Pope Francis Errs On Child Sex Abusers, Women & the Koch Brothers

By Jerry Slevin
Christian Catholicism
January 31, 2015

http://christiancatholicism.com/pope-francis-errs-on-child-sex-abusers-women-the-koch-brothers/

Pope Francis is about to meet with all his Cardinals. He needs to change his basic losing strategy before he meets with them. The pope has admitted that he has made many mistakes. The pope, unfortunately, continues to make them with his flawed strategy, including mistakes (1) on his self policing of clerical sex abusers, as indicated here, “Vatican Investigates 2 Cases of Child Porn Possession”  [ABC News], (2) on disregarding Catholic women, as indicated here,”Vatican Hits Sour Note With Women, but Progress May Come”  [ABC News] , and here, “Who Is the Pope?” by Professor Eamon Duffy [New York Review of Books], and  here “Pope confirms 48 prelates as voting members of October synod”  [National Catholic Reporter], and (3) on aligning through his US bishops with the “low tax” billionaire Koch Brothers, as indicated here, “Controversial Koch brothers give big (again) to Catholic University”  by David Gibson  [Religion News Service] ,  and from Fr. Tom Reese here  “Everyone supports tax reform in the abstract, but not the specifics”  at:

http://ncronline.org/blogs/faith-and-justice/everyone-supports-tax-reform-abstract-not-specifics  .

The Vatican continues to err in handling sexual abuse by priests. Pope Francis would do well to read the wise advice of Dr. Rosemary McHugh. a priest abuse survivor and an expert on women’s reproductive health. Please see her remarkable story entitled “Ireland: A Priest Predator & A Young US Doctor & An Archbishop”   here.

Oddly, the usually meticulously careful AP Rome earlier today (1/31/15) reported that the pope’s regular (and overworked) Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, indicated that two Polish-born prelates were being investigated by Holy See authorities for alleged possession of child pornography.

AP earlier had reported that Lombardi on Saturday identified one of them as Monsignor Bronislaw Morawiec, an administrator at St. Mary Major Basilica, which was Boston’s disgraced former Cardinal Bernard  Law’s former Rome base and is a church where Pope Francis sometimes prays. Presumably, Morawiec had been investigated by then top Vatican prosecutor, Fr, Robert Oliver, Cardinal Law’s former canon lawyer. Cardinal Law’s former  key legal aide, Oliver, is now the top staffer at the pope’s new “go slow” abuse commission that, after almost two years, will have its first full meeting soon.

AP’s original report indicated that the spokesman said Morawiec has already been convicted of fraud by the tiny city-state’s justice system. AP later withdrew the original story linked above, saying in a subsequent report, that Morawiec was not under investigation for child pornography possession, while still indicating that Morawiec has been convicted of fraud by a Vatican tribunal. Got that! He has been shown apparently to be a crook, but not a pervert, thank God.

The Vatican’s tiny city-state’s recently expanded judicial system is neither independent, transparent nor experienced in handling serious crimes involving clerics. It lacks basic competence as well, as the pope’s butler’s trial clearly showed, and as today’s mix up on reporting seems to confirm. Why is the pope’s busy official spokesman Lombardi handling criminal proceedings announcements? These announcements require more thorough and expert attention, no?

No matter what the outcome of the Vatican’s trials, few will accept as reliable any of these Vatican decisions, due the the conflicts of interest, secrecy and sheer incompetence of the Vatican judicial proceedings. The Vatican should look to the current Australian Royal Commission, to the several Irish judicial investigations and even to the imminent UK investigation procedures for guidance as to how to handle criminal investigations of accused clerics in a modern manner.

AP today identified the other child-porn suspect as Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, as had been reported widely awhile ago. A Vatican church tribunal already found Wesolowski guilty of sexually abusing boys while serving as papal ambassador in the Dominican Republic. This criminal trial should be held instead in the Dominican Republic, where the five boys live that this John Paul II appointment allegedly abused.

Of course, the Vatican likely is very concerned about evidence leaks from Wesolowski’ s computer of some of the reported 100,000 child porn images and possibly communications from or to other clerical pedophiles, etc., on his computer.

And with respect to woman, today (1/31/15), AP’s reliable Rome reporter, Nicole Winfield reported in one of the AP reports linked above: “A new Vatican outreach initiative to listen to women hit a sour note before it even got off the ground: The sexy blonde on its Internet promo video came under such ridicule that it was quickly taken down.But the program is going ahead, and an inaugural meeting this week will study women’s issues in ways that are utterly new for the Holy See. No, there is no talk of ordaining women priests. (My emphasis)

Nicole Winfield added that the Vatican’s new initiative on women ” … denounces plastic surgery as a form of ‘aggression’ against the female body “like a burqa made of flesh.” And it acknowledges that the church has for centuries offered women ‘ideological and ancestral left-overs’ This is dangerous territory for the all-male Catholic Church hierarchy, as even Pope Francis has faced criticism for being a bit tone deaf as far as women are concerned. “ (My emphasis). Of course, the new all male celibate initiative appears to be avoiding the contraception ban. Predictable, no?

Please see AP Nicole Winfield’s “Vatican Hits Sour Note With Women, but Progress May Come” in the above AP link.

Please see also the pope’s initial all celibate male appointments today to the Final Synod on the Family in October (no women included, of course — “absurd” per Pope Francis’ top theologian, Cardinal Walter Kasper, and “bonkers” per former Irish president. Mary McAleese. earlier). These appointments are discussed in the above National Catholic Reporter link.

Pope Francis in two years as pope has mostly just recycled some celibate officials from the Church’s 0.01 % all  male leadership group, leaving the flawed top down monarchical structure intact, with no consequential participation by the 99.99% of the Catholic laity and surely no women.

Pre-Constantine (c. 325 A.D.), early Catholics, including laity and some women, oversaw transparently their religious leaders directly for three centuries. Catholics must do so again, soon! Who and/or what follows Pope Francis under his flawed top down all male strategy? Please see  The Crisis Pope Francis Faces ,  “Pope Francis Is Still Failing Too Many Abused & Abandoned Children, No?‏” and  Pope Francis vs. Shadow Pope Benedict — Who is Infallible  .

Meanwhile, US bishops’ seeming political allies,  billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, recently made headlines by pledging nearly $900 million to help elect candidates who support their libertarian strain of economic conservatism, but the industrialists are also nearly doubling their investment in the business school of Catholic University of America, which is overseen by the U.S. bishops, as reported by David Gibson..

That’s despite the fact that many Catholics — including Pope Francis — say the kind of unregulated capitalism that the Kochs appear to promote runs counter to the Catholic Church’s social teachings.

It appears that the US bishops may be collecting here their reward for helping the Kochs’ “low tax/low regulation” Republican candidates get control a couple of months ago of the US Congress. See Jesuit Fr. Tom Reese’s analysis of how US tax changes occur in the National Catholic Reporter link above. Even a slight change in US tax laws could have hundreds of millions of dollars per annum in adverse potential consequences for the Kochs and other billionaire allies of the US bishops and the pope.

Also noteworthy here, David Koch supports gay marriage and abortion rights. Critics of the CUA gift say it is ironic that the school would seek such massive support from a social liberal when Catholic charities are not allowed to take any money from any person or group that supports abortion rights or gay rights.

Indeed, Davis Koch would likely not be able to be hired to work at a Catholic parochial school in some dioceses, given his positions on sexual morality issues. But his money apparently still talks to unprincipled US bishops, it appears. And they also follow Pope Francis’ orders, no?

As to recent popes’, including Pope Francis’, “three card monte ” approach to using “infallibility/creeping infallibility/definitive statements smokescreens” to exclude women (over half the 99.99% of Catholics) from any senior leadership role, please see the recent NY Review of Books article in the above link by eminent (and seemingly Catholic loyalist and former member of the papal historical commission) historian of the papacy, Cambridge University’s Eamon Duffy.

Professor Duffy, in pertinent part perceptively states: ” … In his published “conversation” with the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, he { Pope Francis} has called for a new and profound theology of women and a greater recognition of their crucial role in the church. But his own folksy remarks about the place of women and “the feminine genius” in the church have distressed even the most moderate feminists. He has made clear his belief that Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (Priestly Ordination) has settled ‘definitively’ the question of women’s ordination—’that door is closed.’ ”

Eamon Duffy also notes: “”This blanket endorsement of Papa Wojtyła’s attempt to close down discussion of the issue indicates the limits both of Francis’s radicalism and, arguably, of his theological sophistication. Critics of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis pointed out that popes do not have a hotline to God. ‘Definitive’ papal utterances are not oracles providing new information, but adjudications at the end of a wider and longer process of doctrinal reflection, consultation, and debate, often extending over centuries: there are procedures to be followed if such adjudications are to command obedience. But the question of female ordination has never been subjected to this kind of extended theological scrutiny, and a properly theological basis for the prohibition remains therefore to be tested. So, it was asked, how did Papa Wojtyła know that the ordination of women was impossible, and what was meant by describing his preemptive strike on the question as ‘definitive’?”

The obvious flaw in Francis’ current approach with a self perpetuating, top down and unaccountable management structure was again just noted pointedly by Gerald Posner in an NPR interview, “From Laundering To Profiteering, A Multitude Of Sins At The Vatican Bank” here [NPR] discussing Posner’s ( a former Wall Street lawyer from the elite Cravath, Swaine &Moore) explosive new 750+ page  book, “God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican” , see at Amazon link [Amazon]

God’s Bankers covers the astounding saga marked by poisoned business titans, murdered prosecutors, mysterious deaths of private investigators, and questionable suicides; a carnival of characters from Popes and Cardinals, financiers and mobsters, kings and prime ministers; and a set of moral and political circumstances that make clear the Vatican’s real aims and ambitions.And Posner even looks to the future to assess if Pope Francis can succeed where all his predecessors failed: to overcome the resistance to change in the Vatican’s Machiavellian inner court and to rein in the excesses of its seemingly uncontrollable and insatiable hierarchical greed.

Asked in his NPR interview about Pope Francis’ Vatican financial reforms, Posner responded, in pertinent part: “I’ve been impressed by him … {but} What could upend it? He needs to be there long enough that these changes can’t be reversed by a new pope who gets in and can be pushed around by the strong dominant bureaucrats.”

Pope Francis has not yet even selected an international auditing firm for the Vatican’s own  huge proprietary assets. As eminent historian of the papacy, Eamon Duffy recently noted in the New York Review of Books, in pertinent part: ” … A pope with a long time in office can ensure that those around him share his vision. Rome appoints all the world’s Catholic bishops; the pope himself decides who will be a cardinal. The long pontificate of John Paul II and the succession of his right-hand man, Benedict XVI, have created a hierarchy who share much of their vision for the church. Gerhard Müller, still head of the Vatican’s most influential department, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is also the general editor of Benedict XVI’s collected writings … Francis himself is unlikely to have a long pontificate: he is an old man, with only one functioning lung.”

Focusing on Francis, Duffy also noted in his above article: ” …,  Bergoglio {Pope Francis} himself has acknowledged that as {Jesuit} provincial, ‘I had to learn from my errors along the way, because, to tell you the truth, I made hundreds of errors. Errors and sins.’ Significantly, however, he attributes those sins not to religious or political reaction, but to inexperience and failure to consult: ‘I have never been a right-winger. It was my authoritarian way of making decisions that created problems.’ ” Francis’ inexperience as pope, and authoritarian style still plague him as pope, it appears.

Despite the Vatican spin machine’s 24/7 effort to present the pope as an easy going “happy go lucky” guy, he still seems to fall back too often to his authoritarian default position. If this seemingly oblivious strategy continues to dominate much longer, it is likely to be all moot anyways. Outside government prosecutors and regulators will then likely write the final Vatican chapter.

Australia’s Royal Commission is now projecting it will cost its citizens over $4 billion to clean up the clerical child abuse mess that Vatican’s financial czar, Cardinal Pell, helped create. The UK is now gearing up for a massive Australian style investigation. The USA’s Minneapolis investigations are seemingly closing in on the cover up scandals surrounding President Obama’s Chief of Staff’s brother, Fr. Kevin McDonough. The Vatican has fiddled too long. Rome and its empire is aflame.

Napoleon locked up a pope who died incarcerated. Popes may think they are infallible, but they sure as hell are not invincible. How long can Western democracies be expected to sit quietly for a pope who pushes with his contraception ban a population explosion in desperately poor Catholic countries, who still oversees worldwide priest child abuse cover-ups and who calls as a major religious leader, in effect, for a military solution, a crusade, in Iraq and Syria as he reportedly did last August?

Yes, with Western democracies facing serious internal threats from internal Islamist terrorists, how long do you think the Western leaders are going to sit for Francis calling for another Middle East  invasion? The crusades are history, and so will the Vatican be if Pope Francis fails to get realistic soon.