UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody
Posted on May 7, 2017 by Betty Clermont
Every pope “possesses supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely” according to the Code of Canon Law.
Members of the Roman Curia are appointed and granted authority by the pope.
Pope Francis has also changed the Curia administration. First he created a Secretariat for the Economy and a Council for the Economy. Next, he created a Secretariat for Communications. He replaced the management of the Vatican Bank and the Vatican’s financial “watchdog,” the Financial Information Authority. In the past year, he created new departments for Integral Human Development and another for the Laity, Family and Life replacing five previous councils. Also, the pope appointed 27 new members to the Congregation for Divine Worship, changing the department through its personnel.
Yet the anglophone media has declared in scores of reports that Pope Francis’ struggles to “clean-up” the Vatican but is thwarted by his subordinates, often characterized as “conservatives.” (e.g. here, here, here, here)
Pope Francis, however, refers to his subordinates as “the leprosy of the papacy.” He has accused them of “spiritual Alzheimer’s,” “existential schizophrenia,” “hypocrisy typical of the mediocre,” “progressive spiritual emptiness,” and having cliques that “enslave their members and become a cancer that threatens the harmony of the body.”
SEX ABUSE
Working on the FBI’s specialized team investigating child pornography and sexual abuse crimes is so disturbing that it is the only department staffed entirely by volunteers who are free to leave at any time.
Pope Francis’ leadership in allowing sexual assaults against children to continue is the most sickening and unprecedented in modern ecclesial history.
More than fifteen years after the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” on predator priests, the U.S. bishops published their most recent self-report.
Shockingly, 172 clerics accused of sexual abuse of minors, as counted between 2014 and mid-2015 inclusive, are still in active ministry, retired, resigned or their whereabouts unknown.
Another 121 were permanently or temporarily removed from ministry and 40 were laicized (defrocked). No mention is made how many are free men or if any are incarcerated.
“Research has consistently shown that false allegations of child sexual abuse by children are rare.”
Between 2013-2015 inclusive, 2,315 victim/survivors were reported to the bishops.
Suicides of clerical sex abuse victims “are over 30 times the rate in the general population.”
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