Cardinal Angelo Becciu talking to journalists during a news conference in Rome. Defence lawyers are questioning the legitimacy of the Vatican tribunal where 10 people are on trial, including Becciu, on finance-related charges, arguing their clients can’t get a fair trial in an absolute monarchy where the pope has already intervened in the case and where prosecutors have failed to turn over key pieces of evidence.
Using a form of reasoning of which any Byzantine lawyer would be proud, the defence team for Enrico Crasso, one of those charged alongside (former) Cardinal Angelo Becciu with embezzlement, have petitioned the Vatican judges hearing the case against him to rule that the trial should be stopped and all charges rescinded because Pope Francis violated the Vatican's own legal system.
Their argument is that in exercising his right, as absolute ruler and head of the Vatican City state to issue four 'resctipta' to firstly allow the case to be brought against Becciu and to give prosecutors leeway in their treatment of witnesses and the defendants, to circumvent the archaic and convoluted procedures behind which the defendants in the case were hiding, Pope Francis has violated the Vatican's Legal system, so a fair trial under that system is now impossible. In effect, so the argument goes, Pope Francis has reduced the Vatican City to a lawless state.
Readers of this blog may remember how (former) Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu, number three in the Vatican as Chief of Staff of the Vatican's Secretariate of State, was summarily sacked (or in Vatican terms, 'resigned his rights as a cardinal') and accused of embezzling Vatican funds in connection with a $225 million property deal in London in 2014.
I doubt anyone will be the least surprised that another Christian sect is embroiled in a child sex abuse scandal.
This time it is the Australian Pentecostal mega-rich Hillsong megachurch and global Christian music publishing empire. Its founder, Brian Houston, has agreed to step aside as global senior pastor until the end of the year, while he faces criminal charges in Australia alleging that he concealed the predatory paedophilia of his father, Frank Houston, who died in 2004.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Future Pope Benedict XVI.
Complicit in the abuse of 4 children by paedophile priests in Munich.
The enquiry by the law firm, Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, who had been commissioned by the Catholic Church to investigate the numerous reports of cases in the dioceses, has concluded that Ratzinger was complicit in the abuse of 4 of the 65 victims by failing to act, even though he was aware of the predatory paedophile nature of the priests involved. The investigators also concluded that Pope Benedict's 80 plus page submission to the enquiry contained claims and assertions that were not credible - in essence, accusing Pope Benedict XVI of lying to them to try to cover up his culpability.
They also revealed that he had stated that he did not think a priest acted improperly when he masturbated in front of pre-pubescent girls, because he didn't touch them!
According to this editorial in the National Catholic Reporter:
In his 80-some pages of written testimony for the report's investigation, the 94-year-old Benedict initially denied any wrongdoing and drew some disturbing conclusions, such as indicating that a priest did not "act improperly" because he didn't touch prepubescent girls while masturbating in front of them.
In the same document, Pope Benedict XVI claimed he was not present at a 1980 meeting to discuss the transfer of a priest accused of misconduct. The enquiry team called this claim, "not very credible" and produced the minutes of the meeting which clearly recorded his presence. As I reported earlier, Benedict’s initial response was to claim that the minutes were "only proof that something was written down, not evidence that he read it". Through his private secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, has since admitted that Ratzinger was present at the meeting and his denial had been "a clerical error - an oversight in the editing of his statement."
Funny how one of the most damaging allegations - that the then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger was aware that a predatory paedophile priest was being moved around in his dioceses and allowed to continue working as a priest - was the subject of a clerical error that should have been edited out, but was not!
According to this report in the Guardian:
In one of the cases examined by Westpfahl Spilker Wastl, a now notorious paedophile priest, Peter Hullermann, was transferred to Munich from Essen in western Germany where he had been accused of abusing an 11-year-old boy. He was reassigned to pastoral duties despite his history.
In 1986, he was convicted of molesting more children and given a suspended prison sentence. He continued to work with children for many years and his case is regarded as a pertinent example of the mishandling of abuse by the church.
Cardinal Reinhard Marx, the current archbishop of Munich and Freising, was also found to have failed to act in two cases of suspected abuse. Although he tendered his resignation to Pope Francis, this was rejected.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) is calling for Benedict to give up his title as "pope emeritus". There are also calls for Pope Francis to impose sanctions on 94-year-old Benedict XVI, but, since a Pope is elected for life being officially chosen by God who guided the Conclave of Cardinals that elected him, and since having two popes in the Vatican simultaneously is unprecedented, the rules are being made up as they go along, so it is not clear what authority, if any, Pope Francis has over Benedict or whether Benedict can even resign his position and title.
For Benedict to be convicted of misconduct by a special Vatican tribunal would be cataclysmic for the Catholic Church and would raise all manner of questions of basic doctrine such as the doctrine of papal infallibility and divine guidance as God's personal representative on Earth. It would undermine the entire credibility of the Papacy.
There is probably more of this scandal to come and, if I can obtain an English translation of the Westpfahl Spilker Wastl report in full, I will post it here. So far only the index and the first 21 of the more than 1200 pages have been translated and published. A German language version is available here [PDF].
The Pro-Trump QAnon Inc, in alliance with fundamentalist evangelical Christians and their political wing, the Republican Party, has concocted a lurid conspiracy theory with absolutely no evidence, alleging a massive, world-wide satanic paedophile and child sex-trafficking ring involving prominent Democrats, and just about anyone who contradicts their increasingly lurid and ludicrous claims.
However, if you want to find real paedophile rings, you hardly ever need to look any further than a nearby evangelical church, like The River church in Kimball Township, St Clair County, Michigan, USA.
William Stefan Wahl, 28, of Port Huron man [sic], was arraigned Friday on two counts of second-degree criminal sexual conduct [with a] victim younger than 13, two counts of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct [with] victim between 13 and 16, distributing obscene matter to children, aggravated indecent exposure and using computers to commit a crime.
His bond was set at $25,000 cash/surety.
Wahl is accused of sexually abusing four juvenile victims that he fostered a relationship with through The River, St. Clair County Sheriff Mat King said. King identified Wahl as a former youth minister at the church.
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, the predecessor of Pope Francis and the first pope for centuries to resign, knew of the abuse of children by Catholic priests in his diocese when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982.
This is the devastating finding of an enquiry, commissioned by the Catholic Church, into historic sexual abuse at the Munich Archdiocese over several decades. In effect, this finding accuses Pope Benedict XVI of lying when he denied any knowledge of the abuses.
He was informed about the facts. We believe that he can be accused of misconduct in four cases; two of these cases concern abuses committed during his tenure and sanctioned by the state. In both cases, the perpetrators remained active in pastoral care.
During his [Benedict's] time in office there were abuse cases happening. In those cases, those priests continued their work without sanctions. The church did not do anything. He claims that he didn't know about certain facts, although we believe that this is not so, according to what we know.
Martin Pusch, Lawyer.
Westpfahl Spilker Wastl law firm.
Lawyer, Ulrich Wastl, produced a copy of the minutes of a meeting of Church leaders in Munich on January 15, 1980, when a decision was taken to appoint a known abuser (referred to in the report as "Priest X"). Pope Benedict denied being present when this decision was made, but this is contradicted by the minutes of the meeting. Benedict's incredible response to this evidence of his lies was that the document is only proof that something was written down, not evidence that he read it. However, the charge is not that he read the minutes but that he was present when the decision was made to appoint a known paedophile priest in the diocese of which he was head.
The building of lies to protect Pope Benedict has just collapsed with a crash. Benedict was complicit in the abuse of numerous victims after 1980, victims of Priest X
Matthias Katsch, Abuse survivor.
Leader of "Eckiger Tisch" which seeks justice for abuse victims.
In 2019, the then former Pope, Benedict XVI wrote an essay in which he sought the shift the blame for the paedophile priest scandals which have rocked the Catholic Church, away from the priests and the Church and onto society at large and liberals in particular by claiming it was the result of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the liberalization of the Church's moral teaching. He also blamed homosexuals whom he claimed had established cliques in seminaries which significantly changed the climate in the seminaries. In other words, it wasn't the fault of senior clerics such as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who turned a blind eye to the abuses and allowed abusers to continue their abuses under the protection of the Church, but the fault of those high in the Catholic Church's demonology, 'liberals and homosexuals'.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he was effectively Pope John Paul II's deputy and enforcer and was widely believed to be behind efforts to suppress reports of clerical abuse of minors in an effort to protect the reputation of the church and minimise compensation paid to its victims.
There is an old saying about people, known as Wykehamists, who were educated at Winchester College, Wiltshire, UK - "Never trust a Wykehamist!" Whether there is any truth in that or not, I really couldn't say, but it's certainly true of an evangelical Christian cult that operated in the school during the 1970s and 1980s. They provided cover for the systematic abuse of boys at the college by a powerful and charismatic barrister to groom and sadistically abuse boys with impunity, according to a review of the case made public yesterday.
John Smyth QC, who died in 2018, was Chairman of the Iwerne Trust, a charity which ran evangelical Christian holiday camps for young people. Smyth abused young people in several countries over many years. This abuse was brought to public attention by Channel 4 in 2017 and has since been the subject of a book, Bleeding for Jesus, by Andrew Graystone. In the light of the Channel 4 disclosure, the College commissioned a review from two independent expert reviewers, Ms Jan Pickles OBE and Ms Genevieve Woods. Jan Pickles was assisted in the review of current arrangements by Ms Mary Breen, formerly Headmistress of St Mary’s Ascot.
David Barton,
Pseudo-historian and professional liar for Jesus and the gun lobby
The pseudo-historian, David Barton, who earns his living lying for Jesus is also lying for the gun industry in the USA. Apparently, he feels his piety entitles him to an exemption from the commandments which forbids bearing false witness and he knows the extreme right-wing causes he take money for promoting can't be promoted with truth and honesty.
Long-time readers of this blog may recall how David Barton went on American TV to try to fool Americans into believing the US Constitution was taken 'verbatim' straight from the Bible and so America should be a Christian theocracy, by lying about what was in the Bible - a tactic that depends on the fools he dupes taking his word for it and not fact-checking his claims.
Religious right-pseudo historian David Barton insists that gun control will not lessen the death rate in the U.S. because England does not "allow guns and they've got a knife death rate higher than we have in some of our major cities." pic.twitter.com/BOEdBrV7Op
He has repeated that tactic, this time to defend and promote the gun lobby (which traditionally provides vast financial support for right-wing politicians and buys political influence at Washington). On 17 Dec, he tried to fool viewers of Victory News, that banning guns would not reduce the death rate because England [sic] does not "allow guns and they've got a knife death rate higher than we have in some of our major cities."
Not only does he appear to be unaware that the UK is not just England (a common enough mistake American's make, but a curious degree of ignorance for someone who poses as a historian!), and guns are banned throughout the UK; he is also lying about the knife death rate in the UK. According to a freely available House of Commons Library research briefing, in the year ending March 2021, there were just 224 homicides involving sharp instruments (including broken bottles) in England and Wales. The worst area was the area covered by West Midlands Police, which includes the major industrial cities of Birmingham, Coventry, West Bromwich, and Wolverhampton where the knife crimes in total, not just deaths, stood at 156 for the same year.
By contrast, according to a 2021 CNN analysis of 40 US Cities:
The rise in violent crime is an epidemic that is happening "all across the country," said Thomas Abt, a senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice, and a result of three major factors: the impact of Covid-19 on communities and first responders, the fallout of the social unrest after the murder of George Floyd, and the surge in gun sales since the start of the pandemic.
At least nine major cities have broken their previous annual homicide records with about three weeks left to go in 2021. There have been 513 homicides this year in Philadelphia, higher than the previous total of 503 in 1990. There have been 230 homicides in Indianapolis, breaking the previous record of 215 set just last year.
These increases are not isolated to any particular region of the country. Other cities with record homicide totals include Louisville, Kentucky; Columbus, Ohio; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Tucson, Arizona; Rochester, New York; and Portland, Oregon. Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Nashville are also on pace to reach record homicide numbers by the end of the year.
Los Angeles recorded 352 homicides so far this year, and Chicago has seen 756, with year-to-date increases of 12% and 4% respectively. In Houston, homicides are up 18% from 2020.
In other words, the knife-related deaths in England and Wales (awful though they are), far from being what David Barton lied about, are at levels of which those trying to reduce US gun deaths in the USA can only dream. By contrast, the number of gun deaths in UK is minuscule compared to those in the USA with total anula gun deaths in the entire UK being well below those in an average US city in a month.
Barton's chosen platform from which to lie to America is a right-wing evangelical Christian channel which laughably describes itself on its website as:
VICTORY News is here to bring you daily news you can trust—always delivered in a spirit of faith. Stay informed and encouraged with faith, facts and freedom!
As 'Christians' they would know the power of truth to 'set you free' and so they also know that lies achieve just the opposite. The last thing they want their dupes knowing is the truth when, as a recent Pew Research survey showed, affiliation to the protestant churches in the USA, including the white evangelical churches, is collapsing at an accelearating rate and unaffiliated ('None') numbers are doubling every ten years. They know the only way to keep the faithful inline and paying their tythes is to keep them fooled and enslaved by believing the lies they pump out.
And David Barton knows that too. He also knows how it would hit the profits of the gun industry and so the size of their donations to right wing political causes such as the Repugnican Party if gun sales were curtailed and controlled - which is why he went on a right-wing Christian TV 'news' channel to lie to Americans and probably why the right-wing Christian TV 'news' channel invited him on to lie to Americans.
When you show the world you know you need to lie for your faith, you show the world you know your faith is a lie that needs people to believe falsehoods
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, GOP Georgia, seen here implying that face-masks inhibit free speech, compared non-contagious cancer to highly contagious COVID-19 in what could rank as the most stupid tweet by a senior GOP Trumpanzee to date.
In what could rank as one of the most stupidly ignorant and dangerous tweets by a senior Trumpanzee, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R- Georgia) implied that COVID-19 is no more contagious than cancer. And, as though to prove it wasn't a mistake, promptly followed it up with a second tweet which made the same idiotic comparison.
She clearly has missed the widely available information about new variants such as δ which gave rise to the massive surge of cases starting in autumn, 2020 and now the ο variant currently causing yet another wave of infections, especially amongst the unvaccinated.
Last Sunday, the Californian Ninth District Court of Appeals temporarily blocked San Diego Unified School District’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate from taking effect, one day before students were required to have their first dose.
In essence, the court accepted that the Evangelical Christian covidiot right's objection to the anti-COVID-19 vaccine is part of their religion and therefore protected by the US Constitution. There is nothing in the Bible which prohibits the use of vaccinations, which had not been invented when the books in it were being made up, because no-one then knew anything about germ theory, immunity or antibodies, and the Pope has ruled that it is not immoral to have the vaccines even if stem cells derived from the cells of an aborted foetus were used at some point in its development or testing, because being vaccinated serves a greater good. The vaccines are not, as some antivaxx disinformation sources claim, made from the cells of aborted foetuses.
The court ruling came after a sixteen-year-old Christian girl, backed by the right-wing Christian Thomas More Society, sued the San Diego Unified School District, claiming their mandated vaccination by the end of December 2021, was discriminatory because her faith deemed the vaccine 'morally problematic' because of their alleged association with abortions. The Talibangelical Thomas More Society is keen to promote any cause which amounts to imposing Christian fundamentalism on others and has opposed same-sex marriage on the grounds that Christians have a right to impose their religious view of marriage on others and to take ownership of the institution, obliging everyone to conform to their fundamentalist dogma.
Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, Archbisop of Reims. Head of the Conference of French Bishops.
Told there were 216,000 French victims of 3000 paedophile Catholic priest since 1950.
A couple of days ago I reported on the leaked report of the French independent commission of enquiry into child abuse by Catholic priest in France since 1950. The reports spoke of 10,000 victims of 3000 priests and other Catholic clerics.
The 10,000 figure was wrong and grossly underestimated the true number. In the report delivered to the Archbishop of Reims, Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, in his position as head of the French Conference of Bishops, which commissioned the report, the true number of abuse victims was estimated to be about 216,000 and possibly as high as 330,000!
Another major scandal is about to rock the Catholic Church with the report due out tomorrow into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church in France.
The report, leaked ahead of publication, will confirm that about 3000 priests and other Catholic clerics, sexually abused some 10,000 children between 1950 and 2018 when the independent commission of enquiry was established. The report runs to about 2,500 pages.
In this devastating rebuttal of the 2011 claim by Dr Thomas G. Plante, Ph.D, that generally, religious people are more moral than non-religious people, David Niose, former president of both the American Humanist Association and the Secular Coalition for America, points out the factual and unfounded errors in Plante's article. In particular:
Plante casually claims that religious people are "better citizens" and "behave better." And without citing any sources, he tells us: "Research has consistently found that religious people are less likely to engage in criminal behavior, marital infidelity, alcoholism, unprotected sexual activity. . ."
In other words, according to Plante, if you're not religious you might be a good person, but on average you are more likely to have these undesirable characteristics. This is a bold assertion that, of course, immediately puts secular individuals on the defensive. (Just imagine if the same claims were made against any other minority group.) It is precisely claims like these that lead to many Americans having an unfavorable view of atheists and other nonbelievers.
Fortunately for atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists, there is no factual basis for Plante's claim that "research has consistently found" secular individuals to be more prone to such antisocial behavior.
Creationism's favourite criminal, Mr Kent Hovind, is back in prison. Let's try to help him be a better person.
To anyone familiar with Hovind's distain for the law of the land, believing he makes his own laws because he has a close personal relationship with God, this will come as no surprise, since Hovind pushes a relentlessly literal interpretation of the Bible and the Bible positively commands behaviour which might have been acceptable in a brutal, Late Bronze/Early Iron Age tribal society but which is, following the European Enlightenment and the incorporation of Humanism into Christianity, now regarded as criminal in most civilised societies.
I mentioned at the end my last blog post that Christians seem to need the promise of a reward in order to do the right thing, with the implication that it would be much better if they just did the right thing because it is the right thing to do. However, nowhere in their handbook of morals and ethics, is that ever mandated or even recommended.
The closest they come to it is the instruction to do to others what they would want others to do to them - the so-called golden rule, common to just about every culture. Unfortunately, after several decades of the Republicans advocating greed and selfishness and insisting that it deserves a reward, most American fundamentalist Christians have come to associate doing the right thing by others as some sort of undesirable, socialist/liberal subversion of the 'American Way', and so not what God wants at all.
Few things highlight this better than the findings of a recent Pew Research survey into COVID-19 vaccine take-up, which places white evangelicals at the bottom of the table and Atheists at the top. Atheists clearly understand that by being vaccinated, they are not only protecting themselves, but also protecting other people and the society at large, by:
Former Cardinal McCarrick, the most senior Catholic cleric in the USA and the most senior to be defrocked for child abuse to date, finally appeared in court in Dedham, Massachusetts, last Friday, charged with sexually abusing a 16-year-old boy in 1974. McCarrick, now aged 91 is charged with repeatedly sexually abusing the child of a family friend, including during the sacrament of confession at a wedding in Wellesley College. The alleged victim also claims that McCarrick abused him on family trips and at various hotels in the state.
He pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges and was ordered to stay away from the alleged victim and away from anyone under the age of 18. He has also been accused of similar offences in New York and New Jersey, where the statutes of limitation mean he cannot face prosecution for those offences in those states.
These offences were investigated by the Vatican in addition to claims that he had sexually harassed and performed homosexual acts with adult seminarians under his authority. A two-year investigation by the Vatican also revealed that Pope John-Paul II had been aware of the allegations concerning his sexual relations with seminarians and allegations of paedophile abuse, when he appointed McCarrick to the post of Archbishop of Washington and made him a cardinal.
Given that Pope John-Paul II knew of these allegations, it is almost inconceivable that his then right-hand man and enforcer, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, effectively acting Pope in John-Paul II's prolonged dotage, later to become Pope Benedict XVI, knew nothing of them. This revelation then deepens the mystery surrounding why McCarrick was allowed to continue for so long in his post before anyone moved to stop him.
The report bends over backwards to try to leave Pope Francis looking whiter than white but still leaves a number of questions unanswered. Particularly how much he was told about McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI following his sudden abdication, and if nothing, why not? According to Archbishop Viganò, Pope Francis was fully aware not only of the allegations against McCarrick, but also that his activities had been 'restricted' by Benedict XVI, but Pope Francis removed these restrictions anyway and was thus complicit in his further predatory behaviour.
During John-Paul II's reign, his 'enforcer' was none other than Cardinal Ratzinger, later to become Pope Benedict XVI. It was widely reported when the sexual abuse scandals began to emerge that Ratzinger, acting on John-Paul II's orders, has instructed senior figure in the church to supress allegations of sexual abuse in order to protect the Church's reputation. It was assumed that Benedict XVI's hasty elevation of the dead John-Paul II to the sainthood, was intended to quell these rumours, on the assumption that this was not what a future saint would do. Therefore he could not have ordered Ratzinger to pervert the course of justice, deny redress and compensation to the victims of abuse, and to facilitate the paedophile activities of the Catholic priesthood by being instrumental in covering it up and keeping it from the child-protection agencies.
Pope Francis denies this (in effect, calling Viganò a liar), which begs the question, why did Benedict XVI not tell him? Or did he? By claiming he knew nothing, Pope Francis is shifting the blame onto Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
The executive summary reveals a litany of bumbling incompetence, an over-eager willingness by both John-Paul II and Benedict XVI to believe people who were close to them, and a credulous receptiveness to lies and false assurances that was naive in the extreme. Neither man appeared to be capable of believing a senior Catholic cleric could behave in such a way and then lie about it when challenged. McCarrick's 'oath as a bishop' was regarded as sufficient evidence of his veracity, when he lied about his sexual predation.
The executive summary of that Vatican reports, in the embedded PDF, bears further reading, revealing as it does, scapegoating and a laisses-faire attitude to child abuse and other inappropriate behaviour by senior clerics by Pope John-Paul II and his close advisers.
Meanwhile, Pope Francis, who has shed crocodile tears over the abuse allegations and even blamed Satan, not for the abuses but for encouraging people to speak out against them, is still under a strict code of Omertà regarding the truth of Viganò's allegation that his predecessor, Benedict XVI, placed McCarrick on restricted duties but that Francis rescinded those restrictions, and Francis' claim that McCarrick was never restricted in the first place and he knew mothing of the allegations. Either Francis is lying, or Benedict XVI knew about McCarrick and did nothing he deemed worthy of informing Francis about on his sudden resignation. Either way, McCarrick's predation continued unchecked and it was only when the scandal became public that Francis decided to act, throwing his hands up in horror when the full scale of McCarrick's predatory behaviour and arrogant betrayal of his clerical vows became public knowledge.
Kim Davis, Christian extremist
Ambush meeting with Pope Francis arranged by Cardinal Viganò.
Mind you, it should be said that Viganò bears a grudge. As Papal Legate to Washington, he was in charge of Pope Francis' 2015 official visit, which had been something of a PR coup, until Viganò arrange an ambush meeting between the odious Kim Davis, and Pope Francis. Davis was a Christian extreme fundamentalist and serial adulterer, with multiple extra-marital pregnancies, then disobeying a court order to register same-sex marriage in her job as a registrar. Viganò then issued a press statement announcing triumphantly that Pope Francis had given Davis encouragement in her resistance to authority (and to the rule of law) in the name of Jesus and the sanctity of heterosexual-only marriage.
For a visiting head of state to be seen to encourage law-breaking in his host state and take sides with someone disobeying a court order, turned the triumph into a diplomatic disaster, all so Viganò could sequester the visit and turn it into a victory for right-wing Christian conservatism. He was promptly transferred back to the Vatican, and stripped of his diplomat status, and Francis was left looking like a patsy, casting round for a scapegoat and claiming he knew nothing of Davis' criminal behaviour in the name of Jesus and would not have met her if he had - although, of course, his church still agreed with her about same-sex marriage being a sin.
Maybe the truth about what Pope Francis knew of his predatory behavior will emerge during the coming court case, if McCarrick's lawyers don't manage to get it halted on the grounds that McCarrick is now too old and frail to stand trial, and anyway it was all a long time ago and McCarrick is very sorry. In which case, all the old predator will have suffered is a loss of status and his pension.
None of his victims will have received justice.
Just when you thought the Vatican financial scandals couldn't get any murkier, we have news that someone is sending Pope Francis death threats, presumably to try to intimidate him into dropping the charges against former cardinal, Angelo Becciu and his shady cronies in the dodgy London property deal and money-laundering operation. Meanwhile the Vatican is degenerating into mutual back-stabbing and finger-pointing.
Readers may recall how Becciu was summarily sacked and stripped of his rank as cardinal last September. He had been replaced by Archbishop Edgar Pena Parra, as sostituto (effectively, Pope Francis' Chief of Staff), in 2018.
The Mafioso-style death threat, in the form of an envelope containing three 9mm bullets and a letter referring to Vatican financial mismanagement, addressed to "Pope Francis — Vatican City — St. Peter’s Square in Rome", was sent from France. According to this report, Vatican police believe they know the person who sent it.
The Young Earth Creationist fraud and Christian televangelist, Kent Hovind, or to give him his correct academic title, Mr. Kent Hovind, has been arrested on domestic violence charges, brought by his wife, Cindi Lincoln, who alleges that he 'body-slammed her' causing injuries for which she needed to go to an emergency room. The alleged assault took place in late 2020. She is now seeking a protection order against him to prevent him repeating the attacks.
She also alleges that he sent his 'right hand man' to her apartment to threaten her and had her apartment trashed the next day. She now says she fears he may try to kill her to shut her up because his following depends on his public persona, not on his private behaviour.
Hovind, who styles himself 'Dr Dino', is the owner of a Creationist scam park, Dinosaur Adventure Land, in Conecuh, Alabama, which he opened soon after being released from an nine-year jail term for tax fraud. He makes a living by fooling scientifically illiterate simpletons by pretending to have a legitimate academic doctorate and to have been a high-school science teacher. This works on his target marks who believe anyone called 'doctor' must be an expert scientist.
If ever there was a time for the Catholic Church, under the leadership of Pope Francis, to do some good for the future of mankind and life on Earth it is now, with two major crises currently playing havoc: the coronavirus pandemic and global warming. The latter being perhaps the most serious in the longer term.
And yet we have had very little in the way of encouraging Catholics, let alone the rest of us, to do something constructive about either!
In an article by Thomas Reese in Religion News Service, he simultaneously points out this failure by the Pope and identifies some of the reason for it. The main problem is that the Pope can no longer command the support and mandate the actions of Catholics, under the threat of hellfire and damnation, or even death for heresy for non-compliance, so all he can do is smile and mutter warm words and platitudes in the hope that someone will listen to him.
The problem is not just the lack of any moral authority from the leader of a church whose clerics systematically and routinely abused their positions of trust to sexually predate on children and vulnerable adults, but the fact that when Popes did have those autocratic powers, they almost invariably abused them. Far from supporting scientists like Galileo and Darwin on the basis that the truth is worth defending, they were condemned as heretics because they reported evidence that went against the established doctrines. The test was not "What does the evidence show?" or "What is the truth?", but "What do we need people to believe?".
Reese points out the contrast between when Popes could order Crusades against Muslims and how today the Pope is powerless to order a 'crusade' to save the planet, or to get the world's people vaccinated against the coronavirus:
And rather than organizing crusades against Muslims, as it did in the past, the church could mobilize its people to protect the health of the Earth and humanity. But today, the children’s crusade is led, not by the church, but by Greta Thunberg. Hopefully she will be more successful than the Children’s Crusade of 1212, which ended in disaster.
But of course, by the murderous Medieval crusades, and the Inquisition, the Pope showed how to abuse dictatorial powers, so those powers, post-enlightenment, have been removed.
Again, Reese points out:
There was a time when Christianity had the ability to do great things (some good, some bad).
We marvel at those Christians in the past who dug the foundations of great cathedrals, the completion of which they and their children would never see. The idea of taking on a project, like building a cathedral, that might take centuries to complete is incomprehensible to us.
Indeed, although it is quite difficult to think of many 'great things' that Christianity did. Reese cites the laying of foundations for Cathedrals for their grandchildren by people who would never see the full fruits of their labours, but those were invariably on the instructions of powerful bishops and monarchs, intent on consolidating their grip on the people with an ostentatious display of wealth and power.
It is doubtful that the labourers, or those who paid them, were motivated by a vision of the great architecture, impressive vaulting and stained glass that would follow. Skilled though they may have been, they were likely more motivated by the need to earn their daily bread and feed a family, in the case of the diggers, and their own self-aggrandizement in the case of the financiers, than thoughts of what their grandchildren might eventually see.
In stark contrast, there are the very many bad things that Christianity did, from witch burning, holy wars like the Albigensian Crusade (read, genocide of the Cathars), antisemitic pogroms, the Inquisition, marginalisation of women and minorities, the literal demonization of people suffering with mental health and neurological problems, imperialism and permitting slavery in the nameunder the guise of 'civilising' other peoples and teaching them the 'good news' of the need for salvation and how to achieve it by adopting Christianity, obeying the priests, accepting the autocratic rule of Christian kings and emperors, and knowing their place and staying in it.
Yes, Thomas Reese is right: the Pope could and should use what authority he still has to urge Catholics to do their utmost to save the planet and get on top of the coronavirus pandemic. But he cannot, for the simple reason that he has little or no moral authority left after centuries of abuse of their power by his predecessors, the accumulation of vast treasures of incalculable worth for nothing more important than self-glorification, decades of abuse of children and vulnerable adults by his priests and a long, sorry history of marginalisation, demonization and damnation of minorities, degradation of women, and the promotion of poverty and suffering as a blessing.
He now leads a church visibly struggling to keep up with the advances in humanist ethics now replacing the primitive, Bronze Age superstitions and brutal, misogynistic tribal moral codes that his church still holds sacred, in civilised countries. To paraphrase Stephen Fry's words in the Intelligence Squared debate, the Pope could take that vast wealth stored in the Vatican and use it to send his nuns and priest and monks out into the world with instructions to use it to vaccinate the poor and invest in green technologies and renewable energy.
If he did so, the Catholic Church could be a force for good in the world; but he does not, and it is not.
In common with many other American Catholic diocese, the diocese of Norwich, Connecticut has declared itself bankrupt and applied for Chapter 11 protection. This is often a devise to protect church funds from claimants and ensure victims are denied the compensation they are entitled to while the diocese hangs on to the funds it needs to pay its expenses such as the wages and pensions of those who oversaw the abuses.
This action was precipitated by dozens of lawsuits of victims of the regime that ran the now closed Academy at Mount Saint John School, a residential treatment centre for 'troubled youth' in Deep River. They are also suing the former Bishop of Norwich, Daniel Reilly.
