Monday 18 September 2017

WORST SEXUAL ABUSE TO COME


Worst of Catholic sexual abuse scandal still to come in developing world: report

RN 
The worst of the Catholic sexual abuse scandal may be over in Australia, but the crisis is likely to hit the church in Asia, Africa and parts of Europe within a decade, a report has warned.



The RMIT study, Child Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church, has for the first time compiled the findings of 26 royal commissions, police investigations, judicial probes, government inquiries, church studies, and academic research from around the world since 1985.
It warns the gravest potential for future abuse of children and teenagers lies in the estimated 9,600 orphanages the church still runs, including 2,600 in India and 1,600 in Italy.
"[Child sexual abuse] has peaked and there has been a decline since the late 70s and early 80s and that's because it's been brought into the public arena," the study's co-author, Professor Des Cahill, said.
"But I think in the developing countries and in some of the European countries, there hasn't been a precipitating event to raise the issue into the public arena and I'm thinking particularly of countries in Asia and Africa.
"It may reassert itself after this has all blown over, and come back in 30, 40 years' time … if the underlying issues are not addressed.
"I as yet have not seen any sign at the Vatican level, and even here in Australia, for the bishops to answer why did this happen and why did they — the bishops — react so poorly."
Examining reports from Australia, Ireland, the United States, Britain, Canada and the Netherlands, Professor Cahill and his co-author, theologian Peter Wilkinson, found that one in 15 priests, or about 7 per cent, allegedly abused children and teenagers between about 1950 and 2000.


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They say even today children "are at risk in education and welfare institutions when they can be accessed by psychosexually immature and/or sexually deprived celibates, including priests and religious brothers".
However, Professor Cahill, who was an adviser to the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse, believes the risks to children in Australian Catholic schools are now very low, mainly because of greater vigilance by parents, teachers and school authorities.
He says most Catholic school principals are married men and women, and are extremely conscious of the risks to children.
The decision of the Catholic Church in Australia, the US, Britain, New Zealand and Canada to phase out large orphanages and move children into foster care has also substantially reduced the risk of abuse.
But controversially the report warns that Australia's reliance on overseas trained clergy — up to 40 per cent in some diocese — could be risky, as overseas bishops may try to banish offending or suspect priests to foreign postings.
"Is the phenomenon of child sexual abuse by priests and religious [brothers] likely to reappear and increase in the short or long term?" the report asks.
"The answer is unclear … It might happen, despite even the most stringent checks that an offending priest or religious might be recycled to Australia. In the US, not a few overseas priests, especially from the Philippines and India, have been charged and convicted."
The shortage of local candidates for the priesthood in many Western countries has, in the past, also led bishops to ordain men despite warnings from the heads of seminaries and training colleges that they were unsuitable.
These included "psychosexually immature, psychosexually maldeveloped and sexually deprived and deeply frustrated male priests and religious, particularly those who had not satisfactorily resolved their own sexual identity".
Professor Cahill and Dr Wilkinson do not blame the abuse crisis entirely on celibacy, but their report notes the low levels of abuse in the eastern rite Catholic churches — particularly the Maronite, Ukrainian, Melkite and Chaldean churches — where priests are allowed to marry and become fathers.
Professor Cahill is himself a former Catholic priest who resigned to marry and start a 40-year academic career.
He rejects the claim, often made by church conservatives, that the liberal reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s loosened the morals of priests.
"Much of the abuse happened before Vatican II, during the 1950's and into the 60s," he said.

"And the majority of offending priests were either ordained before Vatican II or well progressed in their studies. I think we need to be suspicious of those explanations."



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“I’m a pedophile, in the real sense”



Father Jan Van Dael holds onto a strand of a boy's hair as he collects free soup. "Look at his hair!" the priest calls to reporters.
Credit: 
Jimmy Chalk/GlobalPost
The boy runs along the trash-strewn potholed dirt street, his long copper-colored hair flowing behind him. Father Jan Van Dael, 76, reaches out to touch his arm, moving close.
“He reminds me of a boy who was in my house in Rio de Janeiro,” Van Dael says, referring to the orphanage he used to run in the 1980s.
The boy wriggles free and lines up to fill his pot from the containers of soup that Van Dael and his volunteers have brought to this small slum just outside the rough-and-tumble city of Caucaia, in Brazil’s northeast.
Van Dael, an avuncular, slightly doddery Belgian priest, seems deeply affectionate toward pre-adolescent boys. He loves to take their photographs. He reaches for children he barely knows, like a father hungry for attention.
Back in the late 1980s, Van Dael moved from Europe to Brazil, first settling in Rio de Janeiro. After a falling out with the local diocese (Van Dael says church officials objected to his working with poor street children whom they deemed criminals), the Belgian was asked to leave, and ended up in windswept Caucaia, a few miles from the crime-ridden city of Fortaleza.
Taking advantage of Brazil’s extraordinary exchange rates at the time, which greatly favored the US dollar and European currencies, the “gringo priest” set up a new orphanage for abandoned and troubled street kids.
He called it “Esperança da Criança,” or Children’s Hope.
But the home's whitewashed walls — which Van Dael hung with dozens of photographs he took of young boys — appear to have borne witness to plenty of misery, along with any hope.

According to Brazilian prosecutors, Van Dael is currently under investigation by both the Belgian and Brazilian federal authorities, an inquiry that adds to a litany of child abuse accusations against Van Dael on two continents.
PAT SAYS:

What the author of the first article says is absolutely true.

The vastness of Catholic Clerical Abuse in Africa, South America, and Asia will leave the clerical abuse in the West in the halfpenny place.

In these countries:

They often have no decent police force.

They often have no child abuse unit.

They often have no social services.

They often have no decent legal system.

In the West we have seen THOUSANDS of clergy, brothers, and nuns abuse TENS OF THOUSANDS OF CHILDREN.

When the truth comes out of the DEVELOPING WORLD the story will even more horrific.

The Vatican, bishops and religious superiors know this is coming but are putting off the TERRIBLE DAY.

THOUSANDS of MISSIONARY PRIESTS, BROTHERS and NUNS will have abused an UNTOLD NUMBER of children.

It is a waiting TSUNAMII

36 comments:

  1. It would be interesting to map the Irish role in all of this. Where have we ssent missionaries and did we export this practice when we sent forth Irish missionaries... we certainly had influence in the US, UK, S.American and Austrian churches - all of which were exposed...

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    1. I am sure they didn't need to wait for the Irish to arrive to discover how to misbehave.. They were perfectly capable of doing the same themselves.. Some of the abuse practices,particularly in certain African countries, are indigenous to the population and are constantly been challenged by good missionaries and medical volunteers.

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  2. Richard Anthony Burke (born 19 February 1949) was a prelate in the Roman Catholic Church.[1]

    Born in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland, he was ordained a priest on 18 May 1975 for St. Patrick’s Society for the Foreign Missions. He was appointed the coadjutor bishop for the Diocese of Warri, inNigeria, on 6 December 1995. He was ordained a bishop on 6 January 1996 and succeeded to the position of ordinary of the diocese on 3 March 1997 at the age of 48. The Principal Consecrator was Pope John Paul II; his Principal Co-Consecrators were Cardinals Giovanni Battista Re and Jorge María Mejía. On 24 December 2007 Pope Benedict XVInamed Bishop Burke as the new Archbishop of Benin City, also in Nigeria.

    The Pope accepted Burke's resignation as Archbishop on 31 May 2010, after allegations of sexual abuse of an initially 14-year-old girl over the course of 20 years. Burke claimed he and his accuser had only had adult consensual sex. St Patrick’s Missionary Society claimed its own investigation “found no evidence to corroborate the allegation of child sexual abuse”.[2] The alleged victim repeated her claims in "Mission to Prey", a documentary broadcast by RTÉ in 2011. In 2015 Burke sued RTÉ for libel in relation to the 2011 broadcast. Burke admitted having sex with numerous women, including a married mother of eight, but denied any underage or non-consensual relations.[3] RTÉ settled out of court, claiming to have paid part of Burke's costs but no damages.[3]

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  3. Church faces Africa abuse scandal

    Tuesday, May 24, 2011

    By Fiachra Ó Cionnaith

    THE Catholic Church is facing yet another abuse scandal after a series of Irish priests were accused of raping and abusing young children and teenagers while working as missionaries in Africa over the past three decades.

    A Prime Time Investigates exposé last night detailed a litany of allegations against Irish priests who were working in areas such as Kenya and South Africa. 

    A number of incidents involve Fr James McAuley, a Belfast-born priest who worked in Cape Town in South Africa for the Redemptorist missionaries. 

    Fr McAuley, who has since passed away, faced at least three specific charges of abuse — including the rape of a Sudanese refugee whose family had been killed. 

    The first known allegation was made in 1996 by Emile Jones.

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  4. Philippines In 2002 the Catholic Church apologized for sexual abuses, including adultery, homosexuality and child abuse by 200 priests over the previous 20 years.[28]In 2003 at least 34 priests were suspended in a sex abuse scandal involving sexual harassment of women. Twenty men were from a single diocese.[29]In 2011, a priest accused of sexually abusing a 17-year-old female minor was sheltered by his Bishop, despite calls for his surrender to civil authorities.[30]

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  5. Argentina Julio Grassi was found guilty (by a three-judge panel of the Criminal Court Oral 1 Morón) of one count of sexual abuse and one count of corrupting a minor in the "Happy Children’s Foundation".[122]Archdiocese of Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz

    Main article: Sexual abuse scandal in Santa Fe de la Vera Cruz archdiocese

    Allegations of sexual abuse by Archbishop Edgardo Storni on 47 young seminarists surfaced in 1994, and were published in 2000.[123] This led to a victim from a 1992 incident coming forward, followed by a conviction for eight years in Dec. 2009.[124]

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  6. Sadly developing areas are more prone to abuse going under the radar. As well as acknowledging the past we need to ask in real measurable terms what we can offer going forward. It would appear that many of the big movers and shakers live in a world of smoke and mirrors.

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  7. Pat, the Vatican or State Police Agencies should employ you. You are wssted as a Bishop!! You'd be so forensic in your investigations, so determined, so ruthless, not leaving a stone unturned, so thorough!! Have I given you an idea? How the Church and the world would be idyllically beautiful places!!

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    Replies
    1. I am not at all sure that I could agree that Pat would be an acceptable investigator.... One of our criteria for a good investigator is to have a completely open-minded approach We start out without even the slightest trace of preformed judgement. It is completely unacceptable to work backwards i e by deciding the result you want to see and then making sure that you only acknowledge and emphasise evidence which fits in with your favoured outcome!
      I think that would be a big problem for Pat...! Judging by the daily content of the blogs here... definitely not.

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  8. I have never wanted to be anything but a priest.

    However when pressed I have always said I would like to be a detective :-)

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  9. Well Fr Stack famous for sayiing open air mass in Drumcree and shaking hands with soldiers went on to become an entrepreneur running a big successful company.
    He did leave the priesthood though.

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  10. I asked on yesterday's blog.
    What was the falling down of people after being blessed by a priest in Medjoria.

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    1. I suspect any 'falling down' or similar occurances which may have taken place at such faith induced gatherings will have had causation similar to that same psychological and emotional phenomena observed in numerous other non religious gatherings.
      Psychological research shows how remarkably suggestible many of us are especially when a high degree of emotional need pairs up with communal expectations.
      Two realities emerge: that many of us are gullible and malleable, and there's always others who will take advantage of this.
      This is not to deride the comfort, emotional or religious, some devout people get from "pilgrimages", regardless of whether the object of devotion has any basis in objective reality.
      For my part I liked the peaceful atmosphere at Lourdes visited Oct. off season when hitch hiking about 45 years ago. But no more than other special places similarly visited in quieter off peak times: Taj Mahal, Pyramids or Machu Picchu. And in such awe inspiring places I can readily imagine how easy one might get caught up in mass crowd hysteria.
      MMM

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    2. It's a devotional practice called 'Slaying in the (Holy) Spirit' or 'Resting in the (Holy) Spirit'. It is usually associated with group healing services.

      Participants are prayed over with the laying on of hands (sometimes they're anointed, too) and then they fall to the floor, having been 'slain' by the Holy Spirit; they can remain there (resting in the Holy Spirit) for anything ranging from seconds to hours.

      Not every Christian believes in the practice; some even go so far as to call it 'satanic'.

      Believers in the practice cite biblical passages in support of it, along with testimonies of good experiences (personal peace, for example) while in this state.

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    3. It was playacting - -a form of mild copycat hysteria... like stressed exam schoolgirls all appearing to faint one after another in the same class.. Quite common actually...

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    4. I didn't believe in it until I saw whole lines of schoolgirls getting the vapours together, here on this blog

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    5. That is right! - Dead on, man!

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  11. Pat, Pat, Pat, you evil little man..

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    1. How can it be evil to expose evil???

      Presumably you believe child abuse to be evil?

      Maybe not?

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    2. Don't be so dismissive Pat. You spend your day so tediously and repetitively, we could write your scriot at this stage. The advice is correct - get a real life! Incidentally, I know of no one in their right, moral mind and conscience who doesn't abhor any form of abuse. So, let's not be so self righteous on this issue.

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  12. Close this blog and get a life

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    Replies
    1. Close Gaynooth instead... then Alice Hall.

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    2. Stop reading the blog and get a life of your own.

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  13. Selective submissions eh Pat, I wonder why

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  14. Pat,
    2 yrs ago I said to a fellow Priest that Africa and Asia would soon reveal an appalling vista of abuse by clergy and religious. I believe the numbers involved will be much greater than in Europe.
    The Church has known about this horrific abuse for decades and did little or nothing about it !
    I am utterly ashamed of the institution that I have served for many years.

    Priest of D&C.

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  15. Thank you mmm and others.
    I did go to a healing session in Medjugorie with my friend.
    Yes they all fell down and a man was there to catch them and help them down
    My friend went for the blessing, she said the priest pushed her on the forehead and that she didn't want to fall.
    No I stayed in my seat, cynical person that I am.
    This Belfast priest had the name of being a healer.
    That was around ten years ago.
    Pat what is your take on it. ? ?

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  16. THE BEAUTIFUL HANDS OF A PRIEST


    (poem by an unknown author)

    We need them in life's early morning,
    We need them again at its close;
    We feel their warm clasp of true friendship,
    We seek them when tasting life's woes.

    At the altar each day we behold them,
    And the hands of a king on his throne
    Are not equal to them in their greatness;
    Their dignity stands all alone;

    And when we are tempted and wander,
    To pathways of shame and of sin,
    It's the hand of a priest that will absolve us,
    Not once, but again and again.

    And when we are taking life's partner,
    Other hands may prepare us a feast,
    But the hand that will bless and unite us
    Is the beautiful hand of a priest.

    God bless them and keep them all holy,
    For the Host which their fingers caress;
    When can a poor sinner do better
    Than to ask Him to guide thee and bless?

    When the hour of death comes upon us,
    May our courage and strength be increased,
    By seeing raised over us in blessing
    The beautiful hands of a priest.

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  17. In Medjagore tonight praying for you Pat. It is heavenly. I shall pray for your welfare in front of the Blessed Sacrament, which is beautifully and validly done. Xxx

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  18. 17:17. I don't know pats take on this but I know mine and others. It's a load of bullshit!

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    1. Lol pat,hoping u wd say that.
      I am cynically orintated where Medjugorie is concerned even though I was there 3 times.
      I just went as others were going.
      Yes there are miracles there, people pray whilst there....so that is the miracle.
      then there is the speaking in tongues, whatever that is ????

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    2. Of course we remember that most of the lay people who go there are 100% sincere.

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    3. That poem makes me feel sick
      Especially all that about a priest when dying.
      When will people get it into their thick heads
      It's how we live our lives that counts when we dying
      Not about a priest blessing us
      We all going to die

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  19. Pat 21.15: The word B.....t perfectly describes much of your diatribes Pat! You cannot ever see the splinter in your own wye - but you are fast and careless about so many others. I just don't fathom this business of continually damning others. So time absorbing when I'm sure there are more worthwhile ways to spend your time.

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    1. Pat is open about failings and struggles. So your point is pointless.

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  20. 21:15 I'm presuming you agree with the BS, Blessed Sacrament diagnosis

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