Survivor dismisses Vatican response

A prominent clerical abuse survivor has dismissed the Vatican’s response to claims that it tried to frustrate a clerical child abuse inquiry as another attempt to absolve itself of responsibility.

Andrew Madden urged the Government to press-ahead with tough new reporting guidelines without undue or unnecessary exceptions.

Mr Madden said: “The gimlet eye of the canon lawyer has been busy in the Vatican as publication of the Holy See’s response to the Irish Government regarding the Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne reveals every effort to continue to find ways for the Holy See to absolve itself of any responsibility for the cover up of the sexual abuse of children by priests for decades from one side of the world to the other.”

Support group One in Four accused the Vatican of not accepting responsibility for a culture which facilitated child abuse.

Maeve Lewis, executive director, said they were disappointed by the Holy See’s response, branding it an exercise in self-justification.

“The Church is accepting no responsibility for the prevailing culture which facilitated the sexual abuse of children and instead the Vatican is presenting itself as a body which has been misunderstood and misinterpreted,” Ms Lewis said.

Mr Madden said the statement’s reference to the absence of statutory mandatory reporting in Ireland does not excuse the lengths Bishops went to conceal child sexual abuse. “Nor does it excuse the way Catholic Bishops misled people into thinking they were implementing child protection guidelines when clearly they were not.”

But All Ireland primate Cardinal Sean Brady welcomed the response, and claimed it conveyed the Holy See’s profound abhorrence for the abuse, and sorrow and shame for victims’ sufferings.

“I believe the response has been carefully prepared and respectfully presented,” Cardinal Brady said.

“The time taken to prepare the reply, and its content, indicates the commitment on the part of the Holy See to deal with this matter earnestly, fairly and sensitively. It shows an appreciation of the seriousness of the questions raised and of the importance, especially for survivors of abuse, of effectively combating this crime.”

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Sex, Celibacy, and Priesthood: A Bishop’s Provocative Inquisition

Sex, Celibacy, and Priesthood is a pastoral review of the research, sexual activity, and celibacy among Roman Catholic priests. It features heart-wrenching, anonymous, and candid self-disclosures about the sexual behaviors of heterosexual, gay, and bisexual priests. It explores the meaning of celibacy in accordance with Roman Catholic Church teachings, doctrine, and canon law. It is an honest, raw, and frank study of current perspectives on celibacy in light of priestly sexual behaviors. This new book allows for Roman Catholic priests to speak out in their own voices about their struggles and conflicts between celibacy and their sexual activities.

Seminaries, formation teams, religious superiors, pastoral care counselors, spiritual directors, therapists, and anyone fascinated or concerned about the sexual scandals within the rank and file of the Roman Catholic Church will find Sex, Celibacy, and Priesthood a candid and transparent study.

In a time when most people are disgusted with the sexual scandal cover-ups, smokescreens, and a veil of secrecy provided by many Roman Catholic bishops and their apologists, Sex, Celibacy, and Priesthood tells the truth and encourages us to think imaginatively and compassionately about an issue of crucial importance to the Roman Catholic Church at this time in history.

About The Author:
The Most Reverend Lou Bordisso is Bishop Emeritus within the Old Catholic faith tradition serving the Diocese of California, American Catholic Church. He is a religious with the Order of St. John Vianney (OSJV) providing pastoral and spiritual care for both ordained clergy and lay ministers.

Prior to being received into the Old Catholic faith tradition and the Diocese of California, Bishop Bordisso was a Roman Catholic vowed religious. Bishop Bordisso has served as Presiding Bishop for the American Catholic Diocese of California and as Provincial for the Order of Saint John Vianney (OSJV).

Like the vast majority of the clergy in the Old Catholic/Autocephalous tradition, Bishop Bordisso is bi-vocational. Bishop Bordisso has been licensed as a marriage and family therapist for over two decades.

Bishop Bordisso is program host for the public and community access television and online broadcast, “Political Inquisitions” which addresses ethics, morality, spirituality, and politics, interviewing political and community leaders about a variety of distinguished topics.

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Vatican rejects cover-up claims over Irish Clergy Sex Abuse report

The Vatican has rejected claims by Irish PM Enda Kenny that it sabotaged efforts by Irish bishops to report child-molesting priests to police.

It follows the damning Cloyne Report that showed how allegations of clerical sex-abuse in Cork had been covered up.

In a speech to parliament in July, Mr Kenny accused the Church of putting its reputation ahead of abuse victims.

The Vatican said it was “sorry and ashamed” over the scandal but said his claims were “unfounded”.

“The Holy See is deeply concerned at the findings of the commission of inquiry concerning grave failures in the ecclesiastical governance of the diocese of Cloyne,” said the Vatican, in a detailed response to the allegations.

“The Holy See… in no way hampered or sought to interfere in any inquiry into cases of child sex abuse in the Diocese of Cloyne.”

“Furthermore, at no stage did the Holy See seek to interfere with Irish civil law or impede the civil authority in the exercise of its duties.”

‘Misinterpretation’
Mr Kenny had told the Irish parliament that the report into how allegations of sex abuse by priests in Cork had been covered up showed change was urgently needed.

Enda Kenny accused the Catholic Church of putting its reputation ahead of child rape victims
“The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation’,” he said.

Parliament then passed a motion deploring the Holy See for “undermining child protection frameworks” after a letter to Irish bishops appeared to diminish Irish guidelines on reporting sex abuse by referring to them as “study guidelines”.

The Vatican then recalled its special envoy in Dublin, Papal Nuncio Giuseppe Leanza, to discuss the impact of the report.

But the Holy See’s response, published on Saturday, said Mr Kenny’s blistering accusations were based on a misinterpretation of a 1997 Vatican letter expressing “serious reservations” about the Irish bishops’ 1996 policy requiring bishops to report abusers to police.

“In a spirit of humility, the Holy See, while rejecting unfounded accusations, welcomes all objective and helpful observations and suggestions to combat with determination the appalling crime of sexual abuse of minors,” said the statement.

Released in July, the 400-page Cloyne Report found that Bishop John Magee – who stood down in March 2009 after serving as bishop of Cloyne since 1987 – had falsely told the government and the health service that his diocese was reporting all abuse allegations to authorities.

It also found that the bishop deliberately misled another inquiry and his own advisors by creating two different accounts of a meeting with a priest suspected of abusing a child – one for the Vatican and the other for diocesan files.

It discovered that, contrary to repeated assertions on its part, the Diocese of Cloyne did not implement the procedures set out in the Church protocols for dealing with allegations of child sex-abuse. It said the greatest failure was that no complaints, except one in 1996, were reported to the health authorities until 2008.

It said the disturbing findings were compounded by the fact that the commission found that the Vatican’s response to the Church guidelines was entirely unhelpful and gave comfort and support to those who dissented from the guidelines. It said this was “wholly unacceptable”.

http://tinyurl.com/3jpsf7z

Vatican says mandatory sex ed programs don’t work

When it comes to sex education programs, the Catholic Church is painted as old-fashioned and callous about teen pregnancy and disease. But governments that mandate sex education in the schools are fooling themselves about its effectiveness, the Vatican newspaper said.

Writing on the front page of L’Osservatore Romano Aug. 30, Lucetta Scaraffia looked specifically at New York City, where students in middle school and high school will be required to attend a semester-long course in sex education.

Scaraffia, a professor of contemporary history at Rome’s La Sapienza University and a frequent contributor to the Vatican newspaper, said that “to avoid religious controversy, chastity will be cited among birth control methods and teachers will have to speak about sex with some caution” in the New York courses.

Still, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York criticized the mandatory program as usurping the rights of parents to educate their children in line with their beliefs and values, she said.

The situation has been repeated several times, Scaraffia wrote: “The state decides to include compulsory sexual education in schools, and the Catholic Church opposes it, earning the image of an obscurantist force, cruel because of its indifference to the consequences its refusal could have among young people, that is, unwanted pregnancies and disease.”

“It is not clear why public institutions in the West continue to have such magical trust in the effectiveness of sex education,” especially when young people in those countries continue to have precocious, unprotected sex, leading to an increase of disease, pregnancy and abortion, she said.

In Italy, where there is no mandatory sex ed in school, there is a low risk of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease among the young, she said.

“This is thanks to the family, to the loving vigilance of parents over their children, to the fact that kids are not left to themselves with a box of contraceptives as the only defense against their passions and mistakes,” she said.

“It is also thanks to the Catholic Church, which continues to teach that sexual relations are much more than some kind of pleasurable exercise to be practiced in an unbridled and risk-free way,” Scaraffia wrote.

For the Catholic Church, she said, sexual activity is an important part of human and spiritual maturity and properly belongs only to marriage and the formation of a family.

“The church teaches respect for one’s own body, which means giving importance and weight to the acts that are done with it, not just taking into consideration the possibility of enjoyment or narcissistic gratification,” Scaraffia wrote.

Human sexuality is not just another subject to be studied in school, “setting out a few dangers it would be best to avoid,” she said.

The real problem is not that young people do not understand what sex is or how to avoid pregnancy and disease; the real problem is the “breakdown of the first institution of moral education, the family,” she said.

http://tinyurl.com/3tpzeqx

A priest’s anti-gay ad campaign

A recent series of advertisements attacking homosexuality has dragged the Catholic Diocese of El Paso into a citywide political recall debate.

The advertisements, titled “The truth about homosexuality,” were written by the Rev. Michael Rodriguez of San Juan Bautista Catholic Church and published in four parts in four consecutive editions of the El Paso Times. The ads started running on Saturday and ended Tuesday. The advertisements were also on elpasotimes.com.

While Rodriguez maintains the ads represent the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, officials of the Diocese of El Paso said they do not.

“These paid advertisements are the personal views and opinions of Father Michael Rodriguez,” said the Rev. Anthony C. Celino, the vicar general and moderator of the curia for the diocese.

Celino said the Catholic Church is not taking and cannot take a side in the recall effort.
The advertisements quote several Bible passages and denounce homosexuality and any encouragement of homosexuality. It also alluded to Mayor John Cook and city Reps. Susie Byrd and Steve Ortega, who are currently the target of a recall petition, organized by Word of Life Church Pastor Tom Brown.

“All Catholics have a moral obligation before God to oppose any government attempt to legalize same-sex unions,” Rodriguez wrote in part two of the series. “Here in El Paso, certain City Council members have remained obstinate in promoting public recognition and legitimization of homosexual unions. Whether
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they realize it or not, their actions are objectively immoral and gravely harmful to marriage and the family. It should be obvious to all Catholics what our duty is with respect to these members of City Council.”

Rodriguez said he wrote the pieces but did not pay for the advertisements or submit the writings to the Times.

A couple from Plano, Texas, paid for the advertisements, he said.
“I decided to write these articles primarily because it’s my duty as a Catholic priest to teach the truth when it comes to faith and morals,” Rodriguez said in a written statement to the Times. “My mission is to labor for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. That’s why I wrote the articles. The government has no right to undermine or redefine the institution of marriage. This is beyond the scope of their competence.”

Rodriguez said he also did not like the fact that the City Council went against the voters’wishes by providing health benefits to the gay and unmarried partners of city employees despite the fact that the public voted not to do that.

“Furthermore, the government has no right to undermine basic public morality,” Rodriguez said. “Unfortunately, members of El Paso’s City Council have made decisions that are immoral, irrational, and contrary to the common good of our city.”

Byrd said the advertisements are a political action because they alluded to the recall effort.

“To me, that is not the most terrible thing about the ad,” Byrd said. “What is, is the fact that he spent a lot of time and money to harm a group in our community.”

Ortega said he does not believe that religion should be mixed with government.
“I haven’t read his opinion pieces,” Ortega said. “I firmly believe in the principle of separation of church and state and therefore his opinions, as a priest, carry absolutely no weight with me as a public official.”

Brown said the advertisements came as a pleasant surprise.
“I think it’s wonderful. It is freedom of speech,” Brown said. “Ultimately, I agree with Rodriguez.”

Brown said the diocese should not remain silent on the recall because it goes against the Catholic faith.
“I think the Catholics should have an opinion,” he said.

Paul Landernan, an adviser for the El Paso chapter of the Stonewall Young Democrats, said that his organization — a youth-based organization that supports lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in the United States — is disappointed that Rodriguez is still stuck in the 19th century.

“He has official duties for the people of his parish,” Landernan said, “some of whom are parents of gay people, related to gay people or work with gay people every day.”
Rodriguez’s words can divide communities, Landernan said.
“Why would a person like this have that level of a violent reaction to the evolution of our society?” he asked. “He suddenly turned the clock back 40 to 50 years to a time when the Jim Crow-type of thinking was acceptable.”

In two weeks, recall petitions for Cook, Byrd and Ortega will be due at City Hall. Landernan said the advertisements’ timing was “curious.”

“It would have been a blip on the radar” if Rodriguez were not a priest, Landernan said. “And really, the church is almost a victim in this. He has almost used the name of the church without authorization.”

The controversy was not limited to the paid advertisements.
On Aug. 21, members of St. Raphael Catholic Church found fliers on their car windshields after church services.

The fliers said, “Éour popes and bishops have reminded us that we must oppose all government efforts to legitimize homosexual unions by attempting to equate them with marriage.”
The fliers also said, “Members of the City Council and the mayor have violated our rights and overturned our popular vote. We must hold our politicians accountable and insist that they truly serve our people.”

The church’s head priest, Monsignor Francis Smith, and the diocese said the fliers were not approved by or affiliated with the church.
“The diocese does not endorse or oppose candidates, political parties, or take actions that can be construed as endorsement or opposition,” Celino said. “Recall fliers claiming to be ‘Catholic’ were not authorized by the Diocese of El Paso.”

Smith said the people who distributed the fliers sneaked into the church’s parking lot during that Sunday’s two largest Masses.
“I always tell my people that if they stick it under your windshield, I did not authorize that,” Smith said. “If it is something worthwhile, then why be sneaky about it.”

The message on the fliers is not what Smith preaches at his church, he said.
“We have been asked several times to take their stance, and we will not,” Smith said. “I do not agree with that lifestyle (homosexuality), but I will help anyone who needs it.”
The fliers also list names and numbers of individuals who filed the intent to recall Cook, Byrd and Ortega.

Two of those individuals, Ben Mendoza and Nacho Padilla, said they had no prior knowledge of the fliers. Neither did Brown, he said.
“I personally would not authorize that,” Mendoza said. “I can see handing it out on the sidewalk, but not on cars.”

Mendoza said he is for the recall because the people’s vote was overthrown and he believes that should be the main issue.

Padilla said the fliers led to more individuals signing petitions.
“What they did has worked really positive,” Padilla said. “We have gotten a lot of signatures. We won’t deny that.”

Brown said he was proud that those who support the recall are acting on their own.
“It’s a free country, and people are free to promote however they want,” Brown said.
Brown said “we’d like to make more progress” as the deadline nears to turn in recall petitions.

“I’d like to say we can predict victory, but we are not there yet. We need to keep working.”

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