Tag: Catholic Church

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Haitian officials look into new allegations against man who founded orphanage

Michael Geilenfeld won a defamation case against a Freeport man in a federal civil trial in Portland this past summer.

Haitian investigators are looking into new allegations of child sex abuse against an American man who founded an orphanage for boys in Haiti’s capital decades ago and who successfully sued a Freeport, Maine, man for defamation this summer.

Police with an arrest warrant searched unsuccessfully Friday for Michael Geilenfeld at a modest private residence in a mountainside community above Port-au-Prince and the nearby Wings of Hope home for about 30 physically and mentally disabled children and young adults. On its website, the facility says it is a “critical part” of Geilenfeld’s charitable organization.

Geilenfeld and his North Carolina charity, Hearts with Haiti, this year sued Paul Kendrick of Freeport for defamation. In July, a federal jury in Portland, Maine, agreed with Geilenfeld and the charity that Kendrick had been reckless and negligent in launching an email campaign spreading false claims that Geilenfeld had sexually abused some orphans in his care.

The jury awarded $7.5 in damages to the charity and $7 million to Geilenfeld.

Kendrick said Saturday that he welcomed the new investigation of Geilenfeld.

“In my mind, children in Haiti are still not safe from Michael Geilenfeld,” Kendrick said. “Now, Haiti officials are stepping in and I applaud that.”

Kendrick said a U.S. District judge in Portland dismissed a motion to order a new trial and another asking that the award be determined excessive in the defamation case. He said his lawyer will file an appeal with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this month.
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Geilenfeld is already the subject of another criminal case in Haiti that accused him of sexually abusing boys in his care. He spent 237 days in detention before being released in April by a Haitian judge who dismissed the charges in a brief trial that was not attended by the accusers, now adults. But the country’s justice minister granted a re-examination of the case and it is now in court again on appeal.

In the trial in Maine, Geilenfeld had testified that he believed the false accusations of sexual abuse lingered against him in impoverished Haiti because he was a gay man in what he described as a homophobic country.

Geilenfeld, an Iowa native and former Catholic brother, founded the St. Joseph Home for Boys in Haiti’s capital in the 1980s. At the defamation court case in Maine, which saw seven Haitian men testify they were molested as youngsters by the American man, Geilenfeld said he was inspired by Mother Teresa’s missionary work to do good works in Haiti. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Kendrick said Saturday that the jury was misled by “a charming child molester.”

During the search Friday at the Wings of Hope facility in Fermathe, a government official who accompanied police showed reporters an arrest warrant for Geilenfeld signed Thursday by General Prosecutor Jean Abner Emile. Geilenfeld returned to Haiti after the Maine defamation case was completed.

Haitian authorities questioned staff members about Geilenfeld’s whereabouts. Communications director Renee Dietrich told them she had spoken to him several days ago but didn’t know where he was. She also showed them unanswered calls she made to him on her cell phone.

Dietrich declined to speak to reporters with The Associated Press who witnessed the Friday police searches, referring all queries to Geilenfeld’s U.S. lawyer, Peter DeTroy, whose law firm is in Portland, Maine. He did not respond to an email seeking comment and has previously said he has no involvement with legal matters in Haiti.

Alain Lemithe, Geilenfeld’s Haitian lawyer, said he was confident that his client would prevail in Haiti’s appeals court in the coming weeks and said the timing of new allegations appeared to be “very suspicious.”

Haitian investigators were accompanied Friday by Valerie Dirksen, a real estate agent from the Atlanta metropolitan area who says she sponsors two young Haitian men who claim they were abused by Geilenfeld when they were under his care as boys.

According to Dirksen, the new arrest warrant for Geilenfeld was issued after a magistrate judge visited the St. Joseph Home for Boys and found three youngsters residing there with him, a violation of an earlier mandate by Haiti’s child welfare authority.

“I will stay here in Haiti until he is arrested,” she said outside the Wings of Hope home.

Complete Article HERE!

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Peru Catholic Society Admits Sex Abuse Probe against Founder

A secretive Roman Catholic society with chapters across South America and in the U.S. has revealed under pressure that a Vatican investigator is looking into allegations that its founder sexually molested young recruits.

Sodalitium Christianae VitaeThe scandal at the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, or Sodalitium for Human Life, has close parallels to other recent cases of charismatic Catholic leaders in Latin America being accused of sex abuse — as well as the church dragging its feet on investigating claims and trying to keep scandals quiet.

This week, Sodalitium’s general secretary disclosed the Vatican investigation after two journalists published a book detailing the accusations against founder Luis Fernando Figari, 68.

Co-author Pedro Salinas, a former society member, has been publicly accusing Figari since 2010 of physical, psychological and sexual abuse. According to the book, three men lodged complaints the following year with a Peruvian church tribunal alleging Figari sexually abused them when they were minors.

There is no indication the tribunal did anything with the case, including notifying prosecutors. Nor is it known when the Vatican was advised.

Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani, the conservative archbishop of Lima with jurisdiction over the tribunal, was quoted as telling the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio this week that case is “regrettable and painful” and claiming

“We have acted with absolute transparency and rapidity,” he said.

No criminal probe was opened in Peru until after the mid-October publication of “Half Monks, Half Soldiers.” Prosecutors, though, say the statute of limitations has almost certainly run out as the alleged crimes occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.

Founded in 1971, Sodalitium has a presence in schools and churches and runs retreat facilities with communities in Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Italy and the United States. Its members are mostly lay Catholics but also include clergy.pplffchile051208

After the book’s release, the society issued three successive press releases as a public clamor for greater accountability and transparency intensified.

First, the society revealed that Figari, who is not a priest, has been living in relative isolation at a Sodalitium community in Rome since 2010 and has been out of public life and governance of the society since then. At the time of his departure as general secretary, Sodalitium said only that Figari was stepping down for health reasons.

It added that the society’s current leader, Alessandro Moroni, decided in 2014 to intensify the regime of “prayer and retreat” being followed by Figari

The statement also noted Figari wasn’t alone in being accused: The book says the society’s No. 2, the late German Doig, was accused of sexually assaulting a minor. He died in 2001. A decade later, after the allegations against him first surfaced, the society said his candidacy for beatification had been canceled.

In a second statement Oct. 21, the society said the book’s allegations were “plausible” and needed to be thoroughly investigated. It said it created a committee to hear complaints from other possible victims and asked forgiveness, calling the accusations against Figari “cause for deep grief and shame.”

peru211It said Figari insists he is innocent, though it notes he hasn’t said so publicly.

This week, the third release disclosed that the Vatican had on April 22 named a local bishop to investigate the society. Figari departed Lima three days later for Europe, according to local published reports.

The book’s co-author, Paola Ugaz, said she and Salinas wrote in January to the Vatican office in charge of apostolic church societies detailing the allegations against Figari. They never got an answer, she said. But the official to whom they wrote, Archbishop Jose Rodriguez Carballo, signed the April 22 decree.

The scandal is similar to one in Chile involving the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a charismatic priest who in 2011 was sentenced by the church to a lifetime of penance and prayer for sexually abusing young people. The local archbishop sat on allegations against Karadima for years, refusing to believe them, and only passed them on to the Vatican after the scandal exploded globally in 2010.

The case also has parallels to a scandal at the Legion of Christ, which was headed by the late Mexican priest Marcial Maciel. The Vatican under St. Pope Paul II ignored decades of credible abuse allegations against Maciel and discredited his victims. Only in 2006 did it act, giving him the same sentence as Karadima.

The Peruvian bishop assigned to the Figari probe, the Rev. Fortunato Pablo Urcey of Chota, is ordered by the decree to “verify the true authenticity of accusations” past and new against Figari and file a full report.

But Urcey, the secretary general of Peru’s council of churches, said in a radio interview this week that he didn’t consider himself an investigator as much as a supporter of Sodalitium.

In an interview with RPP radio, he said he had no plans to interview the ex-members who filed the complaints or to read the book.

“I like the designation ‘visitor’ better than ‘investigator’ because I’m not an investigator,” he said, recalling his official title as an “apostolic visitor.” Three times during the interview, Urcey said he would do all he could to “save the charism of this congregation,” a reference to the spirituality that makes it unique.

Urcey did not return phone messages left by The Associated Press. Efforts to reach a spokesman for the Lima ecclesiastic tribunal also were unsuccessful. The body’s deliberations are secret.

The society’s current leader, Moroni, said in an interview with the newspaper El Comercio this week that he contacted the tribunal about the accusations against Figari more than two years ago.

Tribunal officials responded that “they are an independent body and they didn’t have to give us any kind of information until they reached a decision,” he said.

In an article published Friday, Salinas, the co-author, urged that Moroni be removed, calling him complicit in a culture of abuse that Salinas said included Figari’s burning of his flesh with a candle flame for about a minute in front of fellow initiates.

A Peruvian non-governmental organization, the Institute for Defense of the Rights of Minors, asked prosecutors last week to investigate Cipriani, Lima’s archbishop and an Opus Dei member, for obstruction of justice.

Its president, Daniel Vega, said none of the men who filed complaints against Figari with the tribunal were ever contacted by it afterward.

“There is a recurring conduct of the cardinal and his entire team of covering up crimes and not informing the criminal justice system.”

AP Vatican correspondent Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report.

Complete Article HERE!

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Nun Excommunicated for Becoming a Priest

By Katie Zavadski

 

After nearly five decades as a Catholic nun, Tish Rawles became a priest—and found herself cast out. Now she’s calling on Pope Francis to do what Jesus would’ve done and bring her back.

When Letitia “Tish” Rawles was ordained as a Catholic priest in April, it was the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of yearning—and a practical fix to ministering to the sick and dying at her Cincinnati assisted living facility, where it was often hard to find a priest to administer last rites.“I’ve wanted to be a priest since… probably the fourth grade, as soon as I started attending Catholic school,” she told The Daily Beast. “I always wondered why there were no women at the altar, only men.”

But Rawles didn’t know any female priests then, so she became a nun despite feeling the “deeper calling” of the priesthood. “And I’ve loved being a nun,” she said.

The 67-year-old had that taken away from her last week, though, when the Ohio-based Sisters of the Precious Blood, the order she’d been with for 47 years, found out about her ordination and told her she was out. She was automatically excommunicated from the Catholic Church, which bars women from the priesthood and shows no signs of budging from that position.

Now Rawles and her supporters say they’re appealing to Pope Francis during his Year of Mercy to restore her to the church and to her order. That’s what Jesus would have done, they say.

stay and fight“This is an opportunity for Pope Francis to take a step towards reconciliation and healing misogyny in the church,” Bishop Bridget Mary Meehan of the Association of Roman Catholic Woman Priests told The Daily Beast. “The full equality of women in the church is the voice of God in our time.”

The ARCWP is one of many organizations pushing for allowing women to be Catholic priests but an outlier in that it ordains women. Meehan said the ARCWP’s female bishops were even ordained by an anonymous male Catholic bishop, linking them to an unbroken lineage leading back to the apostles.

“Did she know it was against the rules, did we know it was against the rules? Of course,” Meehan said. “But we are the Rosa Parks of the Catholic Church.”

The ARCWP emphasizes the Catholic concept of “primacy of conscience,” which it says allows it to choose to dissent from an unjust teaching.

“We’re walking in the footsteps of prophets and saints,” Meehan said. “Look at Joan of Arc. They burned her at the stake for what? For following her conscience.”

For Rawles, though, joining the priesthood wasn’t an easy decision.

Even after attending services led by women priests, she tried to convince herself that she was too old, too sick to take on the task herself. Rawles said she suffers from multiple sclerosis, late stage liver disease, and diabetes.

Complete Article HERE!

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Vatican synod calls for a more welcoming Catholic Church

Bishops chat at the end of the afternoon session of the synod in Vatican City on Oct. 24.

By Anthony Faiola

Deeply divided clerics at a landmark Vatican summit echoed the more inclusive tone of Pope Francis on Saturday, extending more welcoming language to divorced and gay Catholics but stopping short of calling for clear alterations in policy and leaving the extent of any change in the hands of the mercurial pontiff.

The meeting — known as a synod — marked the culmination of a two-year process to recalibrate the faith’s approach to families in the 21st century and broke new ground by tackling issues once considered taboo in the Roman Catholic Church. In the most significant pronouncement, the clerics cracked open the door for divorced and remarried Catholics, who the church teaches are technically living in adultery, to receive Communion — a sacrament from which they are currently officially barred.

But the synod did not explicitly condone a change either, leaving Francis room to interpret the will of his hierarchy. The document also recognized the “dignity” of homosexuals, while also saying there was not even a “remote” similarity between same-sex unions and “God’s design on matrimony and family.”

The final communiqué, while a significant bellwether of the hierarchy’s thinking, nevertheless amounts only to a recommendation to Francis. As pope in the benevolent autocracy that is Vatican City, Francis now has the final say.

Liberals at the synod were pragmatic, saying they were impressed they got as far as they did given significant conservative resistance. But the staunch opposition to fast change suggested how difficult it may now be for Francis to translate his revolutionary style into substance.

It also puts him in a highly difficult position. If he fails to change the status quo, he risks disappointing liberal Catholics — as well as many non-Catholics — who have heralded him worldwide as an agent of change. Yet going too far beyond the recommendations could alienate many in his own divided church, triggering an even stronger backlash among conservatives — some of whom are already openly questioning the direction of his papacy.

“What the pope has to do now is take all of this in and decide how to we use it,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington. “He may decide to use bits and pieces in different ways.”

Complete Article HERE!

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Archbishop Cupich lays out pathway for gay couples to receive Communion at Vatican press scrum

By John-Henry Westen and Pete Baklinski

Archbishop Blase Cupich of Chicago  — who is participating in the Synod of the Family at Pope Francis’ personal invitation —  said at a press scrum in the Vatican press office this afternoon that the conscience is “inviolable” and that he believes divorced and remarried couples could be permitted to receive the sacraments, if they have “come to a decision” to do so “in good conscience” – theological reasoning that he indicated in response to a follow-up question would also apply to gay couples.

During the lengthy press briefing, the archbishop also spoke approvingly of the so-called “Kasper Proposal,” which would permit divorced and remarried Catholics to receive Communion in some cases. Cupich explained that he had distributed Cardinal Walter Kasper’s book, The Gospel of the Family, in which the cardinal had laid out this proposal, to all of the priests in his diocese.

“In Chicago I visit regularly with people who feel marginalized: the elderly, the divorced and remarried, gay and lesbian individuals and also couples. I think that we really need to get to know what their life is like if we’re going to accompany them,” he said.

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Archbishop Cupich being interviewed by reporters at Vatican Press office Oct. 16, 2015

When asked to give a concrete example of how he would accompany the divorced and remarried in their desire to receive the sacraments, Cupich replied: “If people come to a decision in good conscience then our job is to help them move forward and to respect that. The conscience is inviolable and we have to respect that when they make decisions, and I’ve always done that.”

When asked by LifeSiteNews if the notion of accompanying people to “the Sacrament” who had a clear indication of conscience to do so also applied to gay couples in the Church, Cupich indicated an affirmative answer.

“I think that gay people are human beings too and they have a conscience. And my role as a pastor is to help them to discern what the will of God is by looking at the objective moral teaching of the Church and yet, at the same time, helping them through a period of discernment to understand what God is calling them to at that point,” he said. “It’s for everybody. I think that we have to make sure that we don’t pigeonhole one group as though they are not part of the human family, as though there’s a different set of rules for them. That would be a big mistake.”

The Catholic Church teaches that while a person “must always obey the certain judgement of his conscience” the conscience, at the same time, must be formed by the “Word of God” and the “Church’s authority and her teaching” to make judgments that are “in conformity with the true good willed by the wisdom of the Creator.”

“Conscience can remain in ignorance or make erroneous judgements. Such ignorance and errors are not always free of guilt,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church states.

On Cardinal Kasper’s proposal specifically, Cupich said, “I really do find his treatment of what he calls the Gospel of the family – it’s published in a book, and I gave it, by the way, to all of my priests, I wanted them to read that because I thought it was very rich theologically.”

“I think he has reasoned this proposal well…I am open to looking at all of it,” he said. “I do think that we can’t ignore the fact that there are lots of people out there who feel stuck, and we have to look for a way in which we’re going to reach out to them.”

Cupich said “we should look at a way in which people are not just accompanied but integrated and reconciled.”

Kasper’s proposal has been criticized by faithful leaders in the Church such as Cardinal Burke as a “serious error” since it makes doctrine and pastoral practice appear to be in conflict with one another.

“The pastoral practice exists to help us to live the truths of the faith, to live the doctrine of the faith in our daily lives. You can’t have a conflict [between these],” said Burke in an interview with LifeSiteNews yesterday.

Others, such as Cardinal Marc Ouellet, have criticized Kasper’s proposal as resulting from a mistaken notion of God’s mercy.

It is “not a matter” of the Church “being more or less ‘merciful’ with regard to persons in irregular situations, but of taking seriously the truth of the sacraments (the gifts of the Bridegroom) and their missionary dimension,” Ouellet wrote in a recently published book on marriage and the family.

Archbisop Cupich had previously responded to a question, in December 2014, about giving Holy Communion to pro-abortion Catholic politicians, saying he would “not use the Eucharist or as they call it the communion rail as the place to have those discussions or weigh in which people would be either excluded from the life of the church.”

Since his appointment as bishop of Spokane in 2010, Cupich has developed a reputation as one of the most “progressive” bishops in the U.S. episcopate. Last year, Pope Francis tapped Cupich to lead the Chicago archdiocese, one of the country’s most prominent dioceses, previously led by the conservative Cardinal Francis George.

In 2011 Cupich, then bishop of Spokane, forbade priests in his diocese from taking part in the semi-annual 40 Days for Life pro-life prayer vigil. His response to the recent U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to redefine marriage focused primarily on decrying discrimination against homosexuals rather than criticizing the imposition of same-sex “marriage.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and that “under no circumstances can they be approved” since they are contrary to God’s plan for sexuality.

“They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life,” states the Catechism.

The Catholic Church teaches the those who present themselves to receive Holy Communion, which Catholics believe to be the real body and blood of Jesus Christ, must be in the state of grace and be free from mortal sin, which cuts off the life of God’s grace from the soul.

Complete Article HERE!