| Translation |
|---|
|
|
Pope Benedict Solves Mystery of Pedophile Priests . . . Sort of
For twenty-four years the archconservative, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—formerly the Holy Office of the Inquisition. As the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog, he earned the monikers, "God's Rottweiler" and "panzer cardinal." It was his job to enforce doctrinal purity, both within the clerical rank and the rank and file . . . a task he performed with an apostolic zeal bordering on mania.
In 2002, when the scope of the pedophile priest scandal in the United States was becoming too obvious for even the Vatican to continue to ignore, Rottweiler Ratzinger claimed that the sexual abuse allegations against Catholic clergy were part of a "planned campaign" that was "intentional [and] manipulated" to discredit the church. Whose campaign he didn't say, but his short list probably included the pro-choice and gay rights lobbies.
On April 19, 2005, in an arcane rite of "transubstantiation" known only to the College of Cardinals, the rabid Rottweiler Ratzinger became, with a puff of white smoke, the kindly, thoughtful Pope Benedict XVI, the 265th Bishop of Rome and leader of one billion Catholics worldwide.
According to Benedict, it is America's "increasingly secular and materialistic culture" that caused priests to fondle and rape children. Keep in mind that the "materialistic" remark is coming from a guy who has been seen sporting a pair of custom-cobbled red shoes, Gucci sunglasses, ceremonial gowns by Gamarelli, and listening to an iPod Nano while tens of millions of Catholics worldwide struggle to feed their families, much less put shoes on their feet or sunglasses on their faces.
One can also suppose that the bishops who knew of the abuse and did nothing other than transfer the pedophiles to other parishes, where they continued to molest children, were suffering from the same demonic secular possession as the priests.
According to a 2002 study conducted by John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, 4,392 Catholic priests and deacons in the United States have been accused of sexual abuse of children since 1950, leaving an estimated 13,000 victims and over 2 billion dollars in lawsuits—money that could have been spent feeding and clothing and "sunglassing" tens of millions of destitute, but tithing, Catholics.
A "penitent" Benedict said that he was "deeply ashamed" of the pedophile priests who scandalized the Catholic Church in the U.S. He said, "It is a great suffering for the church in the United States and for the Church in general and for me personally that this could happen." He did not dwell on the suffering of the 13,000 victims, one of whom described what happened to her as an "abuse of her soul."
The "Golden Retriever" wagged his tail as he asked 67 million U.S. Catholics to create an atmosphere of healing and reconciliation for the victims while the "Rottweiler" tugged at his chain with a not-so-subtle admonition, "Also, I ask you to love your priests, and to affirm them in the excellent work that they do." In other words, "Lay off! There aren't enough priests to go around as it is."
A good number of the abuse victims were not healed by Benedict's anemic apology. Becky Ianni, who was abused by her parish priest from age 9 to 11, said, "He talks about feeling shame for the scandal but it's a far cry from the shame that victims have had to live with our entire lives. We don't really need his sense of shame, we need him to take firm actions to correct the situation."
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the website, Bishop Accountability, which documents sexual abuse, said that words are cheap, but action has a price and she is skeptical that Benedict is willing to ante up.
Doyle wants the church hierarchy that sheltered pedophile priests from the law and allowed them to continue to abuse the bodies and souls of Catholic children to be held accountable, "Rather than shifting attention to pedophile priests, he needs to focus on the culpability of bishops. The crisis occurred because many U.S. bishops were willing to hide their priests' crimes from the police with lies."
So far Benedict, who is the only church official with the authority to discipline bishops for their role in perpetuating the sexual abuse, has failed to do so. Only a sucker's bet says he will.
While Benedict is in his Retriever coat, there are a number of other people to whom he needs to apologize: to gays whom he called emotionally immature and homosexuality "objectively disordered;" to the 50 percent of Catholics whose gender disqualifies them for the priesthood; to impoverished mothers who continue to have children they can ill afford because of the Rottweiler's dogmatic stance against family planning and birth control; to the tens of millions of tithing Catholics who live in squalid poverty while he lives in opulence on their nickels.
While a "kindly" Pope Benedict XVI can get away with blaming priestly pedophilia on someone else's secularism, all the other sorrow caused by his doctrinal intransigence rests squarely in Joseph Ratzinger's gilded lap.
So who is the real Bishop of Rome, the Rottweiler or the Retriever? A few words of caution should inform one's rumination on that mystery. Zebras never change their stripes and dogs only rarely change their dispositions.
|
|
Quote this article on your site | Views: 3863Comments (14) |  |
My words: anyone who continues to support the ongoing criminal enterprise known as the RCC is just as guilty as the murdering, raping, sodomizing, molesting, abusing predatory clergy and their mitered and red-hatted enablers, protectors, transferrers, promoters.
Shame, shame, shame on them all!
The pain that so many victims of sexual abuse continue to endure throughout their lives is the pain that our Catholic Church should be considering first and foremost before the "enormous pain that your communities have suffered when clerics have betrayed their priestly obligations and duties by such gravely immoral behavior," as the pope spoke of in his words to the American bishops on Wednesday when he met with them at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.
The continuing sex scandal was not just "sometimes very badly handled," it was very often and repeatedly handled very badly.
I consider it misleading to say that, "Now that the scale and gravity of the problem is more clearly understood you have been able to adopt more focused remedial and disciplinary measures and to promote a safe environment that gives greater protection to young people."
While the scale and gravity of the sexual abuse problem has been understood for years, the bishops formally or informally were part of a conspiracy that colluded in covering up the transgressions of rogue sexually abusive priests, including those abusing minors, moving them around their own dioceses, moving them to other dioceses and, in some cases, shipping them abroad to avoid arrest and prosecution. This is fact not opinion and is supported by a number of Grand Jury Reports.
In actuality, the bishops on the whole did not even obey the Catholic Church's Canon Law regarding sexual transgressions let alone obey the individual state's law in whose jurisdictions their dioceses resided.
And while bishops, "have been able to adopt more focused remedial and disciplinary measures and to promote a safe environment that gives greater protection to young people," this does not provide justice for those who were abused in the past.
The fact remains that removing Statutes of Limitation in regard to the sexual abuse of children, along with the inclusion of a Legislative Window of at least two years for bringing forward previously time barred cases of childhood sexual abuse, remains the single most effective means of holding sexual predators and any enabling individuals or institutions accountable.
In the State of Delaware we have accomplished this by the passage of the new Child Victims Law which includes a Window that is open until July 10, 2009 for bringing forward cases in the pursuit of justice.
If you or anyone you know was ever sexually abused as a child in the State of Delaware - by anyone - you both have until July 10, 2009 to register to proceed with a civil suit.
Visit -
www.bishopaccountability.org
www.napsac.us
www.reform-network.net
www.votfgp.org
www.childvictimsvoice.org
www.richardsipe.com
To do anything less than to speak out is to enable these predators and their handlers.
and then the what of the Inquisition, and the episode of Galileo, what stupidity! This is just the tip of the ice berg.
Also the flaunting of unspeakable riches in the face of the destitute faithful of the world.
It is not so much the Emperor has no close on, as the Emperor is bedecked in opulence.
Hrh I agree with what you say,
Robert it just takes a clear uncluttered mind, and an honesty heart to write this article.
The trouble is people born to faiths, in the main cling on through fear regardless. Thank you Sir for writing this article.
Mike
That the Pope sees fit to chide us is laughable. In how many other countries is this same thing going on as we write here? I doubt we'll ever know because most folks cannot stand up to the Church officials as Americans did.
Now that's tragic.
Apologize for my blooper 'close', it's a howler.
Mike.
First, you don't sound very much like a reporter when characterizing someone like the Pope as "rabid" and comparing him to a dog.
And second, I really wish your report included some perspective on the whole situation. I mean, you wrote there were 4,392 priests accused of various sex crimes on children over a 52 year period. How many priests lived in the U.S. over those 52 years, and how much of the population were they, as priests and as sex offenders? In other words, were the number of crimes by priests a majority or minority of the child sex crimes over those 52 years, and are the number of sex offender priests the same as a percentage of the population and of the priesthood? In other words, does the priesthood have a larger or smaller percentage of sex offenders than the general population?
Now this is information a real news man would provide, in order to put things into perspective. I mean, as realists, just because people go through the seminary and become priests, are we to assume that these people are no longer Human beings with flaws? I know there are people who believe that somehow pedophiles got together and decided to enter the preiesthood to prey on children, or that the Catholic Church intentionally recruited pedophiles. So let's see the numbers and let the truth speak.
I'm not saying the crimes weren't horrible. What I'm saying is that if we're going to fix the problem we need to analyze it and have the facts and the perspective.
How many priests lived in the U.S. over those 52 years,
All 4,392 priests
Quote:
and how much of the population were they, as priests and as sex offenders?
One too many
I appreciated your article. My family suffers still and will for the rest of our lives because of the sexual abuse of our son by a priest whose name is Fr. Eric Ensey. Although suspended from ministry in the U.S. he has been reinstated to work with the needy in Paraguay. The loss my husband and I have experienced because of what happened to our son is minimal in comparison to the suffering experienced by our son and all of the other victims. There are no words to describe it. ~Shayne Prorock
Second, look up the several definitions of "rabid." You will find that they are not as demeaning as you assume. It was the word that I wanted to describe Ratzinger's devotion to protection the doctrinal purity of the church.
Third, the 'dog' reference was a play on his moniker as "God's Rottweiler." It was a metaphor not a comparison . . which I think worked out splendidly and was very apt.
The number of priest accused of molesting children is about 5 percent of the population of U.S. priests. I don't know, or care, what the percentage of molesters is in the general population, and neither do I think it germane to my argument. It doesn't matter one bit to the scope of the problem if it is larger or smaller in the priesthood than in the general population. As someone pointed out above, one priestly pedophile who was protected by his bishop and transfered to another parish to continue his sexual abuse is one too many.
My piece was about hypocrisy, and about the collusion of the catholic bishops, Ratzinger included as cardinal and pope, in the molestation of children and the cover-up and the spending of billions of dollars worth of poor catholics' tithing "nickels," both to support the coverup and to support the Pope's lavish lifestyle while he pontificates and accuses American secularism and materialism as the root of the the priestly pedophile problem.
I stand by the piece as written
This is a wonderful poem by Gary Corseri on Dissident Voice which encapsulates all the hypocrisy of the Pope's recent visit to America.
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/04/when-the-pope-came-to-america/
|
Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.4
Tags: Robert Weitzel Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict Pedophile Priests Vatican