Politics
Out of context: Reply #11159
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- ukit0
U.S. media doesn't seem to be covering this too much, but over in Europe the Catholic Church is in some serious shit with a huge number of child abuse cases coming to light over the past couple months, even implicating the Pope's brother.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/…
"The crisis gripping the Catholic church deepened today, with calls for national inquiries to be held in Germany and Ireland to fully disclose the detail and extent of sexual abuse by priests.
With hundreds of allegations surfacing in Germany since the start of the year, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said the scandal of abuse in the country's churches and schools posed a "major challenge" that could only be resolved through a full and frank inquiry into all cases.
Addressing the Bundestag in her first public statement on the subject, she called the sexual abuse of minors a "despicable crime". She added: "The only way for our society to come to terms with it is to look for the truth and find out everything that has happened."
Last weekend, in a further blow to its reputation, the most senior Irish Catholic admitted attending meetings where two 10-year-olds were forced to sign vows of silence over complaints against Father Brendan Smyth, who continued abusing children for a further 18 years."
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.u…
"The Catholic Church has been plunged into a renewed crisis over how it has dealt with child abuse after it emerged that the Pope's brother, Georg Ratzinger, ran a renowned choir at the centre of some of the latest claims.
Reports of systematic historical abuse by clergy have surfaced at three schools in the Regensburg diocese in Bavaria. One of them is the much-heralded Regensburger Domspatzen, a thousand-year-old male choir and boarding school, whose choral master for 30 years was the Pope's older brother, Georg.
"In many schools there was a wall of silence allowing for abuse and violence," said Ms Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a prominent critic of the church. She pointed to a Vatican directive from 2001 which required that even the most damaging allegations should be first investigated internally and then reported to the authorities. A church spokesman called her criticisms "absurd".
A separate sex scandal has also enveloped the Catholic Church in the Netherlands after three people said they were abused at a boarding school run by priests in the 1960s. Since the allegations were published on Friday more than 200 people have come forward to a designated helpline claiming that they were also abused by monks and priests."
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.u…
"The brother of Pope Benedict has admitted he slapped pupils in the face at a German school where he led the choir, but said he had been unaware of the brutality of the discipline there.
Rev Georg Ratzinger (86) made the comments to a German paper yesterday following charges of sexual and physical abuse in Catholic schools in the Pope's native Bavaria.
“Pupils told me on concert trips about what went on. But it didn't dawn on me from their stories that I should do something. I was not aware of the extent of these brutal methods,” he told the Passauer Neue Presse."