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If you criticise certain religions in the UK and particularly in Scotland, you're instantly labelled a racist or a bigot.  Even if the criticism is based on facts and verifiable evidence and made in a reasonable, civilised fashion.

 

It's quite worrying. 

 

In a truly liberal and progressive society, everyone and everything should be open to just criticism.  

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Who knew about the abuse at St Benedict’s? The entire Catholic Church

At the child sexual abuse inquiry Stephen Bleach sees the truth emerge about the school where he and other boys were harmed. And it hits him: the instinct to shield paedophiles was endemic

Stephen Bleach

February 17 2019, 12:01am, The Sunday Times

Pope Francis is the head of a worldwide church that is still in denial about clerical child abusePope Francis is the head of a worldwide church that is still in denial about clerical child abuse

It looks more like a call centre than a courtroom. The low-ceilinged, windowless office space is overcrowded and overlit; it looks like the sort of nondescript workplace where insurance is sold or breakdown trucks dispatched. This is the south London home of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). Earlier this month the inquiry spent five days examining the appalling record of child abuse at Ealing Abbey, west London, and the school it ran, St Benedict’s — where I was a pupil in the 1970s.

While there, I was groped and beaten by Andrew Soper, a monk. Other boys suffered much worse at his hands: in 2017 Soper was convicted of 19 counts of child abuse, including buggery. After the trial I wrote an article for this newspaper about the school, detailing six decades of violent paedophilia by at least seven monks and teachers. That article left some loose ends. Apart from the abusers and their many victims, who at the school knew what was going on? And why didn’t they report it to the police?

In the IICSA’s humdrum hearing room, the answers slowly came creeping out. The hearings are not big on drama. Intentionally so: this is not a court, with theatrical cross-examinations by showboating barristers, but a dogged, bureaucratic search for the truth. There was personal testimony — including particularly harrowing recollections of abuse from one former pupil, known by the cypher RC-A8 — but much of the key evidence was contained in written witness statements, extracts from which were read out by the lawyers. Somehow the understatement made them all the more compelling.

It emerged that many, many people at the school and the abbey — teachers, support staff, heads, monks, abbots — knew what was happening to me and possibly hundreds of other young boys. The abuse was able to continue undetected, decade after decade, because the secretive culture of the Catholic Church valued abusers more than children.

The frightening part is that, as events at the IICSA hearings were to show, it still does.

The Catholic Church is good at saying sorry for child abuse. It’s had a lot of practice. At the start of the hearings, Ruth Henke QC, speaking for the abbey and the school, offered a “sincere, unreserved and profound apology” to the abused. As the full extent of the Ealing Abbey cover-up was revealed, I began to realise just how much it had to apologise for.

Harsha Mortemore, who worked in accounts and HR at St Benedict’s from 1996 to 2008, told the inquiry that she was warned by other staff not to leave her own four-year-old child in the company of two notorious paedophile monks who taught at the school. She revealed how one, David Pearce, would often take boys into his office, lock the door and cover the window with paper so nobody could see inside. When she alerted the then headmaster, Tony Dachs, she was told: “If you know what’s good for you, keep your head down and do your job.” A third monk, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told Mortemore that he “touched up” pupils because he “couldn’t deny liking little boys”.

Katherine Ravenscroft, a drama teacher at St Benedict’s in the 1990s, told the IICSA that rumours of abuse were rife. She tried to raise concerns about Pearce, but “to complain meant putting your job on the line. It felt a bit like the mafia” at the school, she said.

Ealing Abbey, which runs St Benedict’s, the school where boys were abused
Ealing Abbey, which runs St Benedict’s, the school where boys were abusedGETTY

A monk, Alban Nunn, also told the IICSA that rumours of abuse were common, and that he and two fellow monks were “very concerned about the way these complaints were being dealt with”. Suspecting Pearce of child abuse, he asked Martin Shipperlee, then the abbot, to act. Shipperlee replied: “What can I do? He is my friend.” True to his word, Shipperlee did nothing.

Hardly surprising. Detective Sergeant Gareth Morgan, a police officer who investigated the first cases that began to leak out, told the IICSA: “I always had the impression that Abbot Shipperlee’s first loyalty was towards the alleged perpetrators rather than the alleged victims.”

It goes on. Jeremy Harvey, a former pupil, spoke of brazen abuse in full view of whole classes of boys by another monk, Kevin Horsey, as far back as 1965. Chris Cleugh, headmaster of St Benedict’s in 2002-16, warned staff not to speak of abuse to anyone outside the school. Over hundreds of pages of testimony and statements, a picture emerged of rampant abuse and a determined effort to prevent the outside world from knowing about it.

At this point, you could reasonably ask: does it really matter? Some men, most of them now old or dead, abused some boys, who are now adults. Terrible, but it’s in the past, and the church is different now. Time to move on.

It does matter, because the church has become a haven for child abusers and their accomplices, from the dioceses right up to the Vatican. It fights tooth and nail to protect them, and it showed this yet again at the IICSA.

To see how, we have to go back a little. In 2011, with accusations against him mounting, Soper — the rapist who groped me and abused so many other boys — skipped police bail and went into hiding. Scotland Yard launched a hunt and asked the church for help.

The Archdiocese of Westminster (which was responsible for safeguarding at the abbey) provided a file on Soper in which, police said, there was “extensive, some might say excessive, redaction . . . one page was completely blanked out”.

Police also asked the Vatican if it knew where Soper was. The Vatican did not reply. In fact the Vatican — or at least some people within it — had a very good idea where he was. As was revealed at the IICSA, Soper had more than €400,000 stashed away in the Vatican bank, and during the five years he was in hiding he periodically contacted the Vatican, requesting transfers to an account he had set up with a bank in Kosovo. Despite repeated requests, the Vatican did not pass this information on to the police.

At one point Soper was even confident enough of Rome’s complicity to provide it with his home address in the town of Pec, Kosovo. Again, the Vatican did not inform the police.

The Vatican has questions to answer, both about the Soper hunt and about the Ealing abuse generally. Last November the IICSA asked the Pope’s ambassador to Britain — the apostolic nuncio, a post currently held by Archbishop Edward Adams — a number of questions. At first he did not respond. And during the week of the Ealing hearings earlier this month it was reported that the nuncio had said he was awaiting instructions from Rome. He has been accused of hiding behind his diplomatic immunity.

“They used their diplomatic status to run down the clock of the inquiry and avoid having to provide evidence,” says Richard Scorer, the specialist abuse lawyer at Slater and Gordon who is acting for seven of the Ealing abuse survivors. “It’s outrageous; it’s scandalous; it’s completely hypocritical. Pope Francis says he wants to root out child abuse, but then he effectively tries to sabotage an investigation into it.”

This bears closer examination. The IICSA is a judicial inquiry that can compel British citizens to give evidence. There is no more hierarchical organisation than the Catholic Church. The flock obeys the shepherd, and the shepherd’s message is clear: obstruct investigations; shield abusers.

At Ealing Abbey they’re still doing just that. The hearings revealed that the abbey is using its charitable funds to pay rent on a flat for the convicted, now released, abuser Pearce, even though he was defrocked in 2012. It has not sought approval for this from the Charity Commission. The abbey is thus in effect receiving a public subsidy to house an abuser. (It paid Pearce’s legal fees too, again from charitable funds.)

The IICSA also heard that a monk who cannot be named for legal reasons, but has been accused of multiple counts of abuse, still resides at Ealing Abbey. In theory he is subject to restrictions that should prevent him from coming into contact with children. Pearce was living at the abbey and subject to restrictions when he abused one of his victims. The abbot, Shipperlee, admitted to the IICSA that in reality “there weren’t any” restrictions. “There was no restriction on his movement . . . it’s not a very good control, and it doesn’t add up.”

In January 2018 Pope Francis said of a Chilean bishop accused of sheltering a notorious child abuser: “It is all slander. Is that clear?” The bishop has since resigned. In August the Pope refused to comment on a claim that he had personally helped to cover up allegations of sexual abuse against Theodore McCarrick, an American cardinal. McCarrick later resigned and the Vatican announced yesterday that he had been defrocked.

The abuse and cover-up at Ealing are simply a microcosm of the abuse and cover-up worldwide: the church, for all its protestations, is still in denial.

I wanted to speak to Ealing Abbey, St Benedict’s School and the Catholic Church itself about all this. After all, they deserve a chance to show that they have changed from the secretive organisations they once were. I asked Ealing Abbey for an interview. It flatly refused, but sent a prepared statement by Shipperlee, dated February 8, announcing his resignation and apologising for his “failings”. I called the nuncio. The man who picked up the phone at his official residence in Wimbledon actually laughed at me. When he’d recovered, he said: “No, no, no, absolutely not. The nuncio does not give interviews to anyone.”

My old school wouldn’t talk either. Instead, St Benedict’s directed me to a press release, a rehash of the opening statement by its lawyer at the IICSA, Ruth Henke. She had argued that the school had changed and reformed. It has been subject to a number of inspections in recent years, with no serious criticisms. It is now co-educational. A new child protection policy has been implemented. The governance has changed: where before it was run by a cabal of Ealing Abbey monks, it now has a proper governing body of 15, with only three monks. Where once many monks taught at the school (even though some had no teaching qualifications), now just one teaches full-time, and he has been vetted by the Disclosure and Barring Service. And, as Henke was at pains to point out: “There is now no physical access between the monastery and the school.”

That sentence is the most telling. It could well be that St Benedict’s has, finally, changed. I hope so. But if it has, it has done it not by embracing the church, but by escaping from it: by reducing the influence of the clergy, and indeed physically keeping them out. It says something when, in evidence designed to reassure a judicial inquiry it can keep children safe, a Catholic school solemnly assures the hearing that it has put up a fence to ward off monks.

I am still a Christian, because the teachings of Jesus still seem to me the most inspiring blueprint for living a good life. I have found my Christian home in the Church of England, but I have friends and family who are devoted to Catholicism, and they are the kindest people I know. The problem is not them; it is their church.

On Thursday Pope Francis will convene an unprecedented worldwide summit to consider child protection. The declared intention of the three-day assembly of 180 cardinals, bishops and others is to come up with a centralised, global administration to deal with allegations of abuse.

Presumably the clerics who deal with abuse will be separate from the clerics at the Vatican bank who shielded Soper. But they’ll be close by — the Vatican is a small place. Perhaps the nuncio to Great Britain can drop in for a gossip when he’s nipping back to Rome to take instructions from His Holiness. In any case, if and when the new policy is implemented, any British child who is abused by a cleric can take comfort in the fact that their suffering is being considered at the very highest level of the Catholic Church.

David Enright, a lawyer who acts for survivors of abuse, told me: “The issue is that child protection in England and Wales will be directed and decided in Rome. That cannot be acceptable.” And, as he pithily told the IICSA: “The Catholic Church is culturally and structurally incapable of addressing clerical abuse.”

When the summit has done its work, there will no doubt be an announcement of a new regime that will finally sort out the issue once and for all. If those drafting it are stuck for wording, they could just copy some from the church’s previous promises. “There is no place in the priesthood for those who would harm the young,” said Pope John Paul II in 2002. “We will absolutely exclude paedophiles from the sacred ministry,” said Pope Benedict XVI in 2008.

If you are a parent, all this boils down to one simple question: do you trust these people to take care of your child?

@stephenbleach

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When an organisation is as powerful as the RC church with such ia formidable lobbying infrastructure they effectively become untouchable.

 

I'd put them up in the top 3 or 4.

 

By rights, industrial scale child abuse and more should see it closed down.

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Catholic diocese of Oakland releases list of 45 men accused of sexual abuse

Associated Press in Oakland, California

Mon 18 Feb 2019 18.43 GMT

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Twenty of the men on the Oakland list were priests.  Twenty of the men on the Oakland list were priests. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

The Catholic diocese of Oakland has released the names of 45 priests, deacons and religious brothers who officials say are “credibly accused” of sexually abusing minors.

The San Francisco Chronicle says the list goes back to 1962, when the diocese was founded. None of the men are currently in the ministry. Of the 45 people named, 20 were priests.

Oakland is the latest in a series of dioceses across the country to release names amid a scandal involving pedophile priests and decades of church cover-ups.

Most of the listed abuse dates from the 1960s into the 1980s. Diocese officials say there have been no credible accusations of abuse since 1988, but acknowledge that the list may grow in the coming months.

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“I pray the public acknowledgment of the sinful actions on the part of some priests will help many of us to find healing and hope, to restore our trust in the Church, and to repair the damage caused to the reputation of so many good priests,” the Oakland bishop, Michael Barber, said in a letter.

The majority of those named have been previously identified through court filings or news articles. But five names have not been in the public domain until now, said Stephan Wilcox, chancellor of the Oakland diocese.

Wilcox said the diocese considered it a “living list”.

“This isn’t, ‘Oh, thank God we’ve got the list out. We’re done.’ This is now part of our process. And we know we have more work to do,” he told the newspaper.

Wilcox said he had turned over the list of names and information to the Alameda county district attorney to determine if prosecutions were warranted. Aside from the fact that many of the accused have died, Wilcox said statutes of limitations might be an issue.

Wilcox said he had spent several weeks reaching out to survivors but had not yet spoken to all of them.

“Survivors in general were pleased with the step but still think the church needs to do more,” he said.

Some wanted a direct apology from the church. Others said the diocese of Oakland needs to offer more services to victims.

In October, a law firm suing bishops for records on abuse released its own list of names of alleged abusers, totaling more than 200 clergy in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Jeff Anderson & Associates list included more names of clergy than those released by the diocese of San Jose, and named 95 tied to the diocese of Oakland – more than double the diocese’s own list.

Wilcox said the discrepancy lay in the standard used to qualify for a credible allegation.

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As the conference on clerical sex abuse opens, The Times' correspondent in Rome observes:

 

In the run-up to the summit, two Catholic cardinals have blamed gay priests for the sex abuse of minors in the church.

In an open letter Raymond Burke, an American cardinal, and Walter Brandmüller, a German cardinal, alleged that sex abuse in the church was “only part of a much greater crisis”, adding that a “plague” of homosexuality among the clergy was “protected by a climate of complicity and a conspiracy of silence”.

A book recently published by the French journalist Frédéric Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican, reported a claim that 80 per cent of Vatican priests were homosexual.

 

Cardinal Burke has emerged as a champion of Catholic conservatives who loathe the Pope’s liberal tolerance of homosexuality, and has allied with Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, to promote back-to-basics Catholicism.

 

The Pope fought back after the letter appeared, telling a group of pilgrims yesterday that those who did nothing but criticise the Catholic church were “friends, cousins and relatives of the devil”.

Noting the high incidence of male victims of sex abuse in the church, conservatives have pinned the blame on gay priests and handed responsibility to the Pope, who famously asked “Who am I to judge?” when asked about homosexuals.

However, Peter Saunders, one of the victims of abuse arriving in Rome from Britain to lobby for stronger action, said that homosexuality was irrelevant. “It’s a red herring — sexuality has no bearing on these crimes,” he said. He was backed by Martel, although both men claimed that as a result of living in fear of being exposed as gay, many priests were reluctant to report colleagues who abused minors.

Martel has alleged a high incidence of homosexuality among the conservative backers of Cardinal Burke, telling The Times: “The more homophobic a priest is, the greater chance he himself will be homosexual.”

Rather than prompting gay witch-hunts, Mr Saunders said that the church needed to institute a universal law enforcing zero tolerance on abusers and the bishops who cover up for them. “If a priest is found guilty he must be dismissed from the priesthood,” he said.

The summit is set to create task forces to put pressure on bishops’ conferences that have yet to draw up anti-abuse policies. Only half have policies approved by the Vatican, despite having been told to write them eight years ago.

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cardinals-blame-sex-abuse-on-plague-of-homosexual-priests-7wcx3cgqs

 

Mr Steven Bannon, in alliance with narrow minded, bigoted Catholic prelates; whodda thunk it? 

 

What is the collective noun for mountebanks?

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47343458

Vatican abuse summit: Cardinal says files were destroyed

Cardinal Reinhard Marx speaking in Poland in August 2018Image copyrightGETTY IMAGES Image captionCardinal Marx called for greater transparency within the Church

A senior Roman Catholic Cardinal has said that files documenting child sexual abuse were destroyed, allowing offences to continue.

German Cardinal Reinhard Marx told a conference on paedophilia in the Church that procedures to prosecute offenders "were deliberately not complied with".

"The rights of victims were effectively trampled underfoot," he said.

The unprecedented four-day summit has brought together 190 bishops from across the world.

The Catholic Church has faced growing pressure amid long-running cases of sexual abuse of children and young men, with victims accusing it of failing to tackle the issue.

"Files that could have documented the terrible deeds and named those responsible were destroyed, or not even created," Cardinal Marx told the third day of the conference in the Vatican. "Instead of the perpetrators, the victims were regulated and silence imposed on them."

He urged greater transparency in the Catholic Church's response to the issue, adding: "It is not transparency which damages the church but rather the acts of abuse committed, the lack of transparency or the ensuing cover up."

p071j1v0.jpg
 
Media captionBrigitte, a survivor of child sex abuse by a chaplain, explains why she is ready to speak now

On Friday, Cardinal Marx - who is one of nine advisers to the pope, known as the C9 - met survivors of abuse and members of the global organisation Ending Clergy Abuse.

Hundreds of victims have protested outside the Vatican, calling for justice and zero tolerance over the issue.

The conference was called for by Pope Francis, who earlier this month admitted that abuse of nuns by members of the clergy had included sexual slavery.

Last week, a former Catholic cardinal was defrocked over historical sexual abuse allegations.

 
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Brutal and dogmatic, George Pell waged war on sex – even as he abused children

 
David Marr

This prince of the church was a superb political operator. Listing sins and condemning sinners kept him in the news 

 

Tue 26 Feb 2019 01.56 GMTLast modified on Tue 26 Feb 2019 02.47 GMT

 

 
 
Pla was big on sex. Inside and outside the church, George Pell built his career preaching the sex rules of his faith. IntransimadPell a celebrity. Standing up to the zeitgeist, demanding obedience, listing sins and condemning sinners kept him in the news.

He was always there with a crisp, dogmatic grab. Universal innocence? “A dangerous myth.” Original sin? “Alive and flourishing.” Drug taking? “Wrong and sinful.” IVF for single mothers? “We are on the verge of creating a whole new generation of stolen children.” That created a most satisfying uproar.

 

He accused his own church of being “frightened to put forward the hard teachings of Christ”. That he never hesitated earned him few friends, many enemies and high office.

As an archbishop in Melbourne and a cardinal in Sydney Pell poured his energies into combating contraception, homosexuality, genetic engineering, divorce, equal marriage and abortion.

He was particularly brutal to homosexuals. When a wreath was laid outside St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne in memory of gay students in Catholic schools driven to suicide, Pell’s disdain was absolute.

“I haven’t got good statistics on the reasons for those suicides,” he declared. “If they are connected with homosexuality, it is another reason to be discouraging people going in that direction. Homosexual activity is a much greater health hazard than smoking.”

The correctives that rained down on him from secular authorities on smoking, Aids and youth suicide left Pell unchastened. He laid the blame for their troubles at the door of homosexuals themselves. He reasoned that if they didn’t keep recruiting “new members to the subculture”, there would be no gay youths to commit suicide.

He kept it simple and brutal.

 

Pell in silhouette at World Youth Day 2008 in Sydney

 ‘Australia never shared Rome’s high opinion of George Pell.’ Photograph: Kristian Dowling/Getty Images

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Pell was the son of a Ballarat publican who ran an SP betting operation from the front bar of the Royal Oak. The boy was picked as a leader early. He studied in Rome, was ordained in St Peter’s and, after taking a doctorate at Oxford, came back to Ballarat, which was a hellhole of paedophile abuse.

Miraculously, he survived his years as a priest on his home turf without ever noticing enough to raise the alarm. This was good for his career. He would admit years later he saw a few things and heard a few rumours but didn’t ask questions. “It was a sad story and of not much interest to me.”

Australia never shared Rome’s high opinion of George Pell. That such an uncongenial and at times embarrassing figure was appointed auxiliary bishop of Melbourne in 1987 distressed many of the faithful in his home country. But these were the early days of John Paul II’s papacy, when such men were being rewarded around the world. A mighty church was finding its feet again.

Pell did nothing to curb paedophile priests in his years as auxiliary bishop, though the predations of some of the worst were being reported to him. He didn’t know enough, he would claim, and he didn’t have the authority to act. Despite the pleas of parents and teachers, Pell left mad Father Searson, toting a gun and terrifying children, in charge of the primary school in Doveton.

 

If you wanted to block inquiries into the abuse of children for as long as humanly possible, Pell was your man

His elevation to archbishop shocked Melbourne Catholics. But he didn’t need to be loved by them. He didn’t need their votes. His authority came from Rome, where he sat on a number of councils policing church doctrine. These were the years the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith worked up fresh hard teachings to revile homosexuals.

Pell earned his stripes in the war on sex.

He was a member of the Pontifical Council for the Family, which warned the governments of the world not to give rights to gays for to do so was to “deny a psychological problem which makes homosexuality against the social fabric … ”.

By this time, Pell had moved to Sydney and, in due course, became a cardinal. The story of his rise makes no sense without acknowledging that this prince of the church was also a fine administrator and a superb political operator.

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Pell was as at home in the big end of town. He had a magical capacity to win money from governments.

 

Pell is seen on a screen giving evidence to Australia’s royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse via videolink from Rome

 ‘An awkward figure in the witness box’: Pell gives evidence to Australia’s royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse via videolink from Rome. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

If you wanted to build a network of Catholic universities, Pell was your man. If you wanted to save hundreds of millions of dollars that victims of abuse might win in the courts, Pell was your man. If you wanted to block official inquiries into the abuse of children by clerics for as long as humanly possible, Pell was your man.

When the inquiry came – the first national inquiry in the world – its examination of the faults of all the faiths was forensic and damning. The Catholic church came out of the royal commission into the institutional responses to child abuse covered in shame.

Pell gave evidence several times. He cuts an awkward figure in a witness box. Answering questions is not his natural metier. But the commissioners only looked at Pell’s sins of omission, his failures over the years to protect children, to discipline priests and to comfort the abused.

They did not revisit the allegations that, as a seminarian, he had abused boys at a camp on Phillip Island. In his early days as archbishop of Sydney, Pell had to stand aside for a few months while the church examined the claims of one of those former altar boys.

The verdict of the retired judge was: not proven but not dismissed.

The commissioners grilled Pell instead on the record of the church. He admitted faults. He expressed regrets. He boasted the work of his Melbourne Response in addressing the needs of victims. He made only a grudging admission that celibacy might be “a factor” in the abuse of children.

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Pell stood for a deeper truth: the sacred mission of not having priestly sex at all.

What hymns of praise this man has sung to that over the years. No sex is sacred. No sex is an offering to Christ. No sex proves our first love is to God and not one another. No sex releases energy and spirit for the service of man. No sex leaves the heart undivided. No sex makes each priest another Christ called to spiritual paternity through the sacraments.

That sort of stuff impressed John Paul II and Benedict XVI immensely, but Francis takes a rather more jaundiced view. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden,” he said. “In many cases, a double life.”

The world can now know that a little over 20 years ago, in Pell’s first months as archbishop of Melbourne, this scourge of sex was forcing choirboys to suck his penis.

 David Marr is a Guardian Australia journalist and author of The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell

 
Edited by BEARGER
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On 22/02/2019 at 11:10, Uilleam said:

As the conference on clerical sex abuse opens, The Times' correspondent in Rome observes:

 

In the run-up to the summit, two Catholic cardinals have blamed gay priests for the sex abuse of minors in the church.

In an open letter Raymond Burke, an American cardinal, and Walter Brandmüller, a German cardinal, alleged that sex abuse in the church was “only part of a much greater crisis”, adding that a “plague” of homosexuality among the clergy was “protected by a climate of complicity and a conspiracy of silence”.

A book recently published by the French journalist Frédéric Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican, reported a claim that 80 per cent of Vatican priests were homosexual.

 

Cardinal Burke has emerged as a champion of Catholic conservatives who loathe the Pope’s liberal tolerance of homosexuality, and has allied with Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist, to promote back-to-basics Catholicism.

 

The Pope fought back after the letter appeared, telling a group of pilgrims yesterday that those who did nothing but criticise the Catholic church were “friends, cousins and relatives of the devil”.

Noting the high incidence of male victims of sex abuse in the church, conservatives have pinned the blame on gay priests and handed responsibility to the Pope, who famously asked “Who am I to judge?” when asked about homosexuals.

However, Peter Saunders, one of the victims of abuse arriving in Rome from Britain to lobby for stronger action, said that homosexuality was irrelevant. “It’s a red herring — sexuality has no bearing on these crimes,” he said. He was backed by Martel, although both men claimed that as a result of living in fear of being exposed as gay, many priests were reluctant to report colleagues who abused minors.

Martel has alleged a high incidence of homosexuality among the conservative backers of Cardinal Burke, telling The Times: “The more homophobic a priest is, the greater chance he himself will be homosexual.”

Rather than prompting gay witch-hunts, Mr Saunders said that the church needed to institute a universal law enforcing zero tolerance on abusers and the bishops who cover up for them. “If a priest is found guilty he must be dismissed from the priesthood,” he said.

The summit is set to create task forces to put pressure on bishops’ conferences that have yet to draw up anti-abuse policies. Only half have policies approved by the Vatican, despite having been told to write them eight years ago.

 

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cardinals-blame-sex-abuse-on-plague-of-homosexual-priests-7wcx3cgqs

 

Mr Steven Bannon, in alliance with narrow minded, bigoted Catholic prelates; whodda thunk it? 

 

What is the collective noun for mountebanks?

A heap of mountebanks?

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