"Smoking Gun" Letter from '97 Warned Irish Church Not to Report Pedo Priests

Having been raised in a Catholic home, I was always aware of the rumors of priests who engaged in sexual contact with boys. My late uncle the priest even tried it with me when I was 13. It comforts me to know that there's a special place in hell for guys like that and for the members of the Church hierarchy that turn a blind eye to it.

When the first of what would become an avalanche of accusations of child sex abuse against Catholic priests came out in Ireland during the 1990's, I was not surprised at all. I felt relieved and vindicated. Finally there might be some justice. It was always understood within the church that these things were handled internally, which meant that the offenders received "counseling" and were moved to another parish where they were free to begin molesting boys all over again.

The church has always maintained publicly that it had reported any known sex offenders within its ranks to authorities and had always assisted with criminal investigations. Adult survivors of pedophile priests have always maintained that in many cases, the church did know, because numerous complaints had been filed over the years.

The Associated Press reports that it has uncovered a letter from the Vatican that was sent out to Irish church officials in 1997, warning them about the consequences of cooperating with the police.

DUBLIN – A 1997 letter from the Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police — a disclosure that victims' groups described as "the smoking gun" needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests.

The newly revealed letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican's rejection of a 1996 Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests following Ireland's first wave of publicly disclosed lawsuits.

The letter undermines persistent Vatican claims, particularly when seeking to defend itself in U.S. lawsuits, that Rome never instructed local bishops to withhold evidence or suspicion of crimes from police. It instead emphasizes the church's right to handle all child-abuse allegations and determine punishments in house rather than give that power to civil authorities.

Signed by the late Archbishop Luciano Storero, Pope John Paul II's diplomat to Ireland, the letter instructs Irish bishops that their new policy of making the reporting of suspected crimes mandatory "gives rise to serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature."

Storero wrote that canon law, which required abuse allegations and punishments to be handled within the church, "must be meticulously followed." Any bishops who tried to impose punishments outside the confines of canon law would face the "highly embarrassing" position of having their actions overturned on appeal in Rome, he wrote.

Catholic officials in Ireland and the Vatican declined AP requests to comment on the letter, which RTE said it received from an Irish bishop.

Advocacy groups for survivors of child sex abuse at the hands of Catholic priests are calling this document the evidence they've been looking for that proves that the Vatican is directly responsible for covering up the global epidemic of child molestation in its ranks:

Joelle Casteix, a director of U.S. advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, described the letter as "the smoking gun we've been looking for."

Casteix said it was certain to be cited by victims' lawyers seeking to pin responsibility directly on the Vatican rather than local dioceses. She said investigators long have sought such a document showing Vatican pressure on a group of bishops "thwarting any kind of justice for victims."

"We now have evidence that the Vatican deliberately intervened to order bishops not to turn pedophile priests over to law enforcement," she said. "And for civil lawsuits, this letter shows what victims have been saying for dozens and dozens of years: What happened to them involved a concerted cover-up that went all the way to the top."

To this day, the Vatican has not endorsed any of the Irish church's three major policy documents since 1996 on safeguarding children from clerical abuse. Irish taxpayers, rather than the church, have paid most of the euro1.5 billion ($2 billion) to more than 14,000 abuse claimants dating back to the 1940s.

In his 2010 pastoral letter to Ireland's Catholics condemning pedophiles in the ranks, Pope Benedict XVI faulted bishops for failing to follow canon law and offered no explicit endorsement of Irish child-protection efforts by the Irish church or state. Benedict was widely criticized in Ireland for failing to admit any Vatican role in covering up the truth.

For the record, Papa Ratzi has also alternately blamed the church's pedophile problem on the gays and society.

Related articles

• ABUSE ALLEGATIONS / Group calls Vatican letter 'smoking gun' in cover-up (sfgate.com)
• Church document warns against mandatory reporting of child sex abuse (cnn.com)
• Vatican Warned Irish Bishops Not to Report Abuse - NYTimes.com (erotixx.wordpress.com)
• Vatican says its Irish abuse letter misunderstood (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Vatican Letter Orders Pedophile Cover Up (abcnews.go.com)
• Vatican Warned Irish Bishops Not To Report Abuse (huffingtonpost.com)

Pope says Church Considered F#!%ing Kids "Normal" in the 70's

Would you leave your kids alone with this guy?

When my brother and his wife got married in a big-ass Catholic ceremony back in the early 80's, they found a young priest that they thought was hip and cool and had him do the deed. As this cool priest spoke of the level of commitment it takes to get married during the cynical 80's, he told a joke that was popular at the time to help illustrate the point:

"What's the difference between love and herpes? Herpes lasts forever."

You could have heard a pin drop, as every jaw in the church dropped. My beautiful sister-in-law, in her perfect gown, who had spent months planning the perfect wedding, stared in stunned silence as tears welled up in her eyes. The church was flooded with complaints and the offending priest was reassigned to another parish.

I bring this up for a reason. When  it comes to matters of human sexuality, the Catholic Church is still living in the 70's. Not the 1970's, the actual First Century 70's.

The Belfast Telegraph reported on the 21st of December that in his annual Christmas address to cardinals last week, Papa Ratzi tried to excuse the church's ~ and his own ~ lack of action in response to rampant child sex abuse, saying that it was seen as "normal".

“In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” the Pope said.

“It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a ‘better than' and a ‘worse than'. Nothing is good or bad in itself.”

The Pope said abuse revelations in 2010 reached “an unimaginable dimension” which brought “humiliation” on the Church.

Back in ancient Rome and Greece, there was a socially accepted practice called pederasty, where an older married man would take on a teen-aged boy as an apprentice to teach him a trade. The was also a sexual relationship within this context. The practice was viewed with varying degrees of acceptance and disapproval at the time, but was tolerated by those cultures.

The ancient Romans, for all their accomplishments, were a lot like the Borg in the Star Trek universe. They had no cultural creativity of their own and assimilated the cultural practices of the civilizations they conquered. Pederasty was one of the practices they inherited from the Greeks. When Rome became Catholic, the Church continued its assimilationist global expansion.

So when the Pope says that pedophilia and child pornography were becoming more "accepted" by society, he probably believes it. He has spent his entire adult life isolated within a global organization with its own bizarre social mores and customs, that go back for centuries. Having had very little involvement with life in the modern outside world, it may seem to him that fucking a kid was normal, because everybody he knew was doing it.

Adult survivors of sex abuse within the church are furious at the pontiff.

"...Outraged Dublin victim Andrew Madden last night insisted that child abuse was not considered normal in the company he kept.

Mr Madden accused the Pope of not knowing that child pornography was the viewing of images of children being sexually abused, and should be named as such.

He said: “That is not normal. I don't know what company the Pope has been keeping for the past 50 years.”

 There is a special place in Hell for pedophiles and Papa Ratzi has a front row center reservation.

Related articles

• Pope: sex abuse scandal 'humiliating' but society must share the blame (telegraph.co.uk)
• Re: Pope: Secular Society's fault Priests raped children (greensboring.com)
• Pope Says Sex Scandal Has Hit Unimaginable Dimension (nytimes.com)
• Pope's Christmas address to cardinals: child porn and child rape was 'normal' in 1970s (americablog.com)

My Take on the Catholic Church's Pedophile Priest Scandal

The Catholic church once again finds itself embroiled in a major international scandal involving allegations of sexual misconduct with minors. After the wave of accusations and multimillion dollar lawsuits against the church that happened in the 90's nobody is surprised by this latest wave of allegations that have swept across Europe and have once again surfaced here in the US.

What is surprising this time is that the allegations include accusations of a cover up within the church that go all the way to the top. The Pope himself is being accused of failing to take action over a decade ago in several cases involving priests from Arizona to Germany when then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, known as "The Enforcer" was tasked with handling such cases.

As the pontiff prepares to celebrate Easter mass tomorrow at St. Peter's Square, his popularity among Catholics has reached an all-time low, with a favorable rating of just 27%, down from 40% in 2006, according to a CBS News poll.

The pope's personal pastor recently made a statement during a sermon comparing the latest allegations to the Nazi persecution of the Jews during the Holocaust. Having been raised Catholic, I can tell you that this is a classic Catholic response. Any time you get called to account for your misdeeds, turn the tables and play the martyr. It's a routine my mother perfected very early in life. Jewish mothers have nothing on Catholic mothers when it comes to that sort of thing.

Although this story has been unfolding over the last couple of weeks, I haven't written about it before for a couple of reasons. First of all, there are stories to be told that have a more direct impact on the LGBT community and due to the limited amount of time I have during the day to update the blog, I've chosen to focus on those.

Second, but perhaps most importantly, this story hits a little close to home for me. Finding the right words to tell the story of my encounter with my now-deceased pedophile priest uncle when I was 13, has been difficult and has caused some confusion and hard feelings within my own family. What makes this story especially difficult to tell is not because of what happened, but because of what didn't, but could have happened, during the summer of 1973 when I spent two weeks at my grandmother's house in rural Sudbury Massachusetts.

That was the year that my parents had finally decided to file for divorce after 3 or 4 years of half-hearted attempts to work things out. Dad had moved out, tensions were very high at home. I was the fourth of six kids, just starting puberty and was having a really hard time dealing with it all. In other words, I was a perfect target for a pedophile priest.

My parents decided that putting me on a bus by myself to make the six-hour trip from Maryland to Massachusetts to spend some time at my grandmother's house with my uncle, Father Jim, was just the solution to my problem child status. Father Jim told me when I arrived that my parents had asked him explain the birds and the bees to me, despite the fact that I had taken a sex education class at school the year before. (I later confirmed with both my parents that this was true.) Father Jim must have felt like a kid in a candy store. Not only did he have a 13-year old kid to share his bedroom with, he had the blessing of the parents. When he started talking about things like nocturnal emissions, erections, the evils of masturbation and when he would undress in front of me, he could say it was for educational purposes.

My grandmother lived in a old farmhouse that had a tub with no shower, so every morning, I had to take a full bath. The first day, Father Jim came in to "wash my back". That first time, that was all he did or attempted to do. Having been totally creeped out by the experience, the next day I locked the bathroom door. Father Jim informed me that the house rule was that the bathroom door would never be locked, because if my frail grandmother fell in the tub, someone wouldn't be able to get to her. Never mind that my grandmother and I never bathed together, it was a house rule and I was expected to follow it.

After that, I took the quickest bath I could possibly take, so that by the time Father Jim came in to "wash my back", I'd be finished. It was then that things got even creepier. He came in as I was toweling off, so I wrapped the towel around myself. He told me that I shouldn't feel ashamed of my body and to open the towel. He took a good hard look before I covered up and left the room to quickly get dressed.

There's something that non-Catholics don't understand about the relationship that Catholics have with their priests. These guys are in a position of ultimate authority. They have a direct line to the man upstairs, they are entrusted with your deepest, darkest secrets in the confessional and they can grant absolution for any sin you might commit. They are invited into the homes of parishioners for Sunday dinner. They baptize children, and throughout their lives grant them the sacraments of communion, confession, confirmation, marriage and last rites. From cradle to grave, the parish priest is there as a trusted member of the family.

In a traditional Catholic family, the sensitive son who doesn't like girls or sports feels a great deal of pressure to become a priest. Is it any wonder there are so many gays in the priesthood? I felt it that pressure. But the time I spent with my uncle put an end to any thoughts of a career in the church. In fact, that was the year I started pulling away from the church altogether.

There were other instances of Father Jim taking liberties, but I won't go into them. Suffice it to say that the time I spent with him became a game of cat and mouse. While technically, "nothing happened", it wasn't for a lack of trying on his part. Back then there was no conversation about the threat of child sexual abuse. In the decades since, parents and counselors tell kids to pay attention to that inner feeling that tells them something is wrong with the situation they're in, to get away from it and tell an adult. As a 13-year-old, I did just that, except that I didn't tell anyone, I just tried to put it behind me.

It was about ten years before I finally told my mother about what I went through that summer. Her response was one of discomfort and anger at discussing the subject. As a devout Catholic, she had always idolized my uncle. She had stayed in close contact with him even after the divorce. She told me that if I really was so upset about it, I should confront him myself. She showed no sense of outrage toward him or any sense of guilt for having put me in that situation in the first place. It's not that I blame her, but any parent would feel a sense of guilt over their role in handing their kid over to a pedophile. There should have been some sense of a betrayal of trust, but there wasn't. There was only her anger at me for wanting to discuss such a distasteful subject.

As for confronting my uncle, how do you accuse somebody of something that didn't happen? He didn't actually molest me. He wanted to. He tried to, but he didn't, because I didn't let it happen. This is the crux of the matter.

When I told my father several years later about what his brother had tried to do, he was appropriately outraged. The next time he saw Father Jim, he confronted him about it and became violent. My uncle, naturally, denied  everything. When my father told me about the incident, I felt both proud and awful at the same time. My father had not been a part of my life since my parents' divorce, but his reaction was what I had wanted from my mother years before, but had been denied.

On the other hand, there was the fact that no actual sexual contact had taken place. Father Jim could truthfully deny that anything had taken place. I tried to set the record straight with my father a few times over the years, but I found that the more I tried, the more confusing it became. The bottom line for me is that I love my father for standing up for me.

Father Jim died several years ago. I don't know what he may of may not have done to other kids over the years. I only know that he was never publicly accused or prosecuted. And I know that if the god he devoted his life in service to does exist, there is a special place in hell for people like him, where he is suffering eternal torment as we speak.

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