Leon J. Podles :: DIALOGUE

Father Gerald Fitzgerald in the 1950s and 1960s warned American bishops and Pope John XXIII and Paul Vi about abusers. A sample of his opinions: 

In a 1957 letter to an unnamed archbishop, Fitzgerald said, “These men, Your Excellency, are devils and the wrath of God is upon them and if I were a bishop I [...]

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Canadians are not sentimentalists about animals. Fur is not a luxury in Canada, but a necessity for surviving the winters. Europeans are trying to punish Canadians for killing seals (although the Europeans do not express any sorrow over the fish that the seals eat).
Matt Gurney at the National Post has HAD ENOUGH!
Barbaric European food [...]

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The files of East Germany continue to reveal secrets. The NYT reveals
The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.

Now a discovery in the archives [...]

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A priest molested a boarding school boy - but this case didn’t happen in Ireland. It was an Episcopal priest, James Lydell Tucker, a father of five, who molested boys at an upper-class Episcopal school in Austin, Texas. And the Episcopal diocese conspired to cover it up.
What are the lessons? Men don’t have to be [...]

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Ireland been shaken by the revelation of the tens of thousands of children physically and sexually abused by Catholic priests, brothers, and nuns.
Archbishop Cousins of Milwaukee knew that the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, the head of St. John’s School for the Deaf, was an abuser. In 1993 victims came to Archbishop Cousins, but Cousins defended Murphy [...]

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The National Post reports  

Europe’s top security and human rights watchdog is urging Ireland not to preserve “blasphemous libel” as a crime in a draft media law, saying this would flout international free speech covenants. Reuters reports that the Irish justice minister is changing a law that provides prison sentences for blasphemous libel and instead making [...]

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After much trepidation and soul searching, The Producers has finally opened in Berlin. 
Here are photos from Der Spiegel.
 
This means something, but I am not sure what.

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Although I know that many people suspect that celibacy is the source of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, abuse, alas, is not prevented by marriage.
Selwyn House, a prestigious private school in Montreal, has had several cases of abuse.
The newly arrived headmaster had to inform the school that one of its employees was just arrested.

Michael [...]

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As the Catholic bishops in the United States are discovering, it is much harder to tighten discipline than to loosen it, as any teacher or parent could have told them. For decades, over a generation, the bishops did nothing to publicly rebuke or discipline Catholic politicians who want abortion to be legal. Catholics got the [...]

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Archbishop Rembert Weakland was one of the more loathsome bishops who shuffled abusive priests from one parish to another without warning anyone. The history and details are at BishopAccountability and videos of his depositions can be seen here, here, here, and here.
In his 1994 interview with the Milwaukee Journal, the archbishop was more effusive and [...]

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Der Spiegel (who else) informs us

Manni, a wild boar piglet, was found abandoned and starving in a field near Ehringhausen in rural southwestern Germany. The lucky pig was adopted by the Dahlhaus family, who bottle-fed him back to health.
The family also introduced the perky porker to their Jack Russell terrier Candy. It turned out to [...]

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