From: People For Peace
Colleagues Home & Abroad Regional News
BY FR JOACHIM OMOLO OUKO, AJ
NAIROBI-KENYA
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2012
Although the Vatican has dismissed Pope Benedict XVI’s assassination threat document, the newspaper that published a confidential document dated December 30, 2011 which was apparently sent by retired Colombian cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos to the Vatican warning of unspecified plans to kill the pope, the fact that he has made many enemies since he became a pope is reason enough to fear for his life.
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According to the document the Pope will die within a year. The sensational prediction was allegedly made by Cardinal Paolo Romeo, the archbishop of Palermo in Sicily, on a recent visit to China.
Cardinal Romeo reportedly made the startling prediction of the Pope’s death during a trip to China in November 2011. He seemed so sure of the fact that the people he spoke with, including Italian businessmen and Chinese representatives of the Catholic Church, were convinced that he was talking about an assassination attempt.
The report was written in German, apparently to limit the number of people within the Vatican who would understand it if it was inadvertently leaked. The story was broken on Friday by an Italian daily, Il Fatto Quotidiano, with the headline “Plot against the Pope – he will die within 12 months”.
“During his talks in China, Cardinal Romeo predicted the death of Benedict XVI within 12 months. His remarks were expressed with such certainty and resolution that the people he was speaking to thought, with a sense of alarm, that an attack on the Pope’s life was being planned,” the paper reported.
Cardinal Romeo also named Benedict’s XVI likely successor as Cardinal Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan – meaning the papacy would return to an Italian after the German Benedict and his Polish predecessor, John Paul II.
The most recent attempt on a pope’s life was in 1981 when John Paul II was shot and critically wounded in St Peter’s Square by Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman with links to a shadowy militant group called the Grey Wolves.
It has been claimed that the assassination attempt was backed by the KGB and Bulgarian secret service, in retaliation for the pope’s support for the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in his native Poland and his opposition to Communism.
For Benedict, the immediate enemies are the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests who have accused him for cover ups. They have gone so far as to submit a formal complaint to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
According to the document filed by CCR, the pope, as head of the Catholic Church, is ultimately responsible for the sexual abuse of children by priests and for the cover-ups of that abuse.
The group argues that he and others have “direct and superior responsibility” for the crimes of those ranked below them, similar to a military chain of command.
The others named in the complaint are Angelo Sodano, dean of the College of Cardinals and former Vatican secretary of state; Cardinal Tarcissio Bertone, now secretary of state, who previously served at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the organisation tasked with handling sexual abuse cases under the pope when he was Cardinal Ratzinger; and Cardinal William Lavada, head of the CDF, whose handling of previous sexual abuse cases has been criticised in the past.
According to Amnesty International Watch, the Holy See is obligated under international law to protect children’s human rights, ensure that perpetrators of child abuse are brought to justice and provide reparations to victims.
“The Holy See must ensure that Catholic Church officials cooperate with criminal investigations, open up records of its internal inquiries, and offer an apology and reparations to all survivors of abuse.”
Amnesty International also called on The Holy See to stop opposing the recognition of sexual and reproductive rights and to support women and men to exercise these rights free from coercion, discrimination and violence.
The organization wrote to Pope Benedict in June 2010 urging full compliance by the Holy See with its international obligations and seeking information on measures taken on this issue, but received no response
The Pope has also been accused of failing to act on accusations of abuse in previous roles as a cardinal in his native Germany, and in Rome. The Vatican has dismissed these claims as “unfounded insinuations”.
Pope’s former archdiocese acknowledged it transferred a suspected pedophile priest while Benedict was in charge and criticism is mounting over a 2001 Vatican directive he penned instructing bishops to keep abuse cases secret.
The revelations have put the spotlight on Benedict’s handling of abuse claims both when he was archbishop of Munich from 1977–1982 and then the prefect of the Vatican office that deals with such crimes — a position he held until his 2005 election as pope.
The Munich archdiocese admitted that it had allowed a priest suspected of having abused a child to return to pastoral work in the 1980s, while Benedict was archbishop. It stressed that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger didn’t know about the transfer and that it had been decided by a lower-ranking official.
The Catholic Church in Germany has been shaken in recent days by revelations of a series of sexual abuse cases- Close to 100 priests and members of the laity have been suspected of abuse in recent years.
Sarandon, who won an Academy Award for her role in the 1995 anti-death penalty film “Dead Man Walking,” has also said she had sent a copy of the book on which the movie is based to the Pope.
“Susan Sarandon’s ignorance is willful: those who have hatred in their veins are not interested in the truth. The fact is that Joseph Ratzinger (the Pope) was conscripted at the age of 14 into the Hitler Youth, along with every other young German boy.
During much of the Nazi era, Joseph Ratzinger lived with his family in Traunstein, Germany, a small and staunchly Catholic town between Munich and Salzburg. During World War I there was a prisoner-of-war camp located here where, ironically, Adolf Hitler worked between December 1918 and March 1919. The town is located near the region of Austria which Hitler came from.
Resistance to the Nazis was dangerous and difficult, but not impossible. Elizabeth Lohner, a Traunstein resident whose brother-in-law was sent to Dachau as a conscientious objector, has been quoted as saying, “It was possible to resist, and those people set an example for others. The Ratzingers were young and had made a different choice.”
Joseph Ratzinger joined the Hitler Youth in 1941 when, according to him and his supporters, it became compulsory for all German boys. Millions of Germans were in a position similar to that of Joseph Ratzinger and his family.
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