The Pope's Cover-Up - An Incomplete Timeline

[ensho]

http://counterpunch.com/leupp04122010.html


Given the rash of reports about the current pope’s alleged involvement in the cover-up of clerical child abuse in a number of countries, I thought I’d produce a timeline for the convenience of anyone studying the matter. It’s no doubt incomplete, but hopefully helpful to those studying the issue.

(the timeline starts with the following)

March 1977: Joseph Alois Ratzinger appointed Archbishop of Munich by Pope Paul VI.

January 1980: Archbishop Ratzinger chairs the Munich Diocesan Council meeting where the case of a priest, Peter Hullermann, accused of sex abuse is discussed. (Hullerman, 31, had plied an 11 year old boy with alcohol and then had him perform oral sex on him.) The Council decides to refer the priest to counseling.

Within weeks Hullerman is reassigned to another parish. (Ratzinger’s vicar-general in Munich, Gerhard Gruber, has since assumed “full responsibility” for this assignment, noting that there were more than 1,000 priests in the archdiocese and that Ratzinger entrusted that kind of personnel matter to his subordinates.)

(Rev. Hullerman is to be convicted in 1986 of molesting young boys but is only suspended from the priesthood recently when this news story breaks.)

-LONG snip-

(and ends with)

April 2, 2010: In a Good Friday sermon in St. Peter’s Basilica with the pope present Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa complains that priests are being stereotyped, mentioning that a Jewish friend had written him to say that accusations against the Church reminded him of the “more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

The pope avoids the issue entirely in his Easter weekend messages.

April 4, 2010: Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano denounces the accusations against the Pope as a “vile defamation operation.”

*****


-snip-

Ratzinger conducts a devious slight-of-hand, feigning transparency and legal cooperation to obscure a history of concealment of egregious sex abuse instances “for the good of the Universal Church.” That’s the real history here, now requiring him to insist on diplomatic immunity so as not to appear in U.S. courtrooms.

****

The Huffington Report informs us that one Angelo Balducci, a Gentleman of His Holiness, one of those carrying the coffin of Pope John Paul II at his funeral in 2005, has been dismissed along with Vatican choristor Thomas Chinedu Eheim. Seems the latter was procuring young men of precise descriptions (“two black Cuban lads,” a rugby player, a former model from Milan) for the former, who paid them very well for their sexual services.

No surprise here. Just more gayness in the Vatican. And the play for pay aspect isn’t particulary disturbing; this is how things work in the world. But 2000 euros ($ 2,700) per tryst? That just seems unreasonable. Indeed, scandalous.
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