Cardinal Kasper defends the Pope
and calls for 'housecleaning'
ROME, March 27 (AP) - A top Vatican cardinal is calling for "housecleaning" and urging the Roman Catholic Church to be more alert and brave in dealing with cases of clerical sex abuse.
Cardinal Walter Kasper has also defended the Pope, saying he was the first to recognize the need for a harsher stance against offenders. He says attacks on Pope Benedict XVI go "beyond any limit of justice and loyalty."
The sex abuse scandal has moved across Europe and into Benedict's native Germany. It has touched the Pontiff himself with a case dating to his tenure as archbishop of Munich.
Kasper said in an interview published Saturday in the Italian daily newspaper
Corriere della Sera that the Church needs to be more vigilant but that the path she has taken is "irreversible."
The memories are still painful for the men who appeared on Italian television last night, and the revelations add to the pain of a Church and a Pope under siege.
The rest of the story is added on by CBS News, the same outfit that tried to torpedo George W. Bush's re-election bid in 2004 by using clearly forged documents to support an allegation that he improperly used his connection to avoid serving in Vietnam.
CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reports that the latest allegations of abuse aimed at another Catholic institution are now getting closer to Rome, and to the Pope himself. [And how does the complaint from Verona get 'closer to the Pope himself'???]
On Friday, Italian television aired allegations from men who, as children, attended a Catholic school for the deaf in Verona, where they say they were repeatedly abused.
At first the local bishop accused them of lying, until one of the staff admitted the allegations were true.
The bishop then ordered an internal investigation, which found some abuse occurred, albeit a fraction of what had been alleged.
Advocates for the self-described victims, however, said the diocese investigation was fatally flawed because no one interviewed the former students.
In a signed statement last year, the 67 former pupils at a school for the deaf in Verona described sexual abuse, paedophilia and corporal punishment from the 1950s to the 1980s.
Only now - a year after the Italian case became public - is the Vatican directing the diocese to interview the victims to hear their testimony about the accusations, The Associated Press learned on Thursday.
While not all acknowledged being "victims," 14 of the 67 wrote sworn statements and made videotapes, detailing abuse, some for years, at the hands of priests and brothers of the Congregation for the Company of Mary.
On Friday three self-described victims detailed alleged abuse at the institute.
"When I was 11, the sexual intercourse started, in the dormitory, in the toilets, very often we were sodomized in the toilets. It went on for four years, always," said 60-year-old Gianni Bisoli.
59-year-old Dario Laiti said he was six when he started at the institute. He said that after a year he was "called by two different priests into a dormitory and they took me behind a white sheet and they sodomized me."
The Verona case is just the latest accusation to rock the church and tarnish Pope Benedict XVI who for years headed the Vatican department that deals with sexual abuse cases, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In 2001 Ratzinger issued a directive that requires bishops to report suspected clerical abuse cases to the Vatican, but makes no mention of calling police.
The Church establishment has rallied in support of the pope, and an editorial in the Vatican newspaper has called the abuse allegations a clear and ignoble attempt of trying to strike Benedict. But an editorial in the
National Catholic Reporter says it's time for the Pope to provide straight answers.
The Church moves slowly, but the news about child abuse is spreading, creating more and more of a demand not just for apologies, but for justice.
Earlier this week it was revealed that the Vatican halted the investigation of a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys. (1)
The Wisconsin and Verona cases are the latest in a burgeoning abuse scandal on both sides of the Atlantic that now threatens to tarnish the papacy itself.
The office charged with disciplining clergy was long led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and a church prosecution in the Wisconsin case was stopped after an appeal to Ratzinger. (2)
The Vatican strongly defended Benedict on Thursday and denounced what it said was a concerted campaign to smear him and his aides for
a problem that Rome insists is not unique to the Catholic Church.
[Does anyone dispute that fact? The fair reporter would write, "that Rome insists - and rightly so- ..."]
The Vatican was responding to the release of documents, first reported by
The New York Times, that showed
how the Pope's former office told a Wisconsin bishop to shut down a church trial against the Reverend Lawrence Murphy, a Milwaukee priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys from 1950 to 1975. (3)
[Can you believe that? Three times in five paragraphs, the reporter(s) repeat what is, at best, a half-truth!]
Murphy died in 1998, two years after Ratzinger first learned of the accusations, and more than 20 years after they came to the attention of the Milwaukee diocese.
[What about mentioning that the Milwaukee diocese itself did not inform the Vatican about the case until 1996???]
While the Vatican has not directly addressed the Italian abuse case, first reported as part of an AP investigation last September, it bears marked similarities to the allegations brought in Wisconsin.
Both involve some of society's most vulnerable: deaf children for whom the admonition "never tell" is easy to enforce because they have difficulty communicating.
And in both, the major priority of Church officials grappling with how or whether to discipline accused predators appeared to be protecting the Church from scandal.
I haven't had a chance to check out Cardinal Kasper's interview with Corsera yet, but if it's worth translating in full, I will.
Italian Senate president condemns
'unmerited' attacks on Pope Benedict
Rome, Italy, Mar 27, 2010 (CNA/EWTN News).- "Unacceptable and unmerited" is how the president of the Italian Senate, Renato Schifani, defined the recent "attacks against the Pontiff."
Calling the media blitz on Pope Benedict XVI "unprecedented", he acknowledged the Pope's "decisive measures against pedophilia" and said that his "very rigorous positions" deserve respect and appreciation.
"This is why I don't understand, and we don't understand, the reason for these attacks," the politician said to a group of young people on Thursday, according to a Friday article in
L'Osservatore Romano.
Schifani, speaking to the youngsters on constitutional values, went on to deem as "unacceptable" the evident "attempt to overshadow a moral patrimony, of traditions, of culture and of meritorious actions such as that of the Church with the instrument of the delegitimization that doesn't distinguish that which is good and just from the individual behaviors..."
He pointed out that the "most odious" of these actions "have been condemned firmly and with the maximum authority."
The president of the Senate went on to defend the fundamental value of life as "the sign of the degree of civilization of a nation" and said that its protection "without ambiguity in all of its manifestations, preserving in it always the intrinsic dignity, is the essential task of every citizen and every institution."
In a message posted on the website of the Italian government following the release of the Letter to Irish Catholics last week, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi expressed, on behalf of the people of Italy, "all of the affection, closeness and solidarity" to the Pope, who "has often had to confront difficult situations that become motive for attacks against the Church and even the very substance of the Christian religion."
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 27/03/2010 21:17]