["Church Sex Abuse Survivors to March on Vatican; AssociatedPress; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AmpgJQ6NwM ]
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"Vatican Letter to Irish Bishops on Sex Abuse: A 'Smoking Gun' in Conspiracy?"
"The Vatican is scrambling to tamp down yet another crisis in the ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal, this time over the revelation of a 1997 letter from a senior Vatican official telling the bishops of Ireland not to implement their new policy of reporting abusive priests to law enforcement authorities...
Advocates for victims and other critics say the letter from the Vatican's envoy to Ireland at the time is a "smoking gun" proving their claims that the Vatican helped direct an effort to conceal abuses for years.
"The letter is of huge international significance, because it shows that the Vatican's intention is to prevent reporting of abuse to criminal authorities. And if that instruction applied here, it applied everywhere," said Colm O'Gorman, director of the Irish chapter of the human rights watchdog Amnesty International..."
David Gibson; Religion Reporter; Politics Daily; http://www.politicsdaily.com/2011/01/19/vatican-letter-to-irish-bishops-on-sex-abuse-a-smoking-gun-in/
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"DUBLIN — A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police – a disclosure that victims' groups described as "the smoking gun" needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests.
The newly revealed letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican's rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland's first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.
The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church's right to handle all child-abuse allegations and determine punishments in house rather than give that power to civil authorities..." ["Vatican Warned Irish Bishops Not To Report Abuse"; The Huffington Post; 1/19/2011; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/18/vatican-irish-bishops_n_810535.html ]
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"Pope Benedict XVI today called on Vatican officials to examine why the Catholic Church allowed the sexual abuse of children by priests to continue unchallenged for so long, and to push through reforms to ensure such scandals never happen again...
"We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred," the pope said in his traditional end-of-year speech to Vatican cardinals and bishops. "We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation, in our whole way of living the Christian life, to allow such a thing to happen."
Over the past year, the Catholic Church has been rocked by a series of child sex-abuse scandals in Ireland, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. In many of these cases, it was discovered that high-up members of the clergy had covered up for pedophile priests and that for decades Vatican officials turned a blind eye to the crimes.
Pope Benedict XVI pauses as he delivers his message during the traditional exchange of Christmas greetings with the Curia, in the Regia Hall at the Vatican today. The pope called for the Catholic Church to scrutinize itself and root out the truth about mistakes made so it can prevent the pedophile abuse crisis from ever happening again.
The pope accepted the church's culpability, but he argued that the scandal had to be seen in its correct social "context," one in which many people see child pornography, drug use and human trafficking as perfectly acceptable...."
"Pope Benedict: Church Must Reflect on Sex Abuse Scandals"; AOL.News; Dec 20, 2010; http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/20/pope-benedict-church-must-reflect-on-sex-abuse-scandals/
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Related News:
"Seizure of Vatican Assets Upheld"
"ROME (AP) — A judge has upheld the seizure of $30.2 million in Vatican assets in a money-laundering investigation involving the Vatican’s bank... Italian authorities seized the money in September as part of an investigation into whether Vatican transactions had violated Italian banking transparency laws, a key weapon against organized crime and corruption... News reports quoted the judge, Maria Teresa Covatta, as saying that the intended beneficiaries of the transactions from the Vatican bank account at a Rome bank were still unclear... Prosecutors have said that clergy members might have acted as frontmen for corrupt businessmen and mobsters. The Vatican has blamed the seizure on a “misunderstanding” and has said it can clear up the matter..."
"Pope Says Sex Scandal Has Hit Unimaginable Dimension"; RACHEL DONADIO; The New York Times; December 20, 2010; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/world/europe/21pope.html?_r=1&hp
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
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