I applaud the fearlessness it must have taken for the Irish bishop who recently turned over a 1997 letter from the Vatican to the Irish Broadcasters RTF, thinking he'd face eternal damnation and excommunication for his act.
This letter was signed by the late Archbishop, Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, and addressed to Ireland's Catholic bishops, telling them not to report all suspected child abuse cases to the police.
Finally a Catholic bishop bravely stepped forward to report what has been known all too long: that the Vatican had been protecting pedophile clergy. I'm sure this bishop had sleepless nights before he found the fortitude to do the right thing. One must wonder how many other bishops and members of the Vatican's hierarchy are still having sleepless nights, while experiencing tumultuous unrest.
David Clohessy, director The Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said, "This may be the most devastating revelation yet showing Vatican complicity in child sex crimes and cover ups. It's bad enough that Catholic officials have a secretive, slow and corrupt internal process to deal with child predators. But it's worse when Catholic officials thwart an open, proven and effective external process to deal with child predators."
As a former orphan and survivor of devastating clergy abuse, I appeal to U.S. Bishops and members of the Vatican's hierarchy to also find the courage to come forward and disclose cover ups and the names of predator clergy and expunge the secrecy.
The afterword in my memoir, The Unbreakable Child, was written by William F. McMurry, the expert legal advocate for abuse victims. McMurry's powerful afterword, below, supports the specifics stated in the bishop's letter and addresses the Church's secrecy.
In 1922 the Vatican sealed the fate of thousands of American children when it issued a secret written order requiring every Roman Catholic Bishop to keep the sexual abuse of children by clergy a Pontifical Secret. This secret decree, known as The Pontifical Secret, also made it a crime for priests to commit sexual abuse of minors.Everyone with knowledge of child sexual abuse accusations, including bishops and archbishops, was forbidden from telling anyone outside of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. This Congregation, or administrative department of the Holy See, was charged with the responsibility of prosecuting such crimes within the Roman Catholic Church. This order, known as Supremae S. Congregationis S. Officii, is the official legislative text issued by the Congregation of the Holy Office and was approved by Pope Pius XI. The document is a reflection and written manifestation of the longstanding policies and directives of the Holy See regarding clerical sexual abuse, which impose this extreme level of secrecy not only on those within the Church who were to prosecute such cases but also on the document itself.
In 1964 the Vatican issued Crimen Sollicitationis (its title refers to the crime of solicitation of penitents in the confessional). While virtually identical to Supremae, this order replaced the 1922 directive and required each bishop to take an oath of secrecy under penalty of eternal damnation and excommunication.However, by the year 1964 virtually every one of the United States had criminal laws in place making it a crime to fail to report to law enforcement authorities known or suspected child sexual abuse. Notwithstanding the criminal laws of their state, the bishops feared eternal damnation more than they feared the unlikely prosecution for their failure to report abuse. These Vatican directives explain the choreographed movement of abusive priests from one parish to the next in an effort to avoid scandal and to fulfill their oath of secrecy.
When Kim was placed in the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth Orphanage in bucolic Anchorage, Kentucky (1960) there was no chance her abuse or the serial sexual and physical abuse of hundreds of other children would ever be discovered outside the institution. Kim's story is a grim but consistent account of the young lives of countless Catholic children unfortunate enough to be abandoned by society. The Vatican's doctrine of secrecy and the systematic silencing of those who would have reported these crimes have created an economic burden on our society...
The Vatican's secrecy is the Roman Catholic Church's cannonball cartouche that has been used to protect serial predator clergy who've committed unspeakable acts against the world's most precious gifts -- our children. Our children should never be silenced to protect the secrets of a harmful culture.
Follow Kim Michele Richardson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/writernwaiting
Vatican warned Irish bishops not to report abuse - Yahoo! News
Vatican told bishops to cover up sex abuse | World news | The Observer
Catholic sex abuse cases - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pope 'is at centre of Vatican abuse cover-up', says Hans Küng ...
Cardinal accuses Vatican official of abuse cover-up | Reuters
Abuse scandal in U.S., Italy taints papacy - World news - World ...
33rd Degree Secrets Published to Help Awaken World from Long Nightmare
http://www.theopenpress.com/index.php?a=press&id=93646
The one thing that Rome has feared the most over the centuries is someone finding proof of their lies and then being able to make it widely understood. The Vatican's worst nightmare now unfolds...
Why they have so far enjoyed such immunity from the criminal court system and paying taxes, especially considering the amount of interference they have injected into our lawmaking process (health care debate - Bishops' conference, anyone?) is beyond my capacity to understand. How the District Attorneys and Attorney Generals, not to mention the IRS have let them get off scot free for all of their crimes is truly mind boggling - and disheartening.
Fact-checking, not only is it your friend, it seperates you from Fax News.
"Over the pope as expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there stands one's own conscience which must be obeyed before all else, even if necessary against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority. This emphasis on the individual, whose conscience confronts him with a supreme and ultimate tribunal, and one which in the last resort is beyond the claim of external social groups, even the official church, also establishes a principle in opposition to increasing totalitarianism". (Joseph Ratzinger in: Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II , Vol. V., pg. 134 H. Vorgrimler, New York, Herder & Herder1967).
The letter below is ample proof that the secular world be damned, that the civil authorities be damned, and any semblence of what we think of as God/Jesus be damned. They ruled for thousands of years.
It will be interesting to see what the USA government does about this church, coupled with this letter. Something or nothing? And what about parishioners, and clergy and nuns?
The leadership in the Church is a brotherhood protecting each other, as you said, which facilitated the pedophiles among themselves to rape and abuse 1000's children for decades. Far from acting on their individual consciences, the clergy ignored their internal moral compass. Their actions were motivated instead by cowardly fear of the Church losing power and prestige, paying out money in lawsuits, losing job security, and fear of damnation from not following Church commands to keep quiet. That the bishops and popes did not follow their consciences is the point – in following ecclesiastical authority they relinquished their own morality and committed terrible crimes.
Ratzinger said in his comment written years ago at Vatican II that conscience comes first - before the Pope, before the church’s rules, and before the laws in a totalitarian state. If those entities ask you to commit a crime or to do wrong, don’t do it. Of course we all know now his insights were ignored, even by himself.
http://www.bishop-accountability.org/Vatican/Documents/1984_01_31_Oddi_to_Moreno_Priest_Files_R.pdf
It's more than a bit twisted to imagine a God who would select out a swath of men and women to enjoy cruelty, vice, and debauchery under the protection of a cross, a chalice, a habit, and cute little white collar.
The only cure for this disease is daylight. So, let the letters roll in.
But having met many of the Australian Catholic Church's most senior powerbrokers in the last 12 months, I think it is more complicated than that.
In person, these vicious, deceitful, desperately ambitious old men are so totally devoid of human emotion that it is impossible not to conclude they share some pretty serious personality disorders.
Not just the general sexual and emotional immaturity common to the majority of clergy, especially the sexual offenders.
It is almost a job requirement for senior church figures that they be both a narcissist and a psychopath. I'm sure many also show signs of paranoid, borderline, obsessive compulsive and histrionic personality disorders.
So they are probably incapable of something as human as belief in God. Most of those who make it to Pope consider themselves to BE God.
As for hell, if they think about such issues at all except as a tool to manipulate the gullible, they are probably convinced that everything they do is right purely because they do it. And as long as they tick all the superficial Catholic boxes, going to Mass and confession, and whatever the latest rule is about meat and other such nonsense, they could be sure of a hero's welcome into heaven, if such a place were to exist, regardless of how obscene and inhumane their behaviour.
Desmond Connell, an archbishop, a professor of philosophy, now a retired cardinal, a finger-wagging moralist; the man who, as head of the philosophy department at UCD for years, was the Church’s man in a key post. Connell, the moralist, told the investigation commission that it was okay to lie, provided that one had a ‘‘mental reservation’’. All right, he may not have said outright that it was okay to lie, but he did say it was okay to convey an untruth and do so deliberately.
This was his explanation: ‘‘Well, the general teaching about mental reservation is that you are not permitted to tell a lie. On the other hand, you may be put in a position where you have to answer, and there may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression, realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be - permitting that to happen, not willing that it happened, that would be lying. ‘It really is a matter of trying to deal with extraordinarily difficult matters that may arise in social relations where people may ask questions that you simply cannot answer. Everybody knows that this kind of thing is liable to happen. So mental reservation is, in a sense, away of answering without lying."
Barbara Blaine, SNAP President, 312 399 4747