Christ! What a better place to defend Mussolini’s
and the Vatican’s Holocaust cooperation than to have a piece of bent pasta like
Berlusconi defend government sponsored genocide at a Holocaust Memorial Event!
Protecting the Vatican’s collusion in WWII with
Mussolini is in line and goose step with the former Italian Prime Minister’s
attempt to protect the German pope’s current revisionist world view of the
Holocaust via the fast track sainthood campaign for Pius XII.
"Obviously the government of that time,
out of fear that German power might lead to complete victory, preferred to ally
itself with Hitler's Germany rather than opposing it," he said. "As
part of this alliance, there were impositions, including combating and
exterminating Jews. The racial laws were the worst fault of Mussolini as a
leader, who in so many other ways did well."
In 1938, Mussolini passed laws barring Jews
from academia and many professions. After 1943, when Germany occupied parts of
the country, more than 7,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps,
with many perishing at Auschwitz.
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said
Saturday that Germany had an "everlasting responsibility" for Nazi
crimes, but Berlusconi said Italy "did not have the same
responsibility," adding that the country's collusion in the Holocaust was
initially "partly unwitting."
Prime Minister Mario
Monti has announced the Vatican must pay taxes on non-religious property, from
which it previously enjoyed an exemption.
The annual cost could
be up to 720m euros ($945m; £598m) according to municipal government bodies.
Italy's Catholic
Church has 110,000 properties, worth about 9bn euros.It includes shopping
centres and a range of residential property.
In December, the
government reintroduced a tax paid by anyone who owns land or property in Italy
- which the Church does not pay.
But a growing wave of
Italians are opposed to what they see as special privileges in the face of a
tightening economy
Following their
government's latest austerity measure package, more than 130,000 people signed
an online petition calling for the Church's tax exempt status to be revoked.
Since 2005, church-run
groups and organisations have not been classed as official commercial bodies
and have been exempt from paying property tax.
According to the
Corriere della Sera newspaper, tax authorities will calculate how much of a
property is used purely for religious purposes and tax it proportionately.
This means a church
would remain exempt but a chapel which operates an hostel would pay tax
accordingly.
Here’s a story that never made it to the Lame Stream American Media.Found it on aJehovah Witness site. Searched around a bit to find a more legitimate looking media source.Could not believe that this story never made it to these shores.Oh well, what else is new?
My article title is a translation from Italian of what no doubt angry parishioners wrote on the wall of the pedophile priest’s church.
(GENOA) — The latest sex-abuse case to rock the Catholic Church is unfolding in the archdiocese of an influential Italian Cardinal who has been working with Pope Benedict XVI on reforms to respond to prior scandals of pedophile priests.
Father Riccardo Seppia, a 51-year-old parish priest in the village of Sastri Ponente, near Genoa, was arrested last Friday, May 13, on pedophilia and drug charges. Investigators say that in tapped mobile-phone conversations, Seppia asked a Moroccan drug dealer to arrange sexual encounters with young and vulnerable boys. "I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues," he allegedly said.
Genoa Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco, who is the head of the Italian Bishops Conference, had been working with Benedict to establish a tough new worldwide policy, released this week, on how bishops should handle accusations of priestly sex abuse.
Worldwide policy? How about your own backyard folks?
I am old enough to remember when Richard Nixon stonewalled the federal prosecutors and the press over his crimes committed in the Watergate Scandal.
Having recently seen the movie Frost/Nixon, you see that Nixon said something to the effect that anything a President does is not a crime - The Nixon Defense so to speak. Nixon in the role of American King Richard I was a tragic figure worthy of a Shakespearian play.
As I see this VaticanGate sex abuse scandal unfolding at the feet of Benedict XVI, I cannot but help see similarities in the major hubris with which kings treat their crimes against the state and humanity. Benedict is stonewalling. He is running out the clock of his papacy because as a man of his age, he does not have much longer to endure or having to keep the modern world from his Ivory Tower world of fantasy and religion.
(click on start first, then click on screen to expand image)
With a mere lengthly papal letter of apology to the People of Ireland for the thousands of sexually abused children over decades of religious institutional authority – it got met with a big Irish YAWN. The Irish problem was that the state outsourced tens of thousands of orphans to slavery workhouse, sweatshop conditions of church institutions and the kids also got buggered as well in that bargain with the devil.
A letter from a lifelong bureaucrat in the Vatican does not hack it for the Irish or for the rest of Humanity as well.
This papal letter post scripts a long, concise and documented account of abuse by Irish clergy that was conducted by present day civil appointed authorities in Ireland. Those recent reports came to light in a secular day just as this sexuality problem, scandal, of celibate priests goes into its second decade, first in the United States and now leapfrogging to Europe.
The Ireland issue has triggered a Eurpopean bursting of the dam of silence over clerical buggery in many countries including the native Germany of the Pope. His deafness while at meetings about a certain German buggering priest that went on until last week was the hallmark of his Archbishop of Munich job done so well that they promoted him to the Vatican in the early 1980’s.
Revelations that the Vatican halted the investigation of a Wisconsin priest accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys have eerie echoes in Italy, where 67 deaf men and women accused two dozen priests of raping and molesting children for years.
Only now — a year after the Italian case became public — is the Vatican directing the diocese to interview the victims to hear their testimony about the accusations, The Associated Press learned Thursday.
The two cases are the latest in a burgeoning abuse scandal on both sides of the Atlantic that now threatens to tarnish the papacy itself. The office charged with disciplining clergy was long led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and a church prosecution in the Wisconsin case was stopped after an appeal to Ratzinger.
And:
On Friday, The New York Times reported that the future pope was kept more closely apprised of a German priest's sex abuse case in 1980 than previous church statements have suggested.
The case of the German priest, the Rev. Peter Hullermann, has acquired fresh relevance because it unfolded at a time when Cardinal Ratzinger, who was later put in charge of handling thousands of abuse cases on behalf of the Vatican, was in a position to refer the priest for prosecution, or at least to stop him from coming into contact with children, the Times said.
Cardinal Ratzinger was copied on a memo that told him that a priest, whom he had approved sending to therapy in 1980 to overcome pedophilia, would return to pastoral work within days of beginning psychiatric treatment, the Times said. The priest was later convicted of molesting boys in another German parish.
Three deaf men who say they were repeatedly abused by priests as children have confronted an Italian church diocese about why it has not punished their abusers, saying they want justice.
The three men appeared on a prime-time talk show on Italy's state-run RAI TV, squaring off with the spokesman of the Verona diocese amid a swirling global sex abuse scandal that has inched closer to Pope Benedict XVI.
The spokesman, the Rev Bruno Fasani, said he hoped the confrontation would be constructive and he welcomed meeting the men for the first time.
But the former students of Verona's Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf refused to shake his hand during the show. One of the three, Dario Laiti, 59, said he couldn't bring himself to greet the prelate. …
Advocates for the victims, however, said the diocese investigation was fatally flawed because no one interviewed the former students.
The pope’s handling of German matters perhaps triggered a matter whereby the Vatican guy Joe Ratzinger squashed an investigation of an American priest that abused over two hundred deaf children in an institution of the deaf for many decades in the Milwaukee diocese.
The deaf in Italy are now talking out – out of frustration of not being heard – after the statutes of limitations have passed. The victims want closure and not forgiveness for their sin of tempting good priests to sin – or at least that is the medieval view from the Vatican on all this fuss about the mere abuse of children at the expense of the church’s prestige and “good” name.
Joe Ratzinger was the best of the best that John Paul II could put in charge of keeping the lid on this worldwide, decades - centuries long secret obscene behavior of the clergy.
Joe Ratzinger, the best of the best, has turned out quite mediocre and flat in light of victims who do not want a sacred letter of apology but instead want secular, human justice.
