Word: vaticans
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Cardinal William Levada, a high-ranking Vatican official whom Pope Benedict XVI hand-picked to succeed him in his old job as head of the Vatican's doctrinal office, offered early signs on Friday that the Vatican will change its internal, or canon, laws concerning the church's response to sexual abuse allegations - a matter that has become the main topic of the Pope's American visit. The changes would follow adjustments made some time ago involving the church's statute of limitations with regard to some particularly egregious offenses. The Cardinal suggested that laws meriting amendment may involve statutes...
Asked whether the Vatican should consider such changes to canon laws, Levada said, "It's possible. There are some things under consideration that I'm not able...
...American-born Cardinal, who was Archbishop of San Francisco before Benedict brought him to Rome, said that there have already been some abuse cases in which the Vatican had "made exceptions" to canon laws - cases in which victims may not have spoken up until years later. "We found that many of the cases go back over quite a number of years, and [victims] don't feel personally able to come forward until they reach a certain level of maturity. Some canon norms are like statutes of limitations, and if the case warrants...we've been able to make exceptions...
Long before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Jospeh Ratzinger had been caricatured as the Catholic Church's Grand Inquisitor, the fearsome guardian of orthodoxy - with an eye on America's Catholic colleges, which the Vatican since the 1960s was wary were becoming more like their secular counterparts. In 1986, Ratzinger officially silenced theologian Fr. Charles Currran of Catholic University in Washington D.C., leading to Curran's dismissal (and a subsequent re-tooling of the school along more conventionally Catholic lines). That apparently led to more obedience to Rome's dictates. In 1999 the American bishops mandated that...
...Catholic school administrators was anticipated with some anxiety. A few months ago, the prevailing wisdom was that the Pope had called the meeting to take them to the woodshed. Patrick Reilly, president of the Catholic-education watchdog group, the Cardinal Newman society, was quoted in The Washington Post citing Vatican officials as saying the speech would "raise a lot of eyebrows." Some liberals worried that the Pope might force them to compromise their academic freedom...