Vatican axed trial for priest accused by deaf boys

[Socrtease]

You'd know about the law better than anybody else here. Am I correct in assuming that, unlike with diplomats, there is no exemption under the law for clergy or other church officials from criminal apprehension and prosecution? Of course, obtaining the necessary evidence that would stand up in a court of law may be difficult given the closed, secretive nature of the organization.

The law is no different for clergy than for the rest of us, except as it applies to confession. The clergy is still exempted from having to report pedophiles to the authorities if the molestation was learned of during confession or religious consultation. This is different from Teachers, social workers, physicians, foster parents, police officers, firefighters and other professionals. That is where the catholic church has made claims of innocense, even when more than one priest knew of the molestation. The Catholic church has knowingly kept pedophiles as parish priests by transferring them to new parishes. For years, priests were sent to the Jemez Springs New Mexico to The Congregation of the Servants of the Paraclete. After spending several hard months in the beautiful forest retreat they were sent to other parishes to molest again, even though in the 50's the church knew that pedophile priests were not curable. The retreat in Jemez Springs was known as Camp Ped even by priests that worked there.

Here is an article about it.

http://www.bishop-accountability.org...ll_CampPed.htm

[China Apologist]

pedophile priests were not curable

By current knowledge.

[Socrtease]

By current knowledge.

It's a brain disorder. Medication does not help. They are a danger to our children and should be locked up

[China Apologist]

What the fuck is a brain disorder? Alzheimers?

It's not organic in nature, and I am sure one day we will know how to treat it. The problem was psychologists would say "I can treat that!" with just about everything, when in actuality they could treat practically nothing. Even the things they can treat today, they usually don't have any clue why their methods work. I think Psychology is eventually going to be replaced by neurology.

[China Apologist]

Anyway, the pope should resign. If he wants his church to have any integrity left at all, he needs to get his ass out of the chair, after firing all the priests and bishops and cardinals and everyone who was involved.

[Thorn]

What the fuck is a brain disorder? Alzheimers?

It's not organic in nature, and I am sure one day we will know how to treat it. The problem was psychologists would say "I can treat that!" with just about everything, when in actuality they could treat practically nothing. Even the things they can treat today, they usually don't have any clue why their methods work. I think Psychology is eventually going to be replaced by neurology.

It may well be organic, we don't know yet. These people are predators, pure and simple, and sociopathic as well. There is evidence for different brain functioning among sociopaths, and not all express that condition in the same way. Medications may help many organic brain disorders, but nothing works if you haven't specifically identified what you're targeting.

[Damocles]

Absolutely. It's even worse because it's not only power but the priest or teacher is in a position of trust.

Yeah, that's the word I was looking for "Person of Trust"...

Priests hold the ultimate position of trust in a religious person's life, these people should get three times the punishment of even a normal pedophile and those people should be branded and set into gen-pop... The church absolutely has a responsibility to report and turn over every Priest who committed these crimes against children.

[AssHatZombie]

Yeah, that's the word I was looking for "Person of Trust"...

Priests hold the ultimate position of trust in a religious person's life, these people should get three times the punishment of even a normal pedophile and those people should be branded and set into gen-pop... The church absolutely has a responsibility to report and turn over every Priest who committed these crimes against children.

Right. And in lieu of those actions, society has a responsibility to destroy the catholic church.

[Damocles]

Right. And in lieu of those actions, society has a responsibility to destroy the catholic church.

Works for me. All they appear to be doing is giving NAMBLA a face of trust. I'm sorry 3D, but it is simply disgusting to have the leadership of your church doing what these people did.

[Socrtease]

Works for me. All they appear to be doing is giving NAMBLA a face of trust. I'm sorry 3D, but it is simply disgusting to have the leadership of your church doing what these people did.

It is not just disgusting, it is reprehensible.

I don't understand why it is that even the Catholics can't get behind a demand of accountability. Let's just for a second, pretend that a hypothetical Secretary of Education was at an elementary school doing a photo op, sometime during his visit, he molests a child at the school. Now, lets imagine that other members of the president's cabinet find out about it and the Secretary of State writes an internal memo urging everyone keep it quiet and the POTUS approves of this. Then the story breaks sometime into the President's second term. I cannot imagine anyone but the most hackish of political hacks defending the president in the way so many Catholics are now defending the Pope and other members of their church leadership. It should be the same reaction.

[Thorn]

You're going to love this one! Now the Pope's personal "preacher" is comparing the criticism of the Catholic church over the abuse to antisemitism and the violence suffered by Jews during WWII.

Pope's preacher: Abuse critique like anti-Semitism
By VICTOR L. SIMPSON, Associated Press Writer Victor L. Simpson, Associated Press Writer
11 mins ago

VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI's personal preacher on Friday likened accusations against the pope and the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal to "collective violence" suffered by the Jews.

The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa said in a Good Friday homily with the pope listening in St. Peter's Basilica that a Jewish friend wrote to him to say the accusations remind him of the "more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism."

The 82-year-old pontiff looked weary as he sat near the central altar during the early evening prayer service a few before he was scheduled to take part in a candlelit Way of the Cross procession near the Colosseum which commemorates Christ's suffering before his crucifixion.

Thousands of Holy Week pilgrims were in St. Peter's Square as the church defends itself against accusations that Benedict had a role in covering up sex abuses cases.

The "coincidence" that Passover falls in the same week as Easter celebrations, said Cantalamessa, a Franciscan who offers reflections at Vatican Easter and Advent services, prompted him to think about Jews.

"They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms," the preacher said.

Quoting from the letter from the friend, who wasn't identified by Cantalamessa, the preacher said that he was following '`'with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful of the whole world.'"

"The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism,'" Cantalamessa said his friend wrote him.

In the sermon, he referred to the sexual abuse of children by clergy, saying "unfortunately, not a few elements of the clergy are stained" by the violence." But Cantalamessa said he didn't want to dwell on the abuse of children, saying "there is sufficient talk outside of here."

Benedict didn't speak after the homily, but, in a tired-sounding voice, chanted prayers. He leaned up to remove a red cloth covering a tall crucifix, which was passed to him by an aide. He took off his shoes, knelt and prayed before the cross. "

Talk about denial! I'm just shaking my head in disbelief.

[AssHatZombie]

It is not just disgusting, it is reprehensible.

I don't understand why it is that even the Catholics can't get behind a demand of accountability. Let's just for a second, pretend that a hypothetical Secretary of Education was at an elementary school doing a photo op, sometime during his visit, he molests a child at the school. Now, lets imagine that other members of the president's cabinet find out about it and the Secretary of State writes an internal memo urging everyone keep it quiet and the POTUS approves of this. Then the story breaks sometime into the President's second term. I cannot imagine anyone but the most hackish of political hacks defending the president in the way so many Catholics are now defending the Pope and other members of their church leadership. It should be the same reaction.

They're all literally brainwashed.

[AssHatZombie]

It is like anti-semitism. Legitimate criticism about elitism, bad behavior, and feelings of entitlement are dismissed as criminal thoughts.

[Socrtease]

Pathetic, where are the Catholics here to decry this as the complete bullshit it is.

[Socrtease]

The Pope Is Not Above the Law.
The crimes within the Catholic Church demand justice.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, March 29, 2010, at 1:53 PM ET

One by one, as I predicted, the pathetic excuses of Joseph Ratzinger's apologists evaporate before our eyes. It was said until recently that when the Rev. Peter Hullermann was found to be a vicious pederast in 1980, the man who is now pope had no personal involvement in his subsequent transfer to his own diocese or in his later unimpeded career as a rapist and a molester. But now we find that the psychiatrist to whom the church turned for "therapy" was adamant that Hullermann never be allowed to go near children ever again. We also find that Ratzinger was one of those to whom the memo about Hullermann's transfer was actually addressed. All attempts to place the blame on a loyal subordinate, Ratzinger's vicar general, the Rev. Gerhard Gruber, have predictably failed. According to a recent report, "the transfer of Father Hullermann from Essen would not have been a routine matter, experts said." Either that—damning enough in itself—or it perhaps would have been a routine matter, which is even worse. Certainly the pattern—of finding another parish with fresh children for the priest to assault—is the one that has become horribly "routine" ever since and became standard practice when Ratzinger became a cardinal and was placed in charge of the church's global response to clerical pederasty.

So now a new defense has had to be hastily improvised. It is argued that, during his time as archbishop of Munich and Freising, Germany, Ratzinger was more preoccupied with doctrinal questions than with mere disciplinary ones. Of course, of course: The future pope had his eyes fixed on ethereal and divine matters and could not be expected to concern himself with parish-level atrocities. This cobbled-up apologia actually repays a little bit of study. What exactly were these doctrinal issues? Well, apart from punishing a priest who celebrated a Mass at an anti-war demonstration—which incidentally does seem to argue for a "hands-on" approach to individual clergymen—Ratzinger's chief concern appears to have been that of first communion and first confession. Over the previous decade, it had become customary in Bavaria to subject small children to their first communion at a tender age but to wait a year until they made their first confession. It was a matter of whether they were old enough to understand. Enough of this liberalism, said Ratzinger, the first confession should come in the same year as the first communion. One priest, the Rev. Wilfried Sussbauer, reports that he wrote to Ratzinger expressing misgivings about this and received "an extremely biting letter" in response.

So it seems that 1) Ratzinger was quite ready to take on individual priests who gave him any trouble, and 2) he was very firm on one crucial point of doctrine: Get them young. Tell them in their infancy that it is they who are the sinners. Instill in them the necessary sense of guilt. This is not at all without relevance to the disgusting scandal into which the pope has now irretrievably plunged the church he leads. Almost every episode in this horror show has involved small children being seduced and molested in the confessional itself. To take the most heart-rending cases to have emerged recently, namely the torment of deaf children in the church-run schools in Wisconsin and Verona, Italy, it is impossible to miss the calculated manner in which the predators used the authority of the confessional in order to get their way. And again the identical pattern repeats itself: Compassion is to be shown only to the criminals. Ratzinger's own fellow clergy in Wisconsin wrote to him urgently—by this time he was a cardinal in Rome, supervising the global Catholic cover-up of rape and torture—beseeching him to remove the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, who had comprehensively wrecked the lives of as many as 200 children who could not communicate their misery except in sign language. And no response was forthcoming until Father Murphy himself appealed to Ratzinger for mercy—and was granted it.

For Ratzinger, the sole test of a good priest is this: Is he obedient and discreet and loyal to the traditionalist wing of the church? We have seen this in his other actions as pope, notably in the lifting of the excommunication of four bishops who were members of the so-called Society of St. Pius X, that group of extreme-right-wing schismatics founded by Father Marcel Lefebvre and including the Holocaust-denying Richard Williamson. We saw it when he was a cardinal, defending the cultish and creepy Legion of Christ, whose fanatical leader managed to father some children as well as to shield the molestation of many more. And we see it today, when countless rapists and pederasts are being unmasked. One of those accused in the Verona deaf-school case is the late archbishop of the city, Giuseppe Carraro. Next up, if our courts can find time, will be the Rev. Donald McGuire, a serial offender against boys who was also the confessor and "spiritual director" for Mother Teresa. (He, too, found the confessional to be a fine and private place and made extensive use of it.)

This is what makes the scandal an institutional one and not a matter of delinquency here and there. The church needs and wants control of the very young and asks their parents to entrust their children to certain "confessors," who until recently enjoyed enormous prestige and immunity. It cannot afford to admit that many of these confessors, and their superiors, are calcified sadists who cannot believe their luck. Nor can it afford to admit that the church regularly abandoned the children and did its best to protect and sometimes even promote their tormentors. So instead it is whiningly and falsely asserting that all charges against the pope—none of them surfacing except from within the Catholic community—are part of a plan to embarrass him.

This hasn't been true so far, but it ought to be true from now on. This grisly little man is not above or outside the law. He is the titular head of a small state. We know more and more of the names of the children who were victims and of the pederasts who were his pets. This is a crime under any law (as well as a sin), and crime demands not sickly private ceremonies of "repentance," or faux compensation by means of church-financed payoffs, but justice and punishment. The secular authorities have been feeble for too long but now some lawyers and prosecutors are starting to bestir themselves. I know some serious men of law who are discussing what to do if Benedict tries to make his proposed visit to Britain in the fall. It's enough. There has to be a reckoning, and it should start now.