Scandal-hit Catholic order head admits covering up priest’s lovechild
The leader of the Legionaries of Christ admitted on Tuesday he knew for years the scandal-plagued Roman Catholic order’s most famous priest had fathered a child but still allowed the popular cleric to preach about morality. The order, still reeling from revelations that its founder was a sex abuser and drug addict with two secret families, suffered another major blow last week when it admitted that Father Thomas Williams, an American based in Rome, also had led a double life.
But the question that had been left hanging after the first admission was how long Williams’ superiors knew. In a letter to members published on the order’s website, the order’s leader, Father Alvaro Corcuera, said he found out about Williams’s child “early in my new assignment” as director-general, which began in 2005.
In an interview with Reuters last week, Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, the man Pope Benedict appointed in 2010 as his personal delegate to try to reform the order, said he did not find out about Williams’s affair until this year.
Williams was the public face of the order, appearing often on American television networks to explain Church teachings. He was the author of more than a dozen books, including one called “Knowing Right From Wrong: A Christian Guide to Conscience”.
He was a big draw on the lecture circuit at Catholic institutions and had two websites, both of which were shut down last week after the order issued a statement about him.
In his letter to members, Corcuera said that after he first found out that Williams had a child he asked him to “start withdrawing from public ministry” but admitted that the restrictions “were not firm enough” and Williams was allowed to continue teaching. In fact, Williams continued to appear in public and teach at Rome’s Pontifical Regina Apostolorum University.
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Catholic order knew for months about scandal of popular priest’s child: Vatican official
Leaders of the scandal-plagued Legionaries of Christ religious order knew that their most famous priest had fathered a child for many months before they acknowledged it this week, a top Vatican official told Reuters on Wednesday.
The once influential religious order, still in crisis following revelations that its founder was a sexual abuser with two secret families, suffered another major blow on Tuesday when American Father Thomas Williams admitted to having fathered a child with a woman in Rome.
The question left hanging was how long the order’s leaders knew about Williams’s secret life and why they continued to let him preach, teach and appear on television around the world, particularly in the United States.
“I found out about it this year,” Italian Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, who was appointed by Pope Benedict in July, 2010 to oversee the restructuring of the order, told Reuters in a telephone conversation from his home.
Asked if he meant since the beginning of this year, he said “yes”.
Williams was the public face of the order, appearing often on American television networks to explain Church teachings. He was the author of more than a dozen books, including one called “Knowing Right From Wrong: A Christian Guide to Conscience.”
He was a big draw on the lecture circuit at Catholic institutions and had two websites, both of which were shut down on Tuesday after the order issued its statement about him.
Vatican says efforts to heal rift with SSPX traditionalists are “encouraging”
An ultra-traditionalist Roman Catholic splinter group has provided an “encouraging” response to Vatican demands that they accept non-negotiable doctrinal principles as a condition for their full re-entry into the Church.
The Vatican said on Wednesday it had received an answer from the dissident Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) to the Holy See’s ultimatum a month ago that the group clarify its doctrinal position or risk a painful break with Rome. “The response is encouraging, it is a step forward,” said Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi.
He said the Vatican’s doctrinal department, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, would study the response, formulate a position and pass its recommendation to Pope Benedict.
The Swiss-based SSPX, which rejects some of the reforms made at the historic 1962 Second Vatican Council, defied Rome in 1988 by illegally consecrating four bishops, triggering their excommunication by the late Pope John Paul.
Last month, the Vatican told the group, which is headed by Swiss-born Bishop Bernard Fellay, that after years of negotiations their response was still “insufficient” to overcome doctrinal problems at the root of the split with Rome. The SSPX says it has about 500 priests and one million followers in 38 countries.
Benedict lifted the excommunications of SSPX bishops in 2009 in a gesture of reconciliation and made some concessions to the group, such as allowing the wider use of the traditional Latin Mass favoured by the SSPX.
The pope values the SSPX’s commitment to Church traditions and wants to avoid their movement creating a permanent schism claiming to be Catholic but outside Vatican control.
These comments are typical responses of anyone who knows about or follows a subject. I am always disappointed when I read or hear from the media about a subject that I am familiar with. It causes me to wonder why I bother to read about stuff I do not know about. I am most likely to get the wrong story. Williamson did not deny the holocaust but stated that the number of Jews killed were exaggerated.
Pope Benedict, 85, says he’s in last stretch of life but God helps him go on
Pope Benedict marked his 85th birthday on Monday saying he is now in the “last stretch” of his life but sure that God would help him continue his mission.
Benedict, who has looked tired and drawn recently, is one of history’s oldest reigning pontiffs – and already older than his predecessor John Paul II was when he died in 2005.
The pope said a Mass of thanksgiving with German bishops and close aides. Afterwards, children in traditional garb from his native Bavaria danced for him under the frescoes of the Vatican’s Clementine Hall.
“I find myself facing the last stretch on the road of my life,” Benedict said in German during the early morning Mass in a Vatican chapel.
He said he was confident that God’s light would help him “proceed with assurance”.
Benedict is now the oldest reigning pope since Leo XIII, who died aged 93 in 1903 after reigning for 25 years.
On Thursday, Benedict will mark another milestone when he celebrates the seventh anniversary of his election.
By the way, Happy Birthday Pope Benedict. May God grant you the peace you seek and etcerta…
Pope Benedict marks milestones this week amid signs of frailty and succession talk
Pope Benedict marks two milestones this week and while his health appears stable, signs of frailty have again prompted speculation over whether he will be the first pontiff in seven centuries to resign.
Benedict, one of the oldest popes in history, turns 85 on Monday, and on Thursday he marks the seventh anniversary of his election as successor to the immensely popular John Paul II.
Speaking to pilgrims and tourists in St Peter’s Square on Sunday, he noted Thursday’s anniversary and asked for prayers “so that the Lord may give me the strength to carry out the mission he has entrusted to me”.
Benedict is already older than John Paul was when he died in 2005 and is now the oldest reigning pope since Leo XIII, who died aged 93 in 1903 after reigning for 25 years.
“His health at 85 is better than John Paul’s was at 75,” said one high-ranking Vatican official who reports to the pope regularly. “He is a very methodical man. He looks after himself and feels that he still has much to do,” the official said.
The Vatican has announced that he will visit Lebanon in September and he may go to Brazil in 2013.
“I’m old but I can still carry out my duties,” the pope told Fidel Castro during his trip to Cuba last month.
Pope Benedict reaffirms ban on women priests, assails Austrian “call to disobedience”
Pope Benedict has restated the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on women priests and warned that he would not tolerate disobedience by clerics on fundamental teachings. Benedict, who for decades before his 2005 election was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer, delivered an unusually direct denunciation of disobedient priests in a sermon at a morning Mass on Holy Thursday, when the Church commemorates the day Christ instituted the priesthood.
The pope responded specifically to a call to disobedience by a group of Austrian priests and laity, who last year boldly and openly challenged Church teaching on taboo topics such as priestly celibacy and women’s ordination. “Is disobedience a path of renewal for the Church?,” he asked rhetorically in the sermon of a solemn Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica on the day Catholic priests around the world renew their vows.
In his response to the Austrian group, his first in public, Benedict noted that, in its “call to disobedience”, it had challenged “definitive decisions of the Church’s magisterium (teaching authority) such as the question of women’s ordination …”
The Austrian group that has demanded sweeping changes is led by the Reverend Helmut Schueller, a former deputy to Vienna archbishop Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn. The group, which says it represents about 10 percent of the Austrian clergy, has broad public backing in opinion polls and has said it will break Church rules by giving communion to Protestants and divorced Catholics who remarry.
Schueller told Reuters on Thursday he remained hopeful for reform despite the pope’s views. “We believe Church teaching can change. It has changed time and again over the centuries. It is our hope that that can happen again in future,” he said.
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Well, there are things to discuss and there are things which cannot be discussed, simply because of their nature.
Women who claim to be priests fall to the latter. Let us try, for a while, to think about “what Jesus wanted”. Where we can find an answer? The Gospel, of course. Now, do we find female disciples there? No. Before you start talking about “the nature of the society 2000 years ago” stop for a second. Our Lord did shatter quite a few dogmas, didn`t he? If He wanted to have female disciples, He would have surely chosen them. So, what do you want to discus here?
Regarding celibacy, that is another thing, so to mix these two, is rather unfair. Yes, we read in the Gospel about Peter`s mother-in-law being healed by Jesus. We also know that the orthodox church allows its clergy to get married. But first things first. Before catholic priests can start to marry again, their role would have to be changed, which is possible, but certainly not easy. With the current model, if they get married, it would mean that they would not be able to fully perform both their duties. When you take a protestant pastor and compare his position and duties to that of a catholic priest, you see that clearly.
So, to sum up: there can be a discussion about celibacy, perhaps also about other things, but not about female “priests”. And secondly, which is what the Pope said, is a call to disobedience really a good start? An assault, actually?
I don`t think so.
Pope Benedict slams U.S. embargo on Cuba, meets Fidel Castro
Pope Benedict called for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba and met with revolutionary icon Fidel Castro on Wednesday as he ended a trip in which he urged the communist island to change.
He also spoke at a public Mass in Havana’s sprawling Revolution Square where the Vatican said 300,000 people gathered to hear the 84-year-old pontiff.
In a trip laced with calls for change in Cuba, his last message was aimed at the United States, its long-time ideological foe, which for 50 years has imposed a trade embargo trying to topple the Caribbean island’s communist government.
Speaking in a departure ceremony at a rainy Havana airport, Benedict said Cuba could build “a society of broad vision, renewed and reconciled,” but it was more difficult “when restrictive economic measures, imposed from outside the country, unfairly burden its people.”
“The present hour urgently demands that in personal, national and international co-existence we reject immovable positions and unilateral viewpoints,” the German pope, dressed in white vestments, said in his soft voice and heavily accented Spanish.
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What does a pope do? Fidel Castro asks Pope Benedict
Pope Benedict and Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, both octogenarians, joked about their age in a brief meeting on Wednesday and then Castro popped the question: so what do you do?
The two world figures chatted for about 30 minutes at the Vatican embassy in Havana near the end of the pope’s three-day visit to Cuba, where he called for greater freedom and a bigger role for the Catholic Church in the communist-led nation.
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said Benedict, 84, and Castro, 85, had an “exchange of ideas” in a “very cordial” atmosphere.
Castro led a 1959 revolution and transformed the Caribbean island into a communist state, ruling it for 49 years before stepping down due to poor health in 2008. Under his rule, Cuba for years called itself an atheist state, although relations with the Church have improved over the past two decades.
Castro arrived for his meeting with the pope on Wednesday in a green Mercedes SUV amid heavy security that included armed guards in a phalanx of surrounding black Mercedes cars.
He was helped out by two assistants, who supported him as he walked slowly up the steps into the stately white building where Benedict spent Tuesday night and where Pope John Paul II stayed during his landmark 1998 visit.
“What does a pope do?” Castro asked Benedict, who is just one year his junior. The pontiff told him of his ministry, his foreign trips and his service to the Church, saying he was happy to be in Cuba and with the welcome he received.
I hope this visit by Holy See will bear fruitful results. Christians and people of other faiths must have full authority to practice their religion and preaching in peaceful way. This will only create bond of love.
Cuba quashes hopes for reform as Pope Benedict meets Raul Castro
Pope Benedict and Cuban President Raul Castro have met for talks on a papal trip that has sparked hopes for economic and political change, but one national leader said there would be no political reform on the communist island.
Cuban television showed the pope and Castro in the Palace of the Revolution on Tuesday at the beginning and end of an hour-long meeting, but they did not speak to the press. A Vatican spokesman said former leader Fidel Castro, who may or may not meet with Benedict, did not attend the talks.
Benedict arrived for what is the second papal trip to Cuba in history at a time when Raul Castro has initiated reforms boosting private enterprise and reducing the state’s role. His aim is to strengthen the country’s struggling Soviet-style economy and assure the future of communism.
Some Cubans have expressed hope that economic changes would be accompanied by political change in the country where the only legal political party is the Communist Party, but Marino Murillo, a vice president in the Council of Ministers and the country’s economic reforms czar, told reporters that was not in the cards.
“In Cuba there won’t be political reform,” he said in a press conference at Havana’s Hotel Nacional, the international press center for the pope visit.
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Pope Benedict visits Latin America in the shadow of Pope John Paul
A ghost will be following Pope Benedict at every step of his trip to Mexico and Cuba — that of his predecessor John Paul.
John Paul, who died in 2005, was a huge draw in many places. But, apart from his native Poland, nowhere was he a more towering figure than in Latin America, visiting every one of the region’s countries at least once. He drew oceanic, throbbing crowds, sloshed through swampy slums in Ecuador, challenged Maoist guerrillas in the Peruvian highlands and defended miners’ rights in Bolivia.
The more cerebral, sedate and shy Benedict, who enters the eighth year of his papacy in April, is making only his second trip to Latin America and his first to the Spanish-speaking part. He visited Brazil in 2007.
John Paul, underscoring the importance of overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Latin America for the Church’s future, chose Mexico as the first place to go just months after his election in 1978. He made one trip to Latin America nearly every year of his 27-year papacy, the last when he was 82 and in failing health. Of the 22 trips Benedict has made since his election in 2005, 15 of them have been in Europe.
Opinion polls show that a majority of people in Mexico and Cuba, reflecting the mood throughout Latin America, feel more affection and veneration for John Paul than for Benedict, who they believe understands them and their culture less.
The difference in pre-trip enthusiasm is so palpable that Bishop Jose Guadalupe Martin Rabago of Leon, the Mexican city where Benedict will be based, felt impelled to admonish his flock to stop making comparisons with John Paul. “From the perspective of faith, all popes are equal and deserve our respect and our loyalty regardless of the charisma they have,” he told CNNMexico.
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