Word: vaticans
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...contesting his suspension. There's a tough trade-off for swiftly protecting the public: not everyone is comfortable with the lack of due process that zero tolerance provides for the accused. Of course, there was little due process when investigations were left in bishops' hands. And last year the Vatican issued new rules so discreetly that most churchmen don't know that anything was changed. Rome quietly published, in Latin, a papal directive known as a motu proprio (meaning under his personal authority), tucked inside a long annual record of the Holy See. It directed that allegations of sex abuse...
...damage. The Pope's cryptic paragraphs at the end of his Holy Thursday letter to priests hardly constituted a ringing mea culpa. At a stiff press conference afterward, Dario Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, a contender for the next pontificate, short-circuited the avalanche of questions with a sample of Vatican stonewalling, sternly defending current policy. Citing the "serious and severe" internal rules the church has applied to pedophile priests, the Cardinal looked up from his text and asked what other institutions had such guidelines. "I would like to know one!" he demanded, waving a finger...
...Vatican has long dismissed all the fuss as "an American problem," as if it plagued no other countries. In the corridors of Rome, prelates disparage the "litigious" nature of U.S. society and blame abusive priests on lax American sexual mores. Complains a Vatican official: "In America there is too much reliance on modern psychology in place of the church's traditional wisdom." Officials say the Pope is greatly pained by the crisis in the U.S. church. But that doesn't mean he is ready or able to confront such an explosive issue. The papacy hates to bend to outside pressure...
...wouldn't take a Vatican II-style revolution to start improving the church's handling of sex abuse. Atlanta's Archbishop John Donoghue ticked off a few lessons in a recent pastoral statement: Report accusations immediately to the law. Cooperate in investigations. Move the accused away from kids. If he's found guilty, bar him from the ministry...
...double murder, to life in prison; by a court in Miami. Over 100 British parliamentarians continue to press for a retrial, based on what they consider significant errors in the millionaire's original 1987 trial. RESIGNED. ARCHBISHOP JULIUSZ PAETZ, 67, high-ranking Polish prelate, following an "inconclusive" Vatican investigation into accusations, which Paetz denies, that he molested clerics; in Rome. "Not everyone understood my genuine openness and spontaneity toward people," he said. RETIRING. RONNIE FLANAGAN, 53, Northern Ireland's progressive chief of police who through the late '90s succeeded in changing the force's Protestant-biased image; in Belfast. Flanagan...