Catholic clergy breaking vows of chastity and engaging in criminal sex acts and cover-ups makes them highly vulnerable to blackmail and manipulation.
I lived in L.A. during the stomach-turning reign of Cardinal Roger Mahony and watched as he lied, evaded, stonewalled, and slimed victims of the priest sexual abuse. He acted like Mafioso, and tried to hide behind a pretend veil of sanctity and holiness (“We have done so much, why do you attack us?”) Later of course, I discovered, as did all of us, that what Mahony did was happening across the country. The Catholic Church only took action when bludgeoned into doing so by law enforcement and public opinion, and their action has been grudging and as little as possible.
The proper response to the recent and devastating Pennsylvania Report would be to laicize thousands of clergy after turning over all their records to law enforcement. Instead we got vague statements, thoughts and prayers, from Pope Francis. And he’s absolutely stonewalling on the Vigano allegations.
There will probably be RICO investigations, as the Church is unable to clean up its mess. RICO investigations? Yes. The Catholic Church has a lot of money, including the Papal Foundation here in the States with assets of $206 million. Pope Francis personally ok’ed a highly questionable loan. Also, the Vatican Bank has been corrupt for decades with no real change apparent.
Maybe the Catholic Church stonewalls so hard on the sex abuse charges because seriously investigating them might lead to some very corrupt places. Clergy who could go to prison for their sex acts are in no positions to resist corruption.
LifeSiteNews has obtained internal documents of the U.S.-based Papal Foundation, a charity with a stellar history of assisting the world’s poor, showing that last summer the Pope personally requested, and obtained in part, a $25 million grant to a corruption-plagued, Church-owned dermatological hospital in Rome accused of money laundering. Records from the financial police indicate the hospital has liabilities over one billion USD – an amount larger than the national debt of some 20 nations.
A report from the Audit Committee of the Papal Foundation, and it’s a doozy. It says that all the bishops on the foundation board voted as a bloc to fund Pope Francis’s request to bail out the corrupt hospital, and that Cardinal Wuerl strongarmed it through. The Audit Committee said this grant was so unjustified, and so reckless, that the Papal Foundation would have trouble recruiting future donors.