File under: The more things change, the more they stay the same
Santo Domingo.- The Vatican on Friday rejected a Warsaw Office of the Prosecutor’s request to hand over its former envoy to Dominican Republic, the Pole Jozef Wesolowski, to face charges of sexual abuse filed by five Dominican boys.
Quoting the AFP, French newspaper Le Monde reports that Pope Francis declined Warsaw’s request to extradite the Polish national to face accusations by Dominican authorities.
Wesolowski was whisked out of the Dominican Republic and sent to Rome once local journalist Nuria Piera uncovered the scandal, which could also be linked to another Polish priest, (Padre Alberto) Wojciech Gil, charged with pedophilia in Juncalito, a town in a rugged region of Santiago province.
“The Holy See’s response is concise and fits in a half-page,” reports Polish TV channel N24. “The letter’s authors noted that the Vatican is investigating the Catholic hierarch about the alleged practice of pedophilia.”
File under: Same Old Story — Archbishop thinks gay marriage bigger threat than sexually abusive priests
by Madeleine Baran
Archbishop John Nienstedt said he accepts responsibility for addressing the unfolding clergy sexual abuse crisis and regrets that a growing number of parishioners and priests in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis have “lost confidence” in him.
However, he denied any abuse cover-up or illegal actions and repeated the archdiocese’s claim that there are no offending priests in active ministry.
Nienstedt’s remarks came in an e-mailed response to questions from MPR News. It’s the first time the archbishop has answered questions about the scandal since MPR News began publishing investigative reports in late September.
“As head of this local Church, I accept responsibility for addressing the issues that have been raised and am completely committed to finding the truth and fixing the problems that exist,” Nienstedt wrote. “My highest priorities are to ensure the safety of our children and to restore the trust of Catholics and our clergy. I will do everything in my power to do so.”
An MPR News investigation found Nienstedt and other top church officials failed to warn parishioners of a priest’s sexual addiction. That priest, the Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer, is serving five years in prison for sexually abusing two children and possessing child pornography.
Subsequent reports showed the archdiocese kept “borderline illegal” pornography found on the computer of the Rev. Jon Shelley in 2004 and gave extra payments to priests who sexually abused children.
In the Shelley case, police first learned of the images this year when Jennifer Haselberger, a canon lawyer who resigned in April, called authorities. The subsequent police investigation did not find child pornography, though the lead investigator questioned whether the archdiocese turned over all the evidence. St. Paul Police recently reopened the case.
Nienstedt continues to decline interview requests, even as some parishioners and priests now call for his resignation.
Nienstedt’s top deputy, the Rev. Peter Laird, stepped down as vicar general of the archdiocese on Oct. 3. Former Archbishop Harry Flynn resigned as chair of the board of trustees at the University of St. Thomas on Oct. 17.
The departures follow the exit of the Rev. Kevin McDonough as head of the archdiocese’s child safety program last month. McDonough played a central role in clergy sexual abuse cases as vicar general under Flynn and former Archbishop John Roach.
Nienstedt, who replaced Flynn in 2008, said the archdiocese may have violated its own procedures in handling abuse cases.
File under: Follow the money! Truth is, all bishops have huge slush funds and these guys are showing us only what they want us to see.
By Tom Heneghan
German Catholic bishops are scrapping centuries of secrecy and reporting the value of their private endowments as a scandal caused by a free-spending prelate puts pressure on them for more financial transparency.
Limburg Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst – dubbed “the luxury bishop” – has shocked the Church by admitting six-fold cost overruns on construction of his luxurious new residence, which is now priced at 31 million euros, most of which will be paid from his ample reserves.
She’s got the bling!
His lavish spending clashes with the humble style of Pope Francis, who urges bishops to turn away from wealth and pomp and get closer to the faithful. Francis has also promised to clean up the murky finances of the Vatican’s own bank.
The Limburg scandal has also prompted worried German Catholics to ask what their dioceses were doing.
“We take these concerns very seriously,” Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann of Speyer said in a communique revealing his 46.5 million euro reserve.
German dioceses have secret reserves called the “bishop’s chair” known only to the bishop and a few advisors. Run as a diocesan nest egg and source of funds for special projects, they are not taxed and not listed in the annual balance sheets.
In some older dioceses, “bishop’s chair” reserves include age-old property holdings, donations from former princely rulers and funds from German states over the past two centuries. Their make-up and value vary widely from diocese to diocese.
RICHES AND MORE RICHES?
Cologne, the largest and reportedly richest diocese in Europe, announced on Tuesday “in connection with the current discussion about Church finances” that its archbishop had reserves amounting to 166.2 million euros in 2012.
It said the 9.6 million euro earnings from its investments were, as in previous years, added to the diocesan budget of 939 milllion euros in 2012, three-quarters of which was financed by the “church tax” levied on churchgoers.
A critic of church financial secrecy, Berlin political scientist and journalist Carsten Frerk, said Cologne’s total should be about 1.1 billion euros because its large real estate investments were listed at only nominal values.
“They don’t pay tax so they don’t update their assessments,” he told Reuters. “It’s not in their interest to publish these amounts because then they wouldn’t get as many donations.”
Dioceses also had holdings in other accounts and some even have their own private banks, somewhat similar to the Vatican’s bank, so their full wealth is hard to calculate, he added.
Cologne diocesan officials were not immediately available for comment. Cathedral Provost Rev Norbert Feldhoff told the diocesan radio station it would be hard to explain some aspects of Church finances if all details are published.
“There are big sums and there are problems,” he told Domradio. “We can explain it all to experts, but it could be difficult for the average housewife in Cologne to understand.”
TIGHT-LIPPED
At least six of the country’s other 26 dioceses also opened their books, several showing much smaller “bishop’s chair” reserves but some revealing quite large amounts.
The small diocese of Trier, Germany’s oldest, had a reserve of 84 million euros and said part of its earnings went to pay damages to victims of the clerical sexual abuse scandals that rocked the German Church in recent years.
Limburg, where Tebartz-van Elst’s lavish spending has led to loud calls from priests and parishioners for his resignation, has not posted its reserves. Media reports have estimated the sum at about 100 million euros.
German dioceses have traditionally been tight-lipped about their “bishop’s chair” reserves. In 2010, 25 of the 27 dioceses refused to discuss them when asked by Der Spiegel magazine.
Last week, four of the five dioceses in North Rhine-Westphalia – including Cologne – declined to give any information to the local West German Radio station. By Tuesday, only Paderborn diocese had still not published its details.
Germany’s church tax, collected by the state and handed over to the churches, raised 5.2 billion euros for the Catholics and 4.6 billion euros for Protestants in 2012, making them major economic actors at home and abroad.
File under: No independent thinking, thank you very much!
By Tom Heneghan
The Vatican warned bishops on Tuesday not to reform faster than Pope Francis, after a German diocese said that some divorced and remarried Catholics would now be allowed to receive communion and other sacraments.
Vatican spokesman Rev Federico Lombardi, announcing the pope would hold a special synod of bishops in October 2014 to discuss issues facing the family, said local churches that come up with their own reforms in the meantime could create confusion.
Pope Francis has indicated he could consider exceptions to a Church law that bars remarried Catholics from the sacraments because Rome considers marriage to be inviolable. Many bishops have mentioned this as a growing problem in their dioceses.
The archdiocese of Freiburg in Germany issued a guidebook on Monday for priests ministering to remarried Catholics that spelled out a way for them to express remorse for their failed first marriage and receive communion and other sacraments.
Speaking at the Vatican, Lombardi did not mention the Freiburg guidebook but stressed that Francis was working with his bishops on a reform of family issues.
“In this context, offering special pastoral solutions by individuals or local offices can risk causing confusion,” he said in a statement, stressing the importance of “conducting a journey in full communion with the Church community.”
The Argentine-born pope has shaken up the Church since his election in March by focusing more on reform and forgiveness than issues such as abortion and homosexuality, where Vatican opposition to current social trends is well known.
But he is also consulting his advisers closely, and they have stressed the reform process will take some time to complete.
File under: Insulated, monolithic, callous, tone deaf church power structure.
By Dagmara Leszkowicz
The comments from Archbishop Jozef Michalik entrenched the view among some younger Poles that the church is out of touch with modern society and failing to properly confront allegations of sexual abuse by priests.
In comments shown on Tuesday by broadcaster TVN24, Michalik said child sexual abuse by priests was unacceptable, but the debate about it needed to be broadened out beyond the immediate physical or psychological wounds inflicted on the victims.
“And one has to say … how many wounds are inflicted when parents divorce? We often hear that this inappropriate attitude (paedophilia), or abuse, manifests itself when a child is seeking love,” said the clergyman, who is head of the Roman Catholic episcopate in Poland.
“It (the child) clings, it searches. It gets lost itself and then draws another person into this.”
After the comments were broadcast, Polish social media networks reverberated with angry comments.
“This is disgusting, and is soaked in a sick logic, when a victim is responsible for a crime,” wrote one person, who gave her name as Anna, posting on Facebook.
Another poster on the site, who identified himself as Adam, wrote: “While reading this, we can only be happy that this ‘Polish institution’ has committed ritual suicide.”
Church authorities later on Tuesday convened a news conference to try to calm the outrage. A spokesman for the episcopate said the archbishop’s comments had been a “a pure slip of the tongue” and the archbishop has been misunderstood.
Michalik himself, who was present at the news conference, apologised for the situation. “The context of my comment was as follows: a child is always innocent. But it can be hurt not only by priests but also by its own environment,” he said.
Poland is one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic countries. The church’s role at the centre of public life was cemented when clergymen, led by Polish-born Pope John Paul II, helped bring down Communist rule in the late 1980s.
That role is now being challenged by a generation of Poles who feel uncomfortable with the church’s traditional views on issues such as abortion, divorce and same-sex partnerships.
While the Catholic church in countries such as Ireland and the United States has taken steps to be more assertive about uncovering child sex abuse by priests, in Poland it remains largely a taboo subject.
Abuse allegations are reported from time to time in the Polish media, but there has so far been no far-reaching public debate about the issue.
Pope Francis said soon after he was elected as Roman Catholic pontiff this year that he wanted to act decisively to root out sexual abuse of children by priests and ensure the perpetrators are punished.
Quoting the AFP, French newspaper Le Monde reports that Pope Francis declined Warsaw’s request to extradite the Polish national to face accusations by Dominican authorities.
