Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

 In the movie Napoleon, Wellington has strictly forbidden his soldiers to loot on pain of death. He comes across a soldier with a chicken under his shirt. The soldier tries to come up with a convincing explanation of why there is a chicken under his shirt. Wellington turns to his aide and tells him to [...]

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Because the reporting on the Vangheluwe - Danneels case is in Dutch, much of the information is difficult to access. 
One important piece of background has recently surfaced. Tom Heneghan of Reuters wrote to Austen Ivereigh at America:

 What is not said in the transcripts but was reported in the other paper running the transcripts (Het Nieuwsblad) [...]

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Tom Roberts at the National Catholic Reporter reflects on the failure of the hierarchy:
Danneels was generally seen as one of the last of the Vatican II generation who knew that council intimately and supported its reforms. He would be, for lack of a better term, a liberal by many of today’s ecclesiastical measures. But it [...]

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Roger Vangheluwe was a priest when he began sexually abusing his five-year-old nephew. The abuse continued even after 1984, when Vangheluwe, at age 48, became bishop of Bruges. 
The boy’s family pressured the boy to remain silent to preserve the bishop’s career. The bishop gave the family money (source of money unspecified). As he grew up, [...]

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In April 2010, eight years after Boston exploded with the news about pedophile cover-ups, Cardinal Danneels, the great progressive hero in the Church, continued the policy of hushing things up. Reuters reports:

The former head of Belgium’s Catholic Church suggested to a sexual abuse victim it would be better to delay a public statement on the [...]

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Der Spiegel recaps the events in Belgium. Cardinal Danneels can’t imagine why anyone thinks he didn’t act properly in handling allegations of sexual abuse. But 

A few days after the police raids in Mechelen, a dozen men gathered on the steps of the cathedral in Brussels. Ten years ago, on Jan. 25, 2000, they said, they [...]

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Catholic Church Conservation has the English translation of an article on the legal liability of
Cardinal Danneels: 

What is the situation of Danneels in criminal law? Can he be prosecuted? And when would that be? How can he defend himself? All at a glance:
 
* If Danneels was aware of a crime he had not reported to the [...]

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Marc Dutroux

 
Cardinal Godfried Daneels
 
When they searched retired Cardinal Danneels’ residence, Belgian police discovered confidential court records on the Dutroux murder-pedophile case. Church officials claim to be completely unaware of the existence of such files.The files contain hundreds of pictures of the corpses of the murdered girls and of the cells in which they were kept. [...]

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The Young Daniel Cohn-Bendit

Der Spiegel is often accused of being anti-clerical. The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Germany has given anti-clericals a vast amount of material to work with. But Der Spiegel is also willing to tell the truth about corruption in the liberal icons of society, in this case the revolutionaries of 1968 and [...]

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Although the good people of Massachusetts were revolted by the behavior of Catholic priests with (mostly) teenage boys, and they sent Cardinal Law packing to a sinecure in Rome for having tolerated such an orgy, they seem to have had (perhaps not unreasonably) lower standards for congressmen.
 
In 1983 Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts took under [...]

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The archival project with which I am associated, BishopAccountability, is collecting all documents, articles, legal cases, and other material, associated with sexual abuse by clerics in the United States. We have close to a million pages of documents now, and will probaly end up with 3 to 5 million pages. 
No one else is collecting this [...]

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The diocese of Stockton, California bought convicted child molester Rev. Oliver O’Grady a pension (at the cost of 94,000) that would begin when O’Grady turned 65. Bishop Blaire of Stockton explained to his diocese: 

When Oliver O’Grady was in prison, he refused to apply for removal from the priesthood, also known as laicization or defrocking. Already [...]

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While I suspect that many priest sexual abusers and even some bishops may be true, congenital psychopaths with a different brain structure than the average person, most of their failure to feel the pain and damage that abuse was causing victims was brought about by the culture of clerical narcissism, Priests considered themselves other Christs, [...]

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The comments in the previous blog raise the interesting question of whether the ordination of an unbeliever is valid. That is, if I man was baptized, but has lost his faith and seeks ordination anyway, is he validly ordained a priest or consecrated a bishop? 
In two cases (including Rudy Kos) I have come across memos [...]

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In reading the cases of sexual abuse, I pity the victims, but I often pity the abusers, who are often psychopaths on a straight path to hell. They must be punished, both to affirm  justice and to waken them to the enormity of their acts. Punishment is necessary for justice, and justice is necessary if [...]

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