Eideard

Two Colombian priests who were found shot dead in the capital Bogota a year ago themselves hired the assassins who killed them, prosecutors say. They said the priests had agreed a suicide pact after one of them was diagnosed with AIDs, but contracted hitmen because they could not bring themselves to carry it out.

Relatives of the dead priests insist they were victims of an armed robbery. They have denied reports that they were involved in a gay relationship.

Two of the alleged killers are being prosecuted after being traced from calls made from the priests’ phones.

Father Richard Piffano, 37, and Father Rafael Reatiga, 35, were found shot dead in a car in southern Bogota in January 2011.

Prosecutors allege they paid the suspected hitmen around $8,500 to kill them and make it look like a robbery attempt.

The two priests had been friends since their training and often celebrated Mass and other religious services together, Colombia’s El Tiempo newspaper reported.

In his final church service, Father Reatiga asked parishioners to pray to Santa Marta, the patron saint of lost causes, the paper reported, while Father Piffano asked his to “pray for me”.

Suicide – like homosexual acts – is forbidden in the Catholic Church.

Apparently, the worst sin is love. There are so many sides to this tale that didn’t have to be, that didn’t have to end in death and sadness. All that was required was walking away from the ideology and customs of the Catholic Church.

These two men should have walked away from a calling that died centuries ago. They should have chosen a new life and enjoyed their love. Death is a decision only left to people without the understanding to change their own lives. Forget the ideology that cannot comprehend change. Or love.

More female priests are joining the Church of England than male ones for the first time ever, it can be disclosed as it takes another step towards the introduction of women bishops.

Official figures show that 290 women were ordained in 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available. By contrast, just 273 men entered the priesthood.

The watershed moment comes less than 20 years since the Church first allowed women to be priests, in the face of opposition from Anglo-Catholics and conservative evangelicals who believe that only men can be church leaders…

Sally Barnes, spokesman for the campaign group Women And The Church, said: “The figures are very good news. They show the increasing numbers of women whose vocations are being recognised, accepted and valued by the Church.”

But detailed breakdown of the figures, published in The Church of England Yearbook 2012, shows that most of the new women priests are “self-supporting” rather than having full-time clergy jobs…

The figures on ordination come on the eve of another critical meeting of the Church of England’s governing body, the General Synod.

The week-long gathering in Church House, Westminster, will hear four debates on the draft legislation to introduce women bishops…

Meanwhile new divisions are opening in the Church over whether or not clergy should be able to bless civil partnerships or support full gay marriage.

Anyone send a copy of the memo to the Pope?

 
Scuffles have broken out between rival groups of Greek Orthodox and Armenian clerics over a turf war in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity.

Bemused tourists looked on as about 100 priests fought with brooms while cleaning the church in preparation for Orthodox Christmas, on 7 January.

Palestinian police armed with batons and shields broke up the clashes.

Groups of priests have clashed before in the church, built on the spot where Christians believe Jesus was born.

“It was a trivial problem that… occurs every year,” Bethlehem police Lt-Col Khaled al-Tamimi told Reuters. “No one was arrested because all those involved were men of God,” he said…

The 1,700-year-old church, one of the holiest sites in Christianity, is in a bad state of repair, largely because the priests cannot agree on who should pay for its upkeep.

Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the site where many Christians believe Jesus was crucified, has also seen similar incidents.

Anyone surprised that money is the root of battles between these churches. Another primo reason for skirmishes like this is who gets the juiciest spots to sell souvenirs to tourists.

After a great discussion of the origins of Christianity – he explained why he wore a fedora hat. Though already out of fashion in the 1960′s, he figured it made him look more like Bing Crosby and therefore less likely to be beaten by the defenders of law and order.

An Indian farmer and father of two had a hysterectomy after doctors discovered a “full female reproductive system” in his lower abdomen.

The Indian man, identified as Ryalu, was admitted to a hospital near Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, after complaining of severe stomach pains. Doctors suspected a normal hernia, but when they carried out an exploratory operation they were shocked to discover it had been caused by a female uterus, ovaries, Fallopian tubes, a cervix and underdeveloped vaginal tissue…

“Usually the contents of the Hernia Sac are abdomen organs like large intestines and small intestines but when we operated on the patient we were surprised to find female reproductive organs. We have removed the organs through a hysterectomy and repaired the hernia.

The man had not suffered any problems until the stomach pains which led him to hospital. Although he is medically a hermaphrodite, his hormones and sexuality are clearly male, he said.

“The external reproductive organs of the patient were masculine and he has no problems whatsoever with his sexuality. He had functional male genitals and there was no formation of breasts in the patient. It’s an embryological accident at the time of embryonic formation,” he said.

Which leads to an obvious question. Might we reverse this operation for the schmucks who insist on ordering about womens’ rights, pimping anti-abortion agitprop, religious claptrap about womens’ role as wife and mother superseding all?

Then, the slogan, “Oppose abortions? Don’t have one” would acquire universal meaning.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia has announced that it had placed 21 priests on administrative leave from active ministry in connection with credible charges that they had sexually abused minors.

The mass suspension was one of the single most sweeping in the history of the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. It follows a damning grand jury report issued Feb. 10 that accused the archdiocese of a widespread cover-up of predatory priests stretching over decades and that said as many as 37 priests remained active in the ministry despite credible allegations of sexual abuse against them…

The announcement Tuesday was a major embarrassment for Cardinal Rigali, who, in response to the grand jury report, had initially said that there were no priests in active ministry “who have an admitted or established allegation of sexual abuse of a minor against them.”

The district attorney immediately indicted five people — two priests, a former priest, a parochial school teacher and a high-ranking church official. Within 10 days of the grand jury report, Cardinal Rigali placed three other priests whose activities had been detailed by the grand jury on administrative leave.

Right on top of issues as ever.

There’s only one question. How much longer would the abuse have continued if law enforcement hadn’t finally started doing their job?

Eight years after the American-clergy sex-abuse controversy erupted, Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams yesterday lobbed a bombshell into the still-simmering scandal.

Williams announced the grand-jury indictment of one of former Archbishop Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua’s top aides for allegedly endangering children by shielding pedophile priests from detection and shuffling them into unsuspecting parishes where they could continue the perversions of which they are accused.

It’s believed to be the first time a high-ranking Catholic official has been accused of being criminally accountable for covering up priest abuse.

Monsignor William Lynn, 60, was charged with two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. As Bevilacqua’s secretary for clergy, he was the Archdiocese’s personnel director and responsible for investigating reports of priest sexual abuse from 1992 until 2004.

Grand jurors had aimed even higher, saying that Bevilacqua may have been involved in the coverup.

“We do know that over the years Cardinal Bevilacqua was kept closely advised of Monsignor Lynn’s activities, and personally authorized many of them . . . [but] we cannot conclude that a successful prosecution can be brought against the Cardinal – at least for the moment,” they wrote in their 124-page report…

Lynn, now parish priest at St. Joseph’s, in Downingtown, faces up to 14 years in prison if convicted…

Advocates for abuse victims celebrated the indictments.

RTFA for the history of abuse, priests sharing victims, passing them around through the ranks – and the inevitable coverup.

The worst any of these thugs suffered was being defrocked. A delightful medieval term that matches the out-of-date mindset of the church leaders who feel they and their acolytes are above secular law.

Andrew Madden is one of a relatively new breed of Irish celebrities who would just as soon be less well known. He was among the first people in Ireland to go public about being sexually abused by Catholic clergy — one of those who set off the intense bout of soul-searching that has racked the country lately. When I met Madden last fall in Dublin, the early rumbles of the collapse of Ireland’s economy were shaking the country, and throughout much of a pub lunch he talked about the failures of the government and the banks. It was only later, once we were driving around his old neighborhood, past the pebbledash house where he grew up and where his parents still live, that he began to talk about his childhood. As we sat in his car in front of Christ the King Church, where he spent much of his youth as an altar boy and a choir member, he outlined the four years of torment he suffered in the late 1970s at the hands of the Rev. Ivan Payne, one of the infamous serial sex offenders among the Irish Catholic clergy whose stories have transfixed the country over the past year and a half…

My afternoon with Andrew Madden might serve as a snapshot of what Ireland has been through lately. The country is preoccupied with the fallout — personal, social and political — from the crash and burn of the Celtic Tiger. But beneath that, and in a way connected to it, is a more primal pain: one deeper, lodged in the bones, maybe. The phenomenal economic boom over the past two decades, and the secularization that came along with it, allowed Ireland to think it was no longer what it once was: a backward land dominated and shaped by the Roman Catholic Church. But as the economy has crashed, the Irish have come face to face with their earlier selves, and with a church-state relationship that was and in many ways still is, as quite a few people in the country see it, perversely antimodern.

Of the various crises the Catholic Church is facing around the world, the central one — wave after wave of accounts of systemic sexual abuse of children by priests and other church figures — has affected Ireland more strikingly than anywhere else. And no place has reacted so aggressively. The Irish responded to the publication in 2009 of two lengthy, damning reports — detailing thousands of cases of rape, sexual molestation and lurid beatings, spanning Ireland’s entire history as an independent country, and the efforts of church officials to protect the abusers rather than the victims — with anger, disgust, vocal assaults on priests in public and demands that the government and society disentangle themselves from the church…

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A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warns Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police because that would violate the church’s canon laws.

The letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided Tuesday to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican’s rejection at that time of an Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests.

In the letter, the Vatican’s diplomat in Ireland at the time, Archbishop Luciano Storero, told the bishops that a senior church panel in Rome, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided that the Irish church’s year-old policy of “mandatory” reporting of abuse claims conflicted with canon law…

The letter, originally obtained by RTE religious affairs program Would You Believe?, said the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome would establish worldwide child-protection policies “at the appropriate time.”

The Vatican has not formally accepted any of the Irish church’s three major documents on child protection since 1996. All emphasize mandatory reporting of suspected offenses.

Yup. Let’s don’t try to hurry up something as insignificant as justice.

Hundreds of sex abuse victims have come forward in Belgium with harrowing accounts of molestation by Catholic clergy that reportedly led to at least 13 suicides and affected children as young as two, a special commission said…

”Reality is worse than what we present here today because not everyone shares such things automatically in a first contact with the commission,” he told reporters.

Adriaenssens, a child psychiatrist who has worked with trauma victims for 23 years, said nothing had prepared him for the stories of abuse that blighted the lives of victims.

”We don’t just talk about touching. We are talking about oral and anal abuse, forced masturbation and mutual masturbation. We talk about people who have gone through serious abuse,” Adriaenssens said…

Belgian Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard said he would react on Monday to the report. The Vatican had no immediate comment.

But Tournai Bishop Guy Harpigny, who deals with the issue for the church, praised Adriaenssens’s work and told VRT television that ”now, the time has come to listen to the victims…”

Spend time considering the ethics of an institution which sets itself up as a leading judge of everyone’s morality – historically incapable of ethical standards in day-to-day behavior.

Friday’s report said 507 witnesses came forward with stories of molestation at the hands of clergy over the past decades. It says those abused included children who were two, four, five and six years old.

Family members or friends said 13 victims committed suicide that ”was related to sexual abuse by clergy,” the report said. Six other witnesses said they had attempted suicide…

The number of those coming forward with their stories and testimonies, however, could be only a fraction of those actually abused, Adriaenssens said.

RTFA. None of this should surprise a thinking, observant reader. But, the information is useful to anyone considering what their personal attitude should be towards so-called organized religion. A misnomer if there ever was one.

Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Dozens of Italian women who have had relationships with Roman Catholic priests or lay monks have endorsed an open letter to the pope that calls for the abolition of the celibacy rule. The letter, thought by one signatory to be unprecedented, argues that a priest “needs to live with his fellow human beings, experience feelings, love and be loved”.

It also pleads for understanding of those who “live out in secrecy those few moments the priest manages to grant [us] and experience on a daily basis the doubts, fears and insecurities of our men”.

The issue was put back on the Vatican’s agenda in March when one of Pope Benedict’s senior advisers, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna, said the abolition of the celibacy rule might curb sex abuse by priests, a suggestion he hastily withdrew after Benedict spoke up for “the principle of holy celibacy”.

The authors of the letter said they decided to come into the open after hearing his retort, which they said was an affirmation of “the holiness of something that is not holy” but a man-made rule. There are many instances of married priests in the early centuries of Christianity. Today, priests who follow the eastern Catholic rites can be married, as can those who married before converting to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism.

One signatory, Stefania Salomone, 42, an office manager, said the message to the pope had been endorsed by nearly 40 women registered with an online forum linked to Il Dialogo website. But such was the sensitivity of the issue that only three had published their names…

My family walked away from the Roman Catholic church almost 70 years ago – over the question of freedom to access means of birth control. I think it unlikely that the church is ready to engage intelligent dialogue on an even more demanding subject.

Living in the 21st Century, peering backwards at an ideology, superstition, rooted to the Dark Ages like a tumor clinging to an organ it has already sucked dry of life – I hardly see any reason for this attempt at dialogue except to illustrate the unwillingness of Papal princes to learn and grow into the real world.