Day: Jan 5, 2019

Argentine bishop promoted by Pope Francis at Vatican accused of abusing seminarians.

An Argentine bishop, who suddenly resigned from his diocese in 2017 citing health reasons only to be appointed to a top Vatican administrative position by Pope Francis, is now under investigation for sexual abuse, the Vatican said in a statement today.
Alessandro Gissoti, interim director of the Vatican Press Office, said today that accusations against Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta emerged over recent months, about a year after Pope Francis created a position for him as “assessor” of the Holy See’s financial administration office.
Bishop Zanchetta resigned from his diocese of Oran in northwest Argentina in 2017, stating that “a health issue prevents me from carrying out the pastoral mission that was entrusted to me.” He added that he wished to relinquish his post as “soon as possible” so as to receive treatment elsewhere. “Please forgive me for having failed or deceived you,” Zanchetta wrote.
After his resignation, Zanchetta spent some time in Spain before being named as an advisor to the Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See, which oversees the various real estate and other properties of the papacy. According to a papal spokesman, Zanchetta was appointed to the administrative position because of his professional abilities. During the investigation, Zanchetta will take a leave of absence from his work at the Vatican.
According to Gissoti, at the time of Zanchetta’s resignation, there had been accusations laid against him of authoritarianism and strained relations with members of the clergy. However, no accusations of sexual misdeeds emerged at that time. Bishop Luis Antonio Scozzina, who currently presides over Zanchetta’s former diocese, has several testimonies about Zanchetta that must still be reviewed.
According to El Tribuno, the newspaper of Salta, a province in northern Argentina, three seminarians accused Zanchetta of abuse and later left the seminary. Ten other seminarians were intimidated to remain silent about the abuse they had witnessed, said the report.
According to media reports, some of Zanchetta’s accusers were subjected to his reprisals and were reassigned. “Knowing the gravity of all types of abuse, the bishop is available to anyone who would like to present a complaint to begin the corresponding procedure for canonical justice, while recalling the right of all victims of abuse to seek ordinary justice [through civil authorities],” said a statement from the current bishop of Oran, an impoverished province that borders neighboring Bolivia.
The alleged abuse, according to testimony provided to the papal nunciature in Buenos Aires, occurred at parties organized by Zanchetta where he offered alcohol to his alleged victims. Reportedly, the seminarians were minors at the time. Zanchetta founded a seminary in Oran where six seminarians were admitted. That seminary is due to be closed.

Zanchetta was under a cloud of accusations even before being named bishop of Oran. According to El Tribuno, Zanchetta was accused of abuse of power and financial misdeeds during his time as bishop of Quilmes, a city near Buenos Aires. A number of priests and laity expressed opposition at that time to his nomination to the Oran diocese. It was Pope Francis himself, a fellow Argentine, who elevated Zanchetta to the post at Oran. Zanchetta was one of the first bishops named by the pope, a fellow Argentine.
Zanchetta hastily left behind his flock in Oran without even a customary farewell Mass on July 29, 2017, after returning from the Vatican where he had offered his resignation to Pope Francis. He departed to Corrientes, several hundred miles away, and was the guest of the archbishop there until the pope accepted the resignation three days later.
***
Statement by Alessandro Gissoti, interim director of the Vatican Press Office
Bishop Zanchetta was not removed from the diocese of Oran. It was he who resigned. The reason for his resignation is linked to his difficulty in managing relations with the diocesan clergy and very tense relations with the priests of the diocese. At the time of his resignation there had been accusations of authoritarianism against him, but there had been no accusation of sexual abuse. The problem that emerged then was linked to his inability to govern the clergy.
After his resignation he spent a period of time in Spain. After the period in Spain, in consideration of his capability for management, he was appointed councilor of APSA [Administration of the Patrimony of the Holy See] (a position that does not provide governmental responsibility for the dicastery).
No charges of sexual abuse had arisen at the time of appointment as advisor. The accusations of sexual abuse date back to this fall. On the basis of these accusations and the news recently reported by the media, the bishop of Oran has already assembled some testimonies that are yet to come to the Congregation for Bishops. If the elements to proceed are confirmed, the case will be referred to the special commission of the bishops. During the investigation, Msgr. Zanchetta will abstain from work.

 

AND IRELAND?

The problem of bishops and other senior clerics sexually abusing seminarians and young priests is something that has happened and is happening in Ireland too! 

This will come out into the light when the young priests and seminarians come forward and speak up.

In clerical circles the names of those involved are known and talked about.

Its the main reason that the Irish bishops cannot sort out Maynooth. If they tried to the seminarians and young priests involved would break their silence and all hell would break loose.

Many of the seminarians and young priests involved are active homosexuals themselves and some of them are being generously rewarded financially for their services.

The rewards come in actual cash, cars, holidays and designer clothes and cosmetics.

It is only a matter of time until some seminarian or younger priest is angered or betrayed by a collared or mitred sugar daddy and that young man will sing like a canary.

That is the time we will see the Irish Zanchetta’s exposed.

 

Nuns in India tell AP of enduring abuse in Catholic church
By TIM SULLIVAN Associated Press

KURAVILANGAD, India (AP) — The stories spill out in the sitting rooms of Catholic convents, where portraits of Jesus keep watch and fans spin quietly overhead. They spill out in church meeting halls bathed in fluorescent lights, and over cups of cheap instant coffee in convent kitchens. Always, the stories come haltingly, quietly. Sometimes, the nuns speak at little more than a whisper.
Across India, the nuns talk of priests who pushed into their bedrooms and of priests who pressured them to turn close friendships into sex. They talk about being groped and kissed, of hands pressed against them by men they were raised to believe were representatives of Jesus Christ.
“He was drunk,” said one nun, beginning her story. “You don’t know how to say no,” said another.
At its most grim, the nuns speak of repeated rapes, and of a Catholic hierarchy that did little to protect them.
The Vatican has long been aware of nuns sexually abused by priests and bishops in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa, but it has done very little to stop it, The Associated Press reported last year.
Now, the AP has investigated the situation in a single country — India — and uncovered a decades-long history of nuns enduring sexual abuse from within the church. Nuns described in detail the sexual pressure they endured from priests, and nearly two dozen other people — nuns, former nuns and priests, and others — said they had direct knowledge of such incidents.
Still, the scale of the problem in India remains unclear, cloaked by a powerful culture of silence. Many nuns believe abuse is commonplace, insisting most sisters can at least tell of fending off a priest’s sexual advances. Some believe it is rare. Almost none, though, talk about it readily, and most speak only on the condition they not be identified.
But this summer, one Indian nun forced the issue into the open.
When repeated complaints to church officials brought no response, the 44-year-old nun filed a police complaint against the bishop who oversees her religious order, accusing him of raping her 13 times over two years. Soon after, a group of her fellow nuns launched a two-week public protest in India’s Catholic heartland, demanding the bishop’s arrest.
It was an unprecedented action, dividing India’s Catholic community. Inside the accuser’s convent in rural Kerala state, she and the nuns who support her are now pariahs, isolated from the other sisters, many of whom insist the bishop is innocent. The protesting nuns get hate mail and avoid going out.
“Some people are accusing us of working against the church, of being against the church. They say, ‘You are worshipping Satan,’” said one supporter, Sister Josephine Villoonnickal. “But we need to stand up for the truth.”
Villoonnickal has been a nun for 23 years, joining when she was a teenager. She scoffs at the idea that she wants to harm the church.
“We want to die as sisters,” she said.

Some nuns’ accounts date back decades — like that of the sister, barely out of her teens, who was teaching in a Catholic school in the early 1990s.
It was exhausting work, and she was looking forward to the chance to reflect on what had led her — happily — to convent life.
“We have kind of a retreat before we renew our vows,” she said, sitting in the painfully neat sitting room of her big-city convent, where doilies cover most every surface, chairs are lined up in rows and the blare of horns drifts in through open windows. “We take one week off and we go for prayers and silence.”
She had traveled to a New Delhi retreat center, a collection of concrete buildings where she gathered with other young nuns. A priest was there to lead the sisters in reflection.
The nun, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on condition she not be identified, is a strong and forceful woman who has spent years working with India’s poor and dispossessed, from battered wives to evicted families.
But when she talks about the retreat her voice grows quiet, as if she’s afraid to be overheard in the empty room: “I felt this person, maybe he had some thoughts, some attraction.”
He was in his 60s. She was four decades younger.
One night, the priest went to a neighborhood party. He came back late, after 9:30 p.m., and knocked at her room.
″‘I need to meet you,’” he said when she cracked open the door, insisting he wanted to discuss her spiritual life. She could smell the alcohol.
“You’re not stable. I’m not ready to meet you,” she told him.
But the priest forced open the door. He tried to kiss her. He grabbed at her body, groping wherever he could.
Weeping, she pushed him back enough to slam the door and lock it.
It wasn’t rape. She knows it could have been so much worse. But decades later she still reels at the memory, and this tough woman, for a few moments, looks like a scared young girl: “It was such a terrifying experience.”
Afterward she quietly told her mother superior, who allowed her to avoid other meetings with the priest. She also wrote an anonymous letter to church officials, which she thinks may have led to the priest being re-assigned.
But nothing was said aloud. There were no public reprimands, no warnings to the many nuns the priest would work with through his long career.
She was too afraid to challenge him openly.
“I couldn’t imagine taking that stand. It was too scary,” she said. “For me it was risking my own vocation.”
So the fierce nun remained silent.
___
Catholic history is filled with women who became martyrs to their own purity: Saint Agatha had her breasts torn off for refusing to marry; Saint Lucy was burned alive and stabbed in the throat for defending her virginity; Saint Maria Goretti was 11 years old when she was killed by a man who tried to rape her.
“It is a sin!” Maria is said to have cried out. “God does not want it!”
But for a nun, fighting off a priest’s advances means pinballing through centuries-old sexual and clerical traditions. Celibacy is a cornerstone of Catholic religious life, as is sexual purity among nuns. Many nuns say a sister who admits to a sexual experience — even if it’s forced — faces the risk of isolation within her order, and possibly even expulsion.
“You’re not sure if you’ll be kept in your congregation, because so much is about your vow of chastity,” said Sister Shalini Mulackal, a New Delhi-based theologian. “That fear is there for the young ones to disclose what has happened to them.”
At the same time, priests are seen as living representatives of Christ, with obedience to them another Catholic cornerstone.
Then there is the isolation of young women struggling to find their way in new communities after leaving their homes.
Caught at this intersection of sexual taboo, Catholic hierarchy and loneliness, sisters can be left at the mercy of predatory priests.

“There’s a lot of emotion bottled up and when a little tenderness is shown by somebody it can be so easy for you to cross boundaries,” said Sister Dorothy Fernandes, who has spent years working with the urban poor in eastern India. “It can be hard to tell what is love and what is exploitation.”
It’s particularly hard for sisters from Kerala, a deeply conservative region long the birthplace of most Indian nuns. Sex is rarely mentioned openly in small-town Kerala, boys and girls are largely kept apart, and a visible bra strap can be a minor crisis for a young woman.
“Once you grow up, once you get your first menstruation, you are not encouraged to speak normally to a boy. And the boys also vice-versa,” said a nun from Kerala, a cheerful woman with sparkly glass earrings and an easy smile. She remembers the misery of Sunday mass as an adolescent, when boys would stand outside the church to watch girls filing in, eyes crawling over their young figures. “We have a terrible taboo about sex.”
That naivety, she said, can be costly.
Like the time she was a novice nun, still in her teens, and an older priest came to the Catholic center where she worked. He was from Goa, a coastal region and former Portuguese colony.
She shook her head: “I was in charge of visitors, and we had this bad habit of being hospitable.”
At one point, she brought the priest’s laundry to his small room, where he was sitting. As she set down the clothes, he grabbed her and began to kiss her.
At first, she had no idea what was happening.
“The kissing was all coming here,” she said, gesturing at her chest.
The confusion of that day is still clear on her face: “I was young. He was from Goa. I am from Kerala. In my mind I was trying to figure out: ‘Is this the way that Goans kiss?’”
She quickly understood what was happening but couldn’t escape his fierce grip. She also could not call out for help: “I cannot shout! He’s a priest.”
“I didn’t want to offend him. I didn’t want to make him feel bad,” she said.
So she pushed herself away from him until she could slip out the door.
She quietly told a senior nun to not send novices to the priest’s room. But, like the nun who fought the drunken priest, she made no official complaint.
A complaint against a priest means leveling an accusation against someone higher in the church hierarchy. It can mean getting pulled into a tangle of malicious rumors and church politics. It means risking your reputation, and the reputation of your order.
In the church, even some of those who doubt there is widespread abuse of nuns say the silence can be enveloping.
Archbishop Kuriakose Bharanikulangara, a New Delhi-based church leader, calls incidents of abuse “kind of sporadic. Once here, once there.”
But “many people don’t want to talk,” he continued. “They may talk in the community, but they don’t want to bring it to the public, to the court.”
Speaking up can also risk financial troubles, since many congregations of nuns are financially subservient to priests and bishops.
The silence is magnified in India by demographics, religious politics and a deep-seated belief that women have little value.
There are roughly 18 million Catholics in India, but that’s a small minority in this largely Hindu nation of 1.3 billion. Speaking up could tarnish the image of their church, many nuns worry, and feed criticism by Hindu hardliners.
“Even we, as religious sisters, even we try to keep it quiet,” said Mulackal, the theologian. “A woman who goes through this experience, she just wants to hide it and pretend everything is OK.”
___
The rapes, the nun says, happened in Room 20 of a small convent at the end of a one-lane road in rural Kerala.
Set amid rows of banana and rubber trees near the little town of Kuravilangad, the sisters at the St. Francis Mission Home spend their days in prayer or caring for the aged. In the garden, a statue of the Virgin Mary overlooks a decorative fish pond the size of a child’s wading pool. The pond is covered in green scum.
The rapist, she says, was the most powerful man in this tiny small world: Bishop Franco Mulakkal.

Smart and ambitious, Mulakkal had risen from small-town Kerala to become a bishop in north India, overseeing a sprawling Catholic community. He was also the official patron of her community of 81 sisters, the Missionaries of Jesus, wielding immense influence over its budgets and job assignments.
The nun is a friendly woman with jet black hair known for her quiet confidence. Every few months, she says, Mulakkal would visit the St. Francis convent and summon her. Then, according to a letter she wrote to church officials, he raped her.
The letter says the first rape happened on May 5, 2014. The last time was Sept. 23, 2016. The dates are recorded in the convent’s visitor logs.
Mulakkal angrily denies the accusations, telling reporters the charges were “baseless and concocted” and accusing the sister of trying to blackmail him into giving her a better job.
“I am going through painful agony,” said Mulakkal, who was jailed for three weeks and released on bail in October. “I tell everyone to pray to God: Let the truth prevail.”
Catholicism envelopes this part of Kerala. Towns are marked by their cathedrals, convents and roadside shrines, where the Virgin watches passing traffic or St. George slays the dragon. Businesses proclaim their owners’ faith: St. Mary’s Furniture and Bed Center; Ave Maria Electronics; Jesus Oil Industries.
Around here, many see Mulakkal as a martyr.
A string of supporters visited him in jail, and crowds greeted him when he returned home, a ring of policemen holding back people who showered him with flower petals. “Hearty Welcome!” a banner proclaimed.
But at the St. Francis convent, one group of nuns watched news reports about that welcome with dismay. While the sister leveling the accusations against Mulakkal does not speak publicly, a half-dozen nuns cluster around her, offering support and speaking on her behalf.
“Nobody came to see sister, but so many people came to wait in line to meet Bishop Franco in jail,” said Villoonnickal, the nun, who moved back to Kerala to support the woman she calls “our survivor sister.”
That sister was the second of five children in a Kerala family. Her father was in the army. Her mother died when she was in high school. Wracked with grief, she was sent to stay with a cousin – a priest – living in north India. Inspired by her time with him, she became a nun in 1994, working in her early years as a teacher.
She knew Mulakkal, of course. Everyone in the Missionaries of Jesus knows him. But the two were never close, the accuser’s friends say, and had no consensual sexual relationship.
It was about fear.
“The bishop is such a powerful person and standing against him, where will she go?” asked Villoonnickal. “If she went home what will happen to her?”
“Many times she was telling him to stop. But each time he was forcing himself on her,” she continued.
Eventually, they say, she told some sisters what was happening. Then she says she repeatedly complained to church authorities. When nothing happened, she went to the police.
She also went to confession.
There, according to the other nuns, she was told she had to resist the bishop.
″‘Even if you have to die, don’t submit yourself.’” the priest told her in confession, according to Villoonnickal. ”‘Be courageous.’”
Catholic authorities have said little about the case, with India’s Catholic Bishops’ Conference saying in an October statement that it has no jurisdiction over individual bishops, and that the investigation and court case, which could take many years, must run their course.
“Silence should in no way be construed as siding with either of the two parties,” the group said. “We request prayers for the Church at this difficult time.”
___
In Malayalam, the language of Kerala, sisters who leave the convent are sometimes marked as “Madhilu Chadi” — Wall Jumpers. It’s a mocking term for the sexually frustrated and is often used for nuns and priests who have fled religious life.
Those who stay get respect. They have communities that embrace them. Their lives have direction, purpose. Those who leave often find themselves adrift in India, searching for new identities and spurned by families and friends. The events that knit families together — weddings, funerals, reunions — are suddenly off-limits. The emotional toll can be immense
Speaking up about the church’s troubles, many nuns say, could end with them forced from their convents, cut off in many ways from what they’ve always known.
“It’s a fear of being isolated if I speak the truth,” said the nun who fought off the drunken priest. “If you do that, you have to go against your own community, your own religious superiors.”
The result is an engulfing silence. Silence is the armor that sisters use to protect themselves and the lives they have created, even if it also means struggling with their memories, and protecting the men who abused them.
In the end, most say nothing.
“I didn’t tell anybody,” said the nun who escaped the priest kissing her chest, and who waited many years to talk about what had happened to her. “So you understand how these things are covered up.”

PAT SAYS:

Here is another appalling scandal in the RC Church – the longstanding rape of nuns – especially in missionary countries – by bishops and priests.

These rapes were all crimes.

The bishops and priests who did the raping were and are criminals.

And all these rapes – perhaps at this stage – hundreds of thousands – were all covered by the hierarchies in these countries and by the Vatican.

This week the Vatican gave its permission for women to have hysterectomies in very particular cases.

Who does the Vatican think it is – to tell all women everywhere that they, the RC Church have control over every aspect of their bodies.

Thankfully most women don’t listen to them any more.

The RC Church consists of some 1.3 billion people who are at least nominally Catholic.

This institution must be the most criminal institution in history.

We can only begin to imagine how many crimes – murder, rape, robbery etc that members of this institution have committed in the past 1700 years.

If we are not going to ban this institution from our nations – we must at least appoint independent law enforcement bodies to monitor their every action.