The baying of the wolves
Is the predatory circle tightening? Der Spiegel has apparently found a second ex-Domspatzen who has come forward with lurid tales of his experiences in their Regensburg school... I'll take AP's wrod for this, as I have no desire to look up these stories.... To its credit, AP leads with something less 'sensational' but note the headline that mentions 'sex allegations' in the same phrase as 'the Pope'.
If you had not been following this particular story before and just happened to see this headline, your first thought might well be, "My God! Sex allegations about the Pope!" And that is precisely what the headline hunters aim for - the first impression that could be all that's left in the mind of raaders who are not really interested in the details of the story and will never read it...
Vatican officials defend Pope
on sex allegations
VATICAN CITY, March 13 (AP) ― The Vatican on Saturday denounced what it called aggressive attempts to drag Pope Benedict XVI into the spreading scandals of pedophile priests in his German homeland, and contended he has long confronted abuse cases with courage.
In separate interviews, both the Holy See's spokesman and its prosecutor for sex abuse of minors by clergy sought to defend the pope.
After decades of similar scandals in the United States, Ireland and elsewhere, the sex abuse scandal moved closer to Benedict in recent days.
After accusations of abuse connected to the Regensburg boys choir directed by the Pope's elder brother for some 30 years, the Munich archdiocese acknowledged Friday that it had transferred a suspected pedophile priest to community work while Benedict was archbishop there.
Criticism has also mounted over a 2001 church directive Benedict wrote while a Vatican cardinal, instructing bishops to keep abuse cases confidential.
[DURING INVESTIGATION!!!! TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT!!!! Deliberate omission of pertinent facts is one of the most effective ways that newsmen adn editors can shape their storyline to reflect their agenda and biases, instead of the truth!]
"It's rather clear that in the last days, there have been those who have tried, with a certain aggressive persistence, in Regensburg and Munich, to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses," Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio.
"For any objective observer, it's clear that these efforts have failed," Lombardi said, reiterating his statement a day earlier noting the Munich diocese has insisted that Benedict wasn't involved in the decision, while archbishop there, to transfer the suspected child abuser.
Lombardi cited an interview with the Italian bishops conference daily
Avvenire Saturday, in which the Vatican's prosecutor for sex abuse cases, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, contended that the future pope dealt firmly with the abuse.
"To accuse the current pope of hiding (cases) is false and defamatory," Scicluna said.
As Vatican cardinal in charge of the policy on sex abuse, the future Pope, "showed wisdom and firmness in handling these cases," said Scicluna, a Maltese prelate in an interview entitled "The Church is tough on pedophilia."
The Archdiocese of Munich and Freising announced late Friday it was setting up a new task force to focus on raising awareness about an preventing sexual abuse within the church and its institutions.
"There is no 100 percent protection against sexual abuse, because we can never rule out the failure or misdoing of individuals, but we want to apply ourselves 100 percent to prevent it from happening again," said the General Vicar of the archdiocese, Prelate Peter Beer.
The new task force will also collaborate with the workgroup tasked with working through allegations of past abuse. Beer said that group would be expanded to include an external, independent legal office.
The archdiocese, where Pope Benedict XVI served as Archbishop from 1977 to 1982, set up the workgroup last month after allegations of abuse in a church-run school surfaced.
Thomas Mayer told Germany's
Der Spiegel weekly that he had been sexually and physically abused while singing in the Regensburger Domspatzen boys choir through 1992.
Mayer's abuse allegations, published Saturday, are
the first that overlap with the tenure of the Pontiff's brother Georg Ratzinger, who led group from 1964 to 1994. Previously reported cases of sexual abuse dates back to the late 1950s.
Mayer charged in
Spiegel that he had been raped by older pupils. Spiegel quoted him as saying that pupils were forced to have anal sex with one another in the apartment of a prefect at the church-run boarding school attached to the choir. The Regensburg diocese has refused to comment on the report.
The New Yotk Times story which will come out in the 3/14/10 paper edition, begins very much like the AP story, but it provides some follow-up on the Munich chapter of this latest showcase of yellow journalism:
Vatican sees campaign against the Pope
By RACHEL DONADIO and NICHOLAS KULISH
March 14, 2010
ROME — As new details emerged on allegations of child sexual abuse by
priests ['Priests'? Only one has been named so far!] in the Munich archdiocese then led by Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican spoke out on Saturday to protect the Pope against what it called an aggressive campaign against him in his native Germany.[
Not just in Germany!]
At the same time, a high-ranking Vatican official overseeing internal investigations on Saturday acknowledged that 3,000 cases of suspected abuse of minors had come to its attention in the past decade, of which 20 percent had been brought to trial in Vatican courts.
In a note read on Vatican Radio on Saturday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said it was “evident that in recent days there are those who have tried, with a certain aggressive tenacity, in Regensburg and in Munich, to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse.” He added, “It is clear that those efforts have failed.”
In Germany, a man who said he was sexually abused by a priest there in 1979 said Saturday that church officials had told him then that the priest would not be allowed to work with children again. Instead, the priest was allowed, under Benedict’s watch, to resume full duties almost immediately, where he went on to abuse more children.
The Vatican also sought to defend the Pope against criticism that a Vatican rule requiring secrecy in abuse cases was tantamount to obstruction of justice in civil courts.
Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the director of a tribunal inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s doctrinal arm, dismissed as “false and calumnious” accusations that Benedict covered up abuse cases when he oversaw investigations as prefect of that congregation for four years before becoming Pope.
In a rare and unusually frank public interview that appeared on the front page of
Avvenire, the Italian Bishops Conference newspaper on Saturday, and circulated by the Vatican Press Office, Monsignor Scicluna
acknowledged [That implies that he was holding back earlier! This is his first interview ever, these figures have never been known before, and no one - absolutely no one - thought of doing a story on the abuse cases raised to the CDF even after Scicluna first made the news in 2007 as the CDF's lead investigator into the case of Fr. Marcial Maciel!] that the Vatican had received about 3,000 accusations of abuse by priests of minors in the past decade, 80 percent of them from the United States.
He said that about 300 priests had been accused of pedophilia in the past nine years. The cases involved both diocesan and religious priests and regarded acts committed over the last 50 years, he said. He added that only 20 percent of priests had been tried — mostly in local dioceses but sometimes in Rome — and some of them had been acquitted.
Of the 3,000 total cases, he said, “We can say that about 60 percent of the cases chiefly involved sexual attraction towards adolescents of the same sex, another 30 percent involved heterosexual relations, and the remaining 10 percent were cases of pedophilia in the true sense of the term; that is, based on sexual attraction towards prepubescent children.”
He said that 60 percent of the total cases had not come to trial, largely because of the advanced age of the accused, but that they faced other “administrative and disciplinary provisions,” including being required to live in seclusion and prohibition from celebrating Mass and hearing confession.
“It’s true that there has been no formal condemnation,” Monsignor Scicluna said, adding, “It must be made absolutely clear that in these cases, some of which are particularly sensational and have caught the attention of the media, no absolution has taken place.”
In Germany, where hundreds of people have come forward in the last few months with accusations of abuse by priests, new details emerged Saturday about a case in the Munich Archdiocese that the church has acknowledged it made “serious mistakes” in handling. Pope Benedict, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, was head of the archdiocese at the time.
The daily newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung said that the pastor previously identified as H sexually abused an 11-year-old boy in Essen in 1979, including by forcing him to perform oral sex.
In a telephone interview on Saturday, the victim, who asked to be identified as Wilfried F. to protect his anonymity, said that the abuse occurred after a vacation trip to the Eifel mountains. The priest gave him alcohol, locked him in his bedroom, took off his clothes, and molested him, Wilfried F. said.
When the abuse was reported to the Church, the Church handled it as an internal matter without notifying the police or prosecutors. Wilfried F. said that church officials said the priest had been transferred to Munich “and that he would no longer be allowed to work with children.”
The archdiocese said in a statement on Friday that the priest was moved to Munich in 1980 for therapy with the approval of Archbishop Ratzinger. Vicar General Gerhard Gruber took responsibility for allowing him to return to pastoral work, where he later was convicted of sexually abusing minors.
“You see how they just kept moving him around,” Wilfried F. said. “He could keep doing it like before.”
In the interview on Saturday, Monsignor Scicluna also addressed accusations that the Vatican was obstructing justice by imposing secrecy on reports of abuse.
In 2001, Benedict, who was then in charge of Vatican investigations of abuse allegations, sent a letter to bishops counseling them to forward all cases of abuse of minors to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where they were to be subject to secrecy.
While dismissing the idea that the Vatican imposed secrecy “in order to hide the facts,” Monsignor Scicluna said that “secrecy during the investigative phase served to protect the good name of all the people involved; first and foremost, the victims themselves, then the accused priests who have the right — as everyone does — to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.”
But he said church secrecy had “never been understood as a ban on denouncing the crimes to the civil authorities.”
Monsignor Scicluna also dismissed as “unjustified” criticism that the wheels of Vatican justice moved too slowly. At the same time, he acknowledged that he oversaw an office of 10 people.
[It is very disingenuous, if not downright dishonest, for these newsmen to write as though 'justice' for the victims had to depend only on what the CDF can do and cannot do! - when in these days of multimillion-dollar settlements, complainants know they can always go directly to the police and seek criminal justice for their aggressors. At which point their success or failure will depend on what they can prove. They do not need teh CDF for that! ]
Catholic fury over The Times's
coverage of Pope Benedict XVI
March 13th, 2010
There is international outrage in Catholic circles over a headline in
The Times this morning that many people regard as utterly misleading and part of the newspaper’s reliably biased coverage (reinforced by vicious cartoons) of anything to do with Pope Benedict XVI.
The headline, over a story by Richard Owen, reads: “Pope knew priest was paedophile but allowed him to continue with ministry.” A universally admired Catholic journalist contacted me this morning and accused
The Times of (and I am toning this down for legal reasons) an extremely serious error of judgment.
Another respected commentator, the American journalist Phil Lawler, takes the headline to pieces on CatholicCulture.org. This is what he has to say:
Count on the London Times to offer the most sensational coverage of a news story involving the Catholic Church. The headline on today’s report by Richard Owen screams: 'Pope knew priest was paedophile but allowed him to continue with ministry'
That’s grossly misleading, downright irresponsible. The reporter runs ahead of his evidence – standard procedure for a Times journalist – but even Richard Owen does not allege anything to justify the headline.
[Lawler goes on with a summary of the 'Story of H', but he gets some things wrwong - I do not know what translation he read - so I won't reproduce it]
A grievous mistake was made in this case; that much is clear now, and the vicar general has sorrowfully taken responsibility for the error. Could you say that the future Pontiff should have been more vigilant? Perhaps. But to suggest that he made the decision to put a pedophile back in circulation is an outrageous distortion of the facts.
The AP story carries a very different headline:
Pope’s former diocese admits error over priest
That’s not so eye-catching. But the headline fits the facts.
And now let us turn to the commentary by Ruth Gledhill, under another nasty headline: “Scandal still not enough to threaten the Pope”. (
The Times will just have try harder, eh?) It begins:
The case of a sex abuser being given accommodation in Munich with the approval of its then archbishop, now the Pope, is reminiscent of the scandal that engulfed Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor soon after his appointment to Westminster.
No, it is NOT reminiscent of that scandal, Ruth. The Pope did not put a paedophile back into circulation; in contrast, the Cardinal showed very bad judgment in the case of Michael Hill and was lucky to hang on to his position. But, by writing such bollocks, you make it reminiscent.
And then there is this gem:
[Still fron Gledhill]
"
The Pope is pretty unassailable. He is not elected…"
Ruth, it long ago became clear to me that you do not know nearly enough about the Catholic Church to comment on it authoritatively. But surely even you have heard of something called a conclave.
I was really trying to keep clear of the news media that one can count on the be predictably nasty and try their very best to exact a pound of flesh from the Pope, but I thought I'd check what Damian Thompson has said so far of this wolves-baying-for-the-kill MSM narrative, and the above is what I get.
As much as I have railed against Richard Owen in the past for his many and glaring journalistic 'crimes', it is much more likely that the desk editor at The Times is the culprit for the inflammatory headline. Not that Owen isn't once again guilty of his habitual bad faith in the article itself, but it's less blatant...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/03/2010 10:37]