Catholic church claims 'seismic shift' after child sexual abuse scandals

The Catholic church says it has made a seismic shift in holding its leaders accountable for protecting Australian children after decades of abuse by hundreds of pedophiles.

The church says its new national professional standards body will ensure consistency across its autonomous dioceses and orders.

Each bishop and religious leader will sign a contract agreeing to abide by the standards and be monitored, audited and subject to public reporting, the church’s Truth Justice and Healing Council chief executive, Francis Sullivan, said.
“It is quite a seismic shift for the Catholic church in holdings leaders to account,” Sullivan said. “It is necessary in order to achieve consistency for survivors.

4,444 victims: extent of abuse in Catholic church in Australia revealed

Seven per cent of Australia’s Catholic priests were accused of abusing children in the six decades since 1950, according to new data from the royal commission.

On Monday the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse released damning statistics on the scale of the crisis within the Catholic Church. The numbers confirm the extent of sexual predation already suggested by four years of royal commission hearings involving the church, which are now entering their final weeks.

Catholic Church Claims It Can Refuse To Pay Victims Of Sex Abuse Because Of Religious Freedom

The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee sought to insulate $55 million of its funds from lawsuits brought by victims of priestly sex abuse, according to a letter penned by then-Archbishop of Milwaukee Timothy Dolan, so it transferred those funds into a separate trust set up to care for the archdiocese’s cemeteries and mausoleums. Once the sexual abuse victims sought those funds in a bankruptcy proceeding, however, the archdiocese claimed that it had a religious liberty right not to use that money to compensate victims of abuse.

Pink Smoke at the Vatican: Women Demand a Voice in Catholic Church Led by "Old Celibate Men"

While the world focused on the selection of Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio to become pope, a protest took place outside the Vatican that received far less attention. The masses gathered outside the Sistine Chapel were waiting for white smoke, the signal that a new pope had been chosen. But smoke of a different color began billowing into the sky over the Vatican. It was released by protesters demanding a greater role for women in the Catholic Church. We speak with Erin Saiz Hanna, executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, and Janice Sevre-Duszynska, an excommunicated female priest.

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Pope Francis Against Gay Marriage, Gay Adoption

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a 76-year-old Argentinean, was chosen as the first Latin American pope on Wednesday. He will lead the world's 1.2 billion Catholics as Pope Francis. While his selection may be historic, it may also mean more of the same when it comes to gay rights in the Catholic Church.

Pope Francis is a conservative who is anti-gay marriage and anti-gay adoption. He has described same-sex marriage as the work of the devil and a “destructive attack on God’s plan.” He has also said that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children.

A New Pope—African, Latin American, Woman, Nice Guy—Will Change Nothing

Editor's Note: The papal conclave has announced that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, will be Pope Benedict's successor. He will be known as Pope Francis I. Shortly after the announcement of Pope Benedict's resignation, Frances Kissling wrote the piece below, in which she argued that a merely electing a pope from Africa or from Latin America wouldn't be enough to spur the fundamental changes the Catholic Church desperately needs.
 
“In Benedict, the Catholic Church got the pope it deserved,” writes John Patrick Shanley in The New York Times. Shanley, author of the play Doubt, pulls no punches. Pope Benedict, he correctly charges, is “a protector of priests who abused children. He’d been a member of the Hitler Youth. In addition to this woeful résumé, he had no use for women.”

Pope Benedict XVI’s leaked documents show fractured Vatican full of rivalries

VATICAN CITY — Guests at the going-away party for Carlo Maria Viganò couldn’t understand why the archbishop looked so forlorn. Pope Benedict XVI had appointed Viganò ambassador to the United States, a plum post where he would settle into a stately mansion on Massachusetts Avenue, across the street from the vice president’s residence.

“He went through the ordeal making it very clear he was unhappy with it,” said one former ambassador to the Vatican, who attended the Vatican Gardens ceremony in the late summer of 2011. “And we just couldn’t figure out, us outsiders and non-Italians, what was going on.”

Bernard Fellay, Head Of Traditionalist Catholic Sect, Says Jews Are 'Enemies Of The Church'

The head of a controversial Catholic sect says that Jews are "enemies of the Church," but the sect has denied any anti-Semitic intentions.

Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, declared Jews "enemies of the Church" during a talk that aired on a Canadian radio station, the Catholic News Agency recently reported. Fellay's remarks took place on Dec. 28 at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Chapel in New Hamburg, Ontario.

Proponents Of Euthanasia, Nazi Genocide Use Same Arguments According To L'Osservatore Romano

VATICAN CITY (RNS) Proponents of euthanasia and aborting chronically ill fetuses use the same arguments that were once used by the Nazis to promote their eugenics program of mass extermination, according to the Vatican's semiofficial newspaper.

The article appears on the front page of Saturday's (May 5) issue of L'Osservatore Romano and is signed by Lucetta Scaraffia, an Italian historian who is a frequent contributor to the Vatican paper.

Scaraffia's article comes in the wake of the Italian translation of a 1920 book by two German scholars, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, that set the ideological foundations for the Nazi program of extermination of disabled and incurably sick people.

The authors of the 1920 book ("Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living") proposed that the lives of the chronically ill or of the mentally and physically disabled were "unworthy of being lived," and should be given a "charitable death."

Scaraffia argues that this mentality can still be seen in the "writings of many contemporary bioethicists, and of many politicians who support legislative proposals of a euthanasic type."

According to the historian, the book is "sinisterly" relevant to contemporary debates, and should "strongly embarrass those who champion euthanasia in the belief that it has nothing to do with Nazism."

"Contempt for imperfect human life, over estimation of the abilities of science" are "still firmly present in our time," she concludes, and this shows that "eugenics is still alive and has not been wiped out together with the Nazi past."

Original Article
Source: Huff
Author: Alessandro Speciale Religion News Service

U.S. Nuns Face Vatican Rebuke for "Radical Feminism" in Stances on Church Teachings, Social Justice

The Vatican has reprimanded the largest group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying they have focused too heavily on issues of social justice, while failing to speak out enough on "issues of crucial importance," such as abortion and same-sex marriage. In a report issued last week, church leaders accused the nuns of promoting "radical feminist" ideas and challenging key teachings on homosexuality and male-only priesthood. An archbishop and two bishops — all of them male — have been appointed to oversee the nuns. "To me, it’s quite puzzling that our work with the poor, which Jesus told us to do in the gospels, would be the source of such a criticism," says Sister Simone Campbell, head of the Catholic social justice group NETWORK, which was harshly criticized in last week’s report. The rebuke comes as the so-called "war on women" has become a key issue in the 2012 presidential race. Some Catholic nuns have opposed the bishops by supporting Obama’s healthcare reform law and contraceptive mandate. Campbell says she believes the Vatican targeted her group because of their support for healthcare reform. "They like it when we just do service, but don’t have thoughts, don’t have questions, don’t have criticism," Campbell says. "That is a real challenge in a political society, when we have to do a deep, nuanced analysis in order to know the way forward for this, for the common good."

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The War on Women: Sex-Trafficking Edition

Last December, at a contentious hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a group consisting almost entirely of men weighed in on women's health care. Millions of federal dollars were at stake. Two Obama officials were facing an inquisition. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.)—who wasn't even a member of the committee but was invited by chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) to speak—was red-faced and practically shouting as he delivered his opening remarks: "The Obama administration's bias against Catholics is an affront to religious freedom and a threat to all people," he inveighed.

Smith's attack was rooted in a now-familiar dispute—the escalating war between conservatives and the Obama administration over reproductive health. But there was a special wrinkle: Smith was concerned with foreigners forced into prostitution in the United States—and the right of the Catholic Church to refuse to provide them with access to birth control and abortion.

Thanks to legislation authored by Smith, the federal government spends millions of dollars each year to help human trafficking victims recover. Since 2006 virtually all of the money has gone to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the church's leadership in Washington. But in September the Obama administration declined to renew the contract. It wanted to ensure that victimized women had access to full reproductive health care, and the bishops had forbidden the grant money to be used for services they deemed immoral.

A War on Nuns?

The fight over contraception and health-care reform was portrayed as various kinds of wars—on women, on religion, between the G.O.P. and Obama—but it also included a skirmish in a longer fight within Catholicism, with the Vatican and bishops on one side and American nuns on the other. On Wednesday, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which for a few years has been conducting an inquiry into the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the main association of American nuns—provoked, it said, by its discernment of “radical feminist themes” in the L.C.W.R.’s work—released a Doctrinal Assessment that found the L.C.W.R.’s state to be “grave and a matter of serious concern.” The nuns in question, according to the Vatican, “perpetuate a distorted ecclesiological vision, and have scant regard for the role of the Magisterium as the guarantor of the authentic interpretation of the Church’s Faith.” An archbishop and two bishops were being urgently dispatched to show them the error of their ways.

Catholic Bishops: Birth Control Is 'Ubiquitous And Inexpensive'

WASHINGTON -- As part of their intensely focused effort to repeal the Obama administration's new contraception coverage policy, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a manifesto of sorts on Wednesday, in which they assert that birth control is "ubiquitous and inexpensive."

"We wish to clarify what this debate is -- and is not -- about," the bishops said in the statement. "This is not about access to contraception, which is ubiquitous and inexpensive, even when it is not provided by the Church's hand and with the Church's funds."

What the debate is about, according to the statement, is the "unjust and illegal" mandate that "would force virtually all private health plans nationwide to provide coverage of sterilization and contraception -- including abortifacient drugs."

The bishops' statement is somewhat misleading. The new federal rule does not cover any drug that causes an abortion. It does cover emergency contraception, which prevents pregnancy.

The Catholicization of the American Right

In the past two decades, the American religious Right has become increasingly Catholic. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. Literally, Catholic writers have emerged as intellectual leaders of the religious right in universities, the punditocracy, the press, and the courts, promoting an agenda that at its most theoretical involves a reclamation of the natural law tradition of Thomas Aquinas and at its most practical involves appeals to the kind of common-sense, "everybody knows," or "it just is" arguments that have characterized opposition to same-sex marriage. There is nothing new about Catholic conservative intellectuals -- think John Neuhaus, William F. Buckley, Jr. What is new is the prominence that these Catholic thinkers and leaders have come to have within the domains of American politics that are dominated by evangelical Protestants. Catholic intellectuals have become to the American Right what Jewish intellectuals once were to the American Left. In the academy, on the Court, Catholic intellectuals provide the theoretical discourse that shapes conservative arguments across a whole range of issues. Often these arguments have identifiable Thomistic or Jesuitical sources, but most of the time they enter the mainstream of political dialogue as simply "conservative."

Meanwhile, in the realm of actual politics, Catholic politicians have emerged as leading figures in the religious conservative movement. Again, there is nothing new about Catholic political leaders nor Catholic politicians, although from Al Smith through John Kennedy they were more often Democrats than Republicans (Pat Buchanan is an exception). What is new is the ability of self-identified Catholic politicians to attract broad support from the among the evangelical Protestant religious right.