Tag: Discontent

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Victorian court allows abused altar boy’s children and wife to sue Catholic church

— Unique case may set precedent as family alleges church’s failings caused man’s violence in later life

The wife and two children of an abused altar boy have sued the Catholic church, alleging they are ‘secondary victims’ of its failure to prevent Father Bryan Coffey from abusing children.

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A Victorian court has paved the way for the children and wife of an abused altar boy to sue the Catholic church, alleging the church’s failings caused their father and husband to become a violent alcoholic and drug addict who beat them later in life.

The abuse victim, now dead, was an altar boy in north-west Victoria in the mid-1970s when he was allegedly raped by Father Bryan Coffey, a parish priest who allegedly used his role as the supervisor of the local school’s cross-country team to prey on children.

Coffey, who died in 2013, is alleged to have abused nine children across four parishes between 1960 and 1975. The church allegedly moved Coffey between various parish appointments because of “knowledge or suspicion that he was capable of child abuse”.

In the years that followed his abuse, the altar boy began drinking heavily and later developed a serious substance abuse disorder. He was violent and abusive to his wife, whom he married roughly a decade later, and their two children, according to court documents.

Now the wife and two children, who cannot be identified, have sued the Catholic church, alleging they are “secondary victims” of its failure to prevent Coffey from abusing children.

They allege the church should have known that failing to protect the boy from abuse meant that, if he went on to have a family, his immediate relatives would be left “vulnerable to the risk of harm”.

The case is unique in that it alleges the church had a duty of care to the victim’s immediate family members, despite the fact that the abuse happened more than a decade before he met his wife and before the two children were born.

If the argument is accepted at any trial, the case could set a precedent that would potentially expose the church to claims from other immediate family members who have suffered intergenerational trauma caused by clergy abuse.

Last month the church failed to have the claim struck out in the Victorian supreme court.

In a judgment last week, Justice Andrew Keogh said the case was “novel” because it argued the church had a duty of care to the victim’s future wife and unborn children, who had no relationship to him at the time of the alleged abuse.

He said the argument, made by law firm Ken Cush and Associates, was “not certain to fail” and should be determined at trial, after hearing all the evidence.

“While the Diocese could not have known of the family plaintiffs at the time of the abuse, that does not mean they should not have had in contemplation members of [the abuse victim’s] immediate family as a class of persons who might suffer harm if negligence by the Diocese led to the abuse,” he said.

Keogh said the plaintiffs would need to confront the “very substantial physical and temporal distance between the abuse and the harm that they suffered” and lead detailed evidence about the connection between the child abuse and their associated harm more than a decade later.

He rejected the church’s argument that the case could “permit a wider scope of the types of family members pursuing secondary victim claims, such as grandchildren and great-grandchildren”.

Keogh said the current claim related only to an abuse victim’s immediate family.

The case is also attempting to establish that the church owed a “fiduciary duty” to all parishioners, which obliged them to “act with undivided loyalty in the interests of that parishioner, including by not promoting the interests of the Diocese (and/or of the Catholic Church) at the expense of the interests of the parishioner”.

That fiduciary duty meant the church was obliged to protect the best interests of its child parishioners.

“The plaintiffs plead that the Diocese breached the fiduciary duties by appointing Coffey parish priest and maintaining him in that appointment, thus enabling him to perpetrate the abuse,” Keogh wrote.

The church also tried and failed to have this argument – a new concept in such cases – struck out.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The Case of the Pope

— Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuses by Geoffrey Robertson

Looking the other way . . . Pope Benedict XVI.

Terry Eagleton welcomes a coolly devastating inquiry into the Vatican’s handling of child abuse

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The first child sex scandal in the Catholic church took place in AD153, long before there was a “gay culture” or Jewish journalists for bishops to blame it on. By the 1960s, the problem had become so dire that a cleric responsible for the care of “erring” priests wrote to the Vatican suggesting that it acquire a Caribbean island to put them on.

What has made a bad situation worse, as the eminent QC Geoffrey Robertson argues in this coolly devastating inquiry, is canon law – the church’s own arcane, highly secretive legal system, which deals with alleged child abusers in a dismayingly mild manner rather than handing them over to the police. Its “penalties” for raping children include such draconian measures as warnings, rebukes, extra prayers, counselling and a few months on retreat. It is even possible to interpret canon law as claiming that a valid defence for paedophile offences is paedophilia. Since child abusers are supposedly incapable of controlling their sexual urges, this can be used in their defence. It is rather like pleading not guilty to stealing from Tesco’s on the grounds that one is a shoplifter. One blindingly simple reason for the huge amount of child abuse in the Catholic church (on one estimate, up to 9% of clerics are implicated) is that the perpetrators know they will almost certainly get away with it.

For almost a quarter of a century, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man who is now Pope, was in supreme command of this parallel system of justice – a system deliberately hidden from the public, police and parliaments and run, so Robertson maintains, in defiance of international law. Those who imagine that the Vatican has recently agreed to cooperate with the police, he points out, have simply fallen for one of its cynical public relations exercises. In the so-called “New Norms” published by Pope Benedict this year, there is still no instruction to report suspected offenders to the civil authorities, and attempting to ordain a woman is deemed to be as serious an offence as sodomising a child. There have, however, been some changes: victims of child abuse are now allowed to report the matter up to the age of 38 rather than 28. If you happen to be 39, that’s just tough luck. As Robertson wryly comments, Jesus declares that child molesters deserve to be drowned in the depths of the sea, not hidden in the depths of the Holy See.

How can Ratzinger get away with it? One mightily important reason, examined in detail in this book, is because he is supposedly a head of state. The Vatican describes itself on its website as an “absolute monarchy”, which means that the Pope is immune from being sued or prosecuted. It also means that as the only body in the world with “non-member state” status at the UN, the Catholic church has a global platform for pursuing its goals of diminishing women, demonising homosexuals, obstructing the use of condoms to prevent Aids and refusing to allow abortion even to save the life of the mother. For these purposes, it is sometimes to be found in unholy alliance with states such as Libya and Iran. Neither is it slow to use veiled threats of excommunication to bend Catholic politicians throughout the world to its will. If Pope Benedict were to air some of his troglodytic views with full public force, Robertson suggests, the Home Office would have been forced to refuse him entry into Britain.

In fact, he argues, the Vatican’s claim to statehood is bogus. It dates from a treaty established between Mussolini and the Holy See, which Robertson believes has no basis in international law. The Vatican has no permanent population, which is a legal requirement of being a state. In fact, since almost all its inhabitants are celibate, it cannot propagate citizens at all other than by unfortunate accident. It is not really a territory, has no jurisdiction over crimes committed in its precincts and depends for all its essential services on the neighbouring nation of Italy. Nor does it field a team in the World Cup, surely the most convincing sign of its phoniness.

“Petty gossip” is how the Pope has described irrefutable evidence of serious crimes. His time as the Vatican official in charge of overseeing priestly discipline was the period when, in Robertson’s furiously eloquent words, “tens of thousands of children were bewitched, buggered and bewildered by Catholic priests whilst [Ratzinger’s] attention was fixated on ‘evil’ homosexuals, sinful divorcees, deviate liberation theologians, planners of families and wearers of condoms”.

Can he be brought to book for this? As a widespread and systematic practice, clerical sexual abuse could be considered a crime against humanity, such crimes not being confined to times of war; and though Ratzinger may claim immunity as a head of state, he is also a German citizen. The book comes to no firm conclusion here, but the possibility of convicting the supreme pontiff of aiding and abetting the international crime of systemic child abuse seems not out of the question. The Vatican, in any case, is unlikely to escape such a fate by arguing, as it has done already, that the relations between the Pope and his bishops are of such unfathomable theological complexity that no mere human court could ever hope to grasp them.

This is a book that combines moral passion with steely forensic precision, enlivened with the odd flash of dry wit. With admirable judiciousness, it even finds it in its heart to praise the charitable work of the Catholic church, as well as reminding us that paedophiles (whom Robertson has defended in court) can be kindly men. It is one of the most formidable demolition jobs one could imagine on a man who has done more to discredit the cause of religion than Rasputin and Pat Robertson put together.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Kansas Catholic priest sex abuse report leads to no charges

FILE – Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt answers questions from reporters during a news conference on Oct. 11, 2022, in Topeka, Kan. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation says a lengthy investigation into sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the state has not led to any charges, according to the report released by Schmidt on Friday, Jan 6, 2023.

By Margaret Stafford and John Hanna

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation said Friday that it has distributed 30 charging affidavits to prosecutors as part of its investigation into sexual abuse by Catholic priests but, so far, no charges have been filed.

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt released the KBI’s report concluding an investigation of the state’s four Roman Catholic dioceses in Wichita, Salina, Dodge City and Kansas City, Kansas.

The bureau said it would continue to investigate clergy associated with the Society of Saint Pius X, a breakaway Catholic group with a large branch in St. Marys.

A summary of the report said a six-member task force had interviewed 137 victims of abuse, initiated 125 criminal cases and distributed 30 affidavits to prosecutors for charging consideration.

Investigators identified 188 clergy members suspected of committing various criminal acts from records that stretched to the 1950s.

Michael McDonnell, a spokesperson for the international Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said that while the numbers of alleged abuses before 1990 are not surprising, the numbers after that are “still questionable” because many victims likely have not come forward.

“The Catholic Church will consistently say this is a thing of the past. We always say it’s a thing very much of the present and very much a thing of the future,” McDonnell said.

As of Friday, no prosecutor had filed charges, primarily because of laws that limit how long authorities have to pursue certain cases, the KBI said.

McDonnell said it’s “the Catholic Church playbook” to run out the clock on potential criminal charges and then be cooperative.

“Well, what we want to know is who was complicit?” McDonnell said, adding that abusers were allowed “to continue their careers in transfer upon transfer upon transfer only to go on to abuse more children?”

The executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference said each of the four Kansas dioceses was reviewing the report. Schmidt directed the KBI to begin the investigation at the request of Kansas City Archdiocese Archbishop Joseph Naumann.

The investigators found several cases that lacked probable cause to present to prosecutors. In nearly all the cases where affidavits were filed, the statute of limitations had expired or the priest was dead, according to the report.

That prompted SNAP to call on Kansas legislators to both eliminate the statute of limitations for filing lawsuits over alleged abuse and to add clergy to the list of people required by law to report suspected child abuse to authorities. Lawmakers convene Monday for their annual session.

“This report is yet another signal flare that legislative change is needed in order to support survivors and protect children,” the group said in a statement.

In a letter accompanying the report, KBI Director Kirk Thompson praised the victims who came forward to report their abuse to investigators.

“It is our deepest and most sincere hope these victims find a way to continue to survive and heal,” Thompson wrote. “And for those victims who are still traumatized who did not report, it is our hope they find the strength to seek help.”

The report was released on the final full day in office for Schmidt, who unsuccessfully ran for Kansas governor last year. Thompson plans to retire from the KBI on Tuesday.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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RIP Pope Benedict XVI

— But let’s not ignore all the harm he did the church and its people

Church of St. Francis of Assisi commemorates the late Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI displaying his portrait picture with a black ribbon, on January 04, 2023 in Krakow, Poland.

Before we canonize the late pope, let’s remember all the harm his preaching caused — and hope for something better

By Celia Viggo Wexler

They say you should never speak ill of the dead, but we may need to make an exception for Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. I don’t presume to judge the state of his soul when he met his maker. But in the mostly positive coverage of this complicated man and his troubled papacy, I fear we will forget all the damage he did to so many Catholics over the course of his long career.

This is not about vengeance. It’s an attempt to stop a Benedict cult before it begins. During his more than four decades at the Vatican, Benedict had a profound impact on the American Catholic church, long dominated by conservative prelates appointed by him and his predecessor, Pope John Paul II. These American bishops placed their allegiance in Benedict even after he stunned the world by retiring in 2013, a step one Vatican critic called the “only great reform” of his papacy. At his death, these anti-abortion warriors and hardliners remain, in thought, word and deed, Benedict’s Mini-Mes.

How did the late pope harm Catholics? Let me count the ways.

Nicknamed “God’s Rottweiler” for his zeal in 24 years at the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose roots date back to the Inquisition, he not only opposed the ordination of women to the priesthood but claimed the ban could never be lifted.

As pope, he fired an Australian bishop for merely suggesting that ordaining women might to be a good way to address the shortage of male priests.

His church not only didn’t give more power to women; it actively tried to suppress them.

In 2012, his Vatican chastised U.S. nuns for being influenced by “radical feminism,” and for purportedly straying from U.S. bishops’ positions on homosexuality and women’s ordination. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious was placed under the supervision of three conservative American bishops for its “serious doctrinal problems.”

For someone so in love with law and order, Benedict should have tackled the church’s sexual abuse crisis with more zeal and thoroughness. Yes, as pope, he did expel scores of priests, but that was a half-measure. Indeed, when he served as the church’s doctrinal cop, he reportedly advised Catholic bishops across the globe that abuse cases could be kept secret and not reported to law enforcement.

While serving as an archbishop, he may have practiced what he preached. According to a recent report commissioned by the Munich archdiocese, the late pope was implicated in the coverup of four abuse cases, accusations Benedict strongly denied.

In a statement, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests insisted: “Honoring Pope Benedict XVI now is not only wrong. It is shameful.”

Benedict also showed little mercy to gay Catholics. Marianne Duddy-Burke, the head of DignityUSA, which represents LGBTQ Catholics, observed that Benedict’s views and pronouncements “forced our community out of Catholic churches, tore families apart, silenced our supporters, and even cost lives. He refused to recognize even the most basic human rights for LGBTQIA+ people. Many of us experienced the most harsh and blatant religiously justified discrimination of our lives as a result of his policies.”

Whenever the choice was to protect the institutional church and its rigid teachings, or to help his flock, Benedict always chose rigidity. Indeed, his Vatican defended a Brazilian archbishop’s decision to excommunicate the mother of a nine-year-old girl likely raped by her stepfather for seeking termination of the pregnancy. The doctors who deemed the abortion necessary to save the girl’s life were also excommunicated, but not her rapist.

Benedict did replace the archbishop who caused all the controversy, likely because he stirred up so much bad publicity, not because what he did was inhumane.

That precisely defined the problem. Like his predecessor John Paul II, Benedict saw the church as a bulwark against the world. He was consistently more worried about the institution and the purity of doctrine than about the welfare of the people within it.

By resigning but sticking around with a title he made up, pope emeritus, and choosing to dress in papal white, Benedict was like the ever-present brake to Pope Francis’ more progressive instincts, and a constant reminder to conservative Catholics that the authentic papacy (in their view) still burned brightly.

May Benedict now rest in peace — and fade into the past. That may free Pope Francis to make the reforms the church so badly needs.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Former Paris archbishop under investigation over sexual assault allegation

Then-Archbishop of Paris Michel Aupetit attends a celebration at the Sacre Coeur basilica in April 2020.

By JOHN LEICESTER

French police are investigating an allegation that the former archbishop of Paris sexually assaulted a woman who is under legal protection as a vulnerable person, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Michel Aupetit, who unexpectedly resigned in 2021 after admitting to an “ambiguous” relationship with a woman in 2012, denies any wrongdoing, his lawyer said.

The police investigation of Aupetit was opened on the basis of information from the Paris archdiocese, the Paris prosecutors’ office said, confirming French media reports.

It was launched in late November over a preliminary potential charge of sexual assault on a vulnerable person, the prosecutors’ office said. The alleged assault took place several years ago, it added, providing no other details.

Aupetit’s lawyer, Jean Reinhart, said the inquiry was triggered by a letter sent to the Paris archdiocese. The letter was then forwarded to prosecutors, an automatic procedure for handling potential abuse cases that Aupetit himself put in place when he was archbishop, Reinhart said. Prosecutors then launched the police probe.

Reinhart said Aupetit has not seen the letter, and hasn’t been told who wrote it or what specifically it contains.

“My client is flabbergasted, doesn’t know what this is about,” the lawyer said. “We are completely in the dark.”

Aupetit became Paris archbishop in 2018. Pope Francis quickly accepted his resignation in December 2021.

The pontiff subsequently said he accepted the resignation because Aupetit couldn’t govern effectively after “gossip” about his relationship with a woman besmirched his “good name.”

Francis said there had been “lapses” with Aupetit involving sexual sins. He said they weren’t that serious and involved “some caresses and massages.”

Roman Catholic priests take vows of chastity.

Aupetit’s resignation piled more upheaval on the French Catholic Church, which has been severely undermined by a long history of sexual abuses. A report in October 2021 estimated that some 3,000 French priests had committed sexual abuse over the past 70 years.

In 2020, the pope accepted the resignation of French Roman Catholic Cardinal Philippe Barbarin in connection with the cover-up of sexual abuse of dozens of boys by a predatory priest.

Other investigations are also underway. In November, the prosecutor’s office in the southern city of Marseille opened a preliminary investigation of “aggravated sexual assault” against Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, one of France’s highest-ranking Catholic prelates.

In a letter that was read out during a conference of French bishops, Ricard said that he had abused a 14-year-old girl 35 years ago and was withdrawing from his religious duties.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!