Canadian bishop sentencing hearing begins
A Canadian Roman Catholic bishop betrayed little emotion during his sentencing hearing Thursday as a court was told his laptop contained hundreds of pornographic images of young boys, including photos of torture.
Bishop Raymond Lahey, 71, sat quietly, his right hand trembling slightly as he ran his index finger along his lips and chin, as Detective Andrew Thompson told the court that almost 600 photos, mostly of young teen boys, were found on Lahey’s laptop and hand-held device when he arrested in 2009.
“Some of them were quite graphic,” said Thompson. “There were images of nude boys, but there were also (images of) torture and stuff like that.”
Lahey pleaded guilty in May to importing child pornography in a rare case of a high-ranking Canadian Church official facing charges over sexual misconduct.
He waived his bail and was taken into custody even though he had not been formerly sentenced. His lawyer Michael Edelson had said Lahey wanted to start serving time now to get credit after sentencing.
Lahey is scheduled to return to court in December. His lawyer, Michael Edelson, has asked the judge to reschedule that appearance for an earlier date.
At the time of his guilty plea, the Vatican said the church would impose its own disciplinary or penal measures, but it did not elaborate on what punishment Lahey could face. Prelates who sexually abuse minors can be defrocked; lesser punishments include being forbidden from celebrating Mass publicly.
Last year, in the midst of the clerical abuse scandal, the Vatican made acquiring, possessing or distributing child pornography one of the most serious canonical crimes that are handled by the powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Lahey was charged in 2009 with possessing and importing child pornography after border agents examined his laptop at an Ontario airport on his return home from London, England.
According to court documents, Lahey became nervous when a border agent asked him if he had a laptop and ordered a second inspection when they discovered his passport contained stamps for Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Germany — countries that can be sources of child pornography.
Thompson told the court some content on Lahey’s laptop ranked among the worst he has seen in scores of investigations into child pornography allegations.
“They’re right up there,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t depict infants, but the explicit images of torture are disturbing.”
Lahey’s lawyers argued that the bishop may not have seen every image stored on his laptop’s hard drive, since some of the pictures may have come from pop-up windows he never actually looked at.
They also tried to make the case that the 588 images of child porn were just a small fraction of the 155,000 or so photos on his computer.
Lahey resigned as head of the Catholic diocese of Antigonish in Nova Scotia just before the charges became public.
The case was especially shocking to Canadians because Lahey had overseen a multimillion dollar settlement for clerical sexual abuse victims in his diocese only a month earlier.
Barbara Dorris, outreach director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, also known as SNAP, applauded Canadian authorities for apprehending Lahey and for pursuing criminal charges against him.
“We urge the magistrate presiding over this sentencing hearing to give Lahey a stiff sentence and send a message to pedophile clerics in Canada and abroad that child abuse will not be tolerated,” Dorris said Thursday.
Spanish priests join opposition to costly papal visit
More than 100 priests from Madrid’s poorest parishes have added their voices to the growing protest at the cost of Pope Benedict’s visit to Madrid next week.
An umbrella group – the Priest’s Forum – says the estimated €60m (£53m) cost of the papal visit, not counting security, cannot be justified at a time of massive public sector cuts and 20% unemployment in Spain.
Evaristo Villar, a 68-year-old member of the group, said he objected to the multinationals with which the Catholic church has had to ally itself to cover the costs of the “showmanship” of the event.
“The companies that are backing World Youth Day and the pope’s visit leave much to be desired,” he said. “They are the ones who, together with international capital, have caused the crisis. We are not against the pope’s visit, we are against the way it is being staged.”
The more than 100 corporate sponsors of the event include Coca-Cola, Telefónica and Santander.
Opponents of the visit have set up a Facebook page calling for a boycott of the sponsors.
Some 140 groups, among them the secular organisation Europa Laica (Secular Europe), are against the visit.
“Catholics can go wherever they like in Madrid but the freedom of movement of the rest of us is restricted,” said Francisco Delgado, leader of Europa Laica, on discovering that the city had prohibited his group’s proposed march.
Europa Laica plans to march under the slogans “Not a penny of my taxes for the pope” and “For a secular state”.
There is particular ire that the some 500,000 pilgrims expected in the city will get free transport.
Madrid metro fares rose by 50% on Monday.
“With the economic crisis we are going through, we can’t pay for this. The church should set the example,” said a spokesman for the Indignados movement, which has staged high-profile protests in central Madrid.
“They propose to spend €60m when the regional government has just cut €40m from the education budget.”
Yago de la Cierva, the executive director of World Youth Day 2011, an event built around the papal visit, said: “We have made a huge effort to be moderate and economically responsible. The new generations – young people today – they like big events and the church uses all the tools that exist to present the message of Jesus Christ.”
Interest in the Catholic church is on the wane among young people in Spain.
A recent survey by the national statistics office showed that the number of believers aged 18 to 24 has fallen by 56% in the past 10 years.
The pope’s visit to Barcelona last November was poorly received, with the popemobile forced to drive at top speed past small groups of the faithful along mainly deserted streets.
Vatican aims to regain trust of US religious women, official says
In the final stage of the apostolic visitation of U.S. women’s religious communities, the Vatican congregation overseeing the study not only is facing mountains of paper, but must try to rebuild a relationship of trust with the women, said the congregation’s secretary.
U.S.-born Archbishop Joseph W. Tobin, secretary of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, said, “I believe a visitation has to have a dialogical aspect, but the way this was structured at the beginning didn’t really favor that.”
In an interview Aug. 10 with Catholic News Service, Archbishop Tobin said the congregation hoped its review of the visitation reports and its responses to the participating religious communities would be marked by dialogue and would be a step toward healing.
“I’m an optimist, but also trying to be realistic: The trust that should characterize the daughters and sons of God and disciples of Jesus isn’t recovered overnight. I think women religious have a right to say, ‘Well, let’s see,'” he said.
The former prefect of the congregation, Cardinal Franc Rode, initiated the visitation in January 2009, saying its aim would be to study the community, prayer and apostolic life of the orders to learn why the number of religious women in the United States had declined so sharply since the 1960s.
Almost a year into the study, Cardinal Rode told Vatican Radio that the investigation was a response to concerns, including by “an important representative of the U.S. church” regarding “some irregularities or omissions in American religious life. Most of all, you could say, it involves a certain secular mentality that has spread in these religious families and, perhaps, also a certain ‘feminist’ spirit.”
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Archbishop Tobin said Mother Mary Clare Millea, superior general of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the apostolic visitor appointed by the Vatican, has submitted her “overall draft report,” but the congregation is expecting another 400 reports from the sisters who visited each community and from many of the communities themselves.
The congregation, which has a staff of 40, including only three native English speakers, will need help reading, assessing and responding to the reports, he said.
One possibility, Archbishop Tobin said, is to ask religious congregations based in Rome to allow U.S. members of their general councils to serve as consultants to the congregation and help go through all the reports.
The fact that Cardinal Rode had decided the visitors’ reports would not be shared with the individual communities was only “part of the real harm done at the beginning,” Archbishop Tobin said. The situation was exacerbated by “rumors and, I would say, some rather unscrupulous canonical advisers exploited that” by sowing fear that the Vatican would replace the leadership of some communities or dissolve them altogether.
“It’s like Fox News, they keep people coming back because they keep them afraid,” Archbishop Tobin said.
“But certainly, on our side of the river or our side of the pond, we had created an atmosphere where that was possible,” and where the idea that some communities would be closed down “didn’t seem to be so outlandish.”
“It’s like preaching; it’s not what you say, it’s what they hear … and what a lot of these women heard was someone telling them their life was not loyal and faith-filled,” he said.
In the end, though, many congregations found the process was not as bad as they feared, he said, and “an important outcome that is already happening is that there is a growing number of women religious in the States who say, ‘We need reconciliation, but it has to happen among ourselves. It can’t be imposed by the Vatican.'”
Archbishop Tobin said reconciliation is needed within and among communities, including between those represented by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, which stereotypically are seen, respectively, as very progressive and very conservative.
“The visitors themselves were from the two different groups, and they found out from talking to each other that the caricatures weren’t accurate,” he said.
Cardinal Policarpo summoned to Vatican for his statements on the ordination of women priests
The Lisbon patriarch, José da Cruz Policarpo, who during a recent interview stated that “no fundamental obstacle” exists, from a “theological stand point,” to the ordination of women priests had an exchange with the Papal Secretary of State Bertone, after he received a letter from the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith, cardinal William Levada, who invited him to clarify his position.
This is according an article by António Marujo published by the Portuguese newspaper Publico. The Vatican Insider has also written about it, reporting the clarification published by the Portuguese cardinal.
It has just been confirmed that the seventy-five year old patriarch of Lisbon, will be serving another two years as leader of the diocese in the Portuguese capital. During a long interview with the monthly publication “OA”, the Portuguese Law Society magazine, discussing the topic of women priests, states that “John Paul II at one point seemed to have settled the controversy.” Reference is made to the apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis (1994), one of the shortest documents written by Wojtyla, with which the Pope, after the Anglican Communion’s decision to open the ordination of women, confirmed that the Catholic Church would have never done it.
“I believe,” cardinal Policarpo said, “that the issue cannot be settled in these terms. From a theological stand point there is no fundamental obstacle (to women priests, Ed.); there is this tradition, let’s call it that way; it was never done any other way.”
In response to the interviewer’s question, intrigued by the cardinal’s statement that no theological reasons exist against the ordination of women, Policarpo answered, “I do not think there is any fundamental obstacle. It is the fundamental equality right of all members of the Church. The problem is rooted in a very strong tradition, which originates from Jesus and the ease with which the reformed Churches allowed women to become priests.”
A few days after, the cardinal disclosed a letter in which he clarified his thoughts, stating that he never “systematically analyzed the matter.” “Reactions to this interview forced me to ponder on the matter with more attention and I realized that, by not paying due attention to the statements of the teachings of the Church on the matter, I helped trigger these reactions.” Policarpo then added, “It would be painful for me if my words were to create confusion in our obedience to the Church and to the words of our Holy Father.”
Now, the Portuguese daily paper reveals a behind the scenes description of what happened over the past weeks, stating that the Lisbon patriarch was summoned by the Papal Secretary of State, Tarcisio Bertone. The conversation took place in Castel Gandolfo in the first half of July, while the Portuguese cardinal was in Rome to participate to a plenary session of the newly formed Papal Council for the new evangelization. Publico writes that Policarpo was treated with extreme kindness “because the Vatican was afraid he would react negatively to a strong reprimand.”
On July 2, a few days before the meeting with Bertone, Policarpo had received, through a papal nuncio in Lisbon, a letter by cardinal William Levada, prefect of the former Holy Office. According to a testimony obtained by Publico, the letter apparently had him very worried. For this reason, on 6 July, the patriarch wrote a clarification statement. The Portuguese daily paper, however, highlights that this was not the first time Policarpo had made statements of this kind about women priests: however, it was the first time that his words had been reported by the international press.
António Marujo’s article provides several of the cardinal’s statements as examples. In 1999, a year after his appointment as Lisbon patriarch of the diocesan center, Policarpo led people to believe that the matter of women priests had not been settled at all and that what was needed, was a period of maturing of the communities and the Church, since today the idea of “women carrying out duties that were unthinkable thirty years ago is now accepted within the Church.”
On May 2003, in Vienna, the cardinal responded in a similar fashion to a question during a press conference in which mention was made to a letter sent by Pope John Paul II in 1994 and the Congregation’s subsequent clarification of the Doctrine of the Faith. Policarpo explained that in his opinion the matter “is not settled that way; from a theological point of view, there is no fundamental obstacle; there is this tradition, let’s call it that way… it was never done any other way”. In that same interview, the Lisbon patriarch stated that at the present time it was not appropriate to raise the issue because it would have triggered “a series of reactions,” but he concluded saying that “If God wishes it to happen, and if it God’s plan, it will happen.”
The document of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith to which reference is made, was the answer to a doubt published by the former Holy Office (at the time led by cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who had archbishop Tarcisio Bertone as his right hand). It asked if “the doctrine, according to which, the Church cannot ordain women priests, as proposed in the apostolic Letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis” had to be “deemed definitive” and “part of the deposit of faith.” The answer, approved by Pope Wojtyla, was “affirmative.” The Congregation at the time explained that “this doctrine requires a permanent confirmation because, based God’s Word, written and constantly kept and applied in the Tradition of the Church since its origins, it was infallibly proposed by the ordinary and universal teachings of the Church” and thus, “it must be followed always, everywhere and by every faithful person, since it belongs to the deposit of faith.”