Pope Connected to Sex Abuse Scandal

  • Thread starter russ_watters
  • Start date
In summary: I'm going with it) actually has some pretty damning evidence against the Pope, specifically saying that he was "complicit" in the coverup.
  • #36
TheStatutoryApe said:
This does not necessarily equate to legal culpability.
For an actual ship's captain it would, but as an analogy, I'm honestly not sure if it does or not. Certainly, in very few corporate boardrooms would this be accepted. Depending on how you see the structure, the Pope is now the CEO who did something bad when he was a junior and senior VP and IMO he should be fired for it. Not just as a punishment, but for the good of the company. The company's image takes a big hit over this, especially since they are in the business of selling morality.

But that's just for the lawsuit over the abuse itself. The coverup is a separate issue and the "legal culpability" of conspiracy and obstruction of justice most certainly do apply.
I'm also not certain about the legal perspective on the church hierarchy. He is not exactly the owner of the "ship" and the cardinals below him are not quit his "employees" either.
The fact that it is considered to be a government is a [the] complication, but if the world headquarters is both collecting money from and giving orders to the branch offices, they most certainly are acting like a company.

What would we do if Germany set up a bunch of bratwurst stands, owned by the German government itself, and they were breaking the law, selling contaminated food?. How would we deal with the fact that the business itself is owned by a foreign government?
 
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  • #37
TheStatutoryApe said:
This does not necessarily equate to legal culpability. I'm also not certain about the legal perspective on the church hierarchy. He is not exactly the owner of the "ship" and the cardinals below him are not quit his "employees" either.

I think the Vatican's position on this is that the pope is the head of state (Vatican City) and thus has immunity.

I'll look for a link...

Edit: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36131434/ns/world_news-europe/"

Pope Benedict, accused by victims' lawyers of being ultimately responsible for a cover-up of sexual abuse of children by priests, cannot be called to testify at any trial because he has immunity as a head of state, a top Vatican legal official said on Thursday.

Wow, that's a horrible move in the court of public opinion.
 
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  • #38
russ_watters said:
The coverup is a separate issue and the "legal culpability" of conspiracy and obstruction of justice most certainly do apply.
But, legally, they would still have to show that he had knowledge. Simply being in charge is not enough in a court of law. Otherwise they would have to show that he was ultimately responsible for their behavior like a "captain" is responsible for his "shipmen". Since their actions were done as part of their job (as opposed to supplemental to it) that could be enough, but I am still not sure how the law will view the hierarchal relationship, and establishing that would seem to be key.

Russ said:
The fact that it is considered to be a government is a [the] complication, but if the world headquarters is both collecting money from and giving orders to the branch offices, they most certainly are acting like a company.

What would we do if Germany set up a bunch of bratwurst stands, owned by the German government itself, and they were breaking the law, selling contaminated food?. How would we deal with the fact that the business itself is owned by a foreign government?
Well of course anyone here that is culpable would be held liable. If a cover up of the contamination was being perpetrated by the German government then they could possibly be tried in absentia in they refused to show up for the proceedings and a judgment handed down. If Germany refused to abide it then I think that the WTO would need to be contacted for any attempt at enforcement. Normally contacting the German authorities would be first I think.

Obviously a church is a bit different. I was surprised to find that churches are considered corporations when looking up information regarding that recent USSC judgment we were discussing. Being a government complicates things a bit further. In your scenario if Germany were to refuse to honour a court decision then the US would likely shut down all of its bratwurst stands and not allow it to do business here possibly confiscating property in the US to pay off the judgment.
Churches would be a bit more difficult though. Since they are religious it could be construed as impeding religious freedom. We could do like China and simply ban Vatican sanctioned churches but there are similar problems there. And I think that the UN would be the only organization where recourse could be taken. I'm assuming that Obama hasn't attempted to sign on to the international courts treaty.
 
  • #39
lisab said:
I think the Vatican's position on this is that the pope is the head of state (Vatican City) and thus has immunity.

I'll look for a link...

Edit: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36131434/ns/world_news-europe/"



Wow, that's a horrible move in the court of public opinion.

But the Vatican itself can still be held accountable. It depends on the way the relationship between individuals in the Vatican and the Vatican itself is viewed. If this was the work of "a few misguided [priests/cardinals]" then the Vatican can be held apart. If higher officials had knowledge and it even seems that there is an official procedure then the Vatican takes the hit too.
 
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  • #41
TheStatutoryApe said:
But, legally, they would still have to show that he had knowledge. Simply being in charge is not enough in a court of law.
Though still technically circumstantial, I think the evidence is strong enough to make that case. The current argument that he wasn't reading his own mail strains credulity enough, but this is also a man with a reputation for being hands-on. Then later, he wrote a memo interpreted by Preists as saying they should cover things up (that the Vatican is saying was misinterpreted). I don't think that there can be a "reasonable doubt" that he wasn't involved-in/directing the coverup.

It would depend on how sympathetic the jury was, I would think.
Well of course anyone here that is culpable would be held liable.
Yes, that's the easy part.
If a cover up of the contamination was being perpetrated by the German government then they could possibly be tried in absentia in they refused to show up for the proceedings and a judgment handed down. If Germany refused to abide it then I think that the WTO would need to be contacted for any attempt at enforcement. Normally contacting the German authorities would be first I think.
Perhaps... but I'm not sure such a framework could be made to apply here, even if logically it should.
Obviously a church is a bit different. I was surprised to find that churches are considered corporations when looking up information regarding that recent USSC judgment we were discussing.
I'm surprised that you were surprised. A "corporation" is pretty much the only legal framework for dealing with the legal/financial issues unified group of people. Churches choose to be corporations because it is better for them to be a corporation than not to be. It is very difficult to buy a building and pay a minister (and even an electric bill!) and protect your own possessions from liability if someone twists an ankle on your church steps if you aren't.
Being a government complicates things a bit further. In your scenario if Germany were to refuse to honour a court decision then the US would likely shut down all of its bratwurst stands and not allow it to do business here possibly confiscating property in the US to pay off the judgment.
Agreed. And I think the same should apply to this case too. Our legal system and federal government itself needs to step up to the plate and do the necessary arm-twisting here.
Churches would be a bit more difficult though. Since they are religious it could be construed as impeding religious freedom. We could do like China and simply ban Vatican sanctioned churches but there are similar problems there.
I really don't think that's an issue. That part of the 1st Amendment has been washed through the courts so many times that it is thoroughly hashed-out by now. Though anything can happen in a lower court, there is rarely any question on how the USSC will decide on a religious freedom case these days. From evolution to school prayer to Nativity scenes to the 10 Commandments in a courtroom: their decisions are never a surprise.
 
  • #42
MotoH said:
Those who have committed these horrible acts need to be prosecuted under due process of law. Trying to take down the whole Vatican is asinine.

True. But, covering it up, to me, is one of "these horrible acts".
 
  • #43
Pope Benedict XVI will know what to do. It takes time and prayer, but a solution will appear within the coming weeks.




On a side note, the Catholic Church, and Christianity in general get attacked wholesale during Holy week every year.
 
  • #44
NeoDevin said:
True. But, covering it up, to me, is one of "these horrible acts".
Agreed. And to me the statements by the Vatican even today are part of that coverup. I'm not a Catholic so I don't care much what this does to their credibility, but I do care when an organization conspires to cover up crimes and continues a posture that will enable that to continue. The catholic church specifically (because of its history, both ancient and recent), but churches in general have the feel of organized crime to me.
 
  • #45
Setting the record straight in the case of abusive Milwaukee priest Father Lawrence Murphy
By Fr. THOMAS BRUNDAGE, JCL
To provide context to this article, I was the Judicial Vicar for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee from 1995-2003. During those years, I presided over four canonical criminal cases, one of which involved Father Lawrence Murphy. Two of the four men died during the process. God alone will judge these men.

To put some parameters on the following remarks, I am writing this article with the express knowledge and consent of Archbishop Roger Schwietz, OMI, of the Archdiocese of Anchorage, where I currently serve. Archbishop Schwietz is also the publisher of the Catholic Anchor newspaper.

I will limit my comments, because of judicial oaths I have taken as a canon lawyer and as an ecclesiastical judge. However, since my name and comments in the matter of the Father Murphy case have been liberally and often inaccurately quoted in the New York Times and in more than 100 other newspapers and on-line periodicals, I feel a freedom to tell part of the story of Father Murphy’s trial from ground zero.

As I have found that the reporting on this issue has been inaccurate and poor in terms of the facts, I am also writing from a sense of duty to the truth.

The fact that I presided over this trial and have never once been contacted by any news organization for comment speaks for itself.

My intent in writing this column is to accomplish the following:

To tell the back-story of what actually happened in the Father Murphy case on the local level;

To outline the sloppy and inaccurate reporting on the Father Murphy case by the New York Times and other media outlets;

To assert that Pope Benedict XVI has done more than any other pope or bishop in history to rid the Catholic Church of the scourge of child sexual abuse and provide for those who have been injured; http://catholicanchor.org/wordpress/?p=601"

Read the whole thing. I am going to say that he knows a lot more about the case than we do.
 
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  • #46
MotoH said:
Pope Benedict XVI will know what to do. It takes time and prayer, but a solution will appear within the coming weeks.

I take it you're Catholic? Most of the rest of the world would say it takes integrity and responsibility.

MotoH said:
On a side note, the Catholic Church, and Christianity in general get attacked wholesale during Holy week every year.

Yep, you guys sure are persecuted... :rolleyes:
 
  • #47
I just hope that "immunity" does not equate to "facts remaining secret"
 
  • #48
pallidin said:
I just hope that "immunity" does not equate to "facts remaining secret"

Not necessarily. Any documents held on foreign (to the Vatican) soil, can be subpoenaed in the usual manner. All immunity means is that he can't actually be punished for (most) crimes. Courts have no legal recourse to get at documents held in the Vatican though.
 
  • #49
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/Criminales.pdf"

Read the first paragraph (it is a PDF). The media has taken this paragraph, and twisted it into some sort of cover-up.
 
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  • #50
MotoH said:
Setting the record straight in the case of abusive Milwaukee priest Father Lawrence Murphy
By Fr. THOMAS BRUNDAGE, JCL

Read the whole thing. I am going to say that he knows a lot more about the case than we do.
I agree that he knows more, but he doesn't tell us everything and some of what he tells us doesn't pass the smell test.

-First, the handwritten letter he refers to: he's basically saying its a forgery. That's a big claim and now we're in a he-said-he said situation because of it. However...
-There was more than one letter, and official ones were just typed and signed. He doesn't address these and the claim that the Pope didn't know about these letters when he was CC'd on them strains credulity.
-On the ordering of the cessation of the trial. Lucky for the Church, the defendant died within days of the order (it literally may have been in the mail at that time) and they didn't need to fight that fight. However, raising this point distracts from the previous point he didn't mention:
-There was more than one letter and some got no response. It was Ratzinger's office's job to deal with issues like that and they were - for a while - silent. Why were they failing to do their job? Why didn't they encourage them to do the right thing and affirm that the trial was the proper course of action?

Remember, MotoH, he knows more about this than any of us because he was part of the conspiracy. Current evidence points to him being an unwilling part of it, but he was a part of it nonetheless. His knowledge goes against his credibility as much as it helps his credibility.
 
  • #51
MotoH said:
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/Criminales.pdf"

Read the first paragraph (it is a PDF). The media has taken this paragraph, and twisted it into some sort of cover-up.

We should absolutely take the word of the Catholics with regard to an (alleged) Catholic cover-up, rather than have secular authorities investigate.

Edit: Just to clarify, this was actually in response to this:
MotoH said:
Setting the record straight in the case of abusive Milwaukee priest Father Lawrence Murphy
By Fr. THOMAS BRUNDAGE, JCLRead the whole thing. I am going to say that he knows a lot more about the case than we do.

I quoted the wrong post.
 
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  • #52
please see:
Additionally, in the documentation in a letter from Archbishop Weakland to then-secretary of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone on August 19, 1998, Archbishop Weakland stated that he had instructed me to abate the proceedings against Father Murphy. Father Murphy, however, died two days later and the fact is that on the day that Father Murphy died, he was still the defendant in a church criminal trial. No one seems to be aware of this. Had I been asked to abate this trial, I most certainly would have insisted that an appeal be made to the supreme court of the church, or Pope John Paul II if necessary. That process would have taken months if not longer.
 
  • #53
NeoDevin said:
We should absolutely take the word of the Catholics with regard to an (alleged) Catholic cover-up, rather than have secular authorities investigate.

Because Fox News and CNN are excellent at reporting unbiased news.
 
  • #54
MotoH said:
http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/Criminales.pdf"

Read the first paragraph (it is a PDF). The media has taken this paragraph, and twisted it into some sort of cover-up.
That paragraph has nothing to do with a coverup nor what the media is saying is a coverup. That paragraph is about the crime itself: using confession as a pretext for manipulating the victims.

Did you mean to link a different document? There is a document that the media is reporting that church officials claim was intended to order a coverup.
 
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  • #55
MotoH said:
Because Fox News and CNN are excellent at reporting unbiased news.

I don't recall suggesting that Fox News or CNN should be the ones conducting the investigation.
 
  • #56
MotoH said:
Because Fox News and CNN are excellent at reporting unbiased news.
Huh? Could you elaborate: you're talking about the media but what you quoted was about church officials. Are you saying church officials are being wholesale-ly misquoted?
 
  • #57
russ_watters said:
That paragraph has nothing to do with a coverup nor what the media is saying is a coverup. That paragraph is about the crime itself: using confession as a pretext for manipulating the victims.

Did you mean to link a different document? There is a document that the media is reporting that church officials claim was intended to order a coverup.

This is the one. It was on the televised news today or yesterday that this was supposed to be some sort of "what happens in the confessional, stays in the confessional" type of thing. I did not catch the whole report though, so I could be mistaken. I just got that article off of another forum which said that was the one being twisted.
 
  • #58
russ_watters said:
Huh? Could you elaborate: you're talking about the media but what you quoted was about church officials. Are you saying church officials are being wholesale-ly misquoted?

NeoDevin said:
I don't recall suggesting that Fox News or CNN should be the ones conducting the investigation.
A problem on my end. Sorry about that! Didn't see the last part of your sentence.
 
  • #59
MotoH said:
This is the one. It was on the televised news today or yesterday that this was supposed to be some sort of "what happens in the confessional, stays in the confessional" type of thing. I did not catch the whole report though, so I could be mistaken. I just got that article off of another forum which said that was the one being twisted.
I'm pretty sure you are mistaken/confused. That directive was written in 1962. Yes, it was part of what directed the cover-up, but it isn't discussed in the paragraph you referred us to [see below]. In addition Ratsinger wrote a similar directive in 1996. Both of these were interpreted by church officials, not by the media, to be instructions to cover these cases up.

-Page 2, boxed in blue, is where it says offenders can be transferred to other dioces rather than removed from the church.
-Page 9, boxed in blue, says if allegations "totally lacks foundation", documentation of them should be destroyed.
-Page 11, boxed in blue, talks about the secrecy of the trials.
-Page 15, boxed in blue, talks about communications secrecy and it being a serious sin to break that (as in: don't leak this to the press).
-Page 17 is a copy of the oath Priests take, which includes an oath of secrecy. It even says in clear language that secrecy trumps righteousness.

Though this is all interesting, it is a bit unnecessary. The church is arguing against a reality here: Secrecy existed. These cases were covered-up. Obviously, that's why we're hearing about them now and not 20 years ago. The only difference this makes is in whether the covering-up was an official policy or was just ordered for a few specific cases while existing mostly as a cultural component of the church. To me, that's a relatively minor difference.

The Vatican is trying to protect itself by blaming the local parishes/dioces for not dealing with the issue in order to show that the problem wasn't directed from the top down or systemic. The problem is, it existed in multiple countries. It was systemic. And the Vatican has known about it for some 50 years and is only just now starting to properly deal with it. That makes it a top-down, systemic problem.

The culture of secrecy really bothers me because it means there may be other crimes we don't know about. I'm particularly thinking about money. I consider tithing extortion anyway, but do priests ever get tempted by the money flowing through their parishes? Would we ever find out if a priest was skimming money and stashing it in a swiss bank account?
 
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  • #60
russ_watters said:
...but do priests ever get tempted by the money flowing through their parishes? Would we ever find out if a priest was skimming money and stashing it in a swiss bank account?

Yeah, Russ, and some are televangelists racking in millions.
This whole darn thing is a mess. Sexual abuse, legally protected financial non-accountability/disclosure.
It's a real mess.

Perhaps the issue with the Vatican can start some type of reform on these types of abuses with respect to all legally recognized "religions"
 
  • #61
pallidin said:
Perhaps the issue with the Vatican can start some type of reform on these types of abuses with respect to all legally recognized "religions"
I was thinking that more regulation/oversight based on the fact that they are businesses would solve much of the problem.
 
  • #62
russ_watters said:
... Then again, perhaps they are relaxing their selection criteria in response to a dearth of candidates? Are you really being serious here, Ivan? You really don't expect more from a priest than you do a teacher, PE coach - even a soldier or cop? REALLY? That strains credulity.

Seriously, Ivan - that's rediculous. Being an examplary example of morality is perhaps the single most important trait of a good priest. By the very nature of the job, I - you - we - should expect priests to be vastly better than average morally.
We want, or hope, anyone in a leadership position to be better than average morally. That's obviously why news of pedophilia in the priest hood is so particularly horrific and news provoking. People being people however, I don't expect that to necessarily be the case. Also I haven't see any good comparisons of like to like in this thread showing that priests really are less so. Regarding sex crimes, comparisons to the public at large including many or most that have no access to children or authority positions does not prove much. Compare instead to the rate of those charged with overseeing children not their own and then we'd have something meaningful.

Regarding the OP point on the Pope himself, I'm inclined to consider most of the pop media stories from outlets such as CNN on this inflammatory subject as crap, absent some personal review of first-hand reports.

Bias, or sloppiness, example:
On Tuesday 3/30, http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache...holicism+in+Turmoil&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" title up on its website:
“Pope Describes Touching Boys: I Went Too Far.”
MSNBC retracted it an apologized the same day.
 
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  • #64
I think
1) all people who committed crime should be treated normally
2) people who covered up the crime should be punished by law
3) church shouldn't give as much focus as it gets
4) people in funny costumes shouldn't make headlines :biggrin:
5) it should be illegal to promote abnormal practices done by many religious organizations if those seem harmful
6) church should have weaker authority in politics/media
7) providing legal statuses to the religion or alike is nonsense and should be stopped
 
  • #65
That the Catholic Church is hesitant on fully disclosing internal acts of severe moral transgression is unacceptable.
 
  • #66
pallidin said:
That the Catholic Church is hesitant on fully disclosing internal acts of severe moral transgression is unacceptable.

They would open up as soon states/media stop giving them special status and when they would have to deal only with the legal authorities.
 

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