In a shocking statement a Lawyer, legal representative of the Catholic Church quoted the Bible to justify the Abuse of Children by the clergy in Australia.
So aggrieved were the Public they walked out of the hearing.
Former orphans Trish Charter and Yvette Parr leave the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse in Sydney on Monday. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP
“”Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such of these that the kingdom of God belongs.”
Over the course of an estimated two weeks, the commission will hear evidence from four victims of abuse by members of the church who sought redress through the Towards Healing process, set up by the church in 1996 to respond to complaints of abuse by members of the clergy.
On Monday morning it was revealed that the Catholic church had paid more than $43m in compensation to victims in a process which it is alleged sought to mitigate public damage to the church rather than address victims’ needs.
Senior counsel assisting the commission, Gail Furness, said the highest payout since the establishment of Towards Healing was $853,000. The amount, which included legal, counselling and other costs, related to a diocesan priest, at the time appointed with the archdiocese of Sydney.
Furness began her opening address by describing the process that Towards Healing was supposed to follow when a complaint of sexual abuse was received.
“It is acknowledged that people will experience this process differently depending upon, among other matters, their understanding of the process and their expectations,” said Furness.
Furness prefaced the evidence expected to be given by the first witness, abuse victim Joan Issacs, who will appear on Monday afternoon.
Peter Gray, representing the church’s Truth, Justice and Healing Council began his opening statement by quoting a passage from the gospel of Mark, prompting cries of shock and disgust in the hearing room.
No cooments are needed , please read my comments on my earlier post,provided at the end of this post.
Magdalen-asylum-England.
‘Magdalene asylums were institutions from the eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries ostensibly to house “fallen women“, a term used to implyfemale sexual promiscuity. Asylums for such girls and women and others believed to be of poor moral character, such as prostitutes, operated throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States for much of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. The first such asylum in Ireland opened on Leeson Street in Dublin in 1765, founded by Lady Arabella Denny.
Initially the mission of the asylums was to rehabilitate women back into society, but by the early twentieth century the homes had become increasingly punitive and prison-like. In most asylums, the inmates were required to undertake hard physical labour, including laundry and needle work. They endured a daily regime that included long periods of prayer and enforced silence.[citation needed]
In Ireland, such asylums were known as Magdalene laundries. It is estimated that up to 30,000 women passed through such institutions in Ireland.[2][3] The last Magdalene asylum, inWaterford in the Republic of Ireland, closed on 25 September 1996.(Wiki)
“The women were locked in and not permitted to leave. And if they tried to get away, the cops would catch them and bring them back. They were quite literally Catholic slave labor working for the government and even Guinness, which would pay the laundries for the women’s slave labor.
Half of the girls enslaved in these Catholic Church prisons were under the age of 23. The youngest entrant was 9 years old.
When I was a young girl, my mother — an abusive, less-than-perfect parent — encouraged me to shoplift. After being caught once too often, I spent 18 months in An Grianán Training Centre, an institution in Dublin for girls with behavioral problems, at the recommendation of a social worker. An Grianán was one of the now-infamous church-sponsored “Magdalene laundries,” which housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. We worked in the basement, washing priests’ clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.
No apology from the Catholic Church
Absent from any of the media reports on the scandal that I could find was an apology from the Catholic Church which operated the Magdalene laundries and made handsome profits from contracts with government and hotels. Oh, found one. It seems the Catholic Church blew the women off. I know, you’re as surprised as I am:
Victims of the child sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Irish Catholic Church have received an apology and compensation, but no one has taken responsibility for what happened in the laundries. Cardinal Sean Brady, the most senior Catholic cleric in Ireland, met with Justice for Magdalenes in 2010. He said “by today’s standards much of what happened at that time is difficult to comprehend” but that it was a matter for the religious orders who ran the laundries to deal with. The religious orders have declined to meet the women.
The Irish Cardinal wasn’t interested in hearing from people who were hurt and abused — if not sexually, certainly physically and mentally, by the Catholic Church. And it’s not the Catholic Church’s fault. Where have we heard that story before?
The laundries were run by nuns, many of whom treated the women sent to work there as slaves:
Senator McAleese’s inquiry found that half of the girls and women put to work in the laundries were under the age of 23 and 40%, more than 4,000, spent more than a year incarcerated.
Fifteen percent spent more than five years in the laundries while the average stay was calculated at seven months.
The youngest death on record was 15, and the oldest 95, the report found.
The Irish state is also implicated in the scandal because the police would take women to the asylums after arresting them for trivial offenses and would return runaways.
Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny has apologised for the stigma and conditions suffered by women who were inmates of the Magdalene laundries.
Mr Kenny said the laundries had operated in a “harsh and uncompromising Ireland,” but he stopped short of a formal apology from the government.
About 10,000 women passed through the laundries in the Irish Republic between 1922 and 1996, a report has revealed.
The laundries were Catholic-run workhouses that operated in Ireland.
Mr Kenny expressed his sympathies with survivors and the families of those who died.
Magdalene Laundries
• Originally termed Magdalene Asylums the first in Ireland was opened in Dublin in 1765, for Protestant girls
• First Catholic home was founded in Cork in 1809
• Envisaged as short-term refuges for ‘fallen women’ they became long-term institutions and penitents were required to work, mostly in laundries on the premises
• They extended to take in unmarried mothers, women with learning difficulties and girls who had been abused
• The facilities were self-supporting and the money generated by the laundries paid for them
• Between 1922 and 1996 there were 10 such laundries in the Republic of Ireland
• Many Irish institutions, such as the army, government departments, hotels and even Guinness had contracts with Magdalene laundries
• The women toiled behind locked doors unable to leave after being admitted and while the laundries were paid, they received no wages
• The last Magdalene asylum in Ireland, in Waterford, closed in 1996
• The congregations which ran them were the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy, the Religious Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of the Good Shepherd
He added that the report found no evidence of sexual abuse in the laundries and that 10% of inmates were sent by their families and 19% entered of their own volition.
The inquiry chaired by Senator Martin McAleese found 2,124 of those detained in the institutions were sent by the authorities.
There will be a debate in the Irish parliament in two weeks time giving members time to read the 1,000-page document.
If one has to know about hypocrisy and double speak, do not look beyond the Church.
Let the Pope find out if the Vatican has room for God with their pedophiles, Church keeping quiet during The Holocaust and innumerable acts of Violence on the ‘Heathen’.
I have often maintained that if Jesus Christ were to be reborn, he would not be able to find the Religion he founded!
Such is the behaviour of the professed Christians, Catholics, let me hasten to add lest I may provoke other sects(In a Religion which states that there is no division among them!)
Where is the Germany born Pope?
Delivering message of peace and reconciliation among the Faiths?
Story:
St.Peter’s Basilica
Germany‘s Catholic Church will deny worshippers the right to Holy Communion and religious burials if people do not pay a special church tax.
A newly-enforced German bishops’ decree says anyone failing to pay the tax – an extra 8% of their income tax bill – will no longer be considered a Catholic.
All people in Germany must pay this tax if they want to worship in either Catholic or protestant churches, or Jewish synagogues.
Last year millions of files spanning decades were handed over to criminal investigators by all 27 dioceses of the Catholic Church hierarchy in Germany in a bid to get to the heart of child sex abuse by priests.
It was seen as an attempt to staunch the flow of leavers who made it plain the scandal, and the inability or unwillingness to deal with it, was the reason for their departure.
In 2010, 181,000 people left, an increase of 50 percent on the previous year. Last year 126,000 left.
Over the past twenty years, the number of members of Germany’s Roman Catholic Church has fallen from 28.3 million to 24.6 million or 30.2 percent of the country’s population.
The Catholic Church has seen numbers fall in recent years, particularly in Germany
Many parishioners said they were sickened that offending clergy were often simply moved to new jons where they were free to commit more crimes.
Now comes the new hardline from the church which is also partly in response to a test case that has been griding through the courts and due for a decision by a court in Leipzig on Friday.
Is the author saying that the Gay Marriage is to be sanctified by the Church?
He does not seem o believe in The Old Testament.
Stained glass at St John the Baptist’s Anglican Church http://www.stjohnsashfield.org.au, Ashfield, New South Wales. Illustrates Jesus’ description of himself “I am the Good Shepherd” (from the Gospel of John, chapter 10, verse 11). This version of the image shows the detail of his face. The memorial window is also captioned: “To the Glory of God and in Loving Memory of William Wright. Died 6th November, 1932. Aged 70 Yrs.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
If The Old Testament is to be questioned, The New Testament has no place , as The Old Testament is Primary.
The question of a Religion sanctifying Gay marriage does not arise.
None of the World Religions approve of Gay Relationship.
Gay relationship is not normal human behavior.
There is evidence that animals, like Chimpanzees engage themselves in Homosexual activity.
But to quote this o justify Human Gay activity as normal is incorrect.
If we were to accept this logic, we are none he better than the animals.
Religion, apart from ennobling the soul, is an instrument of Social Order.
Some behaviors in the Society are harmful to the Structure of society.
Therefore Society has called them Taboos.
People can also justify incest, by quoting Oedipus!
How absurd!
If Gay and Lesbian marriages are to be given Religious sanction, these behaviours, which are not normal, become rampant.
In a Society, an order has to be maintained.
(For further reading please read my blog on ‘Gay Marriages Legalised’
Human instinct if followed unchecked by Reason, will create problems at some stage for those who indulge in it and destabilize the Society in the long run.
Gays and Lesbians must realise that they have a problem and learn to live with it.
You can not force others to approve of it.
It is their prerogative.
Note: The Church itself is not beyond reproach, we have Gay priests, Lesbian Nuns and Paedophiles among them.
It is not to be taken as an example, but rather as a warning.
If one were to question the Origin of The Bible, the entire Bible can be discarded as the Bible was compiled by Constantine nearly 300 years after the Death of Jesus Christ.
Faith is something one should accept with heart,.
We know we can not control the Future and Death, this is Logic.
Do we accept it whole-heartedly ?
“Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage? Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredeness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.
Some of my fellow Catholics even think that “true marriage” was instituted by Christ. It wasn’t. Marriage is prescribed in Eden by YHWH (Yahweh) at Genesis 2.24: man and wife shall “become one flesh.” When Jesus is asked about marriage, he simply quotes that passage from Genesis (Mark 10.8). He nowhere claims to be laying a new foundation for a “Christian marriage” to replace the Yahwist institution.
Some try to make the wedding at Cana (John 1.1-11) somehow sacramental because Jesus worked his first miracle there. But that was clearly a Jewish wedding, like any other Jesus might have attended, and the miracle, by its superabundance of wine, is meant to show the disciples that the Messianic time has come. The great Johannine scholar Father Raymond Brown emphasizes this, and concludes of the passage: “Neither the external nor the internal evidence for a symbolic reference to matrimony is strong. The wedding is only the backdrop and occasion for the story, and the joining of the man and woman does not have any direct role in the narrative.”
The early church had no specific rite for marriage. This was left up to the secular authorities of the Roman Empire, since marriage is a legal concern for the legitimacy of heirs. When the Empire became Christian under Constantine, Christian emperors continued the imperial control of marriage, as the Code of Justinian makes clear. When the Empire faltered in the West, church courts took up the role of legal adjudicator of valid marriages. But there was still no special religious meaning to the institution. As the best scholar of sacramental history, Joseph Martos, puts it: “Before the eleventh century there was no such thing as a Christian wedding ceremony in the Latin church, and throughout the Middle Ages there was no single church ritual for solemnizing marriage between Christians.”
Only in the twelfth century was a claim made for some supernatural favor (grace) bestowed on marriage as a sacrament. By the next century marriage had been added to the biblically sacred number of seven sacraments. Since Thomas Aquinas argued that the spouses’ consent is the efficient cause of marriage and the seal of intercourse was the final cause, it is hard to see what a priest’s blessing could add to the reality of the bond. And bad effects followed. This sacralizing of the natural reality led to a demoting of Yahwist marriage, the only kind Jesus recognized, as inferior to “true marriage” in a church.
In the 1930s, my parents had a civil marriage, but my Catholic mother did not think she was truly married if not by a priest. My non-Catholic father went along with a church wedding (but in the sacristy, not the sanctuary) by promising to raise his children as Catholic. My mother thought she had received the sacrament, but had she? Since mutual consent is the essence of marriage, one would think that the sacrament would have to be bestowed on both partners; but my non-Catholic father could not receive the sacrament. Later, when my father left and married another, my mother was told she could not remarry because she was still married to my father in the “true marriage.” When he returned to my mother, and became a Catholic, a priest performed again the sacramental marriage. Since my father’s intervening marriage was “outside the church,” it did not count. What nonsense.
Those who do not want to let gay partners have the sacredness of sacramental marriage are relying on a Scholastic fiction of the thirteenth century to play with people’s lives, as the church has done ever since the time of Aquinas. The myth of the sacrament should not let people deprive gays of the right to natural marriage, whether blessed by Yahweh or not. They surely do not need—since no one does—the blessing of Saint Thomas.”
Genesis 2:23-24 The man said,
“This is now bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man,”
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother,
and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
Genesis 3:16 To the woman he said,
“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
1 Corinthians 13:1-13 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels,
but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge,
and if I have a faith that can move mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames,
but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient,
love is kind.
It does not envy,
it does not boast,
it is not proud.
It is not rude,
it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered,
it keeps no record of wrongs.
Love does not delight in evil
but rejoices with the truth.
It always protects,
always trusts,
always hopes,
always perseveres.
Love never fails.
But where there are prophecies,
they will cease;
where there are tongues,
they will be stilled;
where there is knowledge,
it will pass away.
For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.
When I was a child, I talked like a child,
I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror;
then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully,
even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 7:3 The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband.
Christians especially the Roman Catholics,in practising their religion seem to believe that they are above the law of the land.
In this they are no different from the Islamic Umma , who place their religion above their Nation.
The difference is that the Christians are subtle.
In proselytising the Christians are way ahead of Muslims and they are not noticed for they do it subtly by offering money and promises while Muslims are brash and rush in with high decibel perorations and the blandishing of swords.
One should watch the Public meetings of the Evangelists, the way they speak(why is it all of them have the same intonation in delivering English and have the same posture?) and the way they go about ‘driving away Ghosts’
Paying lip service to tolerance, Christians are the most intolerant as History of Christianity will divulge.
Christians seem to be neglecting the Message of Christ and I often state that Christ will be the last person to identify Christianity as the one he has founded if were to arrive again!
”
Religious rules should end “at the door of the temple” and give way to the “public law” laid down by Parliament, the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission said.
He argued that Roman Catholic adoption agencies and other faith groups providing public services must choose between their religion and obeying the law when their beliefs conflict with the will of the state.
Mr Phillips singled out the adoption agencies that fought a long legal battle to avoid being forced to accept homosexual couples under equality laws.
Last year, following a High Court case, the Charity Commission ruled against an exemption for Catholic Care, an adoption agency operating in Leeds.
Speaking at a debate in London on diverse societies, Mr Phillips backed the new laws, which led to the closure of all Catholic adoption agencies in England. “You can’t say because we decide we’re different then we need a different set of laws,” he said, in comments reported by The Tablet, the Catholic newspaper.
To me there’s nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn’t apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn’t work.”
He added that religious groups should be free to follow their own rules within their own settings but not outside. “Once you start to provide public services that have to be run under public rules, for example child protection, then it has to go with public law,” he said.
“Institutions have to make a decision whether they want to do that or they don’t want to do that.”
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