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By Kay Ebeling
If you are not specifically Googling “pope” and especially “pope sex abuse” this week, you probably won’t hear or read much about the thousands of felonies committed by pedophiles and other sexual predators operating as priests in the American Catholic Church the last 50 years. In its “complete coverage” of the papal press event, the New York Times does have an article about Catholic school enrollment being half what it was in the 1950s but you have to read between the lines to say, Thank you God that Catholic parents are getting their children out of danger.
Don’t expect mainstream media to do much more than respond to press releases and for that I’m grateful to VOTF and SNAP*. In fact the stream of demands from advocates in the past week may have caused the pontiff to change his upcoming speeches to at least acknowledge the crimes, crimes like these:
Sodomy with children. Men grabbed altar boys and forced oral sex on them before going out to serve Mass. Regularly. Altar boy rape before Mass shows up over and over again in the documents that have come out so far. In one LA coastal town, the church had a carnival every Saturday plus Catechism class, and a network of pedophile priests picked children up from the carnival rides and forced them into nearby rooms to have sex, on church property, when the children were supposed to be learning church doctrine. Instead the children were developing their gag response. Children sexualized before age 10 while staring at the stained glass and statues of saints to take their minds off the horror.
On Saturday Yahoo reported: “Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Pope's second-in-command, said the church had already 'responded with great dignity' to the situation, and added that the ‘clamour created in the US around this scandal is really unbearable.'" On Sunday morning, Reuters quoted Fox News saying Bertone seems to have changed his tone: "The pope will talk about it -- talk about it in a specific way," (in an upcoming interview on Fox) said Cardinal Bertone.
But when you go to the actual front pages of mainstream press, as usual, thousands of felonies aided and abetted in the Catholic Church are barely mentioned, and only then as an upsetting dollar figure. The New York Times refers to the thousands of felonies in its Page One Sunday piece as “the sex-abuse scandals that racked the church and are now costing it millions (sic) of dollars in legal fees and settlements with victims.”
That's a factual error in the New York Times, what was once the “official record.”
The Times itself reported $1.6 billion dollars last week, today AP says it is $2 billion the church has paid out in settlements. No one knows how much more the Vatican has paid out to PR consultants and the legions of law firms attached to each case.
And once again it’s all about money.
No one mentions the hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives were damaged by predator priests. Even the Times’ use of the word “scandal” implies an element of gossip, like something bad happened and then the media turned it into something worse.
Mainstream media reporters today do little more than read press releases and make a few phone calls for quotes to file their stories. They are understaffed in corporate owned news organizations. If you want real reporting you have to turn to places like City of Angels Blog, rapidly becoming City of Angels Network (CAN) with webasting of videos.
Here is a place to put comments at the New York Times, because the religion reporter apparently is submitting questions to the Pope’s office and getting them “answered”
Copy and paste into blogger and go down to comments:
Instead of acknowledging the thousands of felonies and crime victims in the United States, the Associated Press article today has this quote:
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, notes that "religion is deeply rooted in American life despite the separation of church and state."
Reuters reports the Pope brings a message of peace. However, security is so tight that a religious sikh leader could not attend any papal event because he would have to remove his ceremonial sword.
Detroit Free Press: Hundreds flocking to see the Pope because “they don’t know much about the pope.” You will hear that message repeated throughout the coming week: "Americans do not know much about this pope" and then biographical information with a lot of stock footage.
http://cityofangels4.blogspot.com
Wordsmith working in TV production in Los Angeles. Also free lance journalist with an active blog. Old enough to have demonstrated against the Vietnam War but still young enough to dance.
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I live in the heart of America, and am haunted by the saying:
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Understanding the Pope I'm about halfway through a recently released book called A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom, published 2008 by Mark Gregory Pegg. Two particular characters might even sound familiar: "Amaury de Monfont (died 1228) Incompetent and uninspiring eldest son of Simon de Monfort. He succeeded his father in 1218 and conducted the holy war in a determinedly woeful manner. Easily manipulated by the pope, the count of Toulouse, and the king of France." See: Bush, Carter, Popes And Jews at http://GreatRedDragon.com :: by
Edward Ulysses Cate (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 221 comments)
on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 12:05:20 PM
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50% of current priests are gay. The Pope has NOT dealt with the fact that approximately half of the priesthood in American and much of the world is gay. When you have such a high percentage of priests who are gay, you will have trouble. That may not be politically correct to say, but it is the truth. Not that all gay men, by any means, are interested in underage children, but most of the "pedophile" acts involved young males between 12 and 18, and that is behavior that a higher percentage of gay males engage in than straight males engage in with underage females. There is NO dogma that requires priests to be unmarried. In the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church, most priests are married. In the Orthodox Church (whose priesthood the Catholic Church recognizes as valid) most priests are married. For the first thousand years of the Catholic Church most priests were married and for the first few hundred years most bishops and many popes were married. With the great shortage of priests and the high rate of gays in the priesthood all Catholics should be demanding that the rules preventing married men from being priests and bishops be ended at once. There is NO legitimate reason to continue with the Dark Ages policy of allowing only unmarried men in the Western Rite of the Catholic Church. After my wife died of cancer, I entered the deaconate program of the Catholic Church. What I saw was sad. The priest in charge of our program had served time in a Federal prison for child porn possession (boys as young as eight years old being raped by adult men were some of the "topics" of the porn found in his rectory). Many of the professors in the program were gay. I found that the gay priests were usually the ones who had a theology that was simply so far out that sometimes it could not even be called Christian in the broad sense of the word, much less Catholic in the specific sense of the word. If the Pope truly wants to clean up the pedophile mess in the Catholic Church he needs to allow married priests and bishops. That is not a absolute cure, but having a much larger number of straight men in religious life, including men with families with young children, will go a long way to forcing the pedophiles out of the priestly ministry and in keeping future pedophiles out. Stirling by
Lord Stirling (25 articles, 0 quicklinks, 4 diaries, 141 comments)
on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 12:13:16 PM
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Wordsmith working in TV production in Los Angeles. Also free lance journalist with an active blog. Old enough to have demonstrated against the Vietnam War but still young enough to dance. |
Author's response The point is the Catholic CHurch aided and abetted thousands of pedophiles. 4500 is the number identified in a database at http://bishopaccountability.org you can start from A to Z, 4500 identified with enough credible evidence to be included. For each of the 14,000 plaintiffs who've gone through civil court and gotten settlements there are likely 10 for each one, as less than one in ten come forward. To save the family embarrassment, because family are still Catholic, because they don't want to be FOUGHT by church attorneys. The part of the story yet to come out is how vicious the attorneys defending archdioceses were to the plaintiffs in every city, without exception. So much still has not come out about these crimes. Kay Ebeling Author of this article http://cityofangels4.blogspot.com by
Kay Ebeling (32 articles, 0 quicklinks, 7 diaries, 5 comments)
on Tuesday, April 15, 2008 at 6:10:32 PM
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