|
News Updates Please visit our new extensive Survey Poll
BERLIN, Feb 28, 2010 (IPS) - The Catholic Church has for decades protected paedophile priests and clerics who sexually abused children from judiciary prosecution, according to German theologians, law experts, and internal church documents. The church hierarchy's complicity was confirmed recently through thousands of denouncements against numerous priests in Germany. In practically all the cases, the abusers were only transferred from one jurisdiction to another and never legally prosecuted. Similar cases of sexual abuse of children within Catholic schools
and other institutions, with impunity for the abusers, have been documented
in such countries as Austria, Australia, France, Italy, the Philippines,
Spain, and the United States. "Therefore, we do not need a round table specifically for the
Catholic Church," the Archbishop of Freiburg said. He expressed regret for the "misguided" Child Migrant Programme, telling the Commons he was "truly sorry". He also announced a £6m fund to reunite families that were torn apart. The scheme sent poor children for a "better life" to countries like Canada and Australia from the 1920s to 1960s, but many were abused and lied to. 'Deportation of innocents' The trauma of childhood sexual abuse is almost incomprehensible. Here, Michael Corry and Aine Tubridy explain some of the consequences I've come to realise that sexual assault is an imposed death experience
for the victim. That is, the victim experiences her life as having
been taken by someone else. The chairman of the German Bishops Conference has said he was "deeply
shocked" by a child sex abuse scandal in Roman Catholic schools
and asked for forgiveness from the victims. "Sexual abuse of minors is always a heinous crime. I want to associate myself with this statement from Pope Benedict and apologize to all those who were victims of such crimes," he said. more: The DW-WORLD Article http://newsletter.dw-world.de/re?l=ew3ywfI45xikerI7 Such a gathering would be "a good way to clear up the numerous abuse cases and to offer the opportunity to the Catholic Church to discuss voluntary compensation with victims," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said. The German politician leveled criticism at the Bishop of Augsburg, Walter Mixa, who she said was "hiding behind polemic excuses instead of contributing to clearing up" the matter. The controversial bishop had previously told a local newspaper that the media and the "so-called sexual revolution" were partly to blame for the problem of child abuse in society. Damaging allegations The minister's comments come to a backdrop of a widening scandal involving allegations of sexual molestation at Catholic schools throughout Germany dating back to the 1960s. According to media reports, at least six schools were implicated in the claim. Included are two former children's homes of the Catholic order the Salesians of Don Bosco in Berlin and the Bavarian town of Augsburg, as well as institutions run by Marists, Vincentians and Franciscans. The most prominent of these involves as many as 115 alleged cases of child abuse at a Berlin Jesuit school. The matter is currently under investigation. Hamburg Archbishop Werner Thissen said the scandal was the result of "structural problems" in the church. Thissen added it was in the church's interests to do everything it could to help clear up the abuse allegations. An association of Catholic lay people, "We are the Church", has also called on bishops to come clean, and admit that cases that have come to light are not isolated.
Association spokeswoman Sigrid Grabmeier said German Pope Benedict XVI should make a statement urgently. dfm/afpd/dpa Editor: Toma Tasovac: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5270497,00.html?maca=en-newsletter_en_bulletin-2097-txt-nl The tangled web of Church-State relations was rarely so knotted as this week, when two events conspired to tease it further. Pope Benedict met Irish Bishops in Rome to discuss the child abuse scandals, especially after the Murphy report. But the survivors
are ignored, reduced to statistics and denied a voice where it matters.
Their suffering is voiced, if at all, by representatives of the hierarchies
who frustrated them for so long. Abuse survivors condemned the Pope Benedict XVI for not acknowledging that senior clergy covered up decades of sickening Wednesday, 17 February 2010 Read
more:
The bishops promised the Pope that they were committed to co-operating with the civil authorities over the paedophilia scandal. Pope Benedict did not spare his words in addressing his Irish bishops.
He said that child abuse was a "heinous crime" as well as
a "grave sin". Before the meeting began on Monday, the Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone held a Mass attended by the Irish bishops. He called the sexual acts committed against children "particularly
abominable". Quotation:
BERLIN — The Roman Catholic Church faces yet another child abuse scandal, this time in Pope Benedict XVI’s native Germany. The widening public scandal began last month with allegations that three priests at the elite Canisius Jesuit high school in Berlin had sexually abused students in the 1970s and ’80s. In the midst of a steadily growing uproar over the handling of that case, the German magazine Der Spiegel published an article last weekend that said nearly 100 clerics and laypeople had been suspected of abusing children and teenagers nationwide since 1995. The rector of Aloisiuskolleg, a high school in Bad Godesberg, an
affluent neighborhood in the former capital of Bonn where diplomats
and leading politicians lived, resigned Monday over accusations that
he was aware of sexual misconduct by teachers at the school. And on
Tuesday a local newspaper, the Aachener Zeitung, reported new accusations
of sexual abuse against two priests in the diocese in Aachen. Dear Pope Benedict, As the Irish bishops gather in Rome for their meeting with you, we are writing to ensure that the voices of the survivors of abuse by Catholic priests have a place in your deliberations. The distress, anger and frustration experienced by survivors since
the publication of the Report of the Commission of Investigation into
Sexual Abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin (the Murphy Report) is enormous.
Many who have suffered throughout their lives from the impact of sexual
abuse by priests in childhood now realise, having read the Report,
that their pain and suffering could have been avoided if senior churchmen
and the civil authorities had acted properly in response to complaints
received from earlier victims.
The Catholic Church in Germany has been shaken in recent days by revelations of a series of sexual abuse cases. Close to 100 priests and members of the laity have been suspected of abuse in recent years. After years of suppression, the wall of silence appears to be crumbling. By SPIEGEL Staff. This is what it looks like, the document of a conspiracy: 24 pages,
with appendix, in Latin, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith at the Vatican. A "norma interna," or confidential
set of guidelines for all bishops, who were required to keep it a
secret for all eternity, in the name of the Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost. comments: It was just a matter of time until the
inevitable truth will find its way out from under the covering cloak
of the Vatican. His experience had damaged him but, for a long time, Paddy Doyle
resisted writing about it. In the late 1980s, Doyle was a budding
scriptwriter who had tackled disability in his early works but had
never faced up to the horrors that left him disabled. Institutionalised
as a child after the death of his parents in the 1950s, Doyle had
suffered such physical and sexual abuse at the hands of nuns that
he ended up requiring brain surgery. Confined to a wheelchair, he
had been unable to escape the legacy of his childhood, yet he tried
to avoid the ghosts of the past. While the church’s mission was to protect minors, “unfortunately,
in different instances, certain of its members went against this commitment
and violated rights,” the pontiff said in a speech to members
of the Pontifical Council for the Family that was posted on the Vatican
Web site today. “The Church will continue to deplore and condemn
such behavior”
If it does, the 118,000-member Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington
would become the latest U.S. diocese to resort to selling off assets
to satisfy claims stemming from sexual abuse by priests.
Earlier this week,
the elite Canisius school in Berlin admitted systematic sexual abuse
by at least two Roman Catholic priests, named in media reports as
Peter R and Wolfgang S, who both left the order in the 1980s. Fr Stefan Dartmann said students at the Jesuit-run Canisius College had complained in 1981, much earlier than the order had previously admitted. The Jesuit said
he was ashamed that the college and the order had left the complaint
unanswered. Comments to: “Germany Jesuit head apologises for child sex abuse”
He writes that
the indemnity offended Article 44.2.2 of the Constitution, which states
that “the State guarantees not to endow any religion”. She was 4 years old and with her brother, Rudolph, 12, wearing nice dress clothes and holding hands as they stood in the court of an Euskirchen, Germany, Catholic orphanage waiting to visit their "opa," or grandfather. n the picture Ziska held, if you could see beneath their clothes you'd find swollen bellies because of malnutrition and dark bruises from severe beatings, she said. "We looked horrible," Ziska said, shaking her head. "It wasn't a children's home but a prison for children." The picture is the only keepsake she has from spending 18 years as a ward of the state in Germany, but the memories torment her. "I've been abused, tortured and raped by people who were supposed
to take care of me," She said, tears welling in her eyes. "It's
so hard to talk about ... I don't want to remember." Part Two:
The old priest
said: “People should forgive him, after all we are prepared
to forgive the children.” I asked: “Forgive the children
what?” HOLLYWOOD star
Gabriel Byrne has revealed how he was “deeply hurt” by
sexual abuse inflicted on him as a child by the Christian Brothers. Byrne was an altar
boy during his childhood in Dublin and went at the age of 11 to train
as a priest in England. The Irish Times – Monday, January 18, 2010 THE FIRST person in Ireland to have gone public – in 1995 – about his abuse by a Catholic priest has formally left the Catholic Church. Andrew Madden, who was abused when an altar boy in Cabra parish in Dublin by Ivan Payne, wrote to the Dublin archdiocese before Christmas saying he wished to leave the Church. He received notice of his “cessation of church membership by formal act of defection. . .” from church authorities last week. He also received a letter, dated January 11th, from Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin expressing sadness at the decision to leave and saying it made him wonder whether the church could learn from it. In a response
to Archbishop Martin at the weekend, Mr Madden said that following
publication of the Murphy report, he was “appalled, as I believe
you may have been, by the behaviour of your fellow bishops as they
did everything to try and hold onto office, four of them failing”.
Catholic Church accused of denying justice
to Blacks abused by priests:
In Northern Ireland,
it seemed at times as though the bad old days were rising up again
like a malign spectre to mock our optimism and complacency. |
|
|
print this page |
up |
