The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.
The decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests...
Jane Via, a county prosecutor, can't receive the sacraments at an official Roman Catholic Church. She can't even be buried in consecrated ground when her time comes.
Yet she gives communion, marries people -- even gays -- and takes confession. Via, who was ordained in Europe without the Vatican's approval, is apparently the only woman who claims to be a Roman Catholic priest in the county. She oversees a parish that meets in a Serra Mesa neighborhood church each Sunday evening.
The Roman Catholic Church has excommunicated all women who claim to have been ordained as priests, cutting their ties to the rituals of the faith. And earlier this month, the Vatican linked the ordination of women to pedophilia in the hierarchy of church offenses...
An Illinois man is suing the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI for allegedly covering up sexual abuse by a priest at a Catholic school in Wisconsin.
The lawsuit demands the Vatican release the names of thousands of Catholic priests that the suit says have "credible allegations of sexual misconduct" against them...
This story gets more bizarre as it develops. A couple of cardinals seem to argue that they're being hassled for protecting child molesters because they're anti-abortion. I'm Catholic myself, and I'm disgusted with Pope Benedict and his pals.
Some people seem to think that if they do something wrong, the best tactic is to claim to be a victim oneself. They attack instead of apologizing. The Vatican is claiming to be a victim of anti-Catholic hate.
But the Vatican isn't alone in feeling sorry for itself instead of its victims. Religious bigotry is also what San Diego schools attorney Dan Shinoff claims is the motive of one who would criticize his actions. Note to Daniel Shinoff: The recent analogy between persecuted priests and persecuted Jews is the type of analogy that you could rightfully be angry about, as opposed to this. And ironically, sometimes schools you represent defend child molesters in a similar manner to the Vatican.
ROME — A senior Vatican priest speaking at a Good Friday service compared the uproar over sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church — which have included reports about Pope Benedict XVI’s oversight role in two cases — to the persecution of the Jews, sharply raising the volume in the Vatican’s counterattack.
The remarks, on the day Christians mark the crucifixion, underscored how much the Catholic Church has felt under attack from recent news reports and criticism over how it has handled charges of child molestation against priests in the past, and sought to focus attention on the church as the central victim.
In recent weeks, Vatican officials and many bishops have angrily denounced news reports that Benedict failed to act strongly enough against pedophile priests, once as archbishop of Munich and Freising in 1980 and once as a leader of a powerful Vatican congregation in the 1990s....
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican heatedly defended Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday, claiming accusations that he helped cover up the actions of pedophile priests are part of an anti-Catholic "hate" campaign targeting the pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.
Vatican Radio broadcast comments by two senior cardinals explaining "the motive for these attacks" on the pope and the Vatican newspaper chipped in with spirited comments from another top cardinal.
"The pope defends life and the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman, in a world in which powerful lobbies would like to impose a completely different" agenda, Spanish Cardinal Julian Herranz, head of the disciplinary commission for Holy See officials, said on the radio.
Herranz didn't identify the lobbies but "defense of life" is Vatican shorthand for anti-abortion efforts....
I’m a Catholic woman who makes a living being adversarial. We have a pope who has instructed Catholic women not to be adversarial.
It’s a conundrum.
I’ve been wondering, given the vitriolic reaction of the New York archbishop to my column defending nuns and the dismissive reaction of the Vatican to my column denouncing the church’s response to the pedophilia scandal, if they are able to take a woman’s voice seriously. Some, like Bill Donohue of the Catholic League, seem to think women are trying to undermine the church because of abortion and women’s ordination.
I thought they might respond better to a male Dowd.
My brother Kevin is conservative and devout — his hobby is collecting crèches — and has raised three good Catholic sons. When I asked him to share his thoughts on the scandal, I learned, shockingly, that we agreed on some things. He wrote the following:
“In pedophilia, the church has unleashed upon itself a plague that threatens its very future, and yet it remains in a curious state of denial. The church I grew up in was black and white, no grays. That’s why my father, an Irish immigrant, liked it so much. The chaplain of the Police and Fire departments told me once ‘Your father was a fierce Catholic, very fierce.’
My brothers and I were sleepily at his side for the monthly 8 a.m. Holy Name Mass and the guarding of the Eucharist in the middle of the night during the 40-hour ritual at Easter. Once during a record snowstorm in 1958, we were marched single-file to church for Mass only to find out the priests next door couldn’t get out of the rectory.
The priest was always a revered figure, the embodiment of Christ changing water into wine. (Older parishioners took it literally.) The altar boys would drink the dregs.
When I was in the 7th grade, one of the new priests took four of us to the drive-in restaurant and suggested a game of ‘pink belly’ on the way back; we pulled up a boy’s shirt and slapped his belly until it was pink. When the new priest joined in, it seemed like more groping than slapping. But we thought it was inadvertent. And my parents never would have believed a priest did anything inappropriate anyway. A boy in my class told me much later that the same priest climbed into bed with him in 1958 at a rectory sleepover, but my friend threw him to the floor. The priest protested he was sleepwalking. Three days later, the archbishop sent the priest to a rehab place in New Mexico; he ended up as a Notre Dame professor...
In his book, ‘Goodbye! Good Men,’ author Michael Rose writes that the liberalized rules set up a takeover of seminaries by homosexuals.
Vatican II liberalized rules but left the most outdated one: celibacy... it ended up shrinking the priest pool and producing the wrong kind of candidates — drawing men confused about their sexuality who put our children in harm’s way.
The church is dying from a thousand cuts. Its cover-up has cost a fortune and been a betrayal worthy of Judas. The money spent came from social programs, Catholic schools and the poor.
This should be a sin that cries to heaven for vengeance.
I asked a friend of mine recently what he would do if his child was molested after the church knew. ‘I would probably kill someone,’ he replied...
Judge Hayes says that I don't understand Constitutional law (click on image above to read her decision). She's right that I don't understand that the Constitution allows Judge Hayes to impose broad prior restraints on a citizen journalist in order to protect law firms that appear before her. Well, not ALL the law firms who appear before her, but one of them, a group that was founded by two members of what some school-watchers think of as the Poway Pow-wow, lawyers who live in the suburb beloved by Judge Hayes.
What is this constitutional subtlety that Judge Hayes accuses me of not understanding? It seems to be the Hayes Doctrine, devised to fill a gaping hole in the legal system of the United States--a hole that allows citizens to become informed about actions of public entities that their lawyers don't want the public to know about.
In my benighted state, I believe that the law that Hayes is supposed to follow is Balboa Island Village Inn v. Lemen, 156 P.3d 339 (Cal. 2007), a decision striking down an overly broad injunction on speech. (Judge Hayes' injunction says I must remove every mention of Stutz law firm from my websites, and never mention their name again. Balboa Island says that court may only apply prior restraints to specific statements found to be defamatory.
Although the University continues to be under censure by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for academic freedom violations and continues to ban certain speakers from campus, CUA has made a general statement of policy that the academic freedom of its faculty and students will be respected.[18] It considers academic freedom a "fundamental condition for research and dissemination of information."[18] The policy sets forth its respect for the right and responsibility of its faculty and students to (i) conduct research, (ii) publish their findings, and (iii) discuss ideas according to the principles, sources and methods of their academic disciplines.[18] The University further "sanctions" the investigation of "unexplored phenomena, advancement of knowledge, and critical examination of ideas, old and new" and "accepts the responsibility of protecting both teacher and student from being forced to deny truth that has been discovered or to assert claims that have not been established in the discipline."[18]
However, the University specifically provides that "theologians" in the University are "expected to give assent to the teachings of the magisterium in keeping with the various degrees of assent that are called for by authoritative teaching."[18]
