Post #61

Excerpt from National Catholic Reporter: Unformed Future

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- When Shane Claiborne hops to the podium in the meeting room at the Hotel Albuquerque, he looks as stylistically unbounded as his spiritual quest that’s outlined on a bio sheet. He’s long and lanky with a goatee. He looks bookish in dark-rimmed glasses, his thin face framed by dreadlocks held in place by a handkerchief bandana. He projects a kind of urban underbelly chic with an accent as pure as the early days of NASCAR.

He is a product of East Tennessee Protestant evangelical Christianity transplanted to the Northeast, where he engages in a robust version of Catholic Worker-type community, advocating for the poor and for nonviolent solutions to problems.

Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr speaks of him as a gifted “third-way person.” In the context of the conference on emerging Christianity he is about to address, he serves as a bridge, and a personification of one version of what might be arising out of what is.

To talk of an emerging church or emerging Christianity is to speak of something that owes a great deal to tradition but that seeks its shape and bearing in ways not yet formed.

That may be the nature of emergence -- that whatever it is never fully arrives all laid out with clear boundaries and certitude, with clear markers so everyone knows who’s in and who’s out. That may also be why the language of those who take the prospect of emergence seriously is so loaded with movement and an impression of travel. Consider the title of the conference held in April in Albuquerque, at which Claiborne spoke: “Emerging Christianity: How We Get there Determines Where We Arrive.” The journey, then, is the place, and the sojourners don’t expect that all the answers will be waiting, like an award for finishing, at the end of some religious obstacle course.

“I hope whatever emerging Christianity is,” said Fr. Rohr, a featured speaker at the conference, “it’s going to be much more practice-based than doctrine-based. Where has this obsession with believing correct doctrines gotten us? The Roman church is right back into it, although maybe that’s why God is humiliating us, to say: ‘This obsession with being right and having the whole truth, look where it’s gotten you, Roman church,’ ” he said in a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the then-breaking story that the shadow of the clergy sex abuse scandal had darkened the door of the papal palace. “It might well be in the great scheme of God’s grace the only way to bring us to humility, to balancing all of our absolutely certain knowing with a necessary unknowing.”

The conference was sponsored by Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, the second of its kind, and the title suggests an expansion of the idea from last year’s conference, which bore the heading, “The Emerging Church.”

Whether a relative handful of people meeting in the New Mexico desert (some 570 people from 45 U.S. states and five other countries) can be considered a measure of new things emerging, only time will tell. Numbers aside, the discussion was broad enough to cross a range of denominational borders and ideological presumptions, and it wasn’t about easy fixes or the simple overthrow of dogma and traditional practice. In fact, in some instances, the case was quite the opposite.

If Rohr, for Catholics, embodies in many ways whatever is left of the renewal impulses of the Second Vatican Council, he also is a leading advocate today of contemplative life, the ancient discipline that has found a resurgence in some unlikely places.

It is an aspect of Christianity that Rohr thinks has been shortchanged in the church over the centuries. He also believes it holds the key -- “nondualistic thinking” -- to the next level of Christian existence. That level, he said, will be one that goes beyond the mind, beyond rationality, beyond ego. “The mind,” he said, “is never going to get us to a great church. It will always create some moral and doctrinal distinctions because that’s the way the ego operates. The ego prefers the dualistic mind.” In contrast, he said, “the soul prefers to embrace things, not to name things. It is what it is without a name. It is what it is as it is. The soul has a different set of eyes, and my assumption is that the soul sees with contemplative eyes. It sees things without needing to label them up or down.”

Sources include:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8500459074078742992
http://www.thesimpleway.org/shane/bio
http://www.cacradicalgrace.org/aboutus/founder.html
http://www.catholicworker.org/index.cfm
http://advisor401k.info/richard-rohr.html
http://www.cacradicalgrace.org/conferences/2010/emerging-christianity
http://cacradicalgrace.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council

Post #60

Excerpt from The Washington Post: The logic of Vatican's linking sex abuse, women's ordination

by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

"Among the changes to the legal procedures the Church will now follow to remove a pedophile from the priesthood is the extension of the statute of limitations from 10 years after the victim's 18th birthday to 20 years. This extension makes it easier for the church tribunal within the Vatican's "doctrinal department," the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (hereafter CDF), to remove priests even when the victim did not come forward before reaching the age of 28.

Other significant changes include canonical/legal procedures for dismissing priests guilty of using child pornography or of sexually abusing adults vulnerable because of mental challenges.

Yet, many Vatican observers and critics were surprised to find in the list of "exceptionally serious crimes," alongside procedures concerning sexual abuse, also the attempted ordination of women to the priesthood. In taking this step, the Vatican indicated that the latter is, like priestly pedophilia, a serious crime against faith and morals.

Admittedly, the variety of crimes covered might suggest to some, on the one hand, that this is the Vatican's version of an "omnibus bill:" It deals with many urgent issues without necessarily connecting them.

On the other hand, some charge that the Vatican does connect the crimes and, even worse, equates their gravity.

They are both right and both wrong.

This new revision of that original 2001 document, called "The Safeguarding of the Sanctity of the Sacraments," brings together various crimes/sins that were historically handled by the CDF.

In 1988 Pope John Paul II stated that the purpose of the CDF was "to promote and safeguard the doctrine on faith and morals in the whole Catholic world." More specifically, the Pope gave to the CDF the power to deal with what he called "the more serious crimes (graviora delicta) against morals and the celebration of sacraments."

In the 2001 document Pope John Paul II determined which crimes committed by clerics would be tried by the CDF's tribunal. Many of these crimes involved sins committed during the performance of one of the Church's sacraments. They included profaning the Eucharist and, in the case of priests, breaking the Seal of Confession or soliciting sex from a person during confession. To this list, the Pope added pedophile acts. The 2001 document was revised in 2003 to add other crimes, such as the recording of a confession by anyone.
To be clear, from 2001 onward the CDF has been responsible for the Church's prosecution of priests accused of pedophilia. That 2001 document, revised in 2003, was updated in May 2010. The changes were published this week.

Pope Benedict XVI directed the CDF to add to the list of the "more serious crimes against morals and the celebration of sacraments." The revised list of more serious crimes against morality now includes the use of child pornography by clerics and the abuse of vulnerable adults. The revised list of more serious crimes concerning celebration of sacraments now includes the attempt to ordain a woman to the priesthood.

Since the attempt to ordain a woman involves the serious abuse of a sacrament, Holy Orders, it was logical to place those cases before CDF's tribunal. There was a clear need for an adequate church tribunal for prosecuting those involved in this action, which occurs sporadically in certain fringes of the Church."

-------------------------------------

Fr. John Zuhlsdorf was ordained by Pope John Paul II for the diocese of Velletri-Segni in Italy in 1991. He is a former collaborator with the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei and has served in parishes both in Italy and the U.S. He writes a weekly column in The Wanderer on liturgical translation. Fr. Zuhlsdorf is on the board of directors of the Wanderer Forum Foundation.

Sources include:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/07/the_logic_of_vaticans_linking_sex_abuse_womens_ordination.html
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_pro_14071997_en.html
http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_introd-storica_en.html
http://www.ewtn.com/expert/answers/cdw_liturgical_abuses.htm#graviora
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13649b.htm

Post #57

Excerpt from Catholic News Agency: Purification of Church from 'serious sins' a long process

Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said Saturday that the new norms on sexual abuse are an "important step," but, he warned, law "is not everything" in the battle against serious sins. He observed that the Church's path to a "purer and more evangelical witness" will not be short.

Fr. Lombardi reflected on the effects of the updates to Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) norms concerning the "most serious" sins on his weekly Vatican Television editorial "Octava Dies." The details of the updates were released during a press briefing he gave on Thursday with CDF promoter of justice, Msgr. Charles Scicluna.

In his editorial, the Vatican spokesman said that with the publication of the norms, "the Church has taken an important step in addressing the question (of sexual abuse) with responses that will be lasting and have a profound impact.

Highlighting some of the standout elements of the quite extensive updates to canonical procedures, he said that the modifications enable "faster and more effective" trials and greater assistance due to the presence of lay experts on ecclesiastical tribunals. They also increase the statute of limitations and officially consider abusing those with "a limited use of reason" and the possession of pedophile pornography as among the gravest of sins, he outlined.

But, while "law is necessary" to combating sexual abuses within the Church, "it is not everything," Fr. Lombardi pointed out.

Change must come about through "commitment to education, the formation of clergy and staff who work in institutions linked to the Church, information and prevention, dialogue with and personal care for the victims," he said, noting that it is a “huge area in which the Church has mobilized itself, as urged for by the Pope, in many countries.

"For its part, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith continues to work to give aid to local bishops in formulating coherent and effective guidelines,” Fr. Lombardi underscored. “The new law is important, but we know well that our commitment to a purer and more evangelical witness must be a long road."

Sources include
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/purification-of-church-from-serious-sins-a-long-process-says-fr.-lombardi/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+catholicnewsagency%2Fdailynews+%28CNA+Daily+News%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Lombardi
http://www.oecumene.radiovaticana.org/en1/Articolo.asp?c=408865
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_pro_14071997_en.html
http://www.vatican.va/resources/resources_mons-scicluna-2010_en.html
http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1002901.htm
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_jp-ii_exh_25031992_pastores-dabo-vobis_en.html

Post #56

Excerpt from the Boston Globe:  What I Believe

by Charles P. Pierce (11 July 2010)

The institutional church is in disarray. The sexual-abuse scandal that had its ground zero here in Boston has now exploded internationally, most notably in Ireland, where the Roman Catholic Church was as close to an established state religion as it was anywhere in the world since the Reformation. The current pope, Benedict XVI, behaved as dubiously in these matters when he was the archbishop of Munich as Cardinal Bernard Law behaved here. Once, the scandal was treated as an American problem – the Vatican having had issues with the American experiment going back at least to Pope Pius IX, who included many of the American concepts vital to a secular democracy in his Syllabus of Errors in 1864, when American democracy was in enough trouble at home – so it was roundly dismissed by various Vatican functionaries as the creation of liberal freethinkers and scandal-happy US newspapers, including this one. Not any longer. Cases have detonated in Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and several other countries. Church attendance in the United States is down.

A survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, released in April 2009, found that one in 10 US adults has left the Catholic Church after having been raised Catholic – with Catholicism having had the largest net loss in members of all the major religious groups in the United States. About half of those who departed and now identify themselves as “unaffiliated” left the church because of its views on abortion, homosexuality, and birth control. (In 2009, the American Religious Identification Survey by Hartford’s Trinity College found that, between 1990 and 2008, the percentage of people in Massachusetts who identified themselves as Catholic dropped to 39 percent from 54 percent.) The sexual-abuse scandal, then, erupted within a church that already was struggling with serious demographic pressures. The scandal placed the doubts of much of the laity into sharp relief. Many Catholics are out of patience with intramural church solutions that seem to do little more than push the cases down the road and keep in place the sclerotic institutional structure and the paranoid mania for secrecy that allowed the corruption to flourish in the first place.

And that structure existed not only in the opulence of the Vatican itself, but also in the minds of millions of Catholics, like myself. It still exists in the former. It has no influence in the latter, not for me, nor for many others like me. The institutional Catholic Church, for me, has no concrete form, no physical structure, no hierarchy except that of ideas. Even my attendance at Mass is largely contemplative, the priest presiding in a supervisory capacity, his authority dependent wholly on the primacy of my individual conscience. For it’s not really about celibacy, or female priests. It’s about the source of the authority exercised by a hierarchical priesthood based in Rome.

None of this is really new. As Illinois-based historian and author Garry Wills has pointed out, relentlessly, Catholics fought to define the church’s authority within themselves even back in the earliest days of the church, before it attached itself to imperial Rome and, subsequently, to thousands of years worth of European power politics. And the spiritual authority – and authoritarianism – of the hierarchy, up to and including the papacy, was diminishing in the minds of millions of Catholics long before the sexual-abuse crisis brought that issue to a conspicuous boil. “The hierarchy,” says Richard McBrien, a professor at the University of Notre Dame and an outspoken critic of the institutional church, “is largely irrelevant to any intelligent, educated Catholic.”

In the church of my youth, with the priests reciting incomprehensible Latin, their backs to the people, walled off by an altar rail and two millenniums’ worth of imperial design, the purple always came out at Advent and at Lent. It was the color of penance, we were told. And so it is, and penitence begins within, in one mind and one soul and in what the nuns used to call an informed conscience. That’s where my Catholicism is now. It is a penitential faith. That’s where you can look for it. It is possible, I have come to realize, that I’ve grown up to become an anti-Catholic Catholic.

Sources include:
http://www.charlespierce.com/aboutPage
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2010/07/11/what_i_believe
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/writer-charles-pierce-remaining-catholic-amid-chaos
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14368b.htm
http://religions.pewforum.org/
http://livinginliminality.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/aris_report_2008.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Wills
http://www.richardmcbrien.com/

Post #55

Catholic Church in Cuba helps to secure release of political prisoners

The Roman Catholic Church in Cuba published the names of five political prisoners who will be released, and the identities of six others who will be moved to their home provinces.

Cardinal Jaime Ortega has been meeting with President Raúl Castro in a mediation process started in May, describing it at the time as a "magnificent start" to talks surrounding the potential release of some jailed dissidents.

On Wednesday the Archdiocese of Havana announced the forthcoming release of 52 political prisoners -- five immediately and 47 more in the coming three or four months, all of whom will be given the option of moving to Spain if they want. Their release is another fruit of mediation by the Church, which already brought the freedom of a paraplegic prisoner and the relocation of 12 others.

Cardinal Ortega gave the news personally to some of the prisoners.

Cardinal Ortega spoke briefly with the press after meeting with the Spanish foreign minister who assisted in the negotiations, "Reaffirmed with your visit is the hope that we already announced earlier about these topics of prisoners and of all that has to do with the progress of Cuba's presence in the worldwide context considered positively," the Cardinal said.

He thanked the Spanish official for his position as a "bridge" with Cuba, as well as his effort to try to normalize relations with the European Union.

"I thank you as a Cuban, as archbishop of Havana and as a member of this Church that has had this special opportunity to carry forward a very propitious moment to be able to take some positive steps in the best sense of our national situation," said the cardinal.

A communiqué from the Havana Archdiocese, signed on Thursday by spokesman Orlando Márquez Hidalgo, stated: "As we anticipated in yesterday's note, five prisoners will be able to leave for Spain in the next few days."

The note listed the names of the five prisoners who will be released: Antonio Villarreal Acosta, Lester González Pentón, Luis Milán Fernández, José Luis García Paneque and Pablo Pacheco Ávila.

Another note, also signed by the spokesman, stated: "Cardinal Jaime Ortega, archbishop of Havana, has been informed by the authorities that in the next few hours six prisoners will be moved to their provinces of residence."

According to the communiqué, the names of these prisoners are: Nelson Molinet Espino, Claro Sánchez Altarriba, José Daniel Ferrer García, Marcelo Manuel Cano Rodríguez, Ángel Juan Moya Acosta, and Luis Enrique Ferrer García.

Relations between Cuba and the Roman Catholic Church reached a low point after the Communist revolution of January 1959 but improved after a visit by Pope John Paul II in 1998.

Sources include:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/americas/07/08/cuba.political.prisoners/index.html
http://www.zenit.org/article-29847?l=english
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/latin_america/10548480.stm
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bortega.html
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/cuban-cardinal-jaime-ortega-says-his-country-is-in-crisis/19447040?sms_ss=email

Post #54

Within the next weeks, it is likely there will be a new document issued from the Vatican, a motu proprio, meaning a legal document under the pope’s authority.  It may be addressed to the whole Church, to part of it, or to some individuals.  In this case, the expectation, as John Allen points out is that it is expected to encourage the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the Vatican's office for liturgical policy, to focus on promoting what he describes as a “new liturgical movement".  In his article, Allen quotes from Joseph Ratzinger's book Milestones to give some meaning to this phrase, “new liturgical movement".

More than one commentator has suggested that Ratzinger wants to abandon the progress made in Vatican 2 and return the church to the days before Blessed Pope John 23rd said, "I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in."  Instead, it appears that Ratzinger wants to go back to old liturgical practices but put the idea in some new packaging so that it will appeal to those who long for the old days.  There is ample evidence to suggest that as Ratzinger draws his cronies around him (witness recent papal appointments) he is clearly turning the wheel back rather than forward.

Eugene Cullen Kennedy is emeritus professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago and an astute observer of things pontifical.  In this excerpt from a recent column, Kennedy develops his comparison between Ratzinger and the 18th century monarchs/dictators who wanted to preserve the old and ignore the new.

Excerpt from National Catholic Reporter: Frock coats and fiddle back vestments

"Pope Benedict XVI struggles to renew and restore the hierarchical or monarchical model of the church. Sure that the problems are not the clogging rust from the corroding hierarchical structures, he has announced the creation of a new Vatican department dedicated to tackling what he calls "a grave crisis" in which Europe and North America are facing "the eclipse of the sense of God."

Meanwhile the victims of sex abuse by clergy are the counterparts of the masses waiting for the tsar to respond to their suffering as they wait in St. Peter's Square for the pope to respond more fully and effectively to theirs. Benedict seems unsure of what to do as criticism mounts for his seemingly passive management of the problem as a German archbishop or a top Vatican official. One of the central parts of his program is the restoration of the hierarchical forms that are falling like space debris all around him. Having given Archbishop Lefebvre and his pre-Vatican II longings considerable leeway, Benedict now advocates traveling back in time to undermine Vatican II's monumental liturgical reforms, claiming that he is just restoring "continuity" with the imagined glory of a a Gone With the Wind age of Catholic life.

He is calling for fiddleback vestments instead of frock coats, and the team the Vatican has sent to investigate the American nuns -- who are a true glory of the Church -- may want them to slip into the armored suit habits of irretrievable times. Meanwhile, as victims of the sex abuse scandal still wait below his windows, weeping as uncomforted as Rachel, this week the pope made a trip [2] to the small central Italian city of Sulmona, to venerate the relics of Pope St. Celestine V who, Catholic Culture.Com reports, resigned from the papacy five months after his election in 1294. Benedict also blessed a new fountain [3]at the Vatican in honor of St. Joseph, to whom the pope is said to have great devotion. He also announced plans to move shortly to his summer retreat at Castel Gandolfo."

Sources include:
http://ncronline.org/blogs/bulletins-human-side/frock-coats-and-fiddle-back-vestments
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/what-benedict-means-new-liturgical-movement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motu_proprio
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/catholic_stories/cs0117.html
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Pope_John_XXIII

Post #53

Excerpt from National Catholic Reporter: A hierarchy deeply damaged from within

The erosion goes on, at a quicker pace, ugly in details that keep heaping up for the world to see. The pope’s brother admits to slapping choir students who didn’t perform properly -- a human imperfection made all the more perceptible in an arena long wrapped in a façade of seeming perfection.

Meanwhile, the world outside this favored culture is beginning to realize that one of the most powerful men within it during Pope John Paul II’s papacy, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, once secretary of state and now dean of the College of Cardinals, took money from the likes of the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ. Maciel was a favorite of the former pope, and a man who abused his young seminarians and is accused of fathering children, including a son, whom he also allegedly repeatedly abused.

Sodano was one of Maciel’s most ardent backers.

That Sodano should be nowhere near any level of control at the Vatican is apparent to most everyone who has given this scandal the slightest thought. But there he is, still posturing, offering paeans to a beleaguered pope during liturgies, and dismissing the growing chorus of charges against fellow bishops as petty gossip.

And when one of those fellow bishops, Cardinal Cristoph Schönborn of Austria, dares to call him out, as someone should, in one of the more rational comments that anyone inside the culture has yet made, Sodano is able to manipulate a meeting with Schönborn and the pope. The world is subsequently informed that such criticism is not to occur cardinal to cardinal. Such power is reserved for the pope alone. The pope remains silent and Sodano remains influential.

The protection from scrutiny previously enjoyed by the culture, a reflection more than anything of royal prerogatives and palace behavior, has disintegrated to the point where the U.S. Supreme Court gave approval for a suit that seeks to hold the Vatican responsible for the transfer of pedophile priests from place to place, transfers that occurred without warning to law enforcement bodies or to the communities involved.

The sex abuse crisis, as we’ve said in this space before, is a crisis of the clerical culture, a crisis of authority and ecclesiology. The sex abuse crisis is the awful symptom of much deeper problems.

Projection is occurring on a global scale as the bishops grasp for ways to explain how so much has gone so wrong so quickly. Relativism! Secularism! Cultural influences! All those bad things out there, they reason, are influencing the people to revolt, to backslide, to not believe as they should, to disregard the hierarchy’s rulings and pronouncements. It is the bishops who fail to recognize that they, themselves, are the best living examples of the relativism and secularism they decry.

The great irony in all of this, of course, is that the hierarchy need not thrash about wondering how to adjust their culture and lives to the demands of an educated church in the 21st century.

The great questions of this age -- and its demands for accountability and transparency -- were anticipated by the church, which began to deal with them during the Second Vatican Council, the reform gathering of the mid-1960s.

There was reason -- perhaps the Spirit responds when so many openly seek its guidance -- why the texts of that council’s documents were different from any before, why those texts are filled with notions of dialogue, of acceptance, of restraint in judgment and punishment, of the new description of church as the people of God.

Perhaps those at the council anticipated that the hierarchy of the future would have to structure itself differently, lead differently, and see the world differently.

What seems clear at this moment is that the hierarchy as it has evolved in the past half millennium is deeply damaged from within. And there is little evidence of the imagination, the creativity, the spirit, necessary to repair or rethink the structure.

The second half of 2010, it seems, may be just as disheartening to the Holy Father, just as bumpy, as the first.

Sources include:
http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/hierarchy-deeply-damaged-within
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bsodano.html
http://www.vatican.va/news_services/press/documentazione/documents/cardinali_index_en.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcial_Maciel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Christ
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bschoc.html

Post #52

Excerpt from Agence France Presse: Police question Belgian cardinal in child abuse probe

Police questioned the former head of Belgium's Catholic Church, Cardinal Godfried Danneels, for over 10 hours Tuesday as part of a probe into allegations of priestly child abuse.

Danneels has been accused by a retired priest of shielding predator priests when he headed the country's Catholic Church from 1979 to 2009 but he has denied any cover-up. Late last month, police raided the Church's headquarters, seized computer files from Danneels's home and even searched a cathedral crypt in an operation that angered the Vatican.

The legality of last month's raid has been questioned by lawyers for Danneels as well as the archbishop of Brussels-Mechelen, whose palace was also raided. They argue that it compromises the inviolability of the Vatican.

The Roman Catholic Church in Belgium has endured some of the worst of the worldwide paedophilia scandal to beset the Vatican. In April its longest-serving bishop, 73-year-old Roger Vangheluwe, resigned from his Bruges post after admitting sexually abusing a boy for years. According to retired priest Dirk Deville, hundreds of cases of sexual abuse had been signalled to Danneels going back to the 1990s.

In a bid to restore confidence within an increasingly sceptical flock, Belgium's bishops came together in May to publicly beg forgiveness from victims both for the actions of paedophile priests and for the Church's "silence."

Sources include:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5giMWS8lr74gsiIxZXNJBBNHzVDxw
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/07/belgium.church.sex.abuse/  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfried_Danneels
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bdanneels.html

Post #51

Excerpt from Reuters: Vatican says not liable in U.S. sexual abuse case

The Vatican, struggling to control the damage to its image from a sexual abuse scandal, said Tuesday it would prove it cannot be held legally responsible for a predatory priest in a pivotal U.S. lawsuit.

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to consider a case on whether the Vatican has immunity over the sexual abuse of minors by priests, allowing a lawsuit filed in 2002 to go forward.

In a statement, the Vatican's lawyer, Jeffrey Lena, said when the case returns to a U.S. district court it would show it cannot be held responsible for the actions of the priest as he was not a Vatican employee.

"The decision not to hear the case is not a comment on the merits of our case," Lena said, adding that the case would now go back to the district court in Oregon.

The lawsuit, filed against the Vatican by a plaintiff identified only as John Doe, claimed he was sexually abused on several occasions in the mid-1960s when he was 15 or 16 by a Roman Catholic priest named Father Andrew Ronan.

According to court documents, Ronan molested boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in Ireland and then in Chicago before his transfer to a church in Portland, Oregon, where he allegedly abused the victim who filed the lawsuit. Ronan died in 1992.

The Vatican claimed immunity under a U.S. law, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976, that allows foreign states to avoid being sued in court.

But the law contains exceptions. The appeals court cited one of those, ruling the lawsuit has sufficiently alleged that Ronan was an employee of the Vatican acting within the scope of his employment under Oregon law.

NOT A MULTINATIONAL

The Vatican has said it cannot be seen as a multinational business whose executives can be held ultimately responsible for the action of their subordinates, because dioceses around the world have their own legal status as employers.

It has also said the pope, as head of a sovereign state recognized by more than 170 countries, has diplomatic immunity from prosecution in other countries.

Pope Benedict is struggling to control the damage a sexual abuse scandal has done to the Catholic Church's image. The crisis has hit the United States and several European countries, including his native Germany.

Sources:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65S29N20100629
http://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.asp?ID=12033
http://bishopaccountability.org/
http://www.supremecourt.gov/default.aspx
http://www.izandi.net/jeffrey-lena-lawyer-for-pope-talks-about-his-role/
http://www.archdiocesedocuments.org/uploads/Fr_Ronan.pdf

Post #50

You can almost sense the aging cardinals and monsignors mounting the ramparts at the Vatican with their cauldrons of boiling oil to repel another volley from The New York Times.

In a new article, writers Laurie Goodstein and David Halbfinger present important evidence that while Pope Karol Wojtyla may have given Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger responsibility for dealing with the sexual abuse crisis in 2001, church documents and interviews with canon lawyers and bishops cast that decision and the future pope’s track record in a new and less flattering light.  The article includes an interesting interactive timeline showing developments during Ratzinger's involvement.

The article says that documents show and canon lawyers confirm the office led by Ratzinger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, had actually been given authority over sexual abuse cases nearly 80 years earlier, in 1922. But for the two decades he was in charge of that office, the future pope never asserted that authority, failing to act even as the cases undermined the church’s credibility in Canada, the United States, Australia, Ireland and otther countries; instead, Ratzinger focused his attention elsewhere - chasing after theologians with whom he disagreed.

“But the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of non-responsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.”

Here is a further excerpt from The New York Times article. You can read the complete story here.

Excerpt from The New York Times: Amid Church Abuse Scandal, an Office That Failed to Act

"Just over a year later, in May 2001, John Paul issued a confidential apostolic letter instructing that all cases of sexual abuse by priests were thenceforth to be handled by Cardinal Ratzinger’s office. The letter was called “Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela,” Latin for “Safeguarding the Sanctity of the Sacraments.”

In an accompanying cover letter, Cardinal Ratzinger, who is said to have been heavily involved in drafting the main document, wrote that the 1922 and 1962 instructions that gave his office authority over sexual abuse by priests cases were “in force until now.”

The upshot of that phrase, experts say, is that Catholic bishops around the world, who had been so confused for so long about what to do about molestation cases, could and should have simply directed them to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith all along.

Bishops and canon law experts said in interviews that they could only speculate as to why the future pope had not made this clear many years earlier.

“It makes no sense to me that they were sitting on this document,” said the Rev. John P. Beal, a canon law professor at the Catholic University of America. “Why didn’t they just say, ‘Here are the norms. If you need a copy we’ll send them to you?’ ”

Nicholas P. Cafardi, a Catholic expert in canon law who is dean emeritus and professor of law at Duquesne University School of Law, said, “When it came to handling child sexual abuse by priests, our legal system fell apart.”

There was additional confusion over the statute of limitations for sexual abuse cases — or whether there even was one, given the Vatican’s reaffirmation of the 1922 and 1962 papal instructions. Many bishops had believed that they could not prosecute cases against priests because they exceeded the five-year statute of limitations enacted in 1983, effectively shielding many molesters since victims of child abuse rarely came forward until they were well into adulthood.

Mr. Cafardi, who is also the author of “Before Dallas: The U.S. Bishops’ Response to Clergy Sexual Abuse of Children,” argued that another effect of the 2001 apostolic letter was to impose a 10-year statute of limitations on pedophilia cases where, under a careful reading of canon law, none had previously applied.

“When you think how much pain could’ve been prevented, if we only had a clear understanding of our own law,” he said. “It really is a terrible irony. This did not have to happen.”

Though the apostolic letter was praised for bringing clarity to the subject, it also reaffirmed a requirement that such cases be handled with the utmost confidentiality, under the “pontifical secret” — drawing criticism from many who argued that the church remained unwilling to report abusers to civil law enforcement."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/world/europe/02pope.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

Post #49

Excerpt from BBC News: German Bishop 'could return to work'

1 July 2010 by David Willey

A German bishop who resigned after claims he hit children could be allowed to return to work, it has emerged.

Pope Benedict XVI told Bishop Walter Mixa of Augsburg that he must take time off for treatment and reconciliation if he wanted to return to pastoral work. He had been accused of financial misconduct as well as physically abusing children in his care. The case has caused controversy in Germany amid the sexual scandals which have hit the Catholic Church recently.

The Pope received the bishop in private audience at the Vatican during which - according to a Vatican statement - the bishop admitted he had made mistakes, but asked that the good he had done as a pastor not be forgotten. The German Bishop appears to have received much more lenient treatment from the Pope than has been proposed by church authorities in many other countries.

In the United States, Britain, Ireland and Belgium a zero tolerance policy is now being applied in all cases of sexual misconduct by clergy.

Bishop Mixa admitted he hit children as a priest decades ago and submitted his resignation last April. It is clear from Thursday's Vatican statement that he is going to be allowed to return to pastoral work, retaining his rank, after a period of medical treatment and prayer.

At one point the bishop tried to cancel his resignation but fresh allegations were made in the press of sexual misconduct and alcoholism, and a successor has now been appointed. Critics of the way in which the Vatican continues to handle sexual scandals caused by Roman Catholic clergy will argue that the same standards of zero tolerance are not being universally applied.

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/europe/10484354.stm