Avoiding Corporate Responsibility – Page 157

March 12, 2013March 12, 2013

Vatican department shares Rome palazzo with gay sauna

A historic palazzo in Rome that houses a key Vatican department is also the home of a well-known gay sauna.

The Holy See paid 20m euros (£17.5m) in 2008 for around 20 apartments in the building for the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples.

Its Prefect Emeritus, Cardinal Ivan Dias, is one of the priestly residents.

The proximity to Europa Multiclub, billed as Italy’s top gay sauna, has drawn comment due to the Vatican’s strict stance on gay partnerships.

The facility boasts a Turkish bath, Finnish sauna, whirlpools and massages.

Also on offer are “bear parties”, which are advertised on its website with a video of a man stripping down before donning clerical attire.

Bruno, “a hairy, overweight pastor of souls, is free to the music of his clergyman, remaining in a thong, because he wants to expose body and soul”, the website says.

The Vatican has declined to comment on the proximity of the sauna to the headquarters of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples – which is responsible for missionary activities – but Cardinal Dias has previously said that gays and lesbians can be cured of their “unnatural tendencies” through the “sacrament of penance”.

The 76-year-old cardinal, who is Indian and a former archbishop of Mumbai, will take part in the conclave to elect a successor to Pope Benedict XVI, which will begin later on Tuesday.

Complete Article HERE!

March 9, 2013

Roman Catholic leaders need to get rid of their groupthink

By Lisa Miller

Recent events prompt a stating of the obvious. The Roman Catholic Church is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy. It values neither free speech nor freedom of the press. Its leaders are not elected officials, so they do not sweat opinion polls. Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals do not represent the interests of their members, and members, if dissatisfied with their leadership, cannot vote those leaders out. The next pope, the Vatican press office continually reminds us, will be selected not by the 115 cardinals who will soon be sequestered in the Sistine Chapel, but by God.

But in the 21st century, this blatant disregard of democratic principles rankles. Even the cardinals from the United States showed uncharacteristic irritation when their daily news conferences in Rome were canceled last week. Italian newspapers had published leaked accounts of the closed-door meetings at which the voting cardinals are gathering pre-conclave and painted the leadership of the church as divided, rancorous and political. No one accused the Americans of leaking outright, but the news conferences abruptly stopped, and the U.S. cardinals weren’t happy. “In true old-style Catholic school teacher fashion, someone talks and everybody stays after school,” Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the Associated Press.

After decades of sex scandals, financial improprieties and rumors of further financial scandals to come, the American cardinals had been demanding more transparency from the church’s governing body, the Curia. “Obviously, we want to know and learn as much as we can relative to governance in the Church, and the Curia is part of that issue,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston. “So, certainly we want to discuss and learn what we can, and I think that will go on as long as the cardinals feel they need the information.”

When their news conferences were shut down, the USCCB issued a news release: “The U.S. Cardinals are committed to transparency.” Others in the College of Cardinals, the statement seemed to be saying, not so much.

Transparency is not just a post-Enlightenment, democratic ideal. It’s a post-Watergate value, learned the hard way. Corrupt leaders betray the faith and trust of generations to come. Healing and renewed trust in authority happens only when all the secrets have finally been revealed. No one understands this better than Americans, who have gotten used to seeing their government and business leaders apologize, express remorse, and — sometimes cynically, sometimes not — remediate their sins before re-committing themselves to power. The church’s continued refusal to do this after wave upon wave of revelations of abuse of innocents and corporate malfeasance infuriates even her most loyal members.

Institutions as wide-ranging as Google and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia have made transparency a core value. A group called Transparency International ranks countries on the basis of the perceived corruption in their governments. (The United States is 19th, after the United Kingdom but before Chile.) How is it in a world such as this, the men at the Vatican’s highest levels continue to close ranks and insist not only on their own authority but also on their own moral privilege? How is it that the church can continue to be faced with evidence that it abused children and insist that it protects the weak and the vulnerable?

A rereading of Jonathan Haidt’s wonderful book “The Righteous Mind” (just out in paperback) is illuminating here. Groups of like-minded people reinforce their own beliefs. And worse. They convince themselves that those beliefs are moral, even righteous. Individuals “lie, cheat and cut corners quite often when we think we can get away with it,” he writes, “and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others. We believe our own post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our own virtue.”

Groups are worse. Evolutionarily speaking, “group selection pulls for cooperation, for the ability to suppress antisocial behavior and spur individuals to act in ways that benefit their groups. Group-serving behaviors sometimes impose a terrible cost on outsiders.” In other words, in the most powerful groups, people work together — suppressing individual quirks and desires — to protect the group. And then they overlay that group-serving behavior with a moral righteousness that explains and exonerates their ruthlessness. Democratic values — openness, transparency, diversity, free exchange of ideas — do not come naturally to groups, Haidt explains. The brilliance of the American experiment is that it created the freedom for many different groups to thrive.

But then Haidt issues this warning, which the men who run the church would do well to heed: The most effective groups take good care of the people within them.

And the group known as the Catholic Church includes all of its believers, not just the cardinals.

Complete Article HERE!

March 6, 2013

College of Cardinals imposes media blackout

These old men will never get that their pathological need for secrecy is one of the main reasons their church is in crisis. When all else fails, redouble the effort to keep the lid on.

By Jason Horowitz

The College of Cardinals that will elect the next pope cut off formal communications with the news media on Wednesday after their private deliberations emerged in the Italian press, raising the specter of a leaking scandal that cast a pall over the last year in office of Pope Benedict XVI.

“Concern was expressed in the General Congregation about leaks of confidential proceedings reported in Italian newspapers,” said Sister Mary Ann Walsh, director of media relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who has organized news conferences with American cardinals in recent days. “As a precaution, the cardinals have agreed not to do interviews.”

The decision, communicated only an hour before a scheduled news conference with American cardinals on Wednesday afternoon, marked a quick end to a brief period of openness on the part of the Americans, who had said they hoped to keep reporters as informed as possible without breaking vows of secrecy.

The Vatican declined to specify who in the college expressed opposition to the news briefings, saying only that as the cardinals prepare for the conclave that will elect the next pontiff, “they realize the importance of keeping things among themselves,” said the Rev. Tom Rosica, a Vatican spokesman.

A report Wednesday by Italy’s most authoritative Vatican reporter, La Stampa’s Andrea Tornielli, disclosed details of the cardinals’ private deliberations, including the revelation that they had called for reforms of the Roman Curia, the bureaucracy that governs the Catholic Church, and had asked for more information about the leaking of papal correspondence, a scandal known as VatiLeaks that engulfed the Vatican last year. Tornielli also reported that embattled Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles had spoken, that cardinals called for better communications between the pope and the heads of the various church departments, and that some cardinals wanted to extend the preliminary talks into next week.

According to Vatican officials and experts, the media blackout might be more than a crackdown in reaction to the leak. It could also have a political dimension. One Vatican official speaking on background said that Italian cardinals, some of whom stand to benefit most from a quick conclave, had expressed misgivings about the American news conferences, during which U.S. prelates articulated what they were looking for in a pope. They often described criteria that did not match the characteristics of cardinals in the curia. The American cardinals also repeatedly said they wanted more time to listen to their colleagues and get to know one another, a position that Vatican experts said diminished the chances and power of better-known Roman officials, many of them Italian, who would gain from a speedier process.

In conclaves, as in comedy, timing is everything. And it has itself been a point of contention.

Contrary to the statements of some of the American cardinals in the news conferences, the Vatican has said that the selection of the conclave’s start date could occur without all the voting members of the college in attendance. In light of his retirement, Benedict had amended the Apostolic Constitution to empower the College of Cardinals to select the start date, as long as everyone was present.

In the last few days, the Vatican briefing theater has amounted to a semantics seminar on the meaning of “attend.” The Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican’s chief spokesman, has argued that if an absent but expected voting cardinal were going to attend, it was tantamount to his already being in attendance, and so the college could consider itself in plenary session.

American cardinals disagreed that they could tackle the start of the conclave without every seat filled.

“If the electors aren’t all there, why bother?” Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Texas said in one of the news conferences at the North American Pontifical College on a hill overlooking the Vatican. “It takes as long as it takes.”

Of the 115 cardinal electors, only two remained absent Wednesday: Jean-Baptiste Pham of Vietnam and Kazimierz Nycz of Poland. The Vatican said they were expected Thursday.

“The date of the conclave was not decided,” Lombardi said Wednesday. “Rather than try to interpret the so-called delay,” added Rosica, “we should view this in terms of a process of discernment and reflection. All the electors will be here, and they can enter a full discussion about this.”

Vatican experts instead interpreted the delay as they did the tension over talking to the media — as another political power struggle between officials in the Roman Curia and outsiders.

A subsequent statement by Walsh seemed to cast the American cardinals’ lot with the outsiders, a development that could help the papal candidates among them shed their superpower stigma. “The U.S. cardinals are committed to transparency and have been pleased to share a process-related overview of their work with members of the media and with the public,” she said, not mentioning who was not pleased.

“Some people in the curia wanted an early election because it would benefit the front-runners, and it would benefit the curial cardinals who already know everybody in the College of Cardinals,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a political scientist and author of the book, “Inside the Vatican.”

“Who does it hurt?” he asked. “The unknown candidate who would make a great pope, the younger cardinals; they are going to be dependent on the curial officials.”

Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, is one such person who could benefit from a longer process. Though a long shot, he has remained on many short lists to become the next pope. But in the news conferences, he rejected the idea that there was a political dimension to slower deliberations.

“I don’t think that so much is a factor as many cardinals are concerned that if there is not enough time spent in the general congregations, that once we get into the conclave, it could drag on,” he said at a news conference Tuesday. He said the goal was “to have enough discussions previous that when people go to the conclave, they already have sort of a very clear idea of who they are going to vote for at that point. If you cut short the discussion beforehand, the conclave could go on and on.”

The Vatican said Wednesday there was no connection between extended preliminary meetings and a short conclave. “We should resist the link,” Rosica said.

News that the Americans had canceled their news conferences, which had become a daily ritual here, streamed into the smartphones of reporters during the daily Vatican briefing. It was the first thing reporters asked Lombardi about when he opened the floor to questions, reflecting the inconvenient story lines that can emerge for the Vatican in what is essentially a newsless environment.

It is a vacuum that critics of the church have rushed to fill. Earlier Wednesday, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an organization that supports victims of sex abuse by clerics, held a well-attended news conference in which it released a list of a “dirty dozen” cardinals it considers unacceptable leaders of the church based on their past handling of the child sex-abuse crisis. Among them were cardinals often mentioned as prime candidates for the pontificate, including cardinals Timothy Dolan of New York, O’Malley of Boston, Leonardo Sandri of Argentina, Peter Turkson of Ghana, Angelo Scola of Italy and Marc Ouellet of Canada.

The College of Cardinals, which will choose the next pope, expressed concern about leaks of deliberations.

“It really isn’t up to SNAP to decide who should or should not participate in the conclave,” said Rosica.

One Vatican insider close to the church hierarchy questioned the wisdom of a media blackout, suggesting that the church was only creating a headache for itself.

(The front page of Wednesday’s Il Giornale, an Italian daily, carried a paparazzi-style photo of Benedict, who said before retiring and assuming the title of “pope emeritus” that he would be “hidden from the world,” taking a stroll in a white cassock, coat and ball cap.)

Instead, the Vatican has sought to satiate the army of accredited journalists flowing into Rome with brief glimpses behind the conclave curtain. On Monday, the Vatican showed a video of cardinals sitting, standing and reading in the theater where the congregations are held. On Tuesday, the feature presentation was a silent film with a camera panning over the three urns that will contain ballots during the election.

The video, which had the disembodied hands of a home shopping network presentation and the glacial pace of a Michelangelo Antonioni film, was accompanied by a Vatican press release explaining the significance and artistry of the containers. (“These are treated with a light patina which underlines the various chromatics of the bronze, the irregularities on the surface and the contrast between opaqueness and brightness.”)

On Wednesday, two flat screen televisions above the Vatican spokesmen showed blue-gloved workers carrying boards to protect the floor into the frescoed Sistine Chapel, unscrewing screws and unpacking from wooden crates the ovens that will burn the ballots.

The Vatican said, officially, that 18 cardinals spoke on Wednesday on topics ranging from their expectations, hopes and desired characteristics for the next pope to the church’s new evangelization efforts and the relations between the church government and bishops around the world. Speakers were asked to keep their remarks to about five minutes. Lombardi made a point to mention that the cardinals had wished a member of the college happy birthday.

Complete Article HERE!

March 6, 2013

Strong policies on abusive priests vital, O’Malley says

Ya gotta love this guy!

By Lisa Wangsness

Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley said Tuesday that the next pope must make sure the Roman Catholic Church adopts measures to deal with bishops whose “malfeasance” allowed abusive priests to remain in ministry.

O’Malley said in an interview that the successor to Pope Benedict XVI will need to continue Benedict’s campaign to get bishops across the world to adopt policies for dealing with accused abusers. That should include procedures for disciplining bishops who protect abusive priests, said O’Malley, among dozens of cardinals gathered at the Vatican.

The US bishops adopted a zero-tolerance policy on clergy sexual abuse a decade ago, requiring removal from ministry of any priest credibly accused of abusing a minor, but some church leaders have not followed it. The bishop of Kansas City was convicted last fall of failing to report child abuse by a priest, but the church has not sanctioned him.

“There needs to be a path” for disciplining bishops, O’Malley said. “Right now, it’s not terribly clear, but it’s something the next pope will have to deal with.”

Without a protocol in place, he said, it falls to the Vatican to decide what to do with each errant bishop on a case-by-case basis. “My point is always that if you don’t have policies, you’ll be improvising, and when you improvise, you make a lot of mistakes,” he said.

‘There needs to be a path’ for disciplining bishops. ‘Right now, it’s not terribly clear.’

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston discussed some of the issues at stake in the papal election in a brief interview Tuesday in a corridor of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, a peaceful hilltop seminary about 10 minutes by foot from the Vatican.

O’Malley is among the US cardinals staying there before the conclave. Once voting begins, the cardinals will move to lodgings within the Vatican and remain isolated from the world until they elect a pontiff.

The conclave is held in the Sistine Chapel, which closed at 1 p.m. Tuesday so that work crews could begin installing a raised floor, under which they will put antibugging devices, and the stoves in which the ballots will be burned.

O’Malley, who during the interview wore a gray cardigan over his hooded brown habit and blue socks peeking through his sandals, spent the morning in one of a series of meetings the cardinals are holding before the conclave, called general congregations, in which they discuss issues facing the church.

Being part of the papal process is “surrealistic,” he said, but also moving.

“Growing up a Catholic and knowing a little bit about these traditions and the way the Holy Father is selected in the church — it’s a far cry from seeing it up close and being part of it,” he said.

O’Malley also seemed to ache for a little down time. He had just finished a long press conference and had more reporters to speak with before a dinner with cardinals. He said he had not been able to spend much time going out to dinner or otherwise enjoying the city. “If I didn’t have all these interviews,” he said with a laugh, “I could be in a bookstore right now.”

Yet the shy O’Malley seemed at ease at the press conference. He said that after almost 30 years of being a bishop, he had grown accustomed to being the face of the church and interacting with the press. “It’s not always easy, but it’s important; it’s the way we can communicate with the largest number of people,” he said.

He has been highly sought after by the Spanish-speaking press because of his fluency in the language and his work with the Hispanic community in the United States and with the church in Latin America.

Asked in the Globe interview what he was looking for in a potential candidate, O’Malley said the next pope must “relate well to the universal church.” The Catholic Church is growing quickly in Africa, and more than 40 percent of the world’s Catholics live in Latin America.

He said Benedict’s successor also needs the spiritual and intellectual capacity to deal with the church’s many challenges. Governance of the Vatican, he added, is also an issue.

“We want the Holy Father to have a good team of people around him in a way that will support his ministry and allow him to focus on his teaching office, which we see as so important,” he said.

O’Malley has been deflecting a lot of questions lately about the possibility he could be a contender for pope. Most Vatican analysts consider the notion of an American pope a long shot, but some say that O’Malley’s chances could improve if there is no consensus after a few days of voting.

One reporter at the news conference said she had a question from her daughter: Would O’Malley continue to wear his “cappuccino robe” if elected pope? O’Malley, a Capuchin friar whose order’s name derives from the brown hooded habits its members wear, blushed and chuckled with his audience.

“I have worn this uniform for over 40 years, and I presume I will wear it until I die, because I don’t expect to be elected pope,” he said. He stammered slightly. “So — I don’t expect to have a change of wardrobe.”

The press conference focused on the general congregation meetings, a tricky subject, because the cardinals take oaths promising not to reveal the content of the discussions to outsiders.

As described by cardinals and Vatican representatives, there is little back and forth in these sessions. Cardinals sign up to speak and essentially make speeches without debate.

A half-hour coffee break gives the cardinals time to chat informally. Cardinals who are over 80 years old — the cutoff for being eligible to vote in the conclave — are invited to join the general congregations.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the archbishop of Galveston-Houston, who presided alongside O’Malley at the press conference, said the congregations were “pretty serene — it’s not campaign-like.”

The College of Cardinals has not yet set a date for the conclave, nor have cardinals decided when they will set a date. All electors must be present for the date to be set, and a Vatican representative said 5 of the 115 electors were not yet in Rome. Church law requires the conclave to begin no more than 20 days after a papal vacancy.

O’Malley said the cardinals want to be sure they allow themselves enough time to weigh issues and contenders before the conclave to make sure the voting itself does not “drag on.” All the conclaves in the last century have ended within five days; in earlier centuries, some voting sessions lasted for months or even years.

O’Malley and DiNardo said cardinals who, like themselves, were in charge of dioceses, hoped to return home by March 24 for Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week. But they said the prelates do not want to rush. “This is the most important decision that some of us will ever make, and we need to give it the time that’s necessary,” O’Malley said.

He told the National Catholic Reporter Sunday that he hoped the cardinals would meet twice a day every day this week to move the process along. But Tuesday the cardinals decided against meeting twice that day, and they plan on meeting only during the morning Wednesday. O’Malley smiled a little tightly when asked about that. “This is Rome,” he said.

Complete Article HERE!

March 4, 2013

O’Brien priest worries that church wants to ‘crush’ him

Key figure behind allegations of inappropriate behaviour attacks Catholic church’s response to complaints

By Catherine Deveney

A key figure behind allegations of inappropriate behaviour by Cardinal Keith O’Brien has launched a powerful attack on the Catholic church’s response to the complaints, saying he fears the church hierarchy would “crush” him if they could.

Last Sunday the Observer revealed that the former priest, along with three serving priests, had reported O’Brien’s behaviour to the Vatican, prompting the UK’s most senior Catholic to resign the following day. Now the former priest, who says he was the subject of unwanted attention by O’Brien when he was a 20-year-old seminarian, has come forward to explain why he made his allegations public and to lambast the Scottish church leadership’s reaction to last week’s story.

He is “disappointed” by the “lack of integrity” shown by the Catholic church. “There have been two sensations for me this week. One is feeling the hot breath of the media on the back of my neck and the other is sensing the cold disapproval of the church hierarchy for daring to break ranks. I feel like if they could crush me, they would,” he told the Observer.

He added that he was shocked when Peter Kearney, director of communications for the church in Scotland, claimed O’Brien’s resignation was not linked to the Observer story and that the church did not know the details of the allegations.

Kearney said he was unable to comment on suggestions that a new complaint had been lodged as a result of last week’s story. When asked to outline the church’s programme of support for complainants, he said only that they would be directed to Antonio Mennini, the Papal Nuncio, the Vatican’s ambassador to Britain, to make a formal statement.

“The vacuum the church has created has allowed whimsy and speculation to distort the truth,” the priest said. “And the only support I have been offered is a cursory email with a couple of telephone numbers of counsellors hundreds of miles away from me. Anyway, I don’t need counselling about Keith O’Brien’s unwanted behaviour to me as a young man. But I may need counselling about the trauma of speaking truth to power.”

The former cleric says he feels that he, rather than the cardinal, has been the subject of scrutiny. “I have felt very alone and there is a tendency to become reclusive when people are trying to hunt you down.”

He said he felt particularly angered by demands that the identity of the four complainants be revealed: “To those who want to know my name I would say, what does that change? And what do you think I have done wrong?”

He said that when the four came forward to the church, they were asked to make sworn signed statements to Mennini. But they were also warned that if their complaints became public knowledge, they would cause “immense further damage to the church”. The church, he says, failed to act quickly and appropriately, adding that he fears the matter was in danger of being swept under the carpet.

“For me, this is about integrity. I thought it was best to let the men and women who put their hard-earned cash in the plate every Sunday know what has been happening. If you pay into something you have a right, but also a duty, to know what you are paying for.”

He said that the men’s complaints were not maliciously motivated. “I am as sinful as the next man – as my partner and pals frequently remind me. But this isn’t about trying to own the moral high ground. I feel compassion for O’Brien, more compassion than the church is showing me, but the truth has to be available – even when that truth is hard to swallow.”

He also dismissed suggestions that the accusations contain an element of homophobia. ” This is not about a gay culture or a straight culture. It’s about an open culture. I would be happy to see an openly gay bishop, cardinal, or pope. But the church acts as if sexual identity has to be kept secret.”

Complete Article HERE!