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The Vatican Advises On Sexual Abuse

May 18, 2011
Catholicism & Paedophilia
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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

‘Garibaldi’ and Risorgimento by Jasper Ridley – A Book Review

March 18, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS
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GARIBALDI  

by Jasper Ridley – A Book Review

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Updated 6 December 2013

My  great grandfather, Aristodemo Giovanni Frandi, fought in Garibaldi’s ‘army’ and eventually emigrated to New Zealand in 1875. Many were the tales he told his family about the betrayals of the Catholic Church, of its priests and nuns, who informed on Garibaldi’s fighters time and again. Read more about Aristodemo and Annunziata Frandi

 

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Garibaldi 001

The Catholic Church 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.  Pope Benedict XVl has in the past stated that Christianity helped forge a national identity that resisted political fragmentation on the Italian peninsula,  and foreign domination.  He stated that 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 obviously lives in a religious fantasy world.  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 Pope Benedict 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 had fought with Garibaldi in South America.  Peasant farmers, led by Garibaldi, almost single-handedly 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.

– Anne Frandi-Coory 6 December 2013

See post:  Terroni by Pino Aprile    “All that has been done to ensure that the Italians of the South become ‘Southerners’…

Vatican – Is It The Gay Men’s Club?

March 16, 2011
Catholicism & Paedophilia
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The cover of Panorama: “The Wild Nights Of Gay Priests”.

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 Bishop-Accountability.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 complex 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!  http://italia.panorama.it/Le-notti-brave-dei-preti-gay  – can be translated into English via Google

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See previous posts:

Celibacy and Sexual Abuse

Last Judgment and Babies

Paedophilia in Italy

Kiss of Betrayal

I Survived The 2011 Christchurch Earthquake

March 10, 2011
Anne Frandi-Coory - Short Life Stories
6 Comments

Heritage listed Catholic Church in Christchurch (Getty Images)

Manchester Street-one of the worst hit  (Getty Images)

Published in The Australian Writer issue #374 February 2012

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***This page is copyright to author Anne Frandi-Coory. No text can be copied or downloaded from this page without the written permission of Anne Frandi-Coory.***

Anne blog

Anne Frandi-Coory

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I was living permanently in Melbourne when the Christchurch earthquake struck on 4 September 2010. My daughter Gina, her husband and baby son, were living in Christchurch  at the time.

The first I knew about the September quake (without realising it at the time!), was when my daughter sent me a text:  “We are under the table, and Jack thinks it’s great fun”.  After getting out of bed at around 4 am to search for my bleeping mobile, only to find this message from Gina, I promptly turned the thing off, muttering “I will have to have words with that girl about the  time difference”, and staggered my way back to bed.  When the news automatically came on our bedside radio clock at 6am  announcing the 7.1 magnitude earthquake in  Christchurch, I leapt out of bed, wide awake, the full realization hitting me.  I had gone back to sleep ignoring my daughter’s text.  I was used to Gina texting at all hours of the morning after Jack was born, mostly to tell me how gorgeous he was, but often to ask advice about his sleeping and feeding routines.

Panicking, I managed to get through to her and calmed down when I heard she and her family were okay and that their house sustained no damage. At that stage, no-one in Christchurch had died as a result of the quake and damage to buildings was minimal.

However, I was in Christchurch when a devastating earthquake hit five months later on 22 February 2011; Gina and her husband, Paul, were not. They were off to an education conference in Rotorua and I was there to look after Jack,  a 20 month old with attitude.  On Monday the 21st, Gina and I had spent the day with Jack shopping in the CBD, (post earthquake, almost demolished) having coffees and snacks at cafés, and generally having a wonderful mother/daughter day out.

On Tuesday the 22nd, Paul and Gina left me with Jack early morning to catch their flight to Rotorua.  At 9.30am I left the house to take Jack to his usual private day care.  Gina works Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and we decided it was better for Jack if we kept to his routines while his parents were away.  I was a little nervous when they left, because I recalled that the last time they had arranged for me to come over from Melbourne to look after Jack for a week, Paul snapped his Achilles tendon and their trip away was cancelled.  I wondered what my little charge had in store this time to get his parents back.

After dropping Jack off, I did a few messages  and returned to the house in Avonhead to settle down, while Jack was away,  to some serious writing on my laptop for my next book.  Deep in thought, re-reading what I had just written, I felt more than heard, a loud rumble and then the whole house heaved, seemingly all over the place. I leapt up and raced to the nearest door frame with double french doors dividing the dining room and lounge.  I gripped onto the door jamb to stop myself falling as the glass doors swung back and forth on their hinges.  The quake went on for many seconds and slowly settled into faint tremors.  I immediately sent Gina a text “earthquake, all ok”.  That was the last communication with her until that evening, and I learned later how important that simple message was to her, as she could not contact anyone in Christchurch for some time.

Not knowing of the hell that engulfed the CBD, I raced for the car in the driveway, my only thought to get to Jack.  Before I left, I had tried ringing the carer on the landline and mobile, but neither worked.  Ten minutes driving on almost-empty roads, got me to my destination and I arrived to find the carer and her charges under the substantial dining table, watching cartoons on a tiny laptop.  Jack was serene, as though it was perfectly normal to sit under the table.  I joined them.

In between the aftershocks, I got up to watch the horrors unfolding on TV in the adjoining lounge.  The earthquake was of a lesser magnitude than the one in September;  6.3, but shallower at 4 km, and centred at Lyttelton.  Much of the CBD, where Gina, Jack and I had spent most of the day before, was all but razed.  Gina told me later that as the news got through to her and her colleagues, all Christchurch residents at the conference just wanted to get home to family and friends.  But there were no flights to Christchurch that  day.  All control towers and runways had to be inspected.  Back at the house in Avonhead, after spending an hour and half drinking comforting tea at the carer’s, I speedily carried Jack from the car  into the dining room, closed all the doors and removed the chairs from around the dining table, to enable us fast access under the table.  I gathered nappies, toys, books and anything else I needed for our enclosed space.  I had no electricity and no phones, and no battery radio.  That was the worst time, because I felt so isolated.  I managed to find enough food for Jack and I that didn’t need cooking. I took Jack  to bed at about 7 pm after playing with him and reading him stories, in between grabbing him and diving under the table during each aftershock tremor.  Singing Jack’s favourite songs had him swaying and laughing.

Down in Jack’s bedroom, I dressed him in his pyjamas and lifted him into his cot.  I dragged the single bed in his room over beside the cot and lay with my hand through the bars, holding his little hand.  Jack thought this was great fun and fell asleep without a murmur.  Tremors kept me awake most of the night so I was  in a state of  ‘fright and flight’  while Jack slept on.  The next morning Gina managed to get through to speak to me on  my mobile, relieved to hear we had made it safely from the carer’s home and that the house was undamaged.  They were hoping to board a flight late that morning to come home.  In the meantime, she told me that all drinking water had to be boiled and not to flush the toilets because raw sewerage was flowing into the estuary and it was probably seeping into the city’s water supply.  The best news of all was that there was a transistor radio and torch I could use, on a top shelf in the pantry, put there for just such emergencies.  Also, there were several bottles of drinking water in the deep freeze.  I told her that although there were few cars on the road when I went to pick up Jack, on the way back, cars were bumper to bumper going in the opposite direction, probably frantic drivers travelling to loved ones and picking children up from their schools.  Many schools were badly damaged in the quake, but no children were injured or killed.

Meanwhile, still holed up in the dining room, waiting to hear from Gina, I received another text message saying that they were on their way to Christchurch, when a man on the plane, worried about family he could not contact, had a heart attack, and the plane had to return to Rotorua.  Gina and Paul finally arrived back at their home at 4pm on Wednesday, relieved we and the house were fine, but distraught at news that many colleagues had lost their homes and some acquaintances were missing or dead in the rubble of the city.

The next day we travelled to Cromwell in Central Otago, five hours drive away, to Paul’s family’s holiday house.  We were lucky to be able to escape the city, but we were all on edge, thinking of what was happening back home.  After eight days, we returned to Christchurch and the growing total of the dead pulled from rubble.  There was no peace to be had and the after shocks reminded us of the ruin of one of New Zealand’s most picturesque cities.  Over 10,000 homes cannot be rebuilt because of the liquefaction of the land under them.  The violent tremors liquefied the land pushing  the sandy-silt  up through roads and  buildings.  Many families whose homes were destroyed, are living in caravans, cars, halls and tents.  Many have left the city.

Post earthquake, the fanatics and soothsayers had their say in letters to newspaper editors  and on radio talkback.  Apparently God destroyed Manchester Street because it is alive with prostitutes at night.  One has to ask why God would destroy the rest of the city as well, trapping people at work in multi-storied buildings, and flattening countless family homes.  Then there are the churches.  Why did God turn  Christchurch Cathedral,  Baptist churches, Anglican churches,  Catholic churches, Protestant churches, to name a few, into piles of rubble?   Is it possible that the earth moved because of a fault line in the earth’s crust?  I prefer that scientific explanation myself.

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© To Anne Frandi-Coory All Rights Reserved 10 March 2011

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Christchurch CBD 22 February 2011 (Getty Images)

‘The Reformation’ by Owen Chadwick – A Book Review

February 10, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, CATHOLIC CHURCH & Its Institutions
3 Comments

Updated 15 November 2013

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Pope Benedict preaches forgiveness again, albeit centuries too late! Has anything really changed in the Catholic Church?

In the last year or so the Pope has forgiven Joan of Arc (possibly mistaken identity) Galileo, and Martin Luther, their alleged heresy against The Church.

See previous posts: Joan of Arc; &  Galileo’s Daughter

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The Reformation

The Reformation

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THE REFORMATION by Owen Chadwick

– A Book Review

Martin Luther, a former Catholic priest, the Pope now says, did not intend to split the Catholic Church. Luther (1483-1546)  wanted to purge The Church of corruption.  The poor were forced to contribute to the Church’s coffers at Sunday Mass,  and starved, while the clergy grew fat on that income and the wealth given to them by the privileged in order that those who sinned (like paedophile priests) may take a short cut around penances for their mortal sins, and still get to heaven.  Luther preached that whether we go to either heaven or hell,  is preordained when we are born.  We cannot bribe our way into heaven.  This was Luther’s way of stopping the corruption of indulgences within the Catholic Church. Luther believed the Bible to be the sole source of religious authority and made the Bible accessible to the masses by translating it into the vernacular and arranging hundreds of copies to be printed; made possible by Johann Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.

See previous post: Justification of Johann Gutenberg

The whole thing is rather sickening and hypocritical really. The move by the Pope is believed to be the Vatican PR Machine’s way of softening Pope Benedict’s image as arch conservative hardliner, ex-head of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and pro nazi sympathiser during World War ll.  It is no secret that the Catholic Church supported Nazism.  The Pope is also erecting a statue in the Vatican gardens, to Galileo, another  “heretic” excommunicated by the Church, and who lived out his last years in poverty under house arrest.  His crime was his belief in heliocentrism: the planets and the earth revolve around a relatively stationary sun at the centre of the solar system.  I think the only reason Galileo wasn’t tortured to death by the Holy Fathers of the Inquisition was that he was much loved by the people and a brilliant scientist. Nevertheless Galileo was forever alienated from his church, the pope, and the Jesuits in particular.

Luther was excommunicated by Pope Leo X, who dismissed him initially as “a drunken German who will change his mind when sober”.  Many thousands of the poor were tortured and killed in the purges that followed.  A brutal war erupted which divided Christendom; but it was not about religion, it was about POWER!  Nothing has changed in the 21st Century.

St Bartholomew's Day twitter

MERCY

MERCY: St Bartholomew’s Day, Paris, 1572. ‘Ill-fated love affair between a Catholic & a Protestant’. John Everett Millais 1829-96. This is the day thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by Catholics.

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-Anne Frandi-Coory  15 November 2013

Nuns: An Endangered Species?

February 3, 2011
BOOKS In My Non-Fiction Collection-REVIEWS, CATHOLIC CHURCH & Its Institutions
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The Abbess was of noble blood

Catholic Sisters of Mercy; four biological sisters.The nun on the right was the closest Anne Frandi-Coory came to a mother figure; her face is the one she remembers as an infant in a Catholic Orphanage nursery. (see ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’ below.)

But early took the veil and hood

Ere upon life she cast a look

Or knew the world that she forsook

Fair too she was, and kind had been

As she was fair, but ne’er had seen

For her a timid lover sigh

Nor knew the influence of her eye

Love, to her ear, was but a name

Combined with vanity and shame

Her hopes, her fears, her joys, were all

Bounded within the cloister wall:

The deadliest sin her mind could reach

Was of monastic rule the breach;

And her ambition’s highest aim

To emulate St Hilda’s fame

For this she gave her ample dower,

To raise the convent’s eastern tower;

For this, with carving rare and quaint,

She decked the chapel of the saint,

And gave the relic-shrine of cost,

With ivories and gems embost.

The poor her convent’s bounty blest,

The pilgrim in its halls found rest.

Black was her garb, her rigid rule

Reformed on Benedictine school;

Her cheek was pale, her form was spare;

Vigils, and penitence austere,

Had early quenched the life of youth,

But gentle was the dame in Sooth

From: Sir Walter Scott, ‘Marmion’, The Immolation of Constance De Beverley

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My mother was a defeated nun and a defeated mother. She entered a convent to escape the inescapable: LIFE.  (See Previous Post: My Mother Was A Catholic Nun. 

For hundreds of years, young women and girls have been entering convents for various reasons.  Fathers and other patriarchs sent unmarriageable or unmanageable daughters into a cloistered life. Daughters whose mothers had died were also sentenced to this life of imprisonment, with or without their consent.

“A Drama of Science, Faith and Love”

Even Galileo, that illustrious 17th Century  scientist, and devout Catholic, confined his eldest daughter from the age of thirteen (1616)  to San Matteo convent in Arcetri.  His daughter, Virgina was deemed unmarriageable because her father had never married her mother, the beautiful Marina Gamba of Venice. Virginia (Sister Maria Celeste) lived out her life in poverty and seclusion in the convent (Order of St Clare) , as did her younger sister, Livia. Unlike Virginia, very little is heard from, or about, the “silent and strange” Livia.   Virginia  lost all her teeth by age 27  because of her lack of a nutritious diet.  It is worth reading  ‘Galileo’s Daughter’ by Dava Sobel, a gifted author, for more on these remarkable lives.  We know so much about Galileo and Virginia because of the correspondence between the two.  Ms Sobel also covers the horror of Galileo’s life and his banishment to house arrest in Ravenna, at the hands of the Holy Inquisition headed by Pope Paul V.

The Florentine poet, Dante Alighieri, was exiled from his beloved Florence in the early 14th Century by Pope Boniface Vlll (Cardinal Caetani), with support from the French.  Dante’s only daughter, Antonia, was confined to a convent in Ravenna where he was living at the time in 1320.  Antonia took the name Sister Beatrice, the name of Dante’s beloved.

In this day and age, the numbers of young Catholic women wishing to give up their freedom “for God” is dwindling.

What is worrying is that sexual harassment and abuse from priests and bishops continues, particularly in third world countries.  Rape is common because the clergy believe these nuns to be free from aids, unlike prostitutes. If the nuns’ abuse is uncovered, or they become pregnant, they are the ones to be thrown out onto the roads.

(See previous post  ‘Kiss of Betrayal’)

In an extreme case of double standards, always rife in the catholic Church, a nun at a Catholic hospital in Arizona was excommunicated because she approved an emergency abortion last year to save the life of a critically ill young patient.  Imagine the hundreds of  sexually abused girls and boys who could have been spared lives of misery, if paedophile priests had been excommunicated and reported to police, instead of being shifted around from parish to parish?

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From the pen of  The Ethical Nag:  The Vatican has now launched an “apostolic visitation,” or investigation, of every one of America’s 60,000 religious sisters, accused with having what Vatican spokesman Cardinal Franc Rodé calls “a feminist spirit” and “a secular mentality”. At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for bringing the church to a state of global crisis, even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack from these men.

Not surprisingly, the appeal of joining a Catholic religious order as a career choice is plummeting. Fewer than 4% of North American Catholic women have even considered becoming a nun, according to 2008 data from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. And that’s less than half the number compared to just five years earlier.

And no wonder. Dr. Tina Beattie, who teaches Catholic Studies at Roehampton University in the U.K., gives far more disturbing examples of how the Vatican treats its nuns.  For example:

“In 2001, senior leaders of women’s religious orders presented evidence to Rome of the widespread rape and abuse of nuns by priests and bishops, with a particular problem in Africa which has no cultural tradition of celibacy, and where the threat of HIV and Aids means that priests are more likely to prefer sex with nuns than with prostitutes. The Vatican acknowledged the problem and there was a brief flurry of media interest, but this is a scandal which has disappeared without a trace.”

I don’t know whether any Mercy nuns were sexually abused by Catholic clergy when I was a child  in their care, but I well remember the awe and deference the nuns exhibited in the presence of priests, bishops, and cardinals.  Once I understood the hypocrisy and double standard encouraged by the Church’s teachings, I found these displays sickening.

-Anne Frandi-Coory 3 February 2011

Read more about ‘Whatever Happened To Ishtar?’  

Joan of Arc & Pope Benedict

January 28, 2011
CATHOLIC CHURCH & Its Institutions
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updated 15 November 2013

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Mercy: St Bartholomew's Day, Paris, 1572. 'Ill-fated love affair between a Catholic & a Protestant'. John Everett Millais 1829-96. This is the day thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by Catholics.

Mercy: St Bartholomew’s Day, Paris, 1572. ‘Ill-fated love affair between a Catholic & a Protestant’. John Everett Millais 1829-96. This is the day thousands of Protestants were slaughtered by Catholics.

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Has Pope Benedict gone completely mad? He recently stated via a Catholic publication that politicians should behave like Joan Of Arc!   “With her deep prayer life and total devotion to serving God and the good of her fellow citizens, St. Joan of Arc is a wonderful model for Christian politicians”, Pope Benedict XVI said. “Hers is a beautiful example of holiness for lay people involved in politics, especially in difficult situations. Faith is the light that guided all her choices,” the pope said January 26 during his weekly general audience.  What a load of b…….  This is just another Church smokescreen to hide its vast problems.

Joan of Arc’s real name Jeanne d’Arc, The Maid of  Orléans, France. Clad in a white suit of armour, and carrying her own standard, Jeanne was leading an array of loyal French fighters to battle against the English, who were trying to take possession of her beloved Orléans.  Jeanne and her followers won that battle but on the way to relieve Compiégne, she was captured and sold to the English by John of Luxembourg, and they handed her over to The Catholic Holy Inquisition.  It seems to me,  Jeanne was burnt at the stake because she was leading a French army against the British. It was politics not religion, but a smokescreen was desperately needed.  Easier to torture and murder a young woman if she was found guilty of heresy and sorcery; less public sympathy.  The British didn’t want the blood of a  heroine on their historical hands.

But, and here’s the rub: Recent historical evidence has challenged the traditional account of Jeanne d’Arc. The contention is that Jeanne d’Arc has been confused with Jehanne, the illegitimate daughter of Queen Isabeau of France and Louis, duc d’Orléans, brother of the King. Now, how is Pope Benedict going to fix this problem given the Church’s teachings on the grave ‘sin’ of sex outside marriage, not to mention illegitimate births and the spectre of purgatory?

The Catholic Church ‘forgave’ Jeanne and made her a saint in 1920.  Perhaps the Church has canonised the wrong woman?  Now wouldn’t that cause ructions at the Holy See?

But let’s get back to what the Pope is actually saying in the 21st Century: “Christian politicians should not worry about doing the best for their country, but rather spend their time praying and fighting for their religion,  ie  Catholicism”.  There have been enough religious wars over millennia, and they’re still going on!

Shouldn’t the Pope and the Vatican be spending their time bringing paedophile priests to justice and helping their abused victims instead of pontificating about a brutal and savage murder committed by the Catholic hierarchy in the 15th Century?  I believe that the reason priests have been brutalising children for centuries is that they have never been brought to justice for their crimes.  Instead the Church has “forgiven them their sins” and allowed them to continue to prey on innocents.   These evil priests have been “indulged” by the Catholic Church.

Quote from The Ethical Nag’s Blog:

John Swales was only 10 years old back in 1969 when he and later his two younger brothers as well were first assaulted by

Father Barry Glendinning at a summer camp for low-income kids in Ontario. He told Maclean’s magazine in its December 7, 2009 issue:

“The real failing here is the institutional response to these deviants. Every culture, every occupation, has these issues of sexual abuse. But few have the ability to conceal sexual abuse of children like the Catholic church does.”

In Catholic theology, an indulgence is the full or partial remission of temporal punishment due for sins which have already been forgiven. The indulgence is granted by the Catholic Church after the sinner has confessed and received absolution. The belief is that indulgences draw “House of Merit” accumulated by Christ’s  superabundantly meritorious sacrifice on the cross (what?!) and the virtues and penance of the saints. They are granted for specific good works, prayers,  and what the Church will not openly admit, money.  Lots of it.  We all know many priests come from wealthy Catholic families.  No wonder deviant priests re-offend time and again!

Indulgences replaced the severe penances of the early Church. More exactly, they replaced the shortening of those penances that was allowed at the intercession of those imprisoned and those awaiting martyrdom for the faith.

Abuses in selling and granting indulgences were a major point of contention when Martin Luther  initiated the Protestant Reformation. (1517).

Celibates And Nuns Are Not Good For Children

January 19, 2011
Catholicism & Paedophilia
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Adam & Eve. A detail from Michelangelo’s painting in Sistine Chapel in the Vatican

Updated April 2015:  Investigation launched into unmarked graves of children who once lived in Catholic Mercy Orphanage in Ballarat.  Is Ballarat Australia’s ‘Ireland’ where paedophile priests were sent by Vatican?

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Updated 2 August 2014

More and more cases of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy around the world are being uncovered. Not only sexual abuse, but neglect of children in orphanages and homes for unmarried mothers:

Tuam mass grave and the search for almost 800 unbaptised children. So, a foetus is worth more than a child whose mother is unwed? 

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tuam mass grave

Tuam Catholic Home For Unmarried Mothers in Ireland (now demolished)

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There is no doubt that unmarried mothers and their babies were treated with a special type of callousness by the Catholic Church at the time this home for unmarried mothers was in operation.  And those children who were not baptised were not allowed to be buried in proper, named graves.

After all, as far as the Catholic Church was concerned, these ‘inflicted’ children were full of sin!  We will never know if these children were sexually abused, as well as grossly neglected, but if history is anything to go by……..

The Irish Prime Minister, Enda Kenny,  has authorised an inquiry into the missing children and to ascertain exactly how many children are buried at Tuam.  It is estimated that over 60,000 children were abused by Catholic Clergy in Ireland over several decades.

 Updated 20 September 2018 …Tuam Mass Grave – Read more here:

https://ciarantierney.blogspot.com/2018/03/for-peter-and-families-its-personal.html?m=1

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Because of the thousands of cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by paedophile Catholic priests, questions are being asked about the correlation between priestly celibacy and sexual abuse.The Vatican secretary of state,  insists there is no cause-and-effect link between priestly celibacy and the child abuse scandal rocking the Roman Catholic Church.  But how would he know that for sure when there has never been extensive research about this issue?  And, this very issue has not only been swept under the carpet for centuries, but in some cases has been condoned by Bishops.

To quote the secretary of state: “It has been amply demonstrated that celibacy, when faithfully observed, is of great value to their vocation and in helping the people of God…..there is no direct link between celibacy and the deviant behaviour of certain priests,” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state, told the Spanish newspaper Vanguardia.  “On the contrary, it is precisely the failure to remain celibate that gradually degrades the life of a priest, until he ceases to be an example, a gift, a spiritual guide for others”.  This is so Catholic!   SIN is the problem!   That awful blemish we are all born with because Eve tempted Adam.   That means that the only actions  that will save the offending priests’ souls are prayers and penance.  But what about the victims: those poor innocent  children who have been robbed of their childhoods and in most cases, a peaceful adulthood.  I don’t see anywhere, the Vatican’s sorrow for the children so abused.

Last week Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of two bishops implicated in the revelations of paedophile abuse by Catholic priests that have swept Europe and the Americas since November.

In Belgium Roger Vangheluwe, the first bishop directly implicated in the affair, resigned after admitting to abusing a minor several years ago.

Bishop James Moriarty, for his part, became the fourth bishop to resign since two major sex abuse scandals hit the Irish Catholic Church.  Revelations of large-scale paedophilia spanning decades have rocked the Catholic Church in countries including Ireland, Austria, the United States and the pope’s native Germany.  Bishops and cardinals were accused of protecting guilty clergy by moving them to other parishes  instead of handing them over to police for prosecution.   The priests were protected but not the children in those other parishes the paedophiles were sent to.

One alleged victim of a priest accused of molesting up to 200 boys at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin sued the Vatican and the Pope on Thursday in a bid to access secret files on investigations into sex abuse in the Church.   As I have stated in a previous post, there is little chance of any court being allowed access to Vatican files.  All archives are closely guarded by the Office of the Inquisition renamed the Congregation For The Doctrine of the Faith.

See post & book by Geoffrey Robertson QC, a must-read for all Catholics:   The Case of the Pope; Sexual Abuse & The Vatican.

Latest News release relating to the above:

THE Vatican is asking a US  judge to reject an attempt to question Pope Benedict XVI under oath in a sex abuse lawsuit on the grounds that there has been no evidence of a link to church officials in Rome.

The arguments filed on Thursday in the US District Court in Kentucky also say that forcing Benedict, a head of state, to give a deposition would violate international law. The US considers the Vatican to be a sovereign nation. The lawsuit accuses the Vatican, referred to in papers as the Holy See, of orchestrating a cover-up of priests sexually abusing children throughout the US. Louisville attorney William McMurry asked to depose Benedict and other Vatican officials in a motion in March, and the filing on Thursday was a response. Mr McMurry has also asked that the Vatican turn over administrative documents and respond to questions related to the abuse scandal in the US.

Lawyers for the Vatican argue that thousands of documents provided in a lawsuit against the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville several years ago have turned up no connection to Rome. The Louisville archdiocese reached a settlement in 2003 with more than 240 abuse victims represented by Mr McMurry for $US25 million ($A28.87 million). Mr McMurry will have an opportunity to reply to the Vatican’s latest arguments in a response to the court.  While US dioceses have been sued over abuse by priests, the Kentucky lawsuit is the first US case to make it to the stage of determining whether victims have a negligence claim against the Vatican.  Filed in 2004 by three men abused by priests in the Louisville diocese, it argues in part that US bishops should be considered employees or officials of the Holy See.

Last Judgment & Babies

January 10, 2011
Catholicism & Paedophilia
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One of the damned being dragged to the fires of hell by demons – Part of Last Judgment hanging in the Sistine Chapel, Vatican

 

><><  updated 17 July 2014  ><><

Pope Francis is now the Pope and leader of the Catholic Church. Still, nothing has changed!

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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, others 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

December 21, 2010
CATHOLIC CHURCH & Its Institutions
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Updated 10 March 2018

The Catholic Church is the largest, most powerful, most efficient bureaucracy in the world…every child, from the day they’re baptised, is tracked wherever they go in the world; the Church catches up with them again upon confirmation, and later when they marry. The Church owns you! You didn’t really think baptism was about saving humans from ‘original sin’ did you, people? How else could the Church know when every new baby was born?

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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 euro 250,000 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.

See  JP Morgan Closes Its Branch At The Vatican

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