"I'm shocked by these words from a senior dignitary of the Church."

In Rome, the head of Italian gay rights group Gaylib, Enrico Oliari, said it was "worrying that the foreign minister of a state that occupies the heart of the Italian capital would use arguments that are considered passe even in the Third World".

Aurelio Mancuso, former president of a Italian gay rights association Arcigay, said: "The truth is that Bertone is clumsily trying to shift attention to homosexuality and away from the focus on new crimes against children that emerge every day."

The Pope's spokesman has indicated that Benedict may have a discreet private meeting with victims of clerical sexual abuse in Malta during his visit there this coming weekend.

The Pope should not feel he is under the pressure of the glare of the media if such a meeting takes place, Fr Federico Lombardi said, so that he can listen and communicate with them.

In Malta, 10 men have taken three Catholic priests to court for alleged child abuse in their youth and have asked to meet the Pope. There has been a high incidence of reported cases on the small Mediterranean island, whose inhabitants are mainly Catholic, our Rome correspondent notes.

• BEAST FILE

The Vatican's handling of child abuse allegations has been called into question, following a senior cardinal's suggestion of a link between homosexuality and paedophilia.

Gerard O'Connell of the British Catholic newspaper The Universe says the Church's attempts to defend itself often just cause more damage.

Where is the Vatican's media strategy going wrong?

Pope Benedict XVI has been caught in the eye of the cyclone for several weeks, battered by accusations from lawyers and victims in Germany, the USA and elsewhere that he and senior Vatican officials have badly mismanaged or sought to cover up serious cases of abuse, and protected abuser priests.

These accusations - if not fully answered or firmly rebutted in timely fashion - are particularly damaging to the Catholic Church's credibility and image, as well as to the moral authority of the Pope and of the Holy See on the world stage.

But the Vatican has struggled to defend him from the daily drip-drip of damaging revelations, and many questioned its communications strategy.

'Shooting the messenger'

When I asked John L Allen, the American Catholic commentator on the Vatican, why its media strategy was failing, he responded:

"As soon as I see that they have a strategy, I will answer you! The fact is, they don't have one, and that is where they are going wrong."

-----------------

Gus: blame everyone else IS the strategy...

By RACHEL DONADIO

ROME — In his most direct reference to the sexual abuse crisis that has reached the Vatican, Pope Benedict XVI said Thursday that it was necessary for Christians to “repent” in light of “the attacks of the world, which speaks to us of our sins.”

But in an approach typical of the tough-minded yet media-averse theologian, Benedict aimed his message directly at the church, offering his remarks in an off-the-cuff homily at a small, untelevised Mass at the Vatican.

“I have to say that we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word ‘repentance,’ which seems too harsh,” Benedict said at a Mass later broadcast on Vatican Radio.

“Now under the attacks of the world, which speaks to us of our sins, we see that the ability to repent is a grace, and we see how it is necessary to repent, that is, to recognize what is wrong in our life,” he added.

Benedict’s remarks seemed a marked shift in tone from comments by other top church officials, who have played down the scope of the crisis and gone on the offensive against allegations that the Vatican, as well as Benedict himself before he was elected pope, failed to act strongly against pedophile priests.

Meanwhile on Thursday, the Vatican confirmed the authenticity of a 2001 letter written by a top cardinal, Darío Castrillón Hoyos, praising a French bishop who was jailed for three months for not reporting a pedophile priest to civil authorities.

“I rejoice to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and all the other bishops of the world, preferred prison rather than denouncing one of his sons, a priest,” the letter to the bishop, Pierre Pican, read. The letter was first published on the French Catholic Web site Golias.

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Gus: when will the pope stop trying to dunk his flock into some of the mess he created and he should personally apologise for? Why should he ask all catholics to repent for sins they did not commit, when he should be the one to admit he goofed by letting a pedophile priest get away with it? Is he trying to protect his record of infallibility?

from the ABC

A prominent Roman Catholic bishop in Mexico blamed eroticism on television and internet pornography for child abuse by priests, in the latest incendiary comments on sex scandals in the church.

"With so much invasion of eroticism, sometimes it's not easy to stay celibate or to respect children," Bishop Felipe Arizmendi said during an annual meeting of Mexican bishops near Mexico City on Thursday (local time).

"If on television and on the internet and in so many media outlets there is pornography, it is very difficult to stay pure and chaste," said Bishop Arizmendi, an influential bishop from the colonial town of San Cristobal de las Casas in southern Mexico.

---------------------------------

see toon at top...

I am probably posting this before I have all of the facts that I am researching but struth, it is hard to work your way through the clearly false variations of recorded factual events. I aim for those quotes without emotion even if that may blur some otherwise truthful statement.

It is so fascinating and so different to that which I have been programmed to accept since I was a child.

So, I go to the references of Judea; Israel; Judah and anti-Semite claims. 

To the best of my research, Judean refers to a Jewish fraternity and not to a recognized state, past or present?

The consistent mention of Abraham and the Israelites had me confused since there was no Israel in Abraham's time.

They were not Israelites who conquered the Canaanites, but a coalition of Semite desert tribes who even adopted the language of the Canaanites (Hebrew) and their religion as well.  Thus, they became known as the Hebrew/Canaanites who reportedly conciliated with the Elders of Zion (a hill near Jerusalem).

The word Jew, or the Greek version of it - Judas - was originated in the time of the two Kingdoms of Israel (who Jacob was so named for defeating God's Angel) and Judah which was made the home of ten of the 12 tribes.

IMHO it appears to me that from that era onwards, the history of the Jewish people is one of constant rebellions; wars; vicious Zealotry and after the Diaspora, developed massive organizations all over the world for the apparent purpose of being recognized as the chosen race.  Shades of Zion?

That made the "Judeans" a force to be reckoned with in world affairs since they had political and financial "governmental portfolios" that would put the US to shame.  (Perhaps not now since they ARE the power of the US Government).  As far as I can gather, the Zionists began with a good name for having a target of a virtual "utopia" but as time and events have shown, that was spoken of but not worked for.

There are many contestants for the original land now known as Palestine but, none of those are Israel or Judah since they seem to be well down the list.  Certainly they entered the "Levant" area of the Middle East as conquerors of Canaan but the land was hosting several other civilizations like the Phoenicians; Philistines; Hittites et al before that.

As always, it seemed at those times of the Bronze and Iron Ages, that the most dominating original nation was the "Old Egypt" then followed by the "New".

So to me, there is no Great Britain, only a United Kingdom without much dignity.

The "Land of the free and the brave" could not possibly be applied to the multi-cultural, multi-national greed-plagued US of A?

There isn't any Israel or Judea or Judah or Judas, but there are many Jewish people throughout the world and some of those can be called Zionists as a political entity.  But they must now bear the responsibility of following these treacherous warmongers until civilization and basic human nature itself defeats them again.

In conclusion, IMHO the people named in the previous para have no special rights to the land of Palestine, so named by the Greeks. 

And I quote:  As a geographic term, Palestine can refer to 'ancient Palestine,' an area that today includes Israel and the Israeli-occupied [2] Palestinian territories, as well as part of Jordan, and some of both Lebanon and Syria.[1] In classical or contemporary terms, it is also the common name for the area west of the Jordan River. The boundaries of two new states were laid down within the territory of the British Mandate, Palestine and Transjordan.[3][4][5][6] The term Land of Israel is used to refer to the same geographic region, both narrowly or broadly defined, by Israelis, Jews, and Christian Zionists, among others. Other terms for the same area include Canaan, Zion, and the Holy Land.

God Bless us Australian Koories.  NE OUBLIE.

As we witness the most world wide attack on the morals (or absence of) the Roman Catholic Church, it occurs to me that we owe a lot to people like Darwin and Galileo for the courage of their convictions against the almighty power of "the Church".

IMHO the Christian and Jewish versions of the bible are very similar in their stories of the beginning of the universe, the planet and its inhabitants.  However, the Jews claim that all of the original "leading actors" were virtually Israelites with Jewish names and yet, that does not blend with their own timeline of the Exodus etc.  Were all names of that era Jewish or were they Greek, Egyptian et al.

If Christianity was a result of the charisma of an Aramaic Jewish Rabbi then let it be so – for those who judge its healing feeling as a miracle itself.

So I wonder.  As time goes by, the intelligence of the human race and its desire to learn the truth is about to shatter the "depleted Uranium" stack of cards called Catholicism.

This Catholicism, as with Zionism, was originated for worthy reasons and the assistance of those who face the unknown of death of the prospect of a "Utopia" - but - both of them have betrayed the very people they have financially milked and slavishly controlled since their inception.

The only thing that appears to me to be a miracle worth a mention is evolution and to suggest that climate change has nothing to do with that is just plain crazy and medieval.

If only right and wrong could be seen and judged fairly and uniformly by each national government, albeit with their personal cultural rules, then I see no logical or intelligent reason for us to worry about “them hating us for our values”.

Will the Palestinian Semites be a nuclear danger to the world?

God Bless Australia and all who sail in her.  NE OUBLIE.

The bishop of the Belgian city of Bruges, Roger Vangheluwe, has resigned after admitting sexual abuse of a boy earlier in his career.

Bishop Vangheluwe, 73, said the abuse had happened when he was a simple priest and continued when he started as a bishop, a Vatican statement said.

The Vatican said Pope Benedict XVI had accepted the resignation.

The Catholic Church has come under severe pressure over child sexual abuse allegations emerging across the world.

"Before I was a bishop and for a certain time afterwards I sexually abused a young boy close to me," Bishop Vangheluwe said in a letter that was read out at a press conference in Brussels.

The letter said the victim was still mentally "scarred" by the abuse.

'Turning a page'

Belgium's Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard told the press conference in Brussels that the case would be "very saddening to the Belgian Catholic community".

"We are aware of the crisis of confidence that this will engender for a number of people," he said.

----------------------

This "awareness" of a crisis of confidence lacks crawling apologies... see toon at top...

PORTLAND, Ore. — The Boy Scouts of America were ordered to pay $18.5 million Friday in a lawsuit that has focused new attention on the secret files the Scouts keep to document claims of sexual abuse by troop leaders and volunteers.

Known variously as the “perversion files,” the “red flag files” and the “ineligible volunteer files,” the documents have been maintained for more than 70 years at the Scouts’ national office in Texas. Yet even after scores of abuse cases against the Scouts in recent decades, the case here is one of the few times that substantial portions of the files have been made accessible to a jury.

In Multnomah County Circuit Court on Friday, a jury found the Scouts liable for $18.5 million in punitive damages in a case brought by a man who was sexually abused by an assistant troop leader in the early 1980s, when the man was about 12. The verdict was by far the largest ever against the Scouts in a jury trial.

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Gus: this is the problem with a few rotten apples... They bring the whole edifice of moral indoctrination into disrepute... not so much by the perverse actions of a very few, but by the sneaky cover-ups of these by the systems that want to appear as squeaky clean as possible.

By MICHAEL LUO

In January 2006, Cardinal William J. Levada, the highest ranking American official in the Vatican, slipped into a San Francisco office building, sidestepping a gaggle of media lying in wait. On leave from Rome, he was submitting to a day of questioning before a flotilla of plaintiffs’ lawyers.

For eight strenuous hours, the cardinal was pressed to explain why he had decided to return priests who were confirmed sexual abusers back to ministry. He acknowledged that he had failed to notify the authorities of allegations of abuse. He struggled to recall why he had chosen not to share information with parishioners.

The questions related to abuse cases that Cardinal Levada dealt with while he was an American bishop; he oversaw the archdioceses of Portland and San Francisco from 1986 to 2005. But by the time the questions were being asked, the cardinal had assumed an exalted position at the Vatican just vacated by his old friend Pope Benedict XVI, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

A senior Vatican cardinal is under investigation for corruption, dragging the Catholic church into a public works scandal that has sent shockwaves through the Italian government.

Italian media reported today that Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, the archbishop of Naples, was suspected of striking cosy deals while head of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Vatican congregation that uses proceeds from a property empire including 2,000 Rome apartments to fund missionary efforts.

Sepe allegedly oversaw the sale in 2004 of a building in Rome to the then transport minister, Pietro Lunardi, for the suspiciously low price of €4.16m, newspapers reported, adding that magistrates wanted to know why Lunardi then freed up €2.5m in state funding the following year for the congregation to create a museum in its headquarters, and why that museum never opened.

Lunardi, who is also under investigation, said he would contact the magistrates looking into the deal "as soon as possible... to clear everything up".

Sepe gave a fiery homily today in Naples, asking his congregation: "How many martyrs are there, even today, who in the name of the truth... are tortured, humiliated and disrespected?"

Magistrates are reportedly looking into Sepe's links to builder Diego Anemone and former public works official Angelo Balducci, both suspected of being at the centre of a web of alleged kickbacks and corrupt state construction contracting.

The largest ever study on the sexual abuse crisis inside the Catholic Church in the United States has found that neither homosexuality nor celibacy are to blame.

The report, commissioned by America's Catholic bishops, discounts a number of theories that have been previously floated to explain abuse by priests.

It finds gay priests were no more likely to abuse children than heterosexual ones, and that the celibate culture of the priesthood was not to blame either.

The report also says only a small minority of abusive priests met the clinical definition of paedophiles.

Instead, researchers conclude priests were under stress, ill-prepared to deal with the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and '70s, and poorly monitored.

The multi-million-dollar report has been closely watched because of the unprecedented access researchers were given to priests' records, including the results of psycho-sexual testing.

The researchers conclude it is not possible to identify abusive priests in advance.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/19/3220702.htm?section=justin

see toon and story at top...

In a recent interview with the National Catholic Register, Father Benedict Groeschel, of the conservative Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, said that teens act as seducers in some sexual abuse cases involving priests.

It's been close to a decade since an investigation into clergy sex abuse cases by The Boston Globe unearthed a shocking scandal and cover-up that rocked the foundations of the Catholic Church in the U.S. and around the world.

Ten years may have passed, but the wounds have yet to fully heal in America, especially in light of the recent Penn State allegations, as well as the trial of Monsignor William Lynn, former secretary for the clergy in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

In light of this, the recent comments by Groeschel seem both puzzling and jarringly out of step with current sentiments.

In an interview with the National Catholic Register posted this week, Groeschel was asked about his work with the very conservative Friars of the Renewal, a breakaway order he founded 25 years ago. The conversation took an interesting turn, however, when the editor asked about the 78-year-old's work with sexual abuse perpetrators.

"People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath," Groeschel said. "But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer."

Pressed for clarification, the New York State-based religious leader explained that kids looking for father figures might be drawn to priests to fill an emotional hole in their lives.

Furthermore, Groeschel expressed a belief that most of these "relationships" are heterosexual in nature, and that historically sexual relationships between men and boys have not been thought of as crimes.

"If you go back 10 or 15 years ago with different sexual difficulties — except for rape or violence — it was very rarely brought as a civil crime. Nobody thought of it that way... And I’m inclined to think, on [a priest's] first offense, they should not go to jail because their intention was not committing a crime."

The fact that the interview was published, without comment, in the National Catholic Register was significant due to the publication's affiliation with disgraced Legion of Christ religious order.

In 1995 the legion was part of a group of investors who saved the National Catholic Register from closing. (The Legion later sold the paper, which is now owned by the Eternal World Television Network.)The powerful clerical order was also part of one of the most damaging scandals, involving its one-time leader, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the highest-profile Catholic clergyman ever to be accused of sexual abuse, according to Time magazine.

In 2005, the Vatican scrambled to try to minimize the damage done by revelations that the extremely influential Mexican priest had been abusing seminarians for years.

Groeschel is an influential voice in the American Dioceses and continues to maintain a high-profile in the church, writing several books and appearing weekly on a religious television network.

The priest received a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University in 1971 and now lives in Larchment, N.Y., where he assists with Trinity Retreat, a center for prayer and study for the clergy he founded.

Trinity House stirred controversy in 2006 when the press learned that New York priests credibly accused of sexually abusing children, but not legally convicted, had the option of a life-long close supervision program that began with a stay at the retreat. In the wake of community objections, the Archdiocese later removed Trinity House from the list of program's offered facilities, according to the Larchmont Gazette.

Groeschel is also a professor of pastoral psychology at St. Joseph’s Seminary of the Archdiocese of New York.

Clarification: Information has been added to the article to indicate that the Legion of Christ is no longer an owner of the publication.

Update: National Catholic Register has taken down the interview and Groeschel has offered this statement:

I apologize for my comments. I did not intend to blame the victim. A priest (or anyone else) who abuses a minor is always wrong and is always responsible. My mind and my way of expressing myself are not as clear as they used to be. I have spent my life trying to help others the best that I could. I deeply regret any harm I have caused to anyone.

Father Benedict Groeschel - Teens Seduce Priests

A convicted sex offender and former teacher at Knox Grammar says he was expecting to be sacked when he was first caught, but the school instead showed him leniency.

This week, the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse has been hearing evidence of abuse at the exclusive boy's school on Sydney's north shore between 1970 and 2003.

Craig Treloar, a former teacher at the school, was convicted in 2010 of a number of offences, including sexual assault.

He showed pornography including depictions of bestiality to students, as well as engaging in physical abuse.

He told the commission he admitted to the then headmaster, Dr Ian Paterson, in 1987, that he had shown students pornography, but was not fired.

"I thought my career was over... ," he said.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-25/convicted-sex-offender-and-knox-grammar-teacher-expected-to-be-/6261060

Gus: interestingly the motto for the school is : "Virile Agitur" which the school translates as "the Manly thing is Being Done"... Anyone with a bent mind like me could see some strong sexual connotations in it... My learned European lingo would give me a shiver by thinking of "virile agitation" but the google translation is about "virile deals"... Still, no matter how you stir the pot, it would be a good idea for the school to change this motto pronto...