Ireland’s PM Blasts Vatican’s Response To Sexual Abuse

Pope Benedict XVI’s letter relating to the Cloyne Report has infuriated Ireland’s Prime Minister and the Irish victims of paedophile priests.  People from several countries have been hoping for constructive comments in the letter from the Vatican regarding sex abuse scandals, but they will once again be disappointed.

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Pope Benedict XVI

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Vatican-approved cover-ups of the sexual abuse of children at the hands of priests, have been going on for centuries in parishes and schools.  My own great-grandmother, then 14 years old, was raped by a Catholic priest in Rome in the 19^th Century.  She was sent off to London to have the resultant baby while the priest’s name was protected. I’d hate to imagine how many other girls might have suffered the same fate because the Vatican turned a blind eye.   The Vatican has never put children’s welfare first in these horrendous scandals.  Foremost in the Vatican’s responses to thousands of allegations of abuse, is to protect the Catholic Church at all costs, then the abusing priests.  Some see the present Pope’s position as difficult because he was formerly the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Once The Holy Office of the Holy Inquisition), which makes, and enforces, doctrinal laws.

See previous post:  The Case of the Pope; From a legal perspective.

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It is sickening to me, to see and hear the pope expressing love for ‘God’s children’ while allowing their  torture and rape to continue.  I use the word ‘allowing’ deliberately, because that is what the present Pope is doing, and what his predecessors have done;  the Vatican’s secrecy and  inaction have ensured the abuse continues.  The scandals that first emerged in Canada and Australia in the 1980s, followed by Ireland in the 1990s, the United States this decade and, in recent months, Benedict’s German homeland, are but the tip of the iceberg.  And no-one has even begun to examine accusations coming out of Africa where many paedophile priests are sent for their protection from Western countries’ legal systems.

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Comments regarding the Pope’s letter and the Cloyne Report:

Maeve Lewis, head of  ONE IN FOUR victims’ group, stated that the Pope “passed up a glorious opportunity to address the core issue in the scandal; the deliberate policy of the Catholic Church, at the highest levels, to protect sex offenders, thereby endangering children”.

“The Pope speaks only of failures in the Irish church and neglects the role of the Vatican. If the church cannot acknowledge this fundamental truth, it is still in denial”.  She said she was “astounded” at the Pope’s previous assertion that  ‘the roots of clerical sexual abuse lie in the secularization of Irish society, the falling off of religious devotion, and failures to adhere to canon law.’ “This shows a complete misunderstanding of the dynamics of sexual violence and creates little hope that the church will ever respond effectively to the problem.”

Author and survivor Andrew Madden said issues highlighted by him and others in a letter to the Pope had been ignored.  He said there had been no responsibility taken by the Catholic Church, regarding the sexual abuse of so many children, and its protection  of paedophile priests.   Mr Madden  goes on to say that Pope Benedict has repeated his apology for the hurt caused to those abused but then states that the Church’s only  role has been its failure to ‘deal with criminal and sinful acts’.  According to Mr Madden, the Catholic Church didn’t fail to act; it acted very clearly to protect itself and left the abused children to fend for themselves.

Another survivor, Marie Collins said she welcomed the order that church leaders should co-operate with police, but she said there had been no mention of the Vatican’s role in the cover-ups which allowed the abuse to continue.  [In fact it is not an 'order' but a 'guideline'].

Alan Shatter, Justice Minister in the Irish parliament also lashed out at the Pope, saying:  “We should never again tolerate a foreign state issuing directives to members of the hierarchy and other clerics in this state to violate Irish law by concealing reports of child sexual abuse and not reporting such allegations. Nor should we ever again tolerate a foreign state requiring that an oath of any nature be taken by an adult or child to maintain a veil of secrecy over incidents of sexual abuse.”

The latter was a reference to a case involving current Cardinal Sean Brady, who in 1975 swore two young children to an oath not to reveal their abuse.

The Cloyne report into Catholic clerical child abuse in Ireland released on Wednesday 20^th July, will identify 19 Catholic priests who allegedly sexually assaulted children in the 1990s. The report into abuse allegations in the Catholic diocese of Cloyne, has been approved for publication by the Irish government.

The report, known officially as the Commission of Investigation Report into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, will be published by Ireland’s minister for justice, Alan Shatter, and the minister for children, Frances Fitzgerald.

The last Irish government agreed to extend the Murphy commission’s remit to include Cloyne, as well as the Dublin archdiocese. The commission’s Dublin report found widespread clerical abuse and cover-up in the Irish capital which was devastating for the Catholic Church. It also found child protection practices in the Dublin diocese to be ‘inadequate and in some respects dangerous’.

The commission was later asked to investigate the handling of sex abuse allegations in Cloyne by church and state authorities between 1 January 1996 – when the church’s first-published guidelines, its Framework Document, came into play – and 1 February 2009.

Minister Alan Shatter said the report’s findings were unambiguous. “We cannot correct past wrongs perpetrated on our children, but we can take action to prevent, insofar as is possible, the wrongs of the past being perpetrated on our children in the future,” he said.  “We cannot depend on the undertakings of others to correct failings and introduce robust and effective structures of protection. The Cloyne Report  irrefutably confirms that some who, in the past, gave such undertakings, acted in bad faith,” the Minister told Parliament.

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has launched an unprecedented attack on the Catholic Church,  saying the relationship between church and state in Ireland could not be the same again following the Cloyne report. The Vatican chose to focus on the interests of the Church rather than the children abused by its clergy and shielded by its leaders.

The Catholic News Service reports Mr Kenny accused the Vatican of adopting a “calculated, withering position” on abuse.   He said that “the Irish people, including the very many faithful Catholics who – like me – have been shocked and dismayed by the repeated failings of Church authorities to face up to what is required; deserve and require confirmation from the Vatican that they do accept, endorse and require compliance by all Church authorities herewith, the obligations to report all cases of suspected abuse, whether current or historical, to the state’s authorities.”

“The revelations of the Cloyne report have brought the Government, Irish Catholics and the Vatican to an unprecedented juncture. It’s fair to say that after the Ryan and Murphy reports Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes to the abuse of children. But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order. Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual-abuse exposes an attempt by the Holy See, to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic . . . as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism . . . the narcissism . . . that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day.”

PM Kenny said the Cloyne report told “a tale of a frankly brazen disregard for protecting children”. He said although the report had shown the need for the Vatican “to get its house in order”, it also revealed how the State had failed victims too.  “For too long Ireland has neglected its children,” he said.  “This is not Rome. This is the Republic of Ireland 2011, a republic of laws,” Mr Kenny said.

The Prime Minister was speaking during a Government motion on the report that “deplores the Vatican’s intervention which contributed to the undermining of the child protection frameworks and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish bishops”. It expresses “dismay at the disturbing findings of the report and at the inadequate and inappropriate response, particularly of the Church authorities in Cloyne, to complaints and allegations of child sexual abuse.”

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Italy, another predominantly Catholic country, has a similar tale to tell.

See Post:  Paedophilia in Italy

Most recent post: 

Clerical Paedophilia; Centuries Old Time Bomb

The Vatican Advises On Sexual Abuse

The Vatican has advised bishops around the world  of the importance of co-operating with police if complaints have been laid about specific priests raping and molesting children. Bishops were asked to develop guidelines for preventing sex abuse by May 2012.

How can Bishops prevent sex abuse by following ‘guidelines’ unless the priest under suspicion is reported to police immediately and is barred from performing official duties while under investigation?  Neither of these necessary actions have been insisted on by the Vatican.

The communique from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly Office of the Holy Inquisition) made no provision to ensure the bishops actually follow any guidelines, and victims groups immediately denounced the recommendations as “dangerously flawed” because they stress the exclusive authority of bishops to determine the credibility of abuse allegations.  And we all know where that has led.  It seems that this is another release from the Pope to lull the faithful into a false sense of security regarding their children in the hands of priests, while nothing has changed!

“There’s nothing that will make a child safer today or tomorrow or next month or next year,” said Barbara Dorris, outreach director for the main U.S. victims group Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests.

The sexual abuse of children continues:

The communique is being issued at a time when the sex abuse guidelines of the U.S. bishops have been put into question after a Philadelphia grand jury earlier this year indicted a high-ranking church official on child endangerment charges for allegedly transferring predator priests. Four co-defendants — two priests, an ex-priest and a former Catholic school teacher — are charged with raping children.

The grand jury found “substantial evidence of abuse” committed by at least 37 other priests who remained in active ministry at the time of the report. Philadelphia’s archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, initially insisted that no archdiocesan priests in ministry had an “admitted or established allegation” against them. But he later suspended two dozen of the 37 priests. The archdiocese says many of the 37 were accused not of actual molestation but of so-called “boundary issues,” including inappropriate touching or sharing porn with minors — the latter a canonical crime in and of itself.  These are mere “boundary issues”??

How about this for a pathetic excuse: It was explained by a spokesman that the Vatican didn’t make reporting abuse cases to police mandatory because different countries have different laws which bishops must abide by. The Vatican states such a binding  rule would be problematic for priests working in countries with repressive regimes.  Who would the leaders of repressive regimes be more harmful to, the abusive priests or the abused children?

If this is the Vatican’s idea of a ‘transparency drive’, perhaps the Vatican hierarchy needs to look up the meaning of transparency in the dictionary, that’s if they possess one.  The newly published guidelines also outline the different ways that abusive priests can be disciplined by the church’s internal courts [my emphasis]. In “very grave cases”, (aren’t they all grave?) the pope may issue a decree dismissing a priest from the clerical state.   You mean the ‘E’ word?  But this has never yet happened, has it?

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The Vatican Speaks

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The following statement has to be the most idiotic the Vatican has ever released in relation to paedophile priests:

The pope’s secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone risked new controversy by claiming that paedophilia was linked to homosexuality. “Many psychologists and psychiatrists have shown that there is no link between celibacy and paedophilia but many others have shown, I have recently been told, that there is a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia,” he told a news conference in Santiago.   Can we please have the names of these many psychiatric experts, and are they all Catholic?  What about the thousands of ‘celibate’ priests who have raped hundreds of thousands of girls and boys?  Still more questions than answers.

Perhaps The Church’s fantastical teachings has made it easy for priests to delude themselves into believing that they weren’t really having sex with their victims.  It was women, those evil temptresses they had to avoid, as I write in  Catholic Dichotomy of Females.  I cannot believe that the problem is solely down to paedophilia or homosexuality.  It is much more psychologically complicated than that.

More…Vatican, Is It The Gay Men’s Club?

&   Celibacy and Sexual Abuse

&    Paedophilia In Italy

&    Kiss Of Betrayal

Unification of Italy Anniversary – Risorgimento!

Jasper Ridley's Garibaldi & the history of Risorgimento

Pope Benedict XVI has the audacity to say that  Catholics made a fundamental contribution to creating a united Italy and a national identity, in a message marking the country’s 150th birthday.  Benedict says Christianity helped forge a national identity that resisted political fragmentation on the Italian peninsula,  and foreign domination.  He says the church’s contribution came through education, literature and the arts in general, listing such personalities as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Bernini, whose works were often commissioned for religious purposes.  Is the pope trying to publicise a dwindling Christianity in this age of free thinking and science?

Benedict is speaking utter BS.  Artists were stymied and never allowed to paint what they pleased in case it offended the Catholic Church.  Many artists lived a life of subsistence because of this and it is well documented how the Catholic clergy, including extremely wealthy popes and cardinals,  enforced their sexual proclivities on young artists.  The 19th Century Pope did all he could to quash any attempts at the unification of Italy.  It would mean that the papal states would shrink to the City of Rome and finally to Vatican City.  Giusseppe Garibaldi led the Risorgimento;  he and his followers hated the Catholic Church (Papal Rome) because so often they were betrayed by nuns, priests and cardinals.  It was Garibaldi and those politicians who supported his quest for unification, who finally forced Austria, papal sycophants, and France, out of Italy.  Garibaldi’s heartbreak was that Nice, his birthplace,  was ceded to France in 1861 by politicians, as part of the deal that they leave the peninsula.

It is such a joke that this pope could come out and say it was through Catholic education and literature that Italy was united.  The truth is, only ‘the list’ of books approved by the Church were available for the general populace to read.  Most literature that made its way to Italy was burned or hidden in heavily fortified libraries only accessible to Monks and Cardinals.  See previous post Vatican Library.   As for resisting political fragmentation; the only reason they exiled or brutalised any political opposition was because the Church did not want to lose the corrupted power base they possessed.   The Church was fully funded and supported by the Spanish, French and Austrians.

If any group can be held responsible for seeding the Risorgimento (resurgence) it was the people of Italy themselves; mostly peasant farmers, some elitists, and mercenaries who fought with Garibaldi in South America.  Peasant farmers, led by Garibaldi, almost singlehandedly drove foreign power out of Sicily, and this was the catalyst that began the unstoppable unification of the peninsula.  The Roman Catholic Church opposed unification simply because it would mean the end of the vice grip they held over Italy.  Read Garibaldi by Jasper Ridley, it is very enlightening and I would hazard a guess that it is not one of the Vatican’s favourite books.

See Pino Aprile’s book about Southern Italy

Vatican – Is It The Gay Men’s Club?

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The cover of Panorama: “The Skilled  Gay Priests Of  The Nights”.

Is it any wonder that the Vatican, in light of its failure to immediately report sexual abuse by Catholic clergy to criminal investigators, is known as ‘The Gay Men’s Club?
Apparently, Cardinal Sean O’Malley has a list of suspected paedophile priests in Boston which he refuses to release. The unreleased list, possibly 40 names of  offending priests, is included in a record of the minutes from a March 2010 meeting of the Archdiocesan Pastoral Council. How can the Vatican  therefore, allow these men to continue working around vulnerable children in  positions of trust?   It also means these men are not receiving help for their predilections.

Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, called the number of undisclosed priests “staggering.” She accused O’Malley of purposely delaying to protect church officials responsible for monitoring the priests.  And also, if past actions by Bishops are anything to go by, so the accused can be sent on safely to another parish in Africa somewhere.  The church has said compiling the list is a complex task. It cited concerns about due process for accused priests.  What I would like to know is:  what about the children?

Many gay priests have been exposed by Panorama magazine frequenting gay clubs and actually having sex with gay partners.  Being gay is not the issue here.  It is the hypocrisy of supposed men of God, claiming they are celibate.  If there is so much opportunity around for gay sex, one has to wonder why these men have joined the priesthood.  It may be that the Catholic religion allows them to believe that if they are not having sex with women, then they are not having sex.  Perhaps it is as simple or as psychologically complicated as that.

Panorama magazine is owned by Catholic Prime Minister and media baron, Silvio Berlusconi.  Its reporters have film of priests attending gay clubs and having gay sex.  One of the priests  is later filmed saying Mass!

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See previous posts:

Celibacy and Sexual Abuse

Last Judgment and Babies

Paedophilia in Italy

Kiss of Betrayal

Last Judgment & Babies

One of the damned being dragged to the fires of hell by demons - Part of Last Judgment hanging in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican

World News: VATICAN CITY – Pope Benedict XVI baptized 21 newborns in an intimate ceremony in the Sistine Chapel on Sunday that marked the end of the Christmas season.

Standing under Michelangelo’s magnificent “Last Judgment” fresco, the pope poured water on the foreheads of 13 baby boys and eight baby girls. Some babies screamed, other squirmed, some slept through it. Benedict prayed for their “life and health so they can grow and mature in the faith.”

Or perhaps to be molested by paedophile priests.   Until the pope and the Vatican hierarchy make changes within Catholicism, nothing will change! Call me a cynic, but years of being brainwashed with stories of hell-fire and brimstone as a child, have made me so. The nightmares a large part of my childhood. (Whatever Happened To Ishtar?) The Last Judgment fresco is an amazing artistic achievement by Michelangelo, I have seen it for myself in person.  But the scene which covers most of a wall in the Sistine Chapel is horrifying, and is what is promised for our innocent children if we do not baptise them in the ‘Faith’. What he is really saying is: get them young, so they can grow up indoctrinated in the ‘Faith’ and the money will continue to roll in and continue to  enrich the Vatican.

‘The Pope was quoted as saying  that, in an ever-changing society without firm cultural references, it has become more difficult to educate children in the faith, and urged parishes and parents to cooperate. The babies — aged between four weeks and four months — are all children of Vatican employees.’

What a contrast in the two images, but an accurate portrayal. The fact is that not all in Catholicism is light & happiness, that is the problem.  There are too many dark, dark depths that have not been dealt with satisfactorily by the Pope and the Vatican power brokers, and until that is done, they should not be allowed near children.  Anyway, that’ s my opinion.

The Corrupt Vatican

Corrupt Vatican - Mafia Connections?

At last the Vatican’s centuries of corruption and hypocrisy have caught up with it.   I guess that the Catholic Church has millions of  sexual abuse compensation claims outstanding and this close scrutiny of its bank could not have come at a worse time for it.

See my previous  posts:

Islam, Christianity & The Vatican Library

Vatican Bank or Office of Religious Works

Sexual Abuse;  The Pope & The Vatican

ARTICLE BELOW – Source:

VICTOR L. SIMPSON and NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press

VATICAN CITY – This is no ordinary bank: The ATMs are in Latin. Priests use a private entrance. A life-size portrait of Pope Benedict XVI hangs on the wall.   Nevertheless, the Institute for Religious Works is a bank, and it’s under harsh new scrutiny in a case involving money-laundering allegations that led police to seize euro23 million ($30 million) in Vatican assets in September. Critics say the case shows that the “Vatican Bank” has never shed its penchant for secrecy and scandal.

The Vatican calls the seizure of assets a “misunderstanding” and expresses optimism it will be quickly cleared up. But court documents show that prosecutors say the Vatican Bank deliberately flouted anti-laundering laws “with the aim of hiding the ownership, destination and origin of the capital.” The documents also reveal investigators’ suspicions that clergy may have acted as fronts for corrupt businessmen and Mafia.  The documents pinpoint two transactions that have not been reported: one in 2009 involving the use of a false name, and another in 2010 in which the Vatican Bank withdrew euro650,000 ($860 million) from an Italian bank account but ignored bank requests to disclose where the money was headed.

The new allegations of financial impropriety could not come at a worse time for the Vatican, already hit by revelations that it sheltered paedophile priests. The corruption probe has given new hope to Holocaust survivors who tried unsuccessfully to sue in the United States, alleging that Nazi loot was stored in the Vatican Bank. Yet the scandal is hardly the first for the centuries-old bank. In 1986, a Vatican financial adviser died after drinking cyanide-laced coffee in prison. Another was found dangling from a rope under London’s Blackfriars Bridge in 1982, his pockets stuffed with money and stones. The incidents blackened the bank’s reputation, raised suspicions of ties with the Mafia, and cost the Vatican hundreds of millions of dollars in legal clashes with Italian authorities.

On Sept. 21, financial police seized assets from a Vatican Bank account at the Rome branch of Credito Artigiano SpA. Investigators said the Vatican had failed to furnish information on the origin or destination of the funds as required by Italian law.  The bulk of the money, euro20 million ($26 million), was destined for JP Morgan in Frankfurt, with the remainder going to Banca del Fucino. Prosecutors alleged the Vatican ignored regulations that foreign banks must communicate to Italian financial authorities where their money has come from. All banks have declined to comment.

In another case, financial police in Sicily said in late October that they uncovered money laundering involving the use of a Vatican Bank account by a priest in Rome whose uncle was convicted of Mafia association.  Authorities say some euro250,000 euros, illegally obtained from the regional government of Sicily for a fish breeding company, was sent to the priest by his father as a “charitable donation,” then sent back to Sicily from a Vatican Bank account using a series of home banking operations to make it difficult to trace.

“I don’t trust them,” he said. “After the previous big scandals, they [The Vatican] said ‘we’ll change’ and they didn’t. It’s happened too many times.”   He said the structure and culture of the institution is such that powerful account-holders can exert pressure on management, and some managers are simply resistant to change.   The list of account-holders is secret, though bank officials say there are some 40,000-45,000 among religious congregations, clergy, Vatican officials and lay people with Vatican connections.

The bank chairman is Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, also chairman of Banco Santander’s Italian operations, who was brought in last year to bring the Vatican Bank in line with Italian and international regulations. Gotti Tedeschi has been on a very public speaking tour extolling the benefits of a morality-based financial system.  “He went to sell the new image … not knowing that inside, the same things were still happening,” Nuzzi said. “They continued to do these transfers without the names, not necessarily in bad faith, but out of habit.”  It doesn’t help that Gotti Tedeschi himself and the bank’s No. 2 official, Paolo Cipriani, are under investigation for alleged violations of money-laundering laws. They were both questioned by Rome prosecutors on Sept. 30, although no charges have been filed.  In his testimony, Gotti Tedeschi said he knew next to nothing about the bank’s day-to-day operations, noting that he had been on the job less than a year and only works at the bank two full days a week.

As the Vatican proclaims its innocence, the courts are holding firm. An Italian court has rejected a Vatican appeal to lift the order to seize assets.  The Vatican Bank was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII to manage assets destined for religious or charitable works. The bank, located in the tower of Niccolo V, is not open to the public, but people who use it described the layout to the AP.  Top prelates have a special entrance manned by security guards. There are about 100 staffers, 10 bank windows, a basement vault for safe deposit boxes, and ATMs that open in Latin but can be accessed in modern languages. In another concession to modern times, the bank recently began issuing credit cards.   In the scandals two decades ago, Sicilian financier Michele Sindona was appointed by the pope to manage the Vatican’s foreign investments. He also brought in Roberto Calvi, a Catholic banker in northern Italy.

Sindona’s banking empire collapsed in the mid-1970s and his links to the mob were exposed, sending him to prison and his eventual death from poisoned coffee. Calvi then inherited his role.  Calvi headed the Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982 after the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans made to dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.  Calvi was found a short time later hanging from scaffolding on Blackfriars Bridge, his pockets loaded with 11 pounds of bricks and $11,700 in various currencies. After an initial ruling of suicide, murder charges were filed against five people, including a major Mafia figure, but all were acquitted after trial.   While denying wrongdoing, the Vatican Bank paid $250 million to Ambrosiano’s creditors.

Both the Calvi and Sindona cases remain unsolved.

 

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Barbaric Abortion Laws in Queensland

Can you believe that in 2010 Queensland still has laws which only allow abortion when the mother’s life is in danger?  It is far better to control fertility and not allow even more unwanted children on this already overcrowded planet.  I am sick to death of hearing about the sexual, physical and emotional abuse of unwanted and unloved children.  It infuriates me when I see men protesting in the streets against allowing abortion on demand.  When was the last time a man gave birth to a baby?  We have seen in Islamic countries what happens to women who have no power over their own bodies or their lives.   We  certainly do not want to return to the days when women were forced to bear too many children and illegal abortions and self-inflicted abortions killed women in their thousands.

That’s why I believe Australia would be going back decades if Tony Abbott was ever elected as Prime Minister.  See Post: Tony Abbott Speaks The Gospel Truth?  As a strict Catholic with extreme right-wing views Tony Abbott would be latched onto by the Pope and the Vatican.  Any Western leader who is a Catholic is fair game for Vatican  power brokers  to influence into making Federal or National law changes  banning abortion, contraception and stem cell research.

Tony Abbott - Leader of Federal Opposition

No  young couple in 2010 should ever have had to go through this ordeal:

NEWS RELEASE 14/10/10:

A Cairns couple charged over a home abortion has been found not guilty.

A Cairns District Court jury took less than an hour to a young couple  not guilty of charges of procuring an abortion and supplying drugs to procure an abortion following a three-day trial.

The couple were charged after police found empty blister packets of abortion drugs RU486 and Misoprostol during a search of their home on an unrelated matter in February last year.

They admitted in police interviews that Leach took the pills, imported by Brennan’s family in the Ukraine, because they were not ready to have a child.

Under Queensland law, abortion is illegal except to protect the mother’s life or her physical or mental wellbeing.

However, in his final directions to the jury, Judge Bill Everson said they had to be satisfied the drugs were noxious to Leach’s health, rather than the foetus.

A teary-eyed Ms Leach hugged her legal team and family after the verdict was delivered.

The jury’s decision was cheered by observers in the court’s public gallery.

The Kiss of Betrayal

Kiss of Betrayal

This photo is disgusting in light of the Vatican’s cover up of the sexual abuse of thousands of children and the protection of paedophile priests. Just wait for the time bomb of huge numbers of abused children to explode over the next few years in countries such as Africa and parts of Asia.  Children are now being abused in developing countries where these rapist priests have free reign after being exiled from America, Australia, Canada, Ireland etc, to escape conviction.  But not only children suffer from this insidious clerical abuse.  It was revealed in 2001 that predator priests sent to Africa, forced themselves on nuns, because they were free from Aids/Hiv virus.  Convents stripped the abused nuns of their vows and evicted them from the convent with no means of support.  Of course, the offending priests were free to continue their abuse.  Anyone like me who was indoctrinated into the Catholic faith from infancy, will know first hand the adoration which nuns bestow on priests.  So, like children, they are powerless and vulnerable in the hands of a  priest intent on his own sexual gratification.

The Vatican has a priority list when in damage control and spin: Protect its wealth, priests and reputation. Women and Children’s welfare is not considered! The hypocrisy is sickening.

Sexual Abuse; The Pope & The Vatican

Pope Benedict the chief hypocrite of the Catholic Church

Can you believe that  Pope Benedict,  ex chief of the  Office of the  Inquisition until 2005, (re-named the Office of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or CDF) truly believes that homosexuality between consenting adults is evil, along with divorce and abortion, yet through Canon Law, exonerates, forgives and protects from the criminal law of legitimate nations, paedophile priests who have  raped and ruined the lives of thousands of children. In his warped view, paedophile  priests are afflicted with an illness they cannot control!  It says much about the Catholic religion and their Canon Law; it considers gay relationships within the priesthood as  the most grievous of sins and  offending priests are to be excommunicated immediately! Yet those priests sodomising boys are protected by the Vatican while the victims are forced into silence.  As long as the paedophile priests  say extra hail marys after confession they will be protected forever by the Vatican.  This is the pope who has publicly stated that to ordain women as priests is an equivalent evil to sodomising children.

The Pope  visited African countries recently and warned against the evils of divorce and contraception but neglected to warn the people  about the paedophile priests who have been sent to that continent in their hundreds to shield them from certain imprisonment in Europe, Ireland,  America and other countries,  for the sexual abuse of innocents;  in order to protect the Vatican’s   vast assets and the reputation of the Catholic Church.  The welfare of the children so sexually abused is not considered.  It is estimated that when the child sexual abuse scandals do break in developing countries (in Asia as well) the total number of victims added to those already uncovered, could reach in excess of 100,000, and will as usual be the tip of the iceberg.

The little book with so much to say about Catholic paedophile priests and the Vatican 'State' which protects them

I bought a book on Saturday at one of my favourite   little book shops.  It is  adjacent  to the Sun Theatre in Yarraville and I often spend time looking for that special book  when I  go to a movie at the theatre.  This particular book is a ‘Penguin Special’ and is so up to date, it features the visit of  Pope Benedict to the UK in the last few days.  If you are, or have been,  a Catholic, this book will stun you.  I had believed the Vatican to be corrupt in the past, but I am absolutely incredulous at what the author has uncovered in his book.  That the pope and the officials at the Vatican could be so hypocritical and uninterested in the plight of all those hundreds of innocent victims is criminal.

The Vatican and the pope protect,  from outside scrutiny, their highly secret documents and decisions regarding  abusive priests, through the process of Canon Law and  constantly declare that the Vatican is a sovereign state and by definition beyond the reach of the national criminal law of other countries.  However, Geoffrey Robertson the author of  ‘The Case Of The Pope; Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse’ explores the legality of recognising the Vatican as a state.  He documents the vast numbers of child sex abuse cases around the globe which reached new heights during the reign of  the two previous popes before Pope Benedict, when he as Joseph Ratzinger, headed the Office of  Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.   The three were a formidable team.  When the first sex abuse scandals involving numerous priests erupted in America in 2001, various cardinals, Bishops and other Vatican spokesmen blamed: “Jewish journalists working on the  New York Times”, “petty gossips”, “natural enemies” of Catholics, “the American problem”, modernity, “the media’s treatment of Catholic church leaders is comparable to Hitler’s treatment of the Jews”.  When scandals broke in Ireland these spokesmen had to re-think who to blame.

“……Congratulations sent to Bishop Pican, with the approval of Pope John 2nd and Cardinal Ratzinger, for refusing to  report his paedophile  priest to the police, were congratulations circulated to bishops to encourage them to do likewise.  This really disposes of the  fallacious argument that the Vatican would be quite content for law enforcers to arrest its guilty priests”.

I wont quote any more from the book because you really need to read the book to grasp the extent of the scandals and the extreme failure of the Catholic Church to protect the innocent.  It is all about the protection of reputations, and wealth; no matter what the pope tells the families in his audiences, children are well down the list of priorities in the Vatican machine.  You will be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of victims individual priests abused.  The sections on the extensive results of research carried out into  celibacy and the effect on priests, the fact that around 80% of victims are boys,  and the lifelong consequences of the damage done to victims, is both heartbreaking and riveting.

How corrupt is the Vatican?  This so-called state which appears to be above international law, is currently being investigated for money laundering and several million dollars  have been seized!

back cover of 'The Case of the Pope' (Click on image to read)

Catholic Dichotomy of Females & Abuse of Children

Guido Cagnacci: Allegory of Human Life (1601-1663)

The Italian painter Guido Cagnacci encompasses it all in his beautiful painting which depicts the “cyclical regeneration of life out of death”.  He knew the realities of life and death.  His nude woman was the personification of beauty and fecundity, fundamental to the eternal  cycle of life and  the antithesis  of patriarchal  Catholicism. The Church created the dichotomy of the female; the virginal mother vs the whore.  Easy to commit ‘sins’ against the worthless latter and be forgiven in the confessional.  Within the flawed doctrine of Catholicism this is implicit.

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See posts: Are We But  a Flock of  Sheep?

& Saint?  Pope?

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The power brokers behind the Vatican machine are very astute.  Every so often they target some obscure person for beatification; the penultimate  stage before sainthood.  They don’t have to pay millions of dollars for publicity and enhancement of Catholicism because it is all free once this ‘news’ is released to the Global Media.  But the global congregation is growing weary of the sheer numbers of abused children.  The Dead Sea Scrolls have revealed that so much of Christianity is based on fantasy.

The latest canonisation  into sainthood scams regarding the 19th Century cardinal John Henry Newman and Sister Mary MacKillop are nothing but   pathetic attempts at diversion from the sexual abuse of hundreds of children by Catholic clergy around the world and especially the latest discoveries in Belgium.  This has been going on for centuries but in the past the Church always covered it up.  Priests’ sexual gratification and its secrecy was paramount;  children’s welfare wasn’t an issue.  The Church just ignored the abuse and shifted the offending priests around the parishes where they carried on with their proclivities.   Perhaps The Church’s fantastical teachings made it easy for priests to delude themselves into believing that they weren’t really having sex with their victims.  It was women, those evil temptresses they had to avoid.  I cannot believe that the problem is solely down to paedophilia.  It is much more psychologically complicated than that.

Children suffer and grow into adults who continue to suffer for the rest of their lives, that is if they haven’t committed suicide; and by the way, suicide is another sin in the eyes of the Church so the victims are condemned to “go to hell” as if they haven’t already been there. In some cases priests refuse to bury them!   Little Boys are as fair game as little girls; in the latest investigations into the Belgium abuse cases involving Catholic clergy,  girls and boys from two years of age were repeatedly raped.  Celibacy is a joke and the Vatican’s continued stance on celibacy, that Jesus was celibate,  is rubbish; he married and fathered children.  Mary Magdalene, his wife, was always labelled by The Church as a prostitute and Mary, mother of Jesus, was promoted to the pedestal of sainthood and mother of God because, The Church’s doctrine would have us believe,   hers  was an Immaculate Conception.  Some parts of Catholicism were taken from paganism so they had to have a replacement for the ancient  mother goddess such as the Babylonian Ishtar.  In the grottos around the Middle East whatever figurine of a goddess was in residence,  was removed and replaced with a statue of the Virgin Mary.  (See my book ‘Whatever Happened to Ishtar? – A Passionate Quest To Find Answers For Generations Of Defeated Mothers‘).  The Catholic Church had a very different kind of goddess in mind.

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7 News Item: Pregnant Nun Image Sparks Outrage:

 

An ice cream advertisement featuring a pregnant nun has been banned in the UK, media reports say.

The Italian ice cream brand Antonio Federici launched the magazine campaign with the attached tagline text: “Immaculately conceived … Ice cream is our religion.”

According to the British Advertising Standards Authority it reportedly received 10 (is that all) complaints from magazine readers who said the ad was offensive to Christians, especially those who practice Catholicism.

“We concluded that to use such an image in a light hearted way to advertise ice-cream was likely to cause serious offence to readers, particularly those who practised the Roman Catholic faith.” an official statement from the ASA says.

A UK advertising watchdog says the imagery used to illustrate Immaculate Conception was likely to be seen as mocking Catholic beliefs.

The Italian company said the ad, featuring in The Lady and Grazia magazines, aimed to gently satirise religion and that the notion of conception represented the creation of their ice cream product.

Where’s the outrage about predatory priests? one person asks in the comments section of the news item.