I include this item here because it is highly outrageous and a truly base example of news manipulation -
even if the newspaper is Northern Irish and constitutionally anti-Catholic.
Vatican sought deal on 'Fr Filth'
Friday, 17 December 2010
The Vatican wanted a dangerous Irish paedophile priest to serve 10 years in a monastery rather than force him out of the Catholic Church, an inquiry has revealed.
Irish clerics wanted to dismiss Tony Walsh - jailed for 16 years last week on 17 counts of child abuse - but Rome urged that he be allowed to remain in the clergy.
Nicknamed Fr Filth, he attacked a young boy in the toilet of a pub in Dublin in May 1994 after attending the funeral of his victim's grandfather as the Catholic hierarchy in Rome debated how he should be dealt with.
Pope John Paul II dismissed Walsh in 1996 after a direct appeal for action by Cardinal Desmond Connell.
A previously censored chapter of a report by the Commission of Investigation into the Dublin Archdiocese, the Murphy Report, was released on Friday.
It described the defrocked priest as probably the most notorious child sexual abuser to have come to its attention, and who was likely to have assaulted hundreds of children.
Dublin-based clerics investigated Walsh in the early 1990s and asked Rome to laicise him in 1993. Walsh appealed in October 1993 and the Vatican called for the penalty to be reduced in June 1994.
The Pope was asked to intervene after the attack on the boy in a pub.
The Commission stated: "This option of dismissing a priest directly by the Pope is reserved for grave and clear cases and is regarded as an extraordinary remedy, even when the normal penal process is inadequate." [So John Paul II used the extraordinary remedy, and rather quickly too after his intervention was sought. What's the problem there?]
Forty people complained of being abused by Walsh and he admitted to "using children for sexual gratification" once a fortnight over an eight-year period. The report stated that Archbishop Dermot Ryan, head of the Archdiocese from 1972-1984, failed to properly investigate complaints against several priests including Walsh.
1. The headline and first sentence of the lead paragraph are outright lies. There is nothing in the story to support the claims made that the Vatican 'sought a deal' nor that it 'wanted the priest to serve in a monastery'.
2. The report never mentions which Vatican office dealt with the case of Walsh except that John Paul II eventually dismissed him.
3. A timeline is not mentioned until the third and fourth paragraphs, which makes it clear this took place in the mid 1990s. And yet the report does not mention that in the 1990s, it was the Congregation for the Clergy that had jurisdiction over the canonical punishment of priests, with the approval of the Pope. Obivously, John Paul II originally approved the positive response to Walsh's appeal but rescinded the approval upon being requested by Walsh's local bishop.
4. The absence of specification and the way the headline and the story are presented are designed to make the casual reader presume this all this took place somehow at the time Cardinal Ratzinger had something to do with adjudicating the sex offenses of priests.
AP has picked up the story, and not surprisingly slants it as best it can to cast the worst light on 'the Vatican'. Its headline and report are just as misleading as that from the Belfast Telegraph.
We also have to get to Paragraph 6 before we find out the time frame in which these events occurred! In fact, the AP headline is even more sanctimonious, and although it mentions the monastery solution cited unsupported in the Belfast Telegraph report, and provides other information, its account of how the offender was finally defrocked is more muddled - and John Paul II's role in it is not mentioned. In everything else, one can attribute the same objections to it as to the Belfast Telegraph report....
Vatican tried to keep
Irish child rapist as priest
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
DUBLIN, Dec. 17 (AP) –
The Vatican [WHO IN THE VATICAN? WHICH AGENCY?] tried to stop Dublin church leaders from defrocking a particularly dangerous pedophile priest and relented only after he raped a boy in a pub restroom, an investigation reported Friday.
Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said he fully accepted the findings of the latest chapter in Ireland's investigation into child abuse by Catholic Church figures.
Martin called Tony Walsh an "extremely devious man" who should never have been ordained a priest, and said the report highlighted how the church had grown too powerful and arrogant in 20th century Ireland.
A state-ordered investigation into Dublin Archdiocese cover-ups reported last year that Catholic officials had shielded scores of priests from criminal investigation over several decades and didn't report any crimes to the police until 1995. The findings sent shockwaves through the Church and forced three Irish bishops to resign.
A chapter dealing with Walsh was censored from the original report because he was still facing a criminal trial. The Department of Justice published the chapter Friday following the 56-year-old Walsh's Dec. 6 conviction for repeatedly raping three boys three decades ago. He received a 12-year prison sentence.
The investigators — a judge and lawyers acting independently of the Irish government — concluded that Walsh actually raped and molested hundreds of boys while serving as a Dublin priest from
1978 to 1996, a rein of terror that church leaders never effectively stopped.
They described Walsh as "probably the most notorious child sexual abuser" of the 46 cases they investigated covering the years 1975-2004. Walsh often performed as an Elvis impersonator in a traveling Catholic song-and-dance production popular with children called the "All Priests Show." The report found this increased his easy access to so many victims.
The fact-finders based their conclusions on previously confidential Dublin and Vatican documents and interviews with key church figures that took five years to gather. They found that Dublin Archdiocese leaders spent several years arguing over whether Walsh should be defrocked, sent to counselors in England, or assigned to duties that kept him away from children.
They finally expelled him from the priesthood at a 1993 canonical trial — the first in Ireland in three decades.
But Walsh successfully appealed the verdict to the Vatican, which ordered him to be sent for 10 years to a monastery instead.
The investigators documented how
Rome relented only after police finally opened a 1995 criminal probe into the mountain of abuse reports — including Walsh's recent sexual assault of a boy in a pub restroom following the funeral of the victim's grandfather.
BBC News - of course, of course! - has an even more extended, almost gloating account of Walsh's story, though not any more informative in terms of 'the Vatican' culprits:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-12020813 When they want to, journalists can easily identify exactly who in the Vatican was responsible for exactly what in this case. But perhaps it's not convenient for their purposes to name names, unless Cardinal Ratzinger was somehow involved????
P.S. AP has now filed a story extending its earlier report above considerably, with much more information about the Walsh case
hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_IRELAND_CATHOLIC_ABUSE?SITE=CACHI&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE...
Toward the very end, it indirectly identifies the Roman Rota as the Vatican office that had dealt with the case before John Paul II finally defrocked Walsh, and notes:
The report documented how the future pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, replied in January 1996 confirming that John Paul had expelled Walsh from the priesthood.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/12/2010 04:58]