Day: Feb 27, 2019

tHE ,ORE

The more priests, bishops and cardinals that are accused and prosecuted for child sexual abuse the more danger there is that the clerical collar becomes a symbol of paedophilia.

I wear my clerical collar every day for two reasons:

As a sign of Christianity and Jesus Christ.

As an invite to anyone who wants to approach me to do so.

However I am aware that more and more priests are not wearing the collar in public out of a fear of being called a paedophile or even being attacked.

I have only been abused on the street twice – and called a paedophile – and both instances happened in Dublin.

I have never been verbally abused for being a priest in Belfast or any where in Northern Ireland.

Maybe that is because religion matters more in Northern Ireland than it does in the Republic?

Ireland is fast becoming anti religion and anti clerical.

And who can blame the people – given the fact that we clerics are most often in the news these days for abuse and abuse cover up.

There is an old story of the time that Napoleon Bonaparte met a cardinal. He tld that cardinal that he was going to destroy the church. The cardinal answered: “You have no chance. We priests have been trying to do that for hundreds of years.

Currently the Roman Church is being destroyed. And it is not being destroyed by secularism, materialism or pluralism.

It is being destroyed by priests and bishops and by rampant clericalism.

George Pell is the latest, big, nail in the coffin!

HOLY COMMUNIONS, CONFIRMATIONS AND A WEDDING IN PORTLAOISE

I am in Portlaoise yesterday and today.

Yesterday I had a ceremony in which some local children received their First Holy Communion and the Sacrament of Confirmation.

Today I am celebrating a Catholic marriage ceremony for a young couple and meeting other couples who wish to marry in the future.

Portlaoise is home territory for me. I am a Midlands man and was born in nearby Tullamore.

BREAKING NEWS – PELL TAKEN INTO CUSTODY

Cardinal Pell: Poisoned power at the top of the Church
By Martin Bashir Religion editor BBC 26 February 2019

Last weekend’s unprecedented Vatican summit on child sexual abuse was closed with a Sunday homily by Australian Mark Coleridge, the Archbishop of Brisbane.
“In sexual abuse,” Archbishop Coleridge said, “the powerful lay hands on the Lord’s… weakest and most vulnerable.”
He could have been describing his fellow countryman, Cardinal George Pell, for there are few as powerful to have fallen from grace within the Roman Catholic Church.
Pell is certainly the most senior churchman to have been convicted of offences against children.
‘Cardinal Rambo’
Pell was appointed by the Pope as Prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy, which effectively runs the Vatican’s voluminous finances.
Following his appointment, he relocated to Rome from Australia, where he had been the Archbishop of Sydney since 2001.
Pell, who began a five-year term in 2014 with offices on the first floor of the Apostolic Palace, quickly set about introducing new accounting standards, established the Holy See’s financial watchdog to deal with suspicious transactions, and ensured that the Vatican Bank’s accounts were independently audited.
A bullish figure who faced plenty of obstruction, he was known among some officials as “Cardinal Rambo”. But that was more a term of endearment – because Pell was having a positive impact on the church’s finances.
News of his conviction for child sexual abuse is a grave blow not just to the church, but also to Pope Francis personally.
He was one of the Pope’s closest aides.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGES Image caption Pell was appointed to oversee the Vatican’s finances in 2014
He was not only leading the crucial reform of the church’s sprawling finances, but was also appointed by Francis to his nine-member Council of Cardinal Advisors, known as the C9. It was the C9 that encouraged Pope Francis to host this first-ever summit on child sexual abuse.
But that was just one of many Vatican departments in which Pell played a significant role.
Poison from top to bottom
Cardinal Pell was a member of the Congregation of Bishops, the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Congregation for the Institutes of the Consecrated Life and the Societies of Apostolic Life, and the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelisation.
His conviction confirms that the poison of sexual abuse has infected every level of the Roman Catholic Church

Back in 2012, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard established a Royal Commission to inquire into institutional responses to child abuse in Australia.

It found that 7% of priests in Australia had abused children.
The charges against Pell emerged from Australia’s rigorous inquiry into every institution that had access to children.
The state began a process that the church itself seemed incapable of managing – and now this 77-year-old ambitious Cardinal will swap the Apostolic Palace for a jail cell.
And in a final turn of providence, or coincidence, it won’t even be necessary for Pope Francis to fire Cardinal Pell from office.
His five-year term as Prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy expired on 24 February.

PAT SAYS

Cardinal Pell has been convicted of sexually abusing minors.

He will be sentenced this week.

He is the highest ranking cleric in the RC to be convicted of such crimes.

He still has an appeal in the system. That appeal will cement or overturn his conviction.

I imagine an overturn is highly unlikely – but not impossible.

I watched an original tv programme that interviewed the victims. I was impressed with what they had to say and how they conducted themselves. I believed they were telling the truth.

Sadly one of them died recently and never got to know the outcome.

Pope Francis is now left with another McCarrick decision – to dismiss Pell from the College of Cardinals and to remove him from the clerical state.

He will probably wait for the outcome of the appeal to do that?

We had Cardinal Keith O’Brien in Scotland; Cardinal Groer in Austria; McCarrick in the USA and now Pell in Australia. There are others out there who have not yet been exposed.

It shows how widespread and universal the problem is.

The Roman Catholic Church is in melt down.

“How the mighty have fallen”.