The newspaper published a front-page editorial on Monday hailing Tom McCarthy’s film and calling it “not anti-Catholic”. The editorial said Spotlight, which centres on the work of a group of Boston Globe reporters to uncover abuse by Roman Catholic priests, faithfully presented the church’s attempts to defend itself in the face of “horrendous realities”.
“Not all monsters wear cassocks. Paedophilia does not necessarily arise from the vow of chastity,” wrote the editorial’s author, Lucetta Scaraffia. “However, it has become clear that in the Church some are more preoccupied with the image of the institution than of the seriousness of the act.”
Spotlight paints a picture of widespread abuse by members of the Catholic church in Boston and elsewhere, with officials turning a blind eye to the molestation of hundreds of children by priests over a period of decades. The reporters responsible won the 2003 Pulitzer prize for public service.
Accepting the best picture prize on Sunday night, producer Michael Sugar said he hoped the film had given a voice to the survivors of the abuse that would “become a choir that would resonate all the way to the Vatican”. He continued with a direct call to the pontiff: “Pope Francis, it’s time to protect the children and restore the faith.”
L’Osservatoire Romano’s editorial insisted such pleas “should be seen as a positive sign,” adding: “There is still trust in the institution, there is trust in a Pope who is continuing the cleaning begun by his predecessor.”
L’Osservatore Romano has been owned by the Holy See since 1861 but is no longer as conservative as it once was. In 1960, it launched a full-scale attack on La Dolce Vita, labelling Federico Fellini’s classic of Roman indolence and debauchery an “incitement to evil crime and vice”, deploring its effect on “unsafe minds” and rebuking Fellini for trying to “moralise through immorality”.
Senior Counsel Assisting Gail Furness stands in front of a screen displaying Australian Cardinal George Pell as he holds a bible while appearing via video link from a hotel in Rome, Italy to testify at the Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse in Sydney, Australia, February 29, 2016.
Australian Cardinal George Pell, the highest-ranking Vatican official to testify on systemic sexual abuse of children by clergy in the Roman Catholic Church, said on Monday that he has the full backing of Pope Francis.
Pell on Sunday told Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse that the church made “enormous mistakes” and “catastrophic” choices by attempting to cover up abuses in the 1970s.
Pell’s testimony has received global coverage. Because of his high position in the Vatican, the Australian inquiry into sexual abuse cases that occurred decades ago has taken on wider implications about the accountability of church leaders.
Pell, 74, has become the focal point for victims’ frustration over what they say has been an inadequate response from church leaders. Pell himself is not accused of sexual abuse and has twice apologized for the Church’s slow response.
“I have the full backing of the pope,” Pell told reporters as he arrived at Rome’s Hotel Quirinale to give evidence in front of former abuse victims who traveled to Italy for the late night sessions.
In his position as Vatican treasurer, Pell met with Pope Francis for a routine meeting earlier on Monday, after telling the inquiry he was “not here to defend the indefensible.”
He said was aware of rumors and complaints against pedophile clergy when he was a young priest in the 1970s, but that Church superiors tended to give priests the benefit of the doubt, something he acknowledged was wrong.
Pell said children were often not believed, abusive priests were shuffled from parish to parish and the Church was over-reliant on the use of counseling of priests to prevent further abuses.
The strong language was welcomed by former victims, but Pell’s failing memory on specifics angered witnesses in Rome and Sydney. He repeatedly said he could not recall specific incidents when he was asked about them.
Special prosecutor Gail Furness quizzed Pell via video link from Sydney on Monday. There were audible gasps as the Cardinal said he was deceived by Church leaders who did not inform him about claims against Father Gerald Ridsdale among others.
Ridsdale, who was repeatedly moved from parish to parish, was later convicted of 138 offences against 53 victims.
Ridsdale’s nephew, David Ridsdale, was among 15 abuse victims and supporters who traveled to Rome on the back of a crowd-funding campaign to see Pell give evidence after he said he was unable to travel to his native Australia because of heart problems.
SPOTLIGHT WIN
Last year, Pell denied accusations made at Commission hearings that he had tried to bribe a victim to remain quiet, that he ignored another complaint and that he was complicit in the transfer of a pedophile priest.
Church sexual abuse broke into the open in 2002, when it was discovered that U.S. bishops in the Boston area moved abusers from parish to parish instead of defrocking them. Similar scandals have since been discovered around the world and tens of millions of dollars have been paid in compensation.
The hearing started on the same night that Spotlight, a film about newspaper reporters who uncovered systemic paedophilia in the Church in Boston, won the Academy Award for best picture.
The Vatican newspaper dedicated two articles to the win, saying Spotlight was not an anti-Catholic film as some have claimed.
“The ogres were not exclusively men in cassocks. Paedophilia does not necessarily derive from a vow of chastity,” the newspaper said. “But it is by now clear that there were too many people in the Church who were more worried about the image of the institution than the gravity of the act.”
This coming 29 February, the cardinal is to give evidence before an Australian commission, via video link from Rome. The cardinal, who has been accused of covering up child sex abuse cases, said the false news report printed by the Herald Sun is outrageous
Cardinal Pell denies outright the sex abuse allegations made against him and corroborated by Australian newspaper Herald Sun.
By IACOPO SCARAMUZZI
Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop Emeritus of Sydney and Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, has denied outright the sex abuse allegations made against him and corroborated by Australian newspaper Herald Sun. One week before he is due to give evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, via video link from Rome, the cardinal also criticised the suspicious timing of the news leak. Some victims are accusing him not of actually carrying out acts of sexual abuse but of covering up cases that were reported to him in recent decades. He was responsible for the priests who are said to have committed the offences.
“Cardinal Pell is due to give evidence to the Royal Commission in just over one week. The timing of these leaks is clearly designed to do maximum damage to the Cardinal and the Catholic Church and undermines the work of the Royal Commission,” says a statement leaked by Pell’s offices. “The allegations are without foundation and utterly false.”
The Herald Sun wrote that Cardinal Pell is being investigated by Victoria Police’s Sano Taskforce, over alleged abuse against minors both consistently and occasionally when he was still only a priest in Ballarat and when archbishop of Melbourne.
“It is outrageous that these allegations have been brought to the Cardinal’s attention through a media leak,” the statement reads. “The Cardinal has called for a public inquiry into the leaking of these spurious claims by elements in the Victorian Police in a manner clearly designed to embarrass the Cardinal, in a case study where the historical failures of the Victorian Police have been the subject of substantial evidence.”
In his statement, Cardinal Pell refers to the Southwell Report, an independent Church inquiry into the accusations of abuse the cardinal allegedly committed against an altar boy at a summer camp on Phillip Island in 1962. The investigation, which was conducted by retired Supreme Court judge, Alec Southwell, ended with the cardinal’s absolution. The Phillip Island allegations have been on the public record for nearly 15 years. The Southwell Report which exonerated Cardinal Pell has been in the public domain since 2002,” today’s statement reads. “The Victorian police have taken no steps in all of that time to pursue the false allegations made, however the Cardinal certainly has no objection to them reviewing the materials that led Justice Southwell to exonerate him. The Cardinal is certain that the police will quickly reach the conclusion that the allegations are false.” “The Victorian Police have never sought to interview him in relation to any allegations of child sexual abuse and apart from the false allegations investigated by Justice Southwell, the Cardinal knows of no claims or incidents which relate to him.”
Cardinal Pell, the statement says, “strongly denies any wrongdoing. If the police wish to question him he will co-operate, as he has with each and every public inquiry. In the meantime, the Cardinal understands that several media outlets have received confidential information leaked by someone within the Victorian Police.” Thus, “the Cardinal calls on the Premier and the Police Minister to immediately investigate the leaking of these baseless allegations”.
Cardinal Pell will give evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse via video link on 29 February. 15 victims are travelling to Rome to attend the cardinal’s hearing, with money raised through a crowdfunding initiative. “As an archbishop for almost 20 years he has led from the front to put an end to cover-ups, to protect vulnerable people and to try to bring justice to victims,” says a separate statement released by the office of 74-year-old cardinal Pell, who was granted permission not to travel to Australia for the hearing, due to the serious health risks involved. “As Cardinal Pell has done after earlier hearings, he is prepared to meet with and listen to victims and express his ongoing support.”
Pope Francis waves upon his arrival at the stadium of Morelia, Michoacán State, Mexico on February 16.
In May 1993, just outside the airport in the west Mexican city of Guadalajara, Juan Jesus Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was sitting in his parked white Mercury Grand Marquis when three vehicles packed with gunmen pulled up alongside and opened fire. The cardinal’s car was riddled with 26 bullets, and a nearby vehicle was apparently hit 20 more times.
Cardinal Posadas, his driver, and five others were found dead.
The high-profile assassination of one of the Mexico’s two Roman Catholic cardinals offers a window into the complex relationship between the Vatican and Mexico’s drug cartels. Cardinal Posadas was an outspoken critic of the groups and the violent terror they use to control Mexico’s illicit drug economy. Though the government ruled that his death was a case of mistaken identity, many still believe the killing was deliberate—that is, a successful attempt to silence him.
The man was wearing his clerical robes, after all.
Since Posadas’s death, and in particular over the past decade or so, the church has exercised top-down dealings with the cartels—condemning them in public, but, critics charge, colluding with drug criminals on the ground. Pope Francis spoke to that fraught dynamic during his historic visit to Mexico last week. In a sermon in the Michoacán state capital Morelia, which has been hit hard by cartel violence, he cautioned bishops, priests, nuns, and seminarians against shirking away from the unique challenge posed by the cartels in their area.
“What is the temptation that we face in environments dominated by violence, corruption, drug trafficking, disrespect for personal dignity, and indifference to suffering?” he asked, before answering his own question. “Resignation. Resignation terrifies us and makes us barricade ourselves in our vestries.”
That alleged resignation has long plagued the Catholic Church in Mexico, and though they weren’t named directly by Francis, no discussion of the cartel-church relationship would be complete without mention of “narco alms”—or blood money supposedly offered by cartels to help fund public works and other church activities. Cartel influence in the church was condemned by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 shortly after he began his papacy, but the Vatican’s emphasis on the problem seems to have waned since. In 2010, a minor scandal erupted when it was revealed that a church with a stunning 65-foot high metal cross in the working-class barrio of the central Mexican city of Pachuca bore a plaque thanking Heriberto Lazcano, alleged kingpin of the Zetas cartel, for its construction.
As a result, the church began looking more carefully into “narco alms,” as the New York Timesreported in 2011.
It can be hard to resist the money and the help from cartels, particularly when murderous kidnappers are involved. Take for instance, the tale, also about the Zeta cartel, from Brooklyn-born priest Robert Coogan, who used to run a tiny prison chapel in the northern Mexico. As he told the Guardian in 2012, when Zeta prisoners offered to help paint his modest chapel, he declined, telling them a leaky roof would surely ruin their work. They not only completed the job but waterproofed the building too. “Making a fuss,” he said, “could have triggered reprisals against other prisoners.”
Francis also addressed the citizens of Mexico on his trip, warning them, “Don’t let yourselves be corrupted by trivial materialism, or the seductive illusion of deals made below the table.” He urged ordinary Mexicans not to fall prey to the trap of pursuing money, fame, and power. “These are temptations that seek to degrade and destroy.”
The pope clearly recognizes that the downtrodden are particularly vulnerable to the temptation of violent crime in hopes that it might better their own lives.
“Throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, we have the massive divide between the rich and poor,” Henry Louis Taylor Jr., director of the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Buffalo, told VICE. “In Mexico and other places, the economy does not produce sufficient jobs for people to make ends meet. So most of them are forced to work in the informal economy—or in the clandestine economy. In those countries, corruption and bribery have been interwoven into the daily life and culture.”
Taylor Jr. believes you can’t stop stop the violence in places like Michoacán without radically changing the economy and offering alternatives. “In places where the cartels are entrenched, I don’t think the authorities are willing to do this.”
A couple years ago, armed vigilante groups emerged that seemed to take on the cartels before being at least partially infiltrated by them, as the in-depth Oscar-nominated documentaryCartel Land (which VICE helped distribute) shows.
“The pope expressed the views of so many people in Mexico,” Cartel Land director Matthew Heineman tells VICE. “But the tragedy is that their views and hopes for order and security have been ignored for so long by a government that has allowed the cartels to operate with impunity, resulting in a vicious cycle of violence for so many.”
Some believe the Catholic Church still needs to do more, perhaps even excommunicating those who affiliate with cartel members. After all, Pope Francis did travel to southern Italy to excommunicate members of the mafia in 2014. “The hierarchy of the church in Mexico has been timid when it comes to narco traffickers but that could change,” religious scholar Elio Masferrer told TIME earlier this month. “An action such as excommunicating them could have a significant impact.”
One might argue Mexican cartels are much more powerful—or at least more brazen—than the Italian mafia in 2016. But it’s not insignificant that the church’s top figure, a man who commands respect in Mexican cities plagued by drug violence, is speaking plainly and forcibly about the cartels. (At one point, Pope Francis went so far as to dub them “dealers of death.”) What remains to be seen is whether a relatively new pope and a government that did manage to recapture Sinaloa cartel boss El Chapo after his escape from prison this summer can put some real distance between spiritual matters and the drug money coursing through Latin America.
Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston, head of the Pontifical Commission for Child Protection, speaks at a news conference at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome on Feb. 16, 2015.
Catholic clergy have a “moral and ethical responsibility” to report sexual abuse, the cardinal tasked with reforming the Vatican’s approach to sexual crimes said after criticism of the Holy See.
Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley sought to reaffirm the church’s position on reporting abuse in his role as head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, which Pope Francis set up in 2014.
“Our obligations under civil law must certainly be followed, but even beyond these civil requirements, we all have a moral and ethical responsibility to report suspected abuse to the civil authorities who are charged with protecting our society,” O’Malley said in a statement Monday (Feb. 15).
O’Malley’s comments followed a report that a French priest told new bishops they were under no duty to report abuse allegations to the police.
Monsignor Tony Anatrella, who serves as an adviser to the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, made the statement during a presentation, it was reported last week.
O’Malley denied that churchmen were effectively told to ignore abuse.
“Every year at our November meeting, at a training session for new bishops, this obligation is reaffirmed,” he said, adding: “And every other February the conference runs a second training program for new bishops, which also clearly and explicitly includes this obligation.”
The pontifical commission has come under renewed scrutiny recently after one of the two victims on the panel was sidelined. Peter Saunders, who was abused as a child in Britain, is taking a “leave of absence,” the commission announced.
Saunders disputed the nature of his leave and said only Pope Francis could permanently remove him from the commission.
“A number of members of the commission expressed their concern that I don’t toe the line when it comes to keeping my mouth shut,” Saunders said on Feb. 6, describing the advisory body as “a public relations exercise.”
The second abuse victim on the commission, Marie Collins from Ireland, said she remained committed to the commission’s reform goals.
Collins did, however, raise concerns about the reaction of some within the Vatican administration to the pope’s commission.
“I feel strongly that anyone criticizing the commission is choosing the wrong target. There are many of good will in the Curia but unfortunately there are still those, at this top level, who worry more about their own fiefdoms and the threat of change than they do about the work the Commission is trying to do to protect children,” she told National Catholic Reporter on Feb. 9.
