UNITED STATES
SNAP Wisconsin
Catholic bishops and religious superiors from around the world descended upon Rome for the Vatican sponsored conference titled “Towards Healing and Renewal”. The four day symposium, which ran from February 6th -9th, at the Pontifical Gregorian University, was billed as a “global initiative on safeguarding children and vulnerable adults”.
Organizers of the conference stated that the purpose of the event was to help bishops create guidelines on how to handle reports of childhood sexual abuse. Instructing the bishops on how to best safeguard and protect children were their colleagues; cardinals, bishops, and church approved mental health experts. The very same “experts” and church officials who bear responsibility for the continued cover up of clergy child sex crimes “instructed” the world’s bishops on how to best protect children in their care.
The keynote address was provided by Cardinal William Levada, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican department responsible for collecting and examining evidence of child sex crimes from throughout the world.
Levada himself covered up criminal reports of child rape and sexual assault when he served as archbishop of San Francisco, California and Portland, Oregon. Levada had earlier addressed the worldwide explosion of clergy child sex assault reports by stating “So this is a crisis if you will that I think caught most of us by surprise”. Levada was fully briefed on the magnitude of the crisis in a 92 page report presented to him in 1985 by Fr. Thomas Doyle, a Vatican canon lawyer. Levada was not caught by surprise; in fact he was one of the first bishops to learn of the magnitude of sexual assault reports facing the church.
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