Posted on 07/12/2004 10:26:32 AM PDT by Land of the Irish
Roman Catholic leaders in Austria called an emergency meeting today after officials discovered a vast cache of photos and videos allegedly depicting young priests having sex at a seminary.
About 40,000 photographs and an undisclosed number of films, including child pornography, were downloaded on computers at the seminary in St Poelten, about 50 miles west of Vienna, the respected news magazine Profil reported.
Officials with the local diocese declined to comment but were meeting privately on the scandal, Austrian state television reported.
It said the seminary’s director, the Rev Ulrich Kuechl, and his deputy, Wolfgang Rothe, had resigned.
The Austrian Bishops Conference issued a statement today pledging a full and swift investigation.
“Anything that has to do with homosexuality or pornography has no place at a seminary for priests,” it said.
Church officials discovered the material on a computer at the seminary, Profil said. It published several images purportedly showing young priests and their instructors kissing and fondling each other and engaging in orgies and sex games.
The child porn came mostly from web sites based in Poland, the magazine said.
Bishop Kurt Krenn, a conservative churchman who oversees the St Poelten Diocese, told Austrian television he had seen photos of seminary leaders in sexual situations with students. Krenn, however, dismissed the photos as “silly pranks” that “had nothing to do with homosexuality”.
A group of St. Poelten Diocese officials planned to ask the Vatican to remove Krenn as bishop, Austrian radio reported.
Vatican spokesman Ciro Benedettini told the Austria Press Agency that the Holy See had no comment.
Krenn, 68, issued a statement calling the accusations groundless while conceding that he “may have made some wrong personnel decisions” at the seminary.
Gay seminary scandal rocks Austria
July 13, 2004 - 7:04AM
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Austria's Roman Catholic Church is launching an investigation into charges of homosexuality between priests and seminarians at a seminary outside Vienna.
A church panel in the Sankt Poelten diocese west of the capital agreed on the inquiry after the news magazine Profil published photographs showing leading clerics of the local seminary fondling and kissing student priests.
Profil said investigators had also found at least 40,000 mostly pornographic photographs at the seminary.
The director of the seminary and his assistant have both quit as details of the scandal emerged in recent days.
"The panel has decided to investigate this issue thoroughly, discuss and assess the results of this inquiry and draw the necessary conclusions from the result," a Church statement said.
Kurt Krenn, Sankt Poelten's controversial bishop, told Austria's ORF television he had seen a compromising photograph of the seminary director fondling another man over his clothes but said the scene had nothing to do with homosexuality.
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This and other shots concerned nothing more than "youthful pranks", said Krenn, who told his interviewer he did not plan to step down because of the scandal.
The Roman Catholic Church has been shaken by a series of sexual abuse scandals across the world. The abuse has cost the American Catholic Church millions of dollars in payments to victims and angered Catholics who held priests in high esteem.
The Church in traditionally Catholic Austria was rocked by a scandal in 1995 when Profil published charges that Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, the then head of the Catholic Church in the country, had sexually abused seminarians. The Vatican replaced him months later and he retired to a monastery.
Krenn, whose close ties to Pope John Paul led to a papal visit to his modest diocese in 1998, has regularly been criticised by lay Catholic groups as an arch-conservative.
The Austrian Bishops Conference said on Sunday the Church had "an urgent need to act" in view of the alleged scandal at the Sankt Poelten seminary.
Porn discovered at Austrian seminary
Roman Catholic diocese scandalized by cache of photosThe Associated Press
Updated: 6:24 p.m. ET July 12, 2004VIENNA, Austria - A vast cache of child pornography and photos of young priests having sex has been discovered at a Roman Catholic seminary, officials said Monday, leading politicians and church leaders to demand a criminal probe and the resignation of the bishop in charge.
Bishop Kurt Krenn, who oversees the diocese, refused to step down, however, dismissing the images as a “childish prank.”
Leaders of the Catholic diocese of St. Poelten where the seminary is located, about 50 miles west of Vienna, spent much of the day in an emergency meeting.
The seminary’s director, the Rev. Ulrich Kuechl, resigned along with his deputy, Wolfgang Rothe, the diocese said after the meeting. It did not elaborate.
As many as 40,000 photos and an undisclosed number of films, including child pornography, were found a year ago on computers at the seminary, the respected news magazine Profil reported.
It published several images purportedly showing young priests and their instructors kissing and fondling each other, and said others showed them engaging in orgies and sex games. The child porn came mostly from Web sites based in Poland, the magazine said.
‘Perverse situations’
Hannes Jarolim, a spokesman for the opposition Socialist Party, urged the Interior Ministry on Monday to launch a criminal investigation. Public prosecutor Walter Nemec said police were examining the material, which he said showed seminarians “in perverse situations together with their superiors.”
The Austrian Bishops Conference issued a statement pledging a full and swift internal investigation.
“Anything that has to do with the practice of homosexuality or pornography has no place at a seminary for priests,” it said.
Krenn, a conservative churchman, told Austrian television he had seen photos of seminary leaders in sexual situations with students, but he described the images as part of an elaborate prank that “had nothing to do with homosexuality.”
Harsh reaction for bishop
His nonchalance drew swift and scathing reaction across the overwhelmingly Catholic nation.
“Collecting child pornography cannot be dismissed as a prank,” said Thomas Huber, a Green Party politician.
In the mid-1990s, Austria was stung by allegations that Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, who died last year, had molested students at an all-male Catholic boarding school two decades earlier. The affair had prompted Groer to step down.
A group of St. Poelten Diocese officials planned to ask the Vatican to remove Krenn as bishop, Austrian radio reported Monday. Martin Walchhofer, who supervises the alpine country’s seminaries, said Krenn ultimately was responsible and “must answer before the church and before God for all of this.”
Asked whether he intended to resign, Krenn said bluntly: “No.”
The Vatican said it had no comment.
Krenn, 68, issued a statement calling the accusations groundless while conceding that he “may have made some wrong personnel decisions” at the seminary. Rothe, the former deputy seminary chief, was a legal adviser to the bishop.
Close the seminary and burn it to the ground.
"I too am concerned with the drastic downward spiral that can clearly be traced back to Vat II."
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The scandals began in the 1950's if you look up the John Jay Report. Blame the rightists or the leftists, blame celibacy or the poetry of Pope John Paul II, or the Latin Mass or English Mass or whatever you like, but Vat. II is no more to blame for the immorality of Catholics than the Council of Carthage.
http://www.usccb.org/nrb/johnjaystudy/index.htm
BS, calm down.
I'm mystified when I see statements like this. On what basis does he "seem to be a very holy man"? We can't judge his soul, just like any other man, we can only make prudential judgements based on exterior actions. All of his exterior actions have promoted the "Vatican II Church," have systematically undermined the traditional Catholic faith, and have caused immensely more scandal than any pope of the Middle Ages.
What if you saw a photo of Bill Clinton kissing the Koran? You'd be ready to indict him for treason and consorting with the enemy right on the spot. How does JPII manage to get away with it and still be considered "holy" even by someone who recognizes the damage he has inflicted?
I can't understand why his exterior actions would lead anyone to consider JPII "holy." Just because he can get a bunch of teenagers at some "Catholic Woodstock" to shout "JPII, we love you"? I'm afraid he seems to share more in common with the American televangelists than he does with the four Evangelists.
Only God can judge the state of his soul. But if you were making a prudential decision about joining a certain parish, and you were told that the pastor there was known to do things like:
Mix Aztec worship with the Mass
Have bare-breasted lectors reading at Mass
Have clowns on stilts come up for communion
Hold inter-faith services with local protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and even Voo-Doo practicioners
"Reinterpret" all the traditional Catholic rules about marriage
Sponsor rock-n-roll, rap and break-dancing performances, but refuse to find enough time ever to meet with any traditional Catholics,
Give sermons in which no one understood a word he was saying, but they just managed to catch the idea that he was promoting a new kind of Catholicism,
Would you say, "He seems like a very holy priest"? Or would you say, "Hell will freeze over long before I or my family ever set foot in such a parish"?
And if you believe that one: the October Revolution had nothing to do with the Communists taking over Russia, the Reign of Terror had no connection with the French Revolution, and WWI had no connection to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
Before you embarrass yourself with any more silly statements of this sort, why don't you do some reading, for example, this article where a mathematician examines the numbers since Vatican II, and concludes:
"- That the decline in priestly vocations did, in fact, begin with Vatican II and the introduction of the Novus Ordo.Seattle Catholic: Springtime Decay- That the loss is beyond our human ability to comprehend, since it involves souls, but that we should at least be honest about the situation and attempt to comprehend it. We should quit denying that there is a crisis in the Church, and we should quit denying that it is related to the Second Vatican Council.
- That the decline is not showing any signs of reversal, despite the assertions of many bishops and priests to the contrary.
- God has left his Holy fingerprint on the decline by relating the decline to the natural number, e. Whenever we find an exponential decay function Ce-xt in nature, where C and x are constants, and t is time, it is in conjunction with the death or decay of some entity within His creation. Now we find an exponential decay function describing the number of seminarians from the Novus Ordo wing of the Church in the United States. We should reflect on whether He is trying to tell us something."
The scandals did not begin in the fifties--the John Jay study began in the fifites, a big difference. In fact, the number of abuse cases rose abruptly in 1960 during the pontificate of John XXIII--precisely at a time when clerical discipline grew more lax. By the close of the Vatican Council and throughout the late sixties and the seventies and eighties the number of abuse cases skyrocketed astronomically.
"Before you embarrass yourself with any more silly statements"
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Am I embarrassing myself???
Please, look up the link in my post to the John Jay Report.
All statistics show that the sexual abuses of minors began to drop with the commencement of John Paul II's papacy. They are almost non-existent now.
No other Pope in the history made as many apostolic visits to different God-forsaken lands as JP2, no other Pope brought down the worldwide grip of godless communism. John Paul authored fourteen profound encyclical letters, promulgated new Code of Canon Law and a new Catechism. There are many good things happening in the Catholic Church because of the leadership of John Paul II.
Better look up the facts before you embarrass yourself completely.
So, in your opinion the Catholic Church has been a "sinner" within a "holy" society?
lol, i have to admit i would not be going to that mass.
In other cases people just lied. The periti at the council and the Rhine Bishops just stole the show. The 1969 Missal is an abomination and I've been suffering through it all my life.
VII might have been inspired by the Holy Spirit but it has been hijacked by Satan.
If John Paul II started to take serious action against the Lavender Mafia of Satan he'd be murdered that night. He has realized it all too late.
Bernadin plugged his butt-buddies for the first 10 years of JPIIs pontificate
Padre Pio pray for us, you recognized the stain of the new Mass, help us cleanse ourselves.
"Padre Pio pray for us, you recognized the stain of the new Mass, help us cleanse ourselves."
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That was deep, deep. Not sure why you mixed Padre Pio into this, but it was deep.
The scandals began in the 1950's if you look up the John Jay Report. Blame the rightists or the leftists, blame celibacy or the poetry of Pope John Paul II, or the Latin Mass or English Mass or whatever you like, but Vat. II is no more to blame for the immorality of Catholics than the Council of Carthage.
http://www.usccb.org/nrb/johnjaystudy/index.htm
That's right, Vatican II has simply been used and abused by the Modernists and other heretics who have taken control of so much of the Modern Church.
Women were not relegated to the 'back' of the nave, but to one side or the other.
All in all, it worked very well that way.
The drop in the number of scandals came, not because of anything JPII did, but because the media had begun exposing the huge number of cases in the 80s. It was public exposure that finally compelled corrupt bishops to get their act together and stop covering-up--and this was a full TEN YEARS after JPII began his pontificate. In other words, the scandals were raging all during the pontificate of JPII--and he never once addressed them or sought any kind of reforms--and this at a time when bishops were openly pushing their gay agendas and gay bishops were networking and consolidating their hold on the American hierarchy.
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