"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
He's guilty as sin, but ...
Texas court dismisses child-rape conspiracy
lawsuit against Pope Benedict XVI
by Mary Alice Robbins, Texas Lawyer Dec. 23, 2005
Our comment:
The headline sounds like wacko news, and for many readers it will be inconceivable that someone would sue the Pope over all the child-raping priests.
But the sad truth is that it's no stretch to say that the current Pope, formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger, is
largely responsible for the church's cover-up for who-knows-how-many priests who raped myriad
Pope Benedict XVI
little boys -- exactly as this lawsuit claimed.
Until his recent promotion, Ratzinger ran the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Commonly called the Holy Office, it went by a different, more familiar name until 1965: The Office of the Inquisition. Yes, seriously.
In this office, Ratzinger routinely sent edicts ordering priests, bishops, and nuns to be "silenced" -- to stop outreach to gays and lesbians, to stop questioning church positions on condoms, abortion, and AIDS, etc.
And Ratzinger's office was responsible for handling the ongoing sex scandal, involving hundreds of priests who molested children under the cover of their clerical collars. So what did Ratzinger do?
In 2001, as the decades-long pattern of priests' abuse first started to be reported, he wrote a letter to bishops reminding them that church policy since 1962 mandated that the church itself would investigate, bypassing worldly police authorities, and required victims of priestly abuse to take an oath of secrecy.
According to an article in Britain's Observer, the letter, signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, "asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood." What the hell would you call that, if not a plain and obvious obstruction of justice?
In layman's terms, Ratzinger ordered a cover-up. Exactly as this lawsuit complains.
But at the Bush administration's request, Ratzinger has been let off the hook.
The Bush administration operates as if it's above the law, and they asked the court to view the Pope the same way, as above the law, unpunishable even for crimes committed before he was Pope. He gets "head-of-state immunity," even though he wasn't head of the church-state when he ordered the cover-up.
After all the sickening stories that have trickled and flooded out over recent years, this is the closest we're going to come to a culmination.
If there's one person who can reasonably be said to have overseen the church's organized non-response, that person really is Joseph Ratzinger. But he won't face justice in this lifetime.
The case against Ratzinger is dismissed, not because he's innocent. Au contraire, the evidence is overwhelming, virtually inarguable, that he coordinated a cover-up of the scandal.
The court's ruling is that the Pope walks -- on a technicality.
Holy Mary, mother of God ...
Helen & Harry Highwater, proprietors Unknown News
On Dec. 22, U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal of Houston dismissed claims against Pope Benedict XVI in a suit in which three plaintiffs allege that the pope conspired to cover up a seminarian's sexual abuse of them in the mid-1990s.
Rosenthal based her decision in John Doe 1, et al. v. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, et al. on Pope Benedict's head-of-state-immunity, although the suit was filed in 2004 before he was elected pope. Pope Benedict, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, alleged in amended motions filed in May that he should be dismissed from the suit on several grounds, including immunity.
The U.S. Department of State issued a suggestion of immunity in May, requesting that the pope be dismissed from the suit. "Judicial review of this determination is not appropriate," Rosenthal wrote in the opinion.
"I think it's a shame that our State Department would get involved in an issue that basically involved covering up the sexual abuse of children in this country," says Tahira Kahn Merritt, attorney for two of the plaintiffs.
"We're going to go forward with the case against the archdiocese," says Merritt, of Kahn Merritt & Allen in Dallas.
Robert Schick, a partner in Houston's Vinson & Elkins and an attorney for the archdiocese, did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
The plaintiffs alleged in their complaint that Ratzinger "designed and explicitly directed" a conspiracy to fraudulently conceal tortious conduct in connection with Colombian-born Juan Carlos Patino-Arango's alleged abuse of them while he was a seminarian working at St. Francis de Sales Church in Houston. They further allege in the complaint that after the parents of one plaintiff reported the alleged abuse to the archdiocese, Patino-Arango was moved to a "retreat house for abusive priests" and later "secretly spirited" out of this country and sent back to Colombia.
A Harris County grand jury indicted Patino-Arango on a charge of indecency with a child in 2004 and he is a fugitive from justice, according to an Associated Press report.
As alleged in the complaint, Ratzinger sent a letter to all bishops in 2001, reminding them that all proceedings against clerics accused of improprieties with minors should be sent to the tribunal of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Jeffrey S. Lena, a Berkeley, Calif., solo who is one of the attorneys representing the pope, says Rosenthal's decision is important because the judge dismissed the case against a head of state notwithstanding the fact that the defendant was not a head of state at the time the suit was filed.
"He still gets immunity," Lena says.
The decision also is important, Lena says, because Rosenthal identified Pope Benedict as head of a foreign state, the Holy See. According to the opinion, the plaintiffs had contended that the pope's motion and the State Department's suggestion of immunity were insufficient because neither identified the pope as head of the Vatican City State.
Lena says Rosenthal's decision recognizes that the pope is entitled to head-of-state immunity as a religious leader.
Like the URL says, this website is about unknown news.
We present a once-weekly wrap-up of news that was underplayed, ignored, or simply lost in the non-stop news cycle. Our news comes only from mainstream, professional journalists or (rarely) other sources we trust entirely, with no nuttiness and no interest in the same news you see everywhere else.
What we believe
We believe in liberty and justice for all, so of course, we oppose many US government policies. This doesn't mean we're anti-American, redneck scum, pinko commies, militia members, or terrorist-sympathizers. It means we believe in freedom, as more than merely a cliché.
We believe you have the right to live your own life as you choose, and others have the equal right to live their lives as they choose. It's not complicated.
We believe freedom leads to peace, progress, and prosperity, while its opposite -- oppression -- leads to war, terrorism, poverty, and misery.
We believe it's preposterously stupid to hate people because of their appearance, their race or nationality, their religion or lack of religion, how they have sex with other consenting adults, etc. There are far more apropos reasons to hate most people.
We believe in questioning ourselves, our assumptions, each other -- and we especially believe in questioning authority (the more authority, the more questions). We believe obedience is a fine quality in dogs and young children, but not in adults.
Like America's right-wingers, we believe in
individual responsibility,
hard work to get ahead,
and stern punishment for serious crimes.
We believe big government should not be blindly trusted.
But unlike most right-wing leaders, we mean it.
Like America's left-wingers, we believe in
equal treatment under law,
war as a last (not first) resort,
and sensible stewardship of natural resources.
We believe big business should not be blindly trusted.
But unlike most left-wing leaders, we mean it.
Like libertarians, we believe it's wrong and reprehensible to arrest people for what they think, believe, look like, wear, eat, smoke, drink, inhale, inject, or otherwise do to themselves.
But unlike many libertarians, we're not obsessed with the gold standard, we don't believe incorporation is humanity's highest achievement, and we don't believe everything in life comes down to dollars and cents. We've read and enjoyed Ayn Rand's novels, but we understand that they're works of fiction.
We're skeptical, and we're sick of so-called 'journalists' who aren't skeptical at all.
A reader asks, what are our solutions?
We propose no solutions except common sense, which is never common. We like the principles of democracy, and the ideals broadly described as 'American'. The US Constitution is a fine and workable framework for solutions, when it's actually read and thoughtfully understood by intelligent statesmen and women. So, no manifestos from us. We don't dream that big, and if there's one thing the world doesn't need it's yet another manifesto.
Our suggestion is: think.
A fact-based instead of faith-based approach leads to solutions for most of the recurring issues of our time, from abortion to global climate change, pollution to universal health care, careful but real regulation of industry and economy, hunger, war, terror, human rights for humans not for corporations, science not religious doctrine in public schools, equal protection and prosecution under law, etc. Approach problems without glorifying stupidity, without demonizing intelligence, and answers usually come into focus.
These pages are published by Harry and Helen Highwater, happily married low-income nom de plumes and rabble-rousers from Madison, Wisconsin (with a few friends scattered around the world helping out).
We try to spotlight news that hasn't gotten enough (or appropriate) attention in American media, along with our opinions and yours.
We bang our keyboards against the wall, because it doesn't hurt as much as banging our heads.
We assume our readers are well-informed before they click here, so we focus on news that's generally unknown or under-reported. We're generally disinterested in such non-news as reports on what politicians might do, may do, or should do, and we don't usually mention the murders, kidnappings, house fires, auto wrecks, celebrity crap, wacky fluff, and other nonsense that's pushed real news right out of the newscasts.
Disclaimer for dummies: Our front page is free from nudity, but we make no promise on profanity. If your surfing is monitored this site might not be safe for work, and you may be shocked, offended, or in trouble with your boss. A link doesn't imply that we agree with every sentence and every sentiment on every site we link to. We use our noggins, and suggest you use yours.
We always welcome comments from readers, and we're especially interested in hearing and considering different perspectives, so please don't be shy. All we ask is that you conduct yourself sanely and civilly, so consider yourself invited to speak your mind. Our email address and other info is on our contact page.
Please don't email us unless you're sending an original communication that you're not sending to anyone or everyone else. If you add us to your mailing list or chat group without asking us first, or if you send "Dear friend" newsletters, or "link exchange" form letters, or if you send a press release every time you add a post to your blog, you're a spammer and we'll soon block your emails. Also, as a matter of security, we don't open emails from strangers which include attachments or have any kind of programming imbedded, and we recommend a similar policy for others. If you're sending us an email, please send it in plain text only.
Our RSS feed of Unknown News headlines is updated whenever we update the site. Click the orange button for more information, or just get the feed at http://unknownnews.org/ RSSfeeds/dailyRSS.xml.
(Enormous and eternal thanksto Doug at mistersquirrel.net, for setting up our RSS feed.)
Our privacy policy has a page of its own, but the short and sweet version is: We're in favor of privacy. We make no effort to track or identify anything about visitors to our website. We never share, trade, or sell email addresses. We never send spam. We never send email, except in response to readers' queries. We never send (or open) attachments of any kind, and we delete un-opened any emails received with attachments.
Anything sent to Unknown News may be published. If you don't want it published, say so plainly. When we publish incoming emails, we edit out the sender's last name and email address — if we slip up (or if you want your full name and email address published) please let us know. Of course, if your email is unambiguously intended only to annoy, insult, or threaten us, we'll publish it with all the details and leave it on-line forever.
