Catholic Church and child abuse

[brian]

More on the Fr. Paul Pavlou case:

FOR an experienced detective, what is missing from a crime scene can be more telling than what is there.  It could be a knife missing from its place in the kitchen or a room that seems too spotless.

When Victorian detectives seized Paul Pavlou's computer in 2007, they were struck by the lack of online history, especially given that a witness had told them only weeks before that the Healesville priest was a regular internet user.  So detectives brought in one of the tools of the modern investigator, a forensic computer expert.  His task was simple: to find what was missing.

Despite thoroughly wiping his hard drive, Pavlou had still left traces of where he had travelled in cyberspace and as the computer's memory was reconstructed, images with strange names began to appear.

Although only a limited number of files could be retrieved, they ultimately helped police charge Pavlou with child pornography offences.  He was also charged with committing ''indecent acts'' with a minor, a crime to which the Healesville priest pleaded guilty last month ...

http://www.theage.com.au/national/faith-betrayed-20090809-eea1.html

[brian]

GEELONG'S most senior priest has broken ranks with his boss, Archbishop Denis Hart, to demand a review of the Melbourne Catholic Church's handling of more than 450 church sexual abuse cases over 13 years.

Father Kevin Dillon's call for a review into the system set up in 1996 by the Melbourne archdiocese to deal with abuse comes just a day after Archbishop Hart dismissed a similar demand from a victims' collective, which is backed by two interstate bishops.

Father Dillon - who is the priest at Geelong's largest church, the St Mary of the Angels Basilica - said yesterday the failure to review a system that has handled so many cases without public scrutiny was due to a church that was ''too self-protecting for its own good'' ...

http://www.theage.com.au/national/priest-calls-for-sexcase-review-20090811-egz5.html

The Catholic Church seems to be pinning its hopes on the priestly child abuse scandal 'just going away'.  It won't, because it's systemic.  Everyone understands this except for the Catholic hierarchy and National Civic Council lackeys.

[brian]

A 54-year-old Sydney Catholic priest has been arrested and charged after allegedly attempting to groom detectives who were masquerading as a 13-year-old girl, sending them a series of sexually explicit chat-room messages.

Police allege they posed as a 13-year-old girl on the internet to catch Robert Fuller, a priest of three decades standing and the parish priest of All Saints at Liverpool for six years.  Prior to that he was the parish priest at a Punchbowl parish ...

http://www.theage.com.au/national/sydney-priest-groomer-caught-on-webcam-court-told-20090814-ekyy.html

Like I say, a systemic problem i.e. they have to fix the whole system, which is rotten to the core.

[brian]

THE Vatican has lashed out at criticism over its handling of its pedophilia crisis by saying the Catholic Church was ''busy cleaning its own house'' and that the problems with clerical sex abuse in other churches were as big, if not bigger.

In a defiant and provocative statement, issued after a meeting of the UN human rights council in Geneva, the Holy See said most of the Catholic clergy who committed such acts were not pedophiles but homosexuals attracted to sex with adolescent males.

The statement, read out by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's permanent observer to the UN, defended its record by claiming that ''available research'' showed that only 1.5 per cent to 5 per cent of Catholic clergy were involved in child sex abuse ...

http://www.theage.com.au/world/vatican-responds-to-sex-abuse-accusations-20090929-gb1p.html

What does '5 per cent of Catholic clergy' mean in terms of actual numbers?  Something in the tens of thousands?

Edit:  According to this, there are over 400,000 Catholic priests worldwide - http://www.allaboutreligion.org/catholic-priests.htm  

So '1.5 per cent to 5 per cent' would mean between 6,000 and 20,000 priests involved in child sex abuse.

That's a lotta priests.

[Victory67]

A 54-year-old Sydney Catholic priest has been arrested and charged after allegedly attempting to groom detectives who were masquerading as a 13-year-old girl, sending them a series of sexually explicit chat-room messages.

Police allege they posed as a 13-year-old girl on the internet to catch Robert Fuller, a priest of three decades standing and the parish priest of All Saints at Liverpool for six years.  Prior to that he was the parish priest at a Punchbowl parish ...

http://www.theage.com.au/national/sydney-priest-groomer-caught-on-webcam-court-told-20090814-ekyy.html

Like I say, a systemic problem i.e. they have to fix the whole system, which is rotten to the core.

One of the big problem here is the lack of the Catholic Church to see that their priests should be married, as the Bible says they should be.
And, since the Catholic Church has had the regulations against priests to marry, there have been problems like this. It is absolutely against what the Scriptures have said, and they continue to get stuck in the mud more deeply as time goes on.
"1 Timothy 3:2, "A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;"
1 Timothy 3:12, "Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well."
Titus 1:6, "If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly."
All of those scriptures say that the leaders should be married to one wife, and have children. You don't see that in the Orthodox Catholic Church today.

[s0sman]

Vic your quotes are a little selective.  Paul said it was better not to marry - go figure.

[brian]

IRELAND'S Catholic Church has apologised after a damning report showed it covered up child sex abuse over more than three decades.

The Irish Government also said sorry for failing to protect children in the wake of the latest report, published six months after a first landmark study revealed widespread abuse of children in Catholic care.

''I offer to each and every survivor my apology, my sorrow and my shame for what happened,'' said Diarmuid Martin, Archbishop of Dublin since 2004.

''I am aware that no words of apology will ever be sufficient,'' he said, adding that the fact that many abusers were priests was an offence to God and an affront to the priesthood.''

The country's most senior Catholic, Cardinal Sean Brady, echoed the comments, saying: ''I want to apologise to all those who have been hurt and their families.''

Following a three-year investigation in the Dublin Archdiocese, the country's largest, the report said four archbishops routinely protected abusers and failed to inform police of the allegations.

One priest admitted to sexually abusing more than 100 children, while another confessed that he had abused children fortnightly over 25 years ...

http://www.theage.com.au/world/irish-church-apologises-for-child-abuse-coverup-20091127-jx03.html

[brian]

IRISH politicians have denounced the refusal of Pope Benedict's diplomat in Ireland to testify to a parliamentary panel probing the church's cover-up of child abuse.

The papal nuncio to Ireland, Cardinal Giuseppi Leanza, told MPs that he would not answer questions from the parliament's foreign affairs committee.  ''It is not the practice of the Holy See that apostolic nuncios appear before parliamentary commissions,'' he wrote in the letter, dated February 12.

Cardinal Leanza has faced heavy criticism for ignoring letters from two state-ordered investigations into how the church suppressed reports of child abuse by parish priests and in residences for children.

MP Alan Shatter called Cardinal Leanza's stance ''incomprehensible'', given that ''it is acknowledged in Rome that members of the clergy in Ireland are guilty of abominable sexual abuse of children''.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/unholy-row-rocks-ireland-20100216-o8vr.html

[brian]

POPE Benedict has told Irish bishops that priests involved in the sexual abuse of children were guilty of ''heinous crimes'' and ''grave sins''.

The Irish Catholic Church's covering-up of decades of paedophile abuse had caused a crisis that had led to ''a breakdown in trust in the church's leadership'', Benedict XVI told the 24 bishops during an unprecedented two-day summit at the Vatican.

He said they would have to work hard to restore ''spiritual and moral credibility'' after two reports last year documented abuse and cover-ups in church-run schools and orphanages over 50 years.

The Pope and senior Vatican officials had ''examined the failure of Irish church authorities for many years to act effectively in dealing with cases involving the sexual abuse of young people by some Irish clergy''.

Vatican observers said that it was unprecedented for all the serving bishops of one country to be hauled in front of the Pope to discuss such a crisis.

The statement seemed unlikely, however, to satisfy victims of abuse who had called for more resignations of senior clerics involved in covering up decades of sexual abuse of children and young people by priests ...

http://www.theage.com.au/world/pope-admonishes-irish-clergy-over-child-abuse-20100217-odug.html

[brian]

GERMANY'S justice minister has hit out at the Vatican over a child sex abuse scandal engulfing the country's Catholic Church, including at a choir formerly run by the Pope's brother.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said a ''wall of silence'' was prevalent at Catholic-run schools because of a 2001 church directive that cases of abuse be ''subject to papal confidentiality''.

This meant that abuse allegations ''were not supposed to go outside the church but instead were meant to be investigated internally'', she told Deutschlandfunk radio.

Stephan Ackermann, the bishop of Trier, who has been put in charge of investigating abuse by the German Episcopal Conference, rejected this, saying that common church practice was for state authorities to investigate.

The German Catholic Church has been rocked in recent weeks by a scandal over abuse at church-run schools dating back several decades ...

http://www.theage.com.au/world/popes-brother-denies-role-in-german-abuse-scandal-20100309-pvvk.html

[brian]

A WIDENING child sex abuse inquiry in Europe has landed at the doorstep of Pope Benedict, as a senior church official acknowledged that a German archdiocese made ''serious mistakes'' in handling an abuse case while the Pope served as its archbishop.

The archdiocese said a priest accused of molesting boys was given therapy in 1980 and later allowed to resume pastoral duties, before committing further abuses and being prosecuted.

Pope Benedict, who at the time headed the archdiocese of Munich and Freising, approved the priest's transfer for therapy.  A subordinate took full responsibility for allowing the priest to later resume pastoral work, the archdiocese said in a statement ...

Experts said the scandals could undermine Pope Benedict's moral authority, especially because they cut particularly close to the Pope himself ...

http://www.theage.com.au/world/sex-abuse-scandal-entangles-pope-20100313-q528.html

[The Well Hungarian]

European Catholicism is in a mess indeed. Briinging the issue back home for a sec though, Stephen Crittenden's provided a good summary of the recent issues in Australia in "What's wrong with the Catholic Church". Second one from the top as of posting date.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/

[s0sman]

There's an article from Christopher Hitchens at http://www.slate.com/id/2247861/?from=rss

"The Great Catholic Cover-UpThe pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it."

[brian]

... It was a rebellious start to a week in which the disclosure of hundreds of cases of alleged clerical sex abuse in the Catholic Church's European heartlands shook the allegiances of millions and forced their pastors to make unprecedented admissions of guilt and mortification.

In Armagh, Ireland, on St Patrick's Day, the Primate of All Ireland, Sean Brady, told the congregation in his cathedral that the clergy should admit ''the full truth of our sinfulness''.

Archbishop Brady was one of scores of prelates bowing their heads in disgrace in the Netherlands, Austria, Germany and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and Italy.

So far almost 700 new cases have come to light.  It was a week of unmitigated calamity for Benedict XVI, who became Pope pledging to shore up Christianity in an increasingly secular Europe.

''It is such a big story because everything about it is extreme,'' says the religious affairs author Clifford Longley.  ''It is the worst crisis for the Vatican since the Middle Ages'' ...

http://www.theage.com.au/world/catholics-rocked-as-shadows-cast-on-pontiff-20100320-qn4o.html

[brian]

TOP Vatican officials - including the future Pope Benedict XVI - apparently failed to defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act could embarrass the church.

Church files of internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope, unearthed as part of a lawsuit, show that while officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.

The documents emerge as Pope Benedict faces other accusations that he and direct subordinates failed to alert civilian authorities or discipline priests who had been involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican's chief doctrinal enforcer ...

http://www.theage.com.au/world/popes-past-role-exposed-as-scandal-grows-20100325-qzsl.html

Things are looking black for poor old Ratzo.  I remember a Catholic apologist called 'Catholiciam' who used to rush to the Pope's defence whenever someone criticised him here.

Haven't heard from Catholiciam in a long time.