Editors Comment: Pope Benedict was drawn directly into the massive sex scandal involving his church after it was claimed that a paedophile cleric was able to continue offending after the pontiff, then Archbishop of Munich, decided to send him for therapy, rather than report him to police. According to the Times Online, not long after this priest was accused of the sexual abuse of three boys in 1979, he was offered a new home in Munich by Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. Ratzinger wanted Father Peter Hullermann to undergo psychotherapy. A psychiatrist concluded that Hullermann was untreatable, however.
So what happened? Believe it or not, Huth’s warning was ignored and this deviant priest was allowed to return to pastoral work in a local state school where he again abused boys. Of course he was again convicted of the sexual abuse of minors. But even that was not the end of his time in the church. He continued working with altar boys, and he was still working as a priest right up to 2010, when he was suspended from a Bavarian tourist resort for breaching a church order in 2008 to avoid any involvement with children.
Priests in Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico and in the Pope’s former diocese in Germany have been accused of mistreating children. In the Netherlands, a spokesman for the Dutch church said that more than 1,100 allegations of paedophilia committed by clergy since 1950 have emerged this month. The Swiss Catholic Church is examining at least nine “serious” cases of suspected sexual abuse or harassment during the past six years. They are among 60 reported cases of sexual impropriety by Swiss priests or lay Catholics over the past 15 years.
The Rev Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at Georgetown University and the author of Inside the Vatican warned that the sex abuse scandal will only worsen, with thousands more cases likely to emerge across Europe. Similar claims have come from Canada and America (The Telegraph).
This unholy saga raises serious questions about the Catholic Church, which seems more intent on the protection of the entity as a whole, rather than on the welfare of those it serves. Read the shocking article below to find out more on this subject.
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Arrogant, corrupt, secretive – the Catholic church failed to tackle evil
The Guardian, March 21, 2010
telegraph.co.uk
The cover-up of child sexual abuse by the Catholic church is not about sex and it is not about Catholicism. It is not, as Pope Benedict rightly argued in yesterday’s distressingly bland pastoral letter, about priestly celibacy. It is about power.
The urge to prey on children is not confined to the supposedly celibate clergy and exists in all walks of life. We know that it can become systemic in state and voluntary, as well as in religious, institutions. We know that all kinds of organisations – from banks to political movements – can generate a culture of perverted loyalty in which otherwise decent people will collude in crimes “for the greater good”.
In none of these respects is the Catholic church unique. What makes it different – and what gives this crisis its depth – is the church’s power. It had the authority, indeed the majesty, to compel victims and their families to collude in their own abuse and to keep hideous crimes secret for decades. It is that system of authority that is at the heart of the corruption. And that is why Benedict’s pastoral letter, for all its expressions of “shame and remorse”, is unable to deal with the central issue. The only adequate response to the crisis is a fundamental questioning of the closed, hierarchical power system of which the pope himself is the apex and the embodiment. It was never remotely likely that Benedict would be able to understand those questions, let alone answer them.
It is this contradiction that explains why the church has been trying, and failing, to put the abuse crisis behind it for well over a decade now. There is something symbolically apt, for example, about the way the grotesque figure of the dead paedophile, Father Brendan Smyth, has returned to threaten the position of the head of the Irish church, Cardinal Sean Brady.
Smyth emerged as a public figure in 1994, when he was convicted in Belfast after almost half a century of child abuse. He almost destroyed the reputation of Brady’s predecessor, Cahal Daly. He even contributed to the fall of Albert Reynolds’s government in 1994. It makes a kind of grim sense that his horrific career, and the failure of the church to take any real steps to stop him, has re-emerged to haunt another cardinal. (more…)
The Apple Of God's Eye 