Lipstick-Red Shoes
Lipstick-red shoes hitting American soil
And they are real Prada loafers. But then he didn’t come to the States to talk about humility. Beyond the uplifting stuff about violence being bad, Benedict XVI had some serious spinning to do.
There has been a little problem in the US about, well, er, a handful of priests, nearly no-one really, who, ah, well, it appears they have a kind of problem about little boys. It’s probably the kids’ fault anyway, and if it isn’t, well, it only happens in the States, so it probably has to do with the lousy Protestant morals over there.
This is, by the way, the official Vatican position. Pedophile priests are an American problem, not a Church problem. If you listened carefully, that is precisely what the Pope had to say about the whole issue once he had placed those red shoes on the asphalt at Andrews Air Force Base: “I acknowledge the pain which the Church in America has experienced as a result of the sexual abuse of minors. No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse.”
Of course the minors involved may have experienced a degree of pain too, and we expect this is also deeply regretted, but that is still not what the Pope said.
The Church officially believes – everywhere outside of the US – that nothing much is going on and that whatever is happening is hugely blown out of proportion by Jews and Masons. Honest to God.
When the “American” problem began to break a few years ago, there was no great anxiety in Rome and only after lots of yowling and yipping by American prelates was it finally decided that it might be appropriate to show concern and to be seen collaborating in some fashion.
The Church later came to bitterly regret that decision and, without any undue fuss, it has since been withdrawn. Archbishops hounded out of office in the US have been given prestigious posts in the Vatican hierarchy and the official line – we are not making this up – is now to stonewall and just wait for the whole thing to go away.
A letter from Benedict XVI to the world’s Catholic Bishops last spring gave them precise and unmistakeable instructions to ignore the entire question and above all not to collaborate with national judicial authorities who may be inclined to open investigations. As we mentioned when this happened – (here) – it is now, on second thought, the considered judgment of Church authorities that these issues are best handled privately, internally and above all secretly, by ecclesiastical courts.
Just to make this very clear, the Church has no significant problem with pedophile priests – though a handful of the boys may have gotten a little out of line in the States.
The Vatican is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a poor source of information on the subject of Italian pedophile priests. The Secretary General of the Italian Episcopal Conference, Msgr. Giuseppe Betori, explained in 2002 that this was because the phenomenon of clerical sexual abuse here is “such a small reality that it does not merit specific attention … more than that reserved for other social categories.” For that reason, he said, “the Permanent Council of the Conference has never spoken about cases of pedophilia, the conference has no list in this regard, we do not have any cases in evidence nor a procedure for monitoring [them].”
You might though want to take a look at our note in this connection (here). It’s now a little out of date, but we are not aware of anything better around.
In an recent case – (here) – in which it instead appeared something of the sort might after all have happened in Italy, it was shown that the juveniles involved – there were apparently many of them – could not be considered reliable witnesses, even if they seemed to confirm each others’ testimony, because they were in a halfway-house for children with drug problems and it’s well-known that junkies are a bunch of damned liars. The investigation was halted before charges were ever brought. Last we knew though, another investigation was still underway to discover who it was who told the papers…