From: People For Peace
Colleagues Home & Abroad Regional News
BY FR JOACHIM OMOLO OUKO, AJ
NAIROBI-KENYA
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2012
As Catholic leaders from around the world meet in Rome from Monday through Thursday for a conference to combat child abuse by clergy, the big challenge is whether such meetings will end the abuse.
Pope Benedict XVI has called for a major renewal of the Catholic Church as the Vatican began a summit on preventing child abuse.’ The church has been rocked in recent years by thousands of paedophilia scandals, some of them dating back decades.
The Vatican is reluctant to change celibacy law drawn from the code of canon law -277 promulgated in 1983 § 1. The law states that clerics are obliged to observe perfect and perpetual continence for the sake of the kingdom of heaven and therefore are bound to celibacy.
Since celibacy according to the Catholic church teaching is a special gift of God by which sacred ministers can adhere more easily to Christ with an undivided heart and are able to dedicate themselves more freely to the service of God and humanity is one of the strongest reason the law cannot be changed.
Paragraph- § 2 requires that clerics are to behave with due prudence towards persons whose company can endanger their obligation to observe continence or give rise to scandal among the faithful whereas § 3 requires that the diocesan bishop is competent to establish more specific norms concerning this matter and to pass judgment in particular cases concerning the observance of this obligation.
The symposium which is expected to end tomorrow (Thursday Feb 9) is taking place at the time the Archbishop of New York, Edward M. Egan, has issued a letter of the apology to be read at Mass for the sexual abuse of minors by his priests in the New York Archdiocese.
“It is clear that today we have a much better understanding of this problem,” the archbishop wrote. “If in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.”
During then-Bishop Egan’s reign in Bridgeport, from 1988 to 2000, dozens of people came forward with claims of sex abuse by priests, some of it having occurred recently.
It is also at the same time about 550 people are asking for restitution for alleged sexual abuse by clergy in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee — more than in any of the other U.S. dioceses that have filed for bankruptcy protection, according to a lawyer involved in the Milwaukee case. The Milwaukee Archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection last year.
The archdiocese has paid more than $30 million in settlements and other court costs related to allegations of clergy abuse and more than a dozen suits against it have been halted because of the bankruptcy proceedings.
One priest alone is accused of abusing some 200 boys at a suburban school for deaf students from 1950 to 1974. The archdiocese had only $4.6 million in assets to be applied to claims in 2010.
The other seven Catholic dioceses in the U.S. that have filed for bankruptcy since the clergy abuse scandal erupted in 2002 in Boston are in Davenport, Iowa; Fairbanks, Alaska; Portland, Ore.; San Diego; Spokane, Wash.; Tucson, Ariz.; and Wilmington, Del. Two other religious orders have also filed for bankruptcy.
Of the seven other dioceses that also filed for bankruptcy, the number of claims ranged from about 40 to 250. Payouts in the other bankruptcy cases have varied based on the severity of the abuse and the quality of the diocese’s insurance coverage.
For example, cases in Southern California yielded an average of about $1.2 million per claimant, while the amount was far less in Fairbanks, Alaska, where less money was available.
Although it is not known clearly why most of these priests have sex with boys and not girls, according to the psychologist’s published books which include: “Battle for Normality: Self-Therapy of Homosexuality” and “On the Origins and Treatment of Homosexuality” by Van den Aardweg who has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality since the organization was founded in 1992, the “orientation” toward boys or adolescents in priests who have molested youngsters has never originated during their seminary or priesthood years.
In some cases it may initially have been more or less latent, weak; but then, there was always this obvious gap in his feelings, the absence of normal heterosexual feelings.
In certain circumstances, confronted with some youth, or during a period of disillusionment or loneliness, the slumbering homosexual longing may be inflamed. Van den Aardweg is also the European editor of the “Empirical Journal of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior.”
In his interview with ZENIT recently he said homosexuality is more than a sexual problem. It is part of a rather specific variant of personality immaturity, and among its most frequent symptoms are a lack of character strength, inner loneliness, and difficulties in forming mature bonds of friendship, anxiety and depression.
Clergy sexual abuse has been a reality in the Catholic Church not just since 1984 but throughout its history. This terrible dark side was always known by a few but in 1984 it became known to the Catholic and general public, especially with the shocking revelations from Boston in January 2002. Youthful victims generally do not reveal their abuse because of fear, guilt, and confusion and fear that no one will believe them.
Bishops and their representatives from 100 countries and the leaders of 33 religious orders are taking part, as well as the Vatican’s anti-paedophilia prosecutor Charles Scicluna and one abuse victim, Ireland’s Marie Collins.
The symposium comes after the release of a new book this week that quotes Vatican sources as saying the future pope had been concerned about abuse as far back as the 1980s when he was the Vatican’s top enforcer.
Bernard Lecomte’s “The Last Secrets of the Vatican” claims that the then Joseph Ratzinger had noted a “general lack of responsibility” in the Vatican hierarchy and had called for stricter punishment for abusers.
The Vatican is now requesting that all national Catholic bishops’ conferences must submit guidelines by May on how they propose rooting out abusers and cooperating with law enforcement on prevention.
Archbishop Scicluna warned that some of the bishops’ conferences, particularly in Asia, were experiencing difficulties in this task because of “cultural differences” over what exactly constitutes abuse.
This week’s event at Gregorian University in Rome features the launch of a three-year program aimed at setting up “robust procedures” to handle allegations of abuse, according to organizers.
A U.S.-based victims’ group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, dismissed the event as “window dressing” on Monday, arguing that the very same ‘experts’ and church officials who bear responsibility for the continued global cover-up of clergy child sex crimes are the ones to deliberate on the matter.
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