Word: vaticaners
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Nicholson's resume had raised allegiance issues from the start. As Republican National Committee chairman during Bush's 2000 election and later as his ambassador to the Vatican, he had less experience in veterans' affairs than most predecessors. In office, Nicholson defended budgets that turned out to be billions of dollars short of wartime needs, grossly underestimated the numbers of soldiers returning with post-traumatic stress disorder and oversaw a backlog of claims that has swelled to nearly 400,000. On Capitol Hill, during a House veterans' affairs committee hearing in May, he was forced to respond to stories...
...confederation of autonomous dioceses. If you prefer a business model, it's top-down management vs. franchising. Though imperfect, these analogies can help address a lingering question in the wake of the Los Angeles archdiocese's record $660 million settlement with victims of clergy sex abuse: What is the Vatican's responsibility...
...local diocese has essentially shouldered all of the administrative blame - and taken the financial hit - for the priest perpetrators and the bishops who failed to prevent their crimes, with no reference or responsibility assigned to the hierarchy in Rome. Still, victims' lawsuits frequently cite the Holy See, the Vatican-based juridical headquarters of the 1.1 billion-strong Catholic Church, and the Pope himself...
Since the issue exploded in 2002 with the scandal in the Archdiocese of Boston, it has been difficult to force the Vatican to respond directly to the innumerable court cases that have arisen, since, according to the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act, the Holy See is outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. But two recent cases, in Oregon and Kentucky, have cracked open the door for the first time to the possibility that the Vatican could one day be held financially responsible and officials in Rome could be forced to testify. Lawyers are trying to prove in both cases that...
Going back in time - and indeed some of the cases cited in the Los Angeles archdiocese go back to the first half of the 20th century - it would seem the Vatican does share some responsibility for the way that its clergy are trained, hired and transferred, as well as for the climate of secrecy that allowed many of these criminals to linger. At the same time, individual dioceses do in fact have wide latitude in the daily management of their affairs, with Rome rarely intervening on administrative, financial or pastoral matters...