Archive for the ‘Christianity’ Category
Friday, March 19th, 2010
19/3/10
DNA tests have allowed a judge in Miami to reunite a baby rescued from the rubble of the earthquake in Haiti with her parents. Aid workers, meanwhile, say the 33 children illegally taken by US missionaries in the aftermath of the quake have been reunited with their families. The baby was two months old when she was pulled alive from the ruins in Port-au-Prince, four days after the quake in which 220,000 people died. An American rescue team believed baby Jenny was an orphan and flew her to the Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami for treatment. She was dubbed ”the miracle baby” after surviving for so long without milk or water. DNA tests proved she was the daughter of Nadine Devilme and Junior Alexis, who lost everything in the earthquake on January 12.
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Tags: Christianity, Haiti, Human Rights, USA
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Friday, March 19th, 2010
Roger Boyes; 19/3/10
The most famous choir in the world has been caught up in the wave of paedophile scandals sweeping Germany and Austria, with eight former choristers denouncing their teachers in the past few days. An open letter from the management of the Vienna Boys’ Choir to parents expressed regret at the incidents, which were recounted by former singers now aged between 40 and 70. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, called yesterday for truth and clarity in investigating paedophile abuse not only in church institutions but everywhere within the educational system. “We all agree that sexual abuse against children is a despicable crime,” she told parliament. So far about 300 claims of sexual abuse have been made by former pupils of German church schools and of non-denominational boarding schools, which have upset Church-State relations.
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Pedophilia
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Christopher Hitchens; 18/3/10
On March 10, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, 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 pedophilia”. 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 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 top-most level of the Roman Catholic Church has only just begun.
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Tags: Christianity, Pedophilia
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Tess Livingstone; 18/3/10
Four bishops, 40 priests and thousands of parishioners from the Traditional Anglican Communion will petition the Vatican by Easter to be received into the Catholic Church. Archbishop John Hepworth of Adelaide, primate of the TAC, said 26 parishes in Western Australia, Tasmania, NSW, Victoria, far north Queensland and South Australia hoped to be united with Rome by the end of the year. The move comes as 100 Anglican parishes in the US and some in Canada have announced their decisions to convert to Catholicism en masse, voting to take up an offer made by Pope Benedict XVI in November in his apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus (On Groups of Anglicans). The initiative allows Anglican bishops, priests and entire congregations, if they wish, to join Rome. Archbishop Hepworth, 65, who is married with three children, said the Pope had allowed for a continuation of Anglican practices, including a married clergy.
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Tags: Australia, Christianity
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Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
17/3/10; (4 Items)
http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/letters/index.php/ theaustralian/comments/disgraceful_crimes/
The cancer of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic church seeps ever upwards, and it seems very unlikely that knowledge of these disgraceful crimes did not reach the Vatican. Could it be that even one of the popes was guilty of child abuse offences? Rather than protect the children, the policy of the church was for many years clearly to protect the perpetrators. I wonder how the good Christian gentlemen can live with themselves. Dave Arnold, Calista, WA
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Human Rights, Ireland, Pedophilia
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Monday, March 15th, 2010
15/3/10; (4 Items)
The Vatican is fighting attempts to link Pope Benedict XVI to child sex abuse in a counter-offensive against widening pedophilia scandals. “It is clearly evident that in the past few days there are some who have sought – with a dogged focus on Regensburg and Munich – elements to personally implicate the Holy Father in questions of abuse,” spokesman Federico Lombardi told Vatican Radio over the weekend. “It is clear that these efforts have failed.” Earlier, the Pope’s former diocese of Munich had confirmed a report that, as an archbishop in 1980, he approved housing for a priest who had been accused of forcing an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex. Six years later, the priest was given a suspended sentence for child sex offences. The archdiocese said he still worked in Bavaria, with no known repeat violations.
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Tags: Christianity, Pedophilia
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Saturday, March 13th, 2010
13/3/10
The head of Germany’s Roman Catholic Church has issued a new apology to victims of pedophile priests and announced the creation of a watchdog to deal with the abuse issue. “I want to repeat here in Rome the apology that I made two weeks ago,” Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg told a news conference in the Vatican after meeting Pope Benedict XVI yesterday. Zollitsch said the Pope had praised “the steps taken by the German Bishops Conference (including) the naming of a bishop as a special counsel” who would act as a watchdog on the issue of the sexual abuse of children. Pedophile priest scandals have swept Germany since late January, one coming close to the Pontiff’s brother Georg Ratzinger, a former choirmaster.
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Pedohilia
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Friday, March 12th, 2010
Richard Owen; 12/3/10
When Cardinal Sean Brady, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, met journalists in Rome after a two-day carpeting by Pope Benedict XVI of Ireland’s bishops over sex abuse scandals last month, he appeared contrite. “There have been failures in our leadership,” he told us. “The only way we will regain credibility will be through our humiliation.” Lent, Cardinal Brady said, was “a time of penance, and we must begin with ourselves and have a change of heart.” Similar expressions of contrition and “humiliation” can be expected from Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, head of the German Bishops Conference, when he meets the Pope today as the growing clerical sex abuse scandal engulfs the Pontiff’s native Germany. Even now, though, despite the spread of a scandal that began in the US in 2002 and has since embroiled Ireland, Austria, Germany, Australia and The Netherlands, there is a danger that the Vatican and Pope Benedict have not fully grasped the devastating damage it is doing to the standing of the Roman Catholic Church.
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Pedophilia
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Thursday, March 11th, 2010
11/3/10; http://www.theage.com.au/world/monk-admits-child-abuse-20100310-pzbf.html; (2 Items)
The head of a Salzburg monastery has admitted sexually abusing a child decades ago and is offering to resign. Arch-abbot Bruno Becker said he abused a 12-year-old boy more than 40 years ago. In a statement cited by the Austria Press Agency, he said he informed church authorities last year after his victim contacted him. Becker said he was not yet ordained when the abuse occurred and apologised to the victim last year. The revelation comes amid a widening sexual abuse scandal involving the Roman Catholic Church in neighbouring Germany, where abuse in church-run schools dating back several decades has surfaced, including at boarding school where Pope Benedict’s brother, Monsignor Georg Ratzinger, ran a choir.
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Tags: Chrsitianity, Germany, Kung, Pedophilia
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Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
10/3/10
US judge who sentenced a couple to prison for the death of their son says members of their church must stop relying on faith healing when their children’s lives are at stake. “Too many children have died unnecessarily – a graveyard full,” judge Steven Maurer said yesterday. “This has to stop.” Judge Maurer spoke in a quiet voice as he led to his conclusion: Jeffrey and Marci Beagley each should serve 16 months in prison. Members of the Followers of Christ church who packed the courtroom sobbed. The Beagleys were convicted of criminally negligent homicide in the June 2008 death of their son, Neil, 16, of complications from a congenital urinary tract blockage. The condition normally is easily treated.
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Tags: Children, Christianity, health, USA
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Monday, March 8th, 2010
8/3/10
Is a lifelong Christian and human rights activist, I took exception to Angela Shanahan’s criticism (“Godless politics has gone too far for democracy”, Inquirer, 6-7/3) of “human rightists” as somehow being anti-religious. She is quite correct in pointing to the pressure for social justice changes in society—such as the abolition of slavery and trade union rights which she mentions—coming from religious movements but then glibly ignores the situation today by putting all religious pressure groups in one basket. Progressive religious movements are still working for social justice and human rights just as they always did, but conservative Christians, represented by the likes of Cardinal George Pell, Family First and opposition leader Tony Abbott are quite the opposite, obsessed as they are by issues of private morality mainly related to gender issues.; Peter Jones, Lenah Valley, Tasmania
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Tags: Australia, Christianity
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Monday, March 8th, 2010
8/3/10
A bishop has given new details of sex abuse at a boys’ choir in Germany once headed by the Pope’s brother. Gerhard Ludwig Mueller, bishop of Regensburg, in southern Germany, where the Domspatzen choir is based, said Pope Benedict XVI’s brother Georg Ratzinger, 86, did not head the choir at the time. The two “remembered” cases of sex abuse at Domspatzen dated back to 1958 and therefore “did not coincide with the period where professor Georg Ratzinger was in charge”, Bishop Mueller said in the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano newspaper. Mr Ratzinger headed the choir between 1964 and 1994, he said. The director and composer Franz Wittenbrink, a former pupil of the school attached to Domspatzen, spoke of an “ingenious system of sadistic punishments connected to sexual pleasure” at the school.
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Tags: Christianity, Germany, Sexual Abuse
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Saturday, March 6th, 2010
John Hooper; 6/3/10
The Vatican has been rocked by a sex scandal with links to Pope Benedict’s household after a chorister was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes for a papal gentleman-in-waiting. Angelo Balducci, a ceremonial usher, was caught by police on a wiretap allegedly negotiating with Thomas Chinedu Ehiem, a 29-year-old Vatican chorister, over the specific physical details of men he wanted brought to him. According to transcripts, numerous men may have been procured for Balducci, at least one of whom was studying for the priesthood. The explosive claims about Balducci’s private life have caused grave embarrassment to the Vatican, which has yet to publicly comment on the affair.
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Tags: Christianity, Homosexuality
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Friday, March 5th, 2010
5/3/10
Victims of clerical sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church have reacted angrily to an appeal by an Irish bishop for parishioners to help pay spiralling compensation claims. Bishop Denis Brennan of the diocese of Ferns, in the east of Ireland, said the diocese had paid E8 million ($13.4m) to settle 48 civil actions arising from decades of sexual abuse by priests and that another 13 actions against the diocese were pending. Dr Brennan is the first bishop to give details on how much compensation has been paid to victims. He said his official residence had been remortgaged to cover nearly E2m in legal fees. A request for financial help from parishioners was not about sharing blame, he said, but about “asking for help to fulfil a God-given responsibility”. Eugene Doyle, the chief financial officer of the diocese, said the church had no option but to ask its members to help foot the bill.
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Tags: Christianity, Ireland, Pedophilia
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Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
Malcolm Brownl 3/3/10
Australian Christian schools will campaign against what they see as the thin end of the wedge – a decision by the South Australian Non-Government Schools Registration Board to effectively ban the teaching of creationism. Under policies published in December, the board said it required ”teaching of science as an empirical discipline, focusing on inquiry, hypothesis, investigation, experimentation, observation and evidential analysis”. The board said it ”does not accept as satisfactory a science curriculum in a non-government school which is based on, espouses or reflects the literal interpretation of a religious text in its treatment of either creationism or intelligent design”. The chief executive of Christian Schools Australia, Stephen O’Doherty, said the board statement was too strident, removing the right to teach ”biblical perspectives” as part of science.
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Tags: Australia, Christianity, Evangelical
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Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
3/3/10
A pay telephone line for French Catholics to confess their sins has drawn criticism from bishops. ”For advice on confessing, press one. To confess, press two. To listen to some confessions, press three,” says a soothing male voice, welcoming the caller to ”Le Fil du Seigneur”, or ”The Line of the Lord” service. However: ”In the case of serious or mortal sins, that is, sins that have cut you off from Christ our Lord, it is indispensable to confide in a priest,” warns the service. The service has been criticised by the Conference of French Bishops – an assembly of senior clerics – which has warned that the line had ”no approval from the Catholic Church in France”. It was set up this month to mark the beginning of the fasting period of Lent by a group of Catholics working for AABAS, a small Paris company that provides telephone messaging services, said its creator, Camille. (She asked that her second name not be used because she had received threats.)
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Tags: Christianity, France
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