Monday, March 04, 2013




Gay sex rings, 'The Filth' corrupting the Vatican...and why the Pope REALLY quit

John Cornwell (an on-again, off-again Catholic) has some interesting points in the excerpt below but it must  be noted that he is something of a sensationalist.  After his scurrilous but fashionable attacks on the role of Pacelli in WWII ("Hitler's Pope"), he was eventually forced to limit his criticism to the fact that Pacelli did not "explain" his role after the war.  But it would demean a Pope to engage in what would undoubtedly be seen as an Apologia.  Cornwell is, in short, an unreliable witness.  I have no doubt however about the moral corruption of not only the Curia but most of the hierarchy.  There is indeed a need for a root and branch clearout

Here is the remarkable thing you are seldom told about a papal death or resignation: every one of the senior office-holders in the Vatican  – those at the highest level of its internal bureaucracy, called the Curia – loses his job.

A report Benedict himself commissioned into the state of the Curia landed on his desk in January. It revealed that ‘The Filth’ – or more specifically, the paedophile priest scandal – had entered the bureaucracy.

He resigned in early February. That report was a final straw. The Filth has been corroding the soul of the Catholic Church for years, and the reason is the power-grabbing ineptitude and secrecy of the Curia – which failed to deal with the perpetrators. Now the Curia itself stands accused of being part of The Filth.    

Benedict realises the Curia must be reformed root and branch. He knows this is a mammoth task.  He is too old, and too implicated, to clean it up himself. He has resigned to make way for a younger, more dynamic successor, untainted by scandal – and a similarly recast Curia.

Benedict was not prepared to wait for his own death to sweep out the gang who run the place.  In one extraordinary gesture, by resigning, he gets rid of the lot of them. But what then?

The Curia are usually quickly reappointed. This time it may be different. It involves scores of departments, like the civil service of a middling-sized country.

It has a Home and  Foreign Office called the Secretariat of State. There’s a department that watches out for heresy – the former Holy Inquisition which under Cardinal Ratzinger dealt with, or failed to deal with, paedophile priests.

The Curia is a big operation. It maintains contact with all the bishops of the world, more than 3,000, in 110 countries.  The Curia oversees the hundreds of thousands of priests  who care for the world’s 1.2billion Catholics. The flow of information, and money, in and out of the Vatican is prodigious.

What makes the bureaucrats different from normal executives is they don’t go home and have another life.  Unless you’re a full cardinal, with a nice flat and housekeeper, you go back on a bus to the microwave and TV in a Vatican-owned garret.    

Rivalries between departments, vendettas between individuals, naked ambition, calumny, backstabbing and intrigues are endemic.

Not surprisingly, some of the bureaucrats let off steam in unpriestly ways. Some are actively gay men who cannot normalise their lives with a partner because of Catholic teaching.

They frequent discreet bars, saunas and ‘safe houses’. On another level there are individuals known to have a weakness for sex with minors.

It appears the people who procure these sexual services have become greedy. They have been putting the squeeze on their priestly clients to launder cash through the Vatican. There is no suggestion that the bank has knowingly collaborated.

But in January, Italy’s central bank suspended credit-card activities inside Vatican City for ‘anti-money-laundering reasons’.

The Pope was already furious over the theft by his butler of private correspondence and top-secret papers last year. The thefts were probably an attempt to discover how much the Pope knew of malfeasance within the Curia. 

Then news of a Vatican sex ring and money scams reached his ears late last year. Benedict should not have been surprised. Hints of a seamy Vatican underworld have been surfacing for years.

In March 2010, a 29-year-old chorister in St Peter’s was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes, one of them a seminarian, for a papal gentleman-in-waiting who was also a senior adviser in  the Curial department that oversees the church’s worldwide missionary activities.

Last autumn Benedict ordered three trusted high-ranking cardinals to investigate the state of the Curia. This was the report that was delivered to him just weeks ago.

It was meant for Benedict’s ‘eyes only’ but details of a sex ring and money-laundering scams last week reached the Italian weekly Panorama. Then the daily La Repubblica ran the story.

Benedict has resigned to ensure that the whole ‘Filth’ from many countries of the world right up to the Vatican centre is cleansed. He has given up his job to kick out all the office-holders and start again.

So the Pope’s resignation could be just the beginning of a wave of resignations, and/or sackings, when the new Pope comes in.

With just three days left of his  pontificate, Benedict accepted with lightning speed Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s resignation. O’Brien was not involved in covering up for paedophile priests – but allegations that he had made inappropriate advances towards priests in the Eighties were enough for Benedict to confirm that he was not to join the conclave.     

On Tuesday, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, former head of the Catholic Church in England, declared that the Vatican must ‘put its own house in order’.

In a bold castigation of the papacy and the Curia, the cardinal said: ‘There is no doubt that today there needs to be renewal in the Church, reform in the Church, and especially of its government.’ 

The culture of a highly centralised Church government is now deeply entrenched. John Paul II, the energetic superstar Pope, seemed just the man to clean up the Curia.

But he bypassed it, preferring to spend his time travelling the world. Benedict might have made a start on it – but he retreated into bookish pursuits.

But even if a reformer gets in, he is going to have his work cut out to change an institution that has amassed such a centralised grip. Choosing a new team to be trusted may take just as long. There is every chance that the old ways will return.

The coming conclave is set to be the most contentious for centuries. Whichever side wins – the conservatives, the reformers or the devolutionists – will create tensions and antagonism between Catholicism’s different pressure groups.

My guess is that we are going to get a younger Benedict. I believe that we will get a Pope who will remove any cardinal, bishop or priest who is in any way implicated in the paedophile scandal.

But he will also move to exclude Catholics, high and low, who are not prepared to follow the Church’s teachings on sexual morality as a whole. 

Benedict’s stunning self-sacrifice constitutes, in my view, the greatest gamble in the papacy’s 2,000-year history. If it works, the Church will begin to restore its besmirched reputation. If it fails, we Catholics are headed for calamitous conflict and fragmentation.

SOURCE






A great day for British justice: Theresa May vows to take UK out of the European Court of Human Rights

Britain is set to pull out of the discredited European Convention on Human Rights that has allowed dangerous criminals and hate preachers to remain in the UK.

It marks a triumph for The Mail on Sunday’s campaign against the ludicrous abuses of justice carried out in the name of human rights.

The historic move, to be announced soon by Home Secretary Theresa May, would mean foreign courts could no longer meddle in British justice.

The European Convention has led to such hugely controversial decisions as banning the deportation of radical cleric Abu Qatada and giving British prisoners the right to vote.

Mrs May’s bold proposals to include the move in the next Tory Election manifesto reflect the party’s growing hostility towards Europe. If enacted, her policy would leave British judges free  to interpret the law without interference from the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

Mrs May wants to withdraw from the convention before the next Election in 2015, but Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, a keen pro-European, has made it clear he will veto the initiative.

As a result, it is set to be a manifesto promise to be put into action if David Cameron wins an overall majority. Together with the Prime Minister’s vow to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, it will give the Tory manifesto a strong anti-European theme to combat the increasing appeal of UKIP.

The provisions of the European convention are already enshrined in British law in the Human Rights Act – but under Mrs May’s plan, the final right of appeal would be to the British Supreme Court, not Strasbourg.

The proposal is bound to be seen as a response to the Tories’ humiliation of being beaten into third place in the Eastleigh by-election by Nigel Farage’s rampant UKIP. But well-placed sources insist the Home Secretary has been working on the issue for months, supported by Mr Cameron and Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, and say it is not a ‘knee jerk’ response to the drubbing.

Last night, Nick de Bois, secretary of the 1922 Committee of backbench Tory MPs and a member of the Commons Justice Select Committee, hailed the move as ‘hugely significant’.

He said: ‘This would be a crucial pledge that will convince many, many voters to return a Conservative government at the next  Election.

‘It is imperative that we have legal decisions made here, not in Strasbourg. With this pledge, no longer will foreign criminals be able to take refuge in this country when they should be deported immediately after being released from prison.’

Mr Clegg blocked a similar move after Mr Cameron became Prime Minister in 2010.

As a compromise, the Coalition set up a panel to investigate the possibility of a British Bill of Rights.  But after 19 months and £700,000 of taxpayers’ money, the panel was branded ‘fatally flawed’ when it produced its findings last year: it did not even discuss whether Britain should pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights.

An attempt to reform the convention last year by Mr Cameron was dismissed as a flop after experts said it amounted to little more than ‘tinkering’.

The Prime Minister said the European Court was in danger of being ‘swamped’ by unimportant cases and had undermined its own reputation by overturning judgments decided in British courts.

Fewer cases should go to Strasbourg and British judges should be left to decide outcomes more often, he said.

But Mr Cameron’s move to significantly limit the court’s powers to influence the British legal process was opposed by Sir Nicolas Bratza, the British judge who headed the Strasbourg court until November.

Sir Nicolas, 67, accused countries such as Britain of trying to ‘dictate’ how it should operate.

He demanded independence for the court’s judges and said he was determined to protect ‘minority interests’ who bring cases to the court.

Sir Nicholas said that he had ‘no sympathy’ with critics of the ECHR who call for a shift in power away from Strasbourg.

The ECHR was set up after the Second World War to prevent torture and human rights abuses. The court was established in 1959, giving complainants direct access to justice at a European level.

But critics say the court has grown out of all proportion, and its judges do not even need to have any judicial experience in their homeland.

Lord Hoffman, a former Law Lord, said last year: ‘The Strasbourg Court has taken upon itself an extraordinary power to micromanage the legal systems of the member states of the Council of Europe. The very concept of human rights is being trivialised by silly interpretations.’

In theory, the Council of Europe, a body with 47 member states which oversees the Strasbourg court, could retaliate against Mrs May by expelling Britain. But this has not happened to other countries found guilty of flouting human rights laws in the past.

Opposition to the ECHR in Britain has been fuelled by a series of high-profile cases. The court wants to see tens of thousands of prisoners, including murderers and rapists, being given the vote, regardless of the offence that they have committed.

Its ruling, in defiance of a 100-year ban on votes for prisoners in the UK, came after the ECHR backed a complaint by John Hirst, a convicted axe killer.

The ECHR rejected an overwhelming vote by MPs for maintaining the ban, as Mr Cameron protested that the thought of prisoners voting made him feel ‘physically ill.’ Instead the ECHR threatened to award compensation in thousands of cases if the Prime Minister refused to change the law.

Last November, hate preacher Abu Qatada was freed after defying attempts by Mrs May to deport him to Jordan, where he is wanted on terror charges.

His victory came after an ECHR ruling that his trial in Jordan  could be unfair because some of the evidence might have been obtained by torture. The original objection was that Qatada himself could face torture, prompting Mrs May to accuse the ECHR of ‘moving the goalposts’.

Qatada has received hundreds of thousands of pounds in benefits, while his praise for terror attacks led to him being dubbed Al Qaeda’s ‘ambassador in Europe’.

SOURCE






British Green belt at risk as gipsy camp rules are enforced

Ministers have ordered councils to increase the number of authorised sites for gipsy families, despite concerns that the ruling could increase tensions and see more caravans in the countryside.

Local authorities are also being given financial incentives, through council tax bonuses, to build traveller sites. A separate £60 million government fund will help cover construction costs.

Without action, the number of travellers’ caravans in unauthorised camps will almost double from 2,400 in 2010 to 4,500 by 2015, claims the Department for Communities and Local Government.

The total number of gipsy and traveller caravans in England and Wales has increased by 39 per cent between 2000 and 2011 to 18,383.

Nick Boles, the planning minister, said all councils must have allocated enough land by March 27 to cover rising numbers of traveller sites for the next five years.

Mr Boles said the measures would see more authorised sites for traveller camps, reducing the number of illegal settlements, such as the former camp at Dale Farm in Essex.

Ministers believe the policy will ease tensions between travellers and local residents in permanent housing and ultimately save councils money on evictions.

However, the official “impact assessment” on the rules warns of a risk that the arrangements will result in more unauthorised camps in the countryside.

“There is a potential risk that local authorities will not consider working together to produce joint plans,” the document says. “There may also be potential risks to areas such as the Green Belt if a local planning authority has special or strict planning constraints across its area unless neighbouring authorities were to work with it.”

The Government said national planning guidance had increased protection for the green belt, while councils will have more powers to tackle unauthorised camps.

SOURCE




Frankly, this secrecy is undemocratic

AUSTRALIA boasts a stable democracy and a famously frank political culture. Yet for all that robustness, Australians too readily accept secrecy by those representing us.

Like many journalists, I know a simple truth: if you want useful detail and you want it before your deadline, don't bother waiting for our leaders or their high-level officials. That way lies stone-walling and obfuscation.

A better bet is to go straight to the Americans, the Brits, the New Zealanders, or even the Indonesians.

And you don't even need to go to them directly. Sometimes their websites display a level of detail Australian officials reflexively withhold as if the country's survival depends on its non-disclosure.

Foreign officials are sometimes disarmingly frank and are often quite happy to background media revealing pertinent facts, context and atmosphere.

Perhaps surprisingly, Australia's claimed egalitarianism and supposed disdain for rank and privilege does not extend to a perceived right of ordinary people to information.

When US President Barack Obama travelled to Cambodia last November for the East Asia Summit, members of the White House press corps were given a detailed briefing covering what the administration hoped to achieve in foreign policy terms and how the President would go about it. The briefing was transcribed and made available on the White House website.

Australian journalists covering the summit were provided a logistical briefing on Prime Minister Julia Gillard's main appointments. Matters of inevitable interest to the media were judiciously excluded, such as the fact that Ms Gillard's partner Tim was accompanying her and that his son would meet the couple in the Cambodian capital.

A Reuters colleague tells of approaching the Australian embassy in Burma during a period of intense political violence. He was turned away amid "blind panic" at the ramifications of talking to the press. The British, on the other hand, invited him inside, offered a full briefing and even provided internet facilities.

Domestically, the same non-disclosure tendencies inform most of what governments do.

Last week, Fairfax Media's Anne Davies reported on a push to have Gillard reveal her daily diary, so Australians can see what she is doing, and with whom she is meeting.

This kind of information is available in other countries, including the US and Britain.

Yet it is so foreign to official Australian sensibilities as to be almost unthinkable.

Ask the Prime Minister's office about issues being considered at Cabinet meetings and, more often than not, there is a reluctance to confirm even that a meeting is scheduled.

Now as we enter the longest-ever federal election campaign, both sides are moving into super-secure mode. This involves not revealing where and when the leader will be at any given time.

The dominant fear is of protesters stealing the limelight and wrecking carefully stage-managed television pictures. To that end, advice to media is parsed out on an event-by-event basis.

This circling of the wagons reaches its absurd apotheosis during the campaign proper when travelling media are not told of campaign functions and destinations sometimes until the last possible moment. This secrecy is inimical to democracy.

In its place we get circuses such as this week's Western Sydney soiree crafted to impart the illusion of accountability and participation while cementing in place the polar opposite.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICSDISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN (Note that EYE ON BRITAIN has regular posts on the reality of socialized medicine).   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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