The 10 Most Corrupt and Compromised Cardinals Voting For the New Pope

[geomancer]

[I posted this to National Politics because half of them served in the US]

https://www.alternet.org/belief/scan...oting-new-pope

Published on Alternet (https://www.alternet.org)
Home > Scandal Spectacle: The 10 Most Corrupt and Compromised Cardinals Voting For the New Pope

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AlterNet [1] / By Adele M. Stan [2]

Scandal Spectacle: The 10 Most Corrupt and Compromised Cardinals Voting For the New Pope

February 27, 2013 |
Ordinarily, the prelates of the Roman Catholic Church like a good spectacle. If you’ve ever witnessed the pomp and regalia of a bishops’ procession, you know what I mean: the robes rendered in luxurious fabrics, the exotic millinery, the swinging brass chancer billowing clouds of fragrant smoke. But as the cardinals assemble this week in Rome to begin the task of choosing a pope to replace the retiring Benedict XVI, the convergence of men in red hats and ankle-length cassocks is less a glorious display than a spectacle of scandal.

The pope’s abdication, unprecedented in the post-Renaissance period, comes under an acrid cloud of corruption that includes scandals involving the Vatican Bank, sexual harassment by prelates, and most troubling, the collusion of the hierarchy in covering the crimes of sexually predatory priests who preyed on young children and guileless teenagers, and once discovered, turned many of them loose to prey on still more.

Leaving aside issues concerning some fishy doin’s at the Vatican Bank (recounted here [3] by Lynn Parramore), or the sexual harassment scandal [4] that inspired this week’s resignation of Cardinal Keith O’Brien, archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh (in which three priests and one former priest accused the cardinal of making sexual advances toward them*), we focus our gaze here on 10 cardinals who either aided and abetted the priests who abused children, or who served as apologists for the church in its failure to report their crimes. This list is by no means definitive or complete; there are likely many more among the 120 cardinals entrusted with the election of the next pope who traded the safety and welfare of children entrusted to the church’s spiritual care for the safety of their own place in the hierarchy of the world’s oldest Christian denomination.

It is worth noting that during the height of the sex abuse of children by priests, the church’s presiding disciplinarian was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI. Offending priests were rarely disciplined, and were almost never reported to law enforcement authorities; Ratzinger instead focused his energy [5] on silencing liberation theologians, threatening feminist nuns with expulsion, and punishing a bishop for being too accepting of gay people.

1. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York. For flash and visibility, the archbishop’s post in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral offers a level of media-conferred power second only to that commanded by the pope himself. (Pope John Paul II famouslydubbed [6] the New York post as “archbishop of the capital of the world.”) In the wake of Benedict’s abdication, Dolan fast became the subject of talk, perhaps generated by his own noise machine, that he was a contender for the church’s top spot.

Just days before he took off for Rome, however, Dolan sat for three hours of questioning [7] during a legal deposition for a case brought by survivors of sexual abuse by priests in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee during Dolan’s tenure there. According to New York Timesreporter Laurie Goodstein, lawyers for the plaintiffs, who claim to have been abused by priests when they were children, sought to ascertain [7] when Dolan first learned of the allegations against the priests in relation to when he made those allegations public. It appears the plaintiffs seek to show that Dolan deliberately stalled in order to let the clock run out on the statute of limitations governing the prosecution of such crimes. In the meantime, the Archdiocese of Milwaukee declared bankruptcy, apparently a result of settlements made with abuse claimants.

From Goodstein’s report [7]:

In the Milwaukee Archdiocese, 575 people have filed claims saying that they were abused, over many decades, by Catholic clergymen. About 70 said they were victims of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy [8], who, church records show, admitted having molested deaf students [9] at a boarding school outside Milwaukee, said Jeff Anderson, a lawyer in St. Paul who represents 350 of the 575 plaintiffs.

A report [10] filed by Goodstein last year revealed that while presiding over the Milwaukee Archdiocese, Dolan approved payouts to abusive priests of as much as $20,000, in exchange for their agreement not to contest their defrocking. They also continued to receive their pensions.

2. Cardinal Roger Mahony, former Archbishop of Los Angeles. Upon receiving the shocking news of Pope Benedict’s resignation, I speculated [11] that recent revelations in the sexual abuse scandal involving the cardinal archbishop of the City of Angels might have something to do with the timing of the unusual papal retirement.

In a settlement reached with some 500 survivors of priestly sexual abuse, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was compelled to release tens of thousands of pages of documents about the abuse scandals -- including correspondence between then-Archbishop Mahony and Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican official who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI.

Some of the documents revealed in the settlement dump are harrowing, including a letter [12] from Mahony to Ratzinger in which he reports that one Father Lynn R. Caffoe initiated more than 100 “masturbatory and copulative acts” with a single boy, and another report of Father Peter Garcia’s abuse of 20 boys, including one he tied up and raped. Instead of turning Garcia in to law enforcement authorities, Mahony sent the criminal priest to a treatment facility in New Mexico, and warned him to stay away from California, where he would be liable for prosecution.

As I wrote [11] earlier this month:

What is clear, though, is that Mahony repeatedly failed to act on concerns about the sexual abuse of children by priests that were brought to him by pastors and church officials throughout the diocese, and that when he did, his actions were designed to avoid criminal prosecutions of the predator priests.

3. Cardinal William Levada, Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. When Ratzinger won election to the papacy, the man he chose to replace himself in his old job of top Vatican enforcer was Levada, the former archbishop of Portland, Oregon and former archbishop of San Francisco.

Like Ratzinger before him, he valued the reputation of the church above the welfare of its victims and, like Ratzinger, has made a specialty of tormenting feminist nuns -- most recently claiming control [13] over the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an umbrella group for most orders of U.S. sisters.

While in San Francisco, Levada dealt with the case of a pedophile priest by punishing and defaming the whistleblower. As I wrote [13] last year:

Such was Levada's brutality, in fact, that he punished a priest who reported a child-abusing fellow priest to the police -- a move that came back to haunt him when the whistleblower, Father Jon Conley, brought a defamation case against the archdiocese after paving the way for the family of an abused child to win a $750,000 settlement from the archdiocese. (Politics Daily contributor Jason Berry told the sordid tale here [14] in 2010.)

Berry also reports [14] the story of Robert McMenamin, the former Portland church counsel who said Levada refused, against the counsel’s advice, to inform the clergy of their obligation to report crimes against children to law enforcement authorities. When McMenamin subsequently resigned and began representing plaintiffs in the sex-abuse cases, Levada “petitioned the Oregon State Bar Association to disqualify McMenamin from such cases,” according to Berry’s report [14]. The Bar declined to do so.
Continues here.