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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 11, 2010 11:49:03 GMT 12
Church scandal: Paedophile monks releasedBy MICHAEL DICKISON - The New Zealand Herald | 10:52AM - Wednesday, April 09, 2010Bernard Kevin McGrath was found guilty of 22 charges against nine victims. — File photo: Simon Baker.Two paedophile monks jailed for New Zealand's most notorious Catholic sexual abuse scandal have been released on parole, each serving less than half their sentences in prison.
One of the men has been brought back into the fold of his Catholic Order, which will give him a home in Australia once his parole period is up.
The Order of St John of God says it is the best way to care for and supervise him, but an independent member of the Order's professional standards committee says he is being hidden and protected.
The man, Rodger William Moloney, was head of Christchurch's Marylands residential school for boys with learning difficulties, where more than 100 victims were systematically abused in the 1970s.
After case became public in 2002, about $5 million in compensation was given out, and 14 brothers who had been at the school were investigated and two convicted in the courts.
In 2006, Bernard Kevin McGrath was found guilty of 22 charges against nine victims aged 7 to 15 and was sentenced to five years in jail. McGrath was released on parole in February 2008, just less than two years into his five-year term. It is understood he is living in Christchurch and his ties with the Order have been cut.
In 2008, Moloney was found guilty of seven charges of sex abuse against boys and also jailed. He was released in September 2009, 13 months into his 33-month sentence.
In making its decision to release Moloney, the Parole Board said even though Moloney continued to deny the offending, he was unlikely to reoffend because he would not be put in the same circumstances again.
It also cited his age, 74, and the fact that he had no other convictions.
Once Moloney's parole period finishes in about a year, he will be "deported" and St John of God would provide supervision and a home in Australia, said the Order's spokesman, Simon Feely.
"The diocese and religious Order is like a family. And like an ordinary family, we stick by people through thick and thin," said Richard Dunleavy, chairman of the Marist Brothers' professional standards committee.
"It's really the best way because you care for them and you keep an eye on them."
Offenders released from prison typically struggled without support and offering care and supervision away from children was more responsible than putting them out on the streets, Mr Dunleavy said.
But a member of St John of God's professional standards committee, Australian psychologist Michelle Mulvihill said the Order's decision was a cover up.
"Are they going to boot him out? No. They're going to protect him, smuggle him out to Australia and hide him inside the Order," she said.
"It's just another form of cover up."
Ms Mulvihill said the abuse had been extensive, having interviewed more than 120 complainants in New Zealand since 2002.
"It just kept going on and on and on. They were too scared to come forward because they were kids with problems and they wouldn't be believed."
Only a small fraction of the complaints got through the courts, she said.
"[The abuse] really screwed their heads up ... the evidence was so fragile."
She suggested St John of God should make a public apology in New Zealand.
When a complainant first came forward in the 1970s, St John of God shifted Bernard McGrath to Australia where he was put in charge of a boarding school and repeated his abuse.
The Order at the time paid one of McGrath's victims — a student with learning difficulties — $90,000 in compensation and for him to keep quiet.
Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust manager Ken Clearwater said victims still kept coming forward and the two convictions had not ended the matter.
"That was only the tip of the iceberg, even though people think it's all over and done with," Mr Clearwater said.www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10636828&pnum=0 Cardinals claim Pope hit by ‘hate’ campaignAssociated Press | 4:00AM - Thursday, April 08, 2010Benedict XVI is a target because of his conservative views, say church officials. — Photo: Associated Press.VATICAN CITY — The Vatican heatedly defended Pope Benedict XVI, claiming accusations that he helped cover up the actions of paedophile priests are part of an anti-Catholic "hate" campaign targeting the Pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.
Vatican Radio broadcast comments yesterday by two senior cardinals explaining "the motive for these attacks" on the Pope and the Vatican newspaper chipped in with spirited comments from another top cardinal.
"The Pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different" agenda, Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the disciplinary commission for Holy See officials, said on the radio.
Herranz didn't identify the lobbies but "defence of life" is Vatican shorthand for anti-abortion efforts.
Also arguing that Benedict's promotion of conservative family models had provoked the so-called attacks was the Vatican's dean of the College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano.
"By now, it's a cultural contrast," Sodano told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano. "The Pope embodies moral truths that aren't accepted, and so, the shortcomings and errors of priests are used as weapons against the church."
Also rallying to Benedict's side was Italian Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, who heads the Vatican City State's governing apparatus.
The Pope "has done all that he could have" against sex abuse of minors by clergy, Lajolo said on Vatican radio, decrying what he described as a campaign of "hatred against the Catholic Church".
The Rev Rebecca Voelkel, a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based minister in the United Church of Christ who is faith work director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, described the cardinals' comments as "diversionary counterattacks" that are an affront both to the victims of clergy abuse and to gays and lesbians.
"It makes me heartsick," she said.
Sex abuse allegations, as well as accusations of cover-ups by diocesan bishops and Vatican officials, have swept across Europe in recent weeks. Benedict has been criticised for not halting the actions of abusive priests when he was a Vatican cardinal and earlier while he was the Archbishop of Munich in his native Germany.
The mainland European scandals — in Germany, Italy, Austria, Denmark and Switzerland — are erupting after decades of abuse cases in the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland and other areas.
In Germany, nearly 2700 people called the church's sexual abuse hotline in the first three days it was operating, a Catholic Church spokesman said. A team of psychologists and other experts have spoken with 394 people so far, ranging from several minutes up to an hour, Trier Diocese spokesman Stephan Kronenburg said.
"Most callers reported cases of sexual abuse," he told AP.
Benedict has ignored victims' demands that he accept responsibility for what they say is his own personal and institutional responsibility for failing to swiftly kick abusive priests out of the priesthood, or at least keep them away from children.
But he has been protected by a vanguard of senior Vatican prelates who are fending off what they contend is an orchestrated attempt to attack the leader of the world's more than one billion Catholics.
The Vatican No2 official, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone indicated Benedict was standing firm. "He's a strong Pope," he said after arriving in Chile. The Italian news agency ANSA quoted him as calling Benedict a "great prophet of the Third Millennium".
On Easter, the most important day in the Catholic faith, the Vatican broke with tradition and began its service in St Peter's Square with a ringing defence of Benedict delivered by Cardinal Sodano.
The Vatican newspaper quoted Sodano yesterday as saying the church is "certainly" suffering because of paedophile priests but he asserted that "Benedict XVI has apologised several times".
"But it's not Christ's fault if Judas betrayed" him, Sodano said. "It's not a bishop's fault if one of his priests is stained by grave wrongdoing. And certainly the Pontiff is not responsible."
"Behind the unjust attacks on the Pope are visions of the family and of life that run contrary to the Gospel," Sodano said. "Now the accusation of paedophile is being brandished against the church."www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10636916&pnum=0
Catholic church investigating five cases of alleged abuseBy MICHAEL DICKISON - The New Zealand Herald with NZPA | 10:16AM - Thursday, April 08, 2010An independent office headed by John Jamieson (pictured) investigates allegations of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. — File photo: Mark Coote.New Zealand's Catholic church is investigating five historical cases of alleged sexual abuse, and victims' counsellors say the situation here is no better than scandal-plagued dioceses overseas.
It has been eight years since New Zealand's Catholic church apologised to its parishioners about how it had historically handled sexual abuse cases, after admitting to 38 cases of sexual abuse by priests and other men in its ranks.
The apology came as a pledge to better handle victims' complaints.
An independent office was set up in Wellington about five years ago and headed by a non-Catholic former police commissioner, John Jamieson, to review cases and advise when a sexual abuse complaint is made.
Mr Jamieson said he had reviewed 35 cases in five years, including where complainants were not happy with how they had been dealt with.
He is currently investigating five cases.
All incidents he had dealt with were more than 20 years old, and most from the 1950s and 1960s, Mr Jamieson said.
Some of the subjects of the complaints were still alive and living in New Zealand, but some had since died, Mr Jamieson told Radio New Zealand today.
"If there's any criminal activity that is alleged then we would recommend if the person is alive to go to the police station as well."
However, some complainants did not want to have the police investigate their case, he said.
"They have their own reasons for that, but they don't want to go through a court process, they don't want it to be publicised, they want the church to deal with it."
In the past the church had paid money to some complainants to ensure the case did not proceed further, but that was no longer the case, Mr Jamieson said.
Those people would today not be held to conditions agreed at the time.
"People are free to talk to the media, they're free to talk to the police and free to go to lawyers and take any action they wish. They are free to ask me to do a review if they're not happy with it."
The Auckland diocese is currently fielding two complaints.
Its liaison for sexual abuse complaints, Monseignor David Tonks, said one was against a man no longer in active ministry and another was made by a woman who had lodged many complaints in many denominations and there was good grounds for doubting its veracity.
Since the diocese began keeping records about 25 years ago, it had fielded 32 complaints against 17 priests — but they were all historical cases, more than 20 years old, Monseignor Tonks said.
Mr Jamieson said the review process was as open and independent as any system in the country, and the church had "totally changed" in its dealings with sexual abuse victims.
A protocol for dealing with sexual abuse victims drawn up in 1998 has been reassessed frequently, as recently as last year. Complainants are always told they have the right to go to police.
Marist Brothers professional standards committee chairman Richard Dunleavy said the process had been found to be "very satisfactory".
But victims and their counsellors are far less optimistic.
"Things haven't improved. Things are no different. They have processes and procedures in place but they're pretty traumatising for victims to go through," said Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust manager Ken Clearwater.
"[New Zealanders] don't believe it's as bad as it is overseas but it is - the cover ups, the shifting of the priests."
Alleged victims from many different cases keep coming forward, Mr Clearwater said.
Most were historical cases only because victims found it extremely difficult to admit they had been abused, particularly without some time passing.
"We're dealing with victims right throughout New Zealand from several Catholic orders," he said.
In recent months, an alleged victim of sexual abuse was shocked to learn his former priest and alleged sex offender had been reinstated to some ministry, said counsellor Chanel Houlahan, a former priest who left the church after rejecting its attitude toward sexual abuse.
It had been 15 years since the priest's alleged abuses were reported and it seemed the church considered that time had lessened the need to keep a potential paedophile away from children, Mr Houlahan said.
The victim had chosen not to go through the courts with his allegations at the time. He was "extremely unsatisfied" with the process he was going through after recently making contact again with the church, Mr Houlahan said.
"I just wonder if we're any better than some of these other dioceses and experiences overseas."
In 2002, toll-free help lines were set up by Catholic Orders in New Zealand to help victims come forward, and the church said it would be more open.
Today, however, the Society of Mary's help line is deactivated and St John of God's goes to an answering machine in Australia.
"All I can say is we really are trying as sincerely as possible," Monseignor Tonks said.
Counselling was paid for by the church and compensation was offered, either as a lump sum or in portions, totalling about $15,000, depending on circumstances.
People in the church had taken courses on dealing with sexual abuse victims and understood the courage it took to come out with a complaint, and they treated each one with respect, he said.
In recent months, the worldwide Catholic church has come under fresh scrutiny after new allegations of cover ups and sexual abuse in churches in the Netherlands and Ireland.
The Pope this Sunday avoided the topic of sexual abuse in his Easter Mass even as allegations swirled that he had been complicit in letting paedophiles stay active within the church during his time in Munich.www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10637043&pnum=0
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 11, 2010 11:49:58 GMT 12
Catholic order criticisedBy CHARLIE GATES - The Press | 5:00AM - Saturday, 10 April 2010A troubled Catholic order mired in a historical sexual abuse scandal is being criticised for failing to support a brother who was instrumental in brokering compensation for victims.
Critics say the treatment of the brother is in contrast to a monk who sexually abused boys in Christchurch in the 1970s and will be taken back into the Order of St John of God and given a home in Australia once his parole expires.
Rodger William Moloney was released on parole last September after serving 13 months of a 33-month sentence. He was found guilty of seven counts of abuse dating back to the 1970s, when he was head of Marylands special school in Christchurch.
A former member of the order's professional standards committee, psychologist Michelle Mulvihill, said the return of Moloney'swas "shocking".
She said Moloney's treatment was in direct contrast to the shunning of a brother who tried to help sexual abuse victims.
Brother Peter Burke, former Australasian head of the order, led a drive to pay settlements and apologise to abuse victims in 2002. He was shunned by the order after he stood down in 2007, Mulvihill said.
Burke died in Sydney in February.
"He [Moloney] will be royally welcomed back to the tribe and his return will be celebrated, and that is very different to the treatment of the man who did the most for the victims," she said.
"Peter Burke was treated as a whistleblower who didn't follow the party line. He was left for dead. It is just shocking. His own group did not support him in any way. He was just abandoned by his own men. I think it is dreadful and just an enormous injustice."
Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust manager Ken Clearwater also criticised the treatment of Burke.
"They did not look after him at all. It was horrible. They just left him on his own once he stood down."
Provincial of the Order Brother Timothy Graham said it was "outrageous" that "an aggrieved former member" of the professional standards committee would make "unjustified and completely unacceptable comments about Peter Burke and Rodger Moloney".
"Br Peter Burke, so loved and admired across New Zealand for the work that he did, would literally turn in his grave.
"Far from being shunned, Peter chose to spend the last few years living happily and productively in an apartment provided by the order at St Mary's, west of Sydney.
"Nor is the order about to shun Br Moloney. We do not expect the Australian community to have to look after him. The order will do that in secure, safe accommodation, where he will live in supervised retirement."
Mulvihill doubts Moloney will be kept under observation.
"There will be no supervision for him. The idea it is like some kind of lockup is just silly. The only rule will be not to talk to the media," she said.www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/christchurch/3568260/Catholic-order-criticised
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 11, 2010 11:54:06 GMT 12
Future pope stalled pedophile caseAssociated Press | 6:21AM - Saturday, 10 April 2010COVER-UP? The future Pope Benedict XVI resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of sexually molesting children, citing concerns including “the good of the universal church,” according to a 1985 letter bearing his signature. — REUTERS.The future Pope Benedict XVI resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of sexually molesting children, citing concerns including "the good of the universal church," according to a 1985 letter bearing his signature.
The correspondence, obtained by The Associated Press, is the strongest challenge yet to the Vatican's insistence that Benedict played no role in blocking the removal of pedophile priests during his years as head of the Catholic Church's doctrinal watchdog office.
The letter, signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was typed in Latin and is part of years of correspondence between the Diocese of Oakland and the Vatican about the proposed defrocking of the Rev. Stephen Kiesle.
The Vatican has refused to comment on the contents of the letter, but a spokesman confirmed it bore Ratzinger's signature.
"The press office doesn't believe it is necessary to respond to every single document taken out of context regarding particular legal situations," the Rev. Federico Lombardi said. "It is not strange that there are single documents which have Cardinal Ratzinger's signature."
The diocese recommended removing Kiesle from the priesthood in 1981, the year Ratzinger was appointed to head the Vatican office which shared responsibility for disciplining abusive priests.
The case then languished for four years at the Vatican before Ratzinger finally wrote to Oakland Bishop John Cummins. It was two more years before Kiesle was removed.
In the November 1985 letter, Ratzinger says the arguments for removing Kiesle are of "grave significance" but added that such actions required very careful review and more time. He also urged the bishop to provide Kiesle with "as much paternal care as possible" while awaiting the decision, according to a translation for AP by Professor Thomas Habinek, chairman of the University of Southern California Classics Department.
But the future pope also noted that any decision to defrock Kiesle must take into account the "good of the universal church" and the "detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke within the community of Christ's faithful, particularly considering the young age." Kiesle was 38 at the time.
Kiesle had been sentenced in 1978 to three years' probation after pleading no contest to misdemeanor charges of lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two young boys in a San Francisco Bay area church rectory.
As his probation ended in 1981, Kiesle asked to leave the priesthood and the diocese submitted papers to Rome to defrock him.
In his earliest letter to Ratzinger, Cummins warned that returning Kiesle to ministry would cause more of a scandal than stripping him of his priestly powers.
"It is my conviction that there would be no scandal if this petition were granted and that as a matter of fact, given the nature of the case, there might be greater scandal to the community if Father Kiesle were allowed to return to the active ministry," Cummins wrote in 1982.
While papers obtained by the AP include only one letter with Ratzinger's signature, correspondence and internal memos from the diocese refer to a letter dated Nov. 17, 1981, from the then-cardinal to the bishop. Ratzinger was appointed to head the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith a week later.
California church officials wrote to Ratzinger at least three times to check on the status of Kiesle's case. At one point, a Vatican official wrote to say the file may have been lost and suggested resubmitting materials.
Diocese officials considered writing Ratzinger again after they received his 1985 response to impress upon him that leaving Kiesle in the ministry would harm the church, Rev. George Mockel wrote in a memo to the Oakland bishop.
"My own reading of this letter is that basically they are going to sit on it until Steve gets quite a bit older," the memo said. "Despite his young age, the particular and unique circumstances of this case would seem to make it a greater scandal if he were not laicized."
Irwin Zalkin, an attorney representing some of the victims, said he was familiar with the correspondence but wouldn't provide documents to AP.
"Cardinal Ratzinger was more concerned about the avoidance of scandal than he was about protecting children," Zalkin said in a phone interview. "That was a central theme."
As Kiesle's fate was being weighed in Rome, the priest returned to suburban Pinole to volunteer as a youth minister at St. Joseph Church, where he had served as associate pastor from 1972 to 1975.
Kiesle was ultimately stripped of his priestly powers in 1987, though the documents do not indicate when, how or why. They also don't indicate what role — if any — Ratzinger had in the decision.
Kiesle continued to volunteer with children, according to Maurine Behrend, who worked in the Oakland diocese's youth ministry office in the 1980s. After learning of his history, Behrend complained to church officials. When nothing was done she wrote a letter, which she showed to the AP.
"Obviously nothing has been done after EIGHT months of repeated notifications," she wrote. "How are we supposed to have confidence in the system when nothing is done? A simple phone call to the pastor from the bishop is all it would take."
She eventually confronted Cummins at a confirmation and Kiesle was gone a short time later, Behrend said.
Kiesle was arrested and charged in 2002 with 13 counts of child molestation from the 1970s. All but two were thrown out after the US Supreme Court struck down as unconstitutional a California law extending the statute of limitations.
He pleaded no contest in 2004 to a felony for molesting a young girl in his Truckee home in 1995 and was sentenced to six years in state prison.
Kiesle, now 63 and a registered sex offender, lives in a Walnut Creek gated community, according to his address listed on the Megan's Law sex registry. An AP reporter was turned away when attempting to reach him for comment.
William Gagen, an attorney who represented Kiesle in 2002, did not return a call for comment.
More than a half-dozen victims reached a settlement in 2005 with the Oakland diocese alleging Kiesle had molested them as young children.
"He admitted molesting many children and bragged that he was the Pied Piper and said he tried to molest every child that sat on his lap," said Lewis VanBlois, an attorney for six Kiesle victims who interviewed the former priest in prison. "When asked how many children he had molested over the years, he said ‘tons’."
Cummins, the now-retired bishop, told the AP during an interview at his Oakland home that he "didn't really care for" Kiesle, but he didn't recall writing to Ratzinger concerning the case.
"I wish I did write to Cardinal Ratzinger. I don't think I was that smart," Cummins, now 82, told AP.
Documents obtained by the AP last week revealed similar instances of Vatican stalling in cases involving two Arizona clergy.
In one case, the future pope took over the abuse case of the Rev. Michael Teta of Tucson, Ariz., then let it languish at the Vatican for years despite repeated pleas from the bishop for the man to be removed from the priesthood.
In the second, the bishop called Msgr. Robert Trupia a "major risk factor" in a letter to Ratzinger. There is no indication in those files that Ratzinger responded.
The Vatican has called the accusations "absolutely groundless" and said the facts were being misrepresented.www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/3569258/Future-pope-stalled-pedophile-case
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 11, 2010 11:54:35 GMT 12
God's emissary can't outrun this historyBy FINLAY MACDONALD - Sunday Star Times | 5:00AM - Sunday, 11 April 2010AT THE risk of only adding to the "petty gossip" the Holy Father blamed for the sexual abuse scandal within his church, one has to wonder what it will take for some Catholics to see themselves as others do.
Imagine another institution within which trust and decency had been so disgustingly betrayed for so long, acting the way the Vatican has — cover up, complicity, obstruction of justice, useless apology — and ask yourself what the response would be. Damnation seems fitting terminology.
Plainly, however, the Romans are not all of a piece. Some of the most perceptive and humane writing on this appalling subject has come from those raised within the church, subsequently lapsed or not. Having endured the teaching of mean or outright sadistic nuns and brothers, and having themselves sometimes known of peers who were abused, they're perhaps better placed to understand the origins of such behaviour than those who don't know their Eucharist from their elbow.
Those of us not born Catholic tend to have gleaned what we know from a variety of unreliable sources, including the dinner party recollections of boarding school survivors, stomach-turning tales of torture from the Inquisition, the theological subtexts of Brideshead Revisited, Monty Python's infamous "Every Sperm Is Sacred" from The Meaning of Life, and the kind of grim-yet-twinkly memoir of devout poverty best exemplified by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, in which the family live in mortal fear of burning in hell for not praying enough or otherwise obeying the tyrannical fathers.
If you happened to have been brought up outside any form of organised religion, the antics of the Catholics could look like just another form of superstitious mumbo jumbo, albeit overlaid with a sense of theatre and a peculiarly tormented attitude to human sexuality. Original sin, confession, vows of celibacy — strange, but no stranger than other weird belief systems. Once Galileo looked through his new and improved telescope and figured that Copernicus was probably right — that the Earth was not the centre of the universe — religions in general have been engaged in a rearguard action against science and reason.
Even God's emissary on Earth couldn't outrun history forever. The present outbreak of contrition was predated by a catch-all apology in 2000 from the previous pope, John Paul II, to just about everyone who had suffered from the church's past cruelty or criminal culpability, including Galileo, as well as women, Jews, victims of the Inquisition, African slaves, and those burnt at the stake for heresy or chopped down by the Crusaders. Talk about Catholic guilt.
John Paul was criticised for his conservatism on issues such as homosexuality and liberation theology, but time may judge him less harshly in comparison to his successor, Joseph Ratzinger, aka Benedict XVI. As a cardinal, 10 years before the big sorry, Ratzinger was delivering a convoluted defence of the church's ancient prosecution of Galileo — seemingly justifiable in the context of what was known at the time — in keeping with a consistently reactionary approach to "the church in the modern world".
That Ratzinger should now stand accused of covering up or at the very least responding too leniently to cases of paedophilia shouldn't come as much surprise, then. Inward and backward-looking institutions such as the Catholic church inevitably begin to manifest the symptoms of denial, paranoia, self-pity and imagined martyrdom that characterise all cults.
How else to explain the extraordinary comparison by a senior Vatican priest of attacks on the church over the abuse scandals to the persecution of the Jews? Or the less overtly offensive but more unintentionally comedic remark by a priest and "noted Italian exorcist" that press reports about Benedict's role in the whole sordid business were "prompted by the devil"? God knows, maybe the prince of darkness guided my own pen...
Many defenders of the faith will claim these are isolated examples, that the Vatican has distanced itself from such silliness. But that is the same as saying the child abuse was perpetrated by a few wayward priests — essentially the church's official position — rather than what the rest of the world suspects instinctively, that it is the product of a warped tradition of sexual repression and corrupt authority quite peculiar to Catholicism.
Despite the impenetrability of faith-based logic to outside influence or criticism, it's clear there are many more enlightened and progressive minds within the church than the one currently running it. Unfortunately, history would appear to be against anyone dedicated to much more than self-preservation at whatever moral cost.www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/opinion/3569649/Gods-emissary-can-t-outrun-this-history
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Post by Kiwithrottlejockey on Apr 11, 2010 11:57:50 GMT 12
Pope did not impede defrocking of abuse priest — VaticanREUTERS | 6:21AM - Sunday, 11 April 2010LETTER: The signature from then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger on a letter commenting on the defrocking petition for Father Stephen Kiesle. — REUTERS.The Vatican has defended Pope Benedict from accusations that, in a previous post as a senior Church official, he tried to impede the defrocking of a California priest who had sexually abused children.
In a statement, a California-based Vatican lawyer accused the media of a "rush to judgement" and said the case had never been referred to the Vatican as an abuse case but as one of a man who wanted to leave the priesthood.
In a 1985 letter from the Vatican, typed in Latin and translated for The Associated Press, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger told the bishop of Oakland he needed more time "to consider the good of the Universal Church" as he reviewed a request by the man to leave the priesthood.
Vatican lawyer Jeffrey Lena said he could not confirm the authenticity of the letter but indicated that it appeared to be "a form letter typically sent out initially with respect to laicisation cases," when men ask to leave the priesthood.
The letter surfaced as the Vatican fights accusations that the pope mishandled cases of abuse of children by priests when he was a bishop in Germany and a Vatican official before his election in 2005.
Lena "denied that the letter reflected then-Cardinal Ratzinger resisting pleas from the bishop to defrock the priest," the statement said.
MEDIA "RUSHING TO JUDGEMENT"
"There may be some overstep and rush to judgement going on here," Lena said.
"During the entire course of the proceeding the priest remained under the control, authority and care of the local bishop who was responsible to make sure he did no harm, as the canon (Church) law provides. The abuse case wasn't transferred to the Vatican at all," he said.
Ratzinger wrote in the letter that arguments for Stephen Miller Kiesle to be allowed to leave the priesthood were of "grave significance" but also worried about what "granting the dispensation can provoke with the community of Christ's faithful, particularly regarding the young age of the petitioner."
According to The Associated Press, which first reported the story on Friday, the Kiesle was 38 at the time and had been sentenced in 1978 to three years' probation after pleading guilty to misdemeanour charges of lewd conduct for tying up and molesting two young boys in a church rectory.
Vatican analyst and papal biographer Marco Politi told Reuters the letter "is a serious blow to the position of Cardinal Ratzinger in the 1980s."
"This document reflects what was the general attitude of the Vatican in those years when the main thing was to care about the image of the Church and about a scandal in a parish," he said.
"The only way for the Church leadership to get out of this situation is to open the archives and to tell clearly what went wrong in the 1980s and in the 1990s or what was done when."
According to a letter from the Diocese of Oakland to Ratzinger in 1981, Kiesle had asked to leave the active ministry and the diocese asked Ratzinger to agree that he be "relieved of all the obligations of the priesthood, including celibacy."
Lena said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Ratzinger headed from 1981 until he became pope, did not have competence over abuse cases at the time and was simply "undertaking to determine whether the conditions for laicisation were met." Kiesle was eventually defrocked in 1987.
Documents released to Reuters by victims' attorney Jeff Anderson show long delays in responses, the loss of documents at the Vatican and exasperation at the Oakland Diocese.
But Lena said the priest's defrocking was handled "expeditiously, not by modern standards, but by those standards at the time."
"Moreover, while that proceeding was ongoing, there is no known report of the priest having re-offended," Lena said.www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/3570242/Pope-did-not-impede-defrocking-of-abuse-priest-Vatican
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