Thursday, Nov 06th
Last update08:31:35 AM GMT
Special Interest Glance
The Vatican on Monday will make its most detailed defense yet against claims that it is liable for U.S. bishops who allowed priests to molest children, saying bishops are not its employees and that a 1962 Vatican document did not require them to keep quiet, The Associated Press has learned.
As everyone now knows, for decades church superiors repeatedly chose to ignore complaints about pedophile priests. In many instances, accused clerics were quietly bundled off to distant congregations where they could prey anew upon the children of unsuspecting parishioners. This practice of denial and concealment has been so consistently pursued in diocese after diocese, nation after nation, as to leave the impression of being a deliberate policy set by church authorities.
In the past 10 years, dozens of doctors have been accused of abusing hundreds of children. Many of those cases took decades to uncover, and experts believe many other pedophiles are operating undetected.
A close friend of Pope Benedict XVI who has already offered to resign after admitting that he hit children in his care is now being investigated over allegations of paedophilia.
Prosecutors in the southern city of Augsburg said that they had opened a preliminary probe into Walter Mixa after media reports said he had been accused of sexually abusing a boy while bishop of Eichstaett between 1996 and 2005.
The male escort hired by anti-gay activist George Alan Rekers has told Miami New Times the Baptist minister is a homosexual who paid him to provide body rubs once a day in the nude, during their ten-day vacation in Europe.
Victims of a Florence priest who was defrocked for sexually and psychologically abusing his young parishioners are now demanding that his bishops be held responsible for keeping his crimes quiet.
A German priest on trial for sexual abuse in South Africa acknowledged this week that similar charges against him in his home country are "correct in many points," his old diocese in Aachen said Wednesday.
Diocese spokesman Franz Kretschmann told The Associated Press that the priest had written a letter Tuesday to the Krefeld public prosecutors acknowledging "his guilt" and seeking forgiveness for the pain he caused to victims and their families.
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