So, ATSers, do you believe that the Vatican's sex crime investigator's transfer was related to Sevile and/or the UK paedo rings? Did the investigator know and not say anything, or had he reported his damning discovery, but the Vatican chose to ignore his evidence?
I think the Vatican chose to ignore his findings and had to give him a "promotion" in order to keep him quiet.
Scicluna was named the Vatican's promoter of justice in 2002, a year after then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger pushed through church legislation requiring bishops to send all credible abuse allegations to his office for review and instructions on how to proceed.
Ratzinger, now pope, took over after realizing that bishops were simply moving abusive priests from parish to parish rather than prosecuting them under church law, and would continue to do so unless Rome intervened.
It appears to me that the Bishops may have still been transferring church paedos instead of reporting them so they could face prosecution.
The investigator was obviously good at his job.
In his decade on the job, Scicluna became something of the face of the Holy See's efforts to show it was serious about ending decades of sex crimes and cover-up by the church hierarchy. Short, round and affable, with tiny hands and a garrulous laugh, Scicluna, 53, didn't speak out frequently, since much of his work was done behind closed doors, covered by pontifical secret.
But when he did, it carried weight.
"Scicluna embodied the zero-tolerance line on sex abuse," veteran Vatican reporter Andrea Tornielli wrote recently.
His actions, too, often spoke louder than words.
"Scicluna did a remarkable job," said Juan Vaca, a former priest who was the first abuse victim Scicluna interviewed in the long-delayed investigation of the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the once-exalted founder of the now-disgraced Legion of Christ religious order. In the years that followed Maciel's church condemnation, "he continued to prosecute other similar cases with the same integrity," Vaca told AP.
However, he's made it clear that he's not going to stop working on finding and prosecuting church paedophiles.
Scicluna insisted he not only will continue to work with the Holy See on abuse issues, but will do so now wielding the authority of a bishop, a job he considers his vocation after marking his first quarter-century as a priest last year.
"So I can tell bishops to listen to me now as a fellow bishop. That gives me in the Roman Catholic Church a qualitative leap into what I say." he said.
Yet, it appears as though the Vatican will continue to cover up sex crimes no matter what.
In fact, in recent years, civil law has begun going where the Vatican has so far refused, prosecuting bishops and high-ranking church officials for covering up the crimes of the priests in their care and failing to report suspected abuse to police.
Considering all the sex crimes involving powerful people within the UK and the Vatican, I believe that they are making a combined orchestrated effort to protect each other and anyone who doesn't agree with them is sent elsewhere so their voices become the equivalent of a whisper.
In closing,
Yet at last week's national meeting of U.S. bishops in Baltimore, church leaders made no public comment on Finn's failure to follow the bishops' own policy on reporting suspected child abuse to civil authorities. He remains a bishop and participated fully in the meeting. Also attending was Cardinal Justin Rigali, who retired as archbishop of Philadelphia in disgrace after failing to fix an archdiocese that was faulted by the same grand jury indictment that accused Lynn of endangering children.
Scicluna acknowledged that the pope has yet to discipline any bishop for negligence in handling an abuse case. While Cardinal Bernard Law resigned in 2002 after the abuse scandal erupted in his Boston archdiocese, he wasn't sanctioned and was in fact named archpriest of one of the Vatican's pre-eminent Rome basilicas - a cushy promotion to his critics.
Church law provides for bishops to be punished for negligence, and in the past year Benedict has forcibly removed a handful of bishops for mismanagement and doctrinal dissent in a hint that he may be more willing than ever to get rid of problem bishops. The issue is theologically problematic, though, because bishops are considered by divine right to be the stewards of their dioceses.
"The rules are there but they need to be applied" when it comes to disciplining bishops who botch abuse cases, Scicluna said. "People make mistakes. They need to repent and change their ways. But if they are not able to repent and change their ways, they should not be bishops."
hosted.ap.org
(visit the link for the full news article)
edit on 18-11-2012 by Afterthought because: (no reason given)
