Ongoing religious scandals

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

[...] the rcc is one of the biggest money launderers around [...]

CNA wrote:

Vatican City, Apr 29, 2014 / 12:00 am (CNA/EWTN News).- In an open letter, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone has addressed accusations that he had angered Pope Francis with his “luxurious” new residence, saying he and the Pope are on good terms.

“I am personally grateful to Pope Francis for having called me April 23 to express his solidarity and his disappointment for the media attacks about the apartment, of which he had been informed as soon as the article was published,” the emeritus Secretary of State wrote in an open letter published in the magazines of the archdioceses of Vercelli and Genoa, both of which he led for a time. Italian daily La Repubblica published an article April 20 claiming that the cardinal was moving into a lavish 6,500 square foot apartment in the Vatican’s San Carlo Palace, while Pope Francis has been urging clerics to adopt a modest lifestyle.

According to La Repubblica, the Pope himself had been angered by the luxury of Cardinal Bertone’s new apartment. The paper claimed that the restructure combines two apartments, one formerly the home of the head of the gendarmerie, and another once home to a Vatican monsignor. Three nuns who worked with him while he was Secretary of State will live with him in his new residence.

San Carlo Palace is a few steps from Domus Sanctae Marthae, the Vatican guesthouse where Pope Francis resides. La Repubblica’s article caused a certain media frenzy in Italy. Cardinal Bertone did not make any official statement, but in the end decided to send a letter to the weekly magazines of the two dioceses where he had been ordinary, in order “to thank the friends” from the dioceses who showed him support for the media reports and also for “those who may have been surprised by the news.”

Cardinal Bertone stressed that the source of the article “doubled the size” of the apartment he is going to live in, and complained that “it was even said that the Pope angered with me for living in so much luxury.” He explained that the apartment “is temporarily given to me” and that “after me, someone else will be living in it.” He added that the apartment is a typical size for the Vatican palaces, and that he renovated it “at my own expense.”

“As Pope Saint John XXIII used to say, ‘I do not stop to collect the stones launched against me’,” Cardinal Bertone wrote, concluded the letter.

Rosaleen Dixon wrote:

We need to look closer to home (Scandal of Chile's baby-snatching priests, 16 May). Thousands of young unmarried girls in the UK were in a similar position in the 1950s to 70s. I like many others was coerced into giving up my baby in the 1965 by the Catholic church. My only crime was that I was not married. We were never told that we were entitled to free nursery places and that there was help out there to enable us to care for our babies. We were demoralised, browbeaten and humiliated by the church and made to carry out hard physical labour, such as scrubbing floors on our hands and knees until just before our babies were born.

We had pressure put on us by being told our babies would be shunned and called names at school and that they would hate us for keeping them and not giving them a father. We were tricked into allowing our babies to be taken out of the nursery for so-called doctor's examinations or to be checked over by the matron , only to have our babies given to adopters who were told that we didn't want our babies. We were left distraught and crying and just told to get on with it as we no longer had a child.

We were told that we were sinners, whores, bad girls and many more awful things were said to us. It was constant humiliation all day and they wore us down with their nastiness and we had nowhere to turn for help or support, as they made sure that they isolated us as much as possible. The ultimate argument was that we were under 21 years of age and so had to do as we were told. It is not just Chile and Ireland that treated unmarried mothers in this barbaric way and we have never had an apology from the Catholic church.

Raw Story wrote:

A Chicago-area Catholic priest,who has campaigned in his parish against Internet pornography, has been arrested for publicly exposing himself at a gas station, reports WREX13. Monsignor Aaron R. Brodeski, 44, was charged with two misdemeanor counts of public indecency relating to an incident at a Road Ranger Gas Station, where witnesses say he exposed himself inside the gas station and then again in the parking lot.

According to Winnebego County Sheriff Deputy Chief Dominic Iasparro, Brodeski’s actions were observed by adults but no children were present. Employees at the gas station contacted authorities who were able to track Brodeski down after being provided with his license plate number. Following the issuance of a warrant, Brodeski turned himself in to authorities and was released after posting bail.

Brodeski recently held a meeting for parents in his parish, warning about the addictive qualities for online pornography for teens, calling it a “fishhook,” saying “Even if they believe in their heads everything our Church has taught, their bodies believe what the porn culture is teaching them.”

The Rockford Diocese has released a statement regarding Brodeski, saying that he had been placed on leave and sent for evaluation and treatment for “any difficulties affecting his conduct and ministry,” after the incident last month. According to the diocese, Brodeski was arrested following his return from evaluation.

Irish Central wrote:

According to a report in the Irish Mail on Sunday, a mass grave has been located beside a former home for unmarried mothers and babies in County Galway. The grave is believed to contain the bodies of up to eight hundred babies, buried on the former grounds of the institution known locally as “The Home” in Tuam, north of Galway city, between 1925 and 1961. Run by the Bon Secours nuns, “The Home” housed thousands of unmarried mothers and their “illegitimate” children over those years.

According to Irish Mail on Sunday the causes of death listed for “as many as 796 children” included “malnutrition, measles, convulsions, tuberculosis, gastroenteritis and pneumonia.” The babies were usually buried without a coffin in a plot that had once housed “a water tank,” the report claims. No memorials were erected, the site was left unmarked and unmourned. The staggering mortality rate of “The Home” was apparently replicated elsewhere in Ireland.

The Sean Ross Mother and Baby Home, portrayed in the award winning film “Philomena” this year, opened in Roscrea, County Tipperary in 1930. In its first year of operation 60 babies died out of a total of 120, a fifty percent infant mortality rate, more than four times higher than in the general population at the time. Statistics show a quarter of all babies born outside marriage in the 1930’s in Ireland died before their first birthdays. As observers have remarked elsewhere, these were infant death rates from the 17th century. In one year alone in the mid 1940’s in the Bessborough Mother and Baby Home in County Cork, out of the 180 babies born 100 died.

Given the shockingly high mortality rates, it is hard not to conclude that the destabilizing threat these children represented to Irish society and its conservative religious ethos may have contributed to their untimely demise. If 60 babies died in first year of the Sean Ross Abbey home alone, it’s a mathematical probability that hundreds more deaths could have occurred in the decades that followed (an estimated 50,000 babies were born in mother and baby homes throughout Ireland before they closed in the 1990’s). Sean Ross Abbey was just one of the many mother and baby homes operated in the state, but the “illegitimate” stigma was not confined to Catholics alone. Reports show that 219 infants died in the Protestant Bethany home in Rathgar, County Dublin between 1922 and 1949.

As “Philomena” shows, many of the children who survived in the mothers and babies homes were later forcibly adopted, most often to the USA. Between 1945 and 1965 more than 2,200 Irish infants were forcibly adopted, an average of 110 children every year, or more than two a week. Church officials have consistently denied that they ever received payments for these adoptions, insisting many of the papers and documents from that period were lost in a fire. Since there was simply no question of the birth mothers keeping their children – the shame was thought too ruinous – they lost all future claim to them. Their punishment was to work without wages for two or three years in atonement for their sins. In the homes they wore uniforms at all times, they had their names changed and they had their letters censored.

Critics contend that the ongoing reluctance of Irish religious orders to hand over their internal records or compensate past victims of mothers and babies homes, Magdalene laundries and reform schools, can be traced to their alarm over being compelled to offer mandatory payments or fear that further horrors could come to light. But calls for investigation of the various sites are growing. In the end, critics say, it should fall to the state itself to open the unmarked graves and count the dead.