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By Kay Ebeling
If you are not specifically Googling “pope” and especially “pope sex abuse” this week, you probably won’t hear or read much about the thousands of felonies committed by pedophiles and other sexual predators operating as priests in the American Catholic Church the last 50 years. In its “complete coverage” of the papal press event, the New York Times does have an article about Catholic school enrollment being half what it was in the 1950s but you have to read between the lines to say, Thank you God that Catholic parents are getting their children out of danger.
Don’t expect mainstream media to do much more than respond to press releases and for that I’m grateful to VOTF and SNAP. In fact the stream of demands from advocates in the past week may have caused the pontiff to change his upcoming speeches to at least acknowledge the crimes, crimes like these:
Sodomy with children. Men grabbed altar boys and forced oral sex on them before going out to serve Mass. Regularly. Altar boy rape before Mass shows up over and over again in the documents that have come out so far. In one LA coastal town, the church had a carnival every Saturday plus Catechism class, and a network of pedophile priests picked children up from the carnival rides and forced them into nearby rooms to have sex, on church property, when the children were supposed to be learning church doctrine. Instead the children were developing their gag response. Children sexualized before age 10 while staring at the stained glass and statues of saints to take their minds off the horror.
On Saturday Yahoo reported: “Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Pope's second-in-command, said the church had already 'responded with great dignity' to the situation, and added that the ‘clamour created in the US around this scandal is really unbearable.'" On Sunday morning, Reuters quoted Fox News saying Bertone seems to have changed his tone: "The pope will talk about it -- talk about it in a specific way," (in an upcoming interview on Fox) said Cardinal Bertone.
But when you go to the actual front pages of mainstream press, as usual, thousands of felonies aided and abetted in the Catholic Church are barely mentioned, and only then as an upsetting dollar figure. The New York Times refers to the thousands of felonies in its Page One Sunday piece as “the sex-abuse scandals that racked the church and are now costing it millions (sic) of dollars in legal fees and settlements with victims.”
That's a factual error in the New York Times, what was once the “official record.”
The Times itself reported $1.6 billion dollars last week, today AP says it is $2 billion the church has paid out in settlements. No one knows how much more the Vatican has paid out to PR consultants and the legions of law firms attached to each case.
And once again it’s all about money.
No one mentions the hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives were damaged by predator priests. Even the Times’ use of the word “scandal” implies an element of gossip, like something bad happened and then the media turned it into something worse.
Mainstream media reporters today do little more than read press releases and make a few phone calls for quotes to file their stories. They are understaffed in corporate owned news organizations. If you want real reporting you have to turn to places like City of Angels Blog, rapidly becoming City of Angels Network (CAN) with webasting of videos.
Here is a place to put comments at the New York Times, because the religion reporter apparently is submitting questions to the Pope’s office and getting them “answered”
Copy and paste into blogger and go down to comments:
http://thepope.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/laurie-goodstein-answers-questions-about-the-pope/#comment-414
Instead of acknowledging the thousands of felonies and crime victims in the United States, the Associated Press article today has this quote:
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, notes that "religion is deeply rooted in American life despite the separation of church and state."
Reuters reports the Pope brings a message of peace. However, security is so tight that a religious sikh leader could not attend any papal event because he would have to remove his ceremonial sword.
Detroit Free Press: Hundreds flocking to see the Pope because “they don’t know much about the pope.” You will hear that message repeated throughout the coming week: "Americans do not know much about this pope" and then biographical information with a lot of stock footage.
In the New York Times "Complete Coverage" is the article about closing schools and declining membership in parishes, but it never mentions the thousands of felonies.
Oh, and the pope will be reaching out to other religions in his “first visit to an American synagogue by a pope.” That's another sound byte you will hear over and over again, his first visit to an American synagogue, about the same time A Matter Of Truth will be holding its vigil in New York City next Friday night.
When I read a report out of Arkansas that they were doing bingo and car wash to raise cash to go see the pope, I had to stop searching.
This made me laugh out loud, not for reasons you’d think, quoted several places from a press release:
“The Church has changed its rules so that it is easier to dismiss priests whenever there is a credible claim of abuse, according to Sister Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. Walsh could not say how many priests were removed - many had died or retired by the time the report came out.
“But she said the Pope would address the victims' suffering. 'It's very close to Holy Father's heart. He is horrified by this crime,' Walsh said.
I'm not laughing because you know it’s not true, that's old news.
I'm laughing because I knew someone named Mary Walsh in college. Hmm, the Mary Walsh I knew was a journalism grad and hmm, a lesbian, could she have gone on to become a nun?
Does anyone know if Sr. Mary Ann Walsh, spokeswoman for the US conference of bishops, is a lesbian who went to The University of Texas at Austin in the 1970s?
These were felonies committed by 4500 known pedophile priests (and counting)
More than 4.5 thousand priests who were pedophiles committed 14 thousand felonies in the form of child rape, and that is only the number the church has acknowledged so far, through settlement of civil lawsuits. Statistics show with 14 thousand admitted pedophile acts there are most likely ten times that number of crimes committed -- while the Catholic Church aided and abetted the crimes.
The motive is not yet clear, some say the coverup and protection of pedophiles was to “save face” and “avoid scandal” but since face is lost and the scandal has not been avoided, why is the Catholic Church still spending millions on defense attorneys and PR consultants?
To manipulate the media and justice system and keep the truth from coming out about the Sex Crimes in the Catholic Church.
MEANWHILE IS IT A COINCIDENCE?
Same date and time as the Pope’s Mass in Washington on April 17 is a significant hearing on the status of the women and children taken in the West Texas raid on the fundamentalist Mormons.
So anybody who Googles pedophile clergy that day will come up with stories about the FLDS cult in West Texas:
SAN ANGELO, Texas - Children removed from a polygamous sect's Texas ranch will remain in facilities here until a scheduled April 17 hearing on their status, officials said Friday.
(Salt Lake Tribune 4.11.08)
Amazing public relations at a very behind the scenes level, using that bottomless briefcase of cash.
Meanwhile Take Back The Churches
Onward and more to come. . .
in 2009 our ongoing coverage of the pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church will be at City fAngels5. in 2010 at CityofAngels8
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CALL: Target Crimes, LA DA's Office, to report sex crimes in the Catholic Church: Phone: (213) 974-5985
2 comments:
What are the bishops of San Diego doing to celebrate the visit?
http://www.riteofsodomy.com/reviews/The%20Bishop%20Brom%20File.htm
As of this writing, the article at the top of the Abuse Tracker page is from the California Daily Catholic and purports a poll commissioned by the Knights of Columbus shows that, "Americans have an overwhelmingly positive view of Pope Benedict XVI on the eve of his visit to the United States." Oops, shoulda told you to have your barf bags at the ready. Apologies.
I couldn't resist sending in a comment, but it will, most likely, never see the light of day. Just wanted to share it with y'all:
Hey, we could probably find enough people that said they'd prefer root canal to listening to the BeeGees, which proves nothing.
I, myself, don't know anyone who thinks Ratzinger is anything other than a pedophile-enabling closet case who should be arrested the moment he steps foot on US soil and tried under RICO statutes.
Anyone who continues to support the onoing criminal enterprise known as the RCC is just as guilty as the murdering, raping, sodomizing, molesting, abusing predatory clergy and their mitered and red hatted enablers. Shame, shame, shame! And Sieg Heil!
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