Dear Brick:
About your keen desire to condemn me as a liar, let us go through the post of Kalhoun and my reply, again:
(Originally posted by Kalhoun)
I thought I saw something on 60 Minutes about priests in South America and possibly Africa who are married and actively having kids and are still Catholics. The church tends to look the other way because no one complains about it. I’m pretty sure that’s where I saw it.
(Reply post of Susma)
Closing both eyes.
Authorities decided that better a priest going to hell does his ministry to the boon of Catholic faithfuls, than that faithfuls be left without any pastoral care.
Or they send incontinent priests to other locations, hoping they will change for the better.
Which doesn’t usually work.
That’s how bad the scarcity of worthy priests is in the Catholic Church.
Susma Rio Sep
Assuming that you are a full-fledged lawyer in civil law, or even just adept in canon law for Catholic church marriage nullity work, see if you can still insist that I was saying a lie there, if you really know more carefully exactly what a lie is in law, in ethics, and in moral theology?
Your definition of a lie:
“A lie is a statement designed to mislead the listener or reader concerning the truth. The truth is a reasonable, factual representation of a given situation or set of events.”
You forget the truth as in the mind of the speaker.
Look up lie in law, ethics, and in moral theology, and you will find that a lie can obtain even if it is the truth being told by the speaker; contrariwise, an untruth is not a lie even if told by the speaker (thinking that he is telling the truth). One of the reasons why a polygraph is not reliable for genuinely detecting whether a person is lying or not.
Please answer my questions later placed here in this post. In the meantime, think about this: the trouble of priests living in with women is as old as the Catholic Church. What incidents do you want me to cite in her long history? I cannot imagine a licentiatus in iure canonico not knowing this trouble of the Catholic Church from the very beginning of the celibacy discipline to the present.
Would these excerpts be convincing to you about the phenomenon of priests fornicating with women and authorities not removing them?
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http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/031601/031601a.htm
Reports of abuse
AIDS exacerbates sexual exploitation of nuns, reports allege
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR. and PAMELA SCHAEFFER
NCR Staff, Rome and Kansas City, Mo.
Several reports written by senior members of women’s religious orders and by an American priest assert that sexual abuse of nuns by priests, including rape, is a serious problem, especially in Africa and other parts of the developing world.
The reports allege that some Catholic clergy exploit their financial and spiritual authority to gain sexual favors from religious women, many of whom, in developing countries, are culturally conditioned to be subservient to men. The reports obtained by NCR – some recent, some in circulation at least seven years – say priests at times demand sex in exchange for favors, such as permission or certification to work in a given diocese. The reports, five in all, indicate that in Africa particularly, a continent ravaged by HIV and AIDS, young nuns are sometimes seen as safe targets of sexual activity. In a few extreme instances, according to the documentation, priests have impregnated nuns and then encouraged them to have abortions.
In some cases, according to one of the reports, nuns, through naiveté or social conditioning to obey authority figures, may readily comply with sexual demands.
Although the problem has not been aired in public, the reports have been discussed in councils of religious women and men and in the Vatican.
(…)
Harassment common
In McDonald’s report, she states that “sexual harassment and even rape of sisters by priests and bishops is allegedly common,” and that “sometimes when a sister becomes pregnant, the priest insists that she have an abortion.” She said her report referred mainly to Africa and to African sisters, priests and bishops – not because the problem is exclusively an African one, but because the group preparing the report drew “mainly on their own experience in Africa and the knowledge they have obtained from the members of their own congregations or from other congregations – especially diocesan congregations in Africa.”
“We know that the problem exists elsewhere too,” she wrote.
“It is precisely because of our love for the church and for Africa that we feel so distressed about the problem,” McDonald wrote.
McDonald’s was the report presented in 1998 to the Council of 16. She declined to be interviewed by NCR.
When a sister becomes pregnant, McDonald wrote, she is usually punished by dismissal from the congregation, while the priest is “often only moved to another parish – or sent for studies.”
In her report, McDonald wrote that priests sometimes exploit the financial dependency of young sisters or take advantage of spiritual direction and the sacrament of reconciliation to extort sexual favors.
McDonald cites eight factors she believes give rise to the problem:
* The fact that celibacy and/or chastity are not values in some countries.
* The inferior position of women in society and the church. In some circumstances “a sister … has been educated to regard herself as an inferior, to be subservient and to obey.”
“It is understandable then, that a sister finds it impossible to refuse a cleric who asks for sexual favours. These men are seen as ‘authority figures’ who must be obeyed.”
“Moreover, they are usually more highly educated and they have received a much more advanced theological formation than the sisters. They may use false theological arguments to justify their requests and behaviour. The sisters are easily impressed by these arguments. One of these goes as follows:
“ ‘We are both consecrated celibates. That means that we have promised not to marry. However, we can have sex together without breaking our vows.’ ”
* The AIDS pandemic, which means sisters are more likely to be seen as “safe.”
* Financial dependence created by low stipends for sisters laboring in their home countries or inadequate support for sisters sent abroad for studies. The problem of sexual abuse in Africa is most common, according to many observers, among members of diocesan religious congregations with little money and no network of international support.
* A poor understanding of consecrated life, both by the sisters and also by bishops, priests, and lay people.
* Recruitment of candidates by congregations that lack adequate knowledge of the culture.
* Sisters sent abroad to Rome and other countries for studies are often “too young and/or immature,” lack language skills, preparation and other kinds of support, and “frequently turn to seminarians and priests for help,” creating the potential for exploitation.
“I do not wish to imply that only priests and bishops are to blame and that the sisters are simply their victims,” McDonald wrote. “No, sisters can sometimes be only too willing and can also be naïve.”
* Silence. “Perhaps another contributing factor is the ‘conspiracy of silence’ surrounding this issue,” McDonald wrote. “Only if we can look at it honestly will we be able to find solutions.”
The American priest who gave a similar account of sexual abuse of women religious is Fr. Robert J. Vitillo, then of Caritas and now executive director of the U.S. bishops’ Campaign for Human Development. In March 1994, a month after O’Donohue wrote her report, Vitillo spoke about the problem to a theological study group at Boston College. Vitillo has extensive knowledge of Africa based on regular visits for his work. His talk, which focused on several moral and ethical issues related to AIDS, was titled, “Theological Challenges Posed by the Global Pandemic of HIV/AIDS.”
(…)
Church officials have not always, however, been open to such exchanges. McDonald wrote in her 1998 report that in March of that year she had spoken to the standing committee of the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar, the consortium of African bishops’ conferences, on the problem of sexual abuse of sisters.
“Since most of what I gave was based on reports coming from diocesan congregations and Conferences of Major Superiors in Africa, I felt very convinced of the authenticity of what I was saying,” McDonald wrote.
Yet, “the bishops present felt that it was disloyal of the sisters to have sent such reports outside their dioceses,” McDonald wrote. “They said that the sisters in question should go to their diocesan bishop with these problems.”
“Of course,” she wrote, “this would be the ideal. However, the sisters claim that they have done so time and time again. Sometimes they are not well received. In some instances they are blamed for what has happened. Even when they are listened to sympathetically, nothing much seems to be done.”
(…)
The information on abuse of nuns by priests “comes from missionaries (men and women); from priests, doctors and other members of our loyal ecclesial family,” she wrote. “I have been assured that case records exist for several of the incidents” described in the report, she said, “and that the information is not just based on hearsay.”
The 23 countries listed in her report are: Botswana, Burundi, Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, India, Ireland, Italy, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Tonga, Uganda, United States, Zambia, Zaire, Zimbabwe.
Her hope, she wrote, is that the report “will consequently motivate appropriate action especially on the part of those in positions of church leadership and those responsible for formation.”
John Allen’s e-mail address is jallen@natcath.org. Pamela Schaeffer’s e-mail address is pschaeffer@natcath.org
Documents related to the above story will be available on the NCR Web site at www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/documents/index.htm
National Catholic Reporter, March 16, 2001
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Are you a civil lawyer with a civil law degree and you passed the government bar examination; so that you are a member of a state bar, and even authorized to practice in the whole U.S.?
Or are you holding a purely Catholic Church degree making you a licentiatus in iure canonico, and allowed by some bishops to practice, as an advocate in Catholic Church annulment petitions.
Or are you both a civil lawyer with a government recognized degree and membership in a bar, and at the same time a canon lawyer with a purely Catholic Church degree making you a licentiatus in iure canonico?
Do you practice only as an advocate helping a petitioner obtain Catholic annulment of marriage – properly a declaration of nullity of marriage; or do you also represent priests who are being tried for living in with women, the punishment of which is suspension from the ministry?
Tell me which canon of the Present Code of Canon Law prescribes the punishment of priests living in with women.
Tell me, if the bishop should come to know of a priest living in with a woman, can he exercise the discretion to initiate immediately the formal and solemn process to establish the guilt of the priest and to inflict upon the priest the corresponding penalty; or can he choose for reasons justifiable to his conscience to let the priest continue in his ministry?
Do you know that the process is not possibly as simple as a petitio declarationis nullitatis matrimonii?
How much discretionary power can a bishop exercise in this respect?
Do you know of the “Decretum Gratiani”?
Would you like to look up in this work, the part entitled: “De Clericis Incontinentibus”? (I am not so precise about the name of the part, I will let you know as soon as I get my hands on a copy.)
Please answer the above questions, it might enable me to understand your ignorance of the phenomenon in question.
Susma Rio Sep