VATICAN, March – The Pope thought condoms were plastic carry bags which Africans throw around everywhere after use, a spokesman has said. Apologising on the Pope’s behalf for remarks the pontiff made during his recent visit to Africa, the spokesman, who only identified himself as Archbishop Emma Milingo, said that the Pope had misunderstood what constitutes condoms in Africa.
Just before a recent trip that took him to Cameroon and Angola, Pope Benedict XVI was quoted as saying that HIV/AIDS was “a tragedy that cannot be overcome by money alone, that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem”. The Pope reportedly said that the answer to HIV/AIDS lay in “spiritual and human awakening”.
The remarks kicked up a storm, with many observers saying that the Pope’s remarks were short-sighted and not based on facts.
The apology from the self-styled Vatican spokesman, Archbishop Milingo, seems to confirm that the Pope didn’t know what he was talking about.
“In all his pomposity, the Pope didn’t read up on the use of condoms in Africa before his trip. He assumed that since Africans are God’s poorest creatures, they can’t afford real condoms, so they must be using plastic shopping bags as condoms, which they then throw around everywhere endangering the environment. The Pope’s comments were aimed at protecting the environment, not condemning Africans to AIDS,” said Milingo.
“The fact that His Holiness has never actually seen a condom obviously didn’t help matters much,” he added.
The Vatican spokesman said that he had been “quietly” telling the Pope to “loosen up” so that he can understand what goes on in the world of his billions of followers.
“Anyway, he is really, really sorry about the whole condom thing,” Archbishop Milingo, who has a Korean companion, said.
The Analyst was unable to confirm whether Archbishop Milingo is indeed the Vatican’s official spokesman as he claims.
Children in Peril: From Haiti's Dubious Adoptions, to the Vatican's Continuing Cover-up By MARCI A. HAMILTON Thursday, February 4, 2010
The plight of children in Haiti has drawn headlines recently – rightly so, for Haiti's children, like all children, deserve our avid concern. But it is important that we also keep in mind the continuing fight to get justice for children who have been mistreated and abused here in the United States.
Thus, in this column, I'll cover both the Haiti situation and new evidence regarding the Vatican's continuing cover-up of clergy sex abuse.
The Questionable Actions of an Adoption Organization in Haiti
A Baptist group's actions in Haiti have recently triggered controversy. The group's website states that they intended "to rescue orphans from Port-au-Prince," but questions have been raised about their intentions and their operation.
At this early stage, a few facts seem apparent: First, the group attempted to take 33 children to the Dominican Republic, though their original intent had been to transport 100. It is not clear what they intended to do with the children after they arrived in the Dominican Republic, but the group was linked to the "New Life Adoption Foundation," which seeks to arrange adoptions for Christian parents who cannot afford to adopt through the ordinary channels.
Second, the group did not go through proper legal channels and, therefore, failed to do minimal due diligence -- which, at the very least, would have revealed to them that some of the children that they had taken were not orphans; rather, these children had parents in Haiti with whom they could, in the future, be reunited as circumstances in Haiti improved.
Third, the essence of the group's defense appears to be that God and their faith led them to Haiti, and that a religious group in Haiti gave them the children. However, Haitian officials appear poised to make them an example of Haiti's intention to protect its children from exploitation of any kind in the midst of its earthquake crisis.
Whether this group is a bunch of bumbling do-gooders or something more nefarious, the facts available thus far suggest that they crossed the line with their apparent disregard of the basic legal principles governing all adoptions, and with their reported failure to look into the children's actual familial relationships. Even if they intended to eventually fix their "paperwork" problems, they reportedly removed the children from Haiti into the Dominican Republican without knowing whether they still had family ties in Haiti -- a decision that violate every principle underlying adoption laws. It would be illuminating to learn whether the New Life Adoption Foundation has gone to other countries before, to secure children for Christian parents without the resources for ordinary adoptions, and if so, precisely how they did so. For this observer at least, it appears that, once again, the interests of children were likely being sacrificed for the interests of religiously-motivated adults.
The good news, though, is that the children were returned to Haiti and are currently under the care of a reputable adoption organization from Austria that has been operating in Haiti for 30 years. The children are getting needed medical care and, where possible, the issue of finding their family members and reuniting them with the children is being addressed. The primary reason that the children are now in a better position is that the Haitian government imposed its law to forestall harm to its children.
The Emerging Hard Evidence of the Vatican's Role in the Cover-up of Child Sex Abuse in the United States and Elsewhere
Would that the American government had acted as Haiti is now acting -- and aggressively used its own laws to saved the many children here who have been abused by Catholic clergy. But here, for decades, legal action was blocked by a church cover-up that was mandated from the top down. Experts in the field have long known that the widespread abuse of children by priests was perpetuated by executive decisions from the highest levels of the Roman Catholic Church. But only recently has there been evidence of the actual role of the Vatican – emerging from both Ireland and the United States.
Ireland has produced two impressive reports detailing the widespread sex abuse by Catholic clergy in orphanages and elsewhere: Yvonne Murphy et al., Commission of Investigation: Report into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin (2009) and Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, Commission Report (2009) . The most recent report – the Murphy Report -- documents the significant role that the Vatican has played in monitoring and directing the handling of child sex abuse.
At one point, the Catholic Church was part of the government of Ireland, so, in theory, the Irish experience might have been unique. But in fact, the Murphy Report establishes that abusing Irish priests were shipped to the United States, where they continued to commit their abuse of children. In addition, recent documents disclosed in Wisconsin litigation make it quite clear that the Vatican has been orchestrating the handling of abuse – and ensuring that abuse is covered up, and not revealed.
As one Irish observer, former history professor Sean O'Conaill, has persuasively argued, it is patently obvious now that this is a worldwide problem that has been managed from the highest levels of the Catholic Church, for "only the papacy has the authority to discipline errant bishops" and yet it has failed to institute accountability. O'Connail adds, "The Church still refuses to hold to account bishops who endanger children. We know that only secular agencies have done that -- civil courts, media, and the state. Only upon the public outcry as a result of the Murphy Report did four Irish bishops finally resign, each protesting his innocence."
O'Connail concludes that "The Church is still unable to regulate itself. Its central system of governance is dysfunctional. The papacy appears entirely willing to tolerate this state of affairs, misrepresenting this Dublin crisis as though it had nothing in common with Boston in 2002, Philadelphia in 2004 or Los Angeles in 2007, not to mention Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Europe, Africa and Latin America."
The Newly-Discovered Evidence in a Wisconsin Case Confirms the Findings in Ireland
The Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy has been credibly accused of abusing over 100 deaf boys, and now there is solid proof that the bishops of Wisconsin and the Vatican were more concerned about the Church's internal procedural niceties than bringing Murphy to justice or protecting children. There is also proof that the Vatican's primary response to these issues is ice-cold. Higher-ups either neglect to respond to requests for guidance from the American bishops or they put the demands of elderly abusing priests above the need for internal fact-finding and justice. Nowhere is there a trace of concern about civil law or legal obligations.
On July 17, 1996, Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee wrote to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger -- who was, at the time, the head of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (he is now, of course, Pope Benedict XVI) -- for guidance in handling multiple instances of abuse at St. John School for the Deaf in Milwaukee. The offending priest had solicited sex from children in the confessional.
Then, having heard nothing by March 1997 from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Weakland wrote a letter on the same matter to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura. Again, he asked what he was supposed to do with respect to Murphy, whom he now suspected of having abused many more victims.
Within the same month, Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, responded. He instructed Archbishop Weakland to follow the procedures set forth in the 1962 Crimen Sollicitationis document in which the Vatican. directs Catholics to avoid "scandal" by keeping sexual abuse of children and animals (as well as homosexuality) secret, and to follow specific, secret procedures for handling these issues – or face the threat of excommunication. One of the persistent themes of Weakland's missives to the Vatican is his fear of impending "scandal."
Even though the Church's internal statutes of limitations on the charges against Murphy had expired, a trial of Murphy was still set. Nor was Weakland the only bishop seeking guidance regarding this prolific abuser; the Bishop of Superior, Raphael Fliss, also wrote to the Congregation of the Faith, saying that he thought an internal trial of Murphy was necessary. Yet, Murphy himself then wrote to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, admitting his transgressions, but asking to be relieved from having to undergo a trial, because he was elderly and ill and the alleged conduct had occurred decades before. He just wanted to live out his life as a priest in good standing.
A month after Murphy had made his plea to avoid the Church's internal procedures, Weakland and Fliss flew to Rome and met with Bertone and his staff. The notes from the meeting indicate that the Congregation decided to follow Murphy's reasoning, and did not encourage them to carry through with a church trial. The end result was that no action was ever taken against Murphy within the Church. And, there was certainly no criminal action pursued outside. Murphy should have been turned over to prosecutors and the victims should have been the central focus. Child perpetrators do not "age out" of their criminal predilections; thus, while the bishops and the Vatican higher-ups dithered, Murphy was free to prey. Even though they knew he had had numerous victims, this likelihood is not acknowledged in any of the correspondence. Their negligence was criminal.
Because civil authorities were cut out of the process, Murphy's misdeeds were never known -- until today, when civil litigation led by pathbreaking litigator Jeff Anderson has finally led to the discovery of the first hard proof that we have in the United States that the Vatican itself has actively participated in orchestrating and directing its grossly deficient practices for handling child sex abuse within the institution. Finally, too, the unearthing of this evidence proves that the civil law is yielding far better results for society than permitting the Church to operate within its secret sphere. It is apparent that the civil clergy-abuse lawsuits, like the Irish reports, are essential in learning the truth, aiding survivors, and protecting children.
As both of these developments in Haiti and the Vatican reveal, around the world, we have a long way to go in the emerging civil rights movement for children. The first question in each of these scenarios should have been: What is best for the children? Until everyone, including religious organizations, starts making that question the priority, children will be hurt.
Marci Hamilton, a FindLaw columnist, is the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008). A review of Justice Denied appeared on this site on June 25, 2008. Her previous book is God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press 2005), now available in paperback. Her email is hamilton02@aol.com.
The Pieces of the Puzzle Are Falling into Place: Catholic Officials, a Global Web of Childhood Sexual Abuse, and the Judgment of History.
By MARCI A. HAMILTON Thursday, February 18, 2010
In 2002, the Boston Globe broke the story of Cardinal Bernard Law's cover-up of widespread childhood sexual abuse by serial pedophiles in the Boston Archdiocese. In the wake of the coverage, United States Senator Rick Santorum, himself a Catholic, declared what many assumed to be true -- that the problem was peculiar to Boston. According to Santorum, the child sexual abuse had been caused by the lax morals of a very liberal city.
Santorum's particular theory was laughable, but his core assumption that the problem was geographically limited needs to be examined carefully – for although this claim of exceptionalism has proved completely false, it has continued to be repeated, in other contexts, all over the country and the world. And as long as the problem of Catholic clergy child sex abuse is seen as local, ending it will be elusive – because strings are being pulled from high up in the hierarchy.
Pretending Each City's – and Diocese's – Problems Were Specific to It Alone
Yet, in 2002 and after, the media still covered the Boston story as if it were distinctive to Boston. And, after the Boston scandal broke, the Bishops held an emergency meeting in Dallas and declared that the issue was behind them. Of course, today we know that was hardly the case.
After the Boston situation received publicity, victims of child sex abuse by Catholic priests started coming forward in many other American cities, with the pattern of abuse and cover-up repeating itself again and again. There is no room here to list them all, but they have included Bridgeport (Conn.), Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Portland, San Diego, and Spokane. There were recycling bins for the abusers in New Mexico, Maryland, and Canada. A priest could abuse several children in just about any state, take a break in New Mexico (where more children could be abused), and then be sent back to either the original diocese for re-posting, or another city. A handful of honorable prosecutors made the issue a priority, documenting the problem through grand jury reports -- but only a handful. The assumption continued to be that this must be a localized problem in certain dioceses, not one that was endemic to the organization – that is, entrenched throughout the entire Catholic hierarchy and system.
The media in each city focused on the abuse in that city, and the bishops in each city said, after some abuse was finally brought to light, that it was all history now.
The Growing Realization that the Problem Was – and Is -- Greater and More General
Then the list of dioceses with sexual abuse allegations grew longer and longer -- to the point that no state was untouched. Priests started to complain that the "scandal" had started to taint all priests unfairly. Many lifelong – and especially, older -- Catholics rejected out of hand the notion that the problem was deep-seated, or that it might involve the entirety of the Church. For them, this was a short-term bump in the long history of the Catholic Church. Some, though, saw the pattern and formed the Voice of the Faithful -- a collection of devoted Catholics who see the child sex abuse scandal as having revealed an unfortunately built-in problem, not just an isolated set of criminal and tortious acts.
Editors began to treat the stories of abuse, though, as simply redundant, and often caved to the pressure from bishops not to engage in alleged "anti-Catholic bias" by covering one story after another about abuse by priests. The bishops hired public relations firms to spread the word that legislative reform in response to the knowledge of priest abuse was nothing but anti-Catholicism, and to repeat the false claim that all of the abuse had been publicly reported and was safely in the past.
However, lawsuits were filed in numerous jurisdictions, and discovery was demanded, with concomitant news coverage of the lengthening list of abuse allegations. The ambitious American bishops then began to vie among themselves as to who would be the most successful in turning back lawsuits and related legislative reform. Once again, there was an apparent pattern of behavior in response to the public revelations and the lawsuits. The very same arguments against the victims, their attorneys, and legislative reform in this area were floated in far-flung states -- from California, to Delaware, to Wisconsin, and more.
A Problem that Crossed Not Just State, But National Boundaries
Still, the media treated the cases as location-specific. Editors were driven by the need for a contemporary and local "news hook" and did not invest in investigative reporting to cover the (much) larger story. National coverage of the Holy See's 1962 document, Crimen Sollicitationis, which threatens excommunication for bringing "scandal" to the Church by telling outsiders about the sexual abuse of children was – and remains -- sparse. Yet that document provides an embarrassingly obvious hint that the problem was – and is -- endemic and entrenched, and that the cover-up has been constructed from the top down. Was the media in denial over child sex abuse (which is common in our society) or over heinous behavior by the largest church in the United States -- or both? Who knows? Either way, the denial was deep-rooted and pernicious, and unless one has been watching closely, the larger story has escaped the attention of most Americans.
The stories then started to float across the Atlantic from Ireland that many priests there had sexually abused Irish children. Lots and lots of children. Irish prosecutors dug deep and produced two reports. One report detailed how the Irish Church had victimized numerous children in church-run residential schools. Horrifying in itself, the report also served as a reminder of the many stories from Australia – stories that were never widely circulated in the United States -- of the omnipresent sexual and physical abuse of children in church-run residential schools there. The second report, which was 700 pages long and dubbed the "Murphy Report," and focused on the Dublin Archdiocese, painstakingly established that the hierarchy and the police had covered up persistent patterns of abuse. It also pointed to the Holy See as responsible in part for the perpetuation of abuse.
In the end, some Irish bishops were held accountable, with four even resigning after being shamed out of their offices. Then, the current Irish bishops demanded a meeting with the Pope, because they placed significant blame for the pattern of behavior on the Holy See. That meeting took place this week at the Holy See.
The Murphy Report also confirmed that Irish abusers were being shipped to the United States, where they abused American children. Some were sent back and some were permanently dumped here.
Meanwhile, at the same time that the Irish bishops were demanding accountability from the Holy See, discovery in a Wisconsin case -- as I discussed in my last column -- showed that the Holy See and in particular, then-Cardinal Ratzinger (who, of course, is now the Pope) were the official handlers for abusing priests in the United States. The exchanges that litigation unearthed show that there is little question that bishops operated under orders from the highest levels of the Roman Catholic hierarchy on the issue of clergy who had been caught sexually abusing children.
Thus, we have come to know with a certainty that at a minimum, Ireland, the United States, and the Holy See have been linked. And only the Holy See has transnational powers within the group.
Even while all of this information was developing, moreover, there was still a pervasive belief that certain clerical orders were beyond reproach on the issue, especially the widely-respected Jesuits. The lawsuits against the Jesuits for abuse in Alaska were not covered nationally in the media. Then, Germany erupted with stories of pervasive abuse in Jesuit-run schools. The sex-abuse victims are still coming forward, but one rector was recently quoted as saying that he expected that, in the end, they would identify over 100 victims of a single Jesuit perpetrator. And abuse is not limited to this one perpetrator; once again, it is pervasive. In other words, the situation in Germany is a mirror image of that depicted in the first Irish report and of the Australian experience with church-run residential schools. There is an undeniable pattern and web of connections, even for those who would do all that they can to deny child sex abuse and deny wrongdoing by the Roman Catholic Church. That pattern has led to suffering that is beyond human imagination.
Let's face it: there are only two options here: Either the repeated pattern of abuse and cover-up around the world constitutes a giant set of uncanny coincidences, or there is a single source of power directly responsible for the global pattern. The answer is obvious and that is why there are lawsuits currently pending against the Holy See in the United States. History will judge all of us if we do not bring this institution to account for the suffering of children. The Church officials' current behavior makes the selling of indulgences in the fifteenth century almost look quaint.
Marci Hamilton, a FindLaw columnist, is the Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and author of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008). A review of Justice Denied appeared on this site on June 25, 2008. Her previous book is God vs. the Gavel: Religion and the Rule of Law (Cambridge University Press 2005), now available in paperback. Her email is hamilton02@aol.com. In the interest of full disclosure, she represents clergy abuse victims and other victims of childhood sexual abuse on constitutional and federal statutory issues, including one who is currently in litigation against the Holy See..
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