Ratzinger's Swan Song:

 
Is there a mechanism for getting rid of this Pope who has the wrecked lives of innocents on his hands?

It's Time for the Pope to Go

By Mike Whitney

March 29, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Pope Benedict should do everyone a favor and resign. By sticking around, he's just dragging the church through the mud and making matters worse. Who does he think he's fooling anyway? Everyone knows that he was involved in the sex-scandal cover up. Does he really think that he can make amends by just issuing a few feeble apologies? He was in charge; that means he needs to "man up" and face the music. Why make a bigger deal out of it than necessary? Benedict's job is easy: Arrange a press conference, tell the truth, and then resign. That's all there is to it.

It's clear that the problem isn't going to go away either. In the last week alone, three incidents have resurfaced casting more suspicion on Benedict's role in the cover up. In Wisconsin, Father Lawrence Murphy abused as many as 200 boys at a Milwaukee school for the deaf. One of the victims, Arthur Budzinski, has been all-over TV telling his story and blaming the pope. It's pretty heart-wrenching stuff, too. According to Budzinski's daughter Gigi,:

"The pope knew about this. He was the one who handled the sex abuse cases. So, I think he should be accountable, because he did nothing."

This is bad. Everyone knows that the Vatican was shuffling predators from one spot to another trying to keep the details out of the news. It's sleazy, and people want to know the truth. Maybe Benedict thought he was doing the right thing? Maybe he thought he was just being loyal or protecting the church from litigation? Who knows what he thought; it's beside the point. The bottom line is that people's lives have been ruined and someone has to pay. Benedict was the man in charge, which means Benedict's got to go.

Here's another bombshell which appeared in the Associated Press:

"In a signed statement last year, the 67 former pupils at a school for the deaf in Verona described sexual abuse, pedophilia and corporal punishment from the 1950s to the 1980s. They named 24 priests, brothers and lay religious men at the Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf.

One victim, Alessandro Vantini, told the AP last year that priests sodomized him so relentlessly he came to feel "as if I were dead."

"How could I tell my papa that a priest had sex with me?" Vantini, 59, said through a sign-language interpreter. "You couldn't tell your parents because the priests would beat you." ("Sex abuse scandal in US, Italy taints papacy", Nicole Winfield, AP)

67 victims here, 200 victims there; this is industrial-scale sex abuse, a sex abuse conveyor belt!

Naturally, the Vatican has circled the wagons and is lashing out at the media. But it's a hopeless cause. As the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger (as Benedict was known at the time) was at the center of the action and took steps to silence priests who might blab about what they knew. In a 2001 letter to the bishops, Benedict "ordered them to keep sexual abuse allegations secret under threat of excommunication -- updating a noxious church policy... that both priests accused of sex crimes and their victims "observe the strictest secret" and be "restrained by a perpetual silence." (Washington Post)

This is obstruction of justice, pure and simple. Benedict better hire a good attorney or he'll wind up in leg-irons. No man is above the law; not even the pope. Religious freedom isn't license to inflict suffering on others.

Benedict's letter helps to illustrate a larger point, too. It shows that the sex abuse scandal isn't really about sex at all. It's about the people in positions of authority who abused the public's trust. That's the real story; people who pretend to be "spiritual advisers", but don't even do the right thing when a child is raped. And, these are the people who give advice on issues like homosexuality and birth control?

Benedict has also been implicated in a German case involving Father Peter Hullermann who was suspended from his duties but then, allowed to return to work "without restrictions" as a priest in Munich, even though a psychiatrist described him as a potential danger.

According to the New York Times: "In September 1979, the chaplain (Hullermann) was removed from his congregation after three sets of parents told his superior, the Rev. Norbert Essink, that he had molested their sons, charges he did not deny, according to notes taken by the superior and still in Father Hullermann’s personnel file...“Reports from the congregation in which he was last active made us aware that Chaplain Hullermann presented a danger that caused us to immediately withdraw him from pastoral duties."

Hullermann was allowed to return to his parish work on Feb. 1, 1980. He was finally convicted in 1986 of molesting boys in Bavaria.

Can you see a pattern here? These are more than isolated incidents. It's like some bizarre-type of papal crime-ring; Ratzinger's Sopranos.

A few weeks ago, Benedict issued an apology to Catholics in Ireland for decades of cruelty and abuse. In the papal communique Benedict opined, "I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them."

Benedict's comments are predictably insincere. He knew exactly what was going on. As Catholic theologian, Hans Kueng points out:

"There was not a single man in the whole Catholic Church who knew more about the sex-abuse cases than him, because it was ex officio (part of his official role)..."He can’t wag his finger at the bishops and say, you didn’t do enough. He gave the instruction himself, as head of the Congregation of Doctrine of the Faith, and repeated it as Pope."

Sinead O'Connor, Irish musician and abuse-victim, was so incensed by Benedict's fake empathy, she wrote a fiery article for the Washington Post where she said:

"Irish Catholics are in a dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization. The pope must take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. If Catholic priests are abusing children, it is Rome, not Dublin, that must answer for it with a full confession and a criminal investigation. Until it does, all good Catholics...should avoid Mass. In Ireland, it is time we separated our God from our religion, and our faith from its alleged leaders."

If the pope really cared about the church as much as he says, he'd set aside his personal ambition and step down. Catholics are looking for accountability so they can put this mess behind them and start over. That can't happen until Benedict leaves.


There is nothing civil about civil wars!

This Pope Gives Me The Creeps!!!

I have never been anti-Catholic, but for some reason this guy really makes my skin crawl

GARY BERGERON FOR BUZZFLASH.COM

This weekend, BuzzFlash posted a statement by a Boston survivor of church sexual abuse as a child, Gary Bergeron, in response to the recent revelations of international cases of large scale pedophilia by priests and inaction by Pope Benedict. Gary told BuzzFlash, in a call we made to confirm authorship, that he was not looking toward the past; he wanted the Vatican to sincerely commit and take action to prevent any child from experiencing sexual abuse at the hands of priests now and in the future.  On Monday, Gary E-Mailed BuzzFlash his response to Pope Benedict's Palm Sunday remarks concerning the latest outbreak of child sexual abuse revelations crossing several countries.

Yesterday, Pope Benedict stated that he “Will not be intimidated…” by accusations against the Vatican, by what he calls “Petty  gossip…” related to the clerical sex abuse crisis. These comments are grave reminders of the lack of understanding that the leader of the Catholic Church continues to have surrounding childhood sexual abuse by clergy.
Offensive, would be an understatement to describe yesterday’s comments. It is beyond belief that words like “intimidation” and “petty gossip” are being used today in defense of the most important issue continuing to face the Catholic Church. Intimidation and petty gossip are words that I and other survivors know well. These are words that were used to dismiss the stories of victims of childhood clergy abuse for decades. These remarks were used less than one week after Pope Benedict’s words of apology.  Yesterday, in an effort to dismiss the words of his critics, Pope Benedict has dismissed his own words of apology.

In choosing those words yesterday,  Pope Benedict missed an opportunity to work with victims of childhood clergy sexual abuse in answering the question “What are we going to do now?” This question needs to be answered not only for childhood clergy abuse survivors, but for every parent, grandparent & child around the world.

In June of 2003, I received a letter from then Cardinal Joseph Ratinger’s office stating “His Eminence Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger has asked me to respond to …..he has asked me to let you know that the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, of which he is the Prefect, is absolutely committed to doing everything possible so that such crimes do not happen again."

As a survivor of clergy of abuse, as the brother of a survivor of clergy abuse, and as the son of a clergy abuse survivor, I do not ask Pope Benedict to replace the lost years of my youth. Today I ask him to, as he put in his own words almost 7 years ago: “Do everything possible so that such crimes do not happen again."  I’m not sure that the words he spoke yesterday, served that purpose.

Gary Bergeron is a clergy abuse survivor from the Greater Boston area who traveled to the Vatican with his father, also a survivor of clergy abuse, in 2003.  He is the author of “Don’t Call Me A Victim, Faith, Hope & Sexual abuse in the Catholic Church." He is currently working on his next book titled: “Finding Peace, One Man's Journey.”

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Pope's Porblems Multiply

 

It's the cover-up, Your Holiness!

The head of the Catholic church is bracing himself for a new round of allegations by victims of paedophile priests — in Italy

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger handled abuse cases for 24 years before becoming Pope Benedict XVI. Photograph: Max Rossi/REUTERS

Pope Benedict XVI is facing growing pressure over his handling of paedophile priests as new cover-ups come to light in Italy, the country with the greatest concentration of Roman Catholic clerics.

After the latest allegations – that Benedict took no action in the US when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's enforcer – the church is now "terrified" as more victims stand up to be counted in Italy, according to Roberto Mirabile, head of La Caramella Buona, an Italian anti-abuse group. "With the scandals erupting abroad, we will see a huge growth in victims' groups in Italy in coming weeks," said Mirabile yesterday. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict handled abuse cases at the Vatican for 24 years before he became pope in 2005.

"We are likely to discover that the Vatican worked even harder in Italy with bishops than elsewhere to hide cases, simply because the contact was closer and the church is so powerful in Italy," Mirabile added.

Sergio Cavaliere, an Italian lawyer who has documented 130 cases of clerical paedophilia, also believes that the Vatican's backyard could follow Ireland, the United States and Germany in producing a wave of abuse revelations. "The cases I have found are just the tip of the iceberg given the reluctance of many victims to come forward until now," said Cavaliere. "And in no single case did the local bishop alert police to the suspected abuse."

Another startling development is how recent most of the allegations are, unlike the decades-old cases in Munich and Milwaukee that Benedict was last week accused of failing to act on.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who investigates abuse accusations passed on to the Vatican, denied this month that abuse had reached "dramatic proportions" in Italy, but he was concerned about "a certain culture of silence" among Italy's 50,000 priests.

In February, the Vatican opened an investigation into allegations by 67 former pupils at a school for the deaf in Verona that 24 priests, brothers and lay religious men abused pupils from the 1950s to the 1980s. Three of the accusers repeated their claims on Italian prime-time television on Friday.

In a case recalling the accusations against Father Lawrence Murphy in Milwaukee, who was claimed to have abused up to 200 deaf children, one Italian former pupil claimed that priests had sodomised him so relentlessly that he came to feel "as if I were dead".

A second pupil has accused Verona's late bishop, Monsignor Giuseppe Carraro, who is being considered for beatification, of molesting him.

In Ireland, the leader of the Catholic church has been named in more than 200 civil actions by victims of alleged clerical abuse, putting him under further pressure to resign. The victims claim that Cardinal Seán Brady failed in his duties by neglecting to protect them from paedophile priests and other sex abusers. There is no suggestion that he took part in any abuse.

Legal sources in the republic confirmed that 230 separate victims of alleged clerical abuse are taking the church to court. They said these include five victims of Father Brendan Smyth, one of Ireland's most notorious paedophiles.

Smyth's arrest and conviction opened the floodgates for dozens of cases concerning priests abusing children in dioceses all over Ireland, alongside widespread and systemic abuse in church-run orphanages and industrial schools.

Brady has confirmed that he was present at a closed canonical tribunal into the activities of Smyth, who died in jail 13 years ago while serving 12 years for 74 sexual assaults on children.

"Smyth's victims will argue that the church knew as far back as 1975 that he was abusing children. But the hierarchy's secret deal with two of his young victims that year left Smyth free to abuse others many years afterwards," one senior legal source told the Observer.

"The cardinal now faces being named in hundreds of cases, some of which will go through the courts."

Asked if the church was aware that Brady had been named in so many civil actions through the Irish courts, a spokesman for the Catholic Press Office in Ireland said: "The bishop who occupies the position of primate of all Ireland [Brady] is often named as co-defendant in judicial proceedings by people who mistakenly presume him to be the 'CEO' for the Catholic church in Ireland. In answer to your query, I do not know the exact number of cases taken by alleged victims of clerical sex abuse who have named Cardinal Seán Brady in their actions."

Voice of the Faithful, an international lay Catholic organisation campaigning for reforms in the church, said it was "deeply significant" that Brady has said he is spending the run-up to Easter reflecting on his position.

Seán O'Connaill, the group's Irish co-ordinator, said: "The situation regarding the church in Ireland and Cardinal Brady's position is very confused and fluid.

"The problems facing the Catholic church, however, will not be resolved alone by heads rolling. Both the people and the leadership have to realise that there has to be a major reform programme within the church to turn this around."