more Info pages...
♦ What Is Sex Abuse
♦ Defamation
Quotes & Statements
"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." John 4:18
Charlotte Wood is an Australian author of five novels including the award winning The Natural Way of Things
But one of the things growing up Catholic taught me is that I can hold two opposing views in my head at once ......
Earlier I mentioned holding two opposing ideas at once.
It’s a necessary capability, in order to accept that the practical Catholicism of my
upbringing formed the sturdy basis of all I’ve learned about justice – protecting the vulnerable,
standing up to oppression, sharing your wealth, telling the truth, owning your mistakes
– while at the same time the same institution was responsible for the most reprehensible cruelty,
violence and abuses, of children and of power. That some Catholic priests were
sexually assaulting children without compunction at the very same time some Catholic nuns
were the only people prepared to touch our first AIDS patients is a contradiction impossible to reconcile.
That the church still employs elaborate financial and legal tactics to avoid compensating abuse victims while principled nuns like
Patricia Fox and Veronica Openibo stand to call out dictators and abusers is a contradiction impossible to reconcile.
These impossibilities, these contradictions, are endless. To a writer, they are interesting.
♦ www.theguardian.com
Why would anyone not settle at arbitration, if they go to court "we will win".
Simon Davies (Jesuit Professional Standards)
"We're determined to bring justice and full redress - healing, if we can - to the victims of this terrible crime."
Archbishop Anthony Fisher about joining the Redress Scheme
Interesting Freudian slip there by the Archbishop, only one crime was there?
Minimize,minimize, minimize...... that's whats really going on in their heads.
‘I remain committed to fair, reasonable and honest dealings with victims of child abuse and to always treating them with respect and dignity,’
Archbishop Denis Hart. 6 March 2018
"We never worked with Pope Francis," Bonnet said in an NCR interview Feb. 19. "We only said hello, two minutes, and good-bye, two minutes."
Catherine Bonnet, former member of Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, not re-appointed.
"1,800 cases still waiting to be processed. " Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith statistic (those poor little cardinals must be so overworked).
“... we were concerned that a settlement for a substantial sum could detract from the effectiveness of the Melbourne Response,”
Mr Leder wrote. Richard Leder of Corrs Chambers Westgarth said the archdiocese had been reluctant to settle with the Fosters because it might encourage other victims to to sue the church.
A bishop in the process of referring for treatment one of his priests who had sexually abused 5 girls 10 and 11 years old noted that the priest had made “mistakes” that were so well known in the area that his usefulness in the service of the diocese was gone. He added, “If he has learned the lesson of discretion he will be a valuable priest for some other bishop.”
Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier, of South Africa describes paedophilia as "illness, not a criminal condition"
"They are people who have failed in life, want to blame someone and get an easy payday"
some archbishop, name forgotten, about people claiming they were sexually abused.
"..that the law shouldn’t apply to confession because people
in confession weren’t really confessing to the priest,
but to God, with the priest acting as a mediator"
Archbishop Coleridge
Like passing notes under the desk in class, "Sir, you can't blame me, I just passed it on, I didn't know what was in it".
‘…The book’s questioning of the authority of the Church is connected to Bishop Robinson’s uncertainty about the knowledge and authority of Christ himself. Catholics believe that the Church, founded by Christ is endowed by him with a teaching office which endures through time.
This is why the Church’s Magisterium teaches the truth authoritatively in the name of Christ. The book casts doubt upon these teachings. This leads in turn to the questioning of Catholic teaching on, among other things, the nature of Tradition, the inspiration of the Holy Scripture, the infallibility of the Councils and the Pope, the authority of the Creeds, the nature of the ministerial priesthood and central elements of the Church’s moral teaching.’
In May 2008, after the publication of his book,'
Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church’ in 2007, the Australian Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued this statement critical of the book and Bishop Robinson.
The Catholic Church has appointed a new Archbishop of Melbourne,
Bishop Peter Comensoli, who has vowed to "right the grievous wrongs of the past" .
He must have a magic wand. what and how are you gonna do Pete?
“I gather you have been ‘telling on me’ to the Archbishop,” he wrote. “How beautifully girlish. ‘Daddy, tell him to stop’. ”
Bishop Coleridge emailed this statement to Muriel Porter, an Anglican scholar who tried to expose the role of power in the clergy in relation to the sex abuse scandal.
(from The Age – September 13 2002)
‘The safeguarding of all people in our care, particularly children and vulnerable adults, is a fundamental concern for the Australian Province of the Society of Jesus. In fact, there is no greater responsibility for those that care for others than keeping them safe’.
Australian Provincial Fr Brian McCoy SJ.
(words are easy, always and forever talking about the now, never about uncovering the past)
"We hear that in Pennsylvania 300 priests took indecent liberties with 1,000 children—most of them boys big enough to have gotten away or given the priests a jolt to the jaw, a right cross that I would beg fathers to teach to their sons in these sick times."
Professor Esolen is a teaching fellow and writer in residence at Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts, in Merrimack, New Hampshire. https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/what-the-priest-scandal-is-and-is-not-about
(blame the victim and even their fathers)
"there were always rumors due to his distinct form of affection that was common among us. It was excessively expressive and that led to rumors by many people looking for a meaning behind it."
Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz of Santiago (2002) , a longtime friend of Archnishop Cox (Chile), now defrocked.
"the narrow obsession of lawyers with crude monetary solutions ”
I am deeply concerned for the future of victims with life-long mental health issues,
which cannot be addressed simply through the once-off award of damages or redress .”
“I am deeply concerned that the Royal Commission largely lost sight of the goal of restorative justice in both its hearings and its report,”
Prof. Greg Craven , Vice Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University,
comments (his take home pay is around $1.3 million ).
“The presentation of the allegations to the promotor of justice normally calms the aggression of the accusers,” the email says. “With respect to F. Karadima I didn’t ask the promotor to interrogate him; I only asked for his opinion.
He considered everything absolutely implausible. Since this was about facts that had prescribed [moved past the statute of limitations], I closed the investigation.
That’s how I chose to protect them, conscious that the way I acted, if the accusers at some point brought the case to the media, it would turn against me.”
The Chile cover up - 2009 email, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz Ossa, retired Archbishop of Santiago , who sits on the council of nine cardinals who advise the pope on Church governance to to the former papal representative in Chile, Archbishop Giuseppe Pinto.
Questioned about how the Church handled the sexual abuse of the two young sisters by their parish priest, then Bishop Fisher referred to
“dwelling crankily, as a few people are doing, on old wounds.”
He is now Archbishop of Sydney (2018).
The insensitivity and cruelty of those remarks, even now, is appalling.
Everyone did it, why are you picking on us?
"What happened in the church in terms of abuse is nothing different from what happens in society in general." .... "society is behaving pretty hypocritically."
Vatican-based Cardinal Walter Brandmüller. 2019-01-05
"It is likely that no other institution has done more than the Catholic Church to combat and prevent sexual abuse,"
The Diocese of Brooklyn, USA, about a Saturday Night Live skit.
"And priests have the privilege of holding the God of creation in their hands. Without priests, there is no Eucharist. Without the Eucharist, there is no Church. And without the Church as a living and organized community, there is no presence of Jesus Christ in the world."
♦ Archbishop Chaput says...
This quote encapsulates the whole problem and explains why they won't surrender power or authority. We are special, without us there is no god, without us there is no salvation, we are above you and cannot be challenged.
pedophilia in the Church is actually an “ideologically coined” slogan and “quite skillfully chosen” by the enemies of the Church, and while the problem exists, the media uses it to destroy the people’s trust in the clergy.
Archbishop Stanisław Gądecki,Poland . April 2019
https://johnmenadue.com
“Sex is their weapon of choice,” Chaput said, “a kind of Swiss Army knife of gender confusion, sexual license, and ferocious moralizing against anything that hints of classic Christian morality, purity, modesty, fertility, and lifelong fidelity based on the sexual complementarity of women and men.”
Archbishop Chaput. USA. April 2019
https://catholicherald.co.uk
"The idea of a better Church, created by ourselves, is in fact a proposal of the devil, with which he wants to lead us away from the living God, through a deceitful logic by which we are too easily duped. … But even today there is the Holy Church, which is indestructible."
Ex-Pope Benedict . April 2019 letter.
https://www.ncronline.org
"This bread crumb is the Life of God that is communicated.
This bread crumb gives those who receive it eternal life,
it opens the gates of Heaven to us, it makes us participate
in the resurrection of Christ,
that resurrection which we celebrate today and which we
will call our own resurrection in the flesh at the return of the Lord,
which we expect at the end of time"
Archbishop of Paris, Michel Aupetit
According to the Associated Press, Rev. Jacek Prusak, S.J., a well-known theologian, psychologist and psychotherapist, described the Church after viewing the Polish film "Tell No One", as "a home for a herd of wolves in clerical collars" which "would face judgment."
“Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch his flesh in the flesh of those who suffer in body or spirit. Touch in order to let ourselves be touched” by God, he told members of the Hospitaller Brothers of St. John of God.
“there can be no authentic compassion for others if there is no loving passion for Jesus.”
Feb. 03, 2019
(What a silly thing to say. Just exclude billions of human beings on the planet from possibly having authentic compassion)
We should 'obey and abandon' ourselves to the will of God, even in moments of difficulty and trial.
"If we pray it is because we believe that God can and wants to transform reality by overcoming evil with good,"
To pray is to believe in God's power to replace the evil in the world with goodness,
March 20, 2019. catholicherald.co.uk
Yes god will fix it all, he doesn't have to do anything except pray.
February 20, 2019
“we commit ourselves to help eliminate abuses inside and outside the Church, seeking to ensure that victims are heard and properly helped, that justice is done, and that harm is healed.”
Arturo Sosa, S.J., the superior general of the Society of Jesus
♦ www.americamagazine.org
“if there had been more lay people involved in decision making roles in times past,
we wouldn’t have the catastrophe on our hands that we now have.”
Archbishop Mark Coleridge - June 20, 2018
♦ cruxnow.com
This is quite an extraordinary statement.
He is admitting that they can't be trusted to govern themselves, do the right thing and if they are left alone they will do the wrong thing.
We will always protect the church first and foremost unless the laity police force us to behave truthfully.
March 25, 2019
Still waiting on an inquiry result into Coleridge's covering up of sex abuse.
Seems like he knows he can't trust himself.
August 23, 2021
If we believe, then we believe in the Lord’s permissive will as well as His active:
evil is permitted on the grounds that it will give rise to greater good.
This belief, though one of the most difficult in all theology, is also a comforting one as we take stock of crises, Traditionis Custodes being the latest in a long series.
♦ www.crisismagazine.com
"there can be no sexual pleasure without sin" Pope Gregory the Great.
"Every misplaced ejaculation that cannot lead to procreation is considered unnatural, thus onanism (masturbation) is a vice that according to Thomas Aquinas is worse than intercourse with one's own mother."
Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven. Uta Ranke-Heinemann. Penguin books 1990.
"the women should be kept silent in the churches" 1 Corinthians 14:34
"Nothing drags the mind of a man down from its elevation so much as the caress of a woman and the bodily contacts without which a man cannot possess his wife"
St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae) quoting St. Augustine
"We should not dispute stubbornly with anyone. Rather we should patiently give our reasons with the purpose of declaring the truth lest our neighbour remain in error, and not that we should have the upper hand."
St. Ignatius de Loyola, when writing to the Jesuit community at Alcalá, in Spain