From: ouko joachim omolo
Colleagues Home & Abroad Regional News
BY FR JOACHIM OMOLO OUKO, AJ
MIRUKA-NYAMIRA COUNTY
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2011
A probe by the Vatican into the handling of clerical child sex abuse in Ireland which will be published and not kept secret according to a senior aide to the Pope is not only going to reveal more how priests have been abusing children but also how Ireland will run short of priests since almost every priest may be found guilty of the offence.
The report of the Apostolic Visitation ordered by the Pope in 2010 is expected to be published next year February 2012 at the time the Vatican will hold an international conference of experts on sex crimes at the Pontifical Gregorian University.
The Congress “On the road to recovery and renewal” intends to help the church authorities to develop a system of guidelines for dealing with such crimes and their avoidance.
The probe will indicate that Ireland, which once exported Catholic clergy around the world, including Africa, is running out of priests. It means that the faithful will now be in deep trouble of getting priests to serve them.
The probe is announced in December when the Missionary Intention of the Pope is that children and young people may be messengers of the Gospel and that their dignity may always be respected and preserved from all violence and exploitation.
Pope’s intention is also considering millions of children throughout the world who are being bought and sold like chattel and used as sex slaves, which according to the experts is due to poverty, gender discrimination, war, organized crime, globalization, greed, traditions and beliefs, family dysfunction, and the drug trade.
The probe and Pope’s intention has been initiated at the time cases of child rights violation continue to rise along the Kenya-Tanzania border. The most common child rights violations include defilement, early marriages and sexual exploitation where underage girls are trafficked from Tanzania and rural Nyanza to work in towns as prostitutes.
A recent case in Gucha where a pastor was arrested for allegedly facilitating child trafficking has added a new dimension. The pastor who operates a church in Kenya and another branch in Tanzania was involved in the trafficking of an 11-year-old girl from Tanzania according to press report.
Investigations by The Underworld reveal the church has previously been involved in trafficking children from Tanzania to Kenya and handing them over to homes to work as house helps or farmhands.
Through church faithful, vulnerable children are identified and promised good education once they arrive in Kenya only to be handed over to families seeking house helps.
It is also at the time computer technician Ken Kes who was supposed to be repairing a laptop for a local priest as part of his work for a Catholic Diocese in Kansas City found pornographic images of young children.
By the time Kes got to a graphic photo of a little girl on a bed, exposed below the waist, his hands were shaking and he was in full panic. The laptop was for Father Shawn Ratigan, 46-year-old.
It is again at the time Brazilian prosecutors have charged a Roman Catholic priest with possession and exchange over the internet of pornographic images of mainly male adolescents in the latest such scandal to rock the Brazilian church.
Prosecutors in the north-eastern state of Alagoas early this year identified the priest as 41-year-old Benedikt Lennartz the parish priest in Craibas, 160km from the state capital. “An investigation (by federal police) of the priest’s residence revealed the existence of a computer hard drive with 1 300 photographs of explicit sex scenes or pornography involving adolescents, most of them males,” an official statement was quoted to have said.
The latest charge comes after three other Catholic clergymen in Alagoas were formally accused of paedophilia, one of them after being filmed in sexual acts with minors. The Brazilian cases were part of a larger wave of child abuse allegations that have raised questions about how the church hierarchy, including Pope Benedict XVI, has dealt with the problem of paedophile priests.
SBT television had earlier aired hidden camera footage in which father Luis Marques Barbosa, aged 82, was seen having sexual relations with a male youth.
Although Bishop Valerio Breda of Penedo, Alagoas called for “justice and reparation” if the accusations of sexual abuse were confirmed, sexual abuse among the clergy in Brazil is rampant.
According to the SBT network, the altar boy had been working for the priest for more than four years. Monsignor Luis Marques Barbosa, Raimundo Gomes, 52, and Father Edilson Duarte, 42, have been suspended by church authorities for allegedly having sexual relations with boys and young men.
Apart from the probe, the Vatican has also directed bishops around the world to develop a comprehensive guide on combating sexual harassment by next year. American Organization of survivors of the clergy has already condemned the move, because it provides no sanctions for bishops who violate their own rules.
With consistent abuse it will also mean that the Catholic Church in Ireland is coming to terms with the fact that almost no one in country wants to be a priest any more. Even though Ireland still has thousands of priests, the fact that they are ageing and many are in ill-health, is threatening the future of the Church in Ireland.
The Irish Catholic newspaper estimated in 2008 that 160 priests have died in the past year. The paper’s verdict that this is a crisis which is affecting morale around the country is readily confirmed by many clerics. The irony is that Protestant churches report no such problems.
Although vocation to priesthood in Africa is said to be booming, the continent is not also spared of the abuse according to Archbishop of Johannesburg Buti Tlhagale. He said last year that sexual abuse by Catholic priests is a scourge in Africa.
According to the bishop it simply means that the misbehavior of priests in Africa has not been exposed to the same glare of the media as in other parts of the world. Given that Africa is one of the fastest growing regions for the Church and ever more important as the number of practicing Catholics in the developed world declines, it means the faithful will suffer most if such probes are done in Africa.
The abuse has reached into the climax to the extent that Vatican and Catholic bishops in Europe and the United States will no longer protest against what they have been saying is a media campaign against the Church.
The probe will mean that all the priests would be investigated of the abuse and those having mistresses and fathering children- If found in any category of this order it will mean that the particular priest would be sacked immediately. It is believed that pedophilia of priests is closely related to their homosexuality.
The probe is also coming at the time two German lawyers have initiated charges against Pope Benedict XVI at the International Criminal Court (ICC). As one of the reasons for the charges they referred also to the “strong suspicion” that Joseph Ratzinger, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, covered up the sexual abuse of children and youths and protected the perpetrators.
Starting in the 1990s, a series of criminal cases and Irish government enquiries established that hundreds of priests had abused thousands of children in previous decades. In many cases, the abusing priests were moved to other parishes to avoid embarrassment or a scandal, assisted by senior clergy.
By 2010 a number of in-depth judicial reports had been published, but with relatively few prosecutions. In March 2010, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a pastoral letter of apology to address all of the abuse that was carried out by Catholic clergy.
On Monday, May 31, 2010, Pope Benedict established a formal panel to investigate the sex abuse scandal, emphasizing that it could serve as a healing mechanism for the country and its Catholics.
On Wednesday, July 20, 2011, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny launched a blistering attack on the Vatican, accusing it of “dysfunction, disconnection and elitism” in its failure to tackle clerical child sex abuse.
However, the ordination of a married father of two as a priest by the Catholic Church in Germany recently after receiving an exemption to priestly celibacy from Pope Benedict XVI sheds light that very soon churches in Europe and USA will be served by married priests as one way of curbing the abuse and shortage of priests.
Harm Klueting, 61, a theologian and former Protestant pastor, will not have to adhere to the Church’s celibacy law for the duration of his marriage according to the Diocese of Cologne. Harm was a professor of theology at universities in Cologne and Switzerland and his wife served as clerics in the Lutheran church before they converted to Catholicism several years ago.
Since then, Klueting’s wife, whose name was not given, has become a nun in the Carmelite order. Klueting was ordained by Archbishop Joachim Cardinal Meisner during a private ceremony in Cologne. The case was so rare that it required the special permission of Pope Benedict XVI (Reuters).
Klueting is not the first married priest in the Catholic Church. A little known law enacted during the reign of Pope Pius XII in 1950s allows married clergy from other Christian faiths to be ordained priests. The guidelines are strict, though and each case must be approved by the pope.
Last year, a married father of four was ordained as a priest in Regensburg and married priests have also been ordained in Hamburg, according to the Associate Press.
The recent ordination of married men comes as the church is loosening its rules to make it easier for Anglicans to convert to Catholicism.
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