Posted in category "Scandals"
A federal appeals court has permitted a lawsuit over alleged sexual abuse to proceed against the Vatican.
The ruling, issued on November 24, 2008 by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, marks the first time a court at so high a level has recognized that the Vatican could be liable for negligance in the thousands of sex abuse cases in the U.S.
Sex abuse victims and their attorneys have long claimed that the church failed to report priests accused of sexual crimes and misconduct; and instead covered up the deeds to protect them.
Walking a fine line in recognition of Vatican sovereignty, the appeals court found that the Vatican may be responsible for policies or directives as they were carried out in the U.S., and may have affected how abuse complaints were handled.
One of the central pieces of evidence in the case was a 1962 memo, issued by the Vatican and unearthed by reporters in 2003, that directs Catholic bishops to keep silent about claims of sexual abuse. The document was approved by John XXIII.
“What the court has allowed us to do is proceed against the Vatican for the conduct of the U.S. bishops because of the bishops’ failure…to report child abuse,” said William F. McMurry, the attorney for three men who claim they were abused as children by priests in the Louisville, Kentucky archdiocese.
The November 24 ruling will allow the plaintiffs’ case to proceed in the U.S. District Court in Louisville. Among the legal questions to be decided in the case is whether U.S. bishops are employees of the Vatican, and whether they acted on the Holy See’s orders.
The late John Paul II was wounded in a 1982 knife attack. The would-be assassin, a priest, attacked the pope during a visit to Fatima Square in Portugal. The priest was opposed to the reforms adopted by the church after Vatican II.
The pope kept the injury secret. He carried on with the trip without disclosing his wound.
The incident is described in a new film, Testimony, and is based on the 2007 book of the same name by Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, the pope’s long-time secretary and friend. Cardinal Dziwisz accompanied Karol Wojtyla from his time in Poland until his last days in the Vatican. The film is a testimony of John Paul II’s life, presenting many new facts and interpretations. 
The film premiered at the Vatican on October 16, 2008. It is narrated by actor Michael York.
Dziwisz, who is now cardinal of Krakow, Poland, was John Paul’s private secretary and closest aide for nearly 40 years, including all his 27 years as pontiff.
“Today I can say what up to now we have kept secret,” Dziwisz said in the move. “That priest wounded the Holy Father..When we got back to the room there was blood.”
The attack occured on May 12, 1982, when Juan Fernandez Krohn lunged at John Paul with a bayonet during a ceremony in the shrine of Fatima in Portugal. The Pope had gone to the shrine to give thanks for surviving a gunshot wound from Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981.
Krohn was an ultra conservative priest, and former member of the Society of Saint Pius X. He was expelled from that group because he openly proclaimed Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre opposition to Pope John Paul II was too weak. 
Krohn was expelled from Portugal in 1985 after serving half of a six year jail sentence.
In a letter sent to Congressional leaders on September 26, 2008, Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre, NY, chairman of the episcopal conference’s Committee on Domestic Justice and Human Development, urged a consideration of five key principles when considering how to bail out the nation’s failing economy. 
The first key Bishop Murphy encouraged was taking into account the “human and moral dimensions” of the crisis.
“Economic arrangements, structures and remedies should have as a fundamental purpose safeguarding human life and dignity,” he affirmed. Murphy said a “scandalous search for excessive economic rewards,” is an example of “an economic ethic that places economic gain above all other values.”
“This ignores the impact of economic decisions on the lives of real people as well as the ethical dimension of the choices we make and the moral responsibility we have for their effect on people,” Bishop Murphy wrote.
He called for responsibility and accountability.
“Clearly, effective measures are required which address and alter the behaviors, practices and misjudgements that led to this crisis…Those who directly contributed tothis crisis or have profited from it should not be rewarded or escape accountability for the harm they have done,” he said.
“There are human needs which find no place on the market,” Murphy stressed. “It is a strict duty of justice and truth not to allow fundamental human needs to remain unsatisfied.” In this regard, he called for a “renewal of instruments of monitoring and corection within economic institutions and the financial industry as well as effective public regulation and protection to the extent this may be clearly necessary.”
Bishop Murphy’s Diocese of Rockville Centre is based on Long Island. Many of his flock, myself included, work in New York or for people who commute there. Long Islanders have been particularly walloped by the Wall Street meltdown.
It’s stunning just how fast and how deep this collapse is, racing around the world to batter everyone’s economy.
This crisis has created a teachable moment for the bishops – what can happen in an ethics vacuum, and how we are all interconnected.
Any decline in the financial industry has ripple effects across the region, said Jesuit Fr. James Martin, associate editor of America magazine. Before his ordination, Fr. Martin worked in corporate finance with General Electric.
“It’s more a symptom of environments where people seem much more interested in making money than in making sensible decisions,” he said. Senior executives made “obscene amounts of money making bad investments,” he said, and there were no incentives not to continue.
“They were carried away by greed and that trumped rational responsibility. They should have known better.”
Tony Alamo is the leader of the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries in Fouke, Arkansas. The organization’s headquarters were raided by the FBI after a two-year long investigation into child pornography. Although Alamo has denied the allegations, he has been quoted as saying that puberty is the age of consent for girls.
Alamo, an evangelical preacher, built a business empire from street ministry recipients and their children, many of whom were addicted to drugs and had no where else to go.
In a phone call to The Associated Press from a friend’s house in the Los Angeles area, Alamo denied any involvement in pornography or child abuse:
“We don’t go into pornography; nobody in the church is into that,” said Alamo, 73. “Where do these allegations stem from? The anti-Christ government. The Catholics don’t like me because I have cut their congregation in half. They hate true Christianity.”
During an April 2008 radio broadcast, Alamo proclaimed that the government had no right to take 10-year-old wives away from their rightful “husbands”: “What I’m doing is fighting for these people that they, the ungodly beast, is throwing into prison for marrying someone 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11—10, if they’ve reached puberty.”
In recent broadcasts, Alamo waxed poetic about menstruation: “The Bible is filled with stories where God commanded young women to get married. When they start their periods, they are women, according to God’s word. They should be able to be married at 13, 14, 15 years old, and in cases if they’ve menstruated already, 12 years old.”
He also contends that Mary was as young as six at the time she conceived Jesus, and sarcastically asks if God could be considered a pedophile: “You want to take the Almighty God to jail, because He wanted the Son of God to be born of a young virgin? But you, Satan, you wicked people in the Vatican, and all the rest of you want people—men—to be married to old bags! You want [girls] to wait until they’re 18 years old, and them having had sex with possibly up to 100 men!”
While Alamo publicly says he’s not a polygamist, and challenges outsiders to “find marriage licenses about me being married to anybody.” Ex-members say he has unofficially “married” at least eight young girls and many others live in his house.
Tony Alamo was born Bernie LaZar Hoffman in Missouri to Romanian-Jewish parents in 1934. In the early 1960s he moved to Los Angeles, where he met aspiring actress Susan Lipowitz, a Jewish convert to evanglical Christianity. They married in a 1966 Las Vegas ceremony, and legally changed their names to Tony and Susan Alamo. Tony wanted to break into singing and managing bands, and thought an Italian-sounding last name would be more helpful to his career than a Jewish one.
Alamo and his wife were active as street preachers along Hollywood’s Sunset Strip in the ’60s. They also manufactured and sold a line of “Tony Alamo” brand sequined demim jackets, a business that would eventually land Tony in jail for tax evasion. The women and girls the Alamos recruited from their street ministry did the sewing as “volunteers.” 
These days, Alamo doesn’t seem likely to get additional young female friends.
At a recent meeting in New York, the few locals who seemed to be recent recruits were down-and-out men, including a former Nation of Islam member and two immigrant workers speaking Spanish. “You can be saved over the phone if you want,” one woman suggested, giving out the 1-800 prayer line for the ministry, when one newcomer was too shy to go up to the “altar” to be reborn.
“They’re full of conspiracy theories about Waco and Jim Jones and stuff, and they hate, I mean hate, the Catholic Church,” offers one man, a diabetic on an irregular income. “They can be a little pushy about the whole saving-your-soul thing. But they do have a really nice salad bar.” 
Cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, celebrated a Mass to mark the 30th anniversary of the election of John Paul I, “the smiling Pope.” Cardinal Albino Luciani was elected Pope on August 26, 1978. Acclaimed for his refreshing candor, spontaneity and wit, he was described by Cardinal Basil Hume as “God’s candidate.” 
John Paul I was the first Pope to have a composite name, a gesture to honor his two predecessors – John XXIII and Paul VI.
The “smiling Pope” died on September 28, 1978, 33 days after his election to the papacy, allegedly of a heart attack.
Many people, myself included, believe he was murdered for changes he planned to implement in the Vatican.
Most conspiracy theorists believe John Paul I was the victim of a plot involving powerful men linked to the Mafia, the Vatican Bank, and P2, an illegal Masonic Lodge whose membership included senior Italian politicians. One of these men was Bishop Paul Marcinkus, then head of the Vatican Bank.
According to some investigators, John Paul I was murdered not only because he was planning to purge the Vatican Bank, but also because he was planning to demote or dismiss powerful figures in the Curia, the Vatican bureaucracy.
There were several other rumors that may also have contributed to his assassination: the belief he was planning to proceed with the ordination of women; and continue to push the reforms of Vatican II, particularly with the bureaucracy.
The late Cardinal Aloisio Lorscheider of Brazil, a strong supporter of John Paul I, decided to speak out 20 years later. He had to “record with sorrow” that the official version of John Paul I’ death was open to question. The cardinal noted that Cardinal Jean Villot, the then Secretary of State, had refused to allow a post mortem examination. 
“I have to say that a suspicion remains in our hearts,” Cardinal Lorscheider said.
Three well-known books about the death of Pope John Paul I include: In God’s Name by David Yallop; Murder in the Vatican by Lucien Gregoire; and A Thief in the Night: The Mysterious Death of Pope John Paul I by John Cornwell.
Silent screen actor Ramon Novarro (1899-1968) was one of early Hollywood’s leading actors. He got his big break in the 1923 movie Scaramouche, and went on to play the title role in 1925’s Ben Hur and later appear with Greta Gardo in Mata Hari. 
Novarro was gay. Even under pressure from MGM studio head, Louis B. Mayer, Novarro refused to contract a “lavendar marriage”–something most homosexual stars did to keep their contracts and stay out of gossip columns.
He was also a devout Roman Catholic all his life, and at one time considered becoming a priest.
Ramon Novarro was murdered by two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, whom he paid to come to his Laurel Canyon home for sex. Tom was 17 and Paul was 22. Novarro had slept with Paul a number of times before. On this night he brought along his brother to help him rob Novarro. The two young men believed that a large sum of money was hidden in Novarro’s house.
Paul had sex with Novarro, and then the brothers beat and tortured him looking for the money. After they left the house, he suffocated in his own blood.
To avoid Novarro’s slipping into unconsciousness, the brothers dragged him into the bathroom, slapping him awake with cold water. Novarro staggered into the bedroom. Collapsing on his knees, he sobbed: “Hail Mary full of grace.”
Tom’s defense attorney, Richard Walton, placed the blame for the murder on Novarro. “Back in the days of Valentino, this man who set female hearts aflutter, was nothing but a queer. There’s no way of calculating how many felonies this man committed over the years, for all his piety.”
Paul Ferguson blamed his Catholic background: “When he kissed me, I reacted like a Catholic, what they call homosexual panic. Some old guy in the desert says, ‘Kill homosexuals.’ It’s inbred…I was too drunk to be civilized. Whatever my most primitive moral standings were, I reacted. It had nothing to do with Novarro, nothing to do with his being homosexual. It all had to do with how I saw myself. And the fact that my brother was there. And that he could see me in that homosexual act. It all had to do with my Catholic upbringing, with my five thousand years of Moses. And that’s the only reason why this whole thing happened. Because that’s what society teaches you…I think after I hit Mr. Novarro…I turned around and sat down on the sofa. I got up and went to find (Novarro) in the bedroom. ‘This guy’s dead’…We didn’t go there to rob him.”
Novarro was interred in Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles. His killers were released from prison after a few years.
Author John Rechy describes the murder in his blog, Speaking Out. The events he describes are drawn from the book, Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro. 
Is Catholic art getting too excremental?
In recent years we’ve been treated to “Senation,” a Virgin Mary pelted with elephant dung; and ”Piss Christ”- a crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine.
Now it’s “Zuerst dei Fuesse” (Feet First). A green frog is nailed to a cross holding a beer mug in one outstretched hand and an egg in the other. The frog wears a green loincloth and is pinned to the cross in the manner of Jesus Christ. Its green tongue hangs out of its mouth. 
The 4′ wood sculpture was made by the late German artist Martin Kippenberger.
Franz Pahl, an official from the Trentino-Alto Adige region in northern Italy, said the pope had written to him to complain about the frog, which was installed in May at Museion, the modern art museum in Bolzano.
In a letter dated August 7, 2008, Pope Benedict said that the sculpture “injured the religious feeling of many people who see the Cross the symbol of the love of God and of our salvation, which deserves recognition and religious devotion.”
The board of the Museion museum decided by a majority vote that the frog was a work of art and would stay in place for the remainder of the exhibit.
Museum officials said the artist, who died in 1997, considered the sculpture to be a self-portrait illustrating human angst. “Fred the Frog” was Kippenberger’s alter-ego.
An art critic exclaimed: “In this work Kippenberger represents a society that appears perfect but is actually hypocritical…the frog on the cross represents men reduced to animals, that drink to the point of demeaning themselves, that cannot free themselves from the cross of alcohol lived as a plague. And Kippenberger condemns a society that, one the one hand claims to be Christian and on the other, right under and before Christ that it reckons to venerate, can only express its worst side.”
“A crucifixion is always an invitation to reflect on suffering,” said another critic. “In any event of contemporary art you will find more or less strong works on religion. It is part of people’s life, it is normal for it to become an ingredient of art. Society is getting used to being hypersensitive about certain themes but nobody can feel offended by a work of art.”
Well, Pope Benedict, who is German himself, obviously doesn’t agree.
The bishop of Limburg, Germany, Franz Peter Tebartz van Elst, has removed a priest from office for “blessing” the partnership of two gay men. Their marriage took place on Friday, August 15th. 
Fr. Peter Kollas, a dean of priests in the city of Wetzlar, participated in the blessing of the two men during a civil wedding ceremony witnessed by a Protestant minister and 150 guests.
The bishop, appointed to the Diocese of Limburg by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, said Catholics “have a duty to protest the legal recognition of homosexual partnerships.”
In a statement appearing on the diocese’s website, Bishop Tebartz van Elst said he had removed Fr. Kollas as dean of priests to avoid further “damage” to the Church’s reputation.
The bishop met with Fr. Kollas, who said hat he would promise to “omit” such blessings in the future and said that he had never done them before.
A new dean of priests will be chosen who has the “confidence of the bishop.”
The statement from the bishop’s office came after protests over the event, not only from Catholics, but also area Protestants.
Fr. Kollas must have been disciplined within days of the event. The bishop’s reaction was much swifter than what we usually see for other transgressions–like pedophilia accusations or financial improprieties.
Obviously, gay men and lesbians in love are a much greater threat to the church–and merit a much harsher response-than serial child abusers and priests who help themselves to the parish bank accounts.
I am grateful to Fr. Kollas the sacrifice he made to bless a loving relationship.
“As a director, my goal is to be completely open. Just look at how I portray sex in my films. They’re considered shocking and obscene because I like to carefully examine human sexuality. It has to be realistic.”
Paul Verhoeven’s biography of Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait, will be published next month by J. M. Meulenhoff, an Amsterdam publishing house. It will be translated into English in 2009. 
Verhoeven, 69, is best known as the director of a number of blockbuster films, including Basic Instinct, Robo Cop, and Total Recall.
Over the years, Vehoeven, who is Catholic and holds a doctorate in mathematics and physics from the University of Leiden, was a regular attendee of the Jesus Seminar, which was co-founded by the late religious scholar Robert W. Funk. The Jesus Seminar is a group of scholars and authors that seeks to establish historical facts about Jesus, and examines miracles and statements attributed to him.
Verhoeven’s new book makes the suggestion that Jesus may have been the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during a Jewish uprising against Roman rule in 4 B.C. The book also makes the claim that Judas Iscariot was not responsible for Jesus’ betrayal.
William Porter, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, in Ohio, said the Jesus Seminar was known for making provacative claims, but “they are real scholars–you have to deal with them.”
However, he said Verhoeven’s ideas sounded “pretty out there.”
John Dominic Crossan, a Jesus Seminar founder, agreed. He said that while Verhoeven was a member in good standing, there was little evidence for the view Jesus was illegitimate.
Crossan said the claim was first reported in a polemic written in the 2nd century against the Book of Matthew, intended for a Jewish audience.
“It’s an obvious first retort to claims that Mary was a virgin,” Crossan said. “If you wanted to do a hatchet job on Jesus’ reputation, this would be the way.”
On July 27, 2008, a man walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville and opened fire with a 12-gauge shotgun. He killed two people and seriously wounded seven others. Around 200 people were packed in the church for a children’s rehearsal of “Annie.”
The man, David Jim Adkisson, 58, was motivated by a hatred of “the liberal movement,” and he planned to shoot until police shot him, said Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV. 
The police found a four-page letter Adkisson wrote, in which he stated his hatred of “liberals in general, as well as gays.” He targeted the church “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they have ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.”
Adkisson said that “he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement” so he would “target those that had voted them into office.” Police Chief Owen said Adkisson specifically targeted the church for its beliefs and its political advocacy, including gay rights.
Inside his house, officers found Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder by radio talk show host Michael Savage; Let Freedom Ring by political pundit Sean Hannity; and The O’Reilly Factor by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.
All three of these books didn’t prompt a madman to kill people. But in all three of them a madman who hates liberals and gays found words that resonated, sentiments to take comfort in, and nothing to make him think twice before going out to engage in domestic terrorism – violence and murder against fellow Americans holding different political beliefs. The same kind of behavior these three men condemn when perpetrated by Islamic terrorist groups.
I went to see if Bill O’Reilly (Roman Catholic) or Sean Hannity (Roman Catholic) said anything about the incident, had any expression of compassion or grief for the Knoxville victims and their families, or any condemnation of the shootings at all. No quotes turned up on Google or on their websites.
Michael Savage has no search function on his site and no mention of the story either. But his site did feature a link to a Daily Mail story about how an “Islamic ban on ’suggestive’ cucumbers’ cost al-Qaida public support in Iraq.” 
Huh? Well, I guess he has his priorities.
I was disappointed in all three of these entertainers/commentators that they couldn’t spare one word for the dead in Knoxville and the assault on freedom in Tennessee. One man in particular, an usher, shielded others with his body and took the brunt of the first shotgun blast. This is ususally the type of person these talk show hosts love to laud – an American who died for others.
I hope O’Reilly and Hannity have enough left from a Catholic upbringing to be a little shaken up that this nut looked to them for inspiration. They should continue to disagree furiously and passionately with liberals and others they feel are mucking up America, but they need to stop de-humanizing people they don’t like or disagree with. That gives murderers a license to kill.
