Catholic Church Guilty Of Covering Up Sexual Abuse of Over 1000 Children in Pennsylvania

• More than 300 Catholic priests across Pennsylvania had been sexually abusing little boys and girls for over 70 years.
• A thousand children were identified as victims in the investigation, but there are possibly thousands more.
• The Vatican refrained from making any comments about the situation.

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More than 300 “predator priests” across Pennsylvania were reportedly sexually abusing children for over 70 years, according to a new grand jury, who got internal documents from the state’s six Catholic dioceses dating back to 1947: Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton.

The grand jury states, “Priests were raping little boys and girls, and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing; they hid it all. For decades.”

On Tuesday, Attorney General Josh Shapiro said the cover-ups and abuse were reported by other state grand juries and they reviewed the information included in the “secret archives” — referring to the reports that hid the abuse that church leaders did for decades.

The jury report, consisting of 1,400 pages, described the gruesome details of some of the alleged abuse. A boy was raped repeatedly from age 13 to 15 and later suffered from severe spine injuries because of the priest who raped him. The boy later died of an overdose due to painkiller addiction.

In Pittsburgh, priests forced a victim to pose naked on the cross while they photographed him using a Polaroid camera. The report states that because of the cover-up, “almost every instance of abuse we found is too old to be prosecuted.”

In Pennsylvania, victims of child sex abuse have until they reach age 30 to file civil suits and until they are 50 to file criminal charges. The oldest victim who spoke to the grand jury was aged 83.

James VanSickle, 55, recounts the sexual abuse he suffered under the hands of a priest in Erie back in 1981, but because the statute of limitations had passed, the priest was not prosecuted for it.

As he testified before the grand jury, VanSickle said “This is the murder of a soul. We don’t have a statute of limitations on the crime of murder. We don’t go after victims . . . and question their ‘repressed memories’ or ‘recovered memories.”

Many questions now arise about whether high-level church officials could still be covering up their criminal actions.

The grand jury called for a law allowing older victims to file a case against the church for the abuse they’ve suffered as children, in addition to ending such limitations for criminal cases.

The Vatican press office refrained from making any comments to the situation, as the attention is now focused on Pope Francis, with many Catholics waiting on how he would handle this situation of abuse to restore the Catholic Church’s integrity.

Across the country, Pennsylvania is believed to have steered the most number of investigations on child sex abuse.

The recent grand jury report was described by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro as the “largest, most comprehensive report into child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church ever produced in the United States.”

Source: Fox News

Pope Accused of Material Heresy for First Time Since Middle Ages

In a move unprecedented since the Middle Ages, 62 clergy and lay scholars from around the world have issued a formal filial correction to Pope Francis accusing him of “propagating heresies” about “marriage, the moral life, and the reception of the sacraments.”

“Respectfully insisting” that the Pope condemns the heresies that he has directly and indirectly upheld, the letter suggests that the Catholic leader’s unorthodox views have “caused these heretical opinions to spread in the Catholic Church.” The Pope has yet to respond to the accusations.

According to the National Catholic Register, the 25-page Correctio filialis de haeresibus propagatis (A Filial Correction Concerning the Propagation of Heresies) was delivered to the pontiff at his Santa Marta residence on August 11. It accused him of propagating heresies, including allowing some divorced or remarried Catholics to receive communion.

Pope Francis is known for being more liberal than his predecessors, often embracing modernism, which is seen in Catholicism as the antithesis to definite truths, which are God-given, eternal, not to become “provisional and subject to revision.” In a trip to Lund, Sweden in 2016, the Pope came under Catholic condemnation when he visited the Lutheran Church of Sweden that is said to “accept contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and female clergy, all of which are strictly and unalterably forbidden in the Catholic Church.”

The same year, he made an official statement in Amoris laetitia (Pope Francis’ book, translated as The Joy of Love) calling for acceptance of non-traditional lifestyles and those who practice them, challenging the long-held Catholic condemnation of homosexuality. The Pope has even been compared to Protestant leader Martin Luther, to whom he has given “explicit and unprecedented praise” despite the fact that Luther’s attempts to reform the Church ended in a great schism.

The letter, dated July 16th, 2017, was signed by 62 Catholic leaders, including the superior general of the Society of St. Pius X Bishop Bernard Fellay, former president of the Vatican Bank Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, and German intellectual Martin Mosebach. This is the first filial correction addressed to a reigning Pontiff since Pope John XXII was reproved in 1333 for saying that those who died in grace do not see God face-to-face until the Last Judgment, where Catholic belief holds that those who die in the faith do indeed immediately meet with God.

The letter reads that it is with their “profound grief” but moved “by love for the Church and for the papacy, and by filial devotion toward yourself” that they must address “a correction to Your Holiness on account of the propagation of heresies affected by the apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia and by other words, deeds and omissions of Your Holiness.”

Those who signed stress that they are not accusing the Pope of the formal sin of heresy, which is a heretic opinion expressed willfully and deliberately, knowing of its contradiction of some revealed truth. Rather, they accuse him of ‘material’ heresy, in which an opinion unknowingly contradicts the teachings of the Church, leading Catholics into false doctrines.

This is the sixth major initiative since September 2015 in which clergy and lay scholars have condemned the Pope’s liberal teachings and controversial passages in Amoris laetitia that contain “a number of statements that can be understood in a sense that is contrary to Catholic faith and morals.” These previous initiatives garnering hundreds of thousands of signatures from individuals and associations from around the world, none of which have garnered a Papal response.

[written by By Eliana Rudee ]