CRIMEN SOLLICITATIONIS
The Roman Catholic Church has been bankrupted in many parts of the world due to its failure to protect children from its predatory priests and bishops. When complaints were made, the culprit was moved to another area to continue the abuse. The Church also created decrees and vows of secrecy to help facilitate the protection of these men. The laity were complicit in the crimes of the Church. The evil done by the priests to children was an open secret.
One thing the Church loves to state is that if a priest is under investigation, he has the right to be assumed innocent until proven guilty. Why not treat him as innocent until proven guilty? That would be better. Then you are not assuming anything. He certainly cannot have the right to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise. To assume he is innocent means to assume the victims are accusing him falsely. The Church vehemently denies this. The Church logic is like the logic of the following parable.
A man and his wife go to bed for sex. His wife starts using a sex toy during their activities. The man feels insulted. Most people today think the man is the one with the problem. They would say she is only using it for fun and to help achieve orgasm and it is not a substitute for him. But if he is not enough for her and can't help her reach orgasm then it is a substitute for him - some of the time. Like the man is asked to pretend that his wife is not treating him as a love dud rather than a love god, so the Church asks us to pretend that assuming innocence for accused priests is not assuming malice or deception or delusion in relation to the alleged victims of the priest. If you say God chooses some people for Heaven, that is saying he chooses some for Hell. Same principle.
We can treat the priest as an innocent man without assuming he is innocent. Assuming is what you do if you want to bias yourself in favour of believing his innocence. People who make up their minds about you without facts are assuming. They end up biased and often they cannot see that they are wrong about you. People who assume innocence often refuse to believe the verdict of guilty. They hypnotise themselves.
Even if we should assume that accused priests are innocent we cannot say that the priest has a right to be presumed innocent. Rights are based on justice. To say we must presume innocence for it is the priest's right is to say that it is fair to the priest that we presume innocence. But it is not fair if he is guilty. The priest cannot have the right. He may have the privilege. A privilege is an advantage given. It is just given. It is not about rights but about kindness. It is giving something just to give it and not because it is deserved or is a right. A privilege refuses to create any bias in favour of his innocence or to risk such a bias.
The Catholic Church calls itself one and holy and Catholic and apostolic. The boast that it is holy insults religions that did less or no harm or even piles of good to children. Paedophiles do not become priests but priests become paedophiles. A paedophile who wanted to have sex with children would be more likely to become a teacher or a father than a priest for it gives them better access to children. There is something about the Catholic faith that causes priests to become paedophiles. It certainly encourages priests who develop paedophile inclinations to actualise them and practice. The culture of secrecy about such matters that protects the abusing priest and demonises the victim makes the temptation too great for them.
The popes of course are at the top and ultimately responsible for making an environment conducive to clerical child abuse. People like to pretend the popes mean well. But until a pope fights for church property to be sold to feed the poor and lives like a poor man and binds up the wounds of the wounded that assumption is unwarranted. It is Catholics merely being too bigoted to see the truth.
The
The document required that
under canon law such cases must be kept secret and dealt with secretly. However it is alleged that it said nothing
about not bringing such cases when the allegation was proved by a Church
investigation before the civil courts.
It is also alleged that the secrecy was to prevent priests from being
the victims of false accusations.
The facts.
The facts are that the
document did not advise and did not encourage the bishop to turn a priest over
to the civil law if he was found guilty by the Church investigation. Obviously, the document couldn’t dare to
advise the bishop not to do it. If the
law got the document the Church would be in trouble. The silence then indicates that the bishop
should not report the priest over to the civil authorities. In those days, it was taken for granted that
this would never happen. No bishop,
despite child sex abuse being common among priests, involved the civil
law. Therefore the Church not saying,
“Yes report such cases to the police”, is tantamount to the Church saying,
“Keep the civil authorities out of it.”
The facts are that it is
total insanity to hold that the Church could conduct an investigation as
professional and reliable as the civil authorities. And the Church knows that as well. Does it have its detectives and policemen? All it has are men who go about asking
questions which is not enough. And when
secrecy was enjoined on the alleged victims and perpetrators and all involved
there is no assistance from the public.
It is hard to get at the truth when it is all so secretive. How many murders would be solved if such
restrictions were practiced by the civil authorities? There would be nobody able to come forward as
a witness in addition to existing witnesses who knew something.
The document didn’t say
that the Church investigation results could be given to the civil
authorities. That silence proves that
they were not supposed to be. Why? Because the Church investigation wasn’t
advised to get a second opinion the civil laws opinion in cases where there was
some doubt about an accused priest’s innocence.
Because the secrecy forbade going to the civil authorities to ask if any
allegations had been made against the priest by anyone different from the
person making the allegation.
Secrecy can just as easily
lead to a priest being wrongly found guilty by the Church as not guilty. Evidently, the Church was going to be biased
in favour of proclaiming the priest innocent.
The mere fact that the Church didn’t stop paedophile priests who used
the confessional to solicit and suspend them proves that.
The penalties if a priest
is found guilty of soliciting in the confessional are laughable. The priest is suspended and deprived of
benefices and dignities and cannot say mass ever again. Needless to say being handed over to the
police is not one of the penalties.
If the document was as
harmless as the
The Irish Catholic claimed
that it is only canon law investigations that are secret and that the Church
encourages victims to report priests who abused them to the police. If so then why the secrecy? The Church certainly does not believe that
any victim would be happy with a priest being investigated by canon law and not
the civil authorities. It certainly does
not believe that civil law is more important than Church law. God comes first. The Church is God’s kingdom above and beyond
any human kingdom. So if canon law demands
secrecy canon law must be obeyed no matter what civil law says.
The secrecy of the
confessional meant that a priest couldn’t tell what he was told in
confession. Usually what happened was a
child or man who was having sex with a man or another priest confessed and the
priest would then say, “Why don’t you and I have sex sometime?”. The bias then should be in heavily or even
totally in favour of the victim. That is
why the claim that the secrecy was to protect the priest from false accusations
was hogwash. The victims should have
been able to convince the bishop that the priest solicited them in the
confessional. This didn’t happen because
of the secrecy. Therefore the secrecy
was about silencing the victim and covering up.
It is superficial and
vicious to argue that the document was not about priests who took children out
for a trip and then molested them but only priests who used the confessional to
get illicit and perverted child sex. If
the Church worked against victims who were solicited in the confessional then
how could it care about victims who were approached under other circumstances?
The document required that
anybody who broke the secrecy, even the victims or alleged victims, had to be
excommunicated. And why excommunicate
anybody who broke the secrecy? Why put a
victim who during the investigation decided to tell others to get help and
support out of the Church?
Excommunication meant an increased risk of going to hell to burn forever
when one dies for one was put out of the Church and forbidden the sacraments
which forgave sins and healed the soul.
Why such a harsh penalty over a priest’s reputation? The harshness and hatred for the victim shows
that the Church was determined to use blackmail to silence the victims. The Church knew that many victims would
rather not report anything to the bishop than risk feeling they might need to
break the secrecy and be sent to hell.
To blackmail a child making
a complaint about a priest misusing the confessional to seduce them is the lowest
act possible. The secrecy and threats
made sure that children would have to be silent and just live with the
abuse. In fairness secrecy may be
necessary but it’s a matter of striking the balance between publicity and
secrecy in order to discern the facts.
Excessive secrecy meant only one thing: the Church was covering up. The victims were deterred from coming forward
by this secrecy for they knew it could serve only the Church’s interests not
theirs. The victim and those caring for
her or him were expected to maintain secrecy no matter what they thought about
the secrecy. It was secrecy that led to
the victims being molested and for them to be asked to keep it all hidden in
accordance with Church rules would seem to them to be making themselves victims
of secrecy once more. The Church knew
that strict secrecy is a hindrance not a help to finding the truth and it
didn’t care.
That the bishops didn’t
reveal this evil document and protest against it says a lot about them. To expect people to trust them is crazy when
they were all corrupt as proven in 1962 when they got good Pope John’s evil
instructions.
It is better for a victim
of abuse to be allowed to freely make an accusation than for the Church to
protect a priest from false accusations.
To harm a child is worse than to slander an adult so the Church was
indicating a bias in favour of protecting the priest whether guilty or not.
That the Catholic press and
priests and bishops haven’t shown their disgust but on the contrary are
defending the document shows the power of religion to quieten the feelings we
should have about this matter. We should be totally appalled.
The popes, John XXIII and
his successors who didn’t abolish his evil document but who supported it, Paul
VI, John Paul I, John Paul II and now Benedict XVI, should have faced criminal
charges for obstruction of justice.
The Christian claims that love is an absolute. It says that it is better to be murdered than to live and to fail to love somebody. That is why it says that sin is the greatest evil of all and even worse than death. So if somebody attacks you to kill you, you should be examining yourself all along to make sure you love this person attacking you and that you are not letting yourself or sin. If you start doing that you can be sure they will succeed! The hatred we feel for the attacker and the anger is necessary for us to get the strength and concentration to fight them off. It is an evil faith that teaches such things to children. It only makes the child feel guilty about exposing the priest who is abusing her or his body.
Thanks to the papacy, evil men like Archbishop Alibrandi, Papal Nuncio to Ireland and his successors felt happy to appeal to diplomatic immunity to avoid having to testify in court to help the victims of the child sex abuse by priests that these nuncios all knew about.
The Vatican argues that crimen was so secret and little known that its rules were rarely kept. It even goes as far as to say this obscurity refutes the charge that crimen shows the pope and the Vatican to be evil! But it was still an attempt to protect priest sex abusers. And if it was so secret, how do we determine the extent to which its decrees were followed? Obscure or not it is still valid. It still expresses the law of the Church.
Ratzinger in 2001 made it law that all reports of clerical sex abuse were to be sent to his desk in the Vatican (page 56, The Case of the Pope). He demanded this under the pontifical secret which blocked bishops from reporting pervert priests to the police (ibid, page 56).
In 2010, for the first time ever, the Vatican website advised that bishops report pervert priests to the police but only if the law of the state specified that this had to be done. It did not say that bishops in countries where there is no such obligation should do it. The Vatican did not sanction its statement with the force of canon law. Indeed, the Church decided against making a new law of it (page 58, The Case of the Pope). So it amounts to really just a bit of advice. Its nothing special. So it is safe to say the Church has never commanded that bishops do the right thing. Plus the pope overruled the website advice for it made no mention of the duty to report.
Canon 983 urges that if a cleric confesses to sex abuse to his confessor, the confessor must never tell. This is clearly commanding a cover-up and urging the confessor to be an accessory to crime by his or her silence.
How can one trust a pope whose Vatican Bank has never sought to join the IMF and whose operations are conducted in the outmost secrecy? The Vatican is a pretend European state. Because it is not recognised as one, its bank is exempt from laws that avert money-laundering and fraud. The UN did not create relations with the Vatican as it did not recognise it as a state. But it created a relationship with the Holy See. The Vatican has pretended to be a state with the pope as sovereign to gain power. If the pope is a head of state, he cannot be put on trial for covering up child-sex abuse. Clever huh? Despite not being a true state, the Vatican applied for full membership of the UN in 2002. Thankfully the application was rejected.
The Church has enough power with the UN to try and limit human rights. The Vatican urged that drug trafficking be made an international crime (page 106). Significantly, as the Vatican was guilty of paedophile trafficking it showed no concern for having that made a crime! The Vatican has signed no UN human rights treaties - the only exception is the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Ratzinger and John Paul II did nothing about rampant child sex abuser Father Maciel despite having evidence for his guilt since 1998 (page 130). The Church has used the excuse that these were old men and one would not expect them to take on the stress of dealing with sex abusers in the priesthood. That is no excuse. They should have resigned or appointed a body to deal with it.
The Holy See refused to sign the ICC (International Criminal Court) Treaty (page 135). This was because the treaty granted jurisdiction over the heads of state that signed it so they could go to jail for crimes such as condoning child sex abuse.
The Vatican created friendly diplomatic links with military leaders who engaged in gave torture in Chile (page 110).
Ratzinger fought hard to prevent the arrest of vile torturer General Pinochet in 1999 (page 106).
The pope as the lawmaker of the Church is an accessory to the crimes of his priests as he didn't do anything to stop them and indeed made laws authorising the cover-up of the crimes. Thus he is a criminal himself and should be treated as one.
To defend himself he could argue:
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That the abused were not attacked as members of a civilian population - they were not citizens of his country and attacked as such
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That he had no intention to see any child molested or raped or beaten up or whatever
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That the papacy did not create a policy allowing the abuse
The first excuse does not work.
The pope made no effort to stop the crimes or punish them so he did have the intention that children be abused. If you make a law against child abuse, that is only words unless there is a suitable punishment for it. A law that does not punish those who break it is not a law at all. Letting crime happen counts as intending it to happen. The pope knew abuse was happening and took no reasonable measures to do something about it though he could have. Canon 331 decrees that the pope is to rule over the Church implying that seeing to it that bad priests are disciplined is his responsibility.
The fact that somebody never actually tells you to commit some evil does not indicate that they don't intend you to commit it. If they can compel you to refrain and don't or if they do not punish you, you can safely take it that you had their approval. A person can express their intention that you commit the crime by letting you do it and remain unpunished. Letting a person is a stronger way of expressing approval for their crime than telling them to do it. You can tell a person to commit a crime and intend that they do not commit it. Actions speak louder ...
It is said that the pope and the Vatican never actively encouraged child-sex abuse. But they passively encouraged it. Plus the Church commands that we obey the Bible. The Bible God encourages paedophilia. Jesus for example forbad divorce even though he knew that the married couples of his day married when the bride was a child and an under-developed one at that due to the hard time sand the malnutrition of the day. He should have declared such marriages null and void instead of declaring them so great that they could never be dissolved.
One thing is for sure, the Vatican did and does encourage the cover-up of clerical child sex abuse.
Canon Law did not forbid child sex abuse by clerics . It simply didn't deal with it.
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