Pope Picks Abuse Panel On Eve Of President Obama’s Visit, by Jerry Slevin, Christian Catholicism (March 22, 2014)

President Obama’s scheduled visit with Pope Francis next Thursday (3/27) is apparently already paying some dividends on curtailing priest child abuse. Apparently to head off potential public pressure from Obama, Francis has after a year as Pope finally just announced the initial members of his child abuse prevention Commission. While the Commission’s undetermined mandate does not appear to include holding bishops accountable for protecting priest abusers, it may be enough to head off President Obama’s raising the abuse issue strongly and publicly next Thursday.

Of course, the Pope is also facing additional pressure next week as his new Vatican financial czar, Cardinal Pell, will be facing a tough grilling under oath at the Australian Royal Commission’s institutional child sexual abuse investigation hearings. Last week, Pell’s long time aide was questioned and gave tesitimony that undercut some of Pell’s reported earlier statements. Pell’s new testimony may also help explain better why the Pope has pulled Pell back to Rome for a top financial post he seems hardly qualified for.

Per the Vatican Radio release (3/22): “Pope Francis has instituted the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors whose task will be to advise the Holy Father on ways to prevent abuse and provide pastoral care for victims and their families … Members of the new Commission announced Saturday by the Holy See’s Press Office, include four men and four women who will be tasked firstly, with drawing up the Statutes of the Commission, defining “its tasks and competencies”.

”The members of the Commission include: French psychologist Catherine Bonnet; Marie Collins, an Irish victim of abuse; British Professor Sheila Hollins, a specialist in mental health; American Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley; Italian jurist Claudio Papale; Poland’s former Prime Minister and Ambassador to the Holy See, Hanna Suchocka; and the Jesuits Humberto Miguel Yanez, a moral theologian and former pupil and collaborator of Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina and Hans Zollner, vice-rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University and Chair of the Centre for Child Protection at the University’s Institute of Psychology. Other members will be added to the Commission in the future, chosen from around the world.”

The naming of four women to the abuse Commission may indicate Francis is also considering adding women as full time participants to October’s Synod on the Family. Francis’ favored Cardinal theologian, German Walter Kasper, after addessing 150+ childless and celibate cardinals privately recently on family theological matters, indicated in an interview that he thought it was “absurd” that women have not yet been added as full time Synod participants.

With respect to next week’s scheduled Vatican meeting and the upcoming US Congressional elections, please note that Pope Francis recently held after almost a year his much anticipated meeting with his select council of eight cardinals, with Boston’s Cardinal O’Malley as the US representative. The meeting reportedly focused on Francis’ top priorities: (1) consolidating his worldwide control over his childless male hierarchical subordinates, and (2) reviewing his efforts to clean up sordid Vatican finances in order, among other goals, to minimize Vatican cardinals’ potential criminal liability exposure for financial misdeeds.

At the same time, Francis and his media echo chamber have increasingly tried to claim counterfactually and inconsistently, apparently to avoid potential legal liability for covering up for priest child abusers, that popes do not control local Church officials. Other Vatican challenges, including addressing pressing issues affecting child protection, responsible family planning and respecting gay persons’ rights, have continued mainly simmering on Francis’ back burner, if not already precluded by his often inconsistent utterances.

Please note, President Obama, in anticipation of your March 27 meeting with Pope Francis and for the sake of defenseless innocents and your desired legacy, my concerns as a fellow Harvard Law School graduate and as a Catholic grandparent about the unfolding strategy of Pope Francis and his billionaire backers. Francis apparently is seeking, in effect, to exempt the Vatican both from enforcement of international laws and any independent judicial oversight, especially for child abuse related crimes. Many of these laws apply to and are enforcible against even US Presidents. Stalin was right that the pope has no divisions, but he has legions of hard nosed lawyers, creative publicists, opportunistic apologists and self-interested donors.

You, President Obama, appear to be viewed by the Vatican as a major obstacle to Francis’ plans, an obstacle that he seems determined to overcome, as ex-Pope Benedict unsuccessfully tried to do in the 2012 elections. Surely we learned explicitly at Harvard Law School of the essential importance of applying laws equally to all, the powerful and the the weak alike. Francis must know you understand that.

For over 1,700 years, popes have played politics internationally. For centuries, popes made alliances directly with other monarchs. In the current democratic era, popes have often pursued the hierarchy’s interest through mutually beneficial and privately agreed exchanges with plutocrats and politicians, including tyrants, who were seeking papal endorsements to help attract national Catholic voter support.

Through these exchanges, popes have often secured preferential treatment and significant control of key areas like education, as well as financial and tax subsidies. In the process, some popes have often slickly subordinated Jesus’ New Testament teachings and spiritual values, such as helping the disadvantaged and protecting the innocent, especially children and women, to papal political expediency, economic advantage and pious propaganda.

The Vatican plays political hardball in the USA, as your Secretary of State, John Kerry, learned painfully in 2004 when ex-Pope Benedict, Cardinal Sodano, and the current Vatican Secretary of State and Sodano protege, Cardinal-designate Parolin, pushed US bishops hard to help elect George W. Bush. Tellingly, Cardinal Sodano reportedly felt sufficiently entitled for his 2004 political support of Bush to openly ask Bush’s US Secretary of State in 2005 to help deflect abuse survivor litigation discovery subpoenas directed at the Vatican over covering up for priest child abusers. Apparently, Francis, Parolin and Sodano would still like to return to the years of special treatment under the Bush White House that you seemingly refuse to offer them.

Hopefully, neither Pope Francis, Parolin nor Sodano will ask you, President Obama, for similar cover-up help. You have recently noted as a parent and President your concern about protecting youth in college and the military from sexual abuse. Younger children need even more governmental protections. This is likely obvious to you as a parent, even if it is not so obvious apparently to many childless clerics who still want to avoid reporting priest child abusers to the police unless legally mandated to do so, if then. Jesus understood this evil tendency; hence, his severe mandate that child abusers should be tossed into the sea with a millstone around their necks. You might consider bringing some millstones with you when you visit the Vatican on March 27.

As a constitutional law scholar, you know that the US Founders, while writing the US Constitution in 1787, had sound objections to exempting the powerful, especially monarchs and hierarchs, from legal accountability. Hence, the emphasis in the Constitution on “checks and balances”. Special exemptions from criminal laws, currently sought in effect by the Vatican and US bishops , though camouflaged in a “religious freedom” disguise, are still exemptions and are inconsistent with equal treatment under the law.

As a Harvard Law student, I benefited from assisting Archibald Cox, who later admirably acted to apply the law under an independent judiciary to President Nixon and his advisors. As President, you must now seek to apply the rule of law under an independent judiciary to Pope Francis and his hierarchy to protect defenseless innocents from absolute monarchs, as the US Founders expected Presidents would do.

Vatican experts estimate that over 100,000 children to date in the USA alone have been sexually abused by Catholic priests. Ongoing revelations from Minnesota, Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, New Jersey, and even Ireland, Australia, Poland and the Dominican Republic, indicate the hierarchical cover-up continues. The Vatican cannot be left to police itself, plain and simple. The US Founders were right.

You must also resist, President Obama, by all available legitimate means, the increasing papal efforts to interfere with US policies democratically adopted, including with respect to responsible family planning, protecting children, accepting women fully as equals and respecting the rights of gay persons. Fortunately, resisting these papal incursions is not only the right thing to do, it is also good politics.

If you wish effectively to head this papal incursion off, as it is your sworn duty to do, President Obama, you must at least begin now to challenge Pope Francis’ evidentally cynical strategy. This is especially true now in light of the Vatican’s disappointing, but predictable, reaction to the recent UN child protection committee’s severe criticism, and similarly predictable shameful efforts to attack the UN Committee’s scholarly members for raising properly other relevant Vatican child protection shortcomings under the treaty that the Vatican voluntarily agreed to abide by. As you know from your Harvard Law training, this is not the UN waging a culture war; it is a UN committee with consensual jurisdiction only holding the Vatican to its treaty obligations. The Vatican cannot have it both ways–wrapping itself in the treaty and complaining the fit is too tight.

Whether you prefer to be or not, President Obama, you are likely to become enmeshed to some degree in the Catholic hierarchy’s child abuse story. This should be anticipated as your Chief of Staff’s brother, Fr. Kevin McDonough, reportedly continues as former Vicar General to try to avoid depositions and police interviews about several priests’ abuse allegations he had earlier addressed that are now part of the escalating Minneapolis/St. Paul Archdiocesean abuse scandals. Evidence from one of these scandals involving a Fr. Shelley, that Fr. McDonough had personally reviewed as Vicar, was reportedly reviewed recently by your US Justice Department’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. Puzzlingly, to date Fr. McDonough has not been interviewed apparently. He reportedly has his own lawyer whom likely has advised him to avoid testifying unless he is compelled to do so. It seems likely he will be required to testify under oath sooner or later.

Additionally, the ongoing Chicago Archdiocesan abuse scandal revelations include allegations about some priest abusers apparently from South Side locations and time periods that may coincide with some of your earlier work for Catholic parishioners as a South Side community organizer. It may be expected that the media in due course may at least seek your relevant views about some of these cases, especially given your advocacy work in the late 1980′s indirectly on behalf of eight Chicago parishes.

Moreover, your main legacies, including Obamacare coverage for all, future US Supreme Court judicial policies, including on religious freedom, universal health care, family planning, LGBT rights, voting rights and corporate political contributions, and even your many Middle East diplomatic efforts, may hang in the balance, as the critical November US Senate elections rapidly approach.

Francis and his US bishops appear already to be working actively with their conservative billionaire backers to try to exploit “wedge issues”, like contraception insurance and marriage equality, to boost conservative voter turnout in key states, especially among US Latino voters, and thereby to gain control of the US Senate Such control likely will also entail thereby control of the future US Supreme Court selection process for new Justices at a time when four of the nine current Justices are 75 years old or older, and likely to be replaced in the next few years. Control of determining who will be among the US Supreme Court majority is, as you know, one of the most important US political decisions of any President.

Indeed, Francis’ key US Cardinal O’Malley, currently Francis’ principal cardinal advisor on US Latinos, recently confirmed, in an interview on the conservative EWTV network, the current US Catholic hierarchical political preference. In the interview, he indicated disappointment about Latino Catholics’ favoring Democratic candidates. He then volunteered his advice that US Republicans needed to adjust their political message to US Latinos by placing greater stress on “life and family” issues. “Life and family” issues currently are hierarchical code words for anti-contraception/abortion, and anti-gay marriage, political positions.

It appears that Cardinal O’Malley is setting the stage for Pope Francis to encourage more conservative US Latino Catholic to come out and vote for conservative Republican US Senate candidates. In some key states, it would only take a small percentage of additional conservative Catholic Latinos to get out and vote in order to defeat the local Democratic Senate candidate.

You can see, President Obama, that the typical papal political ploys, including the anti-contraception legal crusade, are clearly in evidence at present. For example, so many Catholics in good conscience favor contraception as part of responsible family planning that parish priests have barely discussed its purported “sinfulness” in recent decades. Nevertheless, the contraception issue is still considered useful by the Vatican to draw out “one issue anti-abortion” voters, who overlook the fact that contraception reduces the need for abortions. Of course, Democratic US Senate candidates may also use the issue to draw out more pro-choice voters, as happened in 2012.

Your Catholic voter support, President Obama, reportedly declined from 54% in 2008 to 51% in 2012. The 51 % in 2012 included 76% of US Catholic Latino voters. Your current favorable poll numbers are down overall from the 2012 levels. Given Francis’ popularity, especially among Latino voters, Francis’ opposition to Democratic US Senate candidates could readily change this voting pattern adversely for your preferred candidates, especially in several key states.

If you wait much longer, President Obama, to confront Pope Francis on the gap between his prophetic words and realpolitick deeds, it may become too late to hold on to a Democratic majority in the US Senate. In that case, conservatives, backed by tax avoiding “trickle down” billionaires, will likely continue to select the US Supreme Court majority for many years to come. That would likely destroy most of the legacy you are endeavoring to leave.

Internationally, Francis has already opportunistically aligned himself with Russia’s President Putin on Syria against you, despite Putin’s KGB history during Pope John Paul II’s reign and Putin’s several current repressive policies. Playing powerful leaders off against each other has been a geopolitical strategy successfully implemented by popes for many centuries.

Since Francis seems already committed to politically opposing you, President Obama, you appear to have little chance of gaining his support. Moreover, it would appear imprudent to try to enhance his carefully constructed public relations image. This indicates, to me at least, your goal should be directed at uncovering publicly and clearly Francis’ cynical strategy, while seeking to avoid unnecessarily antagonizing sincere Catholic voters. You can do that. Sincere Catholics generally favor protecting children fully, planning families responsibly, treating women equally and respecting gay persons always. To borrow from sports, the ball is “in your court” now, President Obama.

There are some indications recently that in connection with his childless and celibate hierarchs’ Synod on the Family, Part I, scheduled from October 5-19, Francis will likely, under German bishops’ pressure and for related financial considerations, grant divorced and remarried Catholics’ more access to Catholic rituals, and thereby also restore their dormant financial support for local Churches. Part II of the Synod’s program has been scheduled for October 2015. This would be over two and a half years from Francis’ election, an inexplicable and unnecessary delay on divorced Catholics’ access and on other pressing issues affecting mainly poor children and women.

This single change for divorced Catholics likely would be used by Vatican publicists to claim that Francis is a real reformer and to offset Catholics’ complaints about other changes that Francis has avoided even re-opening for new study and discussion, in light of new insights and more recent biblical research and theological analysis. In particular, current indications are that Francis will not even reconsider, despite some new developments, and will continue permanently the Vatican’s opposition to contraception, gay marriage and married and/or women priests. All of these current papal positions have come to underpin the papal mythological ideology of an “infallible pope” that Catholics have been weaned on since 1870.

The mythology of a “semi-divine pope” is fundamental to the Vatican’s geo-political strategy. This ideology will be reinforced in April by the expected “contrived canonizations” of Popes John Paul II and John XXIII, notwithstanding their apparently indefensible records on covering up priest child abuse and Vatican financial corruption, among other seeming shortcomings. These subjects appear to have been carefully avoided in the rigged canonization preliminaries that lack the “devil’s advocate” investigation that had been used in many earlier canonizations. Ironically, Pope John Paul II, a prodigious and profitable “saintmaker”, had earlier eliminated the devil’s advocate position.

So President Obama, a late October US Senate election push by Pope Francis can then be expected to follow the mid-October Synod on the Family, especially on these wedge issues and among conservative US Latino voters in the approximately half dozen key “toss-up” states. Francis, meanwhile, will likely continue to evade serious efforts to hold the Catholic hierarchy accountable for protecting child abusers or for shortchanging abuse survivors, while wasting billions of dollars of Catholics’ donations on futile legal defenses and unnecessary personal projects like Cardinal Dolan’s $180,000,000+ million renovation of St. Patrick’s Cathedral with substantial funding help from conservative billionaire backers.

Meanwhile, over 500 Milwaukee priest abuse survivors that Dolan left behind are now, in effect, being offered barely $7, 000 each, less than a third of what Dolan offered likely Milwaukee priest child abusers to “disappear”, along with priest pensions and retraining assistance for many of these predatory priests. While Dolan gilds the elite St. Patrick’s, he reportedly also is advancing on closely downtown NYC parishes located on valuable real estate locations. President Obama, you reportedly met with Cardinal Dolan as head of US bishops , including once in the fall of 2012 just after the Penn State child abuse scandal story broke, with serious negative implications for the US Catholic bishops own scandals. You may already have a good measure of the best strategy for dealing with ruthless hierarchs like Dolan with his “Happy Irishman” facade.

Pope Francis is pushing policies that hurt many in the USA and worldwide, including children and women, especially poor ones. Francis’ strategy, evident by clear actions and pregnant inaction that belie his carefully orchestrated public gestures, is evidentally aimed mainly at protecting the cardinals who elected him from potential criminal accountability for facilitating predatory priests and financial felons, among other misdeeds.

Most Catholics, like myself, have experienced indoctrination since childhood in confessionals and classrooms to overlook blindly papal misdeeds and to just “pay, pray and obey”, no questions asked. This childhood indoctrination strongly influences many Catholics throughout their lives. Consequently, many Catholics, and many in the media, overlook Francis’ unambiguous actions and inaction that contradict his pleasing public pontifications. They, instead, choose to continue to be fooled by Pope Francis’ well orchestrated charm offensive, that is both comforting to them and relieves them apparently of guilt about not resisting the Vatican’s evil misdeeds. Catholic intellectuals and media figures mostly are silent, often co-opted by hierarchical “bribes or appointments” or beaten down by decades of papal intimidation. Even some purported Catholic reformers accept insincere and often unbelievable and/or false excuses from the hierarchy, rather than calling a spade a spade.

President Obama, you need to act now to protect defenseless innocents and to prevent Francis from denying you your legacy. You need as well to bring an end to the financial fleecing of US Catholics and the current US tax subsidies for a foreign power, the Vatican, under an absolute monarch who demands secrecy and immunity from reasonable criminal investigations. At the same time, popes continue to demand the unaccountable power to endanger US children with impunity and to control US couples’ family planning options significantly. The US Founders would be truly astounded at the unaccountability the Vatican demands as it tries to turn “religious liberty” into an oppressive shield for special exemptions from the rule of law.

On March 27, President Obama, you will have a unique opportunity when you meet with Pope Francis. This will be your first, and likely last, face-to-face meeting before the significant US Senate elections on November 4. Will Francis lull you with his smooth song, as he has seemingly done so far with many in the world media and among world Catholics?

Please note that Francis speaks frequently as a humble servant of the poor and weak, yet acts often like an absolute monarch in the service the rich and mighty, especially the cardinals who elected him. A year after the ex-Pope’s resignation under pressure, it seems clear Francis will fix little in the broken Church, at least to benefit women and children. Surely, President Obama, you are aware of this and will not be another naive dupe of the Vatican’s spin machine.

Will you, President Obama, be passive at your Vatican meeting, or will you remind Pope Francis that you are the top elected representative of the world’s most powerful democracy? This may be your last clear chance to forestall decisively Francis’ US Senate strategy, especially by executive actions in advance of November’s election These potential executive actions include especially the establishment of a long overdue national investigation commission into institutional child sexual abuse that would cover all religious organizations, not just Catholic ones. A US commission, like the Australian Royal Commission now underway, must be one of Francis’ and the US bishops’ worst nightmares !

President Obama, you will on March 27 have a unique opportunity to help cure the Vatican’s centuries’ old “split personality syndrome”. This spiritual/political papal identity conflict has been most evident in the Vatican’s counterproductive approach to bishop accountability for covering up for child abusers, as recently condemned squarely by a UN Committee of experts on children.

You can consider at this meeting, President Obama, strongly cautioning Francis on priest abuse of US children. You must, at the same time, also protect Obamacare’s universal US health insurance coverage and future US Supreme Court appointments from escalating papal political interference in the upcoming US Senate elections. Already, conservative Republicans are confidently expressing their expectations of securing a Senate majority

Popes and bishops since Constantine’s time, however, have often exhibited “split personalities”–they have tried to act both as political and spiritual leaders. When feasible, popes have frequently tried to get Caesar to coerce papal views of “God’s will” on believers and non-believers alike, especially on sexual morality. Meanwhile, the Catholic populace gradually lost any effective say in selecting their spiritual leaders, who became a self perpetuating hierarchy, frequently working for or closely with European monarchs. Initially with Constantine and thereafter occasionally, popes sometimes acted out of necessity to fill political leadership voids resulting from wars, invasions, etc. Many times, however, popes and their hierarchy sought political power principally for their own personal gains in power and wealth, often by playing foreign monarchs against each other. 1,700 year old habits are tough to break, especially when the material rewards are significant and may be enjoyed with impunity and without accountability.

Prior to the significant populist revolutions (American in 1776) and (French in 1789) that were influenced by English democratic legal advances, popes pursued their personal advantage usually by political alliances with preferred absolute European monarchs. These rulers were either hereditary or selected, like the popes, usually by non-democratic ruling elites. These alliances involved exchanging papal support, for favored monarchs among docile Catholics, usually for a Catholic Church religious monopoly, with its concomitant financial benefits. This Catholic Church monopoly was then exported worldwide with these monarchies’ military support, as happened in Latin and South America, Africa and even the Philippines.

It is sad for me as a Catholic, but not surprising as a retired Wall Street lawyer, to see that Pope Francis has apparently been elected mainly to protect the cardinals who elected him. Catholics are in many respects powerless to stop their own hierarchy’s misdeeds. It is now up to their democratically elected representatives to do so on their behalf.

For the prominent German Jesuit educator experienced with curtailing priest child abuse, Klaus Mertes’s call for Cardinal-designate Muller’s removal as head of the key Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s purported child protection overseer, stemming from Muller’s alleged earlier priest child abuse cover-ups as Bishop of Regensburg, see (via Google Translate) :