Calls for royal commission over alleged cover-up of Catholic abuse

[Guest]

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/charged-pr...707-21nst.html

The NSW Attorney-General, Greg Smith, is under fire for letting a senior staff member with links to Father Finian Egan block the release of government documents relating to the alleged paedophile priest.

Damien Tudehope, Mr Smith's chief of staff, refused access to the documents despite once having worked as Father Egan's solicitor. The priest was arrested in May and charged with multiple sex offences against boys and girls stretching back decades.

Mr Tudehope's brother Anthony Tudehope, a barrister, attended the police station with the Catholic priest when he was charged.


"Overriding public interest against disclosure" ... Damien Tudehope.

Mr Smith used to attend Father Egan's church in Carlingford and thanked him in his inaugural speech to Parliament for his ''Irish wit and pastoral devotion to his flock''.

Despite the web of links, it was Damien Tudehope who ruled that an application lodged by the NSW opposition under the Government Information (Public Access) Act was out of bounds. In his response, dated June 14, Mr Tudehope told Labor MP Adam Searle that documents relating to Father Egan existed, but would not be released.

The documents come under the categories of ''formal and informal briefing notes concerning Father Finian Egan delivered to or held by the Attorney-General'' and ''reports from the Director of Public Prosecutions'' in relation to Father Egan.


Mr Tudehope said there was an ''overriding public interest against disclosure'', saying it would result in the release of material ''provided to the minister in confidence''.

The Opposition Leader, John Robertson, called on the Premier, Barry O'Farrell, to take decisions on freedom-of-information requests out of the hands of people who know the accused priest. ''Why on earth would the Attorney-General think it was appropriate for Damien Tudehope to make this decision?'' he said. ''The Premier should step in and review this decision immediately.''

Mr O'Farrell's office declined to comment directly but said there was a ''range of mechanisms of appeal'' for declined requests.

A spokesman for Mr Smith said: ''The chief of staff acted on the advice of the Crown Solicitor.''

The question of Mr Smith's support for his former priest was raised earlier in the year when reports emerged he had dismissed the claims of one alleged victim as being motivated by ''getting $1 million out of the church''. Mr Smith has said that he does not recall making the remark.

Father Egan is on bail and has not entered a plea to the charges.
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Good ole Libs, up to their necks protecting the paedophiles.

Chook.

[Guest]

John Robertson should be reminded that he backed Nathan Rees for Premier. Nathan Rees, of course, was Milton Orkopoulos' chief of staff while he was drugging and arseraping kids in his office.

I can tell you with absolute authority that everyone knew what was going on and did nothing about it.

[Guest]

http://www.smh.com.au/world/archbish...708-21pkh.html

THE Vatican's most senior representative in Australia failed to co-operate with a government inquiry into child sexual abuse in Ireland and once invoked diplomatic immunity in a civil suit in which a victim was suing the church.

Archbishop Giuseppe Lazzarotto assumed the job of apostolic nuncio in 2008, a role equivalent to the Vatican's ambassador.

He had served in the same role in Ireland but left before the government released an inquiry into sexual abuse in the Dublin archdiocese, the 2009 Murphy Report. The report criticised Archbishop Lazzarotto for not responding to a 2007 request to provide the inquiry with evidence of abuse.

Colm O'Gorman, a former Irish senator and now the executive director of Amnesty International in Ireland, told the Herald Archbishop Lazzarotto invoked diplomatic immunity, which caused him to drop a lawsuit against the Vatican.

Mr O'Gorman launched the suit against his local diocese and the Vatican's representatives in Ireland, seeking compensation for being repeatedly raped as a teenager by Father Sean Fortune, Ireland's most notorious paedophile priest.

He dropped the suit against the Vatican in 2003 after Archbishop Lazzarotto's lawyers obtained a certificate of diplomatic immunity.

''I was told in no uncertain terms that having secured diplomatic immunity, the nuncio would assert it in court,'' Mr O'Gorman said. ''His lawyers told me that if I pursued the case, they would use that immunity to have it thrown out and then seek full legal costs from me.''

Mr O'Gorman received a financial settlement in the case with his local diocese.

In a written statement, the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference said the church had offered full co-operation with the Irish government inquiry through the Dublin archdiocese.

A spokeswoman did not specifically respond to questions about the use of diplomatic immunity: ''Archbishop Lazzarotto, on behalf of the Holy See, accepted the proposal that the case be discontinued by mutual consent.''

A spokesman for the Apostolic Nunciature in Canberra said the Vatican's representatives had no role in investigating sexual abuse cases.
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Gotta love those lying, two-faced, corrupt, kiddy fiddling catholics. They'll do anything to protect their pedo network.

Chook.

[Guest]

The real reason Ratzinger is resigning.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/societ...12-2e9jb.html?

Citing wavering strength of mind and body, Pope Benedict XVI announced his decision to resign from the papacy at the end of February. He will be the first Pope to abdicate in nearly six centuries. In 2010, as allegations of paedophilic priests continued to swirl, the late Christopher Hitchens decried individual and institutional corruption within the church's sacred walls. His original article is reprinted below.

On March 10 [2010], the chief exorcist of the Vatican, the Reverend Gabriele Amorth (who has held this demanding post for 25 years), was quoted as saying that "the Devil is at work inside the Vatican", and that "when one speaks of 'the smoke of Satan' in the holy rooms, it is all true – including these latest stories of violence and paedophilia". This can perhaps be taken as confirmation that something horrible has indeed been going on in the holy precincts, though most inquiries show it to have a perfectly good material explanation.

Concerning the most recent revelations about the steady complicity of the Vatican in the ongoing – indeed endless – scandal of child rape, a few days later a spokesman for the Holy See made a concession in the guise of a denial. It was clear, said the Reverend Federico Lombardi, that an attempt was being made "to find elements to involve the Holy Father personally in issues of abuse". He stupidly went on to say that "those efforts have failed".

He was wrong twice. In the first place, nobody has had to strive to find such evidence: It has surfaced, as it was bound to do. In the second place, this extension of the awful scandal to the topmost level of the Roman Catholic Church is a process that has only just begun. Yet it became in a sense inevitable when the College of Cardinals elected, as the vicar of Christ on Earth, the man chiefly responsible for the original cover-up. (One of the sanctified voters in that "election" was Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, a man who had already found the jurisdiction of Massachusetts a bit too warm for his liking.)

There are two separate but related matters here: First, the individual responsibility of the Pope in one instance of this moral nightmare and, second, his more general and institutional responsibility for the wider lawbreaking and for the shame and disgrace that goes with it. The first story is easily told, and it is not denied by anybody. In 1979, an 11-year-old German boy identified as Wilfried F. was taken on a vacation trip to the mountains by a priest. After that, he was administered alcohol, locked in his bedroom, stripped naked, and forced to suck the penis of his confessor. (Why do we limit ourselves to calling this sort of thing "abuse"?) The offending cleric was transferred from Essen to Munich for "therapy" by a decision of then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, and assurances were given that he would no longer have children in his care. But it took no time for Ratzinger's deputy, Vicar General Gerhard Gruber, to return him to "pastoral" work, where he soon enough resumed his career of sexual assault.

It is, of course, claimed, and it will no doubt later be partially un-claimed, that Ratzinger himself knew nothing of this second outrage. I quote, here, from the Reverend Thomas Doyle, a former employee of the Vatican embassy in Washington and an early critic of the Catholic Church's sloth in responding to child-rape allegations. "Nonsense," he says. "Pope Benedict is a micromanager. He's the old style. Anything like that would necessarily have been brought to his attention. Tell the vicar general to find a better line. What he's trying to do, obviously, is protect the Pope."

This is common or garden stuff, very familiar to American and Australian and Irish Catholics whose children's rape and torture, and the cover-up of same by the tactic of moving rapists and torturers from parish to parish, has been painstakingly and comprehensively exposed. It's on a level with the recent belated admission by the Pope's brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, that while he knew nothing about sexual assault at the choir school he ran between 1964 and 1994, now that he remembers it, he is sorry for his practice of slapping the boys around.

Very much more serious is the role of Joseph Ratzinger, before the church decided to make him supreme leader, in obstructing justice on a global scale. After his promotion to cardinal, he was put in charge of the so-called "Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" (formerly known as the Inquisition).

In 2001, Pope John Paul II placed this department in charge of the investigation of child rape and torture by Catholic priests. In May of that year, Ratzinger issued a confidential letter to every bishop. In it, he reminded them of the extreme gravity of a certain crime. But that crime was the reporting of the rape and torture. The accusations, intoned Ratzinger, were only treatable within the church's own exclusive jurisdiction. Any sharing of the evidence with legal authorities or the press was utterly forbidden. Charges were to be investigated "in the most secretive way ... restrained by a perpetual silence ... and everyone ... is to observe the strictest secret which is commonly regarded as a secret of the Holy Office ... under the penalty of excommunication." (My italics). Nobody has yet been excommunicated for the rape and torture of children, but exposing the offence could get you into serious trouble. And this is the church that warns us against moral relativism! (See, for more on this appalling document, two reports in the London Observer of April 24, 2005, by Jamie Doward.)

Not content with shielding its own priests from the law, Ratzinger's office even wrote its own private statute of limitations. The church's jurisdiction, claimed Ratzinger, "begins to run from the day when the minor has completed the 18th year of age" and then lasts for 10 more years. Daniel Shea, the attorney for two victims who sued Ratzinger and a church in Texas, correctly describes that latter stipulation as an obstruction of justice. "You can't investigate a case if you never find out about it. If you can manage to keep it secret for 18 years plus 10, the priest will get away with it."

The next item on this grisly docket will be the revival of the long-standing allegations against the Reverend Marcial Maciel, founder of the ultra-reactionary Legion of Christ, in which sexual assault seems to have been almost part of the liturgy. Senior ex-members of this secretive order found their complaints ignored and overridden by Ratzinger during the 1990s, if only because Father Maciel had been praised by the then-Pope John Paul II as an "efficacious guide to youth".

And now behold the harvest of this long campaign of obfuscation. The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil – a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice – and speedily at that.
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The catholic church is corrupt from the top down. The vatican precinct is nothing but a jusridictional and political haven for kiddie fiddlers hidden from prosecution by the church and Ratzinger was up to his lying neck in the cover ups.

He won't be but Ratzinger should be prosecuted, found guilty, jailed and raped so he knows what it feels like the piece of shit.

Chook.

[Guest]

Gay sex parties, embezzlement, blackmail, the moraless fibre of the vatican exposed.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/vatican-...222-2ev0d.html

Pope Benedict XVI resigned after an internal investigation informed him about a web of blackmail, corruption and gay sex in the Vatican, Italian media reports say.

Three cardinals were asked by Benedict to verify allegations of financial impropriety, cronyism and corruption exposed in the so-called VatiLeaks affair.

The cardinals were said to have uncovered an underground gay network, whose members organise sexual meetings in several venues in Rome and Vatican City.

On December 17, 2012, they handed the pontiff two red-leather bound volumes, almost 300 pages long, containing "an exact map of the mischief and the bad fish" inside the Holy See, La Repubblica said.

Dark times for the Vatican ... claims of a gay sex and blackmailing scandal.

"It was on that day, with those papers on his desk, that Benedict XVI took the decision he had mulled over for so long," said the centre-left newspaper. It said its article was the first of a series.

Panorama, a conservative weekly, did not speculate about the motives behind Benedict's resignation, but its story about the contents of the confidential report was broadly similar.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi refused to "run after fantasies and opinions" and warned reporters: "Don't expect comments or rebuttals of what is being said on this issue."

La Repubblica quoted a man described as "very close" to the authors as saying the information it contained was "all about the breach of the sixth and seven commandments" - which say "thou shalt not commit adultery" and "thou shalt not steal".

The cardinals were said to have uncovered an underground gay network, whose members organise sexual meetings in several venues in Rome and Vatican City, leaving them prone to blackmail.

The secret report also delves into suspect dealings at the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), the Vatican's bank, where a new chairman was appointed last week after a nine-month vacancy, La Repubblica said, without going into details.

The newspaper said Benedict would personally hand the confidential files to his successor, with the hope he will be "strong, young and holy" enough to take the necessary action.

The authors of the secret report will not take part in the conclave because they are over 80 years old, past the age limit for the meeting. But Panorama said they were likely to inform other cardinals about what they have uncovered.

Their findings "will condition the conclave" as it will have to elect "a pope immune to blackmail, so that he can start the clean-up operation that (Benedict) entrusted to his successor".
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Religions should be resigned to the anals of history as a really bad idea.

Chook.

[Guest]

Gay sex parties, embezzlement, blackmail, the moraless fibre of the vatican exposed.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/vatican-...222-2ev0d.html

Pope Benedict XVI resigned after an internal investigation informed him about a web of blackmail, corruption and gay sex in the Vatican, Italian media reports say.

Three cardinals were asked by Benedict to verify allegations of financial impropriety, cronyism and corruption exposed in the so-called VatiLeaks affair.

The cardinals were said to have uncovered an underground gay network, whose members organise sexual meetings in several venues in Rome and Vatican City.

On December 17, 2012, they handed the pontiff two red-leather bound volumes, almost 300 pages long, containing "an exact map of the mischief and the bad fish" inside the Holy See, La Repubblica said.

Dark times for the Vatican ... claims of a gay sex and blackmailing scandal.

"It was on that day, with those papers on his desk, that Benedict XVI took the decision he had mulled over for so long," said the centre-left newspaper. It said its article was the first of a series.

Panorama, a conservative weekly, did not speculate about the motives behind Benedict's resignation, but its story about the contents of the confidential report was broadly similar.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi refused to "run after fantasies and opinions" and warned reporters: "Don't expect comments or rebuttals of what is being said on this issue."

La Repubblica quoted a man described as "very close" to the authors as saying the information it contained was "all about the breach of the sixth and seven commandments" - which say "thou shalt not commit adultery" and "thou shalt not steal".

The cardinals were said to have uncovered an underground gay network, whose members organise sexual meetings in several venues in Rome and Vatican City, leaving them prone to blackmail.

The secret report also delves into suspect dealings at the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), the Vatican's bank, where a new chairman was appointed last week after a nine-month vacancy, La Repubblica said, without going into details.

The newspaper said Benedict would personally hand the confidential files to his successor, with the hope he will be "strong, young and holy" enough to take the necessary action.

The authors of the secret report will not take part in the conclave because they are over 80 years old, past the age limit for the meeting. But Panorama said they were likely to inform other cardinals about what they have uncovered.

Their findings "will condition the conclave" as it will have to elect "a pope immune to blackmail, so that he can start the clean-up operation that (Benedict) entrusted to his successor".
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Religions should be resigned to the anals of history as a really bad idea.

Chook.

Anals of history,too funny..

The internet is killing religion..

Man created God..

[chook 56]

Anals of history,too funny..

The internet is killing religion..

Man created God..

"That's me in the corner......"

[Guest]

Man created God..

I thought Dog created dyslexics!?

[Guest]

How did I miss this thread?

http://brokenrites.alphalink.com.au

[SConcierge]

Some pretty sick shyte, the Vatican has no credibility and needs to be stripped right back exposed and all these stupid rights of autonomy as a country and tax exemptions stripped. FYI did u guys know that the Vatican is the biggest land owner on the planet!

Its a shame Pope John Paul 1 was assisinated they say he was going to expose it all, open the books and start selling the assets for the poor.

I also think that all religions in essence are good and have a place, its ppl that fark them up.

[Guest]

Pell representing his sick cult of child rapists has been in the box for the last 2 1/2 hours..

Live coverage here..

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-2...nquiry/4714964

[Kingsgrove-Loiner]

Just listened for 10 minutes, and it all sounds like waffle and bollocks.

Lock him up with the rest of his nonce mates.