Finally! Disgraced U.S. cardinal leaves Rome job Cardinal Bernard Law, who was forced to resign as archbishop of Boston in 2002 over a sex-abuse scandal, has left his prestigious post in the Italian Church after turning 80, the Vatican announced…
Tag Archive for Catholic sex abuse cases
(Columbian) Church ordered to pay $238,000 to child abuse victims A Colombian court orders the Catholic Church to pay $238,000 as compensation to the families of two victims of a pedophile priest, newspaper El Tiempo reported Tuesday. According to El…
The Austrian “Call to Disobedience”: Resistance to the “Banality of Evil” in the Catholic Church.
A few weeks ago, the news in the UK was dominated for a while by the extraordinary, and rapid decline in the might of Rupert Murdoch’s British newspaper empire. This has reached a climax of sorts with dramatic, full page…
Vatican editor says media coverage of abuse promoted purification. Media coverage of the clerical sex abuse scandal helped Catholics come to terms with the need to purify and renew the church, although the coverage was not always fair, said the…
Breaking the silence
I ended my last post by asking: will our silence [forced as it so often is] be judged as complicity in the Church’s deceptive ways? It’s a question that has been troubling me for quite some time now, not only…
Scottish Church & Accountability
One of the few positive outcomes of the outcry over sexual abuse has been an increased willingness by those who hold power in the church, to recognise the importance of honesty about the record, and of co-operation with civil authority.…
Ireland, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Italy, Denmark – SPAIN
What more is there to say? First, of course, is to welcome the fact that the cases are being investigated at all, and that the numbers are low. But here, as elsewhere, there is evidence that some clergy at least…
Hand Wringing & Blame
The pastoral latter is carefully constructed to address several groups of people affected by clerical sexual abuse, or implicated in it as perpetrators, or as complicit in their protection. Benedict speaks directly to the survivors and heir families, and to…
Faithful Obedience, or Collaboration in Heresy?
At Enlightened Catholicism, Colleen has posted a powerful piece from Australia, after Pope Benedict’s visit there and expressions of regret and sorrow over Australian clerical abuse. The author, Tom Doyle, writes of his experiences and reflections on the church, after…
Catholic Church’s Abusive Relationship with Irish Society.
“The Roman Catholic Church’s great achievement in Ireland has been to so disable our capacity to think about right and wrong that parents of abused children apologised for the abusing priest.” -The Irish Times, Sat 28th November 2009 The parents…
