Tag: Catholic Church

Posted on

Pope Orders Audit of Church’s Wealth as Whistleblowers Pursued

By 

st peters

Pope Francis, galvanized by a scandal over Vatican finances, has ordered the most powerful bodies in the city-state to launch an unprecedented audit of its wealth and crack down on runaway spending.

At the suggestion of his economic chief, Cardinal George Pell, Francis has set up a “Working-Party for the Economic Future” which brings together the Secretariat of State, or prime minister’s office, the Vatican Bank and other agencies.

Francis has told the panel “to address the financial challenges and identify how more resources can be devoted to the many good works of the Church, especially supporting the poor and vulnerable,” Danny Casey, director of Pell’s office at the Secretariat for the Economy, said in an interview.

The pope’s initiatives come as five people stand trial in the Vatican over the leak of confidential documents in two books published last month that described corruption, mismanagement and wasteful spending by church officials. Those on trial deny wrongdoing.

Francis, 78, has pushed for more openness and transparency in Vatican financial and economic agencies but he has faced resistance from the Rome bureaucracy.

Seek Corruption

On the flight back to Rome on Monday after a visit to Africa, Francis told reporters that the so-called Vatileaks II scandal was an indication of the mess that he’s trying to sort out. The trial of two former Vatican employees alongside the books’ authors highlighted Church efforts “to seek out corruption, the things which aren’t right,” he said, according to a transcript provided by the Vatican.

The working group, which held its first meeting last week, will study measures to cut costs and raise revenue as part of a long-term financial plan.

“This will include comparing actual expenditure against budgets at a consolidated level, which is a new initiative,” Casey said.

As officials try to drag the Vatican’s financial management into the 21st century officials will appoint one of the world’s top-four accounting firms to review the Church’s processes, Casey said. The audit will look at financial investments, real estate and cultural assets. The four biggest firms are PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Deloitte & Touche LLP, EY LLP and KPMG LLP.

Assets that would never be sold and thus have no market value — including St Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel and priceless art treasures by Michelangelo — will be included in financial statements though the Vatican is still considering whether and how they should be valued.

While Casey declined to speculate on overall asset values, Pell, his boss, said earlier this year that the Vatican’s total assets were worth more than $3 billion. Separately, the Institute for the Works of Religion, better-known as the Vatican Bank, has 6 billion euros ($6.4 billion) in deposits, and assets under management and custody for clients.

Real Estate

According to the two books which triggered the latest scandal — Avarice, by Emiliano Fittipaldi, and Merchants in the Temple, by Gianluigi Nuzzi — the Vatican’s assets are massively under-valued. For Fittipaldi, its real estate holdings alone are worth an estimated 4 billion euros, four times as much as their book value.

The two volumes relate that Francis himself has denounced costs as being “out of control” and that St Peter’s Pence donations go not to the needy but to Vatican departments. Many cardinals live in apartments of some 500 square meters (5,400 square feet) waited on by aides and surrounded by Renaissance art.

The Australian Pell, prefect at the Secretariat for the Economy, has been drawn into the controversy. Avarice alleges that Pell and three aides, including Casey, accumulated expenses totaling 501,000 euros between July 2014 and January 2015 for costs including business class flights from Rome to London, Munich and Malta.

Resistant to Change

Pell, who denied the allegations when they first surfaced in the Italian magazine L’Espresso in February, declined to respond to a request for comment. Casey said it was “ridiculous” to suggest the spending was for personal expenses.

“The Cardinal is committed to cost-management as is his whole team,” he said. “Unfortunately every leader working on the financial reforms has at some stage been criticized either personally or professionally — this is a classic diversionary tactic and perhaps a sign that good progress is being made.”

While Francis recruiting experts from outside the Church is a step in the right direction, the pontiff may not be around long enough to see through his reforms, according to papal biographer, Austen Ivereigh. Francis has told his entourage that he plans to remain pontiff until 2020, Ivereigh said — an indication he may then resign, like his predecessor Benedict XVI.

The Vatican can be reformed “but it will take a generation because the existing practices and mindset are so well-established,” Ivereigh said. “The Curia is built to resist change. Historically it was designed to be impervious to outside influence.”

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

St. John’s Abbey monk accused of abuse reports 200 sexual encounters

By

Troy Bramlage
Victim Troy Bramlage, with attorney Jeff Anderson, spoke to the media Tuesday. Their lawsuit forced St. John’s Abbey to release the files on priests credibly accused of child sex abuse. “So many offenders were allowed access to so many kids for so many years,” said Anderson.

One priest reported 200 sexual encounters, including some with students at St. John’s University and prep school.

Another recorded the names of dozens of boys he brought to a cabin, some of whom he sexually abused.

Another abuser was paid $30,000 by St. John’s Abbey to support him as he left the clergy.

These are among findings from the first batch of personnel files from St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville made public Tuesday. The abbey was required to release its internal files on priests credibly accused of child sex abuse as part of a lawsuit settled earlier this year. It marks the first time the abbey — implicated in clergy abuse cases for two decades — has opened its confidential files.

The files include the abuse accusations, abbey response, and psychological assessments of the men from roughly the 1960s to a few years ago. That includes a 2012 assessment of the Rev. Finian McDonald, who told a psychologist that he had about 200 sexual encounters as a priest.

McDonald reported that his youngest victims were 13- or 14-year-old prostitutes in Thailand, that he had 18 victims while serving as a prefect at St. John’s dormitories, and that he had acted out sexually and abused alcohol during most of his 29 years as a dormitory prefect. Sexual encounters also occurred with adults.

Finian McDonaldThe abbey issued a written statement in response to the document release by victims’ attorney Jeff Anderson.

“There are documents in each file which may be quoted and framed in a lurid context,” wrote abbey spokesman Brother Aelred Senna. “But the huge majority of the documents in each of these files acknowledges the very real failures of some monks while showing each of the accused monks as a fallible, relatable person.”

The files “show that the Abbey did not try to cover up allegations and did a reasonable job of managing the monk and the problem,” he wrote.

However, Anderson, whose lawsuit forced the file release, said the magnitude of sexual encounters reported in just the five priest files indicates that many more students or other minors have not stepped forward to report abuse.

“So many offenders were allowed access to so many kids for so many years,” said Anderson at a news conference. “This reflects to us … that there are dozens and hundreds of survivors that are yet to be known.”

In addition to McDonald, files were also released on the Rev. Tom Gillespie, former priest Fran Hoefgen, the Rev. Bruce Wollmering and the Rev. Richard Eckroth. Eckroth and Wollmering are deceased.

Hoefgen was acquitted earlier this year of sexually abusing a boy while he was a priest in a Hastings parish. However, the files show that Hoefgen admitted to abusing a teen in the early 1980s. And in 1994, Hoefgen reported to then-Abbot Timothy Kelly that he had a sexual encounter with a St. John’s student in the student’s dorm room, the files show.

The abbey eventually gave Hoefgen a $30,000 “gift” to help him transition out of the priesthood.

St. John’s is one of the largest Benedictine monasteries in North America. It shares a campus with students at St. John’s prep school and those at St. John’s University. Many of its priests also have served Twin Cities parishes.

Both McDonald and Wollmering worked for decades as student counselors. The files show that Wollmering received a psychological diagnosis in 2004 of “sexual disorder with compulsive and exploitive behaviors.” A St. John’s student reported in 2006 that Wollmering bragged to him that he had 300 “sexual partners.”

Anderson said the abbey allowed known offenders to have access to minors, and he questioned the enforcement of the safety plans that are supposed to restrict the priests’ access to kids.

Gillespie, for example, abused a child in Stillwater in 1978 and had restricted access to minors, the documents show. But in 2013, a student complained that Gillespie was sending him e-mails and showing up unwanted at his school events.

Eckroth, meanwhile, brought boys to a St. John’s cabin for years, giving and getting massages to the boys while naked in the sauna.

Troy Bramlage is the St. Cloud man whose lawsuit against the abbey was settled with the provision that the personnel files be released. He said he hopes that more victims will step forward, as the scope and details of the abuse is revealed.

“People need to know they don’t have to suffer alone,” he said.

The abbey has identified 19 priests credibly accused of child sex abuse. Files on the others will be released in the months ahead, said Anderson.

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

‘Hippie ex-priest’ put ‘Spotlight’ on sexual abuse

Richard Sipe’s studies of celibacy helped uncover the Catholic Church’s scandal

By Peter Rowe

Richard Sipes
Richard Sipes, a former priest and monk, is an expert on the sexual abuse of minors by clergy.

In the new movie “Spotlight,” a character describes Richard Sipe as a “hippie ex-priest shacking up with some nun.”

When the real Sipe heard this line, he laughed. The 82-year-old La Jollan is often called worse: Traitor.

Sipe never appears on screen in “Spotlight,” a dramatization of the Boston Globe’s 2001-02 investigation of the Catholic Church covering up the crimes of pedophile priests. Yet his insights, formed after decades of research on priests, permeate the film.

A psychotherapist who treated troubled clergy, Sipe drew on about 500 case files for his 1990 study of celibacy, “A Secret World.” Another 500 priests were also interviewed, plus an equal number of lay people who had been sex partners — as adults or children, willing or unwilling — of Catholic clergy.

His conclusions: At any one time, no more than half of priests are practicing celibacy. Most of the others are engaged in sexual relationships with women or men, but Sipe found that 6 percent prey on minors. (After further research, he revised that figure to 6 percent to 9 percent.)

A scholarly work from a small publishing house — New York’s Brunner/Mazel — “Secret World” nonetheless rocked a 2,000-year-old global institution.

“This is very important and has to be published,” an abbot told Sipe after reading the manuscript. “But it’s a good thing the church no longer castrates or burns at the stake, or you would be in trouble.”

While he escaped execution, Sipe has been verbally flogged for 25 years. TheMediaReport.com, a website decrying “media bias in coverage of sex abuse in the Catholic Church,” calls Sipe “an angry ex-priest” who uses “the issue of clergy sex abuse as a means to advance his attack on the Catholic Church, especially its teachings regarding human sexuality.”

Victims of sexual abuse, though, praise the man and his work.

“He’s an absolute hero,” said David Clohessy, executive director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP). “He’s just a very wise and compassionate man who has made an enormous contribution to understanding and exposing this crisis.”

In his office at home, the walls are covered with reproductions of murals depicting the Last Judgment. A computer dominates one desk, a sculpted nude female torso another. In his lair, Sipe looks neither angelic nor demonic. He looks frail — a walker waits by his chair, thanks to old skiing injuries — yet joyful.

“I don’t have any regrets about what I went through,” he said. “I couldn’t have accomplished any of this without being a monk and a priest.”

‘What it’s about’

Sipe grew up in Minnesota, part of a large Catholic family. He remembers his parents as faithful, not fanatical. It was his idea, not theirs, for the naive ninth-grader to enter a Benedictine seminary.

“I was one of 10 kids,” he said. “You had to stand out in some way!”

He was allowed to date through high school, and 70 years later can still rattle off the names of girlfriends. His monastic preparations continued, though, through college. He became a Benedictine monk in 1953 and a priest in that order in 1959, vowing obedience, poverty and chastity.

That last vow didn’t worry him, Sipe said, thanks to his ignorance. “You don’t know what it’s about, what sex is about, what an adult sexual relationship is or what it’s like to fall in love.”

While studying psychiatry and religion in Rome, he grew fascinated by the question of why some priests — such as the Very Rev. Ulric Beste, a Vatican official and a mentor — remained celibate and others did not.

He continued his studies at St. John’s University Mental Health Institute in Minnesota and as a fellow at the Menninger Foundation. At Maryland’s Seton Psychiatric Institute, a hospital where struggling priests were sent for treatment, he collected data on the sexual lives of his patients.

In 1966, Margaret Mead toured Seton. The anthropologist encouraged the priest to study this matter in a dispassionate manner. To this day, Sipe doesn’t refer to errant priests as “pedophiles.”

“I say they are priests who have sex with minors,” he said.

Sipe’s tone, especially in “Secret World” and a 2003 sequel, “Celibacy in Crisis,” is free of outrage and judgment. Some victims are disturbed by this clinical approach, but not SNAP’s executive director.

“There’s just way too much blaming and shaming and anger by people from all sides in this crisis,” Clohessy said. “Richard does a superb job of focusing on behavior and not beliefs, on facts and not theories.”

He’s also more than a scholar. As a fellow priest, he understood his peers’ struggles.

“I was part of the culture,” he said. “And I was a data keeper.”

That data would help direct the Boston Globe’s investigation, which inspired similar probes. As the church’s sex scandal erupted around the world, it seemed that no diocese was free of predatory priests — including San Diego.

Persona non grata

In his 30s, Father Sipe fell into a severe depression. In therapy, he came to the conclusion that he could no longer serve as a priest. In 1970, he was granted dispensation from his priestly vows.

Soon after, he married Marianne Benkert, a former nun and psychiatrist who had worked at Baltimore’s Loyola University. He opened a private practice, taught, wrote and devoted himself to his new role as husband.

Soon, he was a father. Walter Sipe, the couple’s son, graduated from Harvard and enrolled in the UC San Diego School of Medicine. His parents bought a La Jolla home in 1996, where their son took up residence. Three years later, after he graduated, his parents moved in.

Sipe was in La Jolla when the Globe learned of his research. In October 2001, he and Marianne flew to Boston to meet with the journalists. After the Spotlight team’s first stories on sexual abuse by clergy appeared in 2002, Sipe was contacted by media from around the world.

He’s still sought as a source and an expert witness. To date, he’s testified in about 250 cases brought against Roman Catholic priests accused of rape and other sexual crimes. He’s also been invited to speak on college campuses, in public forums, in conferences addressing this crisis.

One place he hasn’t been invited: The offices of the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego.

“I’ve been blackballed,” Sipe said. “Bishop Robert Brom sent his chancellor here to say I was not welcome in the chancery. If I came, it would only be in the presence of a lawyer.”

In San Diego, so many victims came forward that the diocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2007. Later that year, the church agreed to pay $198.1 million to 144 victims. The diocese’s bankruptcy petition would be terminated in January 2014.

The diocese, Robert McElroy said when he was named San Diego’s bishop this March, had to do a better job of preventing these crimes.

“We can never relax on that issue,” McElroy said then. “We can never think we have done enough to have put that in the past.”

This week, the diocese declined several Union-Tribune requests to outline steps it has taken to prevent a recurrence.

In the long run

These crimes are not committed only by Catholic clergy, a truth that was underscored last week by two news stories. Former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle was sentenced to prison for possessing child pornography and having intercourse with two minors; and the Associated Press reported that military prisons contain more sexual abusers of children than any other type of offender.

Next year, Sipe himself will testify in child sex abuse cases involving two non-Catholic religious leaders.

Yet he is convinced that the crisis in the Catholic Church is unique, and rooted in that institution’s attitudes toward sex and gender. While he welcomes the new tone set by Pope Francis, he doesn’t expect any rapid changes.

“I think there is something starting,” he said. “But the real change will not come until the church allows optional celibacy and the ordination of women.

“And these changes will cause more problems, and then more changes. This is an evolutionary process.”

Change is constant, even in an institution that seems to move at a glacial pace. Those images of the Last Judgment on the walls of Sipe’s study? One is a reproduction of an 11th-century work, showing a welcoming Christ in a vast paradise. Hell is almost an afterthought, shunted to a small corner of the canvas.

“Now look at Michelangelo,” Sipe said, gesturing to the framed poster of the 16th-century painting on the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. Half of this masterwork is devoted to souls being hurled into damnation.

Sipe laughed. “That says it all.”

Years ago, Sipe stopped attending weekly Mass. He’s not a member of any parish and doesn’t regularly partake of the sacraments. But ask if he’s given up on the faith of his childhood, and he smiles.

“My view of being a Catholic is that I am a Catholic in the long run of things,” said the former priest and ex-monk. “I am a part of the change.”

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

U.S. Catholic bishops take aim against same-sex marriage

U.S. Roman Catholic bishops, at their first assembly since gay marriage became legal nationwide, vowed Monday to uphold marriage as only the union of a man and a woman and to seek legal protections for those who share that view.

Some bishops said they were committed to reversing the U.S. Supreme Court same-sex marriage ruling last June. Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kansas, said a concerted effort was needed to “build a consensus” to do so. As a model, he pointed to new state laws that have made it harder to obtain an abortion, even as the procedure remains legal nationwide.

“I don’t think because five Supreme Court justices changed the public policy on such a fundamental issue that we should just accept it. I think we have to be as strong as we have on the pro-life issue,” Naumann said at the gathering of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore.

Bishop Robert Baker
Bishop Robert Baker

Bishop Robert Baker of Birmingham, Alabama, said the bishops should join other religious groups in working to protect government workers who refuse to participate in same-sex weddings. The bishops have not said specifically what kind of conscience protections they support for civil authorities.

“I hope we will not back away from that advocacy,” Baker said.

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president of the bishops’ conference, highlighted the bishops push for religious exemptions for charities, schools and individual for-profit business owners who oppose gay marriage and other laws and regulations.

Dozens of U.S. dioceses and Catholic nonprofits are suing the Obama administration over the birth control coverage requirement in the Affordable Care Act. President Barack Obama created an accommodation that requires insurers to provide the coverage in place of objecting religious nonprofits. The bishops and other faith groups said the change did not go far enough. The Supreme Court recently announced it was taking up lawsuits challenging the accommodation, with arguments scheduled in March.

Archbishop Kurtz
Archbishop Joseph Kurtz

“What a great tragedy it will be if our ministries are slowly secularized or driven out of the public square because of short-sighted laws or regulations that limit our ability to witness and serve consistent with our faith,” said Kurtz, of Louisville, Ky.

The bishops’ meeting came just days after the Islamic extremists attacked Paris. U.S. bishops said they were praying for victims of the violence and renewed their commitment to resettling Syrian refugees, as some U.S. governors threatened to stop accepting them. American dioceses have a vast network of charities that help resettle refugees.

Still, religious liberty and marriage were the focus of the gathering Monday, the first of two days of public sessions. Among the issues they discussed was how they should include children of gay parents in church life. Last week, the Mormon church sparked a backlash with new, strict limits on participation in church rites by children with same-sex married parents.

The bishops’ conference also heard an address from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the Vatican’s U.S. ambassador who was behind Francis’ controversial meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who briefly went to jail rather than comply with a court order to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

Archbishop Carlo Maria ViganoVigano had invited Davis to be among those greeting the pope in the Vatican embassy in Washington last September during Francis’ visit to the country. Her lawyer caused an uproar when he announced the meeting soon after Francis returned to Rome, describing it as a papal affirmation of Davis’ approach to conscientious objection. The Vatican insisted the meeting was not an endorsement and said she was one of several dozen people who had greeted Francis. The U.S. bishops’ conference has never commented on the meeting.

In his speech Monday, Vigano urged the bishops to persevere in working to “preserve a moral order in society” and said they should not “fall prey” to “secularized and increasingly pagan” practices in broader society. He said Catholic colleges and universities, specifically those founded by Jesuits, should do more to shore up Catholic identity at the schools.

The ambassador received two standing ovations from the bishops. He turns 75 in January, the age when bishops are required to submit their resignations to the pope.

Complete Article HERE!

Posted on

The Monsignor Who Took Money From the Poor and Binged on Ecstasy and Champagne

By Barbie Latza Nadeau

 

Rev. Pietro Vittorielli
Rev. Pietro Vittorielli

Italian officials say Rev. Pietro Vittorielli stashed church donations for the poor in an account that paid for ecstasy-fueled Rio trip, oysters in London, and a Ralph Lauren wardrobe.

At least it is safe to assume that is the case with Monsignor Pietro Vittorelli, the head of Roman Catholic Benedictine abbey of Montecassino, which was made famous when it was destroyed in Allied bombing in World War II when Britain and the U.S. destroyed it in search of Germans who were thought to be hiding there. The abbey was rebuilt, but the hillsides nearby are dotted with the graves of fallen soldiers.

Vittorelli, who gave up his post at the abbey in 2013, was arrested this week on suspicion of siphoning off nearly $540,000 that was donated under Italy’s “Eight per Thousand” tax break, whereby kind-hearted people donate 8 percent of their income to a religious institution. The funds are an oft-used tax break for Italians and almost always go to Catholic entities.

Instead of reaching the poor, the funds that Vittorelli was supposed to distribute to worthy church-sponsored causes ended up in his personal Italian bank accounts, transferred from the Institute for Religious Works, otherwise known as the Vatican Bank. From those personal accounts, Vittorelli paid a personal credit card on which he charged luxury hotels and expensive meals from Brazil to the U.K., according to Italian investigators.

One entry in his credit-card statement included in the criminal dossier against him was for a $7,000 hotel bill in London, which included room service and hotel meals consisting of oysters and Champagne. On that trip, he is alleged to have spent $740 on one meal alone and more than $1,800 on designer duds from Ralph Lauren.

Another charge shows an extravagant holiday in Rio in 2010 on church funds, where, according to testimony by Italy’s Guardia di Finanza to Judge Virna Passamonti, he paid cash for ecstasy tablets he shared with a variety of suspicious friends.

In one month alone, the partying priest spent $34,800.  The other months he averaged expenses around $5,000.

He also owned four apartments in Rome and two storage facilities, which police claim he rented out as part of an intricate money-laundering scheme to keep the embezzlement hidden. Police say he enlisted his brother Massimo, a financial consultant who allegedly shared the wealth and the keys to safe deposit box No. 236 at Deutsche Bank in Rome. His brother would apparently stash cash that was withdrawn from the abbey’s Vatican Bank account in the secret deposit box until it was safe to deposit it in personal accounts without raising suspicion over having both transactions in the same bank statement period. “The sequence of operations unequivocally proves the intent to hide the path of the sums withdrawn from the accounts of the abbey,” Judge Passamonti wrote in her arrest warrant. “The examination of the financial flows directly documents the accurate operating systems meant to defraud.”

Italian police confiscated property, computers, and belongings found in all of the residences tied to the Vittorelli brothers.

Vittorelli left his post at Montecassino in 2013, citing health problems, and retired in Rome on his substantial, albeit ill-begotten, savings. In 2014, an organization hired by the Vatican Bank to audit its books discovered the money trail and started unraveling the fraudulent behavior that apparently began in 2008.

The latest scandal comes on the heels of two recent books published by Italian journalists Gianluigi Nuzzi and Emiliano Fittipaldi, who were fed by Italian laywoman Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui and Spanish Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda, who were on a panel meant to clean up the Vatican Bank’s messy accounting system that has been long embroiled in scandals ranging from money laundering to ties to organized crime. Both journalists are under investigation by Vatican authorities, but the Vatican has no jurisdiction to make arrests outside its fortified walls. Vittorelli, however, will join Vallejo Balda in the Vatican jail while both await trial.

Pope Francis has not commented specifically on the latest scandal, but this week he alluded to the problems in Rome. “God save the Italian Church from any form of power, image, and money,” he said on a visit to Florence.  “I prefer a church that is bruised, hurting, and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.“

Francis will embark on a five-day apostolic voyage to Africa on Nov. 25 before returning to Rome to open the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica on Dec. 8 to kick off the Jubilee year of mercy.

Complete Article HERE!