ROME — Italy’s bishops’ conference provided the first ever statistics of clerical sex abuse in the country Tuesday, saying there had been about 100 cases over the past 10 years that warranted church trials or other canonical procedures.

Monsignor Mariano Crociata, the No. 2 official in the Italian bishops’ conference, gave the estimate during a press conference on the sidelines of the bishops’ general assembly, the ANSA and Apcom news agencies reported.

He declined to say how many of the cases resulted in condemnation or defrocking of the priest, or how many were reported to police. While saying the church officials cooperated with police, he insisted that Italian law doesn’t require bishops to report suspected abuse.

Some lawyers for victims say bishops are required to report abuse since they are public officials. Vatican norms say bishops should follow civil laws in reporting abuse.

Crociata’s comments came a day after the head of the bishops’ conference, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, opened the bishops’ annual meeting by asking families to trust the Catholic Church despite the scandal, insisting that it had never intended to underestimate the problem.

The meeting came as more cases are coming to light in the Vatican’s backyard: On Tuesday, the ANSA news agency reported that a 73-year-old priest well known in Milan’s gay community had been arrested on charges he had sex with a 13-year-old boy, who is now 16. A day earlier, a priest in Savona went on trial for alleged sexual violence against a 12-year-old girl, ANSA said.

And last week, a Rome bishop testified in the case of another accused priest, the Rev. Ruggero Conti, that he knew about rumors of abuse two years before Conti was arrested yet didn’t alert police or the Vatican or proceed with any canonical trial against him.

Mario Staderini, a member of Italy’s Radical party who is a civil party in the Conti case, said it was unconscionable that a canonical trial hadn’t proceeded against Conti, given the evidence provided to his bishop, Monsignor Gino Reali.

Reali testified that he had spoken to 20-25 people, including two boys who said they had been abused by Conti, yet didn’t find their accusations credible. He said he convened a tribunal after receiving a written complaint from one of the boys, but it never got under way because the victim didn’t show up.

Conti is charged with sexual violence and other charges. In police interrogations, the boys — some as young as 13 at the time of the alleged abuse — said Conti would masturbate them and force them to perform oral sex on him in his home, where he frequently invited them to eat dinner and watch movies.

“How is it possible that only in Italy no bishop has felt the need to resign or make a mea culpa for failing to be vigilant?” Staderini asked in a statement.

He said if the Italian bishops’ conference wanted to be transparent and care for victims it should put some of the money that Italians earmark to the Catholic Church on their income taxes toward a fund for victims.

The main U.S. victims group, SNAP, Survivors’ Network for Those Abused by Priests, denounced Crociata for his defense of not reporting abuse to police, saying “it’s tragic and telling that most Catholic officials still insist on keeping clergy sex crimes secret.”

The group’s Midwest director Peter Isely said he doubted that there had only been 100 cases. “For decades, Catholic officials have underestimated and underreported the shocking extent of clergy sex crimes. We believe most of them still do.”

Richard Dawkins: I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.

Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.

The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.

The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.

Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, visiting London, Glasgow and Coventry, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century theologian.

Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.

They have commissioned the barrister Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens, a solicitor, to present a justification for legal action.

The lawyers believe they can ask the Crown Prosecution Service to initiate criminal proceedings against the Pope, launch their own civil action against him or refer his case to the International Criminal Court.

Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: “This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence.”

Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: “This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment.

Last year pro-Palestinian activists persuaded a British judge to issue an arrest warrant for Tzipi Livni, the Israeli politician, for offences allegedly committed during the 2008-09 conflict in Gaza. The warrant was withdrawn after Livni cancelled her planned trip to the UK.

“There is every possibility of legal action against the Pope occurring,” said Stephens. “Geoffrey and I have both come to the view that the Vatican is not actually a state in international law. It is not recognised by the UN, it does not have borders that are policed and its relations are not of a full diplomatic nature.”

ROME – A probe has been opened by Rome magistrates to determine whether the Vatican bank, the Istituto Opere di Religione (IOR), violated Italian laws against money laundering.

The probe is focusing on one or more accounts IOR opened with Unicredit, Italy’s biggest bank, through which some 60 million euros transited over the past three years.

In particular, the investigation will seek to verify whether a 2007 Italian law on transparency in regard to the identity of the account holder or executor was violated.

The possibility that the Vatican accounts violated this law was brought forward by the Bank of Italy special ‘financial intelligence’ unit which passed the information to the Finance Guard which, in turn, forwarded the case to the Rome justice department.

Judicial sources said the probe is currently centered on clarifying the “opaque screen” which hid the identity of the person, persons or organizations that had actual control over the IOR accounts.

Investigators are also trying to discover the beneficiaries of checks and bank drafts issued from the IOR accounts and who ordered them. The accounts were opened at a branch of Unicredit, then Banca di Roma, located on the avenue which leads into St Peter’s Square, via della Conciliazione, in Italian territory.

Thanks to kchiu for the submission.

Pope ‘Whipped Himself In Remorse For Sins’ Reveals Nun

POPE John Paul II regularly whipped himself in a sign of “remorse for his sins”, a nun has disclosed.

Pope John Paul, who died four years ago at 84, is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church – the ultimate accolade and a tribute to his holiness.

As part of the Vatican’s investigation, thousands of documents have been examined by officials from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Among them is the testimony of Polish nun Tobiana Sobodka, a member of the Sacred Heart of Jesus order.

She worked for Pope John Paul in his private Vatican apartments and at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo near Rome.

Sister Sobodka said: “Several times he would put himself through bodily penance.

“We would hear it – we were in the next room at Castel Gandolfo. You could hear the sound of the blows when he flagellated himself. He did it when he was still capable of moving on his own.”

The whipping is also confirmed by Bishop Emery Kabongo, for several years a secretary for Pope John Paul.

He said: “He would punish himself and in particular just before he ordained bishops and priests before passing on the sacraments he wanted to prepare himself. I never actually saw it myself but several people told me about it.”

Sister Sobodka’s leaked statements, published in the Italian newspaper La Stampa, are part of a new book on Pope John Paul II by its Vatican correspondent.

Self-flagellation is sometimes used by devoted Catholics because of the whipping endured by Christ from the Romans before he was crucified. It is still common in the Philippines and Latin America among some strict monastic orders and by some members of the lay organisation Opus Dei featured in The Da Vinci Code movie. In the film – condemned by the Vatican – murderous Albino monk Silas, an Opus Dei member, is seen whipping his back and drawing blood as he prays on his knees.

Thanks to kchiu for this story.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a conference on astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth, with scientists and religious leaders gathering in Rome this week.

For centuries, theologians have argued over what the existence of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for the Church: at least since Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, was put to death by the Inquisition in 1600 for claiming that other worlds exist.

Among other things, extremely alien-looking aliens would be hard to fit with the idea that God “made man in his own image”.

Furthermore, Jesus Christ’s role as saviour would be confused: would other worlds have their own, tentacled Christ-figures, or would Earth’s Christ be universal?

However, just as the Church eventually made accommodations after Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, and when it belatedly accepted the truth of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Catholic leaders say that alien life can be aligned with the Bible’s teachings.

Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory and one of the organisers of the conference, said: “As a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God.

“This does not conflict with our faith, because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God.”

Not everyone agrees. Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and author of The Goldilocks Enigma, told The Washington Post that the threat to Christianity is “being downplayed” by Church leaders. He said: “I think the discovery of a second genesis would be of enormous spiritual significance.

“The real threat would come from the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, because if there are beings elsewhere in the universe, then Christians, they’re in this horrible bind.

“They believe that God became incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ in order to save humankind, not dolphins or chimpanzees or little green men on other planets.”

The Academy conference will include presentations from scientists – by no means all of them Christians – on the discovery of planets outside our solar system, the geological record of early life on Earth, how life might have started on Earth, and whether “alien” life of a different biochemistry to our own might exist here without our knowing, among many other things.

Thanks again to JT Hundley for this one.

WILMINGTON – The Roman Catholic Diocese of Wilmington filed for bankruptcy protection just hours before eight clergy sex-abuse trials were set to begin yesterday – the first wave in dozens of cases against its priests that, by diocesan estimates, could cost it $100 million to $500 million.

In 2007, the Delaware legislature enacted a special two-year moratorium on the statute of limitations, allowing adult victims of sex abuse to sue for assaults perpetrated even decades ago. By the time the moratorium closed last July, 142 plaintiffs had filed lawsuits against the Wilmington diocese, which comprises Delaware and nine counties in eastern Maryland.

The diocese asked for Chapter 11 protection about 8:30 p.m. Sunday. In addition to the eight in Kent County Superior Court, 22 trials were scheduled to start in the weeks ahead. All have been temporarily halted.

In an open letter to the diocese’s 230,000 parishioners, Bishop W. Francis Malooly called bankruptcy a “painful decision” that he had hoped to avoid. However, he wrote, it would ensure that funds will be available for all victims, not just the first who go to trial.

A state bankruptcy court is to decide how much money the diocese must make available for settlements.

In its filing, the diocese claimed assets of $50 million to $100 million.

“It was clear to us in our negotiations that the amount of money that was being sought by the early victims and the finite amount that we had . . . was not going to work,” Malooly said at a news conference yesterday.

Thomas Neuberger, a Wilmington lawyer representing 88 plaintiffs against the diocese and two Catholic high schools, yesterday denounced the filing as a “fraudulent tactic” designed to hide the hierarchy’s “complicity in the sexual abuse of hundreds of Catholic children.”

Several suits also name two religious orders, the Norbertines and the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales, and charge that their members abused students at high schools they operate within the diocese.

Only the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington Inc. is seeking reorganization under Chapter 11. Its parishes are legally distinct corporations under state law, although a state superior court is due to rule on whether parish property can be included as part of the diocese’s assets.

Wilmington is the seventh Roman Catholic diocese in the United States to seek bankruptcy protection this decade in the face of massive numbers of sex-abuse lawsuits. The others are Davenport, Iowa; Fairbanks, Alaska; Portland, Ore.; San Diego; Spokane, Wash.; and Tucson, Ariz.

In those dioceses, cases of clergy sex abuse did proceed to trial. In Spokane and Fairbanks, the lawsuits were settled for an average of $400,000, according to James Stang, a partner in the Los Angeles law firm of Pachulski, Stang, Ziehl & Jones. In San Diego, the average payout was $1.4 million.

Stang, whose firm has worked on behalf of plaintiffs in six of the bankrupt dioceses, said a diocese might file for bankruptcy to “stop a public trial” that could reveal information it wants concealed.

Wilmington, he said, “could have let the trials proceed and filed [for bankruptcy] if they got adverse verdicts.”

Dioceses also file for Chapter 11 so the court will cap current and future abuse claims against it, Stang said. “Then if someone comes forward with a valid claim, the diocese can say, ‘You have to look to this pot of money.’ ”

Although plaintiffs might feel frustrated by the diocese’s decision to file bankruptcy just as their cases were starting to be heard, he said, the proceedings will force the church to reveal “all its assets and liabilities.”

In his letter to parishioners, Malooly wrote that the Wilmington filing was “in no way intended to dodge responsibility for past criminal misconduct by clergy – or for mistakes made by Diocesan authorities” and would not minimize its responsibility to abuse victims.

Bob Krebs, diocesan spokesman, said yesterday that since 2002 the Wilmington diocese had settled eight abuse cases for a total of $6.2 million.

Some Catholics interviewed in Wilmington yesterday said they had misgivings about the bankruptcy.

“It’s wrong to hide stuff,” said Debra Pasquarella, 41. Rosario Serrano, 35, said she believed the church had the financial resources needed to pay abuse victims.

But Anthony Cattermoul, 68, a Welshman who attended Wilmington Friends School and was back for a 50th reunion, said he thought American juries too easily award multimillion-dollar verdicts.

“If the settlements were reasonable, they wouldn’t have to declare bankruptcy,” said Cattermoul, mayor of Mold in North Wales.

Delaware is only the second state to enact a moratorium or “window” on its statute of limitations for child sex-abuse cases. Krebs, the diocesan spokesman, said yesterday that the Wilmington hierarchy was taken “completely by surprise” by the response from plaintiffs.

Proportionally, it exceeds the surge experienced in California. In 2002, the legislature there created a one-year statute window. During 2003, the year of the moratorium, about 1,000 people statewide came forward claiming they had been molested as children; about 850 named priests or religious orders of the Catholic Church.

John Salveson, president of the Philadelphia-based Foundation to Abolish Child Sex Abuse, said yesterday that efforts to enact a similar statute moratorium in Pennsylvania are “nearly stalled” in the Senate Judiciary Committee, but that a similar measure in the New York legislature has “broad support.”

THIS YEAR the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin is celebrating a year of evangelisation. The project’s website notes that “evangelisation is . . . an essential mission of the church”.

Necessary, courageous, no doubt, but, one might well ask the question, “why now?”

A friend told me, several years ago, of a conversation he had with a prominent Irish bishop whose diocese had the first exposure of an abuse scandal. “With this, what time do you think I have left for evangelisation?” asked the forlorn pastor. But worse was to come.

In recent times, it can be argued, the Catholic Church in Ireland has reached the nadir of its long history on this island. This institution is paying the price for its past success and for the kind of clerical dominance that almost inevitably leads to arrogance and the abuse of power.

Is it entering a land of exile?

The Ryan report was horrendous. The damage done to the victims was incalculable, the effect on the morale and reputation of the church, and, I would suggest, much of the country, devastating.

“How did we come to this?” we ask. It reflected not only on the church but also on the whole of Irish society. This will be followed up by the report on clerical sexual abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin.

In the days following publication of the Ryan report, I was travelling on a train from Dublin to Tralee. Sitting opposite me were two elderly ladies, one going to visit her family, while the other was eventually joined by her sister, a retired religious in civil attire.

The conversation turned almost inevitably to Ryan. The two lay persons, both of whom had sisters who were religious, reacted largely as one might have expected from people of this generation and class.

There was a kind of uncomprehending anger towards the victims of abuse expressed in the most negative terms; a defence of the church, and those representing it; as well as an anger that was diffuse and directed at everybody and nobody, including the church. Above all there was a sense of confusion and loss.

These women, like many people today, struggled with the fact that the ecclesiastical institution, in grave difficulty, often reviled, had let them down.

While we have come to assume that young people have lost faith, this is not, of course, always the case. They continue their search for truth and for God.

A bond of trust has been so severely damaged that it is not clear whether it can ever be restored. While priests often receive generous support, they often sense distrust, even among their own family and friends.

And yet, this is the situation within which the church must carry out its mission. If we speak of contextual theology, a locus theologicus, it is within this context of vulnerability and weakness that we must start today. If we are to speak of evangelisation or re-evangelisation this is the locus where it must happen, for all those who present themselves as witnesses to truth.

A Roman Catholic bank in Germany has apologised after admitting it bought stocks in defence, tobacco and birth control companies.

Der Spiegel newspaper discovered the bank had invested 580,000 euros (£495,310, $826,674) in British arms company BAE Systems.

It also invested 160,000 euros in American birth control pill maker Wyeth and 870,000 euros in tobacco companies.

The bank apologised for behaviour “not in keeping with ethical standards”.

Pax Bank has previously advertised ethical investment funds, specifically claiming to avoid arms and tobacco companies along with organisations that do not adhere to Catholic beliefs.

The Catholic Church has historically condemned the use of contraception, for breaking the link between sex and procreation – a view emphatically upheld by current Pope Benedict XVI.

In the past he has called birth control a “grave sin”.

A spokesman for Pax Bank said: “We will rectify the mistakes immediately without negative consequences for our clients.

“Unfortunately in a few internal reviews, the critical investments in question were overlooked – we deeply regret this.”

The spokesman thanked journalists for bringing the controversial investments to its attention.

A Roman Catholic priest who won fame running an Argentine foundation for poor youths was convicted Wednesday of sexually molesting a boy who participated in the program. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

A three-judge panel found Father Julio Grassi guilty of one count of sexual abuse and one count of corrupting a minor. He was acquitted of 15 other charges alleging abuse of two other boys at his “Happy the Children” Foundation. All the alleged crimes occurred in 1996.

Grassi, 52, continued to proclaim his innocence, saying he was “the victim of an injustice.”

“I feel ashamed for justice, not for me,” he said after the verdict.

Outside the court, protesters demanding Grassi’s imprisonment scuffled with the priest’s supporters. Two people were detained by police.

Grassi became widely known in Argentina after starting the “Happy the Children” Foundation in 1993, opening several homes for poor children and doing other charitable work.

Through television appearances and other appeals, the priest raised millions of dollars (euros), many of the donations coming from important public figures who distanced themselves from the priest after the allegations.

A lawyer for one of the alleged victims said it was good that Grassi was sentenced, but he criticized the priest’s acquittal on most of the charges.

“We are going to appeal the verdict because there are facts that have not been considered,” attorney Juan Pablo Gallego said.

The court withheld the identities of the three alleged victims.

Grassi was the third member of the Argentine church to be convicted of sexually abusing minors.