Resign? Sorry, Benedict. You cannot resign. You must carry your papacy to full term. #bestpopejoke
— emjb (@emjb) February 11, 2013
The Vatican has hired an American journalist from the Fox News Network and member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei to help improve its relations with the media, a senior Church source said on Saturday.
Burke, 52, a native of St Louis Missouri, has been working for Fox for 10 years. Before that he worked for Time magazine in Rome. He has also written several books, one about an Italian soccer team.
Msgr. William J. Lynn, a former cardinal’s aide, was found guilty Friday of endangering children, becoming the first senior official of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States convicted of covering up sexual abuses by priests under his supervision.
The single guilty verdict was widely seen as a victory for the district attorney’s office, which has been investigating the archdiocese aggressively since 2002, and it was hailed by victim advocates who have argued for years that senior church officials should be held accountable for concealing evidence and transferring predatory priests to unwary parishes.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said it had filed a complaint calling on the court to "take action and prosecute the Pope" for "direct and superior responsibility for the crimes against humanity of rape and other sexual violence committed around the world."In a statement, SNAP said members from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the US had travelled to The Hague to urge prosecutors to investigate the pope.
They also asked for three high-ranking Vatican officials -- Cardinal Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, his predecessor Angelo Sodano and the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, US William Levada -- to be investigated.
Violence flared last night as a demonstration against the Pope's arrival in Madrid turned ugly.
Anti-Pope protesters marched on the Spanish capital's central Sol plaza to voice their concerns about the 50 million euro price tag of the four-day trip.
But what was being billed as a peaceful protest changed when marchers began taunting the thousands of pilgrims who were congregating in the area.
The Irish are broadly lauding this week's thunderbolt from Prime Minister Enda Kenny, who denounced the Vatican's role in the past 17 years of abuse scandals. He accused the Holy See of downplaying "the rape and torture of children" and hiding behind its status as a sovereign state with its own secrecy-obsessed canon laws.
Astonished cabbies pulled off the road to watch the unprecedented speech on their smartphones. Victims of clerical sexual abuse, who have spent two decades trying to be heard and believed, cheered a day they thought would never come.
The latest investigation, into the County Cork diocese of Cloyne, was published last week. It found that officials there were still shielding suspected pedophiles from the law until 2008.
That's 12 years after the Irish church unveiled a new policy requiring the mandatory reporting of all suspected crimes to police. And seven years after Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Vatican's powerful Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ordered bishops worldwide to report all abuse cases to him, too.
However, the Cloyne report highlighted a 1997 letter from the Vatican to Irish bishops warning them that their new crime-reporting policy undermined canon law and had not won the Holy See's approval. For the first time, an Irish fact-finding inquiry found the Vatican culpable in promoting the culture of cover-up.
![[PHILPRIEST1]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NA-BK668_PHILPR_G_20110311195012.jpg)
[...]the Philadelphia Catholic Archdiocese placed on leave 21 priests accused of sexual abuse of minors [...] The leaves followed a grand jury report last month that lambasted the archdiocese for allowing 37 priests to remain around children despite "substantial evidence of abuse." That report and the investigation that led to it were made possible because the diocese had supplied prosecutors with information following an earlier grand jury report in 2005.
The earlier report concluded that dozens of priests had sexually abused children dating back at least a half-century. But prosecutors were powerless to bring criminal charges because statutes of limitations had expired.
While prosecutors can't bring charges against the 37 priests due to statutes of limitation, prosecutors say the cases "show a pattern of the church looking the other way when it came to investigating these charges," said Tasha Jamerson, spokeswoman for the district attorney's office. [...]Critics [...] said church leadership continued to show a lack of understanding about child sexual abuse in the way it handled the suspensions. The archdiocese drew condemnation for, among other moves, declining to release a list of the priests, choosing instead to inform each parish. Local news outlets gathered and published the names this week.
The grand jury found that an archdiocesan board that reviewed allegations often judged as "incredible" or "unsubstantiated" allegations against priests who had been independently accused or flunked a lie detector test.
"These are simply not the actions of an institution that is serious about ending the sexual abuse of its children. There is no other conclusion," the report said. That the church provided the district attorney's office with information "is some sign of progress," although "much has not changed," the grand jury said.
"It's not unlike a chemical company that has toxic spills in 21 places around Philadelphia," and it won't say where they are, said Barbara Blaine, president of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. "The priests only get removed when there's public pressure or publicity to make that happen, and we see that across the U.S. as well," she said.
Crystal Renn, photographed so memorably in her voluptuous curves by Glamour magazine in September 2009, when her spare tyres (shock! horror!) provoked headlines, and who wrote a memoir about her recovery from anorexia [...] is now a U.S. size two [...] These girls have been used as a smokescreen, so that the gay men who run the industry can continue to peddle the idea that women should look like adolescent boys (it was no coincidence that nerdy, weedy boys walked the runway in womenswear this season). This is their dream, not ours.
Why does what goes on in this elite bubble, this hall of mirrors, matter? Because even though Renn enjoyed fame as a plus-size model, the fact she is now a size [two] reveals that, deep down, women want to be tiny, no matter how much we protest. It confirms the fact that once anorexia nervosa or even yoyo dieting has you in its grip, it is hard to ever be free of it.
Renn has explained her weight loss by saying she has ‘got into hiking’, but then anorexics and those with body image issues always say things like that. [...] Sad for all those women out there who are easy prey to these overpaid idiots. Who will go on a diet, and fail, and binge. Who will worry about fitting into that bikini come summer. Who will look at these impossible, clearly harmful images and find they just don’t measure up, and never will.
[...]one of the women in the audience, Nita Dickson [...] is the mother of Sophie, who died in her 40s from anorexia-related illness. I had become friends with Sophie — who in the end weighed 3st — while working with her on a documentary. I remember sitting talking to her, in her South London terrace house, and gasping when two of her teeth clattered to the floor. This is what these beautiful fashion shows don’t show you, the ugly side of being thin.
So. Will haute couture featuring emaciated models garbed in esoteric, absurd and Grand Guignol-flavoured schmattas persevere? Probably just as polo does, as a form of entertainment for the very rich and really vapid.Look's editor Ali Hall: [...] "about five months ago I started using curvy models every week. The response was unbelievable. I've never had anything like it on a magazine. "People were quite emotional about it, saying 'thank you, it's changed the way I dress' and talked about the confidence it gave them.
[...] In Germany, the market-leading women's magazine went further; Brigitte stopped using professional models altogether in January last year, and now uses a diverse range of readers in its fashion pages. Sales have gone up 4%. "It wasn't a strategic decision, it was a natural development," says editor-in-chief Andreas Lebert. With the boom in fashion blogging, and sites where street style is celebrated, it isn't just designers and magazine editors who can create trends. "The traditional image of a model to show women what they should look like has become redundant.
[...]Will any of this really change the way women are portrayed in fashion magazines? Ben Barry, a PhD student at Cambridge University, thinks eventually it will. His research, to be published in a few months, is on whether female consumers are more likely to buy something when an advertisement (and by extension, a glossy magazine fashion spread) features a model who is more reflective of them.
Using mocked-up fashion adverts, Barry surveyed 3,000 women in the UK, US and Canada, "and the vast majority of women significantly increase purchase intentions when they see a model that reflects their age, size and race. If you speak to consumers on the street about my research, nobody is surprised – consumers are light years ahead of the fashion industry in that they want to see diversity.
The Catholic Church has approved an iPhone app that helps guide worshippers through confession. [...]
Described as "the perfect aid for every penitent", it offers users tips and guidelines to help them with the sacrament.
Now senior church officials in both the UK and US have given it their seal of approval, in what is thought to be a first.
The app takes users through the sacrament - in which Catholics admit their wrongdoings - and allows them to keep track of their sins.
It also allows them to examine their conscience based on personalised factors such as age, sex and marital status - but it is not intended to replace traditional confession entirely.
Instead, it encourages users to understand their actions and then visit their priest for absolution.
Following Dejaeger's deportation from Belgium, he will be taken to Nunavut by RCMP officers.A newly disclosed document reveals that Vatican officials told the bishops of Ireland in 1997 that they had serious reservations about the bishops’ policy of mandatory reporting of priests suspected of child abuse to the police or civil authorities. [...]
The letter was written just after a first wave of scandal over sexual abuse by priests in Irish Catholic schools and other facilities [...] By 1996, an advisory committee of Irish bishops had drawn up a new policy that included “mandatory reporting” of suspected abusers to civil authorities. The letter, signed by Archbishop Luciano Storero, then the Vatican’s apostolic nuncio — or chief representative — in Ireland, told the Irish bishops that the Vatican had reservations about mandatory reporting for both “moral and canonical” reasons.
Dejaeger came to Canada from Belgium in 1973. He was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest of the Oblate order and eventually began work as a missionary in the Arctic, where he served in several communities. According to court documents, Dejaeger pleaded guilty in 1990 to nine counts of sex crimes against boys and girls in Baker Lake, a small Inuit community...More here.
Ireland's longstanding abortion legislation could change due to a ruling expected to be handed down by the European Court of Human Rights next week.
When two Irish women and one Lithuanian woman who were forced to travel to Britain for abortions they took the action against the Irish state five years ago.
When Pope Benedict XVI departed from previous Church doctrine two weeks ago by saying condoms are acceptable in certain cases, Catholic-dominated Ireland was so distracted by news it might need an economic bailout that it barely noticed. There was a time, though, when a Vatican softening on the contraception veto would have made the top headline in Irish newspapers. A time when, in Ireland, things like condoms, pills and diaphragms were not just taboo, but outright illegal, according to a 1935 law forbidding the import and sale of contraceptives. In the 1970s, Irish feminists would challenge their government’s anti-birth control policies by staging protests like massive condom-buying expeditions to Northern Ireland, where contraception devices were legal. But this was still an Ireland where taking on the Catholic Church was socially daring and politically suicidal.
But the Ireland of today has the world’s largest percentage of married women under 49 using contraception, according to the United Nation’s 2010 Human Development Index. The UN figure of 89 per cent of women using birth control includes those who resort to so-called natural contraceptive methods, with which the Church has no moral qualms, but Irish studies looking exclusively at artificial contraception show use among 18- to 24-year-old girls is well over 90 per cent. It’s a startling change of social attitudes, some 30 years after the government lifted the birth-control ban in 1979, and one that illustrates how much the Church’s influence has waned in a country that was once a stronghold of Catholicism in Europe.
Among the Irish clergy, there is a sense “the battle has been lost” on birth control, said Garry O’Sullivan, editor of the Irish Catholic newspaper. In a historic upset, contraceptives, it seems, have gone from being social taboos to no longer being a topic for Sunday sermons. “The bishops have stopped pushing the issue,” said O’Sullivan. “People have moved on.”
It would seem the evulness of losing millions of devout parishioners to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and everywhere the Vatican Taliban enjoys enforcing its own brand of religious dogma, is worse than the evil of safe sex.When asked whether the Catholic Church is "fundamentally against the use of condoms", the Pope is said to have replied [...] "It of course does not see it as a real and moral solution. "In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, it can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality," he said.
The Pope gives the example of the use of condoms by prostitutes as "a first step towards moralisation", even though condoms are "not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection".
The Vatican says the seizure by police of €23 million ($30 million) from a Vatican bank account and the investigation of two top bank officials is due to a misunderstanding that should be clarified quickly. [...] Italian financial police seized the money as a precaution Tuesday and Rome prosecutors placed the bank's chairman, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, and his director general, Paolo Cipriani, under investigation for alleged mistakes linked to violations of the norms.Just a misunderstanding. Say, isn't that the same excuse used for decades to justify clergical obstructiveness with regard to preventing the criminal investigation of priests' pedophilia?
[...] the Vatican bank had neglected to communicate to financial authorities where the money had come from. The reports stressed that Gotti Tedeschi wasn't being investigated for laundering money himself but for a series of alleged omissions in the transactions. [...] Gotti Tedeschi has said he was "humiliated and mortified" by the probe but that the transfers in question were for perfectly normal transactions.It's simple. Just tell the secular authorities where the money originated, Gotti. Shouldn't the chairman of a financial institution, likely paid a 7 digit salary + benefits, know about such regulations?
"Naturally, there will protests against the Pope on his State visit to the UK.Nobody's holding their breath SUZIE CAPS-ON, but many are holding their noses shut while Benny Ratzo spews his rank and fermenting doctrine.
Can someone tell me what exactly the purpose of these protests are? What exactly will these protests accomplish?
Do these protesters genuinely expect the Church to change her stance on birth control and homosexuality? In any future century?
Don't hold your breath."
