Ongoing religious scandals

Odhinn · 25-09-2019 6:38pm

Peregrinus wrote: »

.................

And of course all of this ignores the huge and obvious question; of 5,200 babies born at Sean Ross Abbey, more than 1,000 died in infancy. What the fûck was going on to cause that kind of death rate? This isn't a question about a cover-up, but about basic standards of health and safety.

Going on Bessborough -

For example, going through returns for infant deaths in Cork I noticed there was something unusual and traced the matter to a home for unmarried mothers at Bessborough outside the city. I found that in the previous year some 180 babies had been born there and that considerably more than 100 had died.”

“It was a beautiful institution, built on to a lovely old house just before the war, and seemed to be spotlessly clean. I marched up and down and around about and could not make out what was wrong; at last I took a notion and stripped all the babies and, unusually for a Chief Medical Adviser, examined them. Every baby had some purulent infection of the skin and all had green diarrhoea, carefully covered up. There was obviously a staphylococcus infection about.
“Without any legal authority I closed the place down and sacked the matron, a nun, and got rid of the medical officer. The deaths had been going on for years. They had done nothing about it, had accepted the situation and were quite complacent about it.”

https://avondhupress.ie/james-deeny-the-doctor-who-saved-hundreds-of-bessborough-babies-lives/

Hotblack Desiato · 26-09-2019 2:37am

More on the Wrightbus thing.

https://twitter.com/dup_online/status/1175358929162907648?s=19

UK and EU money going into a company which was making losses, yet at the same time donating millions to a "charity" which is in reality a massive land-speculation exercise linked to the owner's church.

Very bad smell off all this.

mikhail · 26-09-2019 10:30am

Odhinn wrote: »

Going on Bessborough -

“Rev Mother Martina has informed me that the Mother Superior in England was asked to remove her,” wrote Bishop Cohalan. “That procedure was scarcely correct. Mother Martina is Reverend Mother of the Community of Sisters, it is an ecclesiastical appointment; it was not a correct thing to call for the removal.”

Minister Ward’s parliamentary secretary responded that should information about the number of children dying at Bessborough leak into the public domain, it would result in a 'public scandal'.

“The parliamentary secretary is only concerned with (Mother Martina’s) position as matron of a home in which the death rate has reached an exceptionally high figure. The fact that 102 babies died in the institution before reaching the age of 12 months during the year (to) 31st March last – the total infants born in the home and admitted after birth in that year being 124 – is viewed with disquietude.”

102/124 babies don't make it to their first year, and they had the gall to complain about the intervention! :eek:

Odhinn · 26-09-2019 3:22pm

mikhail wrote: »

102/124 babies don't make it to their first year, and they had the gall to complain about the intervention! :eek:

It's very hard for people to imagine the sheer arrogance of the Church unless they've come up against it.

Odhinn · 27-09-2019 6:49pm

Unfortunately most of the article is behind a paywall.

The Vatican is refusing to co-operate with requests to provide witnesses and evidence about child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church to a British public inquiry, it emerged yesterday.

The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse was told that the Vatican considered the requests to be improper and claimed that its officials were protected by diplomatic immunity.
The response appears to be in stark contrast to Pope Francis’s declaration this year of an “all out battle” against child abuse, which he said was “utterly incompatible with [the church’s] moral authority and ethical credibility”

https://www.broadsheet.ie/2019/09/27/protected-by-diplomatic-immunity/

Hotblack Desiato · 29-09-2019 7:21pm

Former US priest sentenced to 30 years for ‘horrific’ child sex abuse

They don't do things by halves in the US justice system. You can imagine the light sentence he'd get here. Not that he'll serve the 30 years - but he'll die in prison and thoroughly deserves to do so.

A former Roman Catholic priest who fled to Morocco before he was returned to the United States and convicted of sexually abusing an altar boy in New Mexico in the 1990s has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

US District Judge Martha Vazquez imposed the sentence in Albuquerque federal court on Arthur Perrault (81), a former Air Force chaplain and colonel, US Attorney John Anderson said in a statement on Friday.

“There are few acts more horrific than the long-term sexual abuse of a child,” Mr Anderson said. “At long last, today’s sentence holds Perrault accountable for his deplorable conduct.”

Perrault’s trial attorney, Samuel Winder, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Perrault was convicted by a federal jury in April on six counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact with a minor in 1991 and 1992 at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque and at the Santa Fe National Cemetery, prosecutors said.

The victim, now an adult, testified that Perrault befriended him when he was nine, showering him with gifts and trips before sexually assaulting him.

Although he was convicted of abusing just one victim, prosecutors alleged in court filings that Perrault was a serial child molester who abused numerous young people over more than 30 years as a priest in New Mexico and Rhode Island.

At his trial, seven other alleged victims testified that Perrault, ordained in 1964, abused them during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

The US Catholic Church has paid out more than $3 billion to settle clerical abuse cases, according to BishopAccountability.org, which tracks the issue.

Under federal law, a convicted defendant must serve at least 85 per cent of a sentence, meaning Perrault will likely die in prison.

Perrault fled the US in 1992 when his criminal conduct became public, prosecutors said. He was located in Morocco, where he was arrested in 2017 following his indictment on the sex abuse charges, and was extradited to New Mexico.

Linda Card, a spokeswoman for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, said Perrault served in the Air Force Reserve Chaplain Corps, and for a time was on active-duty status.

Hotblack Desiato · 04-10-2019 6:48pm

https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/helsinki_pastor_suspended_over_100k_embezzlement_conviction/11003494

The Helsinki diocese council said on Wednesday that it had issued a three-month suspension of pastor Harri Kekäläinen who served at the city's Pitäjänmäki parish.

Last spring, the Helsinki district court convicted Kekäläinen on charges of aggravated embezzlement and sentenced him to a one-year suspended prison sentence. The pastor was found to have appropriated nearly 100,000 euros of church funds for his personal use.

Kekäläinen was also known as the "heavy metal pastor" because he had organised church services where hymns were sung in heavy metal style.

Church officials first caught wind of irregularities in the flow of funds in January, when the Vantaa parish union wanted to transfer 530,000 euros to a bank account held by the Helsinki parish union. However the organisation accidentally paid the funds into Kekäläinen's personal account.

The heavy metal pastor did not inform the Vantaa parishes about the accounting error and used 93,000 euros to pay off some of his debts. Kekäläinen later admitted to using the cash in the manner described by prosecutors and returned the money to the Vantaa parish union.

robindch · 05-10-2019 12:45pm

Although 2018 saw a six-year low there for "suspicious financial activity" at the Vatican, the place is still having significant trouble with financial authorities:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-vatican-raid/vatican-police-raid-top-offices-take-documents-idUSKBN1WG45E

Reuters wrote:

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Vatican police raided the offices of the Holy See’s Secretariat of State and its Financial Information Authority, or AIF, on Tuesday and took away documents and electronic devices as part of an investigation of suspected financial irregularities, a Vatican statement said. It was believed to be the first time the two departments were searched for evidence involving alleged financial crimes.

The Secretariat of State, the most powerful department in the Vatican, is the nerve center of its bureaucracy and diplomacy and the administrative heart of the worldwide Catholic Church. The AIF, headed by Swiss lawyer Rene Bruelhart, is the financial controller, with authority over all Vatican departments. The Vatican statement gave no details except to say that the operation was a follow-up to complaints filed in the summer by the Vatican bank and the Office of the Auditor General and were related to “financial operations carried out over the course of time”.

A senior Vatican source said he believed the operation, which the statement said had been authorized by Vatican prosecutors, had to do with real estate transactions. Since the election of Pope Francis in 2013, the Vatican has made great strides in cleaning up its often murky financial reputation. Last year, a former head of the Vatican bank and an Italian lawyer went on trial to face charges of money laundering and embezzlement through real estate deals. It is still in progress.

In May, the AIF said reports of suspicious financial activity in the Vatican reached a six-year low in 2018, continuing a trend officials said showed reforms were in place. For decades, the bank, officially known as the Institute for Works of Religion, or IOR, was embroiled in numerous financial scandals as Italians with no right to have accounts opened them with the complicity of corrupt insiders.

Seth Brundle · 19-10-2019 2:04pm

Bishop Alphonsus Cullinan provides yet more nonsense - this time against the evils of yoga...
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/catholic-bishop-warns-against-yoga-and-mindfulness-in-schools-1.4055449

Cabaal · 01-11-2019 12:50pm

Those Catholics up to it again

https://www.broadsheet.ie/2019/11/01/the-sun-has-not-fallen-out-of-the-sky/

Claire McGrettrick, co founder of the Adoption Rights Alliance writes:

[Yesterday] I received records relating to my birth. I was told in 2003 that they had been destroyed. This is an excuse frequently given to adopted people.

The sun has not fallen out of the sky because I now have these records. There is no excuse for this kind of discrimination.

The existence was denied in a 2003 letter from Mount Carmel Hospital, Churchtown, Dublin 14 founded by the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary

smacl · 26-11-2019 12:11pm

Two Argentinian Catholic priests have been jailed for sexual abuse of 20 hearing-impaired children under their care over a 12 year period. More here; https://www.rte.ie/news/2019/1126/1095146-argentina-abuse-priests/ Makes you wonder how much of this is still going on?

Hotblack Desiato · 04-12-2019 4:16pm

Nigeria's 'torture houses' masquerading as Koranic schools

The private Islamic boarding school in Daura, northern Nigeria, was not somewhere you would want a child to stay for more than a few minutes, let alone months or years.

The Koranic and Rehabilitation Centre was one of series of institutions raided over the past month where parents have been sending troublesome children and young men who may be addicted to drugs or have committed petty crimes. But the raids have revealed them to be more akin to "torture houses", officials say.

...

The air was stuffy and nauseating. Former students told us that up to 40 people were kept in chains in each 7-sq-m (75-sq-ft) cell.

Filthy clothes and bedding littered the floor. Those who lived there were often forced to urinate and defecate with their chains on - in the same place they ate and slept.

They would be regularly taken out for beatings or to be raped by the staff.

"It was hell on earth," said Rabiu Umar, a former detainee at the centre.

Sixty-seven boys and men were freed from the facility. Police said there were 300 people on the school register, but many of them had escaped following a riot the previous weekend.

Over the past month about 600 people have been found to be living in such horrifying conditions: chained, starved and abused.

...

Some of them were pictured dangling from the ceiling. Others had their hands or feet chained to car wheel rims.

...

As the raids continue and more details emerge, they have been met with public outrage, but these institutions were no secret.

Jaafar Jaafar, from online media platform the Daily Nigerian, says people who live there have always known.

"I don't think there is any person who grows up in the north who can claim that they aren't aware of these schools - we all know they abuse children there."

He adds that growing up in Kano in the 1980s and 1990s he was aware of a number of schools like these.

"People believe that these schools have the spiritual power to heal. They don't mind how much the children are dehumanised, or how they're treated, as long as their child receives a Koranic education and is rehabilitated."

robindch · 05-12-2019 4:09am

The Vatican has announced the resignation of Bishop Richard J Malone of Buffalo, NY, who won few friends for his handling of the claims of sexual abuse which began to surface by the dozen last year. Mr Malone's next moves are unclear at this time.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50664458

Hotblack Desiato · 05-12-2019 11:38am

Meanwhile the Irish bishops and cardinals who covered up child rape face zero sanction.

Raping kids in the US is just too financially costly for them but here they face no penalty. It's always about the $$$$.

robindch · 17-12-2019 3:38pm

The pope has lifted the "papal secrecy" rule for cases of child abuse and pornography which results in - well, it's not completely clear from the articles below - though it seems to allow, if not require, the RCC to co-operate with state authorities generally, and it seems to require the RCC to co-operate, but only if requested to do so. Also, the changes mean that alleged victims and people who make allegations are not required to be bound by vows of silence.

Predictably, it's still some distance from full co-operation.

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/pope-francis-lifts-pontifical-secret-from-legal-proceedings-of-abuse-trials-67274
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50824842

Seth Brundle · 17-12-2019 4:42pm

robindch wrote: »

Also, the changes mean that alleged victims and people who make allegations are not required to be bound by vows of silence.

I hadn't realised they were still using that punishment on victims, the sick f**kers :mad:

Odhinn · 22-12-2019 8:33pm

More of the usual

At least 60 children were abused by Marcial Maciel, founder of the ultra-conservative Catholic order Legionaries of Christ, an investigation has found.
The report, published by the Roman Catholic group, said 33 priests in the order abused at least 175 minors since it was founded in 1941.

In 2006, Maciel was ordered to retire to a life of penitence after years of allegations of sexual abuse of minors.
He died two years later at the age of 87 without facing his accusers.

In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI ordered him to retire as head of the Legionaries of Christ over the allegations, which had been ignored by his predecessor Pope John Paul II when they first emerged.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-50884518

Hotblack Desiato · 24-12-2019 2:32am

JPII's crown grows ever more rusty.

Oops, I mean Saint JPII. :rolleyes:

Seth Brundle · 29-12-2019 11:11pm

Sure why not attack couples trying to conceive...

Catholic parish under fire for Christmas message condemning IVF
Facebook page of Tullamore’s Catholic parish in Offaly was taken down amid criticism

Odhinn · 30-12-2019 11:38am

Seth Brundle wrote: »

Sure why not attack couples trying to conceive...

Catholic parish under fire for Christmas message condemning IVF
Facebook page of Tullamore’s Catholic parish in Offaly was taken down amid criticism

Sure what else would a celibate man do over the holidays?

It continued: “The process of IVF damages embryonic stem cells and thus life and is therefore completely, clearly and totally incompatible with our Catholic faith. For all believers in God, all life is sacred at all times.”

....laughable. However it's good to see that they felt the pressure and took it down.

Hotblack Desiato · 01-01-2020 11:56pm

OK so let's get this straignt :

- Condemn unmarried women who give birth.

- Condemn women who have abortions.

- Condemn couples who use contraception to not have "enough" or any kids (yet, somehow, a life of celibacy is virtuous.)

- Condemn couples who use IVF to try to conceive a child.

Can't win with this bunch.

Anyway let the likes of Irate Tullamore Parish Facebook Admin rant away to their heart's content. They're only driving more and more of their shrinking 'flock' away and alienating practically all young adults.

Odhinn · 23-02-2020 7:04pm

Even now, when you think it's all come out........

A confidential report by the Collaborative Forum on Mother and Baby Homes, seen by RTÉ News, found there was systematic discrimination against women and children of mixed-race families.

"In echoes of the systemic racial segregation in the Apartheid era of South Africa, mothers who were members of the mixed-race community within the various institutions report how on the one hand, they were racially profiled and their children were eugenically rated for likely intelligence based in part on the nuns' assessment 'of the intelligence of the natural mother and how 'negroid' the features of the infant were'," the report said.

"On the other hand, when it came to the child's records, the religious orders did not record the ethnicity of a child's parents and that the default description - African - was mainly used," it added.

https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2020/0223/1117125-mother-and-baby-homes/

Hotblack Desiato · 23-02-2020 9:52pm

Well the Yanks weren't going to pay $$$$ for brown babies, were they?

Anyway... in news which comes as a surprise to nobody at all, another leader of another order/cult within the RCC has been exposed as a serial sex abuser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Vanier

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/l-arche-founder-implicated-in-sexual-abuse-of-women-1.4181170

A report to be published on Tuesday will implicate the founder of L’Arche, which helps people with intellectual disabilities and has four communities in Ireland, in the sexual abuse of women.

The inquiry into L’Arche founder Jean Vanier was undertaken by UK-based GCPS Consulting, which “specialises in helping organisations ensure the safety of children and other vulnerable groups”.

It found that the abuse continued into the 2000s. L’Arche helps people with intellectual disabilities, but it is understood that none of the abused women was in that category. The organisation has declined to comment.

Mr Vanier, a devout Catholic, died last May aged 90. One month later, in June 2019, L’Arche announced it had “commissioned an external organisation to conduct a thorough and independent inquiry that will allow us to better understand our history”.

The original intention was to publish the report last September.

L’Arche, both in Ireland and internationally, is preparing people associated with it for the publication of the report on Tuesday. Senior L’Arche personnel in Paris and Ireland said on Friday they did not wish to comment at this time.

However, one source described the report’s findings concerning Mr Vanier as “devastating, just bloody devastating”.

Another source said the findings were “very disappointing”. It is understood that senior figures in the Catholic Church in Ireland have already been made aware of the report’s findings ahead of its publication.

L’Arche was founded near Paris in 1964 by Mr Vanier to look after people with learning difficulties.

It was named after the biblical story of Noah’s Ark and has more than 10,000 members in 149 communities in 39 countries worldwide. Since 1978 it has developed four communities in Ireland – in Dublin, Belfast, Cork and Kilkenny – where up to 60 people are cared for. It also provides day services to more than 100 others more.

In 1971 Mr Vanier also founded the interdenominational Faith and Light to help people with learning difficulties. It has more than 1,600 such communities in 80 countries, including 23 on the island of Ireland.

Odhinn · 28-02-2020 3:15pm

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The embattled Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo filed for bankruptcy protection Friday, taking another major step in its effort to recover from a clergy misconduct scandal that‘s been the basis for hundreds of lawsuits, Vatican intervention and the resignation of its bishop.

With its filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, the western New York diocese became the second in the state to file for Chapter 11 reorganization, and one of more than 20 dioceses to seek bankruptcy protection nationwide. Most recently, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, filed Feb. 19.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/buffalo-roman-catholic-diocese-seeks-bankruptcy-protection-69280984

Fair play to the Americans.

Hotblack Desiato · 28-02-2020 4:23pm

Whereas here we had a paedophile bailout courtesy of the taxpayer.

ohnonotgmail · 28-02-2020 9:53pm

Odhinn wrote: »

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/buffalo-roman-catholic-diocese-seeks-bankruptcy-protection-69280984

Fair play to the Americans.

Fair play for what? Allowing the RCC to declare bankruptcy allows it to protect its assets.

Odhinn · 28-02-2020 10:05pm

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

Fair play for what? Allowing the RCC to declare bankruptcy allows it to protect its assets.

Taking them to the cleaners, to the extent that they have to declare bankruptcy, which is a hell of a lot more consequences than they suffered here.

ohnonotgmail · 28-02-2020 10:11pm

Odhinn wrote: »

Taking them to the cleaners, to the extent that they have to declare bankruptcy, which is a hell of a lot more consequences than they suffered here.

declaring bankruptcy removes a lot of those consequences for the RCC

Odhinn · 28-02-2020 10:25pm

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

declaring bankruptcy removes a lot of those consequences for the RCC

....more consequences than they've faced here, however, which is my point.

eire4 · 01-03-2020 6:21am

Odhinn wrote: »

....more consequences than they've faced here, however, which is my point.

and a very valid and pertinent one I would add.

Ongoing religious scandals

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