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Vatican ruled by ‘omerta’ code of silence, whistle-blower claims

The Vatican is ruled by a climate of fear and an ‘omerta’ code of silence, a whistle-blower has claimed.

The mole claims to be one of more than 20 people within the Holy See who have leaked sensitive documents to the Italian media in the last few weeks, in an affair that has been compared to the WikiLeaks scandal and dubbed “Vati-leaks”.

The unidentified man, who said he had worked in the Vatican for more than 20 years, made the claims in an interview to be aired on Italian television on Wednesday night.

His face was hidden and his voice digitally distorted when he appeared on the TV channel, La7.

According to extracts of the interview, the whistle-blower said the Vatican was engulfed in intrigue, secrecy and a climate of intimidation.
“Maybe there is a kind of omerta to prevent the truth from surfacing. Not because of a power struggle but maybe because of fear,” he added.

He claimed to have worked in the State Secretariat, which is led by the powerful but unpopular Secretary of State, Tarcisio Bertone, who is reported to have fallen out of favour with the Pope and his supporters.

The whistle-blower said the Vatican is a place where “you can commit a murder and then disappear into the void” – a reference to a murky scandal in the Swiss Guard in 1998, when a young soldier shot dead the corps’ commander and wife before apparently committing suicide.

The mother of Cedric Tornay, 23, the alleged assassin, has never accepted that her son would have committed suicide and has called on Pope Benedict XVI, 84, to reopen the case, amid speculation that the real killer of the three may never have been caught.

There have been long-standing accusations of an official cover-up by the Roman Catholic Church, with numerous conspiracy theories put forward for a possible motive.

The leaks have embarrassed the Vatican in recent weeks, with claims of corruption and nepotism, questions over the transparency of the Vatican bank and unconfirmed reports of an assassination plot against the Pope within the next 12 months.

The whistle-blower dismissed suggestions that documents were being leaked in exchange for money.

“Something like that is inconceivable for me. That would mean betraying what we believe in,” he said.

He urged the Vatican to reinvestigate “with zeal” one of its most enduring mysteries – the kidnap of teenager Emanuela Orlandi nearly 30 years ago.
Over the years it has been claimed that Miss Orlandi was kidnapped so that she could be used as a bargaining chip for the release from prison of Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill John Paul II in St Peter’s Square in 1981.

Another theory is that the girl’s father, a Vatican employee, had stumbled on documents that connected the Vatican bank with a criminal gang in Rome and that she was kidnapped in a bid to silence him.

It has even been suggested that the kidnapping was carried out on the orders of a Catholic archbishop, Paul Marcinkus, the disgraced head of the Vatican bank, known as the ‘Istituto per le Opere di Religione’. Marcinkus, an American, died six years ago.

Complete Article HERE!

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Church watchdog group posts Delaware sex abuse papers

A national watchdog group Wednesday began posting on line an estimated 30,000 pages of formerly undisclosed files from the Catholic Diocese here, which went bankrupt to pay damages to victims of sexual abuse.

The Wilmington Diocese paid out $77 million to 146 victims of sex abuse by priests and other clergy last year, forcing it to declare bankruptcy. The documents are being released as part of an agreement with abuse victims to conclude that process, church lawyer Anthony Flynn said.

“It is the largest single release of documents, by far,” in the nation, said Terry McKiernan, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, who explained that more documents were at one time filed in the Boston Archdiocese scandal, but over a longer period.

“The church itself calls them ‘secret archives,'” he said of the trove of papers, which detail internal Church correspondence over the abuse allegations.

It will take days for the site to post all of the documents on its website, www.bishopaccountability/wilmington, according to co-director Anne Barrett Doyle, who spoke at a press conference outside the diocese office here Wednesday.

“It is a sad day for me because the truth is revealed in documents like these,” said abuse victim Matthias Conaty, now 43, of Wilmington, who said he was abused by a Capuchin friar from the ages of 9 to 12.

“It is sad because men who were supposed to be trusted abused children and equally awful is the fact that men who were supervising (them) found it more important to protect what they saw as the interests of the church and containment of scandal,” Conaty told reporters outside the diocese headquarters.

Doyle told Reuters that her group wants two monsignors in the diocese forced out of the ministry because of what she believes were cover-ups of sexual abuse.

Diocese spokesman Robert Krebs, however, told Reuters that Bishop W. Francis Malooly, who has headed the diocese since 2008, has seen the documents and would have removed the men if he thought it had been justified.

Child abuse accusations have rocked the Catholic Church in the United States since 2002, and the church has paid out some $2 billion in settlements to victims.

In addition to Wilmington, Delaware several other Catholic dioceses have filed for bankruptcy because of sexual abuse claims including Portland, Oregon, Milwaukee, San Diego, Spokane, Washington and Davenport, Iowa.

Complete Article HERE!

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Vatican paper brands leakers irresponsible “wolves”

The Vatican newspaper on Wednesday suggested those responsible for revealing sensitive internal documents alleging corruption and a cover-up were irresponsible, undignified “wolves,” the latest twist in what has become known as “Vatileaks.”

But an editorial in the Osservatore Romano, while renewing criticism of some media handling of the scandal, also said that the Catholic Church should see the current image crisis as a chance to purify itself.

It was the latest chapter in a saga in which the Vatican has had to scramble to deal with what one spokesman called its own version of “Wikileaks” and what the Italian media have dubbed “Vatileaks.” It also coincided with the publication of new leaks about the Vatican bank.

The editorial was ostensibly to mark the 30th anniversary of the arrival in Rome from Germany of then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected pope in 2005, to take up the powerful post as head of the Vatican’s doctrinal enforcer.

But in a section about current events, it described the pope as a man who “is not stopped by wolves” and that he was ready to stand up to “irresponsible and undignified behavior.”

A senior Vatican official familiar with the newspaper’s editorial line, asked if that part of the editorial which referred to wolves was criticizing those who have leaked the documents, said “even them” and added: “They certainly are not boy scouts.”

From leaked letters by an archbishop who was transferred after he blew the whistle on what he saw as a web of corruption and cronyism, to a leaked poison pen memo which puts a number of cardinals in a bad light, to new suspicions about its bank, Vatican spokesmen have had their work cut out responding.

But the editorial said the Church should see the entire episode, which some say is part of a power struggle inside the Vatican, as an opportunity for renewal.

The “irresponsible and undignified behavior,” the editorial said, “winds up becoming intertwined with the noise of the media, which is inevitable and certainly not disinterested, but which we need to see as an occasion for purification in the Church.”

EMBARRASSING LEAKS

The flurry of leaks has come at an embarrassing time – just before a usually joyful ceremony this week known as a consistory, when Benedict will admit more prelates into the College of Cardinals, the exclusive men’s club that will one day pick the next Roman Catholic leader from among their own ranks.

The latest image crisis began last month when an Italian television investigative show broadcast private letters to Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone and the pope from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the former deputy governor of Vatican City and currently the Vatican ambassador in Washington.

The letters showed that Vigano was transferred after he exposed what he argued was a web of corruption, nepotism and cronyism linked to the awarding of contracts to contractors at inflated prices.

Other leaks centre on the Vatican bank, which is trying to put past scandals behind it. They include the collapse 30 years ago of Banco Ambrosiano in a tangle of lurid allegations about money-laundering, freemasons, mafias and the mysterious 1982 death of Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi – “God’s banker.”

The Vatican bank, formally known at the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), aims to comply fully with EU standards on financial transparency in order to make Europe’s “white list” by June.

But the Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper which has published most of the leaked documents about the Vatican bank, ran more confidential letters on Wednesday which it said pointed to an internal clash over just how transparent the bank should be about its past dealings.

Complete Article HERE!

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$2 billion cost for Catholic Church abuse scandals: Experts

A wave of clerical sex abuse scandals have cost the Catholic Church over two billion dollars (1.5 billion euros) but the real price is the blow to its reputation, two U.S. experts said on Wednesday.

“It is probably reasonable to estimate that the actual ‘out of pocket’ cost of the crisis to the Church internationally is well in excess of two billion dollars,” Michael Bemi and Patricia Neal said at a Vatican summit on the issue.

The cost could be much higher though as at least some dioceses in the Church “made many confidential settlements over the years, the total value of which may never be known,” said the two consultants for the U.S. Catholic Church.

Bemi and Neal asked Catholic leaders from around the world: “How many hospitals, seminaries, schools, churches, shelters for abused women and children and soup kitchens could we have built with this amount of money?

“The task of attempting to assess the damage caused to the Church by the crisis is certainly daunting and may seem to be an unattainable goal. No price can be placed on any one single soul,” they added.

As well as up-front litigation costs, the U.S. experts pointed to the time and energy members of the clergy have had to devote to responding to claims.

Many priests had been left scarred by the scandal, they said.

“Thousands of good priests, religious, and lay ministers have all been ‘burned’ by the abuse scandal,” Bemi and Neal said.

“They often must deal with distrust, resistance, suspicion and even ridicule from people with whom they interact, because they have been painted with the same broad brush” as offenders, they added.

The conference at the Vatican’s Gregorian University, which brought together representatives of 100 bishops’ conferences and the leaders of 33 religious orders, is a response to the thousands of abuse cases revealed in recent years.

Complete Article HERE!

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550 people seeking restitution for sex abuse in Archdiocese of Milwaukee bankruptcy

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About 550 people are asking for restitution for alleged sexual abuse by clergy in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee — more than in any of the other U.S. dioceses that have filed for bankruptcy protection, according a lawyer involved in the Milwaukee case.

The Milwaukee Archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection last year, saying pending sex-abuse lawsuits could leave it with debts it couldn’t afford.

The archdiocese has paid more than $30 million in settlements and other court costs related to alleged clergy abuse. More than a dozen sex abuse suits against it have been halted because of the bankruptcy proceedings. They include allegations against a priest accused of abusing some 200 boys at a suburban school for deaf students from 1950 to 1974.

James Stang, a bankruptcy lawyer who represents creditors in the Wisconsin case, estimated about 550 claims had been filed by the Wednesday afternoon deadline set by the bankruptcy court.

Those who filed claims will end up splitting a settlement amount that will be determined by the creditors’ committee, archdiocese and its insurance company. The archdiocese had only $4.6 million in assets to be applied to claims in 2010.

A victims advocacy group called the number of filings “extraordinarily tragic,” but said that represented only a small portion of people abused by clergy.

“It’s sad and it just shows how devastating these crimes have been on this community but it’s obviously far from over,” said Peter Isely, the Midwest director for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

The other seven Catholic dioceses in the U.S. that have filed for bankruptcy since the clergy abuse scandal erupted in 2002 in Boston are in Davenport, Iowa; Fairbanks, Alaska; Portland, Ore.; San Diego; Spokane, Wash.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Wilmington, Del. Two other religious orders have also filed for bankruptcy.

Of the seven other dioceses that also filed for bankruptcy, the number of claims ranged from about 40 to 250, Stang said. About 535 claimants had come forward against the Oregon Province of the Jesuits, he said.

Archdiocese spokeswoman Julie Wolf and attorney Jeff Anderson, who represents clergy abuse victims, including some in the Milwaukee case, said it’s hard to compare cases. Anderson said each diocese represents a different number of people, and Wolf said some dioceses are incorporated differently.

Payouts in the other bankruptcy cases have varied based on the severity of the abuse and the quality of the diocese’s insurance coverage, according to Stang. For example, cases in Southern California yielded an average of about $1.2 million per claimant, he said, while the amount was far less in Fairbanks, Alaska, where less money was available.

Stang predicted the payouts wouldn’t be on the generous side in Wisconsin. The creditors committee, archdiocese and its insurance company will negotiate a dollar amount. After that, those who filed claims will negotiate between themselves on how to divide the money.

“Insurance-coverage issues in Milwaukee cases haven’t been very good for survivors,” he said. “The rulings by courts there have not been survivor-friendly.”

Stang acknowledged some people file claims even though they weren’t abused but said that was “extremely rare.”

“Most people are not willing to come out and publicly say they were masturbated by someone,” Stang said.

Anderson and the archdiocese both said they advertised the deadline both locally and nationally.

Anderson said his firm paid for TV and newspaper advertisements because he didn’t think the archdiocese’s efforts made the victims feel safe coming forward.

Wolf disputed that. “We’ve just been focused on getting this message out far and wide to as many people as we could in order to make sure everybody who had a claim was able to submit it before this deadline occurred,” she said.

A Feb. 9 court hearing is set for a judge to consider a request from the archdiocese to throw out some claims by people on grounds they were filed beyond the statute of limitations, they involved someone who was not an archdiocese employee or involve a victim involved in a prior settlement.

Wolf said she didn’t know how many of the claims would be included in the request.

Complete Article HERE!