Friday, Feb 20th
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Special Interest Glance
In 2001, while he was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church's interests ahead of child safety.
The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated.
Documents reviewed by The Associated Press show that as a Vatican cardinal, the future pope took over the abuse case of the Rev. Michael Teta of Tucson, Ariz., then let it languish at the Vatican for years despite repeated pleas from the bishop for the man to be removed from the priesthood.
A senior Vatican cardinal defended Pope Benedict during an Easter Mass in St. Peter's Square attended by the pope, dismissing criticism of the pontiff's handling of the sexual-abuse crisis as "gossip."
The remarks, delivered by Cardinal Angelo Sodano on the holiest day of the Christian calendar, were a rare departure from protocol and a measure of how the sexual-abuse crisis has affected the highest ranks of Roman Catholicism.
"The people of God are with you, and they won't let themselves be influenced by the gossip of the moment, by the attempts being made to strike the community of the faithful," said Cardinal Sodano in apparent reference to the crisis that has kept the Vatican on the defensive for a month. The cardinal was addressing Benedict XVI before hundreds of faithful who packed the cobblestones of St. Peter's Square on a rainy Sunday.
Father Murphy’s time around Boulder Junction was not so secluded, according to recent interviews with people who live in the area and Roman Catholic Church documents.
Those interviews and documents suggested that Father Murphy, who is accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at the school near Milwaukee, also used his family’s lakefront cottage as a lure in his sexual advances, bringing youths from the school into his home beginning at least in the early 1960s.
What has recently come to light in fresh documents and interviews is that he was in the company of boys not only from the Milwaukee area but in the Northwoods region. Two in the area have accused Father Murphy of abuse, one at the isolated family cottage and the other, as late as 1978, at a youth detention center near Boulder Junction.
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The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has lost all credibility because of the child abuse scandal, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.
In a rare breach of ecumenical protocol, Dr Rowan Williams criticised the Catholic Church over its handling of the paedophile priests crisis and made plain his anger over the Pope’s plans for a new ordinariate to tempt dissatisfied Anglicans over to Rome.
His comments will add to the cloud gathering over the Pope’s four-day visit to Britain in September, when he is expected to give an address in Westminster on moral values in society. More than 10,000 people have signed a “Protest the Pope” petition on Downing Street’s website against the £15 million cost of the visit, which is to be shared by the Government and the Church.
I am a survivor of the Kamloops and Mission Indian residential schools, both run by the Roman Catholic church. I suffered terrible tortures there at the hands especially of Brother Murphy, who killed at least two children. I witnessed him throw a child off a three story balcony to her death. He put me on a rack and broke some of my bones, in the Kamloop school basement, after I tried running away.
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.Page 133 of 173
