest - who died before the diocese could revive the case against him in a diocesan tribunal three decades after he committed the presumed offenses.



The Sexual Abuse of Minors:
A Multi-faceted Response to the Challenge
Oponing Remarks
by Cardinal William Levada
Prefect, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
February 6, 2012

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"Toward Healing and Renewal” is the title given to this Symposium for Catholic Bishops and Religious Superiors on the Sexual Abuse of Minors. For leaders in the Church for whom this Symposium has been planned, the question is both delicate and urgent.

Just two years ago, in his reflections on the Year for Priests at the annual Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia, Pope Benedict XVI spoke in direct and lengthy terms about priests who “twist the sacrament [of Holy Orders] into its antithesis, and under the mantle of the sacred profoundly wound human persons in their childhood, damaging them for a whole lifetime.”

I chose this phrase to begin my remarks this evening because I think it important not to lose sight of the gravity of these crimes as we deal with the multiple aspects the Church’s response.

As I begin my presentation, I want to offer a word of gratitude to the Pontifical Gregorian University for this initiative. Even those of us who have been dealing with this issue for decades recognize that we are still learning, and need to help each other find the best ways to help victims, protect children, and form the priests of today and tomorrow to be aware of this scourge and to eliminate it from the priesthood.

I hope that this Symposium will make a significant contribution toward these goals. I thank in particular Fr. Francois-Xavier Dumortier, S.J., the Rector of the University, and Fr. Hans Zollner, S.J., and his team for organizing these days together.

As the Symposium program indicates, the title of my presentation is “The Sexual Abuse of Minors: A Multi-faceted Response to the Challenge.” For reasons I will indicate, I have chosen as my vehicle to give shape to this response some comments about the “Circular Letter” of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [hereafter CDF], sent last year to all the Episcopal Conferences of the world, to assist them in developing guidelines for dealing with cases of sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by clerics.

To put this Letter into context, I will refer to the important motu proprio Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela, promulgated by Blessed Pope John Paul II on 30 April 2001. This papal document clarified and updated the list of canonical crimes that had traditionally been dealt with by the CDF (classic examples would be crimes against the faith, that is, heresy, apostasy and schism; but also most serious crimes, or graviora delicta, against the sacraments, such as profaning the Eucharist or violating the seal of Confession). These included crimes connected with solicitation in Confession, and Pope John Paul explicitly included among these grave crimes the sexual abuse of minors by clerics.

The motu proprio thus required all cases involving sexual abuse of minors by clergy to be reported to the Congregation, for its guidance and coordination of an equitable response on the part of Church authorities.

Under the careful guidance of the then-Prefect, Cardinal Ratzinger, the Holy See was able ensure a coordinated response to the growing numbers of reports of such sexual abuse, and to deal effectively with the canonical issues involving them, including recourse against decisions by Bishops and Major Superiors.

As the storm of media reports of sexual abuse began in late 2001 and 2002, leading the U.S. Bishops to adopt their Charter for the Protection of Children and Young Adults, a committee of Bishops was able to develop the Essential Norms which, after receiving the recognitio of the Holy See, became binding supplementary legislation for the U.S. Bishops, and a great assistance in giving us guidance in dealing with large numbers of historical cases that surfaced as a result of the media publicity.

I want to express my personal gratitude to Pope Benedict, who as then-Prefect was so instrumental in implementing these new norms for the good of the Church, and for his support in approving the Essential Norms for the United States. But the Pope has had to suffer attacks by the media over these past years in various parts of the world, when he should receive the gratitude of us all, in the Church and outside it.

With the explosion of media coverage of the cases of sexual abuse of minors committed by clerics in the Catholic Church, especially but not only in the United States of America, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under the steady leadership of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, saw a dramatic increase in the number of cases reported; with these reports it discovered the many and complex issues involved in the crime of sexual abuse of minors by clerics.

The more than 4000 cases of sexual abuse of minors reported to the CDF in the past decade have revealed, on the one hand, the inadequacy of an exclusively canonical (or canon law) response to this tragedy, and on the other, the necessity of a truly multi-faceted response.

While the Congregation’s primary responsibility is the application of equitable norms in the discipline of guilty clergy, it has necessarily made its own the expanded view of how best to assist in the healing of victims, of promoting programs for the protection of children and young people, of urging bishops to provide for the education of communities of faith to responsibility for their youth, and of working with other Dicasteries of the Holy See and Episcopal Conferences in ensuring the proper formation of today’s priests, and the priests of the future, in the various aspects related to the issues of sexual abuse on minors.

Nine years after the introduction of Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela, and in the light of her experience in dealing with the thousands of cases presented from various parts of the world, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith presented to the Holy Father some proposed modifications to the legislation adopted in 2001.

While the principal outlines of Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela remain in place, certain substantive and procedural norms were modified, in an effort to render the law better able to deal with the complexities presented by these cases. Pope Benedict XVI approved and ordered the promulgation of the revised norms on 21 May 2010.

Some of the major additions to the previous legislation involve a consolidation of practices that had received previous recognition and approval of Popes John Paul and Benedict, such as
- the right to derogate from the prescription of these crimes (sometimes referred to as the statute of limitations);
- the faculty to dispense from a judicial trial in order to allow an extra-judicial (administrative) process in cases where the facts seemed clear;
- the faculty to present cases directly to the Holy Father for dismissal from the clerical state in cases of extreme gravity;
- the addition of the delict of possession and/or distribution of child pornography (regarding minors of 14 years); and
- other specifications regarding delicts against the Eucharist and the sacrament of Penance, as well as a delict against the sacrament of Holy Orders.

The experience of the Congregation during the past decade also suggested that the time had come to ensure that Church authorities throughout the world were prepared to respond appropriately to the crisis of sexual abuse of minors.

Many Bishops’ Conferences had already developed guidelines, some even norms, to offer a uniform response to this complex problem in their national territories; by way of example, I can mention Canada and the United States in North America, Brasil in South America, Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, Belgium and France in Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand in the southern hemisphere.

But in many cases, such response came only in the wake of the revelation of scandalous behavior by priests in the public media. What seems useful going forward is a more proactive approach by the Conferences of Bishops throughout the world. How should this be done?

In an effort to aid the Church universal to adopt appropriate measures in view of a broad approach to the problem of sexual abuse of minors, whether by clergy or others acting in the name of the Church, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a Circular Letter to Assist Episcopal Conferences in developing Guidelines for dealing with cases of sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by Clerics.

This letter, dated 3 May 2011, invites the Episcopal Conferences of the world to address the various aspects of this issue:
- They must pay due attention to the canonical discipline of the clergy who are guilty of such crimes;
- They must have standards to evaluate the suitability of clergy and other persons who minister in Church institutions and agencies;
- They should oversee education programs for families and Church communities to ensure the protection of children and young people from the crime of sexual abuse in the future; and
- They must be pastors and fathers to any victims of sexual abuse among their flocks who may appeal to them for remedy or help.

The Circular Letter is divided into three sections: first, some General Considerations; second, A summary of applicable canonical legislation; and third, some Suggestions for Ordinaries on Procedures.

Each section of the letter proposes areas of consideration to help Episcopal Conferences provide uniform guidelines for the diocesan bishop members of the Conference, and for Major Superiors of Religious residing in the territory of the Conference, in their response to cases of sexual abuse by clerics, and in taking necessary steps to eliminate such abuse from Church and society.

Church law is clear about the responsibility of diocesan bishops and those who enjoy similar territorial or personal jurisdiction, and of major superiors of religious congregations for their subjects, in the matter of accusations of sexual abuse of minors by clerics.

The role of the Episcopal Conference is twofold: it is to offer assistance to the diocesan bishops members of the Conference in exercising this responsibility, and it is to coordinate an effective, uniform response in the face of the crisis of sexual abuse of minors that can be recognized as such by the Christian faithful, by the members of society at large, and by the civil authorities who have the responsibility to safeguard the public welfare in accord with the norms of law.

I want to very clear about this point. The Circular Letter to Conferences of Bishops does not imply the transfer of authority or responsibility from diocesan bishops and religious superiors to the Conference.

At the same time, the Congregation considers it an obligation for Bishops and Religious Major Superiors to participate in the development of these guidelines, and to observe them for the good of the Church once they have been approved by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. No bishop or major superior may consider himself exempt from such collaboration.

I realize that other presenters at the Symposium will address the important canonical aspects of Church law, and especially the motu proprio Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela. Thus I would like to concentrate on the first section of the letter, the General Considerations, as it is in this section, I believe, that we can best see an outline of the Church’s “multi-faceted response” to the challenge of sexual abuse of minors by clerics.


The victims of sexual abuse

The first general consideration in the Circular Letter refers to the victims of sexual abuse. For many if not most victims, a first need is to be heard, to know that the Church listens to their stories of abuse, that the Church understands the gravity of what they have suffered, that she wants to accompany them on the often long path of healing, and that she has taken or is willing to take effective steps to ensure that other children will be protected from such abuse.

In his address to the Bishops of the United States (16 April 2008) in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., Pope Benedict XVI reminded them, “It is your God-given responsibility as pastors to bind up the wounds caused by every break of trust, to foster healing, to promote reconciliation and to reach out with loving concern to those so seriously wronged.”

Our Holy Father has given personal example of the importance of listening to victims during his many pastoral visits, in Great Britain, in Malta, in Germany, in Australia, as well as in the United States. I think is it hardly possible to overestimate the importance of this example for us Bishops, and for us priests, in being available to victims for this important moment in their healing and reconciliation. It was after all at the hands of an anointed representative of the Church that they suffered this abuse.

No wonder then that they tell us how important it is for them that the Church, now again through her anointed representatives, hears them, acknowledges their suffering, and helps them see the face of Christ’s true compassion and love.

Let us listen again to the words of our chief Shepherd Pope Benedict in his Pastoral Letter to the Catholics of Ireland, speaking to the victims of sexual abuse: “You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry. I know that nothing can undo the wrong you have endured. Your trust has been betrayed and your dignity has been violated.”

The profound sympathy expressed in these words should animate the heart of all of us bishops and priests, as we – like Christ our Good Shepherd – seek out the wounded and assure them that we have begun to recognize the depth of the betrayal they have suffered.

Moreover, hand in hand with the willingness to listen to victims speak of the pain caused by the sexual abuse they have suffered goes a commitment to offering them necessary spiritual and psychological assistance.


The protection of minors

The second general consideration addressed in the Circular Letter is called the “protection of minors.” In some countries programs have already been developed by local Church authorities, in an effort to create “safe environments” for minors.

These efforts include the screening and education of those engaged in pastoral work in the Church, in schools and parishes, in youth outreach and recreational programs, especially offering training to recognize the signs of abuse.

The hope of such training programs for the clergy and laity is of course that through increased awareness of the problem, future cases of abuse can be prevented.

Many of the programs initiated in the Church for the creation of “safe environments” for children have been lauded “as models in the commitment to eliminate cases of sexual abuse of minors in society today.”

A more delicate, but no less important, area of pastoral outreach is the education of parents and children themselves regarding sexual abuse in society at large. Here the various cultural differences will be of particular significance. Episcopal Conferences who are beginning to explore the needs for such awareness programs can be helped by the experience of those that have already begun such outreach.

As our Congregation evaluates the response to the Circular Letter in this area, it is my hope that we can enlist the communications network of the Vatican to provide a clearing-house for information about such programs, in order to assist the Church in those areas of the world where resources are fewer.


The formation of future priests and religious

All of us recognize the importance of ensuring a proper formation for priests and religious. This is the third general consideration addressed in the Circular Letter. In 2002, Blessed Pope John Paul II declared, “there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young” (Address to the American Cardinals [n.3], 23 April 2002).

This bold phrase reminds Bishops and Major Superiors of Religious Orders of the need to exercise even greater scrutiny in accepting candidates for the priesthood and religious life, as well as providing formation programs that provide the necessary foundational human formation, including the appropriate formation in human sexuality.

Here I want to cite a few lines from the Circular Letter on this point: “The directions given in the Apostolic Exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis, as well as the instructions of the competent Dicasteries of the Holy See, take on an even greater importance in ensuring a proper discernment of vocations as well as a healthy human and spiritual formation of candidates. In particular, candidates should be formed in an appreciation of chastity and celibacy, and the responsibility of the cleric for spiritual fatherhood.”

The Circular Letter also highlights an important need for vigilance when it asks that particular attention “be given to the necessary exchange of information in regard to those candidates for priesthood or religious life who transfer from one seminary to another, between different dioceses, or between religious institutes and dioceses.”

I might add that the international dimension of such transfers is clearly increasing, calling for clear guidelines by Episcopal Conferences and religious orders that will be carefully observed by all for the good of the Church.


Support of Priests

The fourth general consideration contained in the Circular Letter relates directly to the clergy. The Bishop always has “the duty to treat all his priests as father and brother.”

As an expression of his paternal and fraternal care for all of his priests, the Bishop should make available programs of continuing formation, particularly in the early years of priesthood. As a father, the Bishop must care for the prayer life of his priests, encouraging them to support one another as brothers and to work together in caring for one another, calling each other to holier and more perfect service to Christ’s flock.

In addition to continuing education and spiritual support of his priests, the Bishop has the responsibility to provide appropriate material support for his priests, including priests accused or found guilty of sexual abuse, in accord with the norms of canon law.

While the Bishop is able to limit the exercise of an accused cleric’s ministry, as warranted by circumstances even during the preliminary investigation (cf. CIC can. 1722; SST art.19 [2010 rev.ed.]), as a father and brother he also has the responsibility to protect the good name of his priests, and should make every effort to rehabilitate the reputation of a cleric who has been wrongly accused.


Cooperation with Civil Authority

The final general consideration addressed in the Circular Letter is cooperation with civil authorities. Certainly no less important than any of the other elements, the cooperation of the Church with civil authorities in these cases recognizes the fundamental truth that the sexual abuse of minors is not only a crime in canon law, but is also a crime that violates criminal laws in most civil jurisdictions.

Since civil laws vary from nation to nation, and the interaction between Church officials and civil authorities may be different from one nation to another, the manner in which this cooperation takes place will necessarily differ in various countries as well. The principle, however, must remain the same.

The Church has an obligation to cooperate with the requirements of civil law regarding the reporting of such crimes to the appropriate authorities. Such cooperation naturally extends also to accusations of sexual abuse by religious or laity who work or volunteer in Church institutions and programs.

In this regard, Church officials must avoid any compromise of the sacramental internal forum, which must remain inviolable.

***
In addition to these general considerations, the Circular Letter provides a summary of the canonical norms to be applied in cases of sexual abuse of a minor, as well as suggestions for procedures to be followed, based on the Congregation’s experience in dealing with these cases over the past decade.

These latter sections of the Circular Letter might be called the “juridical” facet of the Church’s “multi-faceted response” to the challenge presented by the sexual abuse of minors committed by clerics.

The journey “Towards Healing and Renewal” is one that the entire Church must make together, convinced always of the power of God that “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (cf. Ps 147:3).

Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, in his encounter with the victims of sexual abuse in Malta, prayed not for a generic healing and reconciliation of victims, but one which would lead them, and the entire Church, “to a renewed hope.”

I hope my remarks here this evening may be some small contribution to this renewed hope, insofar as they call attention to concrete steps being taken by a Church that is called “Catholic” – universal – in an attempt to address the varied facets of the challenge presented by sexual abuse of minors by clerics.

It bears repeating that the abusers are a tiny minority of an otherwise faithful, committed clergy. Nevertheless, this tiny minority has done great harm to victims, and to the Church’s mission of bringing Christ’s love to the world of today.

Personally I am convinced that the steps currently underway, represented by the motu proprio SST and by the Congregation’s Circular Letter, together with the innumerable local initiatives undertaken in response to the challenge of sexual abuse of minors by clerics, will help us to continue to respond in many fruitful ways to heal the wounds of the past, and to renew our commitment to a future full of hope, as our gracious God has promised.

Thank you for the initiative of this Symposium “Toward Healing and Renewal”: may it be a model for future studies that can help us all confront what we need to do as Church. May it also be a source of expertise and hope for those who seek to eliminate the scourge of sexual abuse of minors from society at large.

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John Allen chooses a good lead, but cancels it out - or 'balances' it, depending on your point of view - with the obligatory 'equal time and space' for SNAP.[In the MSM's cockeyed value scale, SNAP merits full moral and news equivalence as the Pope, the Church and the Vatican put together]... And he relegates Levada's words about Benedict XVI way down in his assessment of news value:

Vatican sex abuse summit:
‘Don’t wait for the media to make us act'
SNAP blasts event as ‘cheap window dressing’
by John L Allen Jr

February 6, 2012

ROME - Conceding that church officials in various parts of the world often adopted tough policies to fight child abuse only in response to negative media coverage, the Vatican’s top doctrinal official today called for a “more proactive” approach.

In part, that's likely a reference to the fact that while the sexual abuse crisis has already exploded in North America and parts of Europe, it has not yet really arrived elsewhere, including much of the developing world -- where two-thirds of all Catholics today live.

Among other points, American Cardinal William Levada stressed that the sexual abuse of minors is not merely a crime under church law, but also under civil law, and that the church is therefore obliged to report “such crimes to the appropriate authorities.”

Levada spoke this evening to a summit conference on sexual abuse hosted by the Jesuit-run Gregorian University in Rome, and co-sponsored by several Vatican departments. The four-day event is titled “Toward Healing and Renewal.”...

[The rest of his piece is a summary of Cardinal Levada's opening remarks.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 07/02/2012 01:08]

Tuesday, February 7, Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

ST. COLETTE (France, 1381-1447), Virgin, Founder of Colettine Poor Clares
Colette joined the Franciscan third order as a teenager and at age 21, became an anchoress [walled into a cell whose only opening is a window
facing the interior of a church]. After 4 years, in response to visions of St. Francis who urged reforms in his order, she joined the Poor Clares
to initiate a return to the primitive rules of the order. The Colettines lived in extreme poverty and perpetual fasting and abstinence. She went on
to found 17 monasteries following her reform, which took place during the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) when three men laid claim to the
Papacy. With St. Vicente Ferrer, the great Dominican theologian and missionary from Valencia, she worked to end the schism by persuading
two of the claimants to withdraw so that a new Pope could be elected, then getting the King of France to withdraw his support from the holdout,
Benedict XIII. (Ironically, as the Pope in Avignon, Benedict had authorized Colette's reform of the Poor Clares and her new monasteries; and
St. Vincent himself had been an avid supporter of this Pope.] It is said that all her life, Colette was plagued by demons who assailed her in
terrible physical forms, such as dragging corpses into her cell, but she was also eventually endowed with many graces including raising
the dead to life. She was canonized in 1807.
Readings for today's Mass:
usccb.org/bible/readings/020712.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

No events announced for the Holy Father today.

The Vatican released the Pope's Message for Lent at a news conference. The theme comes from the Letter to the Hebrews:
"Let us be concerned for each other, to stir a response in love and good works".


OR for 2/6-2/7/12:

Illustration: Jesus heals a paralyitic, Sabino Labo, 1959, Vatican Museums.
Benedict XVI at the Sunday Angelus anticipates World Day for the Sick
'Illness has its uses'
The Pope reiterates support for Italy's 'Movement for life'

The other papal story in this issue: The Holy Father meets the new Chief Delegate of the European Union to the Holy See (photo). Page 1 special: An essay by the British ambassador to the Holy See. 'Sixty years of service' on the Diamond Jubilee yesterday of Princess Elizabeth succeeding her father George VI as Sovereign of the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth (photo shows the 24-year-old Crown Princess after visiting Pius XII at the Vatican in 1951, the year before she became Queen ). Other Page 1 news: China and Russia veto UN resolution sanctioning Syria's President Assad for months of deadly repression against regime protesters (death toll since March 2011 estimated at around 7,000); and Chancelor Merkel meets President Sarkozy in Paris to coordinate strategies in movign forward on Europe's continuing financial crisis.




- On Page 7 of the Feb. 6-7 issue of L'Osservatore Romano, there were two accounts about two new Apostolic Nuncios formally starting their assignment in the country to which they were each assigned - one to the USA, the other to the Ukraine (a much longer account). Andrea Tornielli commented about it in Vatican Insider, saying this is SOP for the Vatican as a way of putting the events on record, even if the reports come out long after the event. In the case of the Nuncio to Washington, Mons. Carlo Vigano presented his credentials to President Obama at the White House in mid-November, two months before his private letters to the Pope and Cardinal Bertone would be made public and cause the furor that it did.

The account also came two days after the publication of a communique from the present and past leadership of the Vatican Governatorate belying the accusations of financial irregularities in that office as discussed by Vigano in his supposed-to-be-confidential letters.

Tornielli's interpretation is that it is a signal showing the Pope's continued confidence in Vigano despite the unmistakable rebuke in the Communique from the Governatorate (which, it is believed, was issued with the Pope's approval, since he met with Cardinal Lajolo two days before the communique was issued). If that were so, then the entire situation is far too perplexing to figure out!

Call it wishful thinking, but how is it possible to publicly rebuke Vigano for lying about accusations he levelled at his peers and superiors in the Vatican, including the president of the Vatican bank, and continue to keep him on in Washington as Nuncio? Even more important, how can Vigano himself carry on as Nuncio in Washington when he first exposed his own blind ambition through those letters, and now has been disclosed as a liar by his superiors at the Governatorate, and obviously with the Pope's approval? For the sake of common sense and consistency, I certainly hope Tornielli is wrong about this! The whole situation is so unnatural it borders on the surreal!

Papal visit to Lebanon
expected in September


JESUSALEM, Feb. 7 (Translated from SIR) -It is expected that Benedict XVI will hand us his Post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the 2010 Synod for the Middle East this September in lebanon, according to Mons. Fouad Twal, latin Patriarch of Jerusalem in his homily on the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord at a Mass in Jerusalem at the church dedicated to Simeon and Anna. Biblical figures who were at the Presentation.

[It Is the first indication of the timing for Benedict XVI's expected apostolic visit to Lebanon this year. The other anticipated foreign trip in 2012 would be to the Ukraine.]

Patriarch Twal said "We are in between two Synods dedicated to witness - that on the Middle East in October 2010, and the one on the New Evangelization this October. And we expect that Benedict XVI will be handing us his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Middle East Synod when he comes to Lebanon in September".

The Holy Father was formally invited to Lebanon by the President of the Lebanese Council Nalib Mikati when he visited the Pope at the Vatican on November 28, 2011, and earlier by President Michel Suleiman in February 2011.

It will be Benedict XVI's third trip to the Middle East - after Jordan, Israel and the Palestine territory in 2009 and Cyprus in 2010.


The Italian service of Vatican Radio has this report:

Vatican Press Director Fr. Federico Lombardi was asked to comment on the SIR report from Jerusalem. He said:

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It is true that such a trip is being considered and the Pope wishes to make it in connection with the publication of the Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Special Synodal Assembly for the Middle East. However, we have no official announcement to make as yet about this".

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POPE'S MESSAGE
FOR LENT 2012
February 7, 2012

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Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The Lenten season offers us once again an opportunity to reflect upon the very heart of Christian life: charity. This is a favourable time to renew our journey of faith, both as individuals and as a community, with the help of the word of God and the sacraments. This journey is one marked by prayer and sharing, silence and fasting, in anticipation of the joy of Easter.

This year I would like to propose a few thoughts in the light of a brief biblical passage drawn from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Let us be concerned for each other, to stir a response in love and good works”.

These words are part of a passage in which the sacred author exhorts us to trust in Jesus Christ as the High Priest who has won us forgiveness and opened up a pathway to God.

Embracing Christ bears fruit in a life structured by the three theological virtues: it means approaching the Lord “sincere in heart and filled with faith” (v. 22), keeping firm “in the hope we profess” (v. 23) and ever mindful of living a life of “love and good works” (v. 24) together with our brothers and sisters.

The author states that to sustain this life shaped by the Gospel it is important to participate in the liturgy and community prayer, mindful of the eschatological goal of full communion in God (v. 25).

Here I would like to reflect on verse 24, which offers a succinct, valuable and ever timely teaching on the three aspects of Christian life: concern for others, reciprocity and personal holiness.

1. “Let us be concerned for each other”: responsibility towards our brothers and sisters.

This first aspect is an invitation to be “concerned”: the Greek verb used here is katanoein, which means to scrutinize, to be attentive, to observe carefully and take stock of something. We come across this word in the Gospel when Jesus invites the disciples to “think of” the ravens that, without striving, are at the centre of the solicitous and caring Divine Providence (cf. Lk 12:24), and to “observe” the plank in our own eye before looking at the splinter in that of our brother (cf. Lk 6:41).

In another verse of the Letter to the Hebrews, we find the encouragement to “turn your minds to Jesus” (3:1), the Apostle and High Priest of our faith. So the verb which introduces our exhortation tells us to look at others, first of all at Jesus, to be concerned for one another, and not to remain isolated and indifferent to the fate of our brothers and sisters.

All too often, however, our attitude is just the opposite: an indifference and disinterest born of selfishness and masked as a respect for “privacy”.

Today too, the Lord’s voice summons all of us to be concerned for one another. Even today God asks us to be “guardians” of our brothers and sisters (Gen 4:9), to establish relationships based on mutual consideration and attentiveness to the well-being, the integral well-being of others.

The great commandment of love for one another demands that we acknowledge our responsibility towards those who, like ourselves, are creatures and children of God. Being brothers and sisters in humanity and, in many cases, also in the faith, should help us to recognize in others a true alter ego, infinitely loved by the Lord.

If we cultivate this way of seeing others as our brothers and sisters, solidarity, justice, mercy and compassion will naturally well up in our hearts.

The Servant of God Pope Paul VI stated that the world today is suffering above all from a lack of brotherhood: “Human society is sorely ill. The cause is not so much the depletion of natural resources, nor their monopolistic control by a privileged few; it is rather the weakening of brotherly ties between individuals and nations” (Populorum Progressio, 66).

Concern for others entails desiring what is good for them from every point of view: physical, moral and spiritual. Contemporary culture seems to have lost the sense of good and evil, yet there is a real need to reaffirm that good does exist and will prevail, because God is “generous and acts generously” (Ps 119:68).

The good is whatever gives, protects and promotes life, brotherhood and communion. Responsibility towards others thus means desiring and working for the good of others, in the hope that they too will become receptive to goodness and its demands. Concern for others means being aware of their needs.

Sacred Scripture warns us of the danger that our hearts can become hardened by a sort of “spiritual anesthesia” which numbs us to the suffering of others.

The Evangelist Luke relates two of Jesus’ parables by way of example. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite “pass by”, indifferent to the presence of the man stripped and beaten by the robbers (cf. Lk 10:30-32).

In that of Dives and Lazarus, the rich man is heedless of the poverty of Lazarus, who is starving to death at his very door (cf. Lk 16:19). Both parables show examples of the opposite of “being concerned”, of looking upon others with love and compassion.

What hinders this humane and loving gaze towards our brothers and sisters? Often it is the possession of material riches and a sense of sufficiency, but it can also be the tendency to put our own interests and problems above all else.

We should never be incapable of “showing mercy” towards those who suffer. Our hearts should never be so wrapped up in our affairs and problems that they fail to hear the cry of the poor. Humbleness of heart and the personal experience of suffering can awaken within us a sense of compassion and empathy. “The upright understands the cause of the weak, the wicked has not the wit to understand it” (Prov 29:7).

We can then understand the beatitude of “those who mourn” (Mt 5:5), those who in effect are capable of looking beyond themselves and feeling compassion for the suffering of others. Reaching out to others and opening our hearts to their needs can become an opportunity for salvation and blessedness.

“Being concerned for each other” also entails being concerned for their spiritual well-being. Here I would like to mention an aspect of the Christian life, which I believe has been quite forgotten: fraternal correction in view of eternal salvation.

Today, in general, we are very sensitive to the idea of charity and caring about the physical and material well-being of others, but almost completely silent about our spiritual responsibility towards our brothers and sisters.

This was not the case in the early Church or in those communities that are truly mature in faith, those which are concerned not only for the physical health of their brothers and sisters, but also for their spiritual health and ultimate destiny.

The Scriptures tell us: “Rebuke the wise and he will love you for it. Be open with the wise, he grows wiser still, teach the upright, he will gain yet more” (Prov 9:8ff). Christ himself commands us to admonish a brother who is committing a sin (cf. Mt 18:15).

The verb used to express fraternal correction - elenchein – is the same used to indicate the prophetic mission of Christians to speak out against a generation indulging in evil (cf. Eph 5:11).

The Church’s tradition has included “admonishing sinners” among the spiritual works of mercy. It is important to recover this dimension of Christian charity. We must not remain silent before evil.

I am thinking of all those Christians who, out of human regard or purely personal convenience, adapt to the prevailing mentality, rather than warning their brothers and sisters against ways of thinking and acting that are contrary to the truth and that do not follow the path of goodness.

Christian admonishment, for its part, is never motivated by a spirit of accusation or recrimination. It is always moved by love and mercy, and springs from genuine concern for the good of the other.

As the Apostle Paul says: “If one of you is caught doing something wrong, those of you who are spiritual should set that person right in a spirit of gentleness; and watch yourselves that you are not put to the test in the same way” (Gal 6:1).

In a world pervaded by individualism, it is essential to rediscover the importance of fraternal correction, so that together we may journey towards holiness. Scripture tells us that even “the upright falls seven times” (Prov 24:16); all of us are weak and imperfect (cf. 1 Jn 1:8). It is a great service, then, to help others and allow them to help us, so that we can be open to the whole truth about ourselves, improve our lives and walk more uprightly in the Lord’s ways.

There will always be a need for a gaze which loves and admonishes, which knows and understands, which discerns and forgives (cf. Lk 22:61), as God has done and continues to do with each of us.


2. “Being concerned for each other”: the gift of reciprocity.

This “custody” of others is in contrast to a mentality that, by reducing life exclusively to its earthly dimension, fails to see it in an eschatological perspective and accepts any moral choice in the name of personal freedom.

A society like ours can become blind to physical sufferings and to the spiritual and moral demands of life. This must not be the case in the Christian community!

The Apostle Paul encourages us to seek “the ways which lead to peace and the ways in which we can support one another” (Rom 14:19) for our neighbour’s good, “so that we support one another” (15:2), seeking not personal gain but rather “the advantage of everybody else, so that they may be saved” (1 Cor 10:33). This mutual correction and encouragement in a spirit of humility and charity must be part of the life of the Christian community.

The Lord’s disciples, united with him through the Eucharist, live in a fellowship that binds them one to another as members of a single body. This means that the other is part of me, and that his or her life, his or her salvation, concern my own life and salvation.

Here we touch upon a profound aspect of communion: our existence is related to that of others, for better or for worse. Both our sins and our acts of love have a social dimension. This reciprocity is seen in the Church, the mystical body of Christ: the community constantly does penance and asks for the forgiveness of the sins of its members, but also unfailingly rejoices in the examples of virtue and charity present in her midst.

As Saint Paul says: “Each part should be equally concerned for all the others” (1 Cor 12:25), for we all form one body. Acts of charity towards our brothers and sisters – as expressed by almsgiving, a practice which, together with prayer and fasting, is typical of Lent – is rooted in this common belonging. Christians can also express their membership in the one body which is the Church through concrete concern for the poorest of the poor.

Concern for one another likewise means acknowledging the good that the Lord is doing in others and giving thanks for the wonders of grace that Almighty God in his goodness continuously accomplishes in his children. When Christians perceive the Holy Spirit at work in others, they cannot but rejoice and give glory to the heavenly Father (cf. Mt 5:16).

3. “To stir a response in love and good works”: walking together in holiness.

These words of the Letter to the Hebrews (10:24) urge us to reflect on the universal call to holiness, the continuing journey of the spiritual life as we aspire to the greater spiritual gifts and to an ever more sublime and fruitful charity (cf. 1 Cor 12:31-13:13).

Being concerned for one another should spur us to an increasingly effective love which, “like the light of dawn, its brightness growing to the fullness of day” (Prov 4:18), makes us live each day as an anticipation of the eternal day awaiting us in God.

The time granted us in this life is precious for discerning and performing good works in the love of God. In this way the Church herself continuously grows towards the full maturity of Christ (cf. Eph 4:13). Our exhortation to encourage one another to attain the fullness of love and good works is situated in this dynamic prospect of growth.

Sadly, there is always the temptation to become lukewarm, to quench the Spirit, to refuse to invest the talents we have received, for our own good and for the good of others (cf. Mt 25:25ff.). All of us have received spiritual or material riches meant to be used for the fulfilment of God’s plan, for the good of the Church and for our personal salvation (cf. Lk 12:21b; 1 Tim 6:18).

The spiritual masters remind us that in the life of faith those who do not advance inevitably regress. Dear brothers and sisters, let us accept the invitation, today as timely as ever, to aim for the “high standard of ordinary Christian living” (Novo Millennio Ineunte, 31).

The wisdom of the Church in recognizing and proclaiming certain outstanding Christians as Blessed and as Saints is also meant to inspire others to imitate their virtues. Saint Paul exhorts us to “anticipate one another in showing honour” (Rom 12:10).

In a world which demands of Christians a renewed witness of love and fidelity to the Lord, may all of us feel the urgent need to anticipate one another in charity, service and good works (cf. Heb 6:10).

This appeal is particularly pressing in this holy season of preparation for Easter. As I offer my prayerful good wishes for a blessed and fruitful Lenten period, I entrust all of you to the intercession of the Mary Ever Virgin and cordially impart my Apostolic Blessing.

From the Vatican
3 November 2011

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SNOW AT THE VATICAN
February 4, 2012

To my surprise, in the Novelties section of the Vatican website, I found a collection of photos taken last Saturday, February 4, to record the unusual snowfall at the Vatican that is part of the record snowfall all over Europe in recent days.











Sorry I cannot match the tones for the Peter and Paul statues!








In the Vatican Gardens - palm trees in the snow!

For the record, here is Vatican Radio's report on February 4 about the snowfall:

Huge falls of snow have caused chaos across Eastern Europe. More than a meter of snow fell on the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo Saturday trapping people in their homes and vehicles. In the Ukraine, Poland and Belarus the bad weather has also led to a number of deaths. Meanwhile here in Rome, people were out and about today enjoying the rare sight of snow in the capital despite the chill in the air.

Rome under a blanket of white snow is something Italy’s capital hasn’t experienced since 1986. But freezing temperatures didn’t stop Roman residents and tourists alike on Saturday from getting out and about in the city...(though) drivers faced long hours in traffic and Italian carrier Alitalia cancelled a number of departures and landing on Saturday morning.

Day 2 of symposium:
Irish abuse victim and psychiatrist
underscore problem of denial
by Church hierarchy in the past

February 7, 2012

The urgent need to change the culture within the Church to ensure zero tolerance of all sexual abuse: that was the starkly clear message that emerged from the Tuesday morning session of the conference on ‘Healing and Renewal’, going on behind closed doors at Rome’s Gregorian University.

Bishops or their representatives from over a hundred countries are attending the four-day meeting which also includes a penitential liturgy and the launch of a German-based center for child protection to provide resources for Church leaders across the globe. Philippa Hitchen report:

Sometimes shock tactics are needed to shake people out of denial, complacency or the refusal to confront a particularly painful problem. That’s what participants at this conference got on Tuesday as they heard a middle-aged Irish victim of abuse describe in detail how her experience led to decades of despair, depression and deep loss of trust in the Church.

As a 13-year-old girl, Marie Collins was abused by a hospital chaplain, who was then protected by his archbishop and went on to abuse and rape other children over a period of 30 years.


Marie Collins speaking to newsmen today.

Though she was sickened by his actions, Marie says she herself felt guilty and was unable to tell anyone about what he was doing. The fact that he was a priest simply added to the confusion in her young mind: “those fingers that would abuse my body the night before were the next morning offering me the sacred host” she told the conference, adding that “my abusers’ assertion that he was a priest and could do no wrong rang true with me”.

Speaking alongside Marie at that morning session was psychiatry professor Sheila Hollins, who recently accompanied British Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor on his visitation to hear victims of sexual abuse in the Irish diocese of Armagh.

She spoke of the devastating psychological damage suffered by victims who feel dirty, ashamed, unable to enjoy normal relationships and often go on to either abuse others or seek refuge in alcohol or drug abuse.

Those mental health problems are simply made worse if their story is then not believed or played down, as many bishops in the past have done. Both women stressed the vital importance of listening to survivors stories and providing them with ongoing psychiatric and spiritual support/

“Certainly in my experience there was very little spiritual support….the hierarchy look at us as outside the Church, angry with the Church….and I said I thought it was wrong”

Another key speaker at that morning session, American professor and psychologist Msgr Stephen Rossetti then stressed the urgency of changing the culture in the Church worldwide, to break through the denial and to learn from all the mistakes of the past.

He listed six areas where Church leaders have got it wrong in the past – from not listening to victims, not heeding the tell-tale signs, underestimating the problem in their own dioceses, or believing that abusers could be cured and returned to parish ministry.

Describing the symposium as an intensive ‘bishops’ formation course’ he said it’s time to stop seeing sex abuse as an American or Western concern and learn how to act fast and effectively

“Hopefully this conference will help people learn faster …change happens slowly but when the Church finally ‘gets it’…it can be a powerful force for change.”


All these years of reading about the scandals, nothing has brought home to me more indelibly and graphically the trauma of the unspeakable crimes committed by priests against their victims than Marie Collins's statement that “those fingers that would abuse my body the night before were the next morning offering me the sacred host”. Yhe very thought sends shudders through me. The sacrilege and offense to God and to another human being could not be more tersely expressed. I hope it makes the same impression on anyone in the clergy who may still have any cultural prejudices or resistances against the only position one could take towards this offense and the errant priests who commit these offenses... Let us offer our prayers and thanks for those like Marie Collins who have had the courage to speak out and seek authentic changes in a responsible way instead of wallowing in victimhood and allowing do-gooders to exploit their misfortune. But let us pray for the latter, too, that they may be open to the healing gifts and comfort of the Holy Spirit.


Penitential vigil ends
Day 2 of abuse symposium


ROME, February 7 (SIR) - A penitential vigil was to be held this afternoon in the Church of St. Ignatius in Rome during which seven members of the Church, on behalf of different groups, would ask forgiveness from God and their victims for the sexual abuse of children and culpable negligence.

This will be the culminating moment of Day 2 of the International Symposium entitled “Toward Healing and Renewal” that is being held at the Gregorian University in Rome.

Fr. Hans Zollner, President of the Symposium’s Organising Committee, explains that a “very deep, clear and explicit” text will be read out, and then a victim will ask God for the strength to forgive.

Earlier today, at the Symposium, a victim also took the floor and addressed bishops and religious superiors from all over the world - Marie Collins, an Irish victim who was abused by a hospital chaplain at the age of 13, more that fifty years ago.

“Maybe not everyone will agree with me." she said at press conference, "and it is up to every victim to decide whether to forgive or not, but what is important is that the Church is asking for forgiveness”. This, he says would show it is indeed “a time of change”.

In her answers, Marie often uses the word “hope”: she appreciates the fact that one of the goals of the Symposium is to “look to the future and move towards it”.

She told journalists how “difficult” it has been for her to address an audience with representatives of “the Church leadership”. But that she was “happy” to do it after all.

She says what she has at heart now is the future and the Church’s commitment to ensure “the best protection of children”. For this reason, she thinks the Symposium is a “good initiative”.

She is also grateful to the Pope, saying "The Pope is behind this Symposium. He was the first to give the example by listening to the victims himself", pointing out how it is "extremely important for the victims to be heard".

She explained that it may take a victim a long time to confess an abuse. This was actually her experience: “The fact that my abuser was a priest added to the great confusion in my mind”.

His claim that “he was a priest and, therefore, he could do no wrong rang true with me”, Marie added. “This made me feel even more guilty and I was convinced that what had happened was my fault, not his. When I left the hospital, I was no longer a confident, carefree and happy child. I was convinced I was a bad person and I needed to hide that from everyone”.

The global war on Christians
in the Muslim World
From one end of the Muslim world to the other,
Christians are being murdered for their faith.
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

February 6, 2012

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a prominent feminist and atheist activist who was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and escaped an arranged marriage by immigrating to the Netherlands in 1992. She served as a member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003 to 2006. She wrote the screenplay for a Theo Van Gogh film and had to leave the Netherlands because of threats on her life by Islamists who did murder Van Gogh earlier. She is currently a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Her autobiography, Infidel, was a 2007 New York Times bestseller.

We hear so often about Muslims as victims of abuse in the West and combatants in the Arab Spring’s fight against tyranny. But, in fact, a wholly different kind of war is underway—an unrecognized battle costing thousands of lives. Christians are being killed in the Islamic world because of their religion. It is a rising genocide that ought to provoke global alarm.

The portrayal of Muslims as victims or heroes is at best partially accurate. In recent years the violent oppression of Christian minorities has become the norm in Muslim-majority nations stretching from West Africa and the Middle East to South Asia and Oceania.

In some countries it is governments and their agents that have burned churches and imprisoned parishioners. In others, rebel groups and vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands, murdering Christians and driving them from regions where their roots go back centuries.

The media’s reticence on the subject no doubt has several sources. One may be fear of provoking additional violence. Another is most likely the influence of lobbying groups such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation — a kind of United Nations of Islam centered in Saudi Arabia—and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Over the past decade, these and similar groups have been remarkably successful in persuading leading public figures and journalists in the West to think of each and every example of perceived anti-Muslim discrimination as an expression of a systematic and sinister derangement called “Islamophobia” — a term that is meant to elicit the same moral disapproval as xenophobia or homophobia.

But a fair-minded assessment of recent events and trends leads to the conclusion that the scale and severity of Islamophobia pales in comparison with the bloody Christophobia currently coursing through Muslim-majority nations from one end of the globe to the other.

The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity — and ultimately of all religious minorities—in the Islamic world is at stake.


At least 24 Coptic Christians were killed in Cairo during clashes with the Egyptian Army on Oct. 9.

From blasphemy laws to brutal murders to bombings to mutilations and the burning of holy sites, Christians in so many nations live in fear.

In Nigeria many have suffered all of these forms of persecution. The nation has the largest Christian minority (40 percent) in proportion to its population (160 million) of any majority-Muslim country. For years, Muslims and Christians in Nigeria have lived on the edge of civil war.

Islamist radicals provoke much if not most of the tension. The newest such organization is an outfit that calls itself Boko Haram, which means “Western education is sacrilege.” Its aim is to establish Sharia in Nigeria. To this end it has stated that it will kill all Christians in the country.

In the month of January 2012 alone, Boko Haram was responsible for 54 deaths. In 2011 its members killed at least 510 people and burned down or destroyed more than 350 churches in 10 northern states. They use guns, gasoline bombs, and even machetes, shouting “Allahu akbar” (“God is great”) while launching attacks on unsuspecting citizens.

They have attacked churches, a Christmas Day gathering (killing 42 Catholics), beer parlors, a town hall, beauty salons, and banks. They have so far focused on killing Christian clerics, politicians, students, policemen, and soldiers, as well as Muslim clerics who condemn their mayhem.

While they started out by using crude methods like hit-and-run assassinations from the back of motorbikes in 2009, the latest AP reports indicate that the group’s recent attacks show a new level of potency and sophistication.

The Christophobia that has plagued Sudan for years takes a very different form. The authoritarian government of the Sunni Muslim north of the country has for decades tormented Christian and animist minorities in the south.

What has often been described as a civil war is in practice the Sudanese government’s sustained persecution of religious minorities. This persecution culminated in the infamous genocide in Darfur that began in 2003.

Even though Sudan’s Muslim president, Omar al-Bashir, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which charged him with three counts of genocide, and despite the euphoria that greeted the semi-independence he granted to South Sudan in July of last year, the violence has not ended.

In South Kordofan, Christians are still subject-ed to aerial bombardment, targeted killings, the kidnapping of children, and other atrocities. Reports from the United Nations indicate that between 53,000 and 75,000 innocent civilians have been displaced from their residences and that houses and buildings have been looted and destroyed.

Both kinds of persecution — undertaken by extra-governmental groups as well as by agents of the state — have come together in Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

On Oct. 9 of last year in the Maspero area of Cairo, Coptic Christians (who make up roughly 11 percent of Egypt’s population of 81 million) marched in protest against a wave of attacks by Islamists — including church burnings, rapes, mutilations, and murders — that followed the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship.

During the protest, Egyptian security forces drove their trucks into the crowd and fired on protesters, crushing and killing at least 24 and wounding more than 300 people. By the end of the year more than 200,000 Copts had fled their homes in anticipation of more attacks. With Islamists poised to gain much greater power in the wake of recent elections, their fears appear to be justified.

Egypt is not the only Arab country that seems bent on wiping out its Christian minority. Since 2003 more than 900 Iraqi Christians (most of them Assyrians) have been killed by terrorist violence in Baghdad alone, and 70 churches have been burned, according to the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA).

Thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled as a result of violence directed specifically at them, reducing the number of Christians in the country to fewer than half a million from just over a million before 2003. AINA understandably describes this as an “incipient genocide or ethnic cleansing of Assyrians in Iraq.”

The 2.8 million Christians who live in Pakistan make up only about 1.6 percent of the population of more than 170 million. As members of such a tiny minority, they live in perpetual fear not only of Islamist terrorists but also of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws.

There is, for example, the notorious case of a Christian woman who was sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhammad. When international pressure persuaded Punjab Gov. Salman Taseer to explore ways of freeing her, he was killed by his bodyguard. The bodyguard was then celebrated by prominent Muslim clerics as a hero —and though he was sentenced to death late last year, the judge who imposed the sentence now lives in hiding, fearing for his life.

Such cases are not unusual in Pakistan. The nation’s blasphemy laws are routinely used by criminals and intolerant Pakistani Muslims to bully religious minorities. Simply to declare belief in the Christian Trinity is considered blasphemous, since it contradicts mainstream Muslim theological doctrines.

When a Christian group is suspected of transgressing the blasphemy laws, the consequences can be brutal. Just ask the members of the Christian aid group World Vision. Its offices were attacked in the spring of 2010 by 10 gunmen armed with grenades, leaving six people dead and four wounded.

A militant Muslim group claimed responsibility for the attack on the grounds that World Vision was working to subvert Islam. (In fact, it was helping the survivors of a major earthquake.)


At least 13 people were killed and 140 injured on March 8, 2011, when participants in a large Christian demonstration in a Cairo slum were attacked by residents of a surrounding neighborhood.

Not even Indonesia — often touted as the world’s most tolerant, democratic, and modern majority-Muslim nation — has been immune to the fevers of Christophobia. According to data compiled by the Christian Post, the number of violent incidents committed against religious minorities (and at 7 percent of the population, Christians are the country’s largest minority) increased by nearly 40 percent, from 198 to 276, between 2010 and 2011.

The litany of suffering could be extended. In Iran dozens of Christians have been arrested and jailed for daring to worship outside of the officially sanctioned church system.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, deserves to be placed in a category of its own. Despite the fact that more than a million Christians live in the country as foreign workers, churches and even private acts of Christian prayer are banned; to enforce these totalitarian restrictions, the religious police regularly raid the homes of Christians and bring them up on charges of blasphemy in courts where their testimony carries less legal weight than a Muslim’s.

Even in Ethiopia, where Christians make up a majority of the population, church burnings by members of the Muslim minority have become a problem.

It should be clear from this catalog of atrocities that anti-Christian violence is a major and under-reported problem. No, the violence isn’t centrally planned or coordinated by some international Islamist agency.

In that sense the global war on Christians isn’t a traditional war at all. It is, rather, a spontaneous expression of anti-Christian animus by Muslims that transcends cultures, regions, and ethnicities.

As Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, pointed out in an interview with Newsweek, Christian minorities in many majority-Muslim nations have “lost the protection of their societies.”

This is especially so in countries with growing radical Islamist (Salafist) movements. In those nations, vigilantes often feel they can act with impunity—and government inaction often proves them right.

The old idea of the Ottoman Turks — that non-Muslims in Muslim societies deserve protection (albeit as second-class citizens) — has all but vanished from wide swaths of the Islamic world, and increasingly the result is bloodshed and oppression.

So let us please get our priorities straight. Yes, Western governments should protect Muslim minorities from intolerance. And of course we should ensure that they can worship, live, and work freely and without fear. It is the protection of the freedom of conscience and speech that distinguishes free societies from unfree ones.

But we also need to keep perspective about the scale and severity of intolerance. Cartoons, films, and writings are one thing; knives, guns, and grenades are something else entirely.

As for what the West can do to help religious minorities in Muslim-majority societies, my answer is that it needs to begin using the billions of dollars in aid it gives to the offending countries as leverage.

Then there is trade and investment. Besides diplomatic pressure, these aid and trade relationships can and should be made conditional on the protection of the freedom of conscience and worship for all citizens.

Instead of falling for overblown tales of Western Islamophobia, let’s take a real stand against the Christophobia infecting the Muslim world. Tolerance is for everyone—except the intolerant.


P.S. There is a complementary current article in La Bussola Quotiiana citing findings by the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe, in which at present, there are at least 527 pending cases before European courts of anti-Christian discrimination mostly arising from a mistaken interpretation and application of what 'secularism' or 'laicism' means. I will translate and post is as soon as I can/

BTW, I am still debating whether Christophobia or Christianophobia is the more appropriate term, although the Council of European Christian Conferences has defined the terms (taken to be equivalent) as "every form of discrimination and intolerance against Christians" in the same way that Islamophobia is against Islam.

Strictly speaking, however, a phobia is a morbid fear, and while it would not be untrue to say that there is a morbid fear that underlies most forms of rabid discrimination against any group, as in anti-Semitism, for instance, the fear is actually masked overwhelmingly by the outward manifestation of hatred. So maybe the more correct terms would be Christ-hatred [which has the great advantage of directness] or, not very euphonic but accurate, Christianodium. Odium is so much more descriptive than phobia in this context. Also, the haters are truly odious, not just phobic!/C]. When all else fails, why not just anti-Christian, to go with anTi-Semitic and anti-Muslim?

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 08/02/2012 04:12]

Giuliano Ferrara, who with Marcello Pera, is the most congenial of intellectuals on the Italian scene today - both also happen to be 'devout atheists' - wrote this far-from-conventional editorial yesterday on the opening of the symposium on child abuse....

To the Church as it faces the 'pedophile scandal':
Do what is right and do not play
to the Western world's prejudices
Editorial
by Giuliano Ferrara
Translated from

February 6, 2012

Today at the Gregorian University, Charles Scicluna, authoritative officer at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich-Freising, are the animators of an international conference of great importance not just for the Church.

The subject is sexual abuse of minors by members of the clergy, with all the incumbent weight of shortcomings with respect to the law, the culture of silence that used to prevail on this issue, and failure to answer to the victims and to society - accusations that have been habitually levell3ed against the Catholic Church and its clergy, high and low.

What is to be done? The conference hopes to lay it out. Under the impetus of Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has decided to bring down every traditional defensive wall, and to undergo penitence and expiation for past failings through prayer, a new consideration for the victims of this terrible phenomenon, and exemplary severity against bishops and other pastors at various levels who have anything to do with covering up these offenses or even of dealing with them administratively without any assumption of responsibility.

The campaign to accuse ecclesial (institutional) responsibility in these cases has been radical, at times almost fanatic. There have been attempts to place the ultimate responsibility on the Pope. even judicially (as in the United States). Theee have been attacks against an entire national Church, as in Ireland, where almost all the bishops are collectively held responsible. And in Belgium, police opened the tombs of two long-dead archbishops in search of presumed hidden files on priest abuse, while the entire Belgian bishops' conference was sequestered for hours during the search.

The criminal and civil suits filed against accused priests have been innumerable, not to mention the damages awarded to the victims so far [paid for by the dioceses or religious orders to which the offenders belong]. And all the public wrangling with political leaders and government committes assigned to investigate such cases ostensibly in defense of national honor against the atrocious misdeeds of the Church!

Then, there's the internal opposition within the Church, quick to attribute the crimes to mandatory priestly celibacy, a cause used by the post-Conciliar 'reformists' to blaze the trail for other liberal reforms they demand in the name of having the Church adhere to modernity, to democracy, to equality and equal opportunity for men and women.

The burden on this symposium is far from enviable!

A secular who favors religious participation in the public sphere, who is not deaf to the cultural critics of traditional Catholicism, who is nonetheless concerned about a totalitarian liberalism disfigured by political, ideological and cultural correctness, who is interested in defending the diversity of an open society against the transformation of secularizaiton into an ideology and a new religion to be professed by all - a secular person such as I think myself to be has little to say but much to listen to.

Among the little I have to say is this: Beware, reverend fathers, of whatever seems to be clear, consolidated or certain beyond any doubt in the Western media or cultural world.

Their verdict for you is this:
- The Church is a monosexual body of persons who therefore generate bestial pathologies on this account.
- The Church is an earthly power that is much too socially active and acts in an abusive way apart from the lawful state.
- The Church wishes to maintain a caste-defined power that is incompatible with democracy, with justice, with piety itself.

And the accusation against you by the victims and their advocacy directly concerns the Church's freedom to care for souls, do apostolic work, and comply with her mission, because, they claim, that mission has been made obsolete by the progress of science and ideas.

In 1981, William Buckley Jr. [American conservative writer, credited with reviving conservatism in the 1960s to challenge the dominant liberalism in American life] wrote a pamphlet entitled "God and man in Yale", in which he reflected on his experience as a student at one of America's leading cathedrals of humanistic and scientific knowledge, a sort of Ivy League Gregorian University.

He wrote that any true respect for the individual was prohibited by the academic caste and its conformism, which had replaced religious freedom with a teaching constructed to force the free individual conscience into conforming to the dominant ideology and culture.

Just last Friday, on the subject of sexuality and the modern witchhunt, Peter Berkowitz, professor of law and conservatibe publicist, protested in the Wall Street Journal against the calumny by Yale of an American quarterback accused of sexual molestation who had not yet undergone due process although the accusation was not anonymous - still hearsay was substituted for justice and due process, while assassinating the character of a man who ought to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

So, your task is difficult, reverend fathers, in a world that scrutinizes and judges you, that scrutinizes and judges your Church and your entire history, judging you from the heights of prejudices integral to a body of 'received wisdom' and the nonsense of dominant mentality.

Do what you consider to be right, but do not forget this detail: Even in the secular world, there are those who believe something is seriously wrong about judging questions of freedom, the human being, sex, love and ethical priorities in the tribunals of 'conscience' that would dictate rules and regulations in the Western world.



No one could be more in contrast with Ferrara's elegant thining outside the box then Jose Manuel Vidal, whose measure as a commentator I am starting to get. He's impulse-driven, all bark and roar, at the expense of reflection. His language can be colorful, but that does not make up for a certain banality of thought. The only reason I decided to go ahead and post this article anyway because of his stunningly ignorant statement towards the end of the piece about how the Church is very ready to throw out dissident theologians while tolerating sex-abusive priests! It is such a factually wrong statement so unworthy of a journalist with his reputation and stature....Moreover, one can only take his peptalk-admonitory-taskmaster manner of addressing the Pope once - and that was too much. If he makes it habitual, he's nothing more than a condescending nag unfit to even nuzzle at the Holy Father's shoes!... And yet, after WYD Madrid, he did call Benedict XVI the only true world leaders today...


Driving out the predators
from the vineyard of the Lord
by Jose Manuel Vidal
Translated from

February 7, 2012

Her testimony was brutal, spine-chilling, hair-raising. The calvary of Marie Collins, abused by a priest, at age 13, on her hospital bed. Her innocence shattered by a heartless brute: "The fingers that had abused my body the night before would offer me the Host the next morning".

Her fight, for years and years, against depression and in search of justice, coming up instead against those who made her feel she was to blame, as the most shameless cover-up on the part of religious authorities, including her archbishop [Vidal says we have to learn his name, but she identified him - Desmond O'Connell of Dublin].

"After I denounced the priest, the bishop['s priority was to protect 'the good name' of my abuser". What use was it to insist - they could read her testimony and draw their conclusions.

And this is only one case. Out of the 4,000 over the past ten years that have reached the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Just the tip of the iceberg. But it was a case that showed how seminaries, priests and bishops together carried out the fierce cover-up that seemed to reign everywhere.

Marie Collins's abuser was a young priest, newly ordained. What happened to the 'filters' at the seminary? And his superiors? He is repugnant. Abusive priests are not just rotten apples, which they are, nor merely sinners, which they are more than most. They are real vermin. The fox in the henhouse. With the permission of the henhouse owners - those unworthy pastors who protected and covered up for these cradlesnatchers.

Even worse, they tried to make the victims feel culpable while defeding their tormentors. The world upside down in normative institutions which ceaselessly teach moral doctrine and to which we entrust our children from their most tender years.

But something is changing in Rome. In forced lockstep. Marie Collins spoke before hundreds of clerics, including many bishops and cardinals. In the Gregorian University, at a symposium on sexual abuse, from which new measures will come to end this curse.

It is the crusade of the Pope who is God's broomwielder. Thanks to him, the Church has not only established zero tolerance for pederasts in the clergy, but is seeking to indemnify the victims, as well as to prevent - from the seminary to begin with - predators from getting into the vineyard of the Lord.

May God give you strength, Holiness. May your hand not tremble. Because there will continue to be much resistance from some institutional hierarchs. Many because they will feel left out. Some from the sheer inertia of habit or vice. And some, out of misguided piety, will still refuse to deliver these depraved priests to the justice system. With the argument of Cardinal Castrillon that a father does not denounce his sons.

So clean up, Holiness. Drive out the wild boars from the vineyard of the Lord along with their protectors, who are as bad as the sex offenders if not worse. They cannot be allowed to continue using God's name in vain. They cannot continue to scandalize the innocent....

Why is Rome so quick to punish and admonish and expel theologians who wish to propose new explanations for the faith but is so slow to throw out these pederast vermin vfrom its bosom? [Once again, Vidal is not only rash but unfair - and more fundamentally, ignorant - about the situation of theologians who are pretty much left free to spread their poison, as long as they do not do it in Catholic schools as Catholic theologians. All he has to do is look up the list of 'dissident theologians disciplined by the Church' since 1950 - and he will find exactly 14 individuals, the last one being Jon Sobrino from 2008. If anything, 14 individuals in 64 years is an almost appalling measure of leniency, considering the liberties and dpctrinal anarchy that hundreds of theologians have been peddling since after Vatican-II... And yet, Vidal has been editor of El Mundo for years and has a solid reputation as a journalist! But sometimes, journalists think they are too big to have to do any fast-checking and simply spout off their impressions without realizing how factually wrong their impressions may be. In the Internet age, there is no excuse for failing to do at least some minimal fact-checking before unleashing one's ignorance on the unsuspecting reader!]

Clean up, Holiness - and you can count on the unconditional support of the People of God. Let the offenders go to Hell! [The Pope, of course, would never say or think that!]

Benedict XVI has been doing more than his part, and one of Marie Collins's graces is that she acknowledges what he has done - which is to set an example that few, alas, have bothered to follow so far. [Unless they have all been doing it in private and hiding their light under a bushel.

The day after Alessandro Speciale reported in the VATICAN INSIDER and Andrea Tornielli on his blog that based on a homily given by the FSSPX superior general, Mons. Fellay, in Minnesota last February 2, the Lefebvrians had rejected signing a Doctrinal Preamble that the CDF considers the necessary step before the FSSPX can return to full communion with the Church of Rome. Other known traditional sites like the English blog Rorate Caeli and the Italian blog Fides et Forma see it differently, claiming that Fellay has made it clear he was leaving the door open. And in fact, the Insider had an unsigned article the next day saying the same thing...

The problem is that the opposing viewpoints are looking at different parts of Fellay's rambling homily, in which he alternates between professing that the FSSPX remains Catholic, it is part of the Church, it recognizes the Pope, etc, and insisting in more ways than one that the FSSPX represents the real Church, that it is Rome that needs to come around to their point of view that Vatican II is not at all in continuity with Church tradition... If you have not seen it previously, here is the transcript of the homily that was posted online by the FSSPX sites. You have to be patient...Mons. Fellay's English syntax is not always easy to follow:


Extract from the sermon
of Mons. Fellay on Feb, 2, 2012

---

In the following transcription, reviewed by His Excellency Bishop Fellay, we have retained the quality of the spoken word.

The Society of St. Pius X has been founded by the Church and in the Church, and we say this Society continues to exist, despite the fact that there is a pretense that it does not exist; that it was suppressed in 1976 (but obviously with total disrespect of the laws of the Church itself). And that's why we continue. And our dear Founder insisted many, many times on the importance of this existence of the Society. And I think, as time evolves, we must keep this in mind – and it is very important that we keep this Catholic Spirit.

We are not an independent group. Even if we are fighting with Rome, we are still, so to say, with Rome. We are fighting with Rome; or, if you want, against Rome, at the same time with Rome. And we claim and we continue to say, we are Catholic. We want to stay Catholic.

Many times I say to Rome, you try to kick us out. And we see it would be much easier for us to be out. We would have many more advantages. You would treat us much better! Look at the Protestants, how they open the churches to them. To us, they close them.

And we say, we don’t care. We do things in front of God. We suffer from the Church, fine. We don’t like that, of course. But we ought to stay there in the truth. And we have to maintain that we do belong to the Church. We are Catholics. We want to be and we want to stay Catholic, and it is very important to maintain that.

It’s also important that we don’t finally imagine a Catholic church which is just the fruit of our imagination but which is no longer the real one. And with the real one we have problems. That’s what makes it even more difficult: the fact that we have problems with it. That does not allow us, so to say, to shut the door.

On the contrary, it is our duty to continuously go there, knock at the door, and not beg that we may enter (because we are in) but beg that they may convert; that they may change and come back to what makes the Church. It is a great mystery; it is not simple. Because at the same time we have to say, yes, we do recognize that Church – that’s what we say in the Creed, I believe in the Catholic Church – so we accept that there is a Pope; we accept that there is a hierarchy, we do accept that. {But they won't be bound by the Magieterium of the Pope - that's not 'accepting' at all!]

And practically, at many levels, we have to say no. Not because it does not please us, but because the Church has already spoken about that. Even many of these things it has condemned them. And so, in our discussions with Rome we were, so to say, stuck there.

The key problem in our discussions with Rome was really the Magisterium, the teaching of the Church. Because they say, "we are the Pope, we are the Holy See" – and we say, yes. And so they say, "we have the supreme power," and we say, yes. They say, "we are the last instance in teaching and we are necessary" – Rome is necessary for us to have the Faith, and we say, yes. And then they say, "then, obey." And we say, no.

And so they say to us, you are Protestant. You put your reason above the Magisterium of today. And we answer to them, you are Modernists. You pretend that the teaching of today can be different from the teaching of yesterday. We say, when we adhere to what the Church has taught yesterday, we, by necessity, adhere to the teaching of the Church today. Because the truth is not linked to time. The truth is above it.

What has been said once is binding all times. These are the dogmas. God is like that; God is above time. And the Faith is adhering to the truth of God. It’s above time. That’s why the church of today is bound and has to be like (not only like) the Church of yesterday.

And so when you see the present Pope say that there must be continuity in the Church, we say, of course! That is what we have said at all times. When we talk about tradition, that’s precisely the meaning. They say, there must be Tradition, there must be continuity. So there is continuity. Vatican II has been made by the Church, the Church must be continuous, so Vatican II is Tradition. And we say, beg your pardon?

It goes even further, my dear brethren. That was during the discussion. At the end of the discussion, comes this invitation from Rome. In this invitation there is a proposition of a canonical situation that is to regularize our situation. And I may say, what is presented today, which is already different from what was presented on the 14th of September, we can consider it as all right, good. They fulfilled all our requirements, I may say, on the practical level. So there is not much problem there.

The problem remains at the other level – at the level of the doctrine. But even there it goes very far – very far, my dear brethren. The key is a principle. Which they say, "this you must accept; you must accept that for the points that make difficulty in the Council – points which are ambiguous, where there is a fight – these points, like ecumenism, like religious liberty, these points must be understood in coherence with the perpetual teaching of the Church. So if there is something ambiguous in the Council, you must understand it as the Church has always taught throughout the ages."


They go even further and say, "one must reject whatever is opposed to this traditional teaching of the Church." Well, that is what we have always said. Amazing, isn’t it? That Rome is imposing on us this principle. Amazing. Then you may wonder, then why don’t you accept?

Well, my dear brethren, there is still a problem. The problem is that in this text they give two applications of what and how we have to understand these principles. These two examples that they give to us are ecumenism and religious liberty, as they are described in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, which are exactly the points for which we reproach the Council.

In other words, Rome tells us, we have done that all the time. We are traditional; Vatican II is Tradition. Religious liberty, ecumenism is Tradition. It is in full coherence with Tradition. You just wonder, where do we go? What kind of words will we find to say, we agree or we don’t? If even the principles which we have kept and said, they say, yes it’s ok you can say that, because this means what we mean, which is exactly the contrary of what we mean.

I think we could not go further in the confusion. In other words, my dear brethren, that means that they have another meaning with the word “tradition,” and even maybe even with “coherence.” And that’s why we were obliged to say no. We’re not going to sign that. We agree with the principle but we see that the conclusion is contrary. Great mystery! Great mystery!

So what is going to happen now? Well, we have sent our answer to Rome. They still say that they’re reflecting on it, which means they’re probably embarrassed. At the same time I think we may see now what they really want. Do they really want us in the Church or not?

We told them very clearly, if you accept us as is, without change, without obliging us to accept these things, then we are ready. But if you want us to accept these things, we are not. In fact we have just quoted Archbishop Lefebvre who said this already in 1987 – several times before, but the last time he said it was in 1987.

In other words, my dear brethren, humanly speaking, difficult to say how the future will look, but we know that when we deal with the Church, we deal with God; we deal with divine providence, and we know that this Church is His Church.

Humans may cause some disruption, some destruction. They may cause turmoil, but God is above that, and He knows how to, out of all these happenings – these human happenings – these odd lines, God knows how to direct His Church through these trials.

There will be an end to this trial, I don’t know when. Sometimes there is hope that it will come. Sometimes it is like despair. God knows when, but really, humanly speaking, we must wait for quite a time before hoping to see things better – five, ten years.

I am persuaded that in ten years things will look different because the generation of the Council will be gone and the next generation does not have this link with the Council. And already now we hear several bishops, my dear brethren, several bishops tell us: you give too much weight to this Council; put it aside. It could be a good way for the Church to go ahead. Put it aside; forget it. Let’s go back to the real thing, to Tradition. [Little white fantasies, maybe?]

Isn’t that interesting to hear bishops who say that? That’s a new language! It means that you have a new generation which knows that there are things that are more serious than Vatican II in the Church, and that we have to go back to this more serious, if I may say so.

Vatican II is serious because of the damage it has caused, yes it is. But as such it wanted to be a pastoral council, which is over now. We know that someone who is working in the Vatican wrote a thesis for his academic grades and it was about the Magisterium of Vatican II. He himself told us and nobody in the Roman universities was ready to take that thesis. Finally a professor did, and the thesis is the following: the authority of the magisterium of Vatican II is that of a homily in the 1960’s. And he passed!

We shall see my dear brethren. For us it’s very clear. We must stick and hold to the truth, to the Faith. We are not going to give that up – whatever happens. There are some threats, of course, from Rome now. We shall see. We put all these things in the hands of God, and in the hands of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Oh, yes, we have to continue our crusade of rosaries. We count on her, we count on God. And then whatever happens, happens. I cannot promise a beautiful spring. I have no idea what’s going to be in this spring. What I know is that the fight for the faith will continue, whatever happens. If we are recognized or not, you can be certain that the Progressives will not be happy. They will continue and we will continue to fight them too.

---

All this talk about sticking to TRADITION - and yet, it's also Tradition that the Church has respected the Magisterium from all of its ecumenical councils! Why should she, all of a sudden, reject the Magisterium of Vatican II? Obviously, the Council was far from perfect - I doubt that any of the previous Councils were - but it is no less legitimate than the previous 20. The real test is to be able to apply its teachings in the light of Tradition, renewal in continuity. Why is that so difficult to grasp?

Benedict XVI is showing how it can be done. He has begun correcting the most egregious errors of interpretation and application of Vatican II. Over time, as with all the previous Councils, only the authentic will remain as part of the living Tradition.

And, BTW, only a Neanderthal would question the principles of ecumenism and religious freedom. That is perhaps the worst case of unreason in the Lefebvrian mentality. Very closed, if they object to ecumenism (getting together with other Christians); and religious freedom (Did Jesus ever say our neighbor was only someone who was also his disciple? What was the point of the Good Samaritan story?)
I sincerely hope all the rosaries cotinually offered by the Lefebvrians will help open their minds soon to the Holy Spirit. Of course, they think the Holy Spirit is with them, not with the universal Church!

PENITENTIAL LITURGY
February 7, 2012



Cardinal Ouellet leads
penitential liturgy


From darkness to light. From pain and hurt, to healing and hope. That was the symbolic sense of the penitential liturgy led by Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, as a central part of the four-day symposium.

Appropriately, since it is the Jesuit-run Gregorian University that has been a driving force behind this conference, the liturgy was held in the great baroque church of St Ignatius, dedicated to the founder of the Society of Jesus.

Beneath the masterly ceiling fresco by Andrea del Pozzo, a small procession of bishops, priests, and lay people entered the dark and silent church as images were projected onto a screen beside a simple wooden crucifix. They showed the beauty of God’s creation, images of nature and new life, children of different countries and cultures.

But then a dramatic change of tone as the slides showed man’s destruction of the environment, our greed and violence, racism and conflicts that remind us all of our need for forgiveness.

In his homily Cardinal Ouellet spoke of the scandal and shame of sexual abuse, a crime, he said, which causes a sense of death for the innocent victims.

He spoke too of the sins of church leaders who often knew what their priests were doing but failed to stop the abuse. “Sometimes the violence was committed by deeply disturbed persons, or by those who had themselves been abused. It was necessary to take action concerning them and to prevent them from continuing any form of ministry for which they were obviously not suitable. This was not always done properly, and once again we apologise to the victims."

One by one a representative of seven groups then came forward to ask for forgiveness – a teacher, a religious superior, a parent and a lay person, a priest, the Cardinal and finally an abuse victim who has spoken at this conference.



Irish survivor Marie Collins acknowledged how hard it is to forgive and asked for God’s strength to pardon those who have sinned.

One by one, each speaker lit a candle and placed it at the foot of the cross as the congregration of bishops and religious from Marie’s own country and from the Churches around the world prayed together for mercy, for healing, for the hope that the scourge of sexual abuse may never happen again.




Penitential liturgy:
A spirit of 'Never Again!'
by John L Allen Jr


ROME, Feb. 7 -- In a first of its kind for Rome, the Vatican’s top official for bishops tonight led a liturgy of penance to ask forgiveness for the sexual abuse of children by priests, and for Church leaders who covered up that abuse.

The service included an Irish victim of clerical abuse, who, in an apparent reference both to abusers and their protectors, asked God to “forgive them.”

Held tonight at Rome’s Church of St. Igantius, the liturgy was presided over by Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who serves as Prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops.

His participation was seen as significant, because it implicitly acknowledged that the Church’s shortcomings are not limited to priests who committed abuse, but also include bishops who failed to act.

The service was part of a four-day Vatican summit on the sexual abuse crisis titled “Towards Healing and Renewal.” The event brings together roughly 100 bishops and religious superiors from around the world, ahead of a May deadline for bishops’ conferences to submit their policies on fighting abuse for Vatican review.

In his reflections during the liturgy, Ouellet called the crisis “a source of great shame and enormous scandal,” saying that sexual abuse is not only a “crime” but also an “authentic experience of death for the innocent victims.”

The first step towards healing, Ouellet said, is to “listen carefully” to victims and “to believe their painful stories.”

Beyond listening, he said, the Church must “establish the proper structures to help prevent similar crimes,” which Ouellet said must be based on the sentiment of “Never again!”

Ouellet said that in many instances, abusers in the clergy should have been identified and removed much earlier, but instead were left in place.

“Once again, we apologize to the victims,” he said, for their “terrible and humiliating experience.”

Tonight’s hour-long liturgy began with a slide show in the darkened Church of St. Ignatius, chosen because it’s a major Jesuit church in Rome and the four-day summit is being held at the Jesuit-run Gregorian University. The slide show featured images symbolizing themes of creation, sin, and redemption.

At one stage, representatives of various groups in the church read prayers asking God for forgiveness, including bishops, educators, religious superiors, priests, parents, and the faithful.

The bishop said, “Here we are humbled before you, and before all of humanity, crucified by the evil that has disfigured the face of your Church.”

Irish abuse victim Marie Collins, who spoke this morning at the symposium, then read a prayer on behalf of victims. The text of her prayer was:

---

Lord, as one acquainted with great sorrows,
you know how difficult it is for us to forgive
those who have done us evil and
only your love can open ourselves to this gift:
we ask you for the strength to unite us to
the forgiveness that, from the cross, you made descend
upon sinful humanity as a healing balm,
so that also thy Church may be healed by our forgiveness.
“Forgive them.”

---

Though liturgies of penance with victims of abuse have been conducted by bishops and other Church leaders in other parts of the world, this was apparently the first time such a service was conducted in Rome by senior Vatican officials.

In his six meetings with victims of sexual abuse so far, Pope Benedict XVI has taken part in private prayers of penance, but has not yet led any such public liturgy.

Back in 2002 amid the spiraling American scandals, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, today Pope Benedict, endorsed such liturgies of penance.

“Such a public act takes note of the reality of sin and invites us to think about sin and mercy,” Ratzinger said at the time. “Above all, it can promote a praxis of penitence, focusing on both education and prevention against these human failings.”

Here is the English text of Cardinal Ouellet's homily:

HOMILY OF CARDINAL OUELLET

---

My venerable brother bishops and priests
and my dear brothers and sisters,

In the context of the reflection that is taking place during these Days of the Symposium “Towards Healing and Renewal”, we remind Ourselves that we are here this evening not only as believers, but also as penitents.

The tragedy of the sexual abuse of minors perpetrated by Christians, especially when done so by members of the clergy, is a source of Great shame and enormous scandal. It is a sin against which Jesus himself lashed out: “It would be better for him if a millstone were put around his neck and he be thrown into the sea than for him to cause one of these little ones to stumble” (Lk. 17:2).

Abuse is a crime, in fact, which causes an authentic experience of death for the innocent victims, whom God alone can truly raise to new life in the power of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, with profound vonviction and awareness of what we do, we turn to and implore the Lord.

This gesture of purification involves the entire Church, and each one of us - Bishops, Religious Superiors, educators, all Christians - feels the pain of what has occurred. We ask that the Spirit of God, who heals and radically renews all things, come down upon us.

As members of the Church, we must have the courage to ask humbly for God’s pardon, as well as for the forgiveness of His “little ones” who have been wounded; we must remain close to them on their road of suffering, seeking in every possible way to heal and bind up their wounds following the example of the Good Samaritan.

The first step on this road is to listen to them carefully and to welieve their painful stories. The road of renewal for the Church, who will continue to educate people and establish proper structures to help prevent similar crimes, must include the sentiment of “never again”.

As Blessed John Paul II said, “there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young” (Address of Blessed Pope John Paul II to the Cardinals of the United States, on April 23, 2002, n. 3). It is intolerable that the abuse of children
would take place within the Church. Never again!

Sadly, we observe all too well that the sexual abuse of children is found throughout modern society. It is our profound hope that the Church’s commitment to address this great evil will foster renewal among other communities and agencies in society who have been affected by this tragedy.

In this new path, we Christians should be aware that only faith can guarantee an authentic work of renewal in the Church: faith understood as personal, as a true and life-giving relationship of love with Jesus Christ.

Mindful of our own lack of living faith, we ask the Lord Jesus to restore us all and to lead us through the agony of the cross towards the joy of the resurrection.

Sometimes the violence was committed by deeply disturbed persons or by those who had themselves been abused. It was necessary to take action concerning them and to prevent them from continuing any form of ministry for which they were obviously not suitable. This was not a
always done properly and, once again, we apologize to the victims.

The Shepherds of the Church, having learned from this terrible and humiliating experience, have a grave duty to take responsibility in the discernment and acceptance of candidates who seek to serve within the Church, most especially those seeking ordained ministry.

Still shocked by these sad occurrences, we hope that this Vigil liturgy helps us to view the horrible sins that took place among the People of God in the light of salvation history, a story which we have retraced together here tonight. It is a story that speaks of our misery, of our repeated failures, nut most of all of God’s infinite mercy, of which we are always in need.

And so we entrust ourselves entirely to the powerful intercession of the Son of God, who “emptied himself” (Phil. 2:7) in the mystery of uhe Incarnation and Redemption, and who has taken upon himself every evil, even this evil, destroying its power so that it would not have the last word.

The Risen Christ, in fact, is the guarantee and the promise that life triumphs over death; He is capable of bringing salvation to each person.
A
s we continue with our prayer service, we pray, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, for a more profound appreciation of our respective vocations, so as to rediscover the roots of our faith in Jesus Christ and to drink deeply from the springs of living water that he offers us through his Church (cf. Pastoral Letter of Pope Benedict XVI to the Catholics of Ireland).

May the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who is always at work in the world, descend and help us through the prayers of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, whose powerful intercession sustains and guides us to be obedient and receptive to divine love. Amen!

---

Wedesday, February 8, Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
Photos on extreme right: Poster for TV movie shown last year on RAI-TV by the producers of the Augustine miniseries; and an English biography of Bakhita.
ST JOSEPHINE BAHKITA (b Sudan ca 1869, d Italy 1947), Former slave, Canossian nun
Our saint of the day has the distinction of her biography cited in a papal encyclical. Here is what Benedict XVI said of her in Spe salvi: "She was born around 1869 — she herself did not know the precise date — in Darfur in Sudan. At the age of nine, she was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying 'masters' who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of 'master' — in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name paron for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave.

"Now, however, she heard that there is a paron above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her — that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme Paron, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her 'at the Father's right hand'.

"Now she had hope — no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: “I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me —I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.” Through the knowledge of this hope she was 'redeemed', no longer a slave, but a free child of God. She understood what Paul meant when he reminded the Ephesians that previously they were without hope and without God in the world —without hope because without God.

"Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her Paron. On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter's lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had 'redeemed' her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody." She died in 1947, and steps for her beatification began in 1959. She was canonized in 2000.
Readings for today's Mass: usccb.org/bible/readings/020812.cfm


AT THE VATICAN TODAY

General Audience - The Holy Father reflected on Jesus's dying prayers on the Cross, saying the words from the Psalm, "Why have you forsaken me?" paradoxically express Jesus's "utmost confidence and abandonment in God's hands, even when He seems absent, even when He seems to remain silent, according to a design that is incomprehensible to us". After the catechesis, he offered a prayer for those who are suffering during the current cold snap in Europe.

Thanks to John Allen who, when he is reporting an event on site, as he is for this symposium, is always most conscientious and diligent about filing stories.

CDF's top 'sex crimes' prosecutor says
'Bishops must be held accountable'
by John L Allen Jr

February 8, 2012

ROME -- To all those critics who have clamored for greater accountability for Catholic bishops who drop the ball on sex abuse cases, the Vatican’s top prosecutor this morning had a simple message: You’re absolutely right.

“We need to be vigilant in choosing candidates for the important role of bishop, and we also need to use the tools that canonical law and tradition give us for the accountability of bishops,” said Maltese Monsignor Charles Scicluna.

As a case in point, Scicluna bluntly said it is simply “not acceptable” for bishops to ignore anti-abuse protocols established by the Vatican or by their bishops’ conference.

He said the Church in Ireland, to take one example, “has paid a very high price for the mistakes of some of its shepherds.”

Sciculuna was apparently referring, at least in part, to a damning 2011 government report on the Irish diocese of Cloyne, which found that both civil laws and Church procedures on handling sex abuse complaints were flouted as recently as 2009.

“When set standards are not followed, this is unacceptable,” he said.

Scicluna said there are actually already provisions in Church law to sanction bishops for “negligence and malice in exercising one’s duties,” suggesting this provision should be more strenuously applied. (He appeared to be referring to canon 128 of the Code of Canon Law, which reads: “Whoever illegitimately inflicts damage upon someone by a juridic act or by any other act placed with malice or negligence is obliged to repair the damage inflicted.”)

Scicluna also noted that when canon law specifies penalties that can be imposed on “clergy,” that includes bishops as well as priests and deacons – although, he said, the fact it applies to bishops too is sometimes “ignored.”

“Ecclesial accountability has to be further developed,” he said. “I agree with you on that.”

Scicluna made the remarks to reporters as part of a four-day symposium on the sexual abuse crisis titled “Towards Healing and Renewal”, which is being held at Rome’s Jesuit-run Gregorian University. It brings together roughly 100 bishops and religious superiors from around the world, in tandem with child protection experts.

Scicluna serves as the Promoter of Justice in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a position he first took up under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, today Pope Benedict XVI.

In effect, that makes Scicluna the Vatican’s “D.A.” on sex abuse cases; among other things, he was responsible for the investigation of the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, which led to a 2006 edict restricting Maciel to a life of “prayer and penance.”

Pressed this morning to expand on the theme of accountability for bishops, Scicluna pulled few punches. Without "redefining the Church, which will always be hierarchical," he said, it's equally clear that power must be wedded to accountability."

“Bishops are accountable to the Lord, but also to their people,” Scicluna said during this morning’s session with the media. “They owe their people good stewardship.”

Noting that Church law reserves the power to impose sanctions on a bishop to the Pope, Sciculna appeared to suggest that the papal nuncio, or ambassador, in various countries could play a greater role in prompting the Pope to act.

“The nuncio to a country represents the concerns of the Holy Father to that local Church, but he also has the duty to listen to the people in order to convey the concerns of the local church to the Holy Father,” Scicluna said.

Scicluna rejected suggestions that Church law as it presently stands does not have adequate accountability mechanisms for bishops.

“It’s not a question of changing laws, but of applying what we have,” he said.

He added that more vigorous enforcement of the law should make it clear that, “There is behavior that is not compatible with being a good shepherd.”

Scicluna likewise insisted that bishops have a “moral, if not legal” responsibility to consult with experts in making decisions such as responding appropriately to sexual abuse complaints.

He noted that his boss at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, American Cardinal William Levada, had already warned of an “exclusively canon law” approach to the problem of abuse, and Scicluna said he would add the danger of an “exclusively hierarchical response.”

“The hierarchy has to listen to the experts,” he said. For instance, Scicluna said, “we need the input of psychologists to help us.”


Allen wrote an earlier piece today based on Mons. Scicluna's address to the symposium:

Mons. Scicluna decries what was
a ‘deadly culture of silence’
by John L Allen Jr

February 8, 2012

ROME -- The Vatican’s top prosecutor on sex abuse cases today bluntly decried “a deadly culture of silence” on clerical abuse, calling such denial “in itself wrong and unjust.”

Maltese Monsignor Charles Scicluna told participants in a Vatican summit on sex abuse that while the Church now has clear laws to punish abusers, just having such laws on the books isn’t enough.

“Our people need to know that the law is being applied,” he said. “No strategy for the prevention of child abuse will ever work without commitment and accountability.”

Scicluna likewise reaffirmed the obligation of Church leaders to cooperate with civil authorities, including reporting abuse allegations to police and prosecutors.

“Sexual abuse of minors is not just a canonical [violation] or a breach of a code of conduct internal to an institution, whether it be religious or other,” he said. “It is also a crime prosecuted by civil law.”

As a result, Scicluna said, Catholic officials have “the duty to cooperate with state authorities in our response to child abuse.”

Scicluna’s address this morning pivoted on the moral and legal dimensions of the fight against child abuse.

“A deadly culture of silence or “omertà” is in itself wrong and unjust,” he said.

“Other enemies of the truth are the deliberate denial of known facts, and the misplaced concern that the good name of the institution should somehow enjoy absolute priority to the detriment of legitimate disclosure of crime.”

Scicluna laid out five principles for thinking about the church’s responsibility to break that culture of silence:
- Truth implies a commitment to justice.
- Justice, based on truth, “evokes a response from the individual’s conscience.”
- Respect for truth breeds confidence in the rule of law; ignoring the truth “generates distrust and suspicion.”
- Rights must be protected, but in the context of concern for the common good.
- Respect for the law avoids “pastoral” distortions of the law – meaning, in part, reluctance to punish abusers.

Scicluna insisted that the Church’s understanding of the common good must include the child welfare.

“Safety of children is a paramount concern for the Church, and an integral part of its concept of the ‘common good’,” he said.

Discussing the individual response to abuse, Scicluna stressed “the radical need of the victim to be heard attentively, to be understood and believed, to be treated with dignity as he or she plods on the tiresome journey of recovery and healing.”

At the same time, he warned against what he called “the limited phenomenon of some victims who refuse to move on in life, who seem to have indentified ‘self’ simply with ‘having been victims’.”

“These fellow brothers and sisters of ours merit our special attention and care,” he said.

In remarks to the press, Scicluna clarified that point.

“It’s unfair to expect that abuse by a priest should define the person” who suffered it, Scicluna said.”That would be a permanent form of abuse. [It would mean that] the harmful effect of what a minister of the church has done to them will remain with them forever.”

The experience of abuse, Scicluna said, “does not define you. You are bigger, your dignity is greater, than the harm that has been done to you.”

Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, an American expert on clerical sexual abuse, said that it’s important for the Church “to hear the anger” of victims, but also to help them in “not being stuck” in that anger. [The latter is the primary reproach one can make to the leading 'victim advocacy' groups who seem to encourage the victims to wallow in victimhood, bitterness and anger, instead of relieving them of negativity. These 'victim advocates' are clearly exploiting the victims' misfortunes to advance their (advocates) own personal and ideological agendas, as a study of the group SNAP's finances appears to show, with very little in actual aid to victims but mostly administrative and publicity expenses.]

Allen has another item today from the symposium entitled "Reassessing the media's role"
ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/vatican-abuse-summit-reassessing-med...
in which he reports approvingly of statements made at the symposium by Cardinal Levada and other speakers crediting the media for their role in exposing the sex abuse stories, but he makes no mention whatsoever of the many false stories and biased reporting that MSM has initiated in a deliberate effort to paint the Pope, the Church and her bishops and clergy as black as they possibly can. He reserves one line towards the end quoting Cardinal levada's statement in his opening address that the media should thank Pope Benedict XVI, instead of attacking him, for the personal efforts he has put into this problem since he was at the CDF, without bothering to cite all the outrageously false stories filed in 2010 by AP and the New York Times proactively seeking to tie Cardinal Ratzinger directly to 'mishandled' cases in Munich and the United States.


Expert on clerical abuse welcomes
'marked drop' in US charges but
says he wants the number to be zero
By David Kerr


Rome, Italy, Feb 7, 2012 / 06:20 pm (CNA/EWTN News)- One of the Catholic Church’s leading experts on clerical abuse says he welcomes a significant drop in the number of cases being reported in the United States – but won’t rest until that figure reaches zero.

“The instance of new allegations have dropped precipitously, it’s a marked drop, which is great news, although we’re not going to stop till we've stopped it completely,” Monsignor Steve Rossetti, associate professor at the Catholic University of America, told CNA Feb 7.

Msgr. Rossetti was in Rome to address an international symposium on the issue of clerical abuse at the Jesuit-run Gregorian University. The Feb. 6 - 9 gathering has brought together representatives from over 140 bishops’ conferences and 30 religious orders worldwide.

Msgr. Rossetti said that recent research suggests two reasons for the sharp drop in reported cases in the U.S. First, mandatory reporting and prison sentences for those found guilty; and second,“the Church has a much stronger prevention program.”

Such prevention programs, he emphasized, “do work.” By changing “the culture in which people live,” he added, “molesters realize they no longer have any safe haven in the Church or in society,” and if and when abuse does occur, “we respond much more quickly.”

Msgr. Rossetti, a priest of the Diocese of Syracuse, New York, and a licensed psychologist, served as a psychological consultant to the U.S. Bishops’ Conference in drafting the 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. He is currently a consultant to the USCCB ad hoc committee on revising that Charter.

He addressed delegates today on the topic of “Ministering to Offenders: Learning from Our Past Mistakes.”

“I was really trying to share with the bishops around the world many of the mistakes that had been made in responding to allegations with child sexual abuse, and so that they wouldn’t make the same mistakes,” he said.

His primary message was that the most important thing a bishop can do is to listen to victims as in doing so “you understand the pain caused, the need to reach out to the victims, to listen to their stories, and to bring some healing from the Church.”

Msgr. Rossetti also explained to CNA that the vast majority of cases of clerical abuse actually took place in the 1970s. His research provides two main reasons for the spike in criminal behavior at that time.

First, “the Church took in a cohort of men who had greater amounts of sexual deviancy for some reason, not sure why, but in that time frame, there were a number of men who had more, frankly, more sexual problems.”

He also added that statistically the 1960s and 1970s was a “more permissive environment,” when “crimes of all sorts, not just child abuse, spiked up during that time frame.”

“So, when you have a permissive environment, and in that permissive environment you place a group of men with deviant sexual interests, you end up with an explosion,” he concluded.

[ut both the 'greater number of sexual deviants' and the 'permissive environment' of the time were manifestAtion the 1960s cultural revolution, primarily expressed by the mantra of unrestricted 'sex, drugs and rock-and-roll' in which the rule was 'anything goes'.]

The Vatican has now given bishops conferences and religious congregations until May 2012 to submit their guidelines for dealing with clerical abuse to the Vatican for approval or revision. Many are looking towards the U.S. model as a template.

“My understanding is that the Bishops’ Conference in the U.S. has been helping anyone who comes and asks for help,” said Msgr. Rossetti, “not only other countries or bishops, but also other secular programs.”

He has seen religious and non-religious groups approach the U.S. bishops of the and say “we have heard about your guidelines, we want to learn from them and implement them in our organization.”

GENERAL AUDIENCE TODAY




The cry of Jesus from the Cross:
Not despair but confidence in God
Adapted from

February 8, 2012

Continuing his catecheses on the prayers of Jesus, the Holy Father today reflected on his prayers as he was dying on the Cross, and the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, taken from one of the Psalms.

He said Jesus teaches as that “In the face of the most difficult and painful situations, when it seems that God does not listen, we need not fear to entrust to Him all the weight we carry in our hearts, we must not be afraid to cry out to Him in our suffering”.

Here is how he synthesized the lesson in English:

---

Today I want to reflect with you on the cry of Jesus from the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

This cry comes after a three-hour period when there was darkness over the whole land. Darkness is an ambivalent symbol in the Bible. While it is frequently a sign of the power of evil, it can also serve to express a mysterious divine presence.

Just as Moses was covered in the dark cloud when God appeared to him on the mountain, so Jesus on Calvary is wrapped in darkness. Even though the Father appears to be absent, in a mysterious way his loving gaze is focused upon the Son's loving sacrifice on the Cross.

It is important to realize that Jesus's cry of anguish is not an expression of despair: on the contrary, this opening verse of Psalm 22 conveys the entire content of the psalm - it expresses the confidence of the people of Israel that despite all the adversity they are experiencing, God remains present among them, he hears and answers his people's cry.

This prayer of the dying Jesus teaches us to pray with confidence for all our brothers and sisters who are suffering, that they too may know the love of God who never abandons them.

---

In his main talk, he said: “Jesus prays at the time of ultimate rejection by men, at the time of abandonment; he prays, however, aware of the presence of God the Father in this hour in which he feels the human drama of death. But we wonder: how could a God so powerful not intervene to save his Son from this terrible ordeal? It is important to understand that the prayer of Jesus is not the cry of one who goes to meet death with despair, nor is it the cry of one who knows himself to be abandoned.

Jesus uses the opening line of Psalm 22, which was the cry from the people of Israel in their suffering, in this way taking upon himself "the punishment of his people, but also that of all men who suffer from the oppression of evil and at the same time, brings all of this to the heart of God himself in the certainty that his cry will be heard in the resurrection”.

“This prayer of Jesus encloses the utmost confidence and abandonment in God's hands, even when He seems absent, even when He seems to remain silent, according to a design that is incomprehensible to us. His is a suffering in communion with us and for us, that comes from love and already carries within redemption, the victory of love”.

The Holy Father concluded: “Dear friends, in prayer we bring our daily crosses to God, in the certainty that He is present and hears us. The cry of Jesus reminds us that in prayer we must overcome the barriers of our "self" and our problems and open ourselves to the needs and suffering of others. The prayer of the dying Jesus on the Cross teaches us to pray with love for so many brothers and sisters who feel the weight of everyday life, who are experiencing difficult moments, who are in pain, without a word of comfort, so that they too can feel the love of the God who never abandons”.

Following his catechesis Pope Benedict launched an appeal for all the victims of a deadly cold snap that has gripped much of Europe this week: “In recent weeks a wave of cold and frost has swept some regions of Europe causing great inconvenience and considerable damage. I wish to express my closeness to people affected by this intense bad weather, while I invite prayers for the victims and their families. At the same time I encourage solidarity so that those who are suffering from these tragic events are generously supported”.




Here is a translation of the Holy Father's full catechesis:

---

Dear brothers and sisters,

Today I wish to reflect on the prayer of Jesus in the imminence of death, dwelling on the accounts by St. Mark and St. Matthew.

The two evangelists report the prayer of the dying Jesus not just in the Greek language, in which they wrote their accounts, but, because of the importance of those words, also in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic.

In this way that they have handed down not just the content but even the sound that this prayer had from the lips of Jesus - and so we truly hear the words of Jesus as he said them.

At the same time, they (Mark and Matthew) also described the attitude of those who were present at the Crucifixion, who did not understand - or did not wish to understand - this prayer.

St. Mark writes, as we heard: "At noon darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. And at three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?' which is translated, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'” (15,34).

In the structure of the narration, this prayer, the cry of Jesus, arises at the culmination of three hours of darkness which, from noon till three in the afternoon, fell over the whole land. These three hours of darkness are, in their turn, the continuation of a preceding period, also three hours long, that began with the crucifixion of Jesus.

The evangelist Mark indeed informs us: "It was nine o’clock in the morning* when they crucified him" (15,25). From the hourly indications given in the account, the six hours of Jesus on the cross were articulated into two chronologically equivalent parts.

During the first three hours, from nine to noon, we find the derision of various groups of persons who show their skepticism, affirming they do not believe [in Jesus as the Son of God or the Messiah].

St. Mark writes: "Those passing by reviled him, shaking their heads and saying,i 'Aha! You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself by coming down from the cross” (15,29); "Likewise the chief priests, with the scribes, mocked him among themselves" (15,31); "Those who were crucified with him also kept abusing him" (15,32).

In the following three hours, from noon to three in the afternoon, the Evangelist speaks only of the darkness that had descended upon the whole land. The darkness occupies the scene all by itself without any reference to movements by persons or to words.

As Jesus came closer to death, there is only darkness "which falls over the whole land". Even the cosmos takes part in this event: the darkness envelops persons and things, but even in this time of shadows, God is present - he does not abandon.

In Biblical tradition, darkness has an ambivalent meaning: It is the sign of the presence and action of evil, but also of the mysterious presence and action of God who is capable of triumphing over every shadow. In the Book of Exodus, for example, we read: "The LORD said to Moses: 'I am coming to you now in a dense cloud'" (19,9); and "So the people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the dark cloud where God was" (20,21).

In the discourses in Deuteronomy, Moses narrates: "The mountain blazed to the heart of the heavens with fire and was enveloped in a dense black cloud" (4,11); "you heard the voice from the midst of the darkness, while the mountain was ablaze with fire" (5,23).

In the scene of the Crucifixion of Jesus, darkness covers the earth - shadows of death in which the Son of God immerses himself in order to bring life through his act of love.

Going back to the narration of St. Mark: In the face of insults from various categories of persons, in the face of the darkness that falls over everything, at the moment in which he faces death, Jesus, with the cry of his prayer shows that, along with the weight of the sufferings and death which seem to signify abandonment - the absence of God - he has the full certainty of the Father's nearness, approving this supreme act of love, of the total giving of himself, even if the voice from on high cannot be heard as it was at other times.

Reading the Gospels. we become aware that at other moments of his earthly existence, Jesus has heard the clarificatory voice of God associated with the signs of the presence of the Father and his approval of his journey of love.

Thus, in the episode that followed the baptism in the Jordan, as the heavens were torn open, the voice of the Father was heard saying, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Mk 1,11). In the Transfiguration, the sign of the cloud was accompanied by the words: “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him” (Mk 9,7).

Instead, as the Crucified One approaches death, silence descends - no voice is heard, but the Father's look of love is transfixed on the Son's gift of love.

What then is the meaning of Jesus's prayer, that cry that he makes to the Lord: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?". Does it mean doubt about his mission, about the presence of the Father? Does this prayer perhaps not convey an awareness of having been abandoned?

The words that Jesus addresses to the Father are the start of Psalm 22, in which the Psalmist expresses to God the tension between feeling oneself left alone and the certain knowledge of the presence of God among his people.

The Psalmist prays: "My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer; by night, but I have no relief. Yet you are enthroned as the Holy One; you are the glory of Israel" (vv 3-4). The Psalmist uses the word 'cry out' to express all the suffering of this prayer to a God who is apparently absent - at a moment of anguish, prayer becomes a cry.

And this happens even in our relationship with the Lord: Before the most difficult and painful situations, when it seems like God does not hear us, we must not be afraid to entrust to him all the weight we carry in our heart, we must not be afraid to cry out to him our suffering, we must be convinced that God is near even if he apparently remains silent.

By repeating from the Cross those initial words of the Psalm, "Eloì, o, lemà sabactàni?" – "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mt 27,46), Jesus prays at the moment of men's ultimate rejection of him, at the moment of abandonment. But he prays with the Psalm, in the knowledge of God's presence even at this moment when he feels the human tragedy of death.

But a question comes to us: How is it possible that such a powerful God does not intervene to save his Son from this terrible ordeal? It is important to understand that the prayer of Jesus is not the cry of someone who goes to his death in despair, nor the cry of one who knows he has been abandoned.

At that moment, Jesus takes upon himself the entire Psalm 22, the Psalm of the suffering people of Israel, and in this way, he takes upon himself not just the sorrows of his people but also of all men who suffer the oppression of evil, while at the same time, he vrings these all to the heart of God himself in the certainty that his cry will be answered in the Resurrection: "The cry of extreme torment is also the certainty of divine response, certainty of salvation - not just for Jesus himself, but for 'many'" (Gesu di Nazaret II, 239-240).

This prayer of Jesus expresses the ultimate trust and abandonment into the hands of God, even when he seems absent, even when he seems to remain silent, following a plan that is incomprehensible to us.

In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we read: "...in the redeeming love that always united him to the Father, he assumed us in the state of our waywardness of sin, to the point that he could say in our name from the cross: 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'" (No. 603).

His is a suffering in communion with us and for us, which comes from love and already carries redemption itself, the victory of love.

The persons present at the foot of Jesus's Cross do not understand, and they think that his cry was a supplication addressed to Elijah. In some agitation, they seek to dissect the words, waiting to find out whether Elijah will truly come to his aid, but a loud cry puts an end to the earthly life of Jesus and to their desire.

At the last moment, Jesus allows his heart to express pain but also allows the presence of the Father to emerge in his acceptance of God's plan of salvation for mankind.

We too always find ourselves facing suffering anew 'today' in the silence of God - we express this so many times when we pray - but we also find ourselves in the 'today' of the Resurrection, the response of God who took on our sufferings upon himself, to give us the firm hope that these sufferings will be overcome" (cfr Lett. enc. Spe salvi, 35-40).

Dear friends, in prayer, let us bring to God our daily crosses, in the certainty that he is present and hears us. The cry of Jesus reminds us that in prayer we must overcome the barriers of our 'I' and our problems in order to open up to the needs and sufferings of others.

The prayer of Jesus dying on the Cross teaches us to pray with love for so many brothers and sisters who particularly feel the weight of daily life, who are going through difficult times, who are in pain, who do not have a word of comfort. Let us bring all this to the heart of God so that they, too, can feel the love of God who never abandons us. Thank you.

---

Thanks to Beatrice for pointing out this item from today's Le Figaro online. I must admit it never even occurred to me to ask why Benedict XVI himself is not playing an active part in this symposium, given the background for the symposium itself, and the obvious fact that he has done all he can on his own. Now it's time for the bishops to follow his example and, as responsible pastors, to carry out his directives. He cannot do that for them! And they certainly do not need him to hold their hand while they work out their respective anti-abuse and child protection plans!


Why Benedict XVI is keeping a distance
from the current symposium on abuse
by Jean-Marie Guénois
Translated from

February 8, 2012

ROME - The Pope apparently will not be receiving the participants in the symposium on sex abuse crimes now going on at the Pontifical Gregorian University.

In organizing an international conference on the problem of pedophile priests, the Jesuit Pontifical Gregorian University inrtends above all to press the issue after a dozen years during which the problem has troubled [What an inadequate verb that is! I'd say 'publicly plagued and branded'] the entire Catholic Church.

The Jesuits, after all, did play a role in the media re-eruption of this issue in January 2010, with the disclosure of decades of sex abuses committed by priests at the Jesuits; Canisius boarding college in Berlin - followed by similar disclosures in other German cities. [including Regensburg and Munich, where the media sought to implicate the Pope's brother somehow in alleged crimes that took place against members of the Regensburg cathedral choir, years before he even came to Regensburg. In Munich, media sought to blame Joseph Ratzinger for the recidivism of a sex-offender priest long after Joseph Ratzinger had left Munich for Rome, just because the priest first came to Munich in 1981, Cardinal Ratzinger's last full year as Archbishop of Munich, to undergo a psychiatric cure for his sexual propensities. (The Western world at the time thought pedophilia was a curable disease.)]

Last Jan. 27, the 200 victims who came forward in the Canisius College investigations turned down an offer by the German Jesuits to pay ach of them 5,000 euros as token indemnity (a total of one million euros).

Of course, it is far from the $166 million paid out by the American Jesuits last March for damages claimed by some 500 victims of their priests' transgressions.

In any case, the Gregorian University can hardly preach its own lessons about a scandal that will leave an enduring mark on the Church, on the Jesuit order and many other congregations whose members have been accused of sex offenses against minors, as well as the local dioceses that have undergone a similar experience.

In any case, that is hardly the spirit in which the university, with the support of the Holy See, is seeking to analyze what has happened in order to better take part in resolving the problem.

The Pope did not even send a direct message to the symposium as one would have expected him to do. But news reports inappropriately attributed to the Pope words expressed by Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone in behalf of the Pope in a brief greeting to the Symposium when it opened Monday.

A number of well-placed Curial cardinals are taking part in the symposium, but the Pope's 'discretion' is significant. After all, he has not spared himself any effort to take this crisis 'by the horns', as it were, and to take all the blows himself [unfairly, falsely and wrongly directed at him by media and all the Church's detractors].

He has publicly asked forgiveness from the victims - most notably, in front of the 15,000 priests who joined him to conclude the Year for Priests in June 2010. Nor has he missed an occasion to reprimand the ordained members of the Church herself [as he first did in that memorable 2005 Good Friday Via Crucis meditations, for the 'filth' with which some of them have besmirched the Face of Christ]. Not to mention the internal juridical reinforcements he has promoted to counteract these criminal tendencies and behavior.

It seems as if Benedict XVI thinks this issue has been talked to death and it is now time to act [and on a broad front, universally, not just in 'affected' Churches].



When this event was first announced last year, it was in conjunction with the CDF's circular to all bishops and bishops' conferences around the world, requesting them to draw up their respective plans for confronting the issue in their own dioceses - in a manner appropriate to their own specific situation regarding the problem, and the cultural and social context in which the problem would present itself locally if it has not yet done so.

The symposium is supposed to be a workshop for the bishops and heads of religious orders to put together their respective experiences and learn from one another - as well as from experts who have worked on the issue for years - in order to present the most appropriate diocesan plan by May this year.

In other words, it was always conceived as a practicum to promote and assess the trickle-down effect of Benedict XVI's unflinching and firm leadership on this issue since it was first resuscitated in his Pontificate. The Pope and the CDF have carried the burden of concrete strategizing and setting tactical guidelines for the past few years. It is time for the bishops and heads of religious orders to mobilize themselves to carry out the strategy and tactics on their level, if only to acknowledge a new mentality in the Church regarding the right, just and transparent way to handle the problem.

The Pope and the CDF can only do so much. The local churches themselves and their pastors must start to carry their own water now - not wait until a crisis erupts, as the more 'experienced' churches have learned to their incalculable loss, in terms of the victims' damaged lives, the humiliation of priest offenders, demoralization and loss of trust on the part of the faithful, and unprecedented and hitherto unthinkable material cost to their dioceses.

Local pastors should take Benedict XVI's historic letter to the Catholics of Ireland, post it prominently on their fridge door, their bathroom mirror, the blotting pad on their desk - and keep one in their breviary, as the very model of the spiritual, sacramental program that must accompany each practical action plan. Never under-estimate the power of sacramental grace...

And BTW, there is no danger anyone at the symposium is bound to forget who is really behind it all - after both Cardinal Levada and Marie Collins, the two ends of the spectrum represented at the Gregorian symposium, paid open tribute to him, each in their own way.

Now that there is a highly publicized international symposium focused on Church efforts to have a global mechanism in place to combat sex offenses by priests and related cover-ups by their superiors, the Italian media seem to be turning the spotlight on supposed financial 'scandals' in the Vatican. So after sex, money. What next, drugs? The secular world has a singularly prurient interest in projecting to the Church all of its own favorite preoccupations. Of course, the Church is represented by humans who are sinners like all of us. That does not justify inflating or even manufacturing charges of misdeeds against her most prominent representatives.

Vatican refutes Italian news report
alleging 'new financial scandal'
Translated from

February 9, 2012

Late last night, the Holy See released the following statement:

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The article by Angela Camuso published on Page 23 in L'Unita today [February 8], entitled "Money laundering - 4 priests investigated; Vatican silent on internal checks" represents, unfortunately, a remarkable lack of serious investigation on the part of the writer.

Before anything else, two introductory observations:

1. The title refers to the 'silence' of the Vatican. As will be clarified below, this is completely unfounded. The Holy See and Vatican authorities have cooperated dutifully with Italian ministries and other Italian authorities.

2. The accusations presented in the article simply reiterate criticisms that have already been answered and overcome. Even a quick search of the Internet of Camuso's own previous writings will show that her article today is not 'news' at all. In fact, it is another recycling of previous items which the journalist has repeated many times. To bring them up again [as though it was truly 'news'] does not make them true. One must ask whether the article does not, in fact, constitute advertising advertising for an evening TV program [The reference is to the now well-publicized 'The Untouchables' which broke the Vigano case publicly two weeks ago,


As far as the contents of the article itself, the following points must be made:

The article assumes that four priests - Emilio Messina, Salvatore Palumbo, Orazio Bonaccorsi and Evaldo Biasini – used the Vatican bank IOR to launder money. The principal charge is that the IOR was therefore involved in an illegal activity and failed to provide assistance to Italian authorities who sought to prosecute these priests.

This is incorrect.

First, the article does not mention that since 2006-2007, the IOR has been engaged in a determined effort to analyze its accounts and check out the background of its clients in order to identify and verify the possible existence of suspicious transactions. This commitment of the IOR - which the media curiously seem to ignore - to identify any suspicious transactions anticipated by a few years the adoption of Law No. CXXVII of Vatican City State dated December 30, 2010, against money laundering operations.

Moreover, as Italian authorities know, and as a result of documentation that is accessible both to Vatican officials and to Italian officials, the IOR has cooperated repeatedly with Italian authorities at every level.

This has taken place, on demand, in the judicial sector, between authorities who are specifically competent in these matters on the part of the IOR and their Italian counterparts.

It must be underscored that the IOR has provided such information, even outside formal channels, even before the constitution of the Vatican Authority for Financial Information (formed under the December 2010 law).

The cooperation of the IOR Director-General, Dott. Paolo Cipriani, has been called 'timely and exhaustive' in documents from Italian officials. In fact, in one case, it was Dott. Cipriani's quick action that allowed the filing of charges against one of the priests named.

After consultation with the AIF, we can also state the following:

1. It is not true that the IOR failed to furnish material to the AIF on this matter.

2. It is not true that the AIF failed to pass on such material to the Italian Financial Information Unit.

3. In the case of one of the four persons cited by the article, Mons. Messina, the Italian authorities never requested information about him from the AIF. Therefore, it would not have been possible for the AIF to fail to 'respond', as the article alleges, to a request that was never made,

All these points concerning communications between the AIF and its Italian counterpart are found in AIF documents that are numbered in accordance with protocol.

The article also fails to mention that another person it cites - Rev. Bonaccorsi - was declared innocent on June 6, 2011, in a verdict upheld on appeal.

The unfortunate defamatory effect of the article results from use of the term 'incriminated' with reference to IOR President Ettore Gotti Tedeeschi and Director-General Cipriani. Neither of them were ever 'incriminated' - only questioned about this matter.

---

[What the statement obviously lacks is a clarification on the status of the two other priests mentioned by Camuso. One presumes they are still being prosecuted or awaiting trial?

Curiously - or perhaps not, considering his penchant to bend over backwards to be perceived as 'objective' (MSM euphemism for conforming to whatever happens to be the current herd mentality) - John Allen echoes the 'scandal' slant on this news: ]

Yet another Vatican financial scandal
by John L Allen Jr

Feb. 08, 2012

ROME -- Yet another financial scandal threatened to engulf the Vatican today, in the form of charges that four Italian priests, none of them Vatican officials, are under investigation by Italian prosecutors on charges of money laundering related to accounts they allegedly held at the Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), better known as the “Vatican Bank”.
[If none of the four are Vatican officials, how does the scandal 'threaten to engulf the Vatican' - because of the false allegations made against IOR????]

An article outlining the charges against the four priests ran today in the left-wing Italian newspaper L’Unità, and a report focusing, among other things, on the same charges aired tonight on the widely watched Italian TV program, “The Untouchables.”

The newspaper article ran under the headline, “Money-laundering, Four Priests Investigated: The Silence of the Vatican on Controls.” The suggestion was that the Vatican has refused to cooperate with investigation of the charges.

“The Untouchables” is the same program which, in late January, revealed confidential letters from Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, today the Pope’s nuncio, or ambassador, to the United States, complaining of “corruption and dishonesty” in Vatican finances.

The Vatican spokesperson, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, tonight issued a statement charging that the newspaper report about the four priests reflects “a notable lack of seriousness” on the part of the author.

Lombardi’s statement asserts that far from a policy of “silence,” in fact, “the Holy See and the authorities of the Vatican have dutifully cooperated with the prosecutors and the other Italian authorities.”

The statement asserts that beginning in 2006-07, the IOR began reviewing all its accounts for indications of suspect transactions. That was well ahead, he said, of a Dec. 2010 anti-money laundering law decreed by Pope Benedict XVI.

Lombardi insisted that the Vatican Bank “has repeatedly cooperated with the Italian authorities at every level.” In fact, he said, one of the four priests is currently under investigation precisely because he was reported to Italian investigators by the director of the IOR, an Italian layman named Paolo Cipriani.

“The Untouchables” program this evening charged that investigators in Rome have submitted formal requests for information to the Vatican which have been ignored, but Lombardi denied that as well. He said that the Vatican’s new “Financial Information Authority” has complied with all requests it has received.

In the case of one of the priests mentioned by the newspaper report and the TV program, Lombardi said, no request for information ever arrived; another of the priests, he said, has already been found innocent by a criminal trial, a verdict upheld upon appeal.

Lombardi also objected to the use of the term “incriminated” to refer to both Cipriani and the president of the IOR, layman Ettore Gotti Tedeschi – a reference to an investigation by Italian authorities launched in 2010 related to two Vatican Bank transactions which allegedly failed to comply with European standards of transparency. While the two men have been “investigated,” Lombardi said, neither has ever been “incriminated.” [In fact, as Allen should have pointed out in just one additional sentence, some $24 million in IOR funds sequestered by Italian zauthorities pending their inquiry, were subsequently released after the inquiry was completed. What better exoneration could there be that the IOR had not violated international banking regulations against money laundering?, which was the pretext for the sequestration?]

During tonight’s TV broadcast, a Roman investigator named Luca Tescaroli also said that he had submitted three formal requests for information to the Vatican related to the 1982 death of Roberto Calvi, an Italian financier dubbed “God’s Banker” because of his close Vatican ties. Tescaroli said that to date, there has been no response to those requests. [Why is this 1982 scandal being revived now, 30 years after the fact, when it has nothing to do at all with Benedict XVI's Pontificate nor with the current management and policies of IOR? It is part of an obvious effort - by this TV program, in particular - to hammer home the 'new' media campaign that the Vatican is not just infested with sex predators but also with corrupt and greedy criminals!]

Despite that, Tescaroli also said that he regards the Dec. 2010 law decreed by Pope Benedict XVI, intended to move the Vatican in the direction of greater transparency and compliance with international anti-money laundering norms, as a “Copernican Revolution” in Vatican finances.