Posted on 06/28/2010 12:23:15 AM PDT by Dr. Eckleburg
VATICAN CITY (AP) - The pope on Sunday called the raids carried out by Belgian police investigating priestly sex abuse "deplorable" and asserted the right of the Catholic Church to investigate abuse alongside civil law enforcement authorities.
Pope Benedict XVI issued a message Sunday to the head of the Belgian bishops' conference, Monsignor Andre-Joseph Leonard, expressing his solidarity with all Belgian bishops "in this sad moment."
The June 24 raids targeted the home and office of a retired archbishop and also the graves of two prelates. The Vatican has slowly ratcheted up its criticism of the searches...
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.myway.com ...
Police seized 500 case records not only of priests accused of sexual abuse, but also the records of the "independent" panel supposedly investigating the crimes!
Apparently Belgium hasn't gotten the message that Rome's idea of justice is "yell 'anti-Catholic bigotry' and then keep your mouth shut."
Sorry, Pope.
The RC Church had it’s opportunity to deal with their pervert priest problem... and they failed.
Seperation of Church and State does NOT allow you to cover for your pedophile priests.
Amen. Try as they might.
Belgium will do what Belgium will do. However it seems that Belgium is not honoring the wishes of some abuse victims not to be “outed” as the process apparently will do.
Belgium is taking a risk here too. If nothing substantive is shown (especially with respect the raids of the graves — what the heck are they looking for, DNA? to compare with just what?) they will look like Keystone Kopz. Maybe the Pope should consider that one “I told you so” is worth a million of “we deplore” and let things play out.
It didn't wash then and it won't wash now. If Rome really cared about the victims they would hand over the errant priests and all the evidence rather than protecting sexual deviants and hiding all evidence of their crimes.
Almost one billion dollars was paid out over two days in Los Angeles to victims of priest sex abuse.
God willing, Belgium will follow suit.
Nothing has changed Rome so far. Bankrupting the Vatican could only help (although it would probably take centuries to empty its golden coffers.)
Prosecuting criminals always carries a risk.
Ever sat on a jury?
This just looks weird and overkill. What can they possibly get from a grave?
Well normally it doesn’t give the state a ton of bad PR if the state loses. Unless the state really has done something wacky.
Belgium is 80% Roman Catholic. Not much would surprise me from this country.
Belgium has had a serious pedophile problem in the past, independent of priests and Catholicism. Maybe they’re making up for past sins.
At this point I add the obligatory, “What about school teachers?”
You are absolutely correct. Apparently the scandals involved a number of Belgian government and law enforcement officials. This scandal was huge, and did not involve the Church. The true scope of the problem may never be known, since some of the investigators and witnesses were falsely discredited, and though they have been vindicated, Belgium has a statute of limitations on murder.
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/16/news/16iht-brussels.2.t.html
lolol.
They know no shame.
No surprise these pederasty scandals have found a home there.
Sounds somewhat familiar . . . eh?
Saying Belgium is “80% Roman Catholic” is like saying that Hitler’s Germany was mostly Lutheran. You need to see a bit below the surface to make sense of it. Haven’t surveys of various Christian denominations shown that the rate of clerical molestation is about the same across all?
The largest pedophile scandal in Belgium has NOTHING to do with the Church. Here is a summary:
http://jacquessmythe.tripod.com/
A few snippets:
Since Dutroux’s arrest in August 1996, many Belgians were implicated with him and Nihoul in the organized kidnapping, procurement, torture and murder of children. Prosecutors and judges were suspected of complicity in the dealings of Dutroux and Nihoul. Top politicians and government leaders were exposed as homosexuals and pedophiles. Policemen, including the country’s national police chief, were suspected of complicity and forced to resign. Several cabinet ministers also were forced to resign and eventually the government collapsed. Even the Belgian royal family, and the king in particular, were alleged to have been involved in the perverse murders of children procured by Dutroux and Nihoul.
It is believed that Dutroux and Nihoul were responsible for - or involved in - the disappearances and murders of 100 or more children throughout Europe and related business transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Their clientele pressured the police and prosecutors in Belgium to keep all but a few cases out of court.
Thus, Dutroux, his ex-wife, Nihoul and a French companion were tried only for the kidnapping and torture of six girls and the murder of four of them. (They were tried and convicted also on numerous other related charges.)
The six young girls were probably destined, after Dutroux tired of them, for procurement to Nihoul’s clientele, who would have murdered them in bloody group orgies of sex and torture.
Nihoul’s clientele pressured the police, prosecutors, judges and defense lawyers to whitewash the case - to present Dutroux and his three accomplices as a small gang of pedophiles who acted alone, without business motives or connections.
Indeed, top Belgian officials seem to have been protecting Dutroux and Nihoul all along. Dutroux was caught kidnapping children before - in the 1980s. But for crimes punishable by death in most countries, he spent only three years in jail. Officials responsible for Dutroux’s early release from jail were suspected of having inks to pedophile rings supplied by Dutroux and Nihoul.
This time, Dutroux was sentenced to life in prison. But he could be out on parole in ten years or less. He has yet to appeal. He can also expect help from the police and high government officials in escaping jail and the country.
Dutroux’s ex-wife got 30 years. The French companion got 25 to 30 years.
Nihoul was not tried for his most hideous crime, the procurement of children to pedophiles for torture and murder. The court was not presented evidence that tied Nihoul directly to the particular crimes Dutroux and the two other accomplices were tried for. Thus, one of the monsters of Belgium’s pedophile scandal got off with five to ten years for dealing in fraud and trafficking in drugs and people. Had Leopold, Loeb and Hauptman committed their crimes in Belgium - and procured their victims to prominent Belgian pedophiles - they would have gone free in half a dozen years or less!
The Asian Connection
The trial and the press focused mostly on just six victims of Dutroux and Nihoul - young girls from the south of Belgium.
Who were the other victims of Dutroux and Nihoul and what was their fate?
Following Dutroux’s third and last arrest, in August 1996, starving children were rescued from a dungeon in the basement of his house and dead children were unearthed from the garden.
Shortly afterward, there appeared a report in the Belgian press that the police in Dutroux’s hometown, Charleroi, had confiscated two videocassettes of ritualized tortures and murders of two-dozen young children. The police were to study the videocassettes in an attempt to identify the children and their killers. Whether Dutroux and Nihoul were tied to the cassettes, the murdered children or the killers has not been discussed in the media.
The tortured and butchered children on the videocassettes were Asians and Slavs. The Slavs were thought to have been Poles, sold by mothers who had become prostitutes in Western Europe.
The identities of the brutally murdered Asian children have not been publicly revealed. It was assumed that they were children from China or Southeast Asia, kidnapped off of European streets. Most Asians assumed that the children were Filipinos, sold by mothers who, like the Polish women, had become prostitutes in Western Europe in the mid-l990s.
The sickening crimes of Dutroux are well-documented.
And as you say, they have NOTHING to do with the topic of this thread.
So why do you bring them up?
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