Tell No One - To play hide and seek Polish archbishop requests Vatican to investigate alleged child sex abuse coverup

KLIK

CRUX 17-5 -20

Archbishop Wojciech Polak, Primate of Poland, informs nunciature as soon as documentary "Hide and Seek" is released through the internet

La Croix 

International staff

18-5-2020

.....
Less than half an hour after the new documentary went online, Polak issued a statement announcing he was making use of Vos Estis.

“The film Hide and Seek shows that the standards of protecting children and youth in the Church have not been obeyed,” the archbishop said.

“Due to the information presented in the film, I am asking the Holy See through the nunciature [the Vatican embassy] to initiate proceedings ordered by Motu Proprio of Pope Francis, regarding abandonment of the action required by law,” Polak continued.

“All of the faithful have got the means in the new Motu Proprio Vos Estis Lux Mundi to report both types of cases, sexual abuse and abuse of power. The Holy Father gave us a clear signal - it is an act of love to report. It is a difficult act of love, but it is what is needed,” Father Piotr Studnicki, the Head of the Child Protection Office of the Polish bishops’ conference, told Crux.

“It is an evident case. The documentary proves the lack of reaction. It is the duty of the Delegate of Child Protection to report and words wouldn’t be enough in those circumstances,” Studnicki said. “Action was needed.”

The Polish primate also used his statement to condemn the cold and inappropriate reaction to the parents after they reported the case. Polak also spoke with Jakub Pajkowski by telephone on Saturday afternoon.

In a statement released on behalf of Janiak, the Diocese of Kalisz defended itself, enumerating actions it said it had done in response to the abuse. However, it didn’t explain why the case wasn’t reported to the Vatican until 2016, nor did it include an apology to the victims.

.....

WARSAW, Poland - The Vatican’s sex crimes prosecutor, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, met with Poland’s Catholic bishops on Friday to share his experience in tracking crimes, after the Polish Church admitted knowing about hundreds of cases over the years where priests abused minors.

Scicluna attended the bishops’ plenary session Friday in Walbrzych, southwestern Poland, for a discussion about “protecting children and youths,” the Episcopate said.

Bishop Piotr Libera tweeted that Scicluna’s remarks were “extremely interesting.”

Scicluna told Poland’s Catholic news agency KAI that he would like to “encourage Poland’s bishops to implement the very good guidance points that they themselves adopted” in 2013.

He later told a news conference it was not enough to have rules but “we need to implement what the documents say” and people in parishes should know who to turn to in the Church when they suspect abuse.

Scicluna urged every person aware of a cover-up to report it to higher church authorities or in the case of high-ranking bishops, to the papal nuncio in Poland.
....."

De "nazorg" van 1985 Wat kost zo'n kan petroleum nou?

't Is maar waar je nazorgen over hebt.... klik

en wat je niet kon weten








vraag maar aan Danneels 

 

 

 

Court rules that Diocese of Portsmouth is liable for clerical abuse

Catholic Herald

 The Diocese of Portsmouth is liable to pay compensation for alleged sexual abuse by a priest, the Court of Appeal has ruled.

The decision, by a majority of two judges to one, makes dioceses liable for the wrongdoings of its clergy and clears the way for similar compensation claims. A 48-year-old woman known as JGE says as a child she was beaten by a nun at a care home and later raped and sexually assaulted by a priest, Fr Wilfred Baldwin, who has since died. The diocese disputes her claim. Lord Justice Ward said the relationship of priest and bishop was “close enough” to employer/employee “to make it just and fair to impose liability”. One judge, Lord Justice Tomlinson, dissented, saying: “If Fr Baldwin can be properly regarded as undertaking his ministry for the benefit of anyone, I should have thought it was for the benefit of the souls of his parish.” In a statement the trustees of Portsmouth diocese said they would be “seeking advice” about a potential appeal to the Supreme Court. They said their appeal was not about delaying compensation but was intended to “achieve clarity as to the nature and extent of the bishop’s liability for the actions of diocesan priests”. They said the verdict had “wide-reaching ramifications… not just for the Church but for other organisations, both charitable and commercial”. STATEMENT BY THE TRUSTEES OF PORTSMOUTH DIOCESE FOLLOWING TODAY’S APPEAL COURT JUDGMENT The following statement is issued on behalf of the Trustees of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth in response to the judgment by the Court of Appeal in respect of vicarious liability in the case of JGE v The Trustees of the Portsmouth Roman Catholic Diocesan Trust. We brought this appeal in order to achieve clarity as to the nature and extent of the bishop’s liability for the actions of diocesan priests. A number of judgments in recent years have sought to extend the scope of vicarious liability, which is designed for relationships of employment, to very different relationships, including that between a bishop and his priest, who is an office holder and not an employee. We had not just the right but the duty to ask the Court of Appeal to hear the different arguments in this case, not least because of the far-reaching implications to faith and other voluntary organisations of extending vicarious liability in this way. The decision, although disappointing, was not unanimous, which emphasizes the complexity of this area of the law. The two judges who found against us acknowledged the force of our arguments and all three appeal judges commented on the difficulty of reaching a decision. The judges also referred to the wide-reaching ramifications of the decision, not just for the Church but for other organisations, both charitable and commercial. Because this case raises complex questions of law of real public importance, the Trustees will now be seeking advice from leading counsel as to a potential appeal to the Supreme Court. This case is not, and has never been, about seeking to avoid or delay the payment of compensation to victims with valid claims. The Diocese has for years been offering support to clerical abuse victims, and the law rightly allows victims to sue for damages on grounds of negligence, or, of course, to seek redress from the actual perpetrators of the abuse. This case is about fundamental legal principles involving the very nature of civil society and religious freedom. It would be disastrous if, in seeking to provide redress for victims of harm, the law put intolerable new pressures on the voluntary sector. This judgment shows further thought and scrutiny are required before clarity in this regard can be established.  


Het enige wat zo'n misbruikende kl.....k    -net zo min als die kerkelijke hierarchie- niet kon weten is dus slechts de ontwikkelingen van het internet. 
Maar daar prijst een beetje RKK  (aarts)bisdom (medewerker)  zich toch met Benedictus gelukkig om, niewaar? Hoe hadden we anders zo masaal  diens  opmerkingen over de vullis binnen die Kerk en zijn maatregelen  kunnen weten?   

Of de uitleg van Bonny over financiele belangen van die liegende en ontkennende  kontdraaiende kerkelijke hiërarchie en haar bilmaten in crime  en hadden we het nog steeds met emmertjes en pannetjes tegen het lekke dak moeten stellen.    
Nu weten we tenminste gewoon dat het (aarts) bisdom  en haar medewerksers  nog steeds liegt.    

Dat schijnt goedkoper te zijn.   
Denken ze.   En dat is natuurlijk ook zo, over doden. Heel 

goedkoop 

Cardinal's profit mission and an FBI investigation into sale of church property

Jason Berry

Jason Berry is a multi award-winning journalist in the US for his pioneering work on clergy child abuse. His latest book is the newly-released Render unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money In the Catholic Church.

[..]Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state from 1990 to 2006, was a pivotal figure in the university's growth in Rome.

Maciel and Sodano forged a friendship in Chile in the 1980s during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The Legion needed Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez's permission to function. Haunted by the regime's torturing and abducting of people, Silva had a tense relationship with Sodano, who as papal nuncio appeared on TV in support of Pinochet. Several Chilean bishops implored Silva not to admit Maciel's group, which had a tainted reputation as "millonarios de Cristo" for their obsessions with fundraising. "In a society as polarized as Chile," Andrea Insunza and Javier Ortega wrote in a book on the Legion in Chile, "the Legionaries found a key ally: the apostolic nuncio, Angelo Sodano." Silva approved the Legionaries' presence in Chile.

Back to Rome in 1989, Sodano, in preparing to become secretary of state, took English lessons at a Legion center in Dublin, Ireland. He vacationed at a Legion villa in Southern Italy. An honored guest at Legion dinners and banquets, Sodano became Maciel's biggest supporter. Glenn Favreau, a Washington, D.C., attorney and former Legionary in Rome, said: "Sodano intervened with Italian officials to get zoning variances to build the university" on a wooded plateau of western Rome. Maciel hired Sodano's nephew, Andrea Sodano, as a building consultant. Pontificial Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum is the name of the complex.

But Legionaries overseeing the project complained to Maciel that Andrea Sodano's work was late and poorly done; they were reluctant to pay his invoices. To them, Maciel yelled: "Pay him! You pay him!"

Andrea Sodano was paid.

In 2008, a flashy Italian businessman, Raffaello Follieri, was indicted in New York on fraud and money-laundering charges for his business that bought shuttered church properties and parishes for commercial resale. Andrea Sodano was Follieri Group's vice president. Cardinal Sodano attended the company's 2004 launch party in New York, accorded to press reports. As NCR reported March 3, 2006, the firm's literature trumpeted its "deep commitment to the Catholic church and its long-standing relationship with senior members of the Vatican hierarchy."

After the company secured major backing from billionaire Ron Burkle's Yucaipa development company, Follieri spent wildly on his jet-set romance with movie star Anne Hathaway. As the Follieri-Yucaipa partnership found properties, Follieri sent payments to Andrea Sodano's office in Italy by bank wire transfer.

Documents obtained by the FBI show that Follieri fabricated backdated invoices from Sodano to justify a two-month flurry of payments in 2005 that Follieri had already obtained from the investors. These included: $75,000 on Aug. 22, for "Engineering Services"; a Sept. 12 invoice for $15,000 for work in Atlantic City, N.J., and $80,000 in Orland Park in the Chicago archdiocese; Oct. 21, for $70,000 in Canyon City (no state given in the invoice); another $50,000 for Orland Park; and $75,000 for unspecified "Engineering Services," making a tidy $225,000 net on that single day. None of the single-page invoices has a paragraph on work done.

In the weekly conference calls with Burkle's company, Follieri escalated his request for funds to pay Sodano, stressing that the Vatican needed the engineering reports in order to grant approval for the sales of church property. Yucaipa paid $800,000 to that end, with Follieri providing fabricated, backdated invoices to document payments purportedly made to Andrea Sodano.

On March 8, 2006 — two months before Maciel was banished from the priesthood — Cardinal Sodano sent a letter of complaint to Follieri.[...]

RITE AND REASON: IN 2005 parishioners of St James in the farm belt town of Kansas, Ohio, recoiled when Toledo Bishop Leonard Blair, facing a tight budget, closed the parish, steering them to one several miles away. They filed an appeal to the Vatican. It failed.

Then they sued in a local county court, arguing that the bishop was a trustee but parishioners owned the property. The state sided with the bishop. “We spent $100,000 in legal fees,” said parishioner Virginia Hull. “Bishop Blair paid his lawyers with $77,957 from our parish account.” Blair had the church demolished.

Canon law says a parish is “a juridic person”. But that “person”, like an olden slave, does not own itself. The bishop does. Nevertheless, a federal court in Springfield, Massachusetts barred the bishop there from razing a church deemed a historic landmark. Parish ownership is unresolved in American law.

A US Catholic parish has closed on average once a week for the last 20 years. Many bishops have sold churches to plug deficits, or pay for abuse cases caused by their negligence or their predecessors’.

The idea that each bishop stands in a lineage going back to Jesus’s disciples renders them immune from prosecution for recycling abuse predators or selling churches to cover mistakes. Since 2005 at least 95 parishes from 21 US dioceses have appealed to Vatican courts. At least 12 closures won partial reprieves in the Syracuse, Buffalo, and Allentown, Pennsylvania dioceses.

The Apostolic Signatura (Vatican supreme court), in a split-the-baby ruling, decided that the protesting parishes were “sacred” property not to be sold, but would not restore them as active churches. Juridic “persons” slumber in the folds of legal farce.

In July 2003 Boston’s then new archbishop Cardinal Seán O’Malley visited Rome seeking financial help to resolve 552 abuse cases. He met Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano and Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, then in charge of the Congregation for the Clergy, which oversees the liquidation of diocesan assets.

They gave O’Malley carte blanche to sell properties. In Boston, parish sit-ins ignited bad press and a deep slide in donations.

Cardinal Sodano saw profit horizons. He installed an under-secretary at the Vatican who fed information on closing churches to a New York company, the Follieri Group. Its vice-president was Andrea Sodano, a building engineer in Italy and a nephew of the cardinal. The cardinal greeted potential investors at a New York launch party.

The Follieri website promoted its ties to Vatican officials. Its business plan: find churches, buy low, sell high. When an investor sued Follieri for profligate spending, the FBI investigated.

Follieri had wired $387,000 to the Vatican Bank account of a lay staffer in cahoots with Andrea Sodano. Cardinal Sodano’s nephew’s invoices netted more than $800,000 for work the FBI deemed worthless. Raffaello Follieri today is in prison for fraud and money laundering.

Nepotism, from the Italian “nipote”, means nephew. The FBI considers Andrea Sodano, the Vatican under-secretary and a lay staffer there to be “unindicted co-conspirators”. It helps to have an uncle in robes.

Pope Benedict should empanel constitutional scholars to create a court system for criminal issues and church property. But first, he should sack Cardinal Sodano – now Dean of the College of Cardinals and who will oversee the election of the next Pope.

It would give some sign of papal belief that St Augustine was correct: justice is a virtue.

Vrouw Holle

Vorige week werd John Geogan in de gevangenis vermoord.
Bernard Law gaf hem de titel een beest.
JPII betitelde hem tot aartspriester.

Nu moet hij er in Rome op letten of het in augustus gaat sneeuwen.
Of door de ramen met hagelstenen gegooid.

gli orrori nell’orfanotrofio “E i preti pedofili sono ancora qui– Mgr SciclunaThe abuse of priests against the children is enough to ‘kill the faith’

The Malta Independent
Andrea Tornielli
02 August 2011


[...]The Maltese monsignor thus became one of the future Pope’s closest collaborators and in 2002 was nominated as "promotor of justice" at the former Holy Office. Thanks to the new laws, all dead case files were opened again. Investigations were also reopened and finally, two years later, the Congregation started checking up on the Legion of Christ founder, Father Marcial Maciel. “A deep understanding grew between myself and cardinal Ratzinger who did not have a Canonical background but placed his trust in me nevertheless”.

When the question about what it had meant in terms of his life path, to be involved in these huge scandals, is asked, his face turns serious: “I understood that the Church did not crumble, despite these scandals, and this is precisely because its foundations are supernatural. There is no other way to explain it.”

“The Church – continues Scicluna – considers children’s’ innocence to be one its most precious treasures, and Benedict XVI’s leadership was and is vital. He had the courage to say: we have made a mistake here, here we need to change…” This is precisely what Ratzinger was referring to in his famous meditations for the Via Crucis on Holy Friday back in 2005, when he spoke of the “filth” that existed in the Church: “Those words came from three years of abuse case study; there was an awareness of the need to see priests’ sins for what they really were”.

Over the past few days, during his presentation of an international seminar dedicated to the fight against child abuse by priests due to take place at the Pontifical Gregorian University in February 2012, Scicluma used strong words to underline the fact that violence shown towards minors by clergymen constitutes “an abuse of spiritual power”. “Yes, it is true – adds the Maltese prelate – there is a specific difference between repeated abuse by a lay person and that carried out by a priest, on victims that expect to see in them the figure of the “good shepherd”. Scicluna’s face darkens and he looks saddened. “If a priest commits the abuse, the trauma caused to the victim is even deeper, the spiritual trust that existed is destroyed and a person’s faith is lost.”

We ask the “promoter of justice” whether the change in mentality that Benedict XVI has asked for, is taking root in the Church. “I believe – he says in a faint voice – that a change in mentality is only possible for those who have the courage to meet the victims of abuse, to welcome them and to listen to their stories. If this does not happen, one may have read up on every detail of the scandal, be fully prepared, but that person will not be able to fully comprehend the trauma that these immense sins cause. The reaction and anger expressed by the victims of priests is unlike that found in any other type of case, because it comes from deep within the soul”.

For this reason, reveals Scicluna, the bishops that will be participating in the seminar in February 2012 will need to have met with the victims of paedophile priests in their respective countries, prior to attending. “It is a traumatic experience that is life changing, as in my case. Thanks to God, to the strict laws that are in place and to the development of a new conscience, these cases have decreased dramatically compared to previous years. We need to continue to support the victims who have for so long been seen as “threats” to the good name of the Church, instead of being treated as individuals who have been wounded in their innermost soul. We need to welcome and help these victims ensuring above all that the traumatic experiences they have been through are not repeated”.

OPINION: Unless the Catholic hierarchy examines its obsession with power it cannot reform itself

"It has been my custom to challenge the reader's wits at such point in my novels at which the reader is in possession of all facts necessary to a correct solution of the crime or crimes. ...










bron




MUCH OF the Cloyne report brought no surprises to the people of Ireland and those of us in other countries who had anticipated its publication. In many ways it was a continuation of the revelations that came with the three commission reports that preceded it.
The report was met with the expected “heartfelt” expressions of regret, apology and even shock by officials of the Catholic Church,
followed by promises of reform and the promulgation of yet more procedures, policies and boards. By now the Irish people, however, are beyond suspicion and cynicism. They have broken through another layer of the protective clerical veneer and have named the responses for what they are: a mendacious smokescreen.
It is no consolation to the Irish people but they are certainly not alone. This debacle in the Diocese of Cloyne is reflected in the recent publication of the report of the grand jury in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Five years after a first jury exposed widespread cover-up and shameful treatment of victims, followed by the usual promises to clean up the mess, a second grand jury found that the expressions of regret and promises of reform were a deceptive cover for an intentional lack of commitment to bring justice to victims and protect children.
Cardinal Seán Brady said that “grave errors of judgment were made and serious failures of leadership occurred”. Bishop John Magee admitted that the diocese “did not fully implement the procedures set out in church protocols”. What happened in Cloyne and in Ferns, Dublin, and the institutions cannot be dignified as “grave errors of judgment” or incomplete implementation of church protocols. The systemic sacrifice of the emotional, psychological and spiritual lives of innocent children for the sake of the image and power of the hierarchy was no error.

The commission of investigation into abuse in the Cloyne diocese learned that the destructive response to the reports of sexual abuse was not accidental or isolated but embedded in the fabric of the clerical culture. The members of all four commissions are to be highly commended for their courage in rising above the long-standing tradition of unquestioned deference to the hierarchy to reveal in detail the disgraceful and infuriating systemic disregard of the innocent children.
The three preceding reports were indeed shocking and scandalous. But the report carries the revelations even further in three important ways: naming the Vatican as an integral part of the problem; exposing the cynical use the concept of “pastoral care” as an excuse for obstructing justice; and acknowledging that the church cannot be trusted faithfully to comply with its internal regulations, much less the demands of the civil law.

When the reality of widespread sexual violation of the young by clergy was first exposed in the US in 1985, Pope John Paul II and the Vatican remained mute for six years. When questioned, Vatican spokesmen distanced not only themselves but the rest of the world by asserting it was an “American problem”. In his first public statement on June 11th, 1993, the pope tried to shift the blame to the secular media, whom he accused of “sensationalising” evil. He concluded his letter with: “Yes dear brothers, America needs much prayer lest it lose its soul.”

It was not long before tragic events in Newfoundland, Austria and Ireland clearly dislodged the papal efforts at denial. The recognition of widespread sexual molestation by clerics in several continental European countries, in South America and most recently in the Far East, have confirmed this is a worldwide problem not only of sexual violation by dysfunctional clerics but, even worse, a problem of intentionally self-serving and destructive responses by the bishops.

The direct role of the Vatican in enabling and even directing the cover-up, stonewalling and obstruction of justice has been suspected for years. The report made a vitally important breakthrough by describing in concrete detail the essential role the Vatican played in the disgrace of the diocese.

The report points to two serious deficiencies in the Vatican response.
The first is the papal nuncio’s refusal to co-operate with the commission during the Dublin and Cloyne investigations, as well as his lukewarm response to the horrific contents of the report. The second and far more treacherous aspect is the direct attempt to sabotage the Irish bishops’ 1996 policy document Child Sexual Abuse: Framework for a Church Response .

The commission found this document contained a “detailed and easy to implement set of procedures”. Yet, before it could adequately be put into practice, the papal nuncio, Archbishop Luciano Storero, sent the Irish bishops a letter passing on the concerns of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy. The letter clearly reflected the reactionary attitude of Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, who was prefect at the time. He erroneously labelled the policy “merely a study document”.
This most outrageous and at the same time erroneous sentence gave the Irish bishops licence to ignore their own procedures but also the civil law.

The Vatican response has been the defence of the hierarchy and the scandalous lack of concern for the victims. There are the expected expressions of regret, sorrow and promise of prayers which serve only to confuse and even anger the victims and are a very thin cover for the consistent pattern of self-serving support and protection of the bishops.

The clerical culture that cannot comprehend the depth of evil and destruction it has enabled has failed to internalise the reality that in this 21st century sacrificing the welfare of innocent children to maintain the image and power of an ecclesiastical aristocracy is a disgrace that will be the catalyst for an inevitable and profound change in the nature of the institutional church.

The rapid disintegration of the absolute control of the Irish hierarchy over Irish society is the result not of the lack of faith of the Irish people, as some in ecclesiastical leadership would like to believe, but in the lack of fidelity of the leadership to the people whom they have sworn to serve.
Msgr Denis O’Callaghan, Bishop Magee’s point man, openly opposed the framework document because it did not provide an adequate pastoral response. This masks a fundamental misunderstanding and misapplication of an authentic expression of pastoral care which is not an excuse for minimising the fact sexual violation of a minor is a serious crime in both canon and civil law.

WORSE STILL WAS the use of pastoral care as a justification for protecting the accused priests at the expense of justice for the victims. The report saw the misuse of the pastoral concept as a “scheme whereby counselling was provided to the complainant in a manner which was hoped would not attract any legal liability to the diocese”.

There is no evidence of effective pastoral care in the past or even today, only crisis management. There is no evidence from any of the four reports that the overriding concern of the hierarchy and clergy has been the physical, emotional and spiritual welfare of the victims. What would true pastoral care have looked like? Upon receipt of a report of the sexual molestation of a child or adult, the bishop’s first (and often only) concern would not be the maintenance of secrecy and protection of the priest. Rather, he would immediately seek out the victim and the victim’s family to make clear to them that in their hour of pain, confusion and humiliation at the hands of a cleric, they and not the cleric are the most important people in the diocese and indeed in the church.

The third breakthrough is the realisation that any structures or policies created by the church depend on the commitment of the bishops and the support of the priests. In Cloyne and elsewhere the bishops made promises, created policies and appointed boards and then proceeded systematically to subvert their rules and those of society.

Marie Collins, in her recent interview on RTÉ’s Prime Time , spoke the truth when she said that the promises and policies that have streamed from the bishops mean nothing. The report clearly reflects this sad reality: “It seems to the Commission that continuing external scrutiny is required.” Outside monitoring with serious consequences for neglect, and mandatory reporting by all clergy with possible jail time as a consequence for failure, are necessary responses.

The commission has probed deeply into the dysfunctional clerical culture of the Cloyne diocese. With this report, the threshold to a new level of awareness has been reached. The findings and conclusions, as probing and shocking as they may be, are not enough. What we have seen exposed in all four reports but most shockingly in the Cloyne document is the toxic nature of the clerical culture at the heart of the institutional church.

We must demand answers to even more radical questions. What is it about this culture that justifies living in an alternate reality that places image and clerical security far above the welfare of innocent children? Why does the “people of God”, as Vatican II described the church, need to function like a monarchy with an attendant clerical aristocracy?

Why the narcissistic obsession with power, secrecy and control? Until the bishops and priests look deeply into this culture and acknowledge its pathology, the outrageous behaviour exposed in the report will be part of a shameful history.


Fr Thomas Patrick Doyle OP, a US Dominican priest with a doctorate in canon law, is a renowned and outspoken advocate for church abuse victims.


En dit, geliefde Doyle is een slecht stuk!
Het feit dat er een concilie van Trente bestond wil niet zeggen dat jij niet ook een hoop werk deed..... Petje af!




Maar dáár kan een klein probleempje bij komen kijken.

1984 Vatican letter to Tucson

BRON

Chapter 19 the sequel

Waarmee na het beantwoorden van Lombardi's vraag waartoe zijn wij op d'aard, de meest urgente vraag werd:

hoe vaak mag Lombardi vloeken

THOSE WHO have suggested that the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has had his “wings clipped” and does not see eye to eye with Pope Benedict XVI vis-a-vis his handling of the Irish church’s sex abuse crisis may want to think again after reading Light Of The World , the pope’s new book launched in the Vatican yesterday.

Based on six hours of conversation between the pope and German journalist Peter Seewald, the book attempts to use what senior Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi called “simple, concrete and accessible” language to provide answers to a wide range of key questions concerning today’s church. At one point, Seewald suggests that the evident episcopal mishandling of abuse cases represents a complete “failure” for the church.

By way of response, Pope Benedict says: “The Archbishop of Dublin told me something very interesting about that. He said that ecclesiastical penal law functioned until the late 1950s; admittedly, it was not perfect – there is much to criticise about it – but nevertheless it was applied. After the mid-sixties, however, it was simply not applied any more.
“The prevailing mentality was that the Church must not be a Church of laws but, rather a Church of love: she must not punish . . . This led to an odd darkening of the mind, even in very good people.”
...

...

Murphy Chapter 4

Vatican defends 1997 letter to Irish bishops on reporting clerical sex abuse cases
By Nicole Winfield (CP)


VATICAN CITY — In a new round of damage control, the Vatican has insisted that a 1997 letter warning Irish bishops against reporting priests suspected of sex abuse to police had been "deeply misunderstood."
The Associated Press on Tuesday reported the contents of the letter, in which the Vatican's top diplomat in Ireland told bishops that their policy of mandatory reporting such cases to police "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature."

The newly revealed letter, obtained originally by Irish broadcaster RTE from an Irish bishop, has undermined persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that Rome never told bishops not to co-operate with police.

An Irish government-ordered investigation into decades of abuse coverups in the Dublin Archdiocese concluded that Irish bishops understood the letter to mean they shouldn't report suspected crimes.
And victims groups say it's a "smoking gun" that shows that the church enforced a worldwide culture of concealing crimes by pedophile priests of which Rome bears ultimate — and legal — responsibility.

"The letter confirms that the coverup goes as far as the Vatican, that Vatican officials knew exactly what was going on, and that they proactively sought to deter Irish bishops from co-operating with civil authorities in Ireland," said Andrew Madden, a former Dublin altar boy who was raped repeatedly by a priest, Ivan Payne, in the 1980s.

"This letter also documents how the church remained of the view that it is a law unto itself, how its rules and regulations regarding the handling of a criminal offence take precedence over civil society's laws," said Madden, who in 1995 became the first victim in Ireland to go public with a lawsuit against the church.

On Wednesday, the Vatican insisted the 1997 letter was only intended to emphasize that Irish bishops must follow church law meticulously. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the Holy See wanted to ensure that pedophile priests wouldn't have any technical grounds to escape church punishment on appeal.

It by no means instructed bishops to disregard civil reporting requirements about abuse, added the Vatican's U.S. lawyer, Jeffrey Lena, who said the letter had been "deeply misunderstood" by the media.

At the time, there were no such reporting requirements in Ireland. In fact, the Irish bishops were ahead of Irish lawmakers in pledging co-operation with law enforcement as dioceses were hit with the first lawsuits by victims of abusive priests.

Yet as a result of the 1997 letter, most Irish dioceses never implemented the 1996 commitment to report all suspected abuse cases to police, according to the conclusions of the government-mandated investigation into the Dublin Archdiocese published in 2009.

"This in fact never took place because of the response of Rome," the commission said in its report, although it quoted Dublin Archdiocese officials as saying it was implemented there.
That eight-year inquiry interviewed two senior Dublin Archdiocese canon lawyers involved in handling abuse complaints. They were quoted as saying the letter discouraged bishops from pursuing their 1996 initiative for fear of being overruled by Rome, as had already happened in one notorious case of a serial pedophile.

The AP has requested interviews with both officials, Monsignors Alex Stenson and John Dolan. But the Dublin Archdiocese said Wednesday that no officials would be available to comment on either the 2009 investigation or the publication of the Vatican's 1997 letter.
In that letter, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, Archbishop Luciano Storero, told the Irish bishops that their 1996 policy contained procedures that appeared to contradict canon law and stressed the need to follow that law "meticulously" or risk having their canonical trials overturned on appeal.

The Irish bishops' policy makes clear, with dozens of citations, that canon law must be followed when a bishop learns of an abuse allegation. That raises questions about what — beyond the police reporting requirement — the Vatican was so concerned about in its letter.

Lombardi said Wednesday the Vatican was chiefly concerned about protecting the church's right to deal with crimes that occurred within the sacrament of confession. The Vatican has particular norms with dealing with the crime of soliciting sex from a minor within the confessional that require church proceedings be kept strictly secret.

Plaintiffs' lawyers have charged that those norms mandated non-reporting to police; Lena has argued in court papers they did no such thing.

Irish victims' groups described Lombardi's explanation as nonsensical and irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of thousands of abuse cases, which did not involve the confessional.
They said almost without exception, church officials learned of sexual assaults by priests outside the confessional — from victims or their parents who generally were seeking to prevent the priest from attacking anyone else.
They noted that the Vatican has consistently ignored letters from several Irish investigations seeking church documents, such as the 1997 letter, that would shed light on the scope of Catholic child abuse and any coverup.

"Even within the narrow confines of canon law, raising the question of the sacrament of confession as a credible reason for withholding child-abuse reports to police makes zero sense in Irish experience and, presumably, global experience of the church's actual pattern — to cover up and conceal crimes regardless of whether an act of confession was involved," said Maeve Lewis, director of Ireland's abuse victims support group One in Four.
She said the real reason the Vatican didn't want bishops to report abuse was to shelter the church from scandal and lawsuits.

"We know from bitter experience that the letter's threat to overturn any punishments imposed by the Irish church was real and perversely executed in the case of Tony Walsh," she said.
Walsh was defrocked by a canonical court in Dublin in 1993, but appealed the punishment to Rome, which decided the next year he should be reinstated as a priest and instead sent to a monastery.
Cardinal Desmond Connell, former archbishop of Dublin, got Walsh defrocked only after his criminal trial in Dublin had begun and Connell had made a personal plea to John Paul, explaining that no Irish monastery was willing to take him.

RTÉ 13-1-2011, 0.20.29

U.S. attorney Jeffrey Anderson, who has filed lawsuits against the Holy See and its officials in Oregon and Wisconsin, said the letter bolstered his argument that church officials in Rome were part of a "conspiracy to suppress evidence of sexual abuse by priests." In a statement, he said he believed that there were other "smoking guns secretly vaulted away in the bowels of the Vatican fortress in Rome."

Plaintiffs' attorneys have repeatedly sought to have discovery of Vatican documents and to question Vatican officials under oath to boost their claims. So far the Holy See has avoided their attempts by arguing U.S. courts don't have subject matter jurisdiction over the Vatican because it enjoys foreign sovereign immunity.

The Vatican also insisted Wednesday that the Irish policy was a mere "study" document that it reviewed, not a policy document of the bishops' conference. Yet at the time it was issued, Irish bishops announced it effectively as policy: A full press conference was held to release it and announce the new pledge to report abuse, and the church's top prelate in Ireland said in the forward of the report that it should be enacted by all dioceses.

The 1997 letter cited the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy, which had reviewed the Irish document and expressed reservations.
At the time, the Congregation for the Clergy was led by Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, who has routinely defended the church's practice of not reporting abuse to police in favour of guarding the rights of accused priests. At the height of the Vatican's sex abuse scandal last year, Castrillon Hoyos told a Colombian radio station that no one should be forced to report abuse.
"The law in nations with a well-developed judiciary does not force anyone to testify against a child, a father, against other people close to the suspect," Castrillon told RCN radio. "Why would they ask that of the church? That's the injustice."

Lombardi in his statement noted that the letter was issued before the Vatican in May 2001 instructed bishops worldwide to send abuse cases to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for review.

The Vatican has insisted that its 2001 shift marked a turning point in the way it dealt with abuse. It has cited its 2001 norms as evidence that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who headed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith before becoming Pope Benedict XVI, intended to get tough with pedophile priests.
The 2001 norms, however, say nothing about the need to report abuse to police and repeat the need for the canonical proceedings to be kept under pontifical secret to protect the reputations of all involved.

Later that same year, Castrillon Hoyos congratulated a French bishop in a letter for receiving a suspended prison sentence — his punishment for concealing knowledge of a priest convicted of raping and sexually abusing minors.

Only last year did the Vatican post a nonbinding, unofficial guide on its website saying bishops should follow civil reporting laws where they exist. Significantly, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith updated its norms last summer, it again made no mention of the need to report abuse; the Vatican has said such a reference would be an incongruous melding of civil and canon law.

Two Irish government-commissioned reports — into the Dublin Archdiocese and workhouse-style Catholic institutions for children — unveiled decades of coverups of abuse involving tens of thousands of Irish children since the 1930s.

Truth and a call to renewal

Truth and a call to renewal
Dec. 30, 2010 Accountability [1]
An NCR Editorial

It is fitting that the final years of Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the disgraced founder of the Legionaries of Christ, straddled the two papacies that have been deeply scarred by the ever expanding priest sex abuse crisis: that of John Paul II, the figure who did the most to promote Maciel and his order, and Benedict XVI, the highest-level curial figure to understand the dimensions of the crisis and who, as pope, is left to deal with its consequences.

Maciel, who died in 2008, lived a monstrous double life and was a master manipulator of the powerful in the Vatican. He was skilled at winning over those who were influenced by cash and shows of obeisance. His slavish adherence, at least publicly, to orthodoxies and personal pieties provided him the cover he needed to maintain his status while hiding a life that included horrific abuse of young seminarians and fathering at least three children with two different women.

Maciel embodied the arrogance, sense of privilege, lack of accountability and rot in the ranks of church leadership of which the abuse crisis is merely the most glaring symptom.

As Jason Berry writes [2], who controls the telling of the history of Maciel and his order is important. The overwhelming struggle of sex abuse victims to get their story out is but one indication of how difficult it has been for the church to acknowledge the truth of this ugly reality.

Some contend that John Paul was simply ill served by those around him, kept in the dark about what was occurring in the sex abuse crisis worldwide and about the charges against Maciel specifically. If that were the case, then John Paul, for all of his international bravado and accomplishments, was unbelievably detached from what was occurring inside his church and blind to the reports being filed in his dicasteries.

Certainly there was more to it than a few errant palace functionaries. The myth of Maciel fit John Paul's idea of what church should be — grand, conspicuous, highly regimented, filled with loyal priests who would not question authority, rich in personal heroics, and larded top to bottom with pious practices and rules that helped maintain order. Except that it was an utter sham. Maciel was undoubtedly John Paul's worst personnel mistake, but it was not his only one. The characteristics he treasured — blind loyalty and correct ideology over pastoral acumen or creative leadership — were evident in many of the bishops he appointed, and more than a few of those appointments turned round to haunt him and the wider church.

If John Paul was ill served by his curia, he was just as badly served by some of his highest-profile acolytes in the United States. Such noted conservatives as George Weigel, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, former Crisis magazine editor and Republican consultant Deal Hudson, and the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things magazine, insisted on Maciel's innocence in the face of abundant reporting on the persistent and credible accusations from former seminarians and priests in his order.

None bothered to speak to any of the accusers. It was enough that the Maciel myth fit the John Paul II myth. No amount of unpleasant truth could disturb the romance of it all.

Benedict, referring to the scandal in a recent address to the curia, said, "We must accept this humiliation as an exhortation to truth and a call to renewal. Only the truth saves."

We agree, and on that basis hope that the pope rethinks his strategy for dealing with the Legion. Remaking the Legion with former leaders who were duped by Maciel hardly inspires confidence in the cause of renewal.

Any true call to renewal — whether in the Legion or the wider church — will require a deep and honest investigation of the clerical and hierarchical culture that produced Maciel and so many others who betrayed the Gospel and the community and that enabled their crimes to be covered up for years.

George Weigel: Whitewashing history; jason berry 2

He continues to excuse the late Pope John Paul II from any culpability in the Legion scandal

30-12-2010
Jason Barry

Analysis
George Weigel, Pope John Paul II biographer and a leading conservative voice at the Washington-based Ethics and Public Policy Center, has recently become a critic of the Legion of Christ, the scandal-racked religious order, after years of supporting it while dismissing complaints and charges against its founder, Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado.

Among high-profile U.S. Catholic conservatives who long defended Maciel while denigrating his accusers, Weigel alone has made a turnabout in urging Legion reforms.

However, he continues to go out of his way, as he has for years, to excuse the late Pope John Paul II from any culpability in the Legion scandal. It was John Paul, more than anyone else, who backed Maciel and the Legion and elevated both in church status.

"I have been deeply impressed by the work of the Legionaries of Christ in the United States, in Mexico, and in Rome," Weigel wrote on a Legion Web site in 2002. "If Father Maciel and his charism as a founder are to be judged by the fruits of his work, those fruits are most impressive indeed."

Published accusations against Maciel first surfaced in 1997. In a report coauthored by this writer in Conneticut's Hartford Courant, nine men, interviewed in the United States and Mexico, charged that Maciel had molested them in Spain and Italy during the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Several said Maciel told them he had permission from Pope Pius XII to seek them out sexually for relief of physical pain.

U.S. Catholic conservative voices, including Catholic League president William Donohue and political activist Deal Hudson, defended Maciel at the time. Other conservatives had offered their continued support for the Legion founder. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Mary Ann Glendon, and CNN political analyst Bill Bennett were among them. Glendon, now a Harvard law professor, scoffed at "old slanders" and in a letter dated May 23, 2002, called Maciel a man of "radiant holiness."

Weigel's own endorsement came a month later. Both of their statements followed the April 2002 meeting of the U.S. cardinals with John Paul in Rome to discuss the abuse crisis. With clergy sex abuse receiving more media coverage, it was a period in which Legion leaders wanted to shore up Maciel's reputation amid heavy scrutiny.

The defense of Maciel by conservative Catholics gave valuable cover to Maciel as the Legion struck back against the men from Mexico and Spain who had come forward to relate that they had been sexually abused by Maciel when they were teenage seminarians.
To say that Weigel, Glendon and Neuhaus — who asserted Maciel's innocence as "a moral certainty" — were duped is to overstate the obvious. Clearly, they were influenced by John Paul's own personal support for Maciel.

A larger question is why not one of those supporters bothered to sit down with the men who had accused Maciel, including Juan Vaca, the first to come forward with charges in a document he sent to Pope Paul VI in 1976, or Fr. Felix Alarcón, or the other six survivors, to hear what they had to say.

In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI banished Maciel from active ministry.
One week after the Feb. 2, 2009, news that Maciel had led a double life and had fathered a daughter, and after several priests quit the Legion, Weigel posed questions about the Legion in an essay on the First Things Web site, published by the conservative Institute on Religion and Public Life in Washington.
Many people with friends among "Legionary priests have known for years [that] there is great good here, as there is among the faithful members of Regnum Christi," Weigel wrote. "How shall that good be saved?" He called for a "root-and-branch examination" and "a brutally frank analysis of the institutional culture" by the Vatican. "Can the Legion be reformed from within, after those complicit in the Maciel web of deceit have been dismissed?"

Sanitizing the past
Today Weigel is the leading conservative voice urging Legion reform. Yet his demands for Vatican probity are preceded by a lengthy record of whitewashing John Paul's failure in the abuse crisis. In two biographies of the late pope, and in a 2002 book, The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform and the Future of the Church, Weigel's treatment of the abuse crisis is marred by his blindness to a host of early reports and books on what sociologist Fr. Andrew M. Greeley called, in 1992, "the greatest scandal in the history of religion in America." The first volume of Weigel's papal biography, in 1999, completely avoids the issue. When the Boston scandal in 2002 forced John Paul to deal with it, Weigel flew to Rome as an ad hoc papal advisor.

Weigel is the rare writer not in the Legion's employ to get an interview with Maciel. After the 1997 Hartford Courant report, Maciel shunned journalists, even canceling a speech in Chicago for fear of facing reporters. Weigel's 2010 book, The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II — the Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy, notes that he interviewed Maciel on Feb. 19, 1998. Weigel does not quote Maciel, nor explain what he asked or what Maciel said, other than that John Paul broke a "logjam in 1983" for the approval of the Legion constitutions.

John Paul "may well have been ill served by associates and subordinates who ought to have been more alert to the implications of [Maciel's] cult of personality," writes Weigel. "The reasons that those associates and subordinates were skeptical of the charges will be investigated and debated for years." This, from a writer who had 10 interviews with John Paul for the 1999 book and better access to curial "associates" than most journalists at the Vatican.

"Despite the negative implications of John Paul's reputation that some of [his] critics quickly drew," Weigel writes, "what was at work in this scandalous affair was deception in the service of the mysterium iniquitatis" — the mystery of evil.

And so we are left to believe that one of the great moral leaders of the last century was deceived by the "mystery of evil."

Vatican politics
Weigel airbrushes any reference to Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano pressuring then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to halt the Maciel prosecution from 1998 to 2004, and to the significant sums of money that Maciel advanced to both Sodano and papal secretary Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz (NCR, April 06, 2010). Of Dziwisz, a pivotal Maciel supporter, Weigel simply notes that the Polish prelate was "susceptible to misreading personalities." (Dziwisz has refused to answer NCR questions.)

What made John Paul insist on praising Maciel for years after the 1998 canonical filing by ex-Legion victims at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? NCR's John L. Allen Jr. reported in 2004 that John Paul and his senior advisers simply did not believe the accusations. Yet no one in Vatican inner circle felt the moral urgency to speak to Vaca or the seven other ex-Legionaries mentioned in the doctrinal congregation case.
Heaping blame on Maciel is easy now: He's dead. Why did the Vatican legal system break down? Why did John Paul not demand a probe of Maciel? The deeper mystery is why he could not bring himself to confront the larger crisis Maciel personified.

In 1999, a year after his Maciel interview, Weigel published a 992-page papal biography. Witness to Hope chronicles John Paul's life from childhood and priesthood in Poland, under the Nazi darkness, then communism, through the milestone events as pontiff with lucid analysis of his philosophical, theological and political thinking. Weigel credits Maciel with helping to persuade the president of Mexico in 1979 to meet John Paul at the airport on his first papal trip to Latin America. Not a word on the allegations against Maciel from 1997. The book ignores widely reported clergy abuse cases that rocked America and Ireland in the 1990s: the charges that brought down Covenant House founder Fr. Bruce Ritter; the resignation of Archbishop Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe, N.M., amid allegations from young women; the $119 million jury verdict against the Dallas diocese in 1997 that was a subject of great conversation in the Congregation for the Clergy, according to former priest Christopher Kunze, who worked there at the time. Were these not issues for the pope?

Jonathan Kwitney's biography Man of the Century: The Life and Times of Pope John Paul II, published two years before Weigel's, examines the abuse scandals with a straightforward approach, faulting John Paul for denial. A former Wall Street Journal correspondent, Kwitney, now deceased, wrote admiringly of John Paul's geopolitical triumphs and great pastoral gifts, yet with a moderately critical view of the pope's reaction to such internal church matters as celibacy and women's ordination.

Weigel wrote on the abuse issue in 1999:

Recruitment to seminaries had plummeted in the developed world, and seminaries themselves had experienced conditions ranging from confusion to turmoil since Vatican II. Discipline among the clergy faltered, and while statistical evidence demonstrated that malfeasance among Roman Catholic priests was no more severe (in absolute and relative terms) than among the clergy of other Christian denominations or among professionals in society, scandals involving priests were evils in themselves and another barrier to recruitment and reform within the presbyterate.

The issue of whether the priesthood had a greater proportion of child molesters than other denominations or professions had no consensus at the time. Nor does one exist today. Weigel's "evidence" source was Philip Jenkins' Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis, a 1996 book based on secondary sources rather than church files unearthed by discovery subpoenas. Jenkins argued that the 1990s scandals were a construction of the media, abetted by liberal Catholics, notably Dominican Fr. Tom Doyle, who became an advocate for victims of clergy sex abuse, and Greeley. Jenkins' theory collapsed in the 2002 media coverage that revealed bishops had concealed child molesters in many dioceses. Jenkins works as an expert witness for dioceses facing abuse cases; according to his own sworn testimony, he charges $450 per hour.

Weigel implies that John Paul was not properly briefed in the 1990s. Were the papal nuncios in Washington and in Dublin, Ireland, censoring their diplomatic cables home? In March 1985, Doyle was a canonist working in the Vatican Embassy. "I prepared a 42-page detailed report explaining the issue in graphic details," he told NCR. "My boss, the papal nuncio, Archbishop Pio Laghi, signed it. The document was personally given by [Philadelphia] Cardinal John Krol to the pope. I distinctly recall Laghi saying many times that 'my superiors in Rome' said this or that in response. There was a great deal of telephone traffic about it too."

In 1989 the American bishops sent canon lawyers to Rome, seeking the authority to defrock pedophiles without going through the long wait for such decisions from the pope. John Paul said no. Kwitney reports that John Paul was resistant to judging priests.

In April 2002, as The Boston Globe reports ignited international news coverage damaging to the Vatican, Weigel as an adviser to John Paul in Rome was quoted in the press. John Paul, in deteriorating health from Parkinson's disease, summoned the American cardinals to discuss the crisis. Several high-ranking cardinals and canonists defended church secrecy, impugning the media for anti-Catholic bias. Later that year, Weigel published The Courage to Be Catholic, and wrote scornfully of Cardinal Dario Castrillón Hoyos' blunders at a press conference: "Some suggested that the cardinal's wooden performance had something to do with his alleged papal ambitions." But as Weigel took the curia to task, he was filling holes in the 1999 biography. Weigel blamed the Vatican bureaucracy for failing to keep the pope advised. Although the Holy See had a sophisticated Web site and the Vatican Press Office disseminated daily news digests of papal activities by e-mail, Weigel wrote:

The church in the United States expected that the Vatican was living through the American Catholic trauma of early 2002 in real time through adequate information from the Washington nunciature. The Vatican wasn't, because the Vatican is simply not part of the Internet culture and the information flow from Washington was inadequate. That created an expectations
gap that widened and deepened during the first three months of the crisis.

.

The "expectations gap" had nothing to do with the Internet; it had been building since at least 1989 when the U.S. bishops failed to get permission from John Paul to laicize pedophiles. As a decade of scandals followed, John Paul was largely silent, particularly at the 1995 resignation of Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër of Vienna, whose sexual transgressions with youths provoked a scandal in Austria. John Paul had plucked Groër from obscurity to become an archbishop.

For Weigel, "the crisis" begins in 2002, a position consistent with its absence from his 1999 John Paul biography. The 2002 book cites a litany of scandals, including gay seminarians dancing at the North American College in Rome. Weigel decries a loss of orthodox bearings. He does not spare bishops: "Episcopal misgovernance came in many forms: bishops who took a cavalier attitude toward sexual abuse; bishops who knowingly transferred sexual abusers … who misled other bishops about known sexual abusers; bishops who saw the crisis of clerical sexual abuse in primarily legal and financial terms … bishops who failed to clean up their seminaries"

John Paul appointed many of those bishops. The vetting process, which excluded lay involvement, eliminated any candidate for the episcopacy who had endorsed optional celibacy or women priests. The gay subculture Weigel scorns arose as thousands of men left the priesthood to marry after Pope Paul VI's 1967 encyclical Sacerdotalis Caelibatus, in which he called celibacy the church's "brilliant jewel."

Weigel ignores a substantial body of work on clerical life from the 1970s and 1980s by Greeley, psychologist Eugene Kennedy, author A.W. Richard Sipe, and the late psychiatrist Conrad Baars, who delivered a 1971 report at the Vatican, "The Role of the Church in the Causation, Treatment and Prevention of the Crisis in the Priesthood."

Weigel ignores a longstanding body of literature by these and other Catholic social scientists on the symptoms of crisis, even pathology, in clerical culture. "The deepest root of the crisis of episcopal misgovernance," wrote Weigel, "is theological. … Too many bishops in the United States have traded the rich evangelical, pastoral and sacramental patrimony that is theirs for the mess of pottage that is contemporary management theory."

[Jason Berry is an author and producer of a film documentary on Maciel, "Vows of Silence." The Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute provided support for this article.]

Gambling with history: Benedict and the Legion of Christ

NRC
Dec. 29, 2010
By Jason Berry

Analysis

Pope Benedict XVI's decision last July to take control [3] of the Legionaries of Christ was a calculated risk. Amid a withering clergy abuse crisis, the pope chose an overseer to remake an international religious order built on the "charism" of a founder who sexually abused seminarians and fathered out-of-wedlock children, including two sons who claim they are incest victims.

The late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, lionized for most of his 86 years, is now the scapegoat for nearly everyone drawn into the legal quagmire he left: the Legion and its lay group, Regnum Christi; the pope; Vatican officials; and high-profile Legion supporters who in the past strongly defended Maciel against charges of abuse.

Just last month, the Vatican ordered [4] Maciel's photo removed from Legion facilities and banned sales of his writing, among other restrictions. However, hammering the memory of Maciel, like some statue of a fallen dictator, does little to answer the serious questions that still linger from his life of deception.

The story of the Legion of Christ and Maciel will continue to unfold in 2011. Interwoven into this story, however, has been a larger one, the story of the way the highest Catholic authorities entrusted to run the church reacted to the Maciel scandal, what decisions they made and what these decisions say about their own views of church and its mission.

It helps, then, to stand back and answer a few basic questions: Why did this scandal happen? How could John Paul II, a pope who showed brilliant moral vision in the face of Soviet communism, ignore the pedophilia allegations that trailed Maciel for decades? Why did he continue praising Maciel for six years after ex-Legionaries filed a 1998 canonical case with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger? How could Maciel's supporters, especially in the United States, so easily dismiss the testimony of so many credible accusers? Considering the order's strange history that keeps coming to light, is Benedict's decision to reform the Legion realistic?

While the question for Benedict is both immediate and risky, there is probably more at stake, depending on how those questions are answered, for the late John Paul and his legacy. How the story evolves and who controls the narrative could greatly influence whether John Paul continues to be viewed purely in heroic terms or as someone whose papacy was tainted by a scandal that came to light just five years after his election, but that he acknowledged only in the late days of his reign.

It was in 1983 that John Paul approved Legion bylaws that allowed Maciel to insulate himself from scrutiny. In the order's "private vows," Legionaries pledged never to criticize the founder, and to report on anyone who did. Five months before his death, John Paul approved Regnum Christi statutes that are in some ways as strange and excessively controlling as the private vows.
Benedict revoked the private vows in 2007, after banishing Maciel from active ministry. Maciel died in 2008. A Vatican investigation of Regnum Christi, the lay arm of the order that some describe as a cult, is currently under way. As Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, the papal delegate and canon lawyer, oversees the writing of a new Legion constitution in Rome, Benedict appears to be gambling that it is better to salvage than to dismantle the organization, despite its many disillusioned ex-members, and the opinions of six U.S. bishops who banned the Legion and Regnum Christi from their dioceses.

Benedict is now pushing the Legion to compensate Maciel's victims, especially older victims who have no legal recourse for abuse from long ago, a striking departure from the Vatican's historic aloofness to legal remediation. The Vatican has no mechanism for compensating victims. In essence, the pope is pushing the Legion as a judge would in trying to get two parties to settle a dispute.

Bishop Ricardo Watty Urquidi of Tepic, Mexico, one of five prelates charged with investigating the Legion for the Holy See, said as much to reporters in Mexico May 18: "We need, then, to take care of [Maciel's] victims, as much inside as outside the Legion, and to compensate them for damages. This is something we all agreed on, and the pope accepted — just as he has been doing, and bravely so."

The pope has evinced a pastoral approach to the Legion's 800 priests, 2,500 seminarians and 60,000 Regnum Christi members. He calls down Maciel for a "twisted, wasted life," in Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times, a new book-length interview with Peter Seewald. At the same time, Benedict praises the "dynamism and strength by which [Maciel] built up the Legionaries." He told Seewald: "Naturally corrections must be made, but by and large the congregation is strong."

The Legion certainly is strong by some measures. In Rome, the order symbolizes wealth and orthodoxy. The Legion college campus, Regina Apostolorum, provides newly invested bishops a residence, Mater Ecclesia hall, for introductory training. "The facilities and grounds are spectacular and the Legionaries have been superb hosts," wrote Bishop David M. O'Connell of Trenton, N.J., in a Sept. 13 Web post. "Meals are well prepared and served by members of the community who have demonstrated an uncanny ability to anticipate virtually every need." What O'Connell describes is vintage Legion, catering to the most powerful churchmen.

De Paolis has a commission of canonists and Legionaries drafting a new constitution for
the Legion in Rome. Meanwhile, the order faces lawsuits in Connecticut from one of Maciel's sons, an alleged incest victim, and in Rhode Island from a woman contesting the will of her aunt, Gabrielle Mee, a Regnum Christi member who died before it was known that Maciel had fathered children. The Mee estate that went to the Legion totaled upwards of $7.5 million, according to the Hartford Courant.
Both lawsuits seek financial settlements from the order, arguing that senior Legion officials long knew of Maciel's twisted life.

Foxes guard the hen house
Five days before Watty's May remarks in Mexico, Legion superior general Fr. Álvaro Corcuera sought forgiveness of Juan Vaca, one of Maciel's oldest victims, who, as a young priest, beseeched the Vatican to oust the Legion founder. Corcuera told Vaca that Legionaries in Rome were reading a 1976 letter he had sent to Pope Paul VI in which he identified 20 other sexual abuse victims. Vaca sent the document to the Vatican two more times. Corcuera told Vaca a Legion committee in Rome was considering reparations.
"Unfortunately, we addressed these things very slowly and late," Benedict conceded to Seewald. "Somehow they were concealed very well, and only around the year 2000 did we have any concrete clues."

Why the pope fixed on the year 2000 is unclear. Vaca's dossier on Maciel, which also sought dispensation of his vows, went to the Vatican from his bishop in Rockville Centre, N.Y., in 1990. Ratzinger's office approved the dispensation in 1993, while ignoring the abuse accusations. Nevertheless, Benedict's admission of a response "slowly and late" is a rare admission about the systemic failure to prosecute Maciel.

Several of the priests on De Paolis' committee to rewrite the constitution were strategic figures in Maciel's life.
The Irish-born Fr. Anthony Bannon directed the North American work of Regnum Christi for many years from the Legion headquarters in Cheshire, Conn. Regnum Christi members discussed Maciel's letters in study groups. Targeting new members and raising money was central to the group's mission.

Small, far-flung groups of consecrated women live as celibates in Regnum Christi communities, often staffing Legion schools. A key figure in the Rhode Island lawsuit, Bannon was an architect of Legion fundraising and the Web site campaign against Maciel's early victims. Bannon's presence, among five other priests on De Paolis' group drafting a constitution, is like the proverbial fox guarding the hen house. Bannon's apparatus touted Maciel's heroism to inspire seminarians who, in turn, accompanied priests on fundraising calls to targeted benefactors.

Of the other Legion priests on the commission to revise the constitutions, Fr. Roberto Aspe Hinojosa is a Mexican and one of Maciel's earliest and closest followers, according to Sandro Magister in L'espresso, a prominent Italian newsweekly. A Spaniard, Fr. José García Sentandreu, oversees the Legion's apostolate works, while Fr. Gabriel Sotres was head of the order's communications for two decades. How De Paolis can hope to find the ethical balance for reforming the Legion from these men strains credulity.

On Sept. 12, Vaca sent an e-mail to De Paolis claiming that because of quotes he provided for the 1997 Hartford Courant investigation of Maciel, the Legion tried "to destroy my professional reputation by false declarations in the National Catholic Register" — the Legion-owned weekly paper — "and on the Legionnaire community Web site, LegionaryFacts.org."

Legion priest Owen Kearns, editor of the Register, had written on LegionaryFacts.org following the Courant story, "Vaca is seeking revenge because he was incompetent in his job, and was being demoted."
"Vaca is just one of the disgruntled old men instigating a campaign of lies and calumnies against our beloved and innocent founder," wrote Kearns and Bannon in the Register. The comment also appeared on the Legion Web page.
Kearns recently issued an apology in the Register to the Courant; the late Gerald Renner, who wrote the original Legion story for the Courant; and this writer, with unnamed victims mentioned in passing.

What is Regnum Christi?
Regnum Christi, the other part of what Maciel called the Movement, states on its Web site that it is not a cult because the Catholic church does not approve cults. Did John Paul understand Regnum Christi? That is hard to imagine, given Benedict's decision to open an investigation of the Legion's lay wing. Is it a cult? Do certain practices amount to brainwashing? These questions gnaw at Genevieve Kineke, an orthodox Catholic, wife, and mother of four in East Greenwich, R.I., who has chronicled the Movement with scholarly resolve on her blog. Kineke is one of several women who left Regnum Christi over practices they considered deceptive. The group formed a loose network to assist others who leave.

Regnum Christi cultivates wealthy couples, particularly stay-at-home mothers, while seeking consecrated celibates to live like nuns and staff Legion schools. "When people leave the Movement it cuts through families, friendships and parishes," said Kineke, who has been an unofficial counselor to about 200 people in the last 10 years. "Some are so spiritually scarred they find it difficult to trust the church at all — the manipulation has been too traumatic."
Another ex-Regnum Christi member, who asked that her name not be used, waged a virtual one-woman campaign briefing Baltimore Archbishop Edwin O'Brien, who banned the Legion [5] and the lay wing from his archdiocese. "I've always suspected the flaws in the organization are endemic to it," O'Brien told NCR's John L. Allen Jr. in 2008. "There's no remedying them, because it's so deeply ingrained." Prelates in Minneapolis-St. Paul; Columbus, Ohio; Los Angeles; Miami; Ft. Wayne, Ind.; Baton Rouge, La.; and Richmond, Va., have banned the Movement from their dioceses.

In some houses of consecrated Regnum Christi members, the day begins with a woman entering bedrooms or a dormitory at 5:20 a.m., shouting: "Christ our king!" The women bolt out of bed and reply: "Thy kingdom come!"

"It took me a long time to conclude it was a cult," said Kineke. "I realized that the Movement entirely suppressed the true nature of freedom. Everything from posture and demeanor to verbal responses is scripted. The Movement uses smoke and mirrors to suggest the disciplined convents or seminaries of years past, but Maciel produced a culture that strips away basic freedoms. They thrive on efficiency, reaching quotas, meeting deadlines like a hard-core industry. Everyone read Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. 'Time is kingdom' was Maciel's gospel, meaning that you had to always be urgently working for the Movement. For women who did not need a job, you felt the Kingdom depended on you."

Kineke's blog, life-after-RC.com, is a major link on the Web site of regainnetwork.org, administered by Paul Lennon, a family therapist in Alexandria, Va. Lennon left the Legion and his priesthood in the 1980s after a falling out with Maciel over his dictatorial practices. In 2007 the Legion sued Lennon and ReGAIN, alleging intellectual property theft for the posting of the Legion constitution. The real target was ReGAIN's message board, which had become a clearing house for people leaving Regnum Christi and sharing Legion information. Unable to raise funds for a long legal fight, Lennon dismantled the message board and returned the constitution. Maciel died several months later, and within two years the world knew about his children.

At a Nov. 30, 2004, celebration with Maciel at the Vatican, John Paul praised Regnum Christi for fostering a "civilization of Christian justice and love" and approved their statutes. Among the rules:

103. Recruitment happens in stages, going successfully from kindness to
friendship, from friendship to confidence, from confidence to conviction, from
conviction to submission.
494. No one shall visit outsiders in their homes, deal with them frequently or speak with them by telephone without justifiable reasons or for apostolic purposes. …
509. The center's Director or Manager shall review all correspondence from members of the
center and release that which he or she judges to be opportune.

An apostolic visitation — a Vatican investigation — of Regnum Christi has just started. "Therefore, any changes, if needed, to Regnum Christi statutes would come later," Legion spokesman Jim Fair told NCR.

Benedict's dilemma
John Paul's conflicted view of the sex abuse crisis registered in his April 2002 address at the Apostolic Palace to the cardinals of the United States. Stating that the sexual abuse of youngsters was "rightly considered a crime by society" and "an appalling sin in the eyes of God," he said: "To the victims and their families, wherever they may be, I express my profound sense of solidarity and concern."

He then defended the bishops for "a generalized lack of knowledge" and taking the "advice of the clinical experts," meaning therapists at treatment centers where bishops sent the priests. Then, in reference to offending priests, he said: "We cannot forget the power of Christian conversion, that radical decision to turn away from sin and back to God."

He also declared: "People need to know there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young."

What was John Paul's answer? "The power of conversion" for clergy child molesters or "no place in the priesthood" for them? Conversion or exclusion? On the worst church crisis in centuries, John Paul demonstrated ambivalence, not certainty.

Benedict inherited a huge mess from John Paul. Ratzinger's detachment in the 1980s as a cardinal from serious cases, recently exposed in the European press, The New York Times and The Associated Press, equally underscores John Paul's lack of leadership, as well as more systemic factors: The Vatican monarchical system has no separation of powers and no bona fide court system for criminal prosecution. Benedict in theory has the power to demote, punish or call down cardinals, but that would violate unwritten rules of the hierarchy.

As De Paolis began making personnel changes in the Legion last month, Benedict's prospects of a reform to boost his image from the scandals earlier this year appear to hang on whether De Paolis can secure Legion financial resources to produce a victims' compensation plan. That would be a historic breakthrough and sign of visionary papal leadership. Judges in democratic countries oversee negotiated settlements all the time — not so Vatican tribunals under canon law.

A deeper question is whether the Holy See has control of the Legion, and if so, just how the pope will change the organization.

On Nov. 11, De Paolis responded to Vaca: "I have received your e-mail dated November 3, 2010. Sorry for my delay in answering you, but at present I have many commitments to meet. As far as your case is concerned, I think that the only solution is to address to the responsible [parties] of the Congregation of the Legionaries of Christ. God bless you."