ABUSE TRACKER

AUSTRALIA
The Australian

Carly Crawford
From:Herald Sun
March 18, 2013

ONE of Australia’s worst paedophiles – Catholic priest Gerald Ridsdale – could be freed in months.

And he is being urged to reveal how the church helped cover up his illegal activities.

The child sex offender, who molested at least 40 children over three decades, is eligible for parole in June.

His victims say he should give evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

“If he started to talk about what he knew, the Catholic Church house of cards would come tumbling down,” victim Stephen Woods said.

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

by Dennis Coday,Joshua J. McElwee | Mar. 17, 2013

Vatican City —
About 300,000 people enthusiastically greeted Pope Francis for his first Angelus prayer and address Sunday and heard a short reflection on mercy, a theme the new pope had preached on at the Mass he celebrated that morning in the parish church of Vatican City dedicated to St. Anne.

When he appeared at the window of his study in the apostolic palace, he showed again a knack for engaging his audience. He greeted the crowd with a simple, “Buongiorno,” [good day], and the people in the square roared back, “Buongiorno.”

The pope also surprised some observers by mentioning in his address retired German Cardinal Walter Kasper, a theologian and former Vatican official known for his sometimes public disagreements with Pope Benedict XVI. …

About halfway through his Angelus address, Francis mentioned he had been reading a book about mercy by Kasper, a retired prelate who has previously served as secretary and president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity.

Previous to working in the Vatican, Kasper had received public disapproval from then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in 1993, when Kasper was serving as bishop of the German diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart.

As head of the Vatican’s powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger expressed his disapproval over a letter Kasper had signed along with other German bishops allowing divorced and remarried Catholics access to the sacraments.

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BOSTON (MA)
Boston Catholic Insider

The Boston Herald on Friday ran an article about the excessive pay for Boston Archdiocesan lay execs. Coincidentally, on Saturday, Pope Francis said he wanted to see the church be poor, and for the poor.

At the rate the Boston Archdiocese is paying salaries, giving pay increases to the already overpaid execs and running up debt, we are well on the path to being poor–but for reasons much different than Pope Francis apparently intends.

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BOSTON (MA)
Boston Herald

By
Matt Stout / Boston Herald

Nearly one-third of the Archdiocese of Boston’s top execs ranked among the highest paid people in their field, according to a compensation study that prompted church officials to take a hard look at many of their six-figure salaries — and withhold some merit-based raises.

The study, performed by a third-party firm at the archdiocese’s request and released with its 2012 financial report, is the first in the archdiocese’s history, according to church officials, examining how their pay stacks up to nine comparable archdioceses, other Catholic organizations and a mixture of nonprofit and for-profit groups.

It found that five of the 16 lay executives making more than $150,000 are paid above the 75th percentile when compared to those in similar jobs, while six more make between the 50th and 75th percentiles.

The five remaining have “attributes that are unique to our archdiocese,” officials wrote in their financial report, adding that they are “paid comparably” to those with similar levels of responsibility.

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IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests

St. Patrick’s Parish
Parochial House
Donabate
County Dublin.

Telphone: 01-8436011
Parish Office: 01-8434574
Email: stpatricksrcdonabate@gmail.com
www.donabateparish.ie

11 March 2013.

Dear Father Tony,
We are the members of the Pastoral Council of the parish of Donabate, Portrane and Balheary, Co Dublin, and we write concerning the position in which you find yourself following interventions of the CDF in recent times. We have read your statements in response to these interventions with sadness, disappointment, and bewilderment.

We are sad that a priest who, in the spirit of your Congregation’s Founder, has given almost four decades’ exemplary and tireless service to the Gospel and our Church should have had his ministry terminated in this way.

We are disappointed that the CDF conceives its responsibilities to the Gospel and our Catholic faith as properly discharged through the medium of correspondence of the content and manner of their communications with you. The invocation of law and sanctions, and the peremptory tone of the Congregation’s demands, evoke the ways of a secular boardroom or other such governing entity, and we can only say that we should have expected better from those in authority in an institution whose Founder was Jesus Christ.

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ARGENTINA
Association of Catholic Priests (Ireland)

Paul O’Connor OSA in Ecuador provides a translation of the then Cardinal Bergoglio’s pastoral letter for the Year of Faith, published in Buneos Aires last October. Recognising the whole article may be hard reading for some, he suggests they might slip to the section headed ‘Crossing the Threshold of Faith‘, where Padre Jorje tells what faith means to him.

Pastoral Letter from Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Octubre de 2012

Dear Brothers and Sisters:

Among the most striking experiences of the last decades is finding doors closed. Little by little increasing insecurity has made us bolt doors, employ means of vigilance, install security cameras and mistrust strangers who call at our door.

None the less in some places there are doors that are still open. The closed door is really a symbol of our today. It is something more than a simple sociological fact; it is an existential reality that is imposing itself as a way of life, a way of confronting reality, others and the future.

The bolted door of my house, the place of my intimate life, my dreams, hopes, sufferings and moments of happiness, is locked against others. And it is not simply a matter of the physical house; it is also the whole area of my life, of my heart. All the time there are fewer who can cross that threshold. The security of reinforced doors protects the insecurity of a life which is becoming more fragile and less open to the riches of the life and the love of others.

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IRELAND
Association of Catholic Priests

Mary Cunningham outlines the CDF’s controlling role in the silencing of Fr Sean Fagan, undermining Archbishop Charles Brown’s recent assertion that such actions are a matter for a religious priest’s superior

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Silencing: The Truth Obscured.

Archbishop Brown stated on RTE’s Drive Time programme (15/03/13), that the while the CDF could become involved in silencing issues, they have no reason to do so because it is a matter for the priest’s immediate superior.

Why then is the procedure carried out as follows?
◦Writings of a priest are denounced, often anonymously, to the CDF.
◦The CDF appoints an anonymous consulter to investigate.
◦The head of the order is commanded to appear before the CDF and renunciation of the accused’s work is demanded.
◦On non-compliance, the superior is ordered to impose sanctions on the accused, ranging from censoring of their work, to threats of the removal of their rights to exercise priestly faculties.

In the particular case of Sean Fagan, a letter signed by the then prefect of the CDF, Cardinal Ratzinger, was sent to the Archbishop Brady in 2004. In it he demanded, after referring to asking for four years, that ‘Your Grace publish a ‘Notification’ on Fr. Fagan’s book ‘Does Morality Change?’.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

The tide was turned by old grudges and the bond with the CL movement

Giacomo Galeazzi
Vatican City

Already on Tuesday it looked as though things could get complicated for the cardinals’ top favourite, Scola. A few moments after the extra omnes and the meditation in the Sistine Chapel, Bergoglio surprisingly and very suddenly obtained the largest number of votes. At the first ballot, however, the votes were too scattered for cardinals to get a truly indicative picture. Still, it was a warning sign to the Archbishop of Milan, who was credited with such chances of victory yesterday, that just minutes from the Proto-Deacon’s announcement, an unfortunate statement by the Secretary General of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI) expressed “the feelings of the entire Italian Church in welcoming the news of the election of Cardinal Angelo Scola as the successor of Peter.”

Scola’s path to the Holy Throne was blocked by the confluence of two alliances and of two distinctly different evaluation systems: the non-European one (South America in particular), on the one hand, planned on bringing the papacy out of the old continent for the first time. On the other hand, there was the Curia group led by the nemesis-allegiance of Bertone and Sodano, who are inexorably hostile to Scola. The reason, according to certain voices in the Holy See, are a series of “ancient envies and rivalries”. Bertone has never forgotten the advice that Scola gave to the Pope during a meeting in Castel Gandolfo during the upheaval over the pardon granted to Holocaust-denier Bishop Williamson: his replacement at the helm of the Secretariat of State. Sodano, on the other hand, found himself on opposing sides from Scola in various power struggles for the control of Catholic institutions. Ruini himself, while esteeming Scola, gave no indications to vote in his favour to the conclavists, like the Australian Pell, who asked to visit him before the Conclave. In short, the 28 Italian voters did not all row in the same direction and so they dashed their chances of installing one of their compatriots to Peter’s Throne 35 years after Luciani.

Not even among the residential Italian archbishops was there a complete consensus for Scola, and therefore the votes that many European voters cast in his favour no longer sufficed. Furthermore, the conclavists near the community of Sant’Egidio (Sepe, for example) could not look kindly upon Scola’s involvement in a movement so different from theirs as the Communion and Liberation (CL) one. In the last few hours there were signs that Scola’s strong candidacy was a giant with clay feet. In other words, everybody recognized his exceptional stature as a Bishop and intellectual, but then, digging a little deeper, beyond the circumstancial phrases, separations and reserves began to crop up. Most of all, the idea of an “overseas flight” became more prevalent, which was undermining the opportunity to fall back on a Italian pontificate, as most of the Church’s growth is in South America, Africa, and Asia. “There cannot always be a shepherd upstream with a flock downstream”, summarized an African cardinal in the congregation.

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UNITED STATES
National Survivor Advocates Coalition

March 18, 2013

We hope Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin had some good St. Patrick Day’s inside tracking information stronger than wishful thinking and style changes to back up his Sunday declaration that Pope Francis will “clearly address” the issue of sexual abuse.

Cardinal Bernard Law’s presence at St. Mary Major Basilica during Pope Francis’s first public outing after the conclave is troubling to say the least.

It’s hard to imagine that Law’s baggage wasn’t known to the Argentinian who is now Pope. A Pope, it appears in these early days, for whom style may be a conveyance of substance.

Law’s presence in the Basilica and the new pontiff’s greeting of him was an insult of hippopotamus proportions particularly for one conscious of what appearance can convey.

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UNITED STATES
Whispers in the Loggia

Notice something different there?

(Hint: No Cufflink.)

Normally, a detail of the sort would would be seen as frivolous. In the modern papacy, though, symbolism is substance – and in these first days of a new “Franciscan Rule,” so it seems, the world is eating up every last bit.

On another dress-note, meanwhile, much as the new Pope’s sticking with his black shoes has caused a stir, his reluctance to change too much extends under the white cassock, to boot: the Argentine pontiff’s preferences don’t just make his wearing black pants visible through the garment, but likewise highlight the untucked tails of his white dress-shirt.

In other words, the lack of fuss isn’t just a show for the world. But having declined the Archbishop’s Residence in Buenos Aires for a flat where he did his own cooking, and riding around the city on buses and subways without an entourage, that was fairly well-established.

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VATICAN CITY
John Thavis

Pope Francis’ first few days have already generated an abundance of hope on many fronts, and one of them is ecumenism.

The fact that the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, is attending the pope’s inaugural Mass tomorrow is rightly seen as a milestone in Catholic-Orthodox relations. That hasn’t happened since Catholics and Orthodox split in 1054.

Of course, Pope Francis does not yet have a “record” on relations with other Christian churches. As archbishop of Buenos Aires, however, he dropped some clues.

According to Bishop Gregory Venables, the Anglican bishop of Argentina, then-Cardinal Bergoglio was apparently not enthusiastic about Pope Benedict’s move in 2011 to create a structure in the Catholic Church to welcome disaffected Anglicans.

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SOUTH AFRICA
Inquirer

JOHANNESBURG—A South African cardinal apologized to sex abuse victims on Monday for describing pedophilia as an illness and not a crime in an interview.

“I apologize to victims of child abuse offended by my misstatement of what was and still is my concern about all abused, including abused abuser,” Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier, the Archbishop of Durban, said on Twitter after his interview Saturday to the BBC.

“I believe that every dictionary consulted confirms pedophilia is a medical condition. What is a crime is the sexual abuse of children,” he said.

“Therefore pedophilia must be treated. What must be punished is the crime of sexual abuse of children,” he said.

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SOUTH AFRICA
The Post

March 18 2013
By Mercury Reporters

Durban – The sexual abuse of children was a horrendous crime against children, families, the church and society and needed to be dealt with by the law, South Africa’s cardinal, Wilfrid Napier, 72, said on Sunday night.

In a statement on e.tv news the cardinal, who is the Archbishop of Durban, clarified remarks he made in a BBC Radio 5 Live interview at the weekend.

He had come in for a global hammering for saying paedophilia was a mental disorder and not a crime.

The cardinal said he “at least twice” told the interviewer Stephen Nolan that he was not qualified to explain paedophilia.

“I was afforded no time to explain that the priority of pastoral concern must always be for the victim,” he said on Sunday night.

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UNITED STATES
Why I Am Catholic

March 17, 2013 By Frank Weathers

Sure, Fr. Hans Küng believes in the dubious problem of overpopulation, and that the birth control pill is the best thing since sliced bread, etc. But still, you probably didn’t see this tacit endorsement coming.

For such a conservative group of middle-aged and elderly men, the Princes of the Church do seem to have a few surprises up the sleeves of their vestments. The 115 cardinals sequestered themselves in the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday, and emerged on Wednesday with tidings of a new Pope – and not one very many people expected.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, was elected Pontiff and rechristened himself Pope Francis, signifying his humility and support for the poor and oppressed. He’s the first Jesuit to be made pope, and the first non-European in twelve hundred years to become heir to St. Peter.

Last week, Michael Enright interviewed the preeminent Catholic theologian, Hans Küng, about the crisis in the Catholic Church and the need for reform and liberalization (click here to read).

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UNITED STATES
CBS News

The following is a script from “American Nuns” which aired on March 17, 2013. Bob Simon is the correspondent. Andrew Metz and Tanya Simon, producers.

When Pope Francis became the leader of the Catholic Church on Wednesday, people around the world were asking: what happens now? Can he restore confidence to a church struggling amid scandal to keeps its flock?

To understand just how troubled the church he’s inheriting is, look no further than the power struggle going on between the Vatican and some of its most popular disciples: American nuns.

The Vatican launched what some Catholics call a “new Inquisition” when it accused the official group that represents most nuns in the United States of undermining the Church.

The crackdown last year on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious has sparked outrage — creating yet another rift between those who want the Church to reform, and those who do not.

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BOSTON (MA)
The Heights

By Jennifer Heine
Heights Staff

Published: Monday, March 18, 2013

Although last month’s McAleese Report detailing the abuses of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundry workhouse system and the government’s subsequent apology stunned and dismayed many at Boston College, especially given the school’s Irish Catholic heritage, it proved particularly meaningful to professor James Smith, who, through extensive research and advocacy on the subject, played a vital role in bringing the scandal to light.

Although the Magdalene Laundries, in operation from the 18th until the 20th century, have today come to be associated with the most infamous Irish examples, they were not specific to Ireland, according to Smith. “There was one here in Boston,” he said. “The laundries were not a specifically Irish institution, or even specifically Catholic.”

“Originally, the mission of these institutions was rehabilitative,” he said. “That mission, certainly in the Irish context, seems to have become skewed. They became incarcerative institutions, in which women were incarcerated and worked for no pay.”

That new mission reflects the perception the entrants into the Magdalene Laundries began to take on. “In the Irish context, these were women who, for a variety of reasons, were deemed problem women,” Smith said. “Historically, they were considered, in quotations, ‘fallen women.’” This term, used in the 18th and 19th centuries as a euphemism for prostitution, lent a sense of shame and sexual degradation to the women who were committed.

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SOUTH AFRICA
Eyewitness News

JOHANNESBURG – The Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) has condemned sexual abuse on all levels, responding to controversial comments by Catholic Archbishop of Durban Wilfrid Napier on paedophilia.

In an interview with BBC Radio 5 on Friday, Napier described paedophilia as a psychological illness and not a criminal condition.

He then said paedophiles that were abused as children do not deserve to be punished because they themselves are “damaged”.

While the conference said it had not yet heard or read a transcript of the interview, and therefore could not react, it released a statement, saying it believes paedophilia is a crime and said perpetrators must face the legal system.

“Paedophilia is de facto a criminal offence and we will comply with the legal requirements when such cases come to our attention. Perpetrators must take responsibility for their actions.”

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ARGENTINA
The New York Times

By SIMON ROMERO and WILLIAM NEUMAN

Published: March 17, 2013

BUENOS AIRES — One Argentine priest is on trial in Tucumán Province on charges of working closely with torturers in a secret jail during the so-called Dirty War, urging prisoners to hand over information. Another priest was accused of taking a newborn from his mother, one of the many baby thefts from female prisoners who were “disappeared” into a system of clandestine prisons.

The Rev. Christian von Wernich, a former police chaplain, was convicted of complicity in the killing of political prisoners.

Another clergy member offered biblical justification for the military’s death flights, according to an account by one of the pilots anguished about dumping drugged prisoners out of aircraft and into the sea.

As he starts his papacy, Francis, until this month Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, faces his own entanglement with the Dirty War, which unfolded from 1976 to 1983. As the leader of Argentina’s Jesuits for part of that time, he has repeatedly had to dispute claims that he allowed the kidnapping of two priests in his order in 1976, accusations the Vatican is calling a defamation campaign.

Now his election as pope is focusing scrutiny on his role as the most prominent leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina, an institution that remains under withering criticism for its role in failing to publicly resist — and in various instances actively supporting — the military dictatorship during a period when as many as 30,000 people are thought to have been killed or disappeared.

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ROME
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by David Clohessy on March 17, 2013

Victims seek church whistleblowers
Their case against Vatican in world court is still pending
Top church officials are accused of “crimes v. humanity”
SNAP: “Current & former Catholic employees MUST speak up”
“Pope can’t fix crisis alone, every one in church needs to act,” victims say

WHAT:
Holding signs and childhood photos at a news conference, a child sex abuse victim and advocate will
—call on current and former Catholic employees to “break their silence” and tell law enforcement officials what they know and suspect regarding child sex crimes and cover ups in the church, and
—discuss an unprecedented and still-pending case in the International Criminal Court against top Vatican officials for “crimes against humanity.”

WHEN:
Monday, March 18 at 11:00 a.m.

WHERE:
Orange Hotel, 86 Via Crescenzio 00193, Roma +39.06.6868969

WHO:
A child sex abuse victim from the US, who is a leader of the US-based international support group SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAPnetwork.org). Three of his brothers were also molested by the same priest. One of his brothers went on to become a priest and molest children.

WHY
An international support group for victims of clergy abuse is calling on church officials with knowledge or suspicions of child sex crimes and cover-ups in the church to “break their silence, call outside sources and help protect kids.”

Leaders of SNAP are calling on current or former Italian Catholic employees – particularly who work or have worked in the Vatican – to “share what they know or believe about church corruption and complicity – however old or slight or seemingly insignificant it may seem – with outside sources, especially law enforcement, watchdog NGOs and governmental inquiries.

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AUSTRALIA
J-Wire

March 18, 2013 by J-Wire Staff

The Executive Director of The Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Peter Wertheim and Immediate Past President, Robert Goot, have met with the Chair of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

Chair Justice Peter McClellan, briefed Wertheim and Goot about the way the Commission will operate, the resources available to it and time estimates for completing various phases of the Inquiry.

“The Chairman made it clear that religious communities and religious schools will not be the exclusive focus of the Inquiry, but they will necessarily be included in the spread of institutions covered”, Wertheim said.

“Some other key points to emerge from the briefing:
•The first sitting of the Royal Commission is scheduled for 3 April in Sydney.
•There will be both public hearings and private sessions with 1 or 2 Commissioners. 
The private sessions are for people with information who do not want for any reason 
to give evidence at a public hearing.
•Information from private sessions will not be evidence or the foundation for any 
finding. However, such information might result in a referral to the Police or be used to guide further investigations of institutions or individuals. Such institutions or individuals will be notified beforehand of any potentially adverse information against them and will be accorded procedural fairness.
•There will be no findings of abuse per se, only findings about institutional and cultural failures in preventing and dealing with abuse.

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ARGENTINA
The Guardian (UK)

Lizzy Davies in Rome and Jonathan Watts in Buenos Aires
The Guardian, Sunday 17 March 2013

Pope Francis has delivered his first Sunday prayer to a cheering, laughing crowd of about 300,000 people in St Peter’s Square, amid hopes that his down-to-earth style will usher in a change in the Vatican.

But while many in Rome were looking forward, accusers in his native Argentina continued to raise awkward questions about the past and reproduced a document suggesting the Jesuit may have betrayed two of his priests to the murderous military dictatorship in the 1970s.

The sharply different perspectives have dogged the early days of the new leader of the Catholic church, who will be officially installed at an inaugural mass on Tuesday.

His capacity to rouse affection and optimism were in evidence as he mixed cheery greetings with humour and anecdotes at his inaugural Angelus.

Speaking in Italian rather than Latin, he joked with the crowd and ended by saying: “Have a good Sunday and a good lunch!” Pilgrims, many from Latin America, roared their approval. …

However, his critics in Argentina were unwilling to move on so quickly. The pope continues to be haunted by allegations dating back to the dictatorship era, when the Catholic church colluded with the generals to quell what they saw as a Marxist threat.

The Argentinian newspaper Pagina 12 republished old documents on Sunday that suggest Jorge Bergoglio, as the pope was known until last week, was in contact with the military authorities about the insubordination of two of his priests and rumours that they had contact with leftwing guerrilla groups.

Father Orlando Yorio and Father Francisco Jalics were tortured and kept in a concentration camp for nearly six months in 1976, after they refused Bergoglio’s order to leave the slum where they were working. In that era, any priest who focused on the poor districts was under suspicion of collaborating with Marxist groups.

A foreign ministry memo from 1979 seems to suggest Bergoglio had passed on suspicions to the authorities, and connived behind the backs of the priests.

The typed note contains bullet points that explain why Jalics was denied a passport renewal application. He had fled to Germany following his release, and asked Bergoglio’s help to get a travel document.

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ROME
Cardinal Roger Mahony Blogs LA

After Pope Benedict XVI announced his retirement, all of us turned to prayer, and especially, through the Holy Spiri,t to guide us.

With 1.2 billion Catholics world-wide, and being one of 115 to elect the new Pope, I was deeply humbled–and terrified. My prayers to the Holy Spirit began, and were constant.

I know how many millions of fellow Catholics were praying across the world that the Holy Spirit point us to the best one to lead our Church forward.

When we eventually arrived at the Sistine Chapel on March 12, I was still pondering two or three candidates. However, when the first blank ballot was given to us, and when it was time to write down a name, something powerful–and strange–happened.

I picked up my pen to write, and I began. However, my hand was being moved by some greater spiritual force. The name on the ballot just happened. I had not yet narrowed my thinking down to one name; but it was done for me.

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ROME
National Catholic Reporter

by John L. Allen Jr. | Mar. 17, 2013

Rome —
Two days before the conclave opened to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI on March 12, Cardinal Philippe of Lyon, France, candidly confessed to reporters gathered outside his titular church in Rome that the voters didn’t have their act together.

“There are three, four, maybe a dozen candidates,” Barbarin said, leaving observers with the impression of a crowded field lacking a clear front-runner, and perhaps a long and difficult election ahead.

As things turned out, Barbarin needn’t have worried.

It took the cardinals just five ballots to settle on Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, Argentina, as the next pope, despite the fact that most them said afterwards they hadn’t gone in thinking of him as the obvious choice to be their next boss. Bergoglio had been the runner-up eight years ago, but most cardinals said this time they wanted an “energetic” pope, and a 76-year-old with one lung didn’t seem the most obvious candidate.

Trying to make sense of the result for themselves, cardinals who spoke to NCR on background in the days after the conclave said that what turned this longshot into a consensus candidate was the intersection of three basic forces:

.. • A strong anti-establishment mood, which expressed itself as an informal veto against any Italian candidate and any candidate out of the Roman Curia;
• A desire to elect a pope who could put a face on the burgeoning Catholic footprint in the developing world, which in practice meant the hunt was on for a Latin American;
• A process of elimination inside the conclave that one cardinal described this way: “Not him, not him, and not him, therefore him.”

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VATICAN CITY
Telegraph (UK)

Pope Francis’s sister has revealed that their family fled Italy and emigrated to Argentina in the 1920s in order to escape the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini.

By Nick Squires, Vatican City
8:32PM GMT 17 Mar 2013

Maria Elena Bergoglio hit back at allegations that her brother may have colluded with the military junta in Argentina, saying that their family’s escape from Italy had instilled in him a revulsion for military dictatorships.

Their parents, Mario, a railway worker, and Regina, emigrated from Piedmont in northwestern Italy after Mussolini came to power in 1922.

“I remember my father often saying that the advent of the Fascist regime was the reason why he made up his mind to leave the country,” Mrs Bergoglio, the only surviving sibling of the Pope, told La Stampa newspaper on Sunday.

She said allegations that her brother, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, had turned a blind eye to the brutal rule of Argentina’s military junta in the 1970s and early 1980s were hurtful and false.

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SOUTH AFRICA
Southern African Bishops’ Conference

We have learnt recently of the interview given by Cardinal Wilfred Napier on BBC Radio 5. Regretfully, we have not yet had the opportunity to listen to the interview or to read a transcript. We have not been able to contact the Cardinal. It is therefore not possible to react to that interview.

However the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference is well aware of the devastation caused by sexual and other abuse of minors, both for the victims and their families and condemns all abuse unreservedly. The Conference has, for a number of years, had a protocol in place in which we outline how any allegation of abuse is to be handled. The Conference setup a Professional Conduct Committee which has published protocols for dealing with this scourge. The protocol is in force for all clergy and church workers in the region of the SACBC. For centuries there has been a veil of silence in the world surrounding child abuse and it is only in recent years that the matter is receiving the attention it deserves. Unfortunately there have also been failures on the part of the
Church.

Paedophilia is de facto a criminal offence and we will comply with the legal requirements when such cases come to our attention. Perpetrators must take responsibility for their actions.

Abuse of children is so widespread that there is an urgent need for a growth in knowledge and understanding of what causes an abuser to harm children, particularly when a perpetrator has himself/herself being a victim of abuse. Without such knowledge we will never be able to deal adequately with the matter and we will not be able to give adequate protection to our children.

Archbishop Stephen Brislin
President: Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference
16th March 2013
15h00

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SOUTH AFRICA
The New Age

Itumeleng Mafisa

In the wake of the outrage sparked by a BBC interview in which Cardinal Wilfrid Napier reportedly said “paedophilia is an illness and not a criminal condition”, the Catholic Church in South Africa has condemned sexual and all other forms of abuse of children.

And on the day that newly appointed Pope Francis held his first public mass in Rome, the SA Catholic Bishops Conference’s (SACBC) President Stephen Brislin, admitted there were “failures on the part of the Church” in dealing with sexual abuse cases.

Napier who could not be reached for comment yesterday said on his Twitter account that he was quoted out of context.

“Clearly Stephen Nolan had another agenda when asking to talk about papal election,” the South African cardinal who was part of the conclave that elected the new pope, said.

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VATICAN CITY
Telegraph (UK)

Pope Francis has put the Vatican hierarchy on notice of sweeping changes as he prepares this week to study a secret report into skulduggery and intrigue within the Church’s dysfunctional governing body on Sunday when he addressed an estimated 150,000 people in St Peter’s Square.

By Nick Squires, and John Bingham in Vatican City
8:57PM GMT 17 Mar 2013

The Vatileaks scandal of last year, in which Benedict XVI’s butler was caught stealing and leaking documents to the press, revealed infighting, nepotism and alleged corruption within the Curia, governing body.

On Saturday, the Pope ruled that senior administrators in the Vatican bureaucracy will temporarily keep their posts while he studies what changes may be required.

Hopes for sweeping reforms of the Curia were bolstered by the language of an announcement that its members would “provisionally stay in their respective posts until it is decided otherwise”.

“The Holy Father, wants, in fact, to give himself a certain amount of time for reflection, prayer and dialogue before any appointments or definitive confirmations,” the Vatican said.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

In his first Sunday remarks as Pope, Francis, as priest, reminded Vatican visitors that Jesus showed God’s great mercy and capacity to forgive. But he also reminded his listeners that Jesus mandated, as an essential part of the forgiveness process, that believers must sin no more, or at least try not to.

In many ways, this captures the essence of the problem Pope Francis now faces. He needs to get Catholics to forgive the Catholic hierarchy, while at the same time he needs to get the Catholic hierarchy to try to sin no more. Because defenseless children are still at risk of predatory priests protected by complicit hierarchs and many Catholics also needlessly suffer because of the Church hierarchy’s unChristian moral positions, fine words and humble gestures from the new Pope will not be enough. The ex-Pope was hard to beat on fine words.

Pope Francis needs now to take concrete and clear actions that are desperately needed, including making the Church leaders organizationally accountable as they were in the Church that Jesus’ first followers left behind.

Given the Catholic Church’s current top-down and unaccountable structure, Pope Francis’ rearranging of some Vatican departments and personnel and shaming of some hierarchs, while positive and welcome steps, will surely not be enough to minimize future hierarchical sins. The Vatican’s often shameful history, as well as the current secret dossier of Vatican misdeeds, makes clear that fundamental reforms will be necessary pronto.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Insider

For now everyone remains in their place, but the heads and deputy heads of the Dicasteries may change soon

ANDREA TORNIELLI
Vatican City

“Holy Father Francis has expressed the desire that the heads and members of the dicasteries of the Roman Curia, as well as their Secretaries, and also the President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, continue donec aliter provideatur, that is, provisionally, in their respective positions.” The awaited confirmation for the heads of the dicasteries of the Roman Curia, “suspended” since Francis’ election, came yesterday in the early afternoon. Everyone is staying put for the moment, the Vatican statement said. “The Holy Father wishes to leave some time for reflection, prayer, and dialogue before any final appointment or confirmation is made.”

So everyone’s positions have been confirmed, but none have really been confirmed. The heads of the dicasteries, the cardinals of the congregations and the archbishops who are Presidents of Pontifical Councilskeep their places, but only for the time being, “until otherwise decided.” Strangely, the statement also mentions the secretaries (departments’ number-twos) who keep their jobs when the Holy See becomes vacant and therefore do not need to have their posts reconfirmed. Their mention could signify that, although everyone is expected to continue performing their usual duties, no one can assume they will keep the same posts they currently occupy.

The Vatican statement does not mention the Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone explicitly, who was greeted publicly by the Pope two days ago in the Clementine Hall. It only mentions his role as chamberlain. But the Secretariat of State is the first of the Vatican dicasteries and therefore the temporary confirmation also applies to the 78-year-old cardinal from Italy’s Canavese area, head of Vatican diplomacy and director of the Curia machine since 2006. It is thought the replacement of the Secretary of State, who is almost 79, will be the quickest, while other substitutions may made in the coming months.

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ARGENTINA
New Zealand Herald

An Argentinian judge in charge of the “Dirty War” case concerning two priests who were arrested and tortured has rejected claims that Pope Francis played a role in the crime.

Judge German Castelli told La Nacion it was “totally false” to suggest that Jorge Bergoglio, as the Pontiff was then known, had been complicit in turning over the priests to Argentina’s military rulers in 1976.

“It is totally false to say that Jorge Bergoglio delivered these priests. We addressed this issue, we heard the allegations, we reviewed the facts and we felt there was no case to answer. If we had done we would have prosecuted,” Castelli told the paper.

“There cannot be any questions about it because a court has cleared him,” Castelli added.

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UNITED STATES
KTVI

(KTVI)-On the Jaco Report, a new Pope has been elected. But what do dissident Catholics in St. Louis think of him? Many Catholics have become disillusioned with the church over sex abuse by priests, fights over birth control, and rules against women priests. Is the selection of a Jesuit pope, Pope Francis, enough to get them back?

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UNITED STATES
Minnesota SNAP

By Vinnie Nauheimer

What if all the prophecies about Benedict XVI being the next to last pope are true, but not for the universal reason everyone suspects? Suppose fulfillment of the prophecies doesn’t mean the end of the world, but instead means the end of a centuries old corrupt Vatican reign? The recent sordid revelations bursting forth from the Vatican will hasten the end of days for the hierarchy and the end of daze for millions of Catholics.

Prophecies from Malachy to Fatima and every one in between, including the rarely mentioned prophecy of a Japanese nun from Akita, Japan, Sister Sasagawa have predicted the end of days. However, Sister Sasagawa quoting the Blessed Virgin has a prophecy that has hit the bulls eye, with no interpretation needed, that describes current Vatican events. She said she was told, “The work of the devil will infiltrate even the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against other bishops.” It wouldn’t stretch anybody’s mind (except maybe a bishop’s) to believe that the Blessed Mother was prophesying the scenario currently surrounding Benedict’s resignation.

My personal favorite prophecy is from her son, Jesus: Luke 12:1-3

He began to say unto his disciples first of all, “Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees (Hierarchy), which is hypocrisy. For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops.”

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UNITED STATES
Leon J. Podles: Dialogue

The election of Jorge Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, was somewhat of a surprise, although it should not have been, because he seems to have been the runner-up in the last papal election,, coming in second after Ratzinger.

A few thoughts:

From all reports he is dedicated to the poor and leads a simple, austere life. He wants to seek out the most wounded and despised members of society. He is fiercely orthodox in his denunciations of abortion and gay marriage.

His record as Jesuit superior during Argentina’s dirty war has been questioned. Leftist terrorism in the1970s was designed to provoke a crack-down which would provoke a revolution. The leftists got the crackdown, but not the revolution, and the military executed 30,000 victims. Bergoglio remained publicly silent, although he seems to have helped some victims.

What can one infer about his character from this public silence? It is hard to say. He may have had trouble understanding what was going on and uncertain about how to proceed. I think one can say that he does not seek out confrontation, even when provoked.

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IRELAND
Nationalist

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has backed Pope Francis as the right man to reform the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

Speaking after a Mass in Dublin in honour of the new pontiff, he said Francis will “very clearly” address the child sex abuse issue, and address past and future issues of the Church.

Archbishop Martin says Pope Francis has already begun to change the Vatican.

“I think his eyes will be focused on the future,” he said.

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SCOTLAND
Daily Record

KEITH O’Brien has been accused of sexual assaulting a priest on the night he was made a cardinal.

It has emerged that one of the claims against him centres on the night he was awarded the red mitre by Pope John Paul II in 2003.

The complaint, made by a Scottish priest now based in London, had already been reported but it was thought to have dated back to 2001.

However, it emerged yesterday that the priest claims he was groped by Cardinal O’Brien at an event in Scots College in Rome on October 21, 2003.

The priest said he was among a party of clerics who had travelled to see their senior colleague’s elevation at the Vatican.

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BELGIE
RKnieuws

BRUSSEL (RKnieuws.net) – De Vlaamse regering stuurt dinsdag geen delegatie naar Rome voor de intronisatie van paus Franciscus. In plaats daarvan zal Vlaanderen 30.000 euro schenken aan een goed doel.

Een paar dagen geleden riep paus Franciscus zijn landgenoten op om niet naar Rome te komen voor de intronisatie maar om het geld voor de verplaatsing aan de armen te schenken.

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IRELAND
98 FM

The Archbishop of Dublin says the new Pope will ‘very clearly’ address the child sex abuse scandal.

Diarmuid Martin says Pope Francis has a track-record of speaking out about the protection of children in his native Argentina.

Archbishop Martin was himself named as an acceptable candidate to lead the Church by the child abuse survivors network SNAP – because of his history of speaking out on the issue.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis will hold his opening Angelus today.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

by Thomas C. Fox | Mar. 16, 2013

One of Pope Francis’ most vocal supporters since his election three days ago has been Leonardo Boff, one of the founders of liberation theology, a man silenced by the Vatican in 1985 because of criticism of the church in his book The Church, Charisma and Power.

Since 1993 he has been a Professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro where he is now Emeritus Professor of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion and Ecology.

His more recent writings have sought to integrate ecology into liberation theology. His book, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, is seen as a synthesis of deep ecology thinking with a radical social critique. One chapter celebrates St. Francis of Assisi as the paradigm of “the new covenant of the heart with all things”, which is Boff’s answer to the world’s twin crises of poverty and ecological destruction.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

by Thomas Reese | Mar. 17, 2013

Rumors and questions are circulating about Pope Francis and the time when he was the Jesuit provincial of Argentina and his relationship to two imprisoned Jesuits and the Argentine military dictatorship.

The Society of Jesus is filled with intelligent men who are passionate about their ideas and work, so of course there are arguments and disagreements just as there are in any family. I have had debates with other Jesuits over dinner where voices were raised, but that does not mean I don’t love them and would not be willing to die for them. We are a family.

Father Bergoglio, like Pope John Paul, had serious reservations about liberation theology, which was embraced by many other Latin American Jesuits. As a North American I have trouble understanding these disputes since John Paul and Bergoglio obviously wanted justice for the poor while the liberation theologians were not in favor of violent revolution as their detractors claimed. But clearly this was an issue that divided the church in Latin America.

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DEUTSCHLAND
KFN

Aufruf an Betroffene von sexuellem Missbrauch durch katholische Geistliche!
KFN-Opferbefragung wird fortgeführt

Wir bitten Sie um Ihre Mithilfe! Nach der von der deutschen Bischofskonferenz erfolgten Kündigung des Forschungsprojekts „Der sexuelle Missbrauch an Minderjährigen durch katholische Priester, Diakone und männliche Ordensangehörige“ möchte das KFN die Befragung von Betroffenen sexuellen Missbrauchs durch katholische Geistliche trotz der Widerstände durch die katholische Kirche fortführen. Dazu sind wir auf Ihre Unterstützung angewiesen.

Zum einen bitten wir alle Betroffenen von sexuellem Missbrauch durch katholische Geistliche, an unserer anonymen schriftlichen Befragung teilzunehmen. Derzeit arbeiten wir an der Endfassung eines Fragebogens, den wir Ihnen nach der Fertigstellung gerne auf Anfrage postalisch oder per E-Mail zusenden. Zusätzlich erhalten Sie von uns einen frankierten Umschlag für den Rückversand, den Sie ohne Absenderangaben an uns zurückschicken können – somit ist Ihre Anonymität absolut gewährleistet.

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DEUTSCHLAND
der Freitag

Legislative Nach zwei Jahren im Rechtsausschuss ist das Gesetz zur Stärkung der Rechte von Opfern sexuellen Missbrauchs vom Bundestag beschlossen worden

Kern der Novelle ist eine Verlängerung von Verjährungsfristen in puncto Schadensersatz. Nicht mehr nur wie bislang vermögensrechtliche Ansprüche wie beispielsweise solche aus Eigentum können nun 30 Jahre lang geltend gemacht werden. Die einschlägige Norm des § 197 des Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuches wird diese Frist nun auch auf Schadensersatzansprüche erstrecken, „die auf der vorsätzlichen Verletzung des Lebens, des Körpers, der Gesundheit, der Freiheit oder der sexuellen Selbstbestimmung beruhen“.

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ARGENTINA
The Independent (UK)

David Usborne , Ed Stocker
Buenos Aires

Sunday 17 March 2013

When Jorge Bergoglio is formally installed as Pope Francis at the Vatican on Tuesday, thousands of his fellow Argentines will have risen before dawn to watch the ceremony on giant television screens installed around this city’s most famous national monument, the obelisk in the Plaza de la Republica. Well hundreds, anyway.

The choice of Cardinal Bergoglio may be an acknowledgement that Latin America is home to 40 per cent of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. Yet even here the church is not as hearty as it might look. Secularism is on the rise but something else has been luring customers away: the Pentecostals who are as boisterous in worship as the Catholics are demure.

Nowhere has the Pentecostal movement, a form of evangelical Protestantism, grown faster than in Brazil, notably among the poor. Visit the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, and the ramshackle churches holding daily services with charismatic sermons and stirring song are usually Pentecostal. In 1970, 92 per cent of Brazilians identified themselves as Catholic. In the latest national census in 2010, the figure had dropped to 65 per cent.

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VATICAN CITY
Washington Post

By Anthony Faiola

Published: March 16

VATICAN CITY — Inside a vast hall in the Holy See on Saturday, Pope Francis was greeting a procession of well-wishers when a visually impaired radio journalist with a guide dog approached. Without skipping a beat, the new pontiff smiled, leaned over and blessed the golden retriever, eliciting surprised chuckles from the crowd.

The moment captured the emerging story line of a papacy in the early stages of transformation by the first New World pope. As he eschews the trappings of his exalted office — forgoing the use of the red papal cape in public and mingling directly with cardinals rather than receiving them formally from an elevated white chair — Francis is already building a reputation here as “the casual pontiff.”

It is an impression the Vatican, an institution in crisis and in search of a new beginning, is doing little to dispel. Only time will tell the extent to which an austere Argentine cleric, known for taking public transit and kissing the feet of drug addicts and AIDS patients, can remold the ancient office. Questions, for instance, are still swirling about his actions during Argentina’s so-called “dirty war” from 1976 to 1983.

But as the new pope has appeared to exude humility, even charm, during his first few days in Vatican City, there appears to be an early sense, at least among the church hierarchy, that an institution craving a new image may have just found its man.

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ROME
The Daily Beast

by Christopher Dickey
Mar 17, 2013

The new pontiff’s past reputation is hard to square with his affable presence today. His actions in the weeks to come will tell us who he really is, writes Christopher Dickey.

It was probably inevitable that Pope Francis, whose humor and informality charmed hundreds of members of the international press corps at a gathering on Saturday, would lean down and pet the big golden Labrador seeing-eye dog that accompanied a blind journalist. Of course the crowd applauded. The gesture was perfectly natural and unforced; the kind of thing parishioners would expect from a fatherly priest, and that many of the world’s Catholics hope for from the man they now call Holy Father.

There was no hint on the stage Saturday of the uptight young Jesuit administrator, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, accused of complacency if not complicity while a savage military regime waged what came to be called “The Dirty War” to exterminate guerrillas in his native Argentina more than 30 years ago.

The contrasting images are so striking that it’s tempting to say that one of them must be false, or that, if the past was ugly, it really is just ancient history now. As one young woman with the Vatican staff said indignantly when asked about the Argentine allegations, “If this press corps had been around when Saint Peter became pope, you would be writing headlines about how he denied Christ three times” (as the Gospel tells us he did). “What is important,” she said, “is what the Holy Father does now.”

She has a point. But what Pope Francis does now, in the first days and weeks and months of his papacy, will tell us an enormous amount about where he is coming from and how that affects where he hopes to go. …

Symbolically, Francis is off to a bad start. The morning after his election he went to pray at the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, which is the papal basilica in the city of Rome. That would not be controversial, except that the infamous former cardinal of Boston, Bernard Law, is resident there. Law resigned his post in the United States more than ten years ago after the courts reviewed devastating evidence that he knowingly protected criminally abusive priests. His former archdiocese has paid out more than $100 million to settle hundreds of civil suits by the victims.

What Francis said to Law when the two of them met and briefly embraced at the Rome basilica is not known. Some reports in the Italian press said the pope told Law he must retire to a monastery. But Vatican spokesmen flatly denied that.

David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivors’ Network for those Abused by Priests, said Saturday that the encounter between the pope and this known protector of pedophiles was “extraordinarily hurtful.” “If you ignore wrongdoing,” said Clohessy, “you condone wrongdoing.” And if that is the case under Francis, then millions of children will remain at risk from predators in clerical collars. But Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, an exhaustive database of abuse, was, while very cautious, also a little optimistic. She would give Francis “the benefit of the doubt,” she said.

At a series of press conferences, Doyle and Clohessy have suggested several substantive steps Francis might take to strengthen the Church’s reputation for zero tolerance of child abuse. One critical change would be the removal of such senior officials in the Vatican as Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who heads the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Clohessy and Doyle presented specific allegations that Müller had protected a convicted pedophile among the priests in his archdiocese. Ideally, the activists would like to see Müller’s office release the name of all credibly accused priests who have come to its attention, so that, at a minimum, parents and children in their parishes can be warned. The pope does not have to write an encyclical to make that happen. All he has to do is give the word.

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ROME
Boston Globe

By Martine Powers
Globe Staff
March 17, 2013

Advocates for victims of sexual abuse said they were dismayed to learn that Pope Francis met briefly with Cardinal Bernard F. Law, the Boston archbishop who resigned in 2002 under heavy criticism for his handling of the abuse crisis, in one of the pope’s first appearances after his election to the papacy.

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the Waltham-based online research center BishopAccountability.org, called the Vatican’s report of a brief but friendly meeting between the two officials on the pope’s first day an affront to those working to end sexual abuse in the church.

“It was a truly unfortunate first step on the pope’s part,” said Doyle in a phone call from Rome, where she has traveled to raise awareness about the abuse crisis. “Intended or not, the pope was sending a dispiriting signal to the victims and Catholics of Boston in particular.”

As Francis, the first non-European pope in modern times, steps into his new role as leader of the Catholic Church, observers worldwide are now looking to each decision he makes in his first days in the papacy for perspective on how he plans to lead.

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ARGENTINA/ROME
Telegraph (UK)

He loves tango, pays his own bills and promises a ‘church for the poor’. Philip Sherwell profiles Pope Francis, the outsider chosen to save the Church from scandal

By Philip Sherwell in Buenos Aires, and Nick Squires in Rome
7:00AM GMT 17 Mar 2013

Beneath the frescoed ceilings of the Sistine Chapel, a startling vision dawned on Jorge Mario Bergoglio. He was going to be elected as the next pope. Support for the Argentine clergyman was, he realised, reaching “dangerous” levels. The man so convinced he would not be elected he booked a return, economy-class ticket was, in fact, not going back home to Buenos Aires. His future was in Rome.

“I had next to me the archbishop emeritus of São Paulo, Cláudio Hummes, a great friend of mine,” he said yesterday in his first public reflections on the moment.

“When things became a bit dangerous, he comforted me, and when the vote for me reached the two-thirds majority, a moment in which the cardinals started applauding because they had chosen a Pope, he hugged me, he kissed me and he said: ‘Don’t forget the poor.’”

It was advice that the man now known as Pope Francis evidently took to heart. “That word, the poor, lodged in me here,” Francis said, tapping his head. “It was then that I thought of St Francis. And then I thought of wars and about peace and that’s how the name came to me – a man of peace, a poor man… and how I would like a church of the poor, for the poor.”

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SCOTLAND
Daily Record

ONE former trainee claims he was sexually and physically abused by a senior priest and a man who went on to become a Bishop.

A former trainee priest claims he was sexually abused by a senior cleric while at college.

The man, now in his 50s is one of four alleged victims of Catholic churchmen to have come forward in the wake of the Cardinal Keith O’Brien scandal.

O’Brien faces accusations of sexual misconduct from six priests and former priests.

He is not the subject of the claims by the four new victims who, we can reveal, have contacted lawyers in the last week.

They include a man and woman who say they were was abused by parish priests as children and a man who claims he was abused by monks in a home in the 1970s.

The most recent accusation concerns a man who claims he was sexually and physically abused while training at St Vincent’s seminary in Langbank, Renfrewshire, in the 1970s.

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VATICAN CITY
Digital Journal

By JohnThomas Didymus
Mar 16, 2013

The Vatican on Friday defended Pope Francis against allegations that he failed to oppose and even collaborated with Argentina’s military junta against left-wing activists during the so-called “Dirty War” of the country’s era of military dictatorship.

Digital Journal reports that one of the major allegations against Bergoglio was that he did not do enough to protect two activist priests from the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.

According to The Washington Post, Vatican spokesman Reverend Federico Lombardi reacted to press reports that implicated the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio who was Jesuit provincial superior and then archbishop of Buenos Aires. He said the accusations against Bergoglio were “stale” and part of the efforts of “anti-clerical left-wing elements to attack the church [that] must be decisively rejected.”

Although, the news of Cardinal Bergoglio’s election as Pope Francis was well received with many praising his modesty and commitment to uplifting the poor, questions were raised in the media about his alleged role in the era of military dictatorship during which thousands of citizens “disappeared.”

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UNITED KINGDOM
Mail on Sunday

[with photos of documents]

Special report: The damning documents that show new Pope DID betray tortured priests to the junta

By Sharon Churcher and Tom Worden
PUBLISHED:18:56 EST, 16 March 2013

Damning evidence that Pope Francis may have betrayed two priests who were kidnapped and tortured by Argentina’s brutal military junta can be revealed today.

The Mail on Sunday has seen documents which appear to show the new Pope secretly collaborated with the country’s dictatorship when he was head of the Jesuits there – using his real name Jorge Bergoglio – during the Dirty War that started in the Seventies.

One of the documents is a 27-page report by Orlando Yorio, one of the kidnapped priests, in which he accuses the current pontiff of secretly spreading dangerous rumours about him and a colleague while personally promising them support and protection.

A second document is a confidential government memo written in 1979 which appears to reveal Bergoglio informed junta officials that Father Yorio and Father Francisco Jalics were suspected of collaborating with guerrillas and that Jalics was accused of encouraging dissent among a congregation of nuns.

Bergoglio, 76, who was chosen as the new Pope on Wednesday, has been accused of effectively handing the priests over to the regime’s death squads by failing to quash rumours they were dissidents.

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GERMANY
KENS

BERLIN (AP) — A German newspaper says it has discovered a decades-old letter in which the future Pope Francis pledged to fight for the release of a fellow priest who had been kidnapped by the Argentine junta that was in power from 1976-1983.

Weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung says Jorge Mario Bergoglio wrote to the family of Rev. Francisco Jalics in 1976 to tell them about his attempts to secure the priest’s release despite differences the two men had.

The paper’s report Sunday cites the pope saying in his letter he would “do everything” to free Jalics.

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UNITED STATES
Blog Talk Radio

In our first hour, we will discuss the First Amendment, separation of church and state, and religious privilege in America.

Our guest, Prof. Mitch, is a lawyer by training. He has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and as a community organizer. Currently, he is an administrator at a major New York university where he also teaches American constitutional law, criminal law, and oral advocacy.

Also joining us for the discussion is Robert Baty, who started a petition to the White House asking that the Obama administration lead an effort to get Congress to repeal the parsonage income tax exemption enjoyed by religious ministers.

In our second hour, Alex Grenier will be joining us to share a disturbing and explosive story. Alex was sued by his stepfather, a pastor and police chaplain, because of his writings about abuse. The lawsuit has outraged religious and nontheists throughout the country who started the #WhoWouldJesusSue movement.

Alex is the owner of CalvaryChapelAbuse.com, a blog dedicated to dealing with abuse and corruption in the Calvary Chapel System of Churches that claims 1,500 to 2,000 churches nationwide and all over the world.

At the top of the 3rd hour, we’ll be joined by Judy Block-Jones, Midwest Associate Director of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), who will tell us what SNAP thinks of the new pope.

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ARGENTINA
New Republic

BY SAM FERGUSON

While the world has generally welcomed the Catholic Church’s selection of the Argentine Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio as pope, one large and dark question hangs over his ascension: As the head of the Jesuit order during Argentina’s last dictatorship, was he complicit with the military regime that kidnapped, tortured, and murdered thousands of its citizens?

Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, has rarely spoken about his own role in what’s known as the “Dirty War,” during which at least 9,000 people were forcibly disappeared. But in 2010, he appeared as a witness in the criminal trial of eighteen officers who had worked at the notorious Naval Mechanics School, where the country’s military junta detained political prisoners—including a pair of Jesuit priests who’d been kidnapped shortly after the regime took power in a 1976 coup. Bergoglio, who was not a defendant in the case, insisted on clerical testimonial privilege and did not testify in open court; proceedings were held in his office. As part of my research into that trial, I obtained access to a transcript from the hearing, during which prosecutors and human rights lawyers grilled him for more than four hours over his alleged complicity in the kidnappings. The transcript has not been widely circulated, though it recently appeared in Spanish on the website of an Argentine human rights NGO. It offers a unique insight into the steps Bergoglio took and did not take to save the desaparecidos.

By the time he testified, Bergoglio had been facing criticism about the kidnapping for years. His critics allege that he withdrew Church protection from the priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics, who worked with the poor in the Bajo Flores slum of Buenos Aires. According to this theory, Bergoglio had warned the priests that they should abandon the slum because sectors of the military and church saw their activity as “subversive.” When the priests refused, he allegedly told them they’d have to leave the Compañia de Jesus, their local order, if they wanted to keep working there—effectively giving the green light to the military junta to detain them. In a 1999 interview, conducted shortly before he died, Yorio said that he faulted Bergoglio for his kidnapping. Bergoglio denied complicity. After the interview was published in a book in 2005, a local human rights lawyer filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio over the incident. The courts, however, have not taken any steps to indict Bergoglio, according to the lawyer, Marcelo Parrilli. But the interview appeared just as Bergoglio was being mentioned as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II.

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ROME
Fox News Latino

Hours after becoming the leader of the global Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis had a brief, unscheduled visit to a basilica in Rome that is home to a former Boston Archbishop who was involved in the diocese’s sex abuse scandal in 2002.

What transpired in the short interaction between the pope and Cardinal Bernard Law has become a point of contention between international media outlets and the Vatican.

Both the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano and the British tabloid the Daily Mail reported that during Pope Francis’ stop at the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, he was briefly greeted by Law. The pope then demanded that Law be removed and went on to command that “he is not to come to this church anymore,” according to the Daily Mail.

Il Fatto Quotidiano reported that Pope Francis ordered Law to stop appearing in public at the basilica and that the new pope, “as his first act of purification,” is preparing to send Law to a cloistered monastery.

A Vatican spokesperson, however, told the National Catholic Reporter that the reports of Pope Francis’ order to move Law to a monastery are “completely and totally false.”

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VATICAN CITY
National Catholic Reporter

by John L. Allen Jr. | Mar. 16, 2013

Rome —
In the first clear signal that Pope Francis may be serious about reform, he’s decided that the heads of the various Vatican offices will keep their jobs for now, but he’s not making any definitive appointments.

It’s customary for new popes to swiftly reconfirm the department heads who lose their positions when the previous pontificate ends, and then take his time about bringing in his team. The fact that Francis has not followed that path may suggest that significant personnel moves will come sooner rather than later.

So far, the storyline about Francis has been mostly about style – taking the bus with the other cardinals, preferring to walk rather than being driven, packing his own bags and paying his own hotel bill, and setting aside his prepared texts for off-the-cuff personal reflections.

At some point, however, style will have to give way to substance, and today’s announcement marks the first indication of what that substance might look like.

Vatican-watchers are paying keen attention above all to what Francis does about the all-important position of Secretary of State, held under Benedict XVI by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. Fairly or not, Bertone shoulders most of the blame for perceived breakdowns in business management over the last eight years, and most people presume that Francis will move quickly to bring in his own “prime minister.”

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VATICAN CITY
John Thavis

A two-sentence communiqué from the Vatican today contained an important signal about Pope Francis’ intentions regarding the Roman Curia.

As is normal, the new pope has confirmed that Vatican officials will continue in their various positions donec aliter provideatur – “until otherwise provided.”

What was different this time around was the line that followed: “The Holy Father, in fact, wants to take a certain time for reflection, prayer and dialogue before making any definitive appointments or confirmations.”

That seemed a clear indication that changes are coming, and perhaps big ones, in the Vatican lineup.

As my friend Alessandro Speciale pointed out to me, when Pope Benedict was elected eight years ago, he issued a statement that re-appointed Cardinal Angelo Sodano as secretary of state, reconfirmed the secretaries of Vatican departments in their five-year terms and pretty much left everyone else in place, too.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Agency

By Kevin J. Jones

Vatican City, Mar 16, 2013 / 01:02 pm (CNA).- Leaked U.S. State Department cables published by Wikileaks show that the U.S. Vatican Embassy saw the future Pope Francis as a contender for the papacy in the 2005 conclave, reporting him to be a “wise pastor” who could appeal to allies of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Six cables mention Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires who became Pope Francis on March 13. One of the unclassified cables, dated April 18, 2005, includes a detailed profile that examined the Argentine cardinal as a possible successor to Pope John Paul II.

“Bergoglio exemplifies the virtues of the wise pastor that many electors value,” said the cable authored by the U.S. Embassy to the Vatican. “Observers have praised his humility: he has been reluctant to accept honors or hold high office and commutes to work on a bus.”

The cable was signed by the U.S. embassy’s then-Charge d’Affaires D. Brent Hardt and was sent the day the 2005 conclave began. It discussed the future Pope Francis as one of 16 possible candidates.

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SOUTH AFRICA
RTE News

Survivors of sexual abuse have reacted angrily to comments by a Roman Catholic cardinal that paedophilia is an illness and not a criminal condition.

Archbishop of Durban in South Africa Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier made the remarks in a BBC interview.

Cardinal Fox Napier took part in the election of Pope Francis.

He was asked what the new pontiff could do to repair damage to the Catholic Church’s reputation caused by the way it dealt with sexual abuse by priests.

He said paedophilia was an illness not a criminal condition and questioned whether someone with such a psychological defect automatically deserved to be punished.

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ROME
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

Posted by David Clohessy on March 16, 2013

In his first hours as the new head of the church, Pope Francis made a self-effacing joke, carried his own luggage, rode on a bus, paid his hotel bill and asked his flock to bless him.

Then, he visited Cardinal Bernard Law.

I’m not a sophisticated or well educated person. And while much of the world’s problems seem complicated to me, I’m sure I too often see too much in “black and white.” But when it comes to sex crimes against kids I can’t help it. It’s seems very simple to me: we ought not to celebrate or honor or promote or praise adults who enable predators to hurt children.

And so to me, whatever good will Pope Francis may have begun to engender with his humility and his ‘common touch’ was immediately erased by his visit with the prelate who is the most disgraced Catholic official in the US.

(Granted, LA’s Cardinal Roger Mahony may have stripped Law from that title in recent years.)

I’m sure the Pope didn’t intend to further hurt already wounded victims and already betrayed Catholic. But I’m sure the same could be said of Ireland’s Cardinal Brady or Germany’s Archbishop Mueller or Kansas City’s Bishop Finn or any of the other thousands of prelates who have enabled child molesting clerics to molest more children – they didn’t intend to let more boys and girls be raped and sodomized.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

Francis of Assisi preached to help raise funds for the illiterate poor in a patriarchical society amidst a corrupt and monarchical medieval papacy that answered occasionally to a few European kings. Francis was not a 13th Century papal reformer. He left the heavy reform lifting to the 16th Century Luther. Pope Francis preaches to a literate poor in an egalitarian society amidst a corrupt medieval papacy that is steadily being compelled, most often by women, to answer worldwide to the modern rule of law. Most indications to date are that Pope Francis, elected secretly by celibate and aging patriarchs, will not likely be a papal reformer either.

Inevitably, women will be the ones who both save the literate, and legally equal, poor and reform the patriarchical papacy. Pope Francis’ incessant message to couples has been to forgo contraception and have unplanned children. He promises he will then baptise these unplanned children and try to help support them through charities overseen by purportedly heterosexual and celibate males. This failed approach just won’t cut it today. Women have been there, done that and have moved on!

Pope Francis’ predecessor, ex-Pope Joseph Ratzinger, sought desperately to evade the rule of law as he frantically pushed to downsize Catholicism to a financially self-sufficient cult of exhalted hierarchs that were supported by diehard traditionalists, opportunistic plutocrats and accumulated wealth. Without accountability, he even attempted to continue to suppress women and to endanger children as acceptable collateral damage.

The 2005 description of Pope Francis linked in Jamie Manson’s article accessible below, and his early papal actions to date, suggest strongly that Pope Francis will likely just be a smoother and savvier Latin version of the academic Germanic Ratzinger, without the red slippers and the ever present Georgeous Georg, of course. His record of preserving the traditionalist Jesuit order from a military “siege” suggests he could have some success, for awhile at least, in delaying government prosecutors from storming the Vatican archives’ walls. However, his recent meeting with Cardinal Law and permitting the South African Cardinal to offer his apologia for pedophiles both suggest he may fail even at that. Even if Pope Francis now takes action against Cardinals Law, Brady, Mahony, Rigali and O’Brien and Bishop Finn, for example, he will merely be doing what 100 out of 100 leaders of any other multinational organization would have done long ago. As I said before, it is too little too late.

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JOLIET (IL)
My Suburban Life

By BRIAN HUDSON – bhudson@shawmedia.com
Created: Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Updated: Wednesday, March 13, 2013

The Diocese of Joliet has expanded its public list of priests facing “credible” accusations of sexual abuse on Tuesday — some of whom are being named for the first time, including a former chaplain at Driscoll High School in Addison.

After releasing hundreds of documents in response to a court order Tuesday, the diocese separately added nine names to a list of priests facing credible or substantiated allegations of abuse. The list, which is available on the diocese website, now stands at 34.
Many of the newly added priests are facing allegations and have already been accused in lawsuits. Others are facing accusations that are still under investigation by church officials.

Some of the new priests, however, are being publicly implicated seemingly for the first time.

Among the additions is the Rev. William Dugal, who served as chaplain at Driscoll Catholic High School in Addison until 1996, according to his obituary. He was removed from ministry in 2002 and died in 2009, the same year that Driscoll closed.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Telegraph

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the disgraced former head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, has been accused of sexually assaulting a priest when he was already a Cardinal.

By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor, Vatican City
4:35PM GMT 16 Mar 2013

He is alleged to have attempted to grope the man in Rome on the night of a drinks party to celebrate becoming a “prince of the Church” in October 2003, attended by a raft of bishops and dignitaries.

It is the first allegation to relate directly to his time as a Cardinal and the first suggestion that his sexual misconduct extended to the centre of the Catholic Church.

It follows an admission by the Cardinal that he was guilty of sexual misconduct, with his personal standards falling below those expected of him “as a priest, archbishop and cardinal”.

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FLORIDA
Miami Herald

BY JAY WEAVER
jweaver@MiamiHerald.com

When the Rev. Rafael Escala served at St. Timothy Catholic Church in West Kendall in the late 1980s, he caught a teenaged altar boy stealing $60 from the collection.

Escala threatened to report the teen to his father and the police. But rather than carry out the threat, the priest sexually abused the 16-year-old boy, according to the victim, who obtained a financial settlement from the Archdiocese of Miami in January.

“He told me that I had to ask God for forgiveness for stealing the money after he abused me,” said the victim, a Miami man who did not want to be identified. “He gave me penance.”

The victim also reached a settlement in the same agreement regarding molestation claims against a second priest, the Rev. Oscar Mendez, a Jesuit, while he served at St. Timothy in the 1990s.

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BOSTON (MA)
Religion News Service

Michael J. O’Loughlin | Mar 15, 2013

Boston Catholics (myself included) were rooting for Cardinal Sean O’Malley to ascend to the throne of St. Peter this week. That didn’t pan out, as we all know, but maybe Catholics there received something of a consolation prize.

The British tabloid The Daily Mail writes that Italian media is reporting that Boston’s disgraced former archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law, 82, is being banished from his cushy residence by Pope Francis:

But first days are all about making a good impression – even when you’re the Pope.

So when the appearance of a disgraced cardinal threatened to cast a shadow over his first engagement, Francis I made sure it couldn’t happen again – by banning him from his own church.

Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as Archbishop of Boston in 2002, after being accused of actively covering up for a litany of paedophile priests.’

Despite the scandal which exploded to engulf the entire church, he was given an honorary position at the Basilica Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome.

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SOUTH AFRICA
The Sun

By JACK LOSH

THE new Pope faces more child sex abuse controversy after a cardinal today branded paedophilia an illness NOT a crime.

Catholic Archbishop of Durban Wilfrid Fox Napier defended paedophiles who had been abused as children, saying they were not criminally responsible for their actions as somebody “who chooses to do something like that”.

The South African – among the 115 cardinals at the Vatican who elected Pope Francis earlier this week – called paedophilia a “psychological disorder”.

Speaking out just days after the papal conclave, Cardinal Napier said: “What do you do with disorders? You have got to try and put them right.

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INDIA
Zee News

Coimbatore: A 63-year-old priest of a church here was arrested on Saturday on charges of attempting to outrage the modesty of a woman during prayers.

John Mark, the priest of CSI Church, was arrested on a complaint from the 48-year-old woman, police said.

The woman, in her complaint lodged with the City Police Commissioner’s office, alleged that the priest made advances towards her and touched her when she was attending prayers on March 10.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 16 March 2013 (VIS) – Holy Father Francis has expressed the desire that the Heads and members of the Dicasteries of the Roman Curia, as well as their Secretaries, and also the President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, continue “donec aliter provideatur”, that is, provisionally, in their respective positions.

The Holy Father wishes to reserve time for reflection, prayer, and dialogue before any final appointment or confirmation is made.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Information Service

Vatican City, 16 March 2013 (VIS) – This morning in the the Paul VI Audience Hall, the Holy Father greeted over 6,000 journalists and those working in the media as well as for the Holy See, accredited either permanently or temporarily, to cover the events related to the Conclave. He addressed them with the following words:

“Dear friends, I am pleased, at the beginning of my ministry in the See of Peter, to meet with you who have worked here in Rome at this very intense period that began with the surprising announcement of my venerated predecessor Benedict XVI, this past 11 February. I warmly greet each of you.”

“The role of the mass media has been continuously growing in recent times,” he said, “so much so that it has become essential to narrate the events of contemporary history to the world. I therefore especially thank you for your distinguished service these past few days—you have had a bit of work to do, haven’t you?—when the eyes of the Catholic world, and not only, were turned toward the Eternal City, in particular to this area that has St. Peter’s tomb as its focal point. In these past few weeks you’ve gotten a chance to talk about the Holy See, the Church, her rites and traditions, her faith, and, in particular, the role of the Pope and his ministry.”

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SOUTH AFRICA
BBC News

The Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fox Napier, has described paedophilia as a psychological “illness, not a criminal condition”.

The South African cardinal told the BBC that people who were themselves abused as children and then abused others needed to be examined by doctors.

He was one of 115 cardinals who took part in the conclave at the Vatican to elect Pope Francis earlier this week.

The Church has recently been dogged by scandals over clerical sex abuse.

Criticism

In an interview with the Stephen Nolan programme on BBC Radio 5 live, Cardinal Napier referred to paedophilia as “a psychological condition, a disorder”.

“What do you do with disorders? You’ve got to try and put them right.

“If I – as a normal being – choose to break the law, knowing that I’m breaking the law, then I think I need to be punished.”

He said he knew at least two priests, who became paedophiles after themselves being abused as children.

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SOUTH AFRICA
Global Post

Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier of Durban describes pedophilia as mental illness that should be treated with sympathy, not punishment.

South Africa’s Catholic Archbishop of Durban, Wilfrid Fox Napier, commented in a BBC interview that he believed pedophiles who had themselves been abused as children are not “criminally responsible,” a stance that has swiftly earned the cardinal international condemnation.

“What do you do with disorders? You’ve got to try and put them right,” said Napier. “If I – as a normal being – choose to break the law, knowing that I’m breaking the law, then I think I need to be punished.”

Read more from GlobalPost: Can the Catholic Church outgrow the pope’s antediluvian philosophy?

“Now don’t tell me that those people are criminally responsible like somebody who chooses to do something like that,” said the 72-year-old Napier, who cited other pedophile priests who knew of who had been sexually abused as children in the BBC interview, which can be listened to in full at this link.

“I don’t think you can really take the position and say that person deserves to be punished. He was himself damaged,” Napier said.

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SOUTH AFRICA
Raw Story

South African cardinal who helped elect Pope Francis said on Saturday that paedophilia is a psychological illness, not “a criminal condition”.

Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier, the Archbishop of Durban, told BBC radio that people who become paedophiles after being abused as children should be treated by doctors.

His comments come as Francis, the first pontiff to hail from Latin America, takes the helm of a Catholic Church rocked by thousands of cases of child abuse by paedophile priests.

Napier, who was among the 115 cardinals who elected Francis at the Vatican on Wednesday, told the BBC: “From my experience paedophilia is actually an illness — it is not a criminal condition.”

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VATICAN CITY
TrustLaw

Sat, 16 Mar 2013

VATICAN CITY, March 16 (Reuters) – Pope Francis has decided that all top administrators in the Vatican bureaucracy will keep their posts while he reflects on any necessary changes, the Vatican said on Saturday.

There had been speculation that the new pope could make swift changes to the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy that has been at the centre of allegations of corruption, infighting and intrigue.

“The Holy Father, wants in fact, to give himself a certain amount of time for reflection, prayer and dialogue before any (new) appointments or definitive confirmations,” a statement said.

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VATICAN CITY
Newser

By NICOLE WINFIELD | Associated Press

Pope Francis offered intimate insights Saturday into the moments after his election, telling journalists that he was immediately inspired to take the name of St. Francis of Assisi because of his work for peace and the poor _ and was embraced by another cardinal amid applause inside the conclave.

“Let me tell you a story,” Francis said in a break from his prepared text during a special gathering for thousands of journalists, media workers and guests in the Vatican’s auditorium.

Francis then described how he was comforted by his friend, Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes, as it appeared the voting was going his way and it seemed “a bit dangerous” that he would reach the two-thirds necessary to be elected.

When the threshold was reached, applause erupted in the frescoed Sistine Chapel.

“He (Hummes) hugged me. He kissed me. He said don’t forget about the poor,” Francis recalled. “And that’s how in my heart came the name Francis of Assisi,” who devoted his life to the poor, missionary outreach and caring for God’s creation.

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VATICAN CITY
Los Angeles Times

By Tracy Wilkinson
March 16, 2013

VATICAN CITY — He’s a charmer.
Pope Francis on Saturday went before several thousand journalists, thanked them for their work, told a joke or two and even blessed (or at least patted) someone’s seeing-eye dog.

In a custom that dates at least to John Paul II, one of the pope’s first public appearances was a meeting in the modern Paul VI Hall with an estimated 5,000 reporters based in Rome or flown in to cover the week’s historic events.

Francis sat on the stage in a large but relatively simple chair and read a speech that thanked the press for its work during this “intense period” which had focused the world’s eyes on the Roman Catholic Church.

Then, departing from his text, he offered to tell the story of how he chose his name, and in so doing provided a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the conclave, the secret vote by cardinals to select a new pontiff. He is the first Pope Francis, and some have wondered which Francis was his inspiration.

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DEUTSCHLAND
dradio

Jesuiten-Pater erwartet von Papst Franziskus beim Missbrauchsskandal offene Haltung

Pater Klaus Mertes im Gespräch mit Bettina Klein

Papst Franziskus solle wieder Ordnung in die Kurie bringen, sagt Pater Klaus Mertes, Jesuit und Leiter des Kollegs St. Blasien. Dass der neue Pontifex “von außen” kommt, könne hierbei von Vorteil sein. Außerdem müssen vor allem den Opfern des Missbrauchsskandals zugehört werden.

Bettina Klein: Zum ersten Mal also ein Jesuit als Papst. Vor der Sendung habe ich mit Pater Klaus Mertes darüber gesprochen, ehemaliger Leiter des Canisius-Kollegs in Berlin, und ich habe ihn zunächst gefragt, weshalb es das eigentlich noch nie zuvor gegeben hat.

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DEUTSCHLAND
General-Anzeiger

[Grenzverletzungen im AKO Pro Scouting am Aloisiuskolleg Bonn – Bad Godesberg]

Von Ebba Hagenberg-Miliu
BAD GODESBERG. Den zweiten Aufklärungsbericht zu den Missbrauchsfällen am Aloisiuskolleg (Ako), speziell zu den “Grenzverletzungen im Ako-pro-Scouting”, präsentierte am Freitag Ako-Rektor Pater Johannes Siebner. Er habe den von Arnfried Bintig verfassten 135 Seiten langen Bericht mit Bestürzung gelesen. “Ich bin erschüttert, was wir hier erfahren. Ich bin beschämt ob der vielen Einzelschicksale und ob der perfiden und brutalen Vorgehensweise des ehemaligen Leiters des Ako-pro-Seminars über so lange Zeit.”

Der Bericht handelt von sexualisierten Gesprächen, Aufforderungen zu sexuellen Handlungen bis zu direkten sexuellen Übergriffen. Er schildert Dinge, die ein in der Verantwortung stehender Bonner Pädagoge über Jahre ungeahndet von Schutzbefohlenen erzwungen haben soll. Der Bericht schildert das Leid, die Traumatisierung, das Gezeichnetsein von Opfern und ihren Angehörigen bis heute.

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DEUTSCHLAND
Aargauer Zeiting

Von von Christian Berzins

Er gilt als Papst der Armen, als Vorkämpfer für Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit. Doch in den Jahren der argentinischen Militärdiktatur hat der neue Papst Franziskus offensichtlich eine umstrittene Rolle gespielt.

Menschenrechtler werfen ihm vor, mit schuld an der Entführung zweier Jesuitenpater gewesen zu sein, die 5 Monate von den Todesschwadronen der Junta verschleppt worden waren. Auch habe er es an deutlicher, offener Kritik an der Militärdiktatur immer wieder vermissen lassen.

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DEUTSCHLAND
BGLand

Teisendorf – Bei den laufenden Ermittlungen habe sich der Missbrauchsverdacht gegen einen Teisendorfer Pfarrer nicht bestätigt – sagt zumindest sein Anwalt.

Die Missbrauchsvorwürfe gegen einen Pfarrer aus Teisendorf haben sich nach Ansicht seines Anwalts nicht erhärtet. Dem Pfarrer wird vorgeworfen in Österreich junge Männer sexuell missbraucht zu haben. Dazu wurde mittlerweile auch das mutmaßliche Hauptopfer vernommen.

Wie Anwalt Michael Dohr im Bayernwelle-Interview sagte, dürfe er sich aber nicht konkreter zum Fall äußern, da es sich um ein laufendes Verfahren handele. Dohr rechnet damit, dass noch vor Ostern ein weiterer Zeuge vernommen wird.

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ARGENTINA
Indepedent European Daily Express

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 16 (IPS) – Argentine archbishop Jorge Bergoglio was selected as pope at a time when the Roman Catholic Church in this South American country is facing a rebellion by priests and laypersons who reject the role of the church leadership during the 1976-1983 dictatorship and the lack of reparations for past omissions and complicities.

The accusations against Bergoglio for his alleged ties to the dictatorship, which made headlines around the world when his appointment as pope was announced by the Vatican, are just the tip of the iceberg of a controversy that has raged for decades without a solution and which is coming to light as the regime’s human rights violators have been brought to trial since the amnesty laws were scrapped.

Groups like Curas en la Opción por los Pobres (Priests with an Option for the Poor), Cristianos por el Tercer Milenio (Christians for the Third Millennium) or Colectivo Teología de la Liberación (Liberation Theology Collective) have voiced increasingly harsh criticism against the Argentine bishops’ conference’s shortcomings in terms of self-criticism, in spite of an apology and pledge to investigate issued a few months ago.

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SCOTLAND
Herald Scotland

Saturday 16 March 2013

CARDINAL Keith O’Brien is being investigated for sexual misconduct in the Vatican on the very night he was made a cardinal, The Herald can reveal.

The cardinal is alleged to have assaulted a priest at the Scots College in Rome in October 2003, hours after being awarded the red mitre by Pope John Paul II.

The priest, who is Scottish but now based in London, made a formal complaint to the Vatican’s Congregation of Bishops last September, after which Cardinal O’Brien was summoned immediately to Rome.

The complaint, which was dealt with by Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec, who was one of the early front-runners this week to become Pope, was the first which eventually led to the cleric’s downfall and is not from one of the four complainers whose allegations were made public last month.

It is understood the complaint involved an attempt to grope the priest, who was known to Cardinal O’Brien. Alcohol had been consumed at an event in the Scots College attended by many priests who had travelled to Rome especially for his elevation. Scots based at the Vatican also attended.

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DIXON (IL)
My State Line

By: Matt Mershon

Updated: March 15, 2013

DIXON – One catholic priest is no longer with his parish after the church he worked for announced he and his computer are being investigated by police. Parishioners, however, are left to their own devices to determind why exactly the priest is no where to be found.

A letter to parishioners of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Dixon acknowledged Father John Gow’s absence from the parish on Highland Avenue. Parishioners say Gow left the parish before Christmas of 2012.

The author of the letter from the Diocese of Rockford, Msgr. Eric Barr, writes that Fr. Gow had been removed by the Diocese because police are currently investigating conduct of the priest, “relative to his computer use.” The letter adds that Gow is receiving treatment for this supposed issue that’s, “affecting his priesthood.”

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CALIFORNIA
Appeal-Democrat

March 15, 2013

The attorney for a Catholic priest accused of kissing a 16-year-old Yuba City girl called the incident a “witch hunt” on Friday, while prosecutors said the clergyman knows he violated the law.

The Rev. Julio Cesar Guarin-Sosa, 43, of Colombia is charged with a felony count of false imprisonment and misdemeanor counts of annoying or molesting a minor and sexual battery in connection with a March 8 incident in Yuba City.

Sutter County Judge Susan E. Green entered not-guilty pleas on Guarin-Sosa’s behalf on Friday.

“This case is a witch hunt, your honor,” defense attorney Markus Dombois said. “The conduct may be inappropriate in this country, but it may be an everyday occurrence in his country.”

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UNITED STATES
NBC Bay Area

By Amanda Bonafiglia

Saturday, Mar 16, 2013

The group SNAP — the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests — wants a meeting with the newly-elected pontiff.

The group’s midwest director in Chicago on Friday called for a new rule mandating abusive priests be turned over to the police.

“We want to begin a new dialogue with him, and with the church we want to begin a real dialogue about prevention of child sexual abuse,” Peter Isely said outside the Chicago archdiocesan headquarters.

He was flanked by a small number of men and women abused as children asking for action to be taken against priests who have mistreated children.

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SOUTH AFRICA
The Independent (UK)

A South African cardinal has said paedophilia is not “a criminal condition”, but a psychological illness.

The church is still dealing with historic international evidence of sexual abuse by priests and allegations of a cover-up.

As recently as this month, the BBC claimed to have seen evidence that bishops in the Catholic Church in Scotland knew about 20 allegations of child sex abuse by priests between 1985 and 1995.

Wilfrid Fox Napier, The Catholic Archbishop of Durban, told BBC Radio 5 Live that people who were abused during childhood and became paedophiles were not criminally responsible for their actions in the same way as somebody “who chooses to do something like that”.

Cardinal Napier was among the 115 cardinals in the Vatican conclave that elected Pope Francis earlier this week. He called paedophilia a “psychological disorder.”

He said: “What do you do with disorders? You have got to try and put them right. If I as a normal being choose to break the law knowing that I am breaking the law, then I think I need to be punished.

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NEW YORK
Road to Recovery

[note: This does not link to another web site.]

MARCH 16, 2013

Road to Recovery, Inc.
P.O. Box 279
Livingston, NJ 07039

“Ordinary Catholics deserve credit for identifying sexual abuse as most important issue confronting the Catholic Church”
“Pope Francis must place clergy sexual abuse victims’ healing as his top priority”
“Pope Francis must drive all the snakes out of the Church in imitation of St. Patrick”

What: A demonstration and leafleting thanking American Catholics for agreeing with
clergy sexual abuse victims that clergy sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church is the most important issue confronting the Roman Catholic Church and the new Pope Francis.

Where: In front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Fifth Avenue and E. 51st Street, Manhattan,
NYC

When: Sunday, March 17, 2013 (St. Patrick’s Day) from 11:00 AM until 1:00 PM. St. Patrick is the patron saint of the Archdiocese of New York.

Who: Clergy sexual abuse victims and their supporters, including many who have been
assisted by Road to Recovery, Inc., a non-profit charity based in New Jersey, and its co-founder, Dr. Robert M. Hoatson.

Why: On Thursday, March 7, 2013, the Huffington Post released the results of a survey which asked 184 America Catholics to rank the most pressing issues facing the Roman Catholic Church. By a wide margin, ordinary Catholics indicated that clergy sexual abuse is the most serious and immediate concern of the Catholic Church and its leadership. This news has buoyed clergy sexual abuse victims who have waited for American Catholics to truly understand the damages and injuries caused by well-respected and honored members of the clergy. Clergy abuse survivors will stand in front of the most famous Catholic church in America and thank ordinary Catholics for “getting it.” 34% of Catholics in the survey said that clergy sexual abuse is, by far, the most important Catholic issue of our time. All other issues paled in comparison, and no other issue received a ranking above 9%. It is time for all American Catholics to get on the “road to recovery” by believing, supporting, and walking side by side with clergy sexual abuse victims.

Participants will urge newly-elected Pope Francis to do what American Catholics have done: place the handling of clergy sexual abuse at the very top of his list of priorities. He must drive all the snakes out of the Church in imitation of St. Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland.

Contacts: Dr. Robert M. Hoatson, President, Road to Recovery – 862-368-2800
Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, Boston, MA – 617-523-6250

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VATICAN CITY
Religion News Service

David Gibson and Alessandro Speciale | Mar 14, 2013

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Pope Francis comes into office riding a wave of good will but facing a host of challenges both inside and outside the Catholic Church. Whether he can tackle them, however, may depend on his ability to tame the Roman Curia, the dysfunctional papal bureaucracy that was uppermost in the minds of the cardinals when they elected him on Wednesday (March 13).

Yes, the electors wanted a pastoral figure after eight years of the astringent rule of Benedict XVI, an introverted scholar who struggled to connect with the flock. And in Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio they got one – a humble Argentine Jesuit who champions the poor, lives simply, cooks his own meals and takes mass transit around Buenos Aires.

Yet naming yourself after St. Francis of Assisi is one thing. Running the Vatican is another.

It’s not something the new pope wanted to do even back in the conclave of 2005, when he reportedly ran second to Benedict, at one point signaling to his fellow cardinals to stop voting for him.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

by Jamie Manson | Mar. 15, 2013

I suppose my assessment of the new pope is probably similar to those who have been reading the mainstream news since Wednesday night’s historic election.

I have been touched by Francis’ clear love of the poor and the images of his bathing the feet of sick children and AIDS patients. I am troubled by his alleged failure stand up with Argentine dictators during the “Dirty War” and his harmful words about LGBT families. I am worried by reports that he was unpopular among his brother Jesuits because of his unfavorable views of base communities and liberation theology.

But what most piqued my interest about Pope Francis is his strong tie to a movement called Comunione e Liberazione, or Communion and Liberation (CL).

As John Allen reported in the days before Jorge Mario Bergoglio became Francis, the Argentine cardinal “became close to the Comunione e Liberazione movement” over the years, “sometimes speaking at its massive annual gathering in Rimini, Italy.” Allen also notes Bergoglio presented the books of CL’s founder, Fr. Luigi Giussani, at literary fairs in Argentina. (It should be noted that Cardinal Angelo Scola, widely considered the conclave’s front-runner, is also a longtime CL collaborator.)

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ARGENTINA
Diario de Noticias

Um grupo de réus acusados de crimes contra a humanidade cometidos durante a ditadura na Argentina (1976-1983) apareceu esta quinta-feira no seu julgamento usando insígnias do Vaticano para homenagear Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

A cadeia de televisão C5N e o jornal local La Mañana de Córboda difundiram imagens dos acusados usando as insígnias do Vaticano, durante o julgamento que decorreu na cidade de Córdoba, no noroeste da Argentina.

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ARGENTINA
La Manana de Cordoba

Los represores imputados en la megacausa La Perla se presentaron ayer en la audiencia ante el Tribunal Oral Federal Nº 1 portando en sus solapas escarapelas papales de color amarillo y blanco, en un gesto de identificación con el nuevo Papa de la Iglesia Católica, el argentino Jorge Bergoglio.
La imagen fue considerada una provocación, cuando se discute la connivencia de la Iglesia y del nuevo Papa con la dictadura militar que dejó 30 mil muertos en el país.

Los seis acusados de genocidio, entre ellos Luciano Benjamín Menéndez, mostraron ayer una escarapela papal en su pecho, durante una nueva audiencia del juicio por la megacausa La Perla, el más siniestro centro clandestino de la provincia de Córdoba en la dictadura.

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ARGENTINA
La Manana de Cordoba

El Premio Nobel de la Paz de 1980, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, dijo ayer que el nuevo papa Francisco, «no tuvo el coraje suficiente de otros obispos» para denunciar las violaciones a los Derechos Humanos durante la última dictadura cívico militar en Argentina. «Bergoglio no tuvo el coraje suficiente de otros obispos para acompañar nuestra lucha por los Derechos Humanos durante la dictadura», sostuvo Pérez Esquivel, según publicó en Twitter. Si bien aclaró que el ex arzobispo de Buenos Aires «no fue un cómplice directo de la dictadura», indicó que «le faltó coraje para acompañar la lucha por los Derechos Humanos.

A pesar de ello, afirmó: «Esperamos que el primer Papa latinoamericano, Francisco I, trabaje por la paz más allá de la voluntad de las potencias».

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ARGENTINA
Buenos Aires Herald

The head of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo Estela de Carlotto today gave a “vote of confidence” to former cardinal Jorge Bergoglio in his “new mission” as Pope but warned that he should make a “mea culpa” if he committed “a crime or a mistake” during Argentina’s military dictatorship.

“There is always time. When someone commits a crime or a mistake, even if it is not considered a crime, there is time to think over and make a mea culpa. I think it is a supreme Christian act to confess a sin, to repent and feel contrition,” the founder of the human rights organization told reporters of Milenium radio station.

Carlotto explained that two priests have judicially denounced Bergoglio which she considered a fact and not an “anecdote” that casts a “shadow” over the Pope´s figure although she pointed out that he has not been indicted.

“The repentant must be given a chance, but we must first wait for him to repent,” she added and gave the newly elected pontiff a “vote of confidence in this new mission he has began with great humility”.

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UNITED STATES
Religion and Ethics Newsweekly

[with video]

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: There were jubilant shouts in an array of languages as Catholics from around the globe gathered in St. Peter’s Square to meet their new pope. Many here say electing Pope Francis has brought Catholics together.

KIM DANIELS (Catholic Voices USA): We all operate in different countries, we all operate in different idioms and different ways but we come together for our faith and this is a real moment of unity.

LAWTON: The fact that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio—Pope Francis—hails from Argentina has generated much excitement.

CARDINAL TIMOTHY DOLAN (Archdiocese of New York): You talk about a booster shot to the Church in the Americas, this is going to be a real blessing.

LAWTON: But it’s more than where he comes from that’s unique. David Gibson of Religion News Service says Pope Francis’s simple lifestyle is something new to the papacy.

DAVID GIBSON (Religion News Service): He also has spoken against the clerical privileges in the Church, and the kind of puffery that can often infect the hierarchy and the cardinals themselves—he’s spoken really powerfully against this. If he puts into action the words that he’s spoken against this kind of clerical and ecclesiastical privilege, he could be a revolutionary figure for the church.

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ROME
Telegraph (UK)

Pope Francis is facing outrage from victims of clerical abuse after it emerged that one of the first people he met after being elected was a US cardinal who resigned in disgrace amid allegations of covering up child abuse.

By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor
7:30PM GMT 15 Mar 2013

During his unscheduled visit to a basilica in Rome hours after becoming Pope, he briefly greeted Cardinal Bernard Law.

Cardinal Law resigned as Archbishop of Boston 10 years ago, after issuing a statement begging forgiveness, and left America after being accused in scores of law suits of failing to protect children.

His former archdiocese has paid out more than $100 million to settle as many as 750 suits.

The Cardinal took up residence in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, a major place of pilgrimage. As the papal basilica in Rome, it was where Pope Francis went to pray on Thursday, the morning after his election.

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ROME
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
BishopAccountability.org

[note: This does not link to another web site.]

For immediate release March 16, 2013

They urge that CDF head be fired immediately
CDF’s Mueller is “unfit and totally wrong” for key post
And they want new Secretary of State to have “strong” abuse record
Both are upset that pontiff visited the US’ “most disgraced” prelate
The two NGOs urge pope to clarify reports that he’s removing Cardinal Law

WHAT:
At a news conference, a Catholic mother and archivist and a US clergy sex abuse victim will criticize Pope Francis for visiting Cardinal Law Thursday. They will also call on him to
–clarify whether he is disciplining that prelate,
–replace the current head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and
–bring in a new Secretary of State with a solid record of dealing with abuse and cover up in the church.

WHEN:

TODAY, Saturday, March 16 at 3:15 p.m.

WHERE:
Orange Hotel, 86 Via Crescenzio 00193, Roma +39.06.6868969

WHO:
Leaders of two veteran US-based groups:
–Anne Barrett Doyle of Boston, a Catholic mom who is the co-director of the international watchdog group BishopAccountability.org
–David Clohessy of St. Louis, an abuse victim who is the director of an international support called SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAPnetwork.org)

WHY
In a move that has angered clergy sex abuse victims and advocates, Pope Francis on the first day of his papacy visited Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and met Cardinal Bernard Law, the basillica’s now retired pastor. In 2002, Law resigned as head of the Boston Archdiocese because of his extensive role in ignoring, concealing and enabling child sex crimes by more than 100 priests.

[Telegraph]

A handful of sources (the Italian daily, Il Fatto Quotidiano and London’s Daily Mail) claim that the pope rebuked Law and intends to force him to live in a cloistered setting. Both SNAP and Bishop Accountability.org doubt these claims, and are urging papal spokesmen to clarify the situation. Both groups would support moving Law but emphasize that this step, if it happens, would be “just the first of many such disciplinary moves needed to deter future cover ups of child sex crimes.” And they stress that it would be more effective and powerful if Pope Francis were to clearly discipline sitting prelates, not just one retired one.

[Mark Shea]

[Mundo]

The second most critical office in the Vatican is the Secretary of State, currently Cardinal Tarsicio Bertone. According to several news accounts and Vatican observers, Bertone is very likely to be replaced, and both groups are urging Pope Francis to choose a prelate with a clear and tough track record of removing those who commit and/or conceal child sex crimes.

The groups are also pushing to have the current head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) replaced immediately. He’s Gerhard Ludwig Mueller of Regensburg, Germany. In 2004, in Regensburg, Mueller assigned Rev. Peter Kramer as pastor of a parish, despite Kramer’s criminal conviction in 2000 for sexually abusing two brothers, ages 9 and 12, and his diagnosis as a pedophile by a court-appointed expert. Mueller’s re-assignment of a convicted sexual offender violated new guidelines approved by the German bishops. Kramer went on to sexually assault boys in his new parish.

[BishopAccountability.org]

And last week, SNAP called on the next pope to oust Fr. Robert Oliver of Boston, the recently-named Vatican prosecutor on abuse cases. The group had harshly condemned Oliver’s appointment in January.

[SNAP]

[Daily Mail]

[TGCOM24]

About SNAP
SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, is the world’s oldest and largest support group for clergy abuse victims. SNAP was founded in 1988, is based in Chicago and has more than 12,000 members in 65 nations (but we have heard from victims in more than 100 countries). Despite the word “priest” in our title, we help people who were molested by religious figures of all denominations, including nuns, rabbis, bishops, and Protestant ministers. Our website is SNAPnetwork.org.

About BishopAccountability.org
Founded in 2003, BishopAccountability.org is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, and documents the crisis of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. It offers an online collection of more than 100,000 pages of church records, legal documents, and media reports. Its hardcopy archive is approaching one million pages. The mission of the organization is to give the public convenient access to information pertaining to the abuse crisis in the U.S. and worldwide. An independent non-profit corporation, BishopAccountability.org is an archive and a data center. It is not a victims’ advocacy group or a reform group.

CONTACT
David Clohessy’s Italian cell 334 791 2239 or 339 215 7504 (SNAPclohessy@aol.com) or at the Hotel Cambridge, Via Palestro 87, Rome 00185 (011 39 06 49384917)
Anne Barrett Doyle 001 781 439 5208 or 001 (39) 781 439 5208 or barrett.doyle@comcast.net or Hotel Hilton Garden Inn (39) 06 845441, fax (39) 06 8555171
Clohessy will be in Rome until Wednesday, March 20. Barrett-Doyle will be in Rome until Sunday, March 17.

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TEXAS
Associated Baptist Press

By Bob Allen

A Southern Baptist megachurch claims it called police on a longtime church member not for questioning how church leaders handled a matter of sexual abuse two decades ago, but for posting threatening messages on Twitter.

“When it comes to protecting our people, we take that very seriously,” Ben Lovvorn, director of administration at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, said in a news story broadcast March 14 on Dallas-Fort Worth television station WFAA.

The segment showed screen shots captured from the Twitter account of Chris Tynes, a 14-year member of Prestonwood. One showed a photo of a minister’s parking spot with the words, “My target.” Another said, “I’m sitting in my perfect ambush spot.”

The WFAA story doesn’t say why the 32,000-member megachurch was monitoring Tynes’ Twitter account in the first place. Tynes said March 15 those messages appeared only briefly and were taken down before security guards ordered him off the church campus when he showed up without an appointment to try and meet with a church leader March 5.

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Eurasia Review

By Nimal Fernando

Simon Peter’s latest successor is now in place. Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now known as Pope Francis I, who had been the archbishop of Buenos Aires, follows 265 other pontiffs as the representative of Jesus Christ on Earth.

He will no doubt have to summon all his management skills to deal effectively with more than a few challenges before the Roman Catholic Church.

As the past year and more has made abundantly clear, Catholics worldwide have voiced their unease, if not displeasure, in the church’s handling of the sex abuse by clergy. Catholics in the United States, for instance, tend to view the scandal over sex abuse by clergy as the most pressing issue for their church today, as an early-March poll by the Pew Research Centre showed.

Asked what they thought was the Roman Catholic Church’s most important problem, 34 percent of U.S. Catholics mentioned sex abuse, paedophilia or some other reference to the scandal. Nine percent of the respondents also viewed dishonesty, low credibility and low trust, taken together, as another problem that needs to be addressed.

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UNITED STATES
Chicago Tribune

By Rachael LevyTribune reporter
3:11 p.m. CDT, March 15, 2013

A prominent activist group in the Roman Catholic Church’s clergy-abuse scandal today called for Pope Francis to meet with them and for Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George to help bring about that meeting.

“We want to begin a new dialogue with him, and with the church we want to begin a real dialogue about prevention of child sexual abuse,” said Peter Isely, the Midwest director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, at a Friday morning press conference in front of Chicago archdiocesan headquarters.

Standing in front of a handful of abuse victims and church reform advocates, Isely called for a rule within the church that would eject clergy who have abused children.

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UNITED STATES
The Berkeley Daily Planet

ECLECTIC RANT: Is Pope Francis the Right Choice to Fix a Church in Disarray?

By Ralph E. Stone

Friday March 15, 2013

As the whole world now knows, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope (Pope Francis). Clearly, the cardinals saw him as a safe, compromise choice. In other words, a keeper of the status quo. He holds traditional Catholic Church views. Otherwise he would not have been elected. He opposes abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, adoption by gays and lesbians, and contraception.

He was criticized by human rights activists for not openly confronting the terrorism by the Argentine dictatorship in the 1970s that was kidnapping and killing thousands of people as it sought to eliminate “subversive elements.” In fact, a human rights lawyer has filed a criminal complaint against Bergoglio, accusing him of involvement in the 1976 kidnappings of two priests. At the time, he was the superior in the Society of Jesus of Argentina.

How will he deal with the various scandals facing the Catholic Church? The most pressing, of course, is the widespread allegations of sexual child abuse by Catholic clergy and the coverup by church officials. A study conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that 10,669 allegations of child sexual abuse were reported to church officials in the U.S. alone between 1950 and 2002.

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MONTANA
Ravalli Republic

Associated Press

HELENA – An attorney representing dozens of Native Americans in one of two sex-abuse lawsuits against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Helena said he hopes a new pope will mean a new approach by the church in dealing with victims.

But Pope Francis appears to be a conservative in a time when more transparency is needed, lawyer Blaine Tamaki said Thursday.

“We are very concerned the church needs to have a pope who is more progressive than they have had in the past, and the new pope appears to be one of those keeping the conservative doctrine of the Catholic church in place,” he said.

Tamaki’s clients claim they were sexually abused by nuns and priests in western Montana from the 1940s to the 1970s. That lawsuit has been combined with another that claims the Helena diocese covered up abuse for decades, and there now are more than 300 plaintiffs involved in the suits.

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LOS ANGELES (CA)
Los Angeles Times

By Harriet Ryan and Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times
March 15, 2013

In an acknowledgment that new revelations in the priest abuse scandal have tarnished the church’s image, lawyers for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles are seeking to postpone upcoming sexual abuse trials or relocate them to a courthouse 200 miles away because they don’t believe they can get a fair trial in Southern California.

The church’s request to a judge for a delay or change of venue in pending cases this week came just hours after the announcement that the archdiocese would pay two brothers an unprecedented $4 million each to avoid a molestation trial set for April. The payouts to the men, part of a $10-million deal ending four lawsuits, dwarfed settlements the church paid victims in recent years and underscored the archdiocese’s reluctance to face juries in its own backyard.

“We think that the environment in Los Angeles today is currently hostile,” archdiocese lawyer J. Michael Hennigan said.

The January release of personnel files showing that church hierarchy in the 1980s and 1990s shielded abuser priests from police refocused public attention on the clergy sex scandal. In court papers, archdiocese attorneys blamed media coverage, which they described as “unrelenting obloquy, condemnation and contempt,” for poisoning the potential jury pool.

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AUSTRALIA
WA Today

March 16, 2013

Paul Byrnes

Reviewer rating:
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I am old enough to remember those words as part of the Latin Mass. I learnt them growing up in the Catholic Church in Australia. We spoke them to ask forgiveness for our sins. ”Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault …”

As I was learning them, the Vatican was receiving the first reports of the extent of one priest’s sexual abuse of deaf children at St John’s School for the Deaf in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Father Lawrence Murphy, ordained in 1950, was a master of American Sign Language, a charismatic personality and a great fund-raiser. He may also have abused more than 200 deaf children in the three decades in which he was allowed to remain at St John’s, even after his activities were reported to the Vatican.

Father Murphy took a holiday in 1958. Father David Walsh came to the school. Some of the boys told him what Father Murphy was doing. Father Walsh reported the allegations to Archbishop Meyer of Milwaukee and to the Vatican’s apostolic delegate in Washington, DC. Walsh never came back. In 1963, Father Murphy was promoted to head of the school.

This setting gives extra meaning to the title of Silence in the House of God: Mea Maxima Culpa. Many of these boys arrived at St John’s aged just four, from families in which they could not easily communicate. Many hearing parents never learnt to sign.

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