Word: vaticans
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...says he was physically abused by young men in training to become priests at the school who would routinely smack him on the bottom with their hands or sticks. "This amounted to sexual humiliation," he says. "I was scared and I was shocked." (See "More Headaches for the Vatican: Priests and Child Porn...
...reverberations from the scandal have been felt at the Vatican, where the Holy See spokesman was compelled to respond directly to the abuse allegations - a task that is typically handled by someone on the diocesan level. The spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said on Tuesday that German church authorities acted "promptly and decisively" to investigate the allegations after they emerged. Neither Lombardi nor the Pope himself, however, has commented on Ratzinger's admissions of slapping young people or failing to address wider suspicions of violence. The head of the German Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, who made a public apology...
...former priests at the institution. Similar allegations then emerged at other Catholic schools and institutions in Germany, including a Benedictine monastery and several boarding schools. German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger condemned the "wall of silence" within the Catholic hierarchy, accusing the church of hiding behind a 2001 Vatican directive that called for cases of abuse to be investigated internally before going to state authorities. "This directive makes clear that even serious abuse allegations fall under papal confidentiality and thus should not be forwarded on outside the church," she said. (See "The Pope's Sex Abuse Challenge...
Just as important, however, is the thorny issue of John Paul II, who died in 2005 and was succeeded by Benedict. The Vatican had investigated Maciel's personal life as early as the 1950s, but John Paul II, whose papacy began in 1978, showered praise on the Legion's founder, calling him "an efficacious guide to youth." (See the top 10 religion stories...
Vaca says that remark is what compelled Maciel victims to tell their stories for the book Vows of Silence, published in 2004. They eventually got the Vatican, even under John Paul II, to take their allegations seriously, but Church watchers say Benedict's current mission to canonize his predecessor is another reason Rome won't want to punish the Legion too harshly. "The Legionaries of Christ are going to withstand this [latest] blow," says Elio Masferrer, an expert on the Catholic Church in Latin America at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Rome, he predicts, "will not take any meaningful...