Not even Sunday can get us away from the evil coming out of Rome; and not even a Shaman will save Bergoglio from his own false mercy.
Elizabeth Yore at The Remnant has made great effort in bringing the attention forward that the actions of Bergoglio against pervert priests is not to be trusted. He has weakened the controls instituted by Joseph Ratzinger and has been implicated in one case in particular.
January 2, 2017
January 25, 2017
Now, this news is breaking overnight on AP. The world is waking up that Bergoglio himself ordered the commutation of a priest's sentence in the name of "mercy." A priest who later was charged with the rape of more children as young as twelve.
A priest. A sodomite, a homosexual "redeemed" by Francis only to have him do it again.
ROME - Pope Francis has quietly reduced sanctions against a
handful of pedophile priests, applying his vision of a merciful church even to
its worst offenders in ways that survivors of abuse and the pope’s own advisers
question.
One case has come back to haunt him: An Italian priest who
received the pope’s clemency was later convicted by an Italian criminal court
for his sex crimes against children as young as 12. Father Mauro Inzoli is now
facing a second church trial after new evidence emerged against him, The
Associated Press has learned.
The Inzoli case is one of several in which Francis overruled
the advice of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and
reduced a sentence that called for the priest to be defrocked, two canon
lawyers and a church official told AP. Instead, the priests were sentenced to
penalties including a lifetime of penance and prayer and removal from public
ministry.
In some cases, the priests or their high-ranking friends
appealed to Francis for clemency by citing the pope’s own words about mercy in
their petitions, the church official said, speaking on condition of anonymity
because the proceedings are confidential.
“With all this emphasis on mercy … he is creating the
environment for such initiatives,” the church official said, adding that
clemency petitions were rarely granted by Pope Benedict XVI, who launched a
tough crackdown during his 2005-2013 papacy and defrocked some 800 priests who
raped and molested children.
At the same time, Francis also ordered three longtime
staffers at the congregation dismissed, two of whom worked for the discipline
section that handles sex abuse cases, the lawyers and church official said.
One is the head of the section and will be replaced before
leaving March 31. Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said the others too will be
replaced and that staffing in the office, which has a years long backlog of
cases, would be strengthened after Francis recently approved hiring more
officials.
“The speed with which cases are handled is a serious matter
and the Holy Father continues to encourage improvements in this area,” Burke
told AP.
He also dispelled rumors that sex-abuse cases would no
longer be handled by the congregation, saying the strengthened office would
handle all cases submitted.
Burke said Francis’s emphasis on mercy applied to “even
those who are guilty of heinous crimes.” He said priests who abuse are
permanently removed from ministry, but are not necessarily dismissed from the
clerical state, the church term for laicization or defrocking.
“The Holy Father understands that many victims and survivors
can find any sign of mercy in this area difficult,” Burke said. “But he knows
that the Gospel message of mercy is ultimately a source of powerful healing and
of grace.”
St. John Paul II was long criticized for failing to respond
to the abuse crisis, but ultimately he said in 2002 that “there is no place in
the priesthood or religious life” for anyone who would harm the young. Francis
has repeatedly proclaimed “zero tolerance” for abusive priests and in December
wrote to the world’s bishops committing to take “all necessary measures” to
protect them.
But he also recently said he believed sex abusers suffer
from a “disease” - a medical term used by defense lawyers to seek mitigating
factors in canonical sentences.
Marie Collins, an Irish abuse survivor and founding member
of Francis’s sex-abuse advisory commission, expressed dismay that the
congregation’s recommended penalties were being weakened and said abusers are
never so sick that they don’t know what they’re doing.
“All who abuse have made a conscious decision to do so,”
Collins told AP. “Even those who are pedophiles, experts will tell you, are
still responsible for their actions. They can resist their inclinations.”
Victim advocates have long questioned Francis’s commitment
to continuing Benedict’s tough line, given he had no experience dealing with
abusive priests or their victims in his native Argentina. While Francis counts
Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley as his top adviser on abuse, he has also
surrounded himself with cardinal advisers who botched handling abuse cases in
their archdioceses.
“They are not having zero tolerance,” said Rocio Figueroa, a
former Vatican official and ex-member of the Peru-based Sodalitium Christianae
Vitae, a conservative Catholic lay society rocked by sex scandals.
The Vatican recently handed down sanctions against the
group’s founder after determining that he sexually, psychologically and
physically abused his recruits. His victims, however, are enraged that it took
the Vatican six years to decide that the founder should be isolated, but not
expelled, from the community.
The church official stressed that to his knowledge, none of
Francis’s reduced sentences had put children at risk.
Many canon lawyers and church authorities argue that
defrocking pedophiles can put society at greater risk because the church no
longer exerts any control over them. They argue that keeping the men in
restricted ministry, away from children, at least enables superiors to exert
some degree of supervision.
But Collins said the church must also take into account the
message that reduced canonical sentences sends to both survivors and abusers.
“While mercy is important, justice for all parties is
equally important,” Collins said in an email. “If there is seen to be any
weakness about proper penalties, then it might well send the wrong message to
those who would abuse.”
It can also come back to embarrass the church. Take for
example the case of Inzoli, a well-connected Italian priest who was found
guilty by the Vatican in 2012 of abusing young boys and ordered defrocked.
Inzoli appealed and in 2014 Francis reduced the penalty to a
lifetime of prayer, prohibiting him from celebrating Mass in public or being
near children, barring him from his diocese and ordering five years of
psychotherapy.
In a statement announcing Francis’s decision to reduce the
sentence, Crema Bishop Oscar Cantoni said “no misery is so profound, no sin so
terrible that mercy cannot be applied.”
In November, an Italian criminal judge showed little mercy
in convicting Inzoli of abusing five children, aged 12-16, and sentencing him
to four years, nine months in prison. The judge said Inzoli had a number of
other victims but their cases fell outside the statute of limitations.
Burke disclosed to AP that the Vatican recently initiated a
new canonical trial against Inzoli based on “new elements” that had come to
light. He declined to elaborate.
Amid questions about how the battle against abuse was
faring, Francis recently named O’Malley, who heads his sex-abuse advisory
commission, as a member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But
it’s not clear what influence he can wield from his home base in Boston.
Francis scrapped the commission’s proposed tribunal for
bishops who botch abuse cases following legal objections from the congregation.
The commission’s other major initiative - a guideline template to help dioceses
develop policies to fight abuse and safeguard children - is gathering dust. The
Vatican never sent the template to bishops’ conferences, as the commission had
sought, or even linked it to its main abuse-resource website.
