Tag: Avoiding Corporate Responsibility

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Why the pope must face justice at The Hague

When it comes to holding the Catholic Church accountable for sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy, all roads lead to Rome. That is what my organisation, Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (Snap), concluded after years of seeking justice in other venues and being turned away.

On 13 September, we travelled to the Hague to file an 84-page complaint and over 20,000 pages of supporting materials with the international criminal court, documenting our charge that the pope and Vatican officials have tolerated and enabled the systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes throughout the world.

Holding childhood photographs that tell a wrenching story of innocence and faith betrayed, and joined by our attorneys from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, we stood up and demanded the justice that has so long been denied. The New York Times called the filing “the most substantive effort yet to hold the pope and the Vatican accountable in an international court for sexual abuse by priests”.

No doubt, many people of faith are shocked that we would accuse a world church leader of crimes against humanity – a man considered by many to be infallible. But the man who is infallible must also be accountable.

By the Vatican’s own account, “only” about 1.5-5% of Catholic clergy have been involved in sexual violence against children. With a reported 410,593 priests worldwide as of 2009, that means the number of offending priests would range from 6,158 to 20,529. Considering that many offenders have multiple victims, the number of children at risk is likely in the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands.

We believe the thousands of pages of evidence we filed this week will substantiate our allegations that an operation has been put in place not only to hide the widespread sexual violence by priests in all parts of the world, but also to obstruct investigation, remove suspects out of criminal jurisdictions and do everything possible to silence victims, discredit whistleblowers, intimidate witnesses, stonewall prosecutors and keep a tighter lid than ever on clergy sex crimes and cover-ups. The result of this systematic effort is that, despite a flood of well-publicised cases, many thousands of children remain vulnerable to abuse.

While many pedophile priests have been suspended in recent years, few have been criminally charged and even fewer defrocked. Worse, no one who ignored, concealed or enabled these predators has suffered any consequences. At the head of this hierarchy of denial and secrecy is the pope, who has served as an enabler of these men. We believe the Vatican must face investigation to determine whether these incidences have been knowingly concealed and clergymen deliberately protected when their crimes have come to light.

I know this story well, because I was sexually abused by a parish priest, from my time in junior high school until graduation. Because of the shame and trauma, several years passed before I was able to tell anyone. By that time, it was too late to file criminal charges. Church officials refused to restrict that priest’s access to children or take action against him for several more years, despite other victims coming forward.

Indeed, powerful factors prevent all but the most assertive, healthy and lucky victims from seeking justice. Many others succumb to drugs, anorexia, depression or suicide when the pain of innocence betrayed becomes too much to bear. A recent investigation in Australia revealed a case in which 26 among the numerous victims of a particular priest had committed suicide.

For the safety of children and the prevention of yet more heinous wrongdoing, the international criminal court may be the only real hope. What other institution could possibly bring prosecutorial scrutiny to bear on the largest private institution on the planet?

Our journey for justice has been a long one, and it’s not over yet. But we know where it must end: with justice at The Hague.

Full Article HERE!

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Polish Catholic journal criticizes church over abuse

A Catholic journal has criticized the Polish church’s handling of sexual abuse by priests, following repeated claims that local church leaders failed to confront the problem.

“The harm caused by sexual molestation of children is unquestionable, but the evil is much greater when pedophilia occurs in the community of faith, and when, in a falsely conceived defense of the church, the authorities hide the facts, conceal the perpetrators and ignore the suffering victims,” the Wiez bimonthly said in an editorial in its August-September edition, dedicated to clergy sexual abuse.

The journal questioned whether the Polish church’s handling of abuse claims complied with Vatican instructions and whether the good of the church meant “the good name of clergy or the good of the weakest.”

“In Poland, church superiors react in different ways. Sometimes sentences are passed on the quiet against priest-pedophiles in secular courts. Sometimes, everything is consistently denied,” it said.

However, the Catholic archbishop in charge of legal affairs for the Polish bishops’ conference told Wiez abuse accusations were best handled with pastoral care and “appropriate therapy” and said the bishops would not be publishing guidelines on the issue adopted in 2009.

Archbishop Andrzej Dziega of Szczecin-Kamien said he believed Poland’s Catholic bishops had their own “competence and experience” on sexual molestation and would not need a commission — like that established by the church in neighboring Germany — to examine abuse cases.

“The duty to handle cases, appropriately establish the truth and define the scope of responsibility of concrete people lies with the church superior — but this remains an internal church activity and does not replace the competence of the wider judicial process,” he said.

“Personally, I’m in favor of totally separating church and secular procedures, upholding the civic rights that belong to everyone in the state and the rights of believers in the church community,” he said.

Jakub Spiewak, president of the Kidprotect Foundation, which runs a hotline for abuse victims and seven separate child-protection programs, told Catholic News Service Sept. 12 that the Catholic journal’s warnings were “important and unprecedented” and said some bishops had shown “extraordinary laxity” toward abuse cases.

“I’d prefer the church to draw conclusions from the mistakes of others, rather than waiting to make its own, since people will be hurt when it does,” he said.
“But it sometimes seems as if the church is thinking like a child — that if it closes its eyes, the danger will go away,” he added. “People won’t tolerate a situation in which priests are above the law, answering only to their bishops and claiming different rights and duties than other citizens.”

Leading Catholics, including Poland’s children’s rights spokesman, have urged the church to adopt clear procedures for handling various abuse claims since the 2002 resignation of the Archbishop Juliusz Paetz of Poznan for molesting seminarians.
In 2008, a Dominican, Father Marcin Mogielski, was suspended by the church after testifying to prosecutors about abuse by the priest in charge of Catholic schools in the Szczecin-Kamien Archdiocese.

Other cases have involved allowing convicted abusers to remain in their parishes.
Writing in the journal, a Catholic psychologist, Ewa Kusz, said the Polish church lacked psychological checks for its seminarians and priests or “transparent norms” for vetting lay and religious employees and had no policies or norms for handling abuse accusations.

She added that there was a “lack of cooperation between church and state” on abuse issues and said church cooperation with clinical professionals also “left much to be desired.”

Jesuit Father Hans Zollner, co-author of a book on pedophile priests, told Wiez the situation in Poland was comparable to that of Germany before a wave of abuse scandals in 2010, when “cases from the past were partly known about, but the scale of the problem wasn’t understood or dealt with.”

“If the church in Poland doesn’t confront this reality and doesn’t take the bull by the horns, the same thing will happen which we witnessed in the United States, Canada, Ireland, Germany, Austria and recently in Belgium,” the priest said.
“If the church doesn’t know how to react to such situations because it hasn’t bothered to ascertain the facts, its image will suffer much more than if it had said, ‘Yes, we had such cases — they were very painful, but we tackled them.'”

Full Article HERE!

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Why the ICC likely won’t charge pope over Catholic Church sex abuses

An attempt to prosecute Pope Benedict XVI in the International Criminal Court (ICC) for clerical sexual abuse around the globe faces daunting legal obstacles that make it unlikely the case will be heard, but will nonetheless put the Vatican’s role in the abuse under new public scrutiny.

The complaint, filed Tuesday by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) through its attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), charges that “Vatican officials tolerate and enable the systematic and widespread concealing of rape and child sex crimes throughout the world.”

SNAP President Barbara Blaine said in a press statement: “SNAP wants to prevent even one more child from being raped or sexually assaulted by a priest and we hope that victims around the world will know today that they are not alone and that it is safe to speak up and report their abuse. We as victims are mobilizing across the globe, and every survivor is invited to join us.”

In a statement to the Associated Press, the Vatican described the move as a “ludicrous publicity stunt and a misuse of international judicial processes.”
A high legal bar

The challenge for SNAP and the CCR will be to show that the ICC has jurisdiction over the case. Created by, but operating independently of, the United Nations, the ICC was founded in 1998 for the purpose of trying individuals for war crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity.

Experts say the matter of the Roman Catholic Church’s responsibility for cases of child abuse is outside the remit of the ICC. “It’s a publicity stunt, it’s nothing more,” says British attorney Neil Addison, author of legal textbooks including Religious Discrimination and Hatred Law.

“The ICC is supposed to exist for situations of war crime and where there isn’t a legal remedy within the country where the offenses took place. [But] all the child abuse that took place within Ireland took place under the jurisdiction of the Irish courts, the same for the US, and so on,” Mr. Addison says.

“In simple terms, to get a prosecution before the ICC you need to show that what happened was part of a ‘widespread and significant attack directed against any civilian population.’ The ICC is not designed for dealing with normal criminality,” he says.

But the CCR claims that its case against the Vatican authorities is in keeping with the court’s purview.

“We have looked at findings from all over the world and feel it fits the criteria for the court,” says Pamela Spees, a senior staff attorney with the CCR. “If nobody ever demands it then it will never happen, it’s certainly not going to happen on its own.”

The CCR says it has provided 22,000 pages of documentation alongside its filing with the court, including copies of judicial reports from Ireland and Canada, grand juries in the US, and depositions.

“We’re not simply talking about a situation where they kept [child abuse] silent – which is bad enough – they knew the sexual violence would continue when shift these guys [accused priests] around,” she said.

Full Article HERE!

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Abuse victims seek international court case against pope

Clergy sex abuse victims upset that no high-ranking Roman Catholic leaders have been prosecuted for sheltering guilty priests went to the International Criminal Court on Tuesday, seeking an investigation of the pope and top Vatican cardinals for possible crimes against humanity, a move that Vatican called a “ludicrous publicity stunt.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based nonprofit legal group, requested the inquiry on behalf of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, arguing that the global church has maintained a “long-standing and pervasive system of sexual violence” despite promises to swiftly oust predators.

The Vatican’s U.S. lawyer, Jeffrey Lena, called the complaint a “ludicrous publicity stunt and a misuse of international judicial processes” in a statement to The Associated Press.

The complaint names Pope Benedict XVI, partly in his former role as leader of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which in 2001 explicitly gained responsibility for overseeing abuse cases; Cardinal William Levada, who now leads that office; Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state under Pope John Paul II; and Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who now holds that post.

Attorneys for the victims say rape, sexual violence and torture are considered a crime against humanity as described in the international treaty that spells out the court’s mandate. The complaint also accuses Vatican officials of creating policies that perpetuated the damage, constituting an attack against a civilian population.

Barbara Blaine, president of the U.S.-based Survivors Network of those Abused by priests, said going to the court was a last resort.

“We have tried everything we could think of to get them to stop and they won’t,” she told The Associated Press. “If the pope wanted to, he could take dramatic action at any time that would help protect children today and in the future, and he refuses to take the action.”

The odds against the court opening an investigation are enormous. The prosecutor has received nearly 9,000 independent proposals for inquiries since 2002, when the court was created as the world’s only permanent war crimes tribunal, and has never opened a formal investigation based solely on such a request.

Instead, prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has investigated crimes such as genocide, murder, rape and conscripting child soldiers in conflicts from Darfur to this year’s violence in Libya. Such cases have been referred to the court by the countries where the atrocities were perpetrated or by the U.N. Security Council.

Also, the Holy See is not a member state of the court, meaning prosecutors have no automatic jurisdiction there, although the complaint covers alleged abuse in countries around the world, many of which do recognize the court’s jurisdiction.

“Politically, people do not want to look at this,” said Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Pam Spees before walking to the court with victims to hand prosecutors boxes full of documents.

But Spees conceded she was “not hopeful” the court would launch an investigation.

The prosecutor’s office said in a statement the evidence would be studied. “We first have to analyze whether the alleged crimes fall under the Court’s jurisdiction,” it said.

Attorneys for the Survivors Network argued that no other national entity exists that will prosecute high-level Vatican officials who failed to protect children.

In the U.S., no Roman Catholic bishop has been criminally charged for keeping accused clergy in parish jobs without warning parents or police. Within the church, only the pope can discipline bishops. The few who have been publicly punished by the Vatican have been sanctioned for molesting children, not for negligence in supervising priests.

“When a church has been left to its own devices it does nothing. It wouldn’t even have the reforms it has now if these cases hadn’t begun to bubble up and erupt in the public outside the confines of what the church can control,” said Spees.

The Survivors Network and victims are pursuing the case as the abuse scandal, once dismissed as an American problem by the Vatican, intensifies around the world. Thousands of people have come forward in Ireland, Germany and elsewhere with reports of abusive priests, bishops who covered up for them and Vatican officials who moved so slowly to respond that molesters often stayed on the job for decades.

Vatican officials and church leaders elsewhere have apologized repeatedly, clarified or toughened church policies on ousting abusers and, in the U.S. alone, paid out nearly $3 billion in settlements to victims and removed hundreds of priests. Bishops insist they fully grasp the devastation that molestation causes to victims and the limits that dioceses must impose on abusive clergy.

However, the scandal is far from resolved.

The Vatican is fighting on multiple legal fronts in the U.S. against lawsuits alleging the Holy See is liable for abusive priests. Just last month, the Vatican was forced to turn over internal personnel files of an abusive priest to lawyers representing a victim in Oregon.

Those prosecutions also could form an impediment to the ICC taking the case. The tribunal is a court of last resort, meaning it will only take cases where legal authorities elsewhere are unwilling or unable to prosecute.

Also, the court doesn’t investigate crimes that occurred before its 2002 creation. A study commissioned by the U.S. bishops from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York found abuse claims had peaked in the 1970s, then began declining sharply in 1985, as the bishops and society general gained awareness of the problem.

But Blaine said the abuse continues and she wants church leaders to face justice.

“These priests and church officials live by some other law,” she said. “Somehow they’re not held accountable like every other citizen of a nation. That would be horrific in and of itself but what must end is shattering the innocence of even one more child.”

Full Article HERE!

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Monastery pays €700,000 to victims of abuse

The Benedictine monastery Ettal in the German state of Bavaria announced Tuesday that it is paying 70 former pupils between €5,000 and €20,000 each in compensation, after decades of child abuse were uncovered there last year.
The compensation payments were determined by an independent board of trustees that judged each case individually.

The cases, some of which dated back to the 1950s, included incidents of sexual and psychological abuse as well as severe beatings.

“The monastery was not included in the board’s decision-making process and had no influence on the size of the payments,” a board statement said.

The total sum of €700,000 includes the victims’ legal and therapy costs.

The organization representing the Ettal abuse victims welcomed the compensation payments and praised the Benedictine monks for showing the “courage and honesty” to deal with the claims and face the school’s dark history.

The organization also said the average compensation payment for Ettal victims – of €10,000 – doubled the average for Church abuse victims in Germany.

But the German Catholic Church still falls short of the payments handed out in other countries.

The Irish Church has paid out an average of €68,000 to each abuse victim, an organization statement said.

The organization also pointed out that the Pope’s visit to Germany will cost the Catholic Church €1 per member, while its compensation model for abuse victims – determined by the German Bishops’ Conference – cost the church €0.15 per member.

The monastery’s Abbot Barnabas Bögle and the head of the school Maurus Kraß both resigned in the wake of the scandal in February 2010, following pressure from Archbishop of Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx.

But the Benedictine monks re-elected Bögle later in the year after the Vatican declared there was nothing standing in the way of his return to office. Kraß was also reinstated by the Bavarian Education Ministry later.

At the time, both admitted that regulations on reporting accusations of abuse had not been followed, but a Vatican committee came to the conclusion that the former leaders of the abbey had done nothing wrong regarding the abuse scandal.

Full Article HERE!