Landmark Catholic Report Admits Celibacy Could Cause Child Abuse

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A group of Australian archbishops admitted that obligatory celibacy could’ve contributed to child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, becoming the first-ever Catholic institution to acknowledge the potential link publicly. What used to be mostly voiced by the critics of the church has now been, albeit cautiously, formulated by its leaders. The report, released on Friday by the Truth, Justice, and Healing Council, which includes the Archbishops of Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Canberra, and Adelaide, conceded, “Obligatory celibacy may also have contributed to abuse in some circumstances”. The council based its conclusion on two years of research. It held eight hearings, heard testimony from 50 witnesses, and examined 160,000 church documents. According to The Australian, the council’s chief executive, Francis Sullivan, said, “We’ve got to ask the question about whether celibacy was an added and an unbearable strain for some. It doesn’t mean that celibacy needs to be eradicated… let’s not turn the church on its head… but we’re saying you can’t have an honest and open discussion about the future without having an honest and open discussion about celibacy. We’re placing celibacy on the table”. The report says “psychosexual training” for priests could be enough to prevent child abuse in church.

The Australian study is in sharp contrast to American research in 2011, which found no connection between celibacy and child abuse. That report, commissioned by the American Catholic church and carried out by the New-York based John Jay College of Criminal Justice, stated, “The rise in abuse cases was influenced by social factors in society generally”. Critics then questioned if a study commissioned by the church and based on data provided by the church could actually be trusted. The Australian branch is being overwhelmingly self-critical in its report, which focused on what clerics did wrong to let abuse happen. Sullivan said it was important that the church “had the guts” to acknowledge it abused its power, including in dealing with sex scandals. The Australian report said, “Church leaders, over many decades, seemed to turn a blind eye, either instinctively or deliberately, to the abuse happening within their diocese or religious order, protecting the institution, rather than caring for the child”. Victims of child sexual abuse are sceptical that the report can actually change the church’s attitude to the issue, citing previous difficulties in trying to attain justice. Nicky Davis from the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests told ABC*, “The redress in a lot of cases was absolutely disgraceful and very very devious, and done in such a way to exploit the vulnerability and the damage that survivors had already suffered”.

* Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Ex-Holy See ambassador faces first Vatican child sex abuse trial

UN committee on torture slams Vatican over child sex abuse

2% of Catholic priests are paedophiles: Pope

12 December 2014

RT

http://rt.com/news/213755-catholic-celibacy-child-abuse/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=aplication_chrome&utm_campaign=chrome

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30 May 2014. Vatican Crock o’ Shit… But DO Read It… It’s Curial White Propaganda

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I’d like you to read something. It’s “white propaganda”. “Black propaganda” is utter falsehood… it’s usually engaged in by egregious sources such as Radio Liberty and Eurasia.net (both Langley fronts). “White Propaganda” takes bits n’ pieces of the truth, cobbles them together, but doesn’t give you “the rest of the story”… it’s much more subtle and harder to fight than utter hokum, as it does use truthful material (but in such a way as to bring one to a false and crank conclusion). The piece I’m going to link to is from AsiaNews. Firstly, ask, “Who’s paying the bills?” Once you know who sponsors a particular journalistic outlet, you can fairly well figure out its orientation. Everyone knows that the CIA funds Radio Liberty, so, everybody knows that it’s a lying crock o’ shit. AsiaNews is a Vatican-funded propaganda outlet, its purpose is to put out the Vatican’s spin on the news. That is, everything on it has the purpose of spreading the Vatican’s agenda. That’s to say, all of its articles push the Vatican party line of the moment (just as Fox News parrots the Republican party line). Now, read this.

Read it? Good! Firstly, HH has no problems with V V Putin… never has, never will. Ms Achmatova is known as one of the more willing hacks on the AsiaNews staff; she’ll write whatever her Vatican bosses put in front of her (in fact, some of the other writers on this rag have more character than she does, they’re not quite so much a running dog as she is). This is utter flapdoodle from start to finish, but this is the Vatican line of the moment. Read it and heed it. They’re NOT our friends… they don’t wish us well. They don’t wish the people of Novorossiya well. Note this… they won’t condemn the Galician Uniates… not one little bit. That should tell you something. Indeed, it means that SVS inviting the Jesuit Uniate Robert Taft (a phoney “archimandrite”) to speak on 12 June is treasonous. It means that John Jillions is a treasonous and low individual who hobnobs with the Uniate enemies of the Church and expects praise for so doing.

We have an obligation to stand up for the bleeding Orthodox people of Novorossiya… if not me and you, then, who?

BMD

25 May 2014. The Bart n’ Frankie Show… HO HUM

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The above is a satirical image making the rounds amongst the cognoscenti in the Orthodox cyberworld. Bart isn’t the “head of the Orthodox world” nor is he the “Orthodox pope”. What he does or says binds no one but his bunch, full stop. Frankie Bag o’ Donuts was looking for a gorgeous photo-op to take people’s minds off perv priests and corrupt Vatican bankers. He got it… as for decent Russian Orthodox people, well, it’s less than a yawn. Don’t waste your time attacking this… the Phanar’s been doing this shit for the last 50 years. It doesn’t surprise me or surprise you. It’s time to get back to the real world and its real concerns…

BMD

Top Pope Ally Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga urges Vatican Doctrine Chief Müller to Loosen Up

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On Monday, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, an influential aide to Pope Francisco Bergoglio, criticised Vatican doctrinal watchdog Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller and urged the conservative prelate to be more flexible about reforms being discussed in the Catholic Church. Rodríguez, the head of a “kitchen cabinet” the pope created to draw up reform proposals, said that Müller… who opposes any loosening of church rules on divorce… was a classic German theology professor who thought too much in rigid black-and-white terms. In a rare public criticism amongst senior church figures, Rodríguez rhetorically addressed Müller in an interview with the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, saying, “The world isn’t like that, my brother. You should be more flexible when you hear other voices, so you don’t just listen and say, ‘Here’s the wall'”. Rodríguez, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa in Honduras, didn’t cite any possible reforms in particular, but said the pope’s critics, such as those upset by his attacks on capitalism, were “people who don’t understand reality”.

Former Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger picked Müller in 2012 to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the successor office to the Inquisition. Benedict ran that office as the powerful and feared guardian of Church orthodoxy for 24 years as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, until his election as pope in 2005. However, its influence waned under Francisco, who soon after his March 2013 election reportedly told visiting Latin American priests and nuns not to worry if the CDF wrote to them criticising what they were doing.

In an article in the Vatican daily last October, Müller firmly rejected growing demands for the Catholic Church to reinstate divorced and remarried Catholics as full members of the Church. At present, the Catholic Church excludes Catholics who divorce and remarry in a civil ceremony from communion because the Catholic Church teaches that Christ declared marriage an indissoluble bond. With divorce on the rise, more Catholics are asking Rome to show mercy for them. German bishops have been in the forefront of reform thinking and one archdiocese even published guidelines on how to readmit them, which prompted Müller’s article. The Vatican is due to consider reforming its rules on divorce at a worldwide synod of bishops next October.

Müller also strongly defended Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, who reaped stiff criticism from German Catholics, earning the title “luxury bishop” in the media after it came out that he spent at least 30 million Euros (1.38 billion Roubles. 40.7 million USD. 45 million CAD. 46 million AUD. 24.5 million UK Pounds) on a new residential complex. Tebartz-van Elst’s grand plans were so far from the modest approach favoured by the Argentine-born pontiff that Rome sent an envoy to inspect his diocese and later sent him off to a monastery for a leave of absence pending a final decision. Rodríguez didn’t think Tebartz-van Elst would return as Bishop of Limburg and said that Latin Americans like himself and the pope found it hard to understand spending so much money for opulent features such as a 15,000-Euro (690,000 Roubles. 20,350 USD. 22,500 CAD. 23,000 AUD. 12,250 UK Pounds) free-standing bathtub, dryly observing, “For most people, a shower and a toilet are enough. They’re enough for the pope in his three-room apartment, too”.

20 January 2014

Tom Heneghan

Reuters

http://news.yahoo.com/top-pope-ally-urges-vatican-doctrine-chief-loosen-205104072–sector.html

Editor’s Note:

George Weigel is having conniptions, isn’t he? Boo-hoo! He and all the other righties are shown up to be “cafeteria Catholics” (they’re going to pick n’ choose what they’re going to believe… what a scream! They truly don’t like it when we turn their own wacko verbiage against them… watch ‘em squirm!). Francisco is turning out to be a real Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I). Only this time, he didn’t die after a VERY short reign. As for me, I believe that Luciani died a very natural death, as his health wasn’t the best. I don’t favour conspiracy theories… sometimes, shit just happens, and there’s no cabal behind it (although the Curia IS a snake-pit full of ambitious and unscrupulous SOBs, to be sure… just as our First Families are, to be frank). Conspiracy theorists bore me… they should get lives… that’d take up their time, wouldn’t it?

BMD