Word: churched
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...Church officials in Munich have confirmed that in 1986, Father H was convicted of sexually abusing children in the Bavarian town of Grafing - and was then allowed to again work among children, though no further accusations of abuse have arisen since. Vatican officials have denied that the future Pope knew anything about Father H's being allowed to work with children again, and his deputy at the time quickly took full responsibility last week for the transfer. On Monday, March 15, Father H was suspended from his current position, and his supervisor, Prelate Josef Obermaier, resigned. For some Catholic faithful...
...hard to predict what the the Pope will do, or what will happen next. Cardinal Law's fate may offer insights but no real parallels, even though Cardinal Ratzinger held the same position in Munich as Law held in Boston. Law was a very high Prince of the Church when the Boston scandal broke, but Ratzinger is now the Supreme Pontiff. No one should expect a papal resignation - indeed, both as Vatican Cardinal and as Pontiff, Benedict has been more responsive than many of his colleagues on clergy sex abuse. Still, the Church's history of silence is galling...
...instructive to look back to a previous episode of the Church's attempts at damage control, in April 2002, when a similar clergy-sex-abuse storm was ravaging the U.S. Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II summoned all the American Cardinals to Rome for an urgent meeting on the crisis. It was an unprecedented public acknowledgment of the gravity of the situation from the typically insulated Vatican leadership. But reporters who made the trip from Boston, the epicenter of the scandal, were hardly impressed with the Vatican openness. When the postsummit briefing included five senior Church officials...
...some sense, the dynamic from eight years ago is still in play. Back then, both the American hierarchy and the Roman Curia struggled to respond to a spiraling series of revelations while resisting calls for heads to roll among those Church leaders judged responsible for their poor handling of abusive priests. But what makes the current situation particularly delicate is that the head that some critics want served up is none other than that of the Pope himself. A senior Vatican official who worked directly with the Pope while he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger says the Pontiff's daily...
...Archdiocese at the time of Father H's arrival was Ratzinger, who moved on to Rome in 1982 to become a senior Vatican official and eventually rose to the papacy in 2005 with the name Benedict XVI. (See more about the pedophile-priest scandal that is scandalizing the Catholic Church in Germany...