How will Pope Francis deal with abuse in the Catholic Church?

By Martin Bashir
20 February 2019

In an effort to deal with the sex scandals rocking the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope has convened an extraordinary summit of bishops in Rome.
This follows his recent, unprompted, admission that priests had exploited nuns as “sex slaves” at a convent in France.
Pope Francis decided to call this global conference after discussions with the so-called C9. This is the group of nine cardinal advisers who were appointed soon after Francis was elected.
The Pope is under serious pressure to provide leadership and generate workable solutions to what is the most pressing crisis facing the modern Church.
Stories of abuse have emerged in every corner of the world. And the Church has been accused of covering up crimes committed by priests, leaving its moral authority in tatters.
Pope Francis must also confront the assumptions, attitudes and practices that have allowed a culture of abuse to flourish. The extent of this challenge may prove overwhelming.

Chile court orders Catholic Church to compensate abuse victims

NEWS/CHILE

Karadima is accused of the historical sex abuse of three minors, charges he denies [File: Carlos Vera/Reuters]

The unprecedented ruling comes amid an ongoing clerical sex abuse scandal engulfing deeply religious Chile.

A Chilean court has ordered the country’s Roman Catholic Church to pay compensation to victims in a sex abuse case against influential former priest Fernando Karadima.

A unanimous ruling issued on Wednesday requires the Church to pay 100 million pesos ($146,000) for “moral damages” to each of his three victims.

Juan Carlos Cruz, Jose Andres Murillo and James Hamilton, who accuse Karadima of sexually abusing them three decades ago, had sued the Church for allegedly covering up Karadima’s abuses for years.

Once a parish priest in El Bosque, an upmarket, conservative neighbourhood of the Chilean capital, Santiago, Karadima was defrocked by Pope Francis in September. He has always denied accusations that he sexually abused the three men when they were boys.

Victims of Church sex abuse go global with fight for justice

NEW STRAITS NEWS

By AFP – February 19, 2019

PARIS: After years of struggling alone or finding support in national groups, survivors of sex abuse by priests have formed a new international alliance to pressure the Catholic Church to face up to its crimes.

The group, called Ending Clerical Abuse (ECA), brings together activists from dozens of countries on several continents, and will be mobilised in Rome this week when Pope Francis hosts a hotly awaited summit on tackling the wave of child sex abuse scandals shaking the Catholic Church.

“It’s a momentous and a historic movement… to bring a global and unified voice,” one of its co-founders, Peter Saunders, told AFP. “This is the first truly global initiative.”

See you in Berlin on Friday!

 

„Fridays for Future“-Proteste Weiblich, links, umweltbewusst

STUDIO 9 | Beitrag vom 26.03.2019

Von Claudia van Laak

Eine Umfrage im Auftrag der Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung zeigt, dass sich bei „Fridays for Future“ mehr Frauen engagieren als bei anderen Demonstrationen. (imago images / Ulli Winkler)

Tausende Schülerinnen und Schüler demonstrieren seit Wochen für Klimaschutz. Die Proteste unterscheiden sich von anderen Veranstaltungen, haben Forscher herausgefunden. Unter anderem, weil ungewöhnlich viele Mädchen dabei sind.

„Man sollte nicht noch mehr die Welt kaputt machen.“

„Ich finde es schon aufregend, hier hin zu gehen, aber es hat auch einen Zweck. Und wenn hier Kameras sind und so, die sehen uns ja alle, dann können auch die Politiker sehen, dass wir was bewirken wollen. Und zwar auch zeigen wollen, dass wir da sind und dass wir auch unsere Welt schützen wollen.“

Mexico’s president calls for an apology from Spain for historic wrongs

By Flora Charner, CNN
March 26, 2019

(CNN)Mexico’s president wants an apology for violations committed by Spanish conquistadors in the region, 500 years ago.

“I have sent a letter to the King of Spain and another letter to the Pope so that the violations committed can be acknowledged we could build a record of the grievances and an apology can be made to the people who originally occupied this land (the indigenous Mayans),” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said in a video message posted to his Twitter account on Monday, from the Mayan archeological site Comalcalco.
“There were mass killings,” he said, noting that the “so-called conquest was made with the sword and the cross.”

“Everything is Light” The Incredible interview with Nikola Tesla in 1899

Ifinity Explorer

By MICHAEL

Nikola Tesla is undoubtedly one of the most important inventors that have existed on our planet. Curiously, although he is one of the most important and scientific inventors in the history of civilization, he is also the most absent in history books.(“Everything is Light” The Incredible interview with Nikola Tesla)

Interviews with Tesla are extremely rare, but the ones we have available offer a great understanding of the mind of a brilliant scientist whose goals were to give people around the world unlimited free power.(“Everything is Light” The Incredible interview with Nikola Tesla)

One of the interviews to which we have access, is by journalist John Smith, leaving for posterity one of his phrases:
“Everything is Light. In one of its rays is the destiny of the nations, each nation has its own ray in that great source of light, which we see, like the Sun. And remember, there is no man who has existed and who has not died!(“Everything is Light” The Incredible interview with Nikola Tesla)

Here is the interview that the scientist Nikola Tesla gave to the magazine “Immortality” in his laboratory in Colorado Springs in the year 1899:

JOURNALIST: Mr. Tesla, you have gained the glory of the man who got involved in the cosmic processes. Who are you, Mr. Tesla?

TESLA: It’s an interesting question, Mr. Smith, and I’ll try to give you the right answer.

JOURNALIST: They say that you are from the country of Croatia, the area called Lika, where together with the people grow trees, rocks and starry sky. They say that his hometown is named after the flowers of the mountain and that the house where he was born is next to the forest and the church.

TESLA: Really everything he said is true. I am proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland.

Why the Vatican needs to open its archives on Pope Pius XII

Source: http://theconversation.com/why-the-vatican-needs-to-open-its-archives-on-pope-pius-xii-113235
Academic rigour, journalistic flair

March 25, 2019

Pope Pius XII. AP Photo

Pope Francis announced recently that, in 2020, the Vatican will open to researchers its archival materials related to Pius XII, who served as pope from 1939 to 1958.

The Vatican generally waits roughly 70 years after the end of a papacy before making archival materials available. In this case, the Vatican has decided to allow access earlier, possibly due to the controversy surrounding Pius XII’s wartime papacy.

Many have criticized Pius XII for failing to condemn the Holocaust. Instead, he spoke out against the general loss of life in wartime.

Top cardinal admits the Catholic Church destroyed files to hide sex abuse

“The rights of victims were effectively trampled underfoot.”

Vox
By Amanda Sakuma Feb 23, 2019

Pope Francis visited Abu Dhabi in 2019, the first time a Catholic pope has ever come to the United Arab Emirates. Francois Nel/Getty Images

The Roman Catholic Church took pains to deliberately hide the extent of its global sex abuse crisis, going as far as destroying documents and failing to compile records that could be used to prosecute perpetrators, a top cardinal admitted this week.

At an unprecedented Vatican summit designed to tackle the church’s lingering child sex abuse scandal, German Cardinal Reinhard Marx shed light on the institution’s many failures to tamp down on the problem, telling the gathering of more than 190 bishops from around the globe that “the rights of victims were effectively trampled underfoot.” The National Catholic Reporter has more:

Clergy sex abuse has cost Catholic Church $3 billion in settlements

By Elizabeth Llorente, | Fox News

Fallout over Pennsylvania priest abuse scandal
Dr. Alex McFarland and Christopher Hale on the implications of the sweeping grand jury report about priest sexual abuse in Pennsylvania and how the Catholic Church can begin to make amends.

Clergy sex abuse of children has rocked the Catholic Church not only in terms of trust and reputation, but also financially, to the tune of more than $3 billion, according to National Public Radio.

The multibillion-dollar expense has gone to settlements in response to lawsuits filed by people abused by clergy, reports NPR. Nearly 20 Catholic dioceses and religious orders have filed for bankruptcy because of the scandals.