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BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

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26/03/2010 12:45
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One must give the Times of London some credit for providing the space to Archbishop Nichols for this eminently sensible presentation that contrasts with the persistent almost hysterical anti-Catholic tone that habitually marks its staff coverage and commentary on the Catholic Church.


The Church is not trying
to cover up anything

Catholics are shamed by child abuse allegations,
and the Pope has taken strong action

by VINCENT NICHOLS
Archbishop of Westminster
Catholic Primate of England

March 26, 2010


The child abuse committed within the Roman Catholic Church and its concealment is deeply shocking and totally unacceptable. I am ashamed of what happened, and understand the outrage and anger it has provoked.

That shame and anger centres on the damage done to every single abused child. Abuse damages, often irrevocably, a child’s ability to trust another, to fashion stable relationships, to sustain self-esteem.

When it is inflicted within a religious context, it damages that child’s relationship to God. Today, not for the first time, I express my unreserved shame and sorrow for what has happened to many in the Church.

My shame is compounded, as is the anger of many, at the mistaken judgments made within the Church: that reassurance from a suspect could be believed; that credible allegations were deemed to be “unbelievable”; that the reputation of the Church mattered more than safeguarding children.

These wrong reactions arise whenever and wherever allegations of abuse are made, whether within a family or a Church. We have to insist that the safety of the child comes first because the child is powerless.

Serious mistakes have been made within the Catholic Church. There is some misunderstanding about the Church, too.

Within the Church there is a legal structure, its canon law. It is the duty of each diocesan bishop to administer that law. Certain serious offences against that law have to be referred to the Holy See to ensure proper justice. Some of these offences are not criminal in public law (such as profanation of the sacraments), others (such as offences against children) are.

The role of the Holy See is to offer guidance to ensure that proper procedures are followed, including the confidentially needed to protect the good name of witnesses, victims and the accused until the trial is completed. It is no different from any other responsible legal procedure.

This “secrecy” is nothing to do with the confidentiality, or “seal” of the confessional, which is protected for reasons of the rights of conscience.

The relationship between the administration of church law and the criminal law in any particular state is a point of real difficulty and misunderstanding.

Nothing in the requirement of canon law prohibits or impedes the reporting of criminal offences to the police. Since 2001 the Holy See, working through the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, has encouraged that course of action on dioceses who have received evidence about child abuse and which the diocesan authorities are responsible for pursuing.

The canonical procedure is best put on hold until the criminal investigation is complete, whatever its outcome. This is what is needed. That it has not happened consistently is deeply regrettable.

In England and Wales, since 2001, the agreed policy followed by the bishops has been to report all allegations of child abuse, no matter from how far in the past, to the police or social services.

By doing so and by having clear safeguarding procedures in place in every parish as well as independent supervision at diocesan and national level, we have built good relationships with those authorities in these matters, including, in some areas, co-operation in the supervision of offenders in the community.

What of the role of Pope Benedict? When he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith he led important changes made in church law:
- the inclusion in canon law of internet offences against children,
- the extension of child abuse offences to include the sexual abuse of all under 18,
- the case by case waiving of the statue of limitation and
- the establishment of a fast-track dismissal from the clerical state for offenders.

He is not an idle observer. His actions speak as well as his words.


Every year since 2002 the Catholic Church in England and Wales has made public the exact number of allegations made within the Church, the number reported to the police, the action taken and the outcome. As far as I know, no other organisation in this country does this. It is not a cover-up; it is clear and total disclosure.

The purpose of doing so is not to defend the Church. It is to make plain that in the Catholic Church in England and Wales there is no hiding place for those who seek to harm children. On this we are determined.

One more fact. In the past 40 years, less than half of 1 per cent of Catholic priests in England and Wales (0.4 per cent) have faced allegations of child abuse. Fewer have been found guilty.

Do not misunderstand me. One is too many. One broken child is a tragedy and a disgrace. One case alone is enough to justify anger and outrage. The work of safeguarding, within any organisation and within our society as a whole, is demanding but absolutely necessary. The Catholic Church here is committed to safeguarding children and all vulnerable people.





Having to wake up to see the New York Times unload its latest crap on the public does not lend itself to trying to follow my Forum routine in an orderly way, much less the chance - nor the appetite - to go too far afield to find more animal droppings left off elsewhere by the media. But an Italian agency offers its swift overview of the German press vis-a-vis the Murphy story:

The German press and
the Murphy story




BERLIN, March 26 (Translated from AGI) - The German press, with the exception of Der Spiegel, which is now asking for the Pope's resignation, has decided to ignore the New York Times 'accusations' against Benedict XVI in connection with the now deceased Fr. Lawrence Murphy of Milwaukee.

Sueddeutsche Zeitung, the largest German newspaper [????], reported it on Page 7 without a line of comment.

The two progressive Berlin enwspapers, Tagesspiegel and Berliner Zeitung, ignored it completely.

Only the conservative [???] Frankfuerter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), which devoted a few column inches to a summary of the Times story on page 5, wrote a brief comment in defense of the Pope.

FAZ posed the question "How many cases have been reported to which Vatican authorities, and how many times and in what way did these authorities react?" The fact, it said, that "it took 25 years before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was even notified [of this particular case] fits in with the image of a national Church (ie, the Church in the USA), that has always preferred to keep its distance from the Vatican".

On the other hand, the weekly newsmagazine Der Spiegel is now speculating on a possible resignation by Benedict XVI.

"When is it time that a Pope must resign?", it asks, claiming that the Pope's authority "is evaporating almost daily". [Saying so does not make it so! Or only to you and the rest of the chastising chattering classes, who believe you far outweigh the world's 1.2 billion Catholics on the matter of respect for the Pope!]

Spiegel claims that the German Pope "has done more damage than service to the Church" because he has "many times made relations with the Jews more difficult [Guys, the world has 14 million Jews all told! That doesn't make them any less respectable but it does place a perspective on your exaggerated, most likely German guilt-ridden' concern for their sensibilities!]; with his lecture in Regensburg which played fire with the relationship between Muslims and Catholics [as if they had ever been good before then, and as if they have not markedly improved since then!]; offended the Indians during his visit to Latin America [who are probably scratching their heads now, trying to recall, "Hmm, what was that about exactly?"] ;irritated the Protestants, and shown himself conciliatory to Holocaust deniers".

[Note that all the pretexts cited by Spiegel are mere pufffery: insubstantial media-generated mountains out of molehills and have nothing to do with the Catholic Church itself, much less the Christian faith - only with that golden cow of PR, which is the least of concerns for the Vicar of Christ on earth! Still, you would think from the way Spiegel presents it that this Pope has done nothing but go around annoying and irritating everyone, especially non-Catholics. Oh, wait! they forgot to mention the condoms! - that he is responsible for killing millions because the Church opposes the use of condoms!!!


3/27/2010
P.S. The Guardian (UK) had a more comprehensive account than most newspapers of the developments on this front yesterday.


Child abuse scandal is a war
'between the Church and world',
says Italian bishop

by John Hooper and Riazat Butt

March 26, 2010

Pope Benedict was today accused of being involved in the mishandling of the case of a child-abusing priest in his former archdiocese of Munich, an allegation which directly links him to the burgeoning scandal in the Catholic Church.

The accusation, which has been only partly denied by Church representatives, cast a deep shadow over the Pontiff's approaching visit to Britain. [Where did the 'partly denied' come from???]

It also elicited heated protests from Roman Catholic leaders and Italian politicians.

Italy's foreign minister, Franco Frattini, said on his Facebook site that the Pope was being subjected to "scandalous and disgraceful" attacks. One churchman, Antonio Riboldi, the emeritus bishop of Acerra, declared that it marked the start of a war "between the church and the world; between Satan and God".

Today's allegation arose from the case of Father Peter Hullerman, a paedophile who in 1980 was transferred to the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's diocese for therapy. Instead, after just a few days, he was assigned to pastoral work.

Hullerman went on to abuse at least one boy – a crime of which he was later convicted in a secular court. When the affair came to light this month, the diocese's former vicar-general, Father Gerhard Gruber, accepted full responsibility for the mistake.

However, according to a report in today's New York Times, Benedict's office was copied in on the memo Gruber issued transferring Hullerman to parish duties. It also said that the future Pope had chaired the diocesan council meeting at which it was agreed the priest should be allowed to come to Munich. [This was always clear from the start!]

A spokesman for the archdiocese said: "The report does not contain false information, but the interpretation — that Cardinal Ratzinger knew — is pure speculation."

He added: "I do not know if any copy [of the memo] exists. But it is a usual procedure that a decision about priests goes to the office of the archbishop. But it is not usual that he takes note of every written piece of paper, every decision of the vicar-general."

A statement from the Vatican went further, saying "the then archbishop had no knowledge of the decision."

On Thursday, the Pope's spokesman defended him from claims that, while still a senior Vatican official, he had opted not to try under church law a dying American priest, Father Lawrence Murphy, who abused up to 200 deaf boys. Murphy preyed on the children at a school in Wisconsin between 1950 and 1974, but the case did not reach Rome until 20 years after he was moved to other duties. [Actually, he was officially retired but apparently, he helped out with pastoral duties in his home parish, where he went home to live with his mother.]

Documents posted to the New York Times's website showed that the Pope's then deputy, Tarcisio Bertone, who has since become his right-hand man as secretary of state, decided to scrap the trial. This was despite opposition from Murphy's archbishop, who told a meeting in Rome that the priest remained unrepentant.

Wrong. The diocese had already started with the trial. According to Avvenire's summary of the documents posted by the NYT online:

On April 6, 1998, Mons. Bertone wrote in the name of the CDF, to Mons. Fliss, bishop of Superior, to explain that, after having examined the matter carefully, there was no statute of limitations for penal action as invoked by Fr. Murphy, and so the hearings could go on, but to bear in mind that Art. 1341 of the Code of Civil Law says that a penalty may only be imposed after it has been determined that "it is not possible to sufficiently obtain reparation for the scandal, the establishment of justice, and the emendment of the guilty" through other means...

On May 30, there was a meeting at the Vatican between Mons. Bertone, his undersecretary at CDF, Fr. Gianfranco Girotti, and the American prelates involved in the matter. From the minutes of the meeting, it appears that the CDF officials expressed doubts about the feasibility of such a trial because of the difficulty of reconstructing events that happened 35 years earlier, especially those that have to do with the crime of 'soliciting in the confessional', and since no other accusations had been presented since 1974.


The scandal has brought out a sharp difference between the views of Italy and the Vatican on the one hand, and those of other countries.

The latest allegations have emerged in Germany, where this week a poll for Stern magazine indicated that confidence in Pope Benedict among Catholics had collapsed since the end of January, from 62% to 39%.

"I think he's bound to be damaged," said the British Catholic author and biographer Michael Walsh. "[The scandal] is getting closer to him." He predicted the controversy would affect Benedict's official visit to Britain in September. "He's not popular here anyway, and I don't think he'll get a warm welcome," he said.

But in Rome, Sandro Magister, who runs a Vatican-watching web site, www.chiesa, argued that the criticism of the Pope was "reinforcing his authority, both in respect of the bishops and the Catholic faithful. He is coming out of this stronger than before as a very strong, very decisive man who is seen within the Church as the one who has done more than any other to fight the plague of child abuse."

Benedict's supporters point to his record since becoming Pope in 2005, which they say includes a no-tolerance policy towards clerical paedophiles.

Today brought a reminder in the form of a statement from the Legionnaires of Christ whose founder Benedict stripped of his priestly duties before ordering an investigation into the order that could yet lead to its suppression.

The legionnaires' leadership said in a web statement: "We express our pain and regret to each and every one of the persons who were harmed by the actions of our founder."

The New York Times report — the second in two days — stirred heated rejoinders from a number of the Pope's admirers, including several politicians campaigning ahead of voting in 13 Italian regions on Sunday and Monday.

Maurizio Ronconi, a leading Italian Christian Democrat, said: "For years, a masonic-secularist offensive against Catholics has been under way."

A centre-left opposition MP, Pierluigi Castagnetti, said: "It is now quite clear that the campaign against the Pope and the secretary of state of the Holy See by certain great foreign newspapers is not fortuitous, nor does it stem from any journalistic right or duty, but is rather a precise design intended to strike the Catholic church at the top."

When he was archbishop of Munich and Freisberg, Joseph Ratzinger [not him personally, but the Archbishop's Office] would have kept secret archives on Father Peter Hullermann to comply with the code of canon law. Nestled in book two, part two, section two, title three, chapter two, article two, under the heading "The chancellor, other notaries, and the archives", are rules explaining what is to be archived, how, and who has access to it. [You would think from this sentence that this procedural detail, which it is, was deliberately hidden inside the Code of Canon Law, which like any official document, simply presents the official text as it is!]

According to the Vatican website, each diocese should have an archive or "at least in the common archive a safe or cabinet, completely closed and locked, which cannot be removed; in it documents to be kept secret are to be protected most securely".

These contain "documents from historic criminal cases concerning matters of a moral nature; documentary proof of canonical warnings or corrections when someone is about to commit an offence, is suspected of having committed one, or is guilty of scandalous behaviour; documents relating to preliminary investigations for a penal process that was closed without trial; documents relating to any other matters the bishop considers secret". Only the bishop has a key to the secret archive.

Canon 489.2 states: that "Each year documents of criminal cases in matters of morals, in which the accused parties have died or 10 years have elapsed from the sentence, are to be destroyed. A summary of what occurred along with the text of the definitive sentence is to be retained."

[SO???? Is Archbishop Ratzinger to be blamed now for provisions of Canon Law codified more than 100 years ago?]

It is not known whether secret diocesan archives have ever formed part of a civil claim or criminal investigation against a paedophile priest. But their existence, and the code of conduct surrounding them, sheds light on how much value the Church places on record-keeping and due diligence.

[In this case, at a distance of 30 years, any such 'secretly archived' records about Fr. Hullermann at the time that Cardinal Ratzinger was archbishop, would have been long destroyed by 1992 at the latest, according to the canon law provision. Will the logic-defying moralizers now blame the Pope foer that too?]

John Allen, senior correspondent at the National Catholic Reporter, has suggested the Vatican heed Cardinal Sean Brady's advice and stop the "drip, drip, drip of revelations of failure" by throwing open its records and allowing investigators or responsible journalists to examine them to publicly prove, if nothing else, that the Church is committed to transparency.

"The Munich archdiocese could publish a comprehensive list of every priest, diocesan and religious, who served between May 1977 and February 1982, along with whatever information Church officials had at the time about any accusations against them, and what was done."

True friends of the Pope, he notes, should be pressing for full disclosure. [I agree. As I have commented before, Archbishop Marx of Munich should come out ASAP - instead of waiting for the media to find out on their own - with every document or 'evidence' that can potentially be discovered by determined muck-raking sleuths, and find out what any of their present and former diocesan employees may have to say about their direct or indirect knowledge of exactly what was the extent of Archbishop Ratzinger's involvement and/or interest in the case of this priest! If no written records now exist because of the canon law provision, then they sould say so directly.]

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/03/2010 22:39]
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