The catholic church thought police

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

@The Diplomat

I urge you to read "The Case Of The Pope" by Geoffery Roberson QC,a renowned international jurist.


He examines the child abuse scandal from two broad perspectives:

(1) The official church position that canon law trumps any civil law

(2)The Vatican's claim to be a state.Although the claim is accepted by many countries,the Vatican meets NONE of the criteria for statehood.

I don't ask you to simply accept these claims, but I do ask you to consider them..

A recovering Catholic of over 40 years,I was appalled. I'd like to think any practising Catholic would be deeply ashamed for supporting such an arrogant and corrupt institution.Sadly, I'm aware nothing as prosaic as evidence is likely to change the mind of the faithful.


000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Below is a chunk of a one review. There are many on line.

The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuses by Geoffrey Robertson

Terry Eagleton welcomes a coolly devastating inquiry into the Vatican's handling of child abuse

*
o
o Share2126
o Reddit
o Buzz up
*
Comments (87)

* Terry Eagleton
* The Guardian, Saturday 11 September 2010
* Article history

Pope Benedict XVI Looking the other way . . . Pope Benedict XVI. Photograph: Tony Gentile/Reuters

The first child sex scandal in the Catholic church took place in AD153, long before there was a "gay culture" or Jewish journalists for bishops to blame it on. By the 1960s, the problem had become so dire that a cleric responsible for the care of "erring" priests wrote to the Vatican suggesting that it acquire a Caribbean island to put them on.


What has made a bad situation worse, as the eminent QC Geoffrey Robertson argues in this coolly devastating inquiry, is canon law – the church's own arcane, highly secretive legal system, which deals with alleged child abusers in a dismayingly mild manner rather than handing them over to the police. Its "penalties" for raping children include such draconian measures as warnings, rebukes, extra prayers, counselling and a few months on retreat. It is even possible to interpret canon law as claiming that a valid defence for paedophile offences is paedophilia. Since child abusers are supposedly incapable of controlling their sexual urges, this can be used in their defence. It is rather like pleading not guilty to stealing from Tesco's on the grounds that one is a shoplifter. One blindingly simple reason for the huge amount of child abuse in the Catholic church (on one estimate, up to 9% of clerics are implicated) is that the perpetrators know they will almost certainly get away with it.


For almost a quarter of a century, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the man who is now Pope, was in supreme command of this parallel system of justice – a system deliberately hidden from the public, police and parliaments and run, so Robertson maintains, in defiance of international law. Those who imagine that the Vatican has recently agreed to cooperate with the police, he points out, have simply fallen for one of its cynical public relations exercises. In the so-called "New Norms" published by Pope Benedict this year, there is still no instruction to report suspected offenders to the civil authorities, and attempting to ordain a woman is deemed to be as serious an offence as sodomising a child. There have, however, been some changes: victims of child abuse are now allowed to report the matter up to the age of 38 rather than 28. If you happen to be 39, that's just tough luck. As Robertson wryly comments, Jesus declares that child molesters deserve to be drowned in the depths of the sea, not hidden in the depths of the Holy See.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep...-robertson