By Oscar Ramjeet
Caribbean Net News
August 5, 2010
http://www.caribbeannetnews.com/news-24073--6-6--.html
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| Oscar Ramjeet is an attorney at law who practices extensively throughout the wider Caribbean |
We are living in trying times -- a changing world, a more sinful world, and it seems as if things are moving in different direction.
As a boy growing up, mothers were happy that their sons were being invited by priests to spend weekends and to visit other parishes. Some of them used to boast in those days that their sons were so good and well behaved that the Caucasian Father selected them to spend time with him. They thought that the priest was teaching them the better way of life. Little did they know that these boys were being molested.
I make this comment to point out that priests have been abusing boys for decades, not only in Europe, the United States, but the Caribbean and perhaps the entire planet.
Now the sexual abuse of priests has blown up to such a proportion that the Pope was forced to be involved because of the mass resignations of top level bishops, including Ireland and Belgium; and a few years ago the Catholic Church had to fork out tens of millions of dollars to compensate victims who were sexually abused by priests.
The abuse scandal has swept through the Catholic Church in Europe, forcing its leaders in England and Wales to offer a full apology to victims.
Irish Bishop James Orirty apologised to those who suffered child abuse committed by priests after his resignation was formally accepted by Pope Benedict XVI, and admitted he should have challenged a culture of secrecy.
The leaders of five million Roman Catholics in England and Wales said the crimes had brought "deep shame" to the whole Catholic Church and there were "no excuses" for paedophile priests. The archdiocese of Malines-Brussels, in the Belgian capital, confirmed that a former priest lost an appeal against a prison sentence for rape and other acts against a minor.
The image of the Catholic Church has been tarnished so much so that a massive protest is planned in the United Kingdom when the Pontiff arrives there for a planned state visit in September.
In recent days, the Pope has been drawn into the abuse scandals with claims that he knew both about Father Lawrence Murphy, an American paedophile priest, and a German cleric, Father Peter Hullermann
Moreover, there are reports of more sexual abuse, which forced the Vatican to revise its in-house rules last month to deal with clerical sex abuse cases, targeting priests who molest the mentally disabled as well as children, and doubling the statute of limitations.
The rules, which cover canonical procedures and penalties for the most serious sacramental and moral crimes, were issued as the Vatican confronts one of the worst scandals in recent history, revelations of hundreds of new cases who raped and sodomised children, bishops who covered up for them, and Vatican officials who stood by passively for decades.
Perhaps I should mention that the new rules make no mention of the need for bishops to report clerical sex abuse to police, provide no canonical sanctions for bishops who cover up for abusers, and do not include any "zero tolerance" policy for paedophile priests as demanded by some victims.
I wonder why the Vatican does not consider the question of amending its laws to permit priests and nuns to marry. This move may well prevent the embarrassment now facing the Catholic Church, not to mention the billions it has to dole out to abusers.
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