Posted on 04/09/2010 11:02:30 AM PDT by NormsRevenge
LOS ANGELES – The future Pope Benedict XVI resisted pleas to defrock a California priest with a record of sexually molesting children, citing concerns including "the good of the universal church," according to a 1985 letter bearing his signature.
The correspondence, obtained by The Associated Press, is the strongest challenge yet to the Vatican's insistence that Benedict played no role in blocking the removal of pedophile priests during his years as head of the Catholic Church's doctrinal watchdog office.
The letter, signed by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was typed in Latin and is part of years of correspondence between the Diocese of Oakland and the Vatican about the proposed defrocking of the Rev. Stephen Kiesle.
The Vatican refused to comment on the contents of the letter Friday, but a spokesman confirmed it bore Ratzinger's signature.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Actually the General is not even an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. There ain’t no such “is” — one may act as an EMHC as needed but one cannot “be” one.
But correcting the impression that this is some form of status in the Church is probably beyond hopeless.
“To saying that the Cardinal had nothing to do with it (post 63) when confronted with the fact that the Catholic church, in fact, DID let this guy lead a children’s ministry AND a youth volunteer after that AFTER being prosecuted and AFTER requesting his leave.”
See, this is how utterly ignorant you are. You slip and slide, jig and jive between the cardinal and the CDF and the “Catholic Church.”
The bishop of Oakland removed him from ministry. He did not (and could not) laicize him. Laicization would not prevent the man from volunteering in a youth ministry anyway-as a laicized priest.
All this stupid hullabaloo about the decision not to laicize him immediately is smokescreen. What needed to be done to protect children was to remove the man from ministry.
Which was done. But then a particular parish let him volunteer. The bishop’s failure was to have created a system that would catch him at this circumventing of the bishop’s previous action. Blame the bishop. But the bishop does not equal Ratzinger and Ratzinger does not equal the “Catholic Church.”
The effort to pin this on Ratzinger is specious. IT was the priest who asked to be laicized—which shows that laicization was not in this case desired as a punishment to him. He wanted to be laicized for who knows what reason.
At that time thousands of priests were asking to be laicized. Laicizing them had nothing to do with preventing them from doing wrong deeds.
The fault lies with the bishop of Oakland.
But there’s no money to be had by pillorying the bishop of Oakland. There’s no smear-gain to be had by fingering him.
They are after Ratzinger for other reasons.
Be mad at the what the bishop did and failed to do. I am.
But that has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the current smear campaign against Benedict.
Had Ratzinger agreed to laicize this priest immediately it would not have prevented him volunteering in a youth ministry.
Is that so hard to understand?
The media bandy about “defrocking” as if that somehow would have solved the problem.
They depend on your ignorance as to what laicization means for this bandying to have any effect.
And you gobble it up.
I personally believe that whether P Marlowe thinks Benedict should resign or not
doesn’t
matter
in
the
slightest.
I personally believe P Marlowe should resign from putting a Calvinist nose into things that are none of P Marlowe’s business.
Go tend to your own Calvinist house of cards.
First of all I am not a Calvinist.
Second of all the molestation of children is EVERYONE's business.
That gun is smokin’.
While the offender might go on to have private trysts (as the church is not a police state), it would certainly get him permanently out of the clergy seat of the confessionals.
Of course, Your Snootiness
This makes no sense in the context of your other remarks. The Bishop ought to have warned all the parishes (if that is possible).
Please explain how the facts of this case are anti-Catholic. To my untrained eyes and ears, it seems like Cardinal Ratzinger, before he became Pope, had as his priority to protect the church’s reputation rather than defrock a priest who had tied up and sexually attacked two little boys.
That is not a good thing.
When discussing this issue, you may wish to refrain from the use of the phrase “slipped through the cracks”.
It looks like we really ought to see the whole letter along with its purported translation (the translation might actually be OK but AP is spinning it). There are several Freepers versed in Latin. It might turn out that Ratzinger was merely saying that this wouldn’t be the appropriate move to take care of the risk. Purportedly, a priest can be de-ministered without being de-frocked and the former was what was needed. If I follow the discussion here correctly.
Supposedly, if what Houghton is telling us is accurate, a “defrocking” doesn’t bar a Catholic priest from other ministries. It sounds weird, as the Protestant/evangelical model treats the changes in status as synonymous. If a Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, etc. minister is defrocked he is not allowed to be a minister of anything in the church where it happened.
MEOW
Interesting.
Plausible.
However . . . imho, the Vatican has historically erred far to the side of covering it’s rear vs standing tall on Godly values.
I wonder how much more it would smoke if they checked how much of George Bush´s Faith Based Initiative money went to pay of over 2 billion fines of the church. I know the government had 65 billion in the account for distribution at one time.
That would be interesting if tax payers paid for it - quite a scam, just like the victims being fined to reimburse the muggers for their time at at a 100 time lawyer's fees.
I could bet the moment they check they will find billions unaccounted for. Church, state and billions of dollars is Heaven for politicians both religious and secular.
Unfortunately Petronsius, it was not like that at all, priests do not write to the Vatican. He went though Cardinal Cummins who claimed that he did all the paperwork explaining that Stephen Kiesle had been convicted of tying up two boys and molesting them in a California church rectory, and asked the Vatican in a letter that Kiesle be defrocked and wrote in part “It does seem clear now, with hindsight, that quite probably Father Kiesle should never have been ordained."
Four years later, then Cardinal Ratzinger said the case needed more time and that "it [was] necessary to consider the good of the Universal Church."
When retired Bishop Cummins, then 83, was asked about the letters he at first said he did not remember but when shown letters with his signature he agreed.
“I'm somewhat protective of what we did obviously, but I am also protective of what Rome did. They were working in an entirely different world," said Cummins.
Significantly, not once in all the letters to the Vatican do they reply “not my pigs, not my farm,” in Latin of course it would be Non meus volutabrum non meus agri. In all cases they take possession of the problem and invariably decide against the wishes of their own Bishops. Leaving no doubt in the Bishop’s and anyone else's minds that pedophiles are a protected species in the Catholic Church.
As indeed they are, as they all know that is why only the cases like 200 deaf boys and egregious multiple victim cases are sent to the Vatican. The rest are simply ignored by the Bishops, Archbishops and Cardinals and the priests kept on.
Ratzinger, whom the apologists claim had no authority over the Bishops in these matters, showed diminished supply of empathy and common sense, as in every case he overrode his Bishops and Cardinals wishes and opted for them continue the cover up for the good of the Church.
This is only a partial list and only from the United States but even the most ardent believer in the Vatican lies will pause when the see the math.
Why did one hundred and eleven (111) heads of dioceses including eight (8) cardinals in forty (40) states all decide that they should just cover up the scandal independently?
Why did they they all, to a man, keep sexual predator priests on the job after admissions of wrongdoing, sexual disorder diagnoses, legal settlements and criminal convictions?
What was it?
a) Each of the 111, independently with their advisers consulting their consciences and reaching the same conclusion or
b) being good soldiers followed orders
Why did they only involved the Vatican when the evil was even too much for them to stomach, their natural humanity resisting the warping of their consciences, refusing to obey the rules of their church. They refused to cover up the destruction of so many young lives.
Sadly, even those few, although they numbered in the hundreds if not thousands on two continents, even that small sample that would soon sicken the decent people of the entire world, were of no consequence to the empathy challenged Ratzinger.
I do not believe a normal human being could behave in that way, but then I cannot get into the mind of the religious. The Jones town cultists, to the horror of the world, sacrificed their own children feeding them them poisoned Kool Aide for the promise of the after life with their leader. How may Irish mothers covered up the robbing of the innocence of their own children from fear of retribution if they spoke out, from the church and centuries conditioned congregation?
Anyone with so lacking in empathy is a psychopath, but do you also have a pedophile Pope?
Is this man you all seek to protect, to absolve, to excuse, perhaps even worship? At the time of the Great Schism, they recognised that the real scheme was to add a Universal Pope, whom, even then, they knew would soon become the God/Pope figure for the simple unimaginative peasants.
A senior lay Catholic, who asked not to be named, said: “It is very hard to be a Catholic nowadays. We are meant to be following the Lord.”
He said that he felt as ashamed now as he had when the mother of a nine-year-old girl who had become pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather was excommunicated when she allowed doctors to abort the babies. The doctors were also excommunicated, but the stepfather suffered no penalty from the Church.
The brutalizing of children is more and more a commonplace in that religion/cult that embraces sin, peddles fear, and dehumanizes it adherents as surely as it violates the bodies and minds of their young. There is a special place for those perverted misogynist sadist in robes that try to force a nine year old girl with twins from a brutal rape to destroy her little body and even bring about her death in child birth.
But let someone throw a small piece of bread in the trash – they are condemned by Bell, Book and Candle as Satan’s spawn and immediately barred from eating flesh and drinking blood, condemned to saunas in lakes of fire and suffer the torments of the damned for eternity and three days more; quite bizarre but sadly indisputable.
Ratzinger’s dogma is more important than life itself. Could your Satan be more diabolical?
How can any woman put herself under such a man’s authority?
Finally:
The abuse cases of two priests in Arizona have cast further doubt on the Catholic Church insistence that Pope Benedict played no role in shielding pedophiles before he became pope.
Documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that as a Vatican cardinal, the future pope took over the abuse case of the Rev. Michael Teta of Tucson, and then let it languish at the Vatican for years despite repeated pleas from the bishop for the man to be removed from the priesthood.
In another Tucson case, that of Msgr. Robert Trupia, the bishop wrote to then-Cardinal Ratzinger, who would become pope in 2005. Bishop Manuel Moreno called Trupia "a major risk factor to the children, adolescents and adults that he may have contact with." There is no indication in the case files that Ratzinger even responded.
Christopher Hitchen seems to be right “The pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it”
RE: Christopher Hitchen seems to be right “The pope’s entire career has the stench of evil about it”
Quoting atheists says a whole lot.
Just more from the useful idiots to further the atheistic progressive agenda.
Too bad the rebuttal is being left to Hitchens and Dawkins, as if the only people who are alarmed by this scandal are atheists.
Where are the leaders of other churches?
The Cardinal overrode no one, except in your fevered imagination. Was he ruling on the matter of the offense or whether a priest can through his own choice break his vows? Certainly if he can do this, he can break his baptismal vows. Finally when you quote Hutchins, remember you are quoting Hitler.
Defrocking is not a useful term. Ordination in the Catholic Church does not have the same meaning as it does in Protestant bodies. It has the same effect so we believe, as baptism. Baptism brands us. Even if he join the devil’s camp, the baptised is not there by unbaptised.
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