Bishop quits days before child sex abuse report due
Bishop quits days before child sex abuse report due
Bishop Seamus Hegarty
A Catholic bishop stepped down yesterday just six days before child sex abuse
audits into two dioceses where he served are due to be published.
Bishop of Derry Seamus Hegarty's resignation on health grounds was accepted by
Pope Benedict just two weeks after offering it. He left his post immediately.
Two separate audits of the Derry and Raphoe dioceses, carried out into how the
church dealt with paedophile priests, have been pencilled in for release
next Tuesday or Wednesday, sources have said.
However, previous dates set aside for the release of the reports carried out
by the church-run National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic
Church (NBSCCC) have been postponed.
Church insiders say the contents of audits being carried out by the
organisation have been seen by retired Bishop Hegarty as well as the current
Bishop of Raphoe, Philip Boyce.
Donegal-born Dr Hegarty served as Bishop of Raphoe from 1982 until 1994 before
taking up his position in Derry, where he admitted this year that
allegations of child sex abuse had been made against 26 priests over the
past 50 years.
Allegations against up to 20 priests have been made in the Raphoe diocese over
a similar period.
Former Soviet Citizen Confronts Socialists at Occupy Wall Street
Jesuit arrested on sex assault charges in Colo.
The Douglas County Sheriff's office in Castle Rock, Colo., released this undated photo of Richard James Kurtz who was arrested Monday, Nov. 21, 2011, in Chicago. Colorado authorities say Kurtz a Jesuit priest in Chicago is accused of sexually assaulting a minor 10 years ago. The assault allegedly happened in Douglas County, south of Denver, in 2001 while Kurtz was working as a chemistry teacher at the University of Detroit High School in Detroit.
(Douglas County Sheriff / AP)
CASTLE ROCK, Colo. (AP) — A Jesuit priest in Chicago was arrested Monday on allegations that he sexually assaulted a minor 10 years ago in Colorado, the Douglas County sheriff's office said.
The Rev. Richard James Kurtz, 67, was being held on $100,000 bond in Chicago on charges of sexual assault on a child by someone in a position of trust and attempted sexual assault, sheriff's office spokesman Sgt. Ron Hanavan said.
Authorities allege that the 2001 assault happened in Douglas County, an area south of Denver that is home to both suburban communities and rural areas. At the time, Kurtz was working as a chemistry teacher at the University of Detroit High School in Detroit.
Hanavan said Kurtz and the alleged male victim, who was under 18, knew each other, but he couldn't say where the victim was from or what they were doing in Colorado because the case is sealed. He said there's no connection with any Colorado church.
The investigation began after the Society of Jesus Chicago-Detroit Province notified the sheriff's office in June about the alleged assault, Hanavan said. An arrest warrant was issued Friday.
The province said in a written statement Monday that in 2001, when a report of misconduct first surfaced, it reported the allegation to authorities in Michigan.
The province also has a policy under which it reports abuse allegations to authorities in the place where the conduct is said to have occurred. The province said it has been cooperating with Colorado authorities since April. It wasn't immediately clear why the report was only made this year.
Kurtz was removed from public ministry soon after the initial allegation was received, the province said. The Jesuits said Kurtz's activities have been restricted since then. It didn't say where Kurtz was working at the time of his arrest.
The case has been turned over to prosecutors who will decide whether to charge Kurtz.
Former Soviet Citizen Confronts Socialists at Occupy Wall Street
Former Soviet Citizen Confronts Socialists at Occupy Wall Street (Language Warning)
I am not the video author. I do not agree that the USSR nor any government has ever been communist. Collectivist, tyrannical, fascist: yes. Therein lies the core of our problems. We allow a select few to dictate to the rest of us. This is not living. It is surviving as slaves.
See my other video: Occupy: Soros, Piven and SEIU Working to Destroy Americas Financial System to Create Revolution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFeCHY9qPBw
Brooklyn Bridge incident staged? Occupy WallStreet EXPOSED. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeO3L5EFfBo
» The Ayers Brothers Connection: Coaching #OccupyChicago, Calling for School 'Occcupations' - Big Government http://biggovernment.com/tloudon/2011/10/25/the-ayers-brothers-connection-coa...
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
Occupy Wall Street Obama ACORN Working Families Party protestors, Craigslist ad, ACORN helped create mortgage crisis
http://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/occupy-wall-street-obama-acorn-w...
WHOOPS! Vatican Lets Slip Plans For One World Government
http://www.businessinsider.com/whoops-vatican-lets-slip-plans-for-one-word-go...
'Soros advises Obama to use forceful measures to override the will of the people' http://redwhitebluenews.com/?p=12336
Here it is ... Vatican calls for One World Bank ...
"The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a "global public authority" and a "central world bank" to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican's Justice and Peace department should please the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn."
'Vatican calls for global authority on economy, raps "idolatry of the market"'
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/24/idUS264245887020111024
See more at www.youtube.com
Former Soviet Citizen Confronts Socialists at Occupy Wall Street
I am not the video author. I do not agree that the USSR nor any government has ever been communist. Collectivist, tyrannical, fascist: yes. Therein lies the core of our problems. We allow a select few to dictate to the rest of us. This is not living. It is surviving as slaves.
Brooklyn Bridge incident staged? Occupy WallStreet EXPOSED. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeO3L5EFfBo
» The Ayers Brothers Connection: Coaching #OccupyChicago, Calling for School ‘Occcupations’ – Big Government http://biggovernment.com/tloudon/2011/10/25/the-ayers-brothers-connection-coa…
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
Occupy Wall Street Obama ACORN Working Families Party protestors, Craigslist ad, ACORN helped create mortgage crisis
http://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/occupy-wall-street-obama-acorn-w…
WHOOPS! Vatican Lets Slip Plans For One World Government
http://www.businessinsider.com/whoops-vatican-lets-slip-plans-for-one-word-go…
‘Soros advises Obama to use forceful measures to override the will of the people’ http://redwhitebluenews.com/?p=12336
Here it is … Vatican calls for One World Bank …
“The Vatican called on Monday for the establishment of a “global public authority” and a “central world bank” to rule over financial institutions that have become outdated and often ineffective in dealing fairly with crises. The document from the Vatican’s Justice and Peace department should please the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrators and similar movements around the world who have protested against the economic downturn.”
‘Vatican calls for global authority on economy, raps “idolatry of the market”‘
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/24/idUS264245887020111024
See more at www.nonpartisanssplan.com
Southern Poverty Law Center attack Vatican Assassins Website
Southern Poverty Law Center attack Vatican Assassins
Vatican Assassins: A One-Stop Website for Conspiratologists
Posted in Conspiracies by Arthur Goldwag on November 23, 2011
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/11/23/vatican-assassins-a-one-stop-website-for-conspiratologists/
Coming upon a hate site unexpectedly, you sometimes get this down-the-rabbit hole, Alice-in-Wonderland feeling that you’ve been wrenched into an alternate reality. Such a place is Vatican Assassins, the domain of one Jon Eric Phelps, whose interests and identity are pretty well summed up in the nearly incomprehensible blurb for his 1,836 page magnum opus, Vatican Assassins: Wounded in the House of My Friends:
After Thirty-Eight Years of Suppression
(1963 – 2001)
Exposing the Murder of Knight of Columbus
President John F. Kennedy,
by the bloody hand of the Society of Jesus,
by Order of its Jesuit General being
“the Black Pope”,
In Command of His Most Obedient Servant,
the “infallible” Pope Paul VI being
“the White Pope”,
He Controlling the Soviet KGB
and Jesuit-trained Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba
through the British, Russian and American
Branches of the Knights of Malta,
While in Command of His Jesuit-trained
Most Obedient Servant:
The Archbishop of New York and
Knight of Columbus
Francis Cardinal Spellman,
Directing the Cast of Organized American Traitors,
They Being the High Command of
The Knights of Malta,
Shriner Freemasonry
The Knights of Columbus,
The Mafia and therefore,
The New York Council on Foreign Relations
Controlling the “Holy Roman”
Fourteenth Amendment American Empire
Including Its:
Federal Government and War Machine,
Federal Reserve Banking System,
Military Industrial Complex,
National “Lucepress” Media,
Federal Bureau of Investigation,
Central Intelligence Agency,
National Security Agency
Secret Service,
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court with his Warren Commission,
Speaker of the House of Representatives
with His Assassinations Committee,
and Vietnam War
by
Eric Jon Phelps, White American Freeman
Dispensational, Fifth Monarchy, Seventh-Day Baptist-Calvinist
Phelps, who advertises that he is a White American and a Baptist Calvinist (and a Fifth Monarchist, too, which is an apocalyptic cult that was active in England during the time of Oliver Cromwell), manages to touch on virtually every crazy theory in right-wing New World Order conspiracism, white separatism, birtherism, and 9/11 denial, while at the same time hearkening back to the Anti-Masons and the Anti-Papist Know Nothings of the nineteenth century and much earlier.
Click on the “news” stories featured on the Vatican Assassins website and you’ll learn that “Army General David Patraeous [sic] is a Jesuit Temporal Coadjutor,” as is Vice Admiral Gerald R. Beaman, Commander of US Third Fleet. So is radio’s Alex Jones. Newt Gingrich “is one of the ten most dangerous, Jesuitical politicians of the Pope’s ‘Holy Roman’ Fourteenth Amendment, Cartel-Corporate-Fascist, Socialist-Communist American Empire.” Pope Benedict XVI is an Illuminized Freemason of the highest rank and “[Former Carter Administration National Security Advisor] Zbigniew Brzezinski, a notable CFR-member, founder of the Trilateral Commission, key Bilderberger, fanatical Socialist-Communist, alien Polish Roman Catholic and high-level Freemason, was the foremost mentor of Barry Davis Soetoro, remade into ‘Barack Hussein Obama.’”
Especially crazy are Phelps’ theories of the Kennedy assassination that center on the Jesuit order and its leader, known as the “black Pope.” His fever dream is of a world that is controlled by the Jesuits—either directly or through their Jewish and Masonic proxies (not only were they behind 9/11, he tells us, the Vatican actually founded Islam in the 600s—the Arab Spring is their most recent handiwork), is based on a panoply of primary sources, most of them published long before JFK, Cardinal Spellman, or Pope Paul VI were born.
Protestant conspiracy theorists were obsessed with the Jesuits for centuries before the Illuminati, the Rothschilds, the Bilderbergs, or ACORN were ever thought of. Robert Ware forged the so-called Extreme Oath of the Jesuits all the way back in 1689 and published it in his book Foxes and Firebrands. “You have been taught to insidiously plant the seeds of jealousy and hatred between communities, provinces, states that were at peace, and incite them to deeds of blood,” it supposedly began. “You have been taught your duty as a spy….none can command here who has not consecrated his labors with the blood of the heretic; for ‘without the shedding of blood no man can be saved.’”
Phelps’s book is based on panoply of like-minded “primary” sources. If you buy it, he’ll send you a bonus CD that includes the complete texts of thirteen of them, among them The Black Pope, a book that was “one of the hottest, most controversial books of the late 1800s. This book was so hot, so very controversial that the Vatican forced its withdrawal shortly after it was published.”
The Black Pope: Or, The Jesuits’ Conspiracy Against American Institutions was published in 1892 by the Reverend O.E. Murray, Ph.D., and it was based on a series of lectures the Reverend delivered under the auspices of the virulently anti-Catholic American Protective Association—an organization that, for its relentless fear-mongering and its indifference to the truth, bears an uncanny resemblance to virulently anti-Muslim ideologues Robert Spencer and Pam Geller. The APA is perhaps best remembered for distributing a bogus encyclical in which Pope Leo XIII ordered loyal Catholics to exterminate all of the Protestants in the United States, “on or about the feast of Ignatius Loyola in the year of our Lord, 1893.”
Other texts on the CD are the Rev. John William Dowling’s History of Romanism: From the Earliest Corruptions of Christianity to the Present Time (1845) and Edwin Allen Sherman’s The Engineer Corps of Hell; or, Rome’s Sappers and Miners: Containing the Tactics of the ‘Militia of the Pope,’ of the Secret Manual of the Jesuits, and Other Matter Intensely Interesting, Especially to the Freemasons and Lovers of Religious Liberty, Whithersoever (1883). But wait, there’s more. You’ll get The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1835)—a prurient account of a Canadian nun’s escape from sex slavery that was America’s bestselling book before Uncle Tom’s Cabin—and Thrilling Mysteries of a Convent Revealed by T.B. Peterson (1835), which features scenes in which Jesuits drink blood from a human skull, burn the Bible, and trample the American flag underfoot. Then there’s Abbate M. Leone’s Jesuit Conspiracy: Secret Plan of the Order. This last is the story of a teenaged novice who overhears his superiors plotting to overthrow the governments of the world—a plot premise that can’t but have a familiar ring to readers of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purports to be the notes of a secret meeting of high-placed Jews with similarly nefarious aims.
Not surprisingly, Phelps’s singular focus on the Jesuits has earned him a measure of disrepute in the conspiracy world, which has tended to focus most of its animus on Jews. The arch-conspiracist anti-Semite Ken Adachi posted a lengthy, two-part exposé of Phelps on his website Educate-Yourself.org, that claims that he is a crypto-Zionist, a secret New Ager, and maybe even an FBI agent provocateur. “Eric Jon Phelps is the sort of person that a serious-minded and intelligent reader will quickly dismiss as a Merchant of Tripe,” Adachi says, without irony.
Adachi goes on to mock Phelps for engaging in the same conspiracy mongering as his, “If Phelps is to be believed (not!), even the Rothschilds, the most infamous of Zionist Illuminati, are not really the guilty source of crimes or conspiracy. Phelps says the Jesuits are actually the hidden controllers of the Rothschilds. (What supermen these Jesuits seem to be!) The Jesuits run Hollywood, too, and the Jesuits are masterminds of the pornography industry. According to Phelps, the Jesuits are guilty of, well, just about everything. They’re probably even behind the extraterrestrial and UFO aliens.”
Apparently the story of the pot calling the kettle black hasn’t made its way into Phelps and Adachi’s circles.
Related posts:
Pius XII's Legacy Divides Catholics Too
Push for sainthood for the Holocaust-era pope Pius XII, disappointed some of us who were there.
Pius XII's Legacy Divides Catholics Too
Jewish Concerns Are Minor Issues Compared to Church Splits
The recent controversy over Roman Catholic Cardinal Kurt Koch’s statements at a meeting at Seton Hall University in October with scholars and clergy offers Jews an opportunity to reflect on the challenges of wading into disputes with other religious groups. Koch, the Vatican’s emissary to the Jews, responding briefly to a question about the push for sainthood for the Holocaust-era pope Pius XII, disappointed some of us who were there. He minimized reasonable concerns about the Vatican’s closed archives from the period and alluded to a few fringe Jewish supporters of Pius XII as though they were representative of the Jewish community. These comments have been addressed in media reports that understandably emphasized the negative reaction to Koch of some in the Jewish community.
However appealing it might be to see this as entirely a Jewish-Catholic dispute, there is another context for understanding the tensions surrounding Pius XII that has largely been overlooked. There is also a deep divide between Catholics. While Pius XII’s behavior during the Shoah is an issue that is central to Jews, few Jews are aware that it is only one issue in a larger struggle within the Catholic Church.
The dispute over Pius XII maps onto broader Catholic divisions between traditionalists and progressives. These internal Catholic tensions explain some of the divisiveness of this issue in the church and, consequently, many Jews’ sense of frustration. Many traditionalists revere Pius XII. He is praised for successfully leading the church through World War II and for staunchly opposing Communism. Similarly, recent popes, reflecting views of many traditionalists, have presented Nazism as a threat not only to Jews, but to Christians, as well. The implication that Pius XII and, by extension, the church were not firmly on the side of the persecuted Jews undermines this perception of shared victimization.
Perhaps most important, some traditionalists see Pius XII as one of the last great popes of a strong, confident and faithful church prior to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. They criticize the council for watering down many fundamental Catholic beliefs. Not surprisingly, these traditionalists generally resist outside pressure and eagerly defend the church. This illustrates what John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter identifies as an increasingly “robust proclamation of Catholic identity” that naturally colors responses to critiques of Pius XII.
Progressives, by contrast, cultivate good interfaith relations and welcome a frank reckoning with what they see as the church’s troubled past. They celebrate the Second Vatican Council and the changes it introduced. Their more critical views of Pius XII are grounded in church commitments to improve Jewish-Catholic relations and to eliminate mistrust and suspicion between religious groups.
Underneath the dispute over Pius XII, then, is a clash over the bold changes that started in the 1960s, for traditionalists largely do not share the progressives’ goals. In questioning the push to canonize Pius XII, Jews are de facto inserting themselves into a heated debate over the church’s future (and, in a sense, over its past). For many Catholics, there is much more at stake here than Pius XII’s behavior during the Shoah.
Topics of interest to Jews are often fronts in bitter inner-Christian struggles. Jews repeatedly find themselves in this position because of the deep historical and theological ties they have with Christians, and because of sharp divisions within Catholic (and Protestant) churches. We find recent evidence of this in the Protestant world, too: While straining relations with Jews, harsh anti-Israel statements from some mainline churches reflect a broader conflict between mainline and conservative Protestants over Scripture, theology, and war and violence. Jews sometimes get caught in the crossfire, or enmeshed in disputes that transcend their particular interests.
It should be no surprise that sometimes, progress in Jewish-Christian relations is minimal and dialogue is strained. Jews’ options are necessarily limited, for the Jews are minor players in major struggles within other traditions. Recognition of this broader context should help Jews both to accurately assess the possibilities of influencing Christian groups and to find ways of improving interfaith relations that take into account the often fraught dynamics that exist among these Christians.
Adam Gregerman is a scholar at Baltimore’s Institute for Christian & Jewish Studies.