Cardinal Pell Gets the O’Malley Evil Eye

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Sending out psychic drones

Sending out psychic drones?

Things are looking grim and ominous for Cardinal Pell, high-level curial reformer yet famous defender of the Faith at that heresy-laden Synod on the Family.  He appears to be getting the evil eye from Cardinal O’Malley, the man in charge of those caustic pro-gay professional victims who are spreading their hate from within the offices of the Church itself.

Jean-Louis De La Vaissiere writes:

External experts brought in by Pope Francis to help tackle the tiny city state’s ills are answering the papal call for openness — and infuriating some Holy See stalwarts in the process.

Over the past few months members of the pope’s commission for child protection — handpicked by Francis to help root out sex abuse in the Catholic Church — have publicly attacked a cardinal and a bishop.

The cardinal in question is the Vatican’s finance chief George Pell, who was accused by commissioner Peter Saunders of being an “almost sociopathic” man who covered up abuse and tried to buy the silence of at least one victim.

Australian Pell, who was described by Saunders as “a massive, massive thorn in the side of Pope Francis’s papacy”, threatened legal action and was defended by the Vatican, who stressed Saunders was only expressing his personal views.

Despite the anger among red hats in the gilded corridors of Saint Peter’s, Saunders — a British child abuse victim — stood his ground and has not apologised.

The anti-paedophilia body has strong ties to survivor groups who are highly critical of the Vatican, and its members readily draw attention to the Church’s flaws, even if it embarrasses the very man who appointed them.

These newly empowered survivor groups are plain enemies of the Church and priests.

Now the office run by Cardinal O’Malley, the most senior man at the Vatican appointed to handle such matters, has issued a statement calling on Cardinal Pell to respond directly and promptly.

It was Curial Gang of Nine’s O’Malley who signaled the doom of targeted K.C. Bishop Finn several months before his ultimate resignation.

“The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, as mandated by the Holy Father, Pope Francis, has no jurisdiction to comment on individual cases or inquiries,” the statement issued yesterday evening reads. “Regarding Australia’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Institutional Child Sex Abuse, all appropriate questions are being dealt with by the Truth, Justice and Healing Council in Australia, which is coordinating the local Church’s response to the Royal Commission’s findings,” the statement says. “The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors remains dedicated to its mission as outlined in the recently approved provisional Statutes, which is to help the Church worldwide protect minors and make certain that the interests of abuse survivors and victims’ are paramount. To this ends the Commission considers it essential that those in positions of authority in the Church respond promptly, transparently and with the clear intent of enabling justice to be achieved.”

Just like FrancisChurch has done with Bishop Finn, with the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, and with other good bishops in South America, Italy, now Belgium; they are muscled aside in the name of murky or overblown scandals.

Meanwhile there’s almost nothing the liberal friends of Francis can do to lose their exalted positions in the Church today.

See here,

see here,

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see here.

 

 

German Bishops Continue to Shut Down the Church Militant

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Play glasses on a pretender

Play glasses on a pretender

The German Bishops have just formally announced what many bishops in the U.S. would like to see; we will no longer screen ‘catholic’ employees for faithfulness.

This is generally the case already, but with this official change in Church law, the Germans are making sure that no-one ever fires or refuses to hire someone for a Catholic reason.  It’s a nightmare and it’s coming here quickly.

With potentially far-reaching consequences, the bishops of Germany have voted by more than a two-thirds majority to relax Church labor laws to allow civilly remarried employees or those living in same-sex unions to retain their jobs with Church institutions.

In an announcement Tuesday, the German bishops’ conference in Bonn said the majority of bishops had ruled that immediate dismissal will only be a “last resort” for employees who are divorced and subsequently “remarry” or those living in a registered partnership.

Until now, such employees were required to be dismissed from such employment, although the rules were often ignored. The Church is the second-largest employer in Germany.

“An automatic dismissal may now in future be ruled as out of the question,” said Alois Glück, president of the Central Committee of German Catholics, the country’s top lay Catholic organization. From now on, he said, any public violation of loyalty to Church teachings must be examined on a case-by-case basis.

As limited as his reach seemed to be, can you imagine this kind of thing happening if Pope Benedict hadn’t become sidelined?  It would be unfaithful to lay the blame of any of this on Pope Francis, right?  He’s too holy to let that happen.  It’s amazing how much he’s just like the Pope we would get if they sort of muscled Pope Benedict out, isn’t it?

The amendment, when enacted by a bishop, explicitly overturns a 2002 ecclesiastical law, which stipulated that all Church employees need to be loyal to the magisterium. Glück said the change “represents a substantial paradigm shift in the application of ecclesiastical law,” adding that the new regulation will “open the way” for decisions to be made in accordance with “human justice.”

The lack of unanimity among bishops means the new regulation is left to Germany’s 27 bishops to implement the reform in their dioceses. But in practice, it could be unlikely that any bishop will be able to resist the new measures. According to the official statement, the bishops’ conference is setting up “an additional working group” to examine the question of whether the Church’s labor law can be “more institutionally oriented” in a bid to make it a nationwide and uniform labor structure. The bishops’ conference has also instructed dioceses to publicize the changes in their diocesan newsletters. This is required to formally enact the law.

“I expect and hope this will happen everywhere,” Cardinal Rainer Woelki, the archbishop of Cologne, said in a May 6 interview with Katholisch.de. The cardinal, who headed the committee that drew up the new law, said the first objective of the amendment is to ensure “compliance with lived practice,” but denied the amendment in any way undermines the principle of the indissolubility of marriage.

Caritas Germany, which employs 591,000 staff, welcomed the change. President Peter Neher said Church institutions need a “broader understanding of the concept of loyalty” and that ecclesiastical labor law should reflect how the Catholic Church “stands alongside” those who live broken lives.

Everything is always about Caritas.

The erasure of the Faith is never an organic thing.  It’s always a top-down leveraged affair.  The Christian Faith is natural.  It functions and it lives.  Murder, on the other hand, requires some force.

 

 

Zero-Tolerance Sacrifice in Cardinal O’Malley’s Boston

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According to The Media Report, an injustice has been done to the administration and staff of a working-class Boston area Catholic school.  Apparently there’s been a group firing just because a tenured custodian went to the bathroom before a child walked in afterwards.  This sounds like a brand new low in punishing innocent Catholic employees.

Has anyone noticed that we are living in the totalitarian state they used to warn us about in school and science fiction?

In a way it was inevitable: After years of media hysteria over the issue of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, Church officials have now decided on a policy of “shoot first, ask questions later” when it comes to even the scantest allegations of impropriety.

In January of this year, in an astonishing act of injustice, Boston’s Cardinal Seán O’Malley forced the resignations of three individuals from a Catholic school in Revere, despite the fact that no one broke any law or did anything wrong.

If it were not clear already, it should be clear now: “Zero tolerance” has now fully morphed into paranoia and cruelty.

A 64-year old custodian went to the restroom just outside his office which he’d been using for 17 years.  No boys were in there at the time.  The school apparently has an unfortunate rule against adults and children using the same restroom.  (There was a time when people understood an adult monitoring a school restroom was a good thing.)

If it wasn’t for such rules and the cruel excuses for making them, mothers like the one in this story wouldn’t be frightened into lodging complaints.

Like many urban Catholic schools, Immaculate Conception School in Revere (on the working-class outskirts of Boston) lacks adequate space, so it had been a “common practice for a number of years” in the school for adults to use the student restroom so long as there was not a student already in there.

Well, at some point at the end of last year, a mother called the school to report that her kindergarten-aged son felt “uncomfortable” walking into the restroom and seeing the school’s 64-year-old custodian using a urinal. (The restroom was just steps away opposite the janitor’s office.) [Addendum, 3/18/15: The Revere Advocate reported in late January that the janitor used the bathroom in question “for upwards of 17 years without incident.”]

At no time did anyone ever report or even suggest that anyone had committed any behavior in the least bit sexual or criminal. Never.

In other words, the boy walked into the restroom and saw what anyone would see if he walked into any public men’s restroom – such as at the theater or Boston’s Fenway Park.

Probably in an effort to comply with insanely strict diocesan policy, the school eventually contacted police.  When Cardinal O’Malley was notified, he fired the principal, a parish priest, and a teacher.

The school was at a loss at how to respond to the mother’s phone call, but at some point, someone came up with the idea that the concern should somehow be reported to law enforcement. Big mistake.

Overreacting, Cardinal O’Malley and the Archdiocese of Boston immediately forced the resignations of three employees of the parish and its school: Father George Szal, the popular parish priest; Alison Kelly, the school’s principal; and an unnamed second-grade teacher.

The Cardinal’s reason for forcibly removing the trio was that the group had somehow failed to report the issue to law enforcement and the archdiocese “in a timely manner.” Shockingly, the archdiocese reportedly gave the three “an ultimatum – resign or be fired.”

Yet even after both local police and the local district attorney investigated the case and discovered that nothing even remotely criminal had occurred, Cardinal O’Malley still would not reverse his impetuous decision. The lives of four innocent people (the trio plus the custodian) would remain tarnished.

It doesn’t add up.  Aren’t there enough real scandals in the Boston Church that require action?  Is this an attempt to make some zero-tolerance quota?  Why sacrifice the innocent?

Out of control Boston school up to no good

Out of control Boston school up to no good

….or the faithful?