On July 3, 2018, I posted the ff - in the hope that the story would get more media attention than it has rated so far... but as far as I can tell,
no one else has done so except CHURCH MILITANT which ran an article about it on August 4, 2018.
www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/mother-alleges-sex-abuse-cover-up-under-cdl.-b...
Despite all the new uproar about clerical and episcopal sexual predators in the Church, no one else seems willing to touch this story at all...
WHY?????? The documentation appears adequate and ample!
Why and how was a blogpost by Marco Tosatti on May 26 - recounting a Spanish site's 2013 report about a clerical sex abuse cover-up by then
Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires - taken offline shortly thereafter? Subsequent attempts to access the post came back with 'PAGINA
NON TROVATA' (page not found). I have to admit that since I have not been very thorough these days in my quick skims of the sites I try to
follow daily, I completely missed the above post and have only become aware of it now that the news has been recycled as an 'exclusive'
by World News Daily.)
I suppose I am more surprised that Tosatti has apparently not commented so far on the suppression of the post, and I am curious whether
anyone other than the blogsite owner can take a post offline, otherwise one must conclude that Tosatti took it offline himself for some reason,
such as that he concluded his source was not reasonably reliable. In any case, the post was captured by another blogsite before it was taken offline,
and Atila Sinke Guimarães, editor of the website Tradition-in-Action, took it upon himself to call attention to the post and to translate it to English.
BERGOGLIO ENTANGLED IN ANOTHER COVER-UP
by Atila Sinka Guimaraes
Editor
On May 26, 2018, journalist Marco Tosatti posted an article on his website Stilum Curiae reporting the involvement of Pope Francis in a cover-up for a pedophile priest in Buenos Aires when he was Archbishop of that city. The article refreshed some little-known old data reported by the Spanish blog Publico. Soon after, however, Tosatti's article was removed from that site, probably due to pressure from the Vatican.
Nonetheless, his full article had been screen-captured and posted by another Italian website – Acta Apostolicae Sedis. The Brazilian blog Fratres in Unum made the piece accessible in Portuguese, where I found it, with its various Spanish and Italian links. I thank the blog for this important public service. I am translating the data into English and passing the information on to my readers.
In May 2013, the Appeals Tribunal of Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, confirmed a sentence by the City Court condemning the Diocese to pay US $27,000 (115,600 pesetas) to a victim of pedophilia to compensate for his psychological suffering and the moral damage he suffered.
Soon after, the Spanish blog Publico highlighted the case which involved a then 15-year-old Argentinian – Gabriel Ferrini – who had been abused by Fr. Ruben Pardo in 2002. Immediately after being sexually violated, the youth reported the crime to his mother, Beatriz. She went to the Bishop of Quilmes, Luis Teodorico Stöckler.
The Diocese of Quilmes is subordinate to the Province of Buenos Aires whose Archbishop at that time was none other than Jorge Bergoglio. Bishop Stöckler called the priest to confront him with the accusation. Pardo acknowledged the abuse before the Bishop 96 hours after the abuse took place.
But since the Bishop delayed in punishing the priest, Beatriz Varela, the boy's mother, tried to communicate with Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio. However, he refused to receive her and ordered his bodyguards to prevent her from entering his residence. At the same time the Archbishop of Buenos Aires was hosting the pedophile priest in a comfortable residence under his jurisdiction.
The abuse took place on August 15, 2002. Beatriz Varela was a worker in a diocesan school of Quilmes. She had asked the vicar of the local parish, Fr. Ruben Pardo, to catechize her two sons. The priest went to her house and, after giving some classes there, told Beatriz that he would continue the instruction in the church, providing that Gabriel spend the night there. He also told the mother that in this way the youth could serve his early morning Mass.
With his mother’s consent, the youth went to the rectory for the class. That evening, Pardo invited Gabriel to sleep with him in his bed. The youth first interpreted the gesture as a paternal invitation, until the moment when the priest actually violated him sexually. Gabriel reported: “I knew he was violating me but I couldn’t think of how to avoid it, because I was in shock and very afraid.”
When the priest ended the abuse and fell asleep, Gabriel slipped out and ran back to his house and reported what had happened to his mother. Beatriz went straight to Bishop Luis Stöcker. She stated: “Initially, he showed consternation, but, as the time went by, he did not take any action.” Instead, she continued, the Bishop “tried to minimize the case, saying that I had to be merciful with persons who chose celibacy as a vocation because they have moments of weakness.”
Beatriz told the Bishop that she wanted “truth, justice and the guarantee that such a thing would not happen to anyone else.” The Bishop then threatened to cut her employment. “I worked for a school in the Diocese,” she said, explaining her difficult situation.
Next, Beatriz had recourse to the Church Tribunal, whose president “refused to accept the denunciation.” Fifteen days later, she was interviewed by four priests “who submitted me to a humiliating interrogation with lascivious and tendentious questions, as if I were the one who had induced the abuse, when they knew for sure that the abuser had admitted the fact 96 hours after the episode before the Bishop, who reprimanded him.”
The mother of the victim also went to the Archdiocese, to the residence of Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio. He refused to receive her and sent his security guards to expel her from the property. Soon afterwards, she learned that Fr. Ruben Pardo was a guest at the Vicar’s House in the Flores neighborhood, a residence directly dependent on the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. She observed: “Bergoglio must have known this because no one can be installed in the Vicar’s House without the authorization of the Archbishop.”
She boldly accused Pope Francis: “This is Bergoglio’s way: He speaks against cases of pedophilia in the Church, but uses hypocrisy, lies and complicity to cover them... In the Church everyone knows and everyone keeps silent; thus, all are accomplices.”
She also mentioned other cases she knew about: “There were priests who were transferred to the Archdiocese of Cordoba after I made the denunciation. Last Friday a desolate mother called me because her 4-year-old daughter had been violated by those two priests, who still work in the school. … Other children are still at risk.” The mother of the abused girl did not want to go to press, but she did start a lawsuit against the priests.
Regarding the final verdict of the Appeals Tribunal and the Court of Quilmes, Varela nonetheless has other bitter memories: “When the priest who abused my son died [of AIDS in 2005], the process disappeared for two years. When the lawsuit was at risk of expiring [because of the statute of limitations], my son tried to commit suicide. He had to be interned for one-and-a-half months in a psychiatric clinic. No amount of money can compensate for what we have suffered.”
Ferrini himself said about the verdict: “The verdict established a judicial precedent and can help other victims so that it will not be so difficult for them to find a solution. It is necessary to take action because many people are afraid or too ashamed to denounce and quarrel with someone in clerical garb.”
So this was the case that Tosatti highlighted in the blogpost that was then suppressed.
This case resurfaced at the very moment when Bergoglio was being besieged by public indignation over his nomination of and cover-up for Bishop Barros in the Diocese of Osorno, Chile. So, following his old pattern of action,
Bergoglio apparently sent his “security guards” to threaten the Italian journalist who was trying to make these data public.
Years ago in Buenos Aires he used the same strong arm system against Beatriz Varela; now in Rome he seems to be using an identical procedure with Marco Tosatti. [This is all conjecture, of course. One hopes Tosatti himself will shed light on how and why his post was suppressed.] Let me help to expose this plot, if it exists. I do not like “security guards” used for this purpose. They remind me of the methods of All Capone.
Further, I believe it is time for us Catholics to become aware of what the “honest, pure, merciful and humble” procedures of our Holy Father really are.
For the record, the story touted by WND as its 'exclusive' basically translates Tosatti's blogpost and adds nothing new to it.
http://www.wnd.com
/2018/07/mom-accuses-pope-of-cover-up-of-sons-sex-abuse/#sThiR1FwHizOm4cA.99
If the report were even partially untrue, then the Vatican simply ought to have issued a statement to say so!
Here is CHURCH MILITANT's report, which has updates on the earlier report on which Tosatti based his retracted post:
Mother alleges sex abuse cover-up
by Cardinal Bergoglio in Buenos Aires
by Juliana Freitag
August 4, 2018
Vatican insider Marco Tosatti recently reported the case of Gabriel Ferrini, a young Argentinian man who was sexually abused by a priest of the diocese of Quilmes, in the province of Buenos Aires, in 2002. Ferrini was 15 years old at the time, and in 2013, a court ordered the diocese to pay restitution to both Gabriel Ferrini and his mother, Beatriz Varela.
A few news outlets picked up on the story, highlighting the fact that Tosatti took the article down from his blog almost immediately after publication. Speaking to Church Militant, Tosatti explained that he initially believed he was breaking a story but then realized the case had already been fully documented by watchdog website Bishop Accountability, which claimed that "Argentinian bishops are among the least transparent in the worldwide Church" years ago. Tosatti took it down as it was ill-timed.
[I do not buy this explanation at all!]
Even though it all started 16 years ago, it's difficult to find reports outside of Argentina. Very few articles can be found in English, even though the ruling has repeatedly been quoted as "historical," as
it was the first time in the country that a diocese was considered culpable in a case of sexual abuse by one of their priests. Some have speculated it might have been because of the involvement of the archdiocese of Buenos Aires, at the time under Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, who had just been elected Pope when the court announced its decision.
On Aug. 15, 2002, Catholic widow and mother of three, Beatriz Varela, invited Fr. Rubén Pardo, the 50-year-old priest from the church next door, with whom she had a close relationship, to have dinner in her home with her children. As a lifelong Catholic (Varela was a catechist who worked in a Catholic school, her brother is a deacon and her mother was a Legionary of Mary), Varela thought the priest could offer moral and spiritual guidance for her teenage son, Gabriel Ferrini.
After dinner, Fr. Pardo suggested he and the boy continued talking in his parish house, and that Ferrini was welcome to sleep over if he wanted to serve at Mass the next morning. The mother trustingly gave her permission, and Ferrini, who saw Fr. Pardo as a "fatherly figure," thought the priest was acting paternally when inviting the boy to sleep on the same bed.
In his naivety, Gabriel Ferrini didn't expect to be assaulted.
"I knew I was being violated, but I couldn't think of what to do to avoid it, because I was so shocked and scared," he told the prosecutor. As soon as Fr. Pardo fell asleep, Ferrini escaped and went back to his house to tell his mother what had happened.
Varela immediately turned to the Church for help. Two days after her son had been molested, she had an audience with Msgr. Luis Teodorico Stöckler, bishop of Quilmes, where she handed over a letter from her son describing the abuse. Bishop Stöckler seemed empathetic at first, and on Aug. 19, Fr. Pardo confessed everything to the bishop, while "crying bitterly and asking for forgiveness."
Despite the priest's confession, in the second audience, Stöckler was much more reticent:
[Bishop Stöckler] told me I should be more merciful with people who chose celibacy as a vocation, because they can have moments of weakness. I couldn't believe that he ... said something so atrocious. ... I told him I had been celibate for 13 years, even though celibacy isn't my vocation. I did it in order to dedicate entirely to my children, so they wouldn't be exposed to harm, without realizing that the danger was inside the Church.
Father Rubén Pardo's sole punishment was a canonical admonition for "violation of the sixth commandment" — "You shall not commit adultery." He was transferred to another parish and was forbidden to say Mass or give public and private declarations for a month. He died on Oct. 6, 2005 due to complications related to AIDS, ending the criminal case against him.
In December 2002, the diocese of Quilmes stopped paying for Gabriel Ferrini and his mother's psychological treatment. The payment ceased once Varela submitted the receipt of a legal consultation with a Buenos Aires organization dedicated to the support of sexual abuse victims. When questioned by Varela, Bp. Stöckler said that "enough time had passed for the solution of this problem," and he has never tried to reach out to the family ever since.
At around this time, Varela tried to plead with the inter-diocesan ecclesiastical court in Buenos Aires. Varela claims she was kicked out of the waiting room by the court's president, Msgr. Jorge Rodé, who insisted she should report the abuser to the diocese of Quilmes. A priest in the waiting room offered to take her to the Metropolitan Curia to try to speak to the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Bergoglio. The cardinal's receptionist didn't give Varela an appointment because of her refusal to reveal the reason for the meeting. Varela still tried to leave Cardinal Bergoglio a note, but was then escorted out of the premises by security guards.
After exhausting all her options in the Catholic Church, Beatriz Varela finally filed a criminal complaint at the beginning of February 2003. At the end of the month, prosecutor Pablo Pérez Marcote forwarded a request to the diocese of Quilmes inquiring "urgently" about Fr. Pardo's whereabouts.
The diocese's reply was evasive: "To date, Fr. Rubén Pardo's pastoral destination hasn't been determined and he resides outside the territorial jurisdiction of this diocese." In September 2003, Fr. Pardo was discovered living in the Mons. Mariano Espinosa clergy house in Buenos Aires. Reportedly, Pardo had been hearing confessions and working in a primary school whilst living there.
It's unlikely that the priest lived in the clergy house known for taking in retired priests without Cardinal Bergoglio's permission, which is why Beatriz Varela claims Cardinal Bergoglio acted compliantly. According to Argentinian newspaper Pagina 12, Fr. Pardo was transferred at least twice before passing away, always around Buenos Aires.
The Espinosa clergy house has always been known as Cardinal. Bergoglio's choice for retirement. According to Aleteia, "The decision was widely known among those who worked with him." Even the room - Number 13 on the ground floor - had allegedly already been set up for the eventual Archbishop Emeritus.
On April 2004, after Fr. Pardo’s case was exposed on national television, Bp. Stöckler released a statement saying he had reported Fr. Rubén Pardo to the Holy See, who put the ecclesiastical court of Buenos Aires in charge of the case. He also denied that the diocese had ceased to help with mother and son’s psychological treatment, but that it was Varela who “no longer turned to the diocese when she decided to file a criminal complaint against the priest."
A month later, Varela and her son were summoned to the inter-diocesan ecclesiastical court of Buenos Aires. According to Varela, the four priests on the panel asked them "lascivious" questions unrelated to the crime and kept questioning her son's sexuality. Cardinal Bergoglio was a moderator in the court but was not present at Varela's hearing.
Beatriz Varela's indignation was aggravated by the fact the diocese of Quilmes had been covering up for Fr. Rubén Pardo for decades. Monsignor Marcelo Daniel Colombo (currently second vice-president of the Argentinian Bishops' Conference and bishop of Rioja) was the rector of the diocesan seminary of Quilmes when Fr. Pardo undertook his studies. Msgr. Colombo confirmed to Varela that he had Fr. Pardo transferred to another seminary due to his "inappropriate conducts".
The police also discovered that, before joining the diocese of Quilmes, the priest was part of the Order of the Camillians, where he had been isolated "for not having the right conditions for religious co-existence." And Fr. Isidoro Psenda, also from the diocese of Quilmes, told Beatriz Varela that he and 10 other priests went to Msgr. Jorge Novak (the previous bishop of Quilmes) and warned the bishop about Pardo's "inadequacy for celibacy," but Msgr. Novak decided to ordain him a priest anyway.
In October 2012, a court in Quilmes ruled that the diocese had been negligent in its management of Fr. Pardo and ordered it to pay restitution to Gabriel Ferrini and Beatriz Varela. The diocese appealed, arguing that Pardo had been employed by an autonomous parish at the time and that Beatriz Varela was partly responsible because she allowed her son to spend the night in the priest's residence.
In April 2013 the court rejected these arguments and upheld the previous ruling. The diocese was ordered to pay the plaintiffs 155,000 pesos (about $6,000) plus ten years' interests in compensatory damages.
In 2014, the GlobalPost traveled to Argentina to hear the stories of victims of clerical sexual abuse. All of them declared that "they spent fruitless years seeking an audience with Francis" and that "they were turned away by his office or offered gifts instead of a meeting." GlobalPost also released videos of each of them with a message for Pope Francis.
Beatriz Varela resisted at first, saying she had "nothing to say" to him, but then emotionally said to the camera,
"This is a message to Pope Francis: Do as you say you will do. Be sure to follow everything you say with actions. If the Church is to have zero tolerance towards abuse, all the priests you are aware of, whose names and addresses you know, must be gathered up and put in jail now. ... Do what God wants, for all of us.”
Beatriz Varela and Gabriel Ferrini have both stated that they still believe in God, but they have left the Catholic Church.
AND NOT TO FORGET BERGOGLIO'S 'MCCARRICKONE' PROTEGE (Archbishop Maccarone) who has since died, like Pardo in the Varela-Ferrini story, and can no longer be called to account in this world for his misdeeds, but what about his protector? What's stopping gung-ho Vaticanistas like John Allen from investigating these two allegations against Bergoglio of covering up for sexual predators - at least the two that have been named prominently - while he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires?...And why, one might ask again, has the Vatican not issued an outright denial of these allegations?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 06/08/2018 05:40]