Thread: His Holiness The Pope of Rome

Originally Posted by katie23

speaks English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese

He is also fluent in Latin and is giving his first Latin mass as Il Papa in the Sistine as we speak...

Live stream

Originally Posted by katie23

there was an English language mass at another church which was at the city center

I wish they would bring back the Latin Mass. They changed it to English(or local langauge) after the second Vatican council in the 60s under Pope John XXIII. But the old Latin incantations feel more scintillatingly sacred to my ears, being millennia old.

Katie

a pope who has compassion for the poor

it seems he may also have had compassion for paedophiles. maybe they were poor though.

Landreth

A Pope can bring awareness to the climate crisis.

well, the dark shadows he is apparently casting are unlikely to cool anything down.


The abuse allegations casting a shadow over Pope Leo XIV

09 May 2025 10:08am BST

Leo, formerly Robert Prevost, is said to have failed to properly investigate claims made against Catholic priests in Peru and the US

Leo XIV, the new Pope, has been accused of mishandling allegations of child sex abuse.

Leo, formerly known as Robert Prevost, is said to have failed to properly investigate multiple claims made against Catholic priests in Peru, and, according to reports in the US, gave refuge to an accused paedophile in a monastery without informing a nearby school in Chicago.

As leader of Chicago’s Augustinian Province in 2000, he apparently allowed Father James Ray, an Augustinian priest whose ministry had been suspended nine years previously over allegations of child abuse, to stay at the St John Stone Friary in the city.

Leo did not tell the nearby Catholic school that Father Ray had been installed there, according to the Chicago Sun Times.

Father Ray’s name was later added to a list of “abusive clerics and religious brothers” by the Illinois attorney general, which claimed he had at least 13 alleged victims between 1974 and 1991 at different locations in the state.

Elsewhere in Illinois, in nearby New Lenox, the Augustines also ran the Providence Catholic High School, which was headed by Father Richard McGrath.

In the mid-1990s, Father McGrath allegedly raped a student called Robert Krankvich, with the Church paying a $2 million (£1.5 million) settlement to him in 2018 without admitting wrongdoing after he launched legal proceedings against the Augustines.

Although this was before Leo became head of the Augustine Order in 2001, Father McGrath remained in post throughout his tenure, and was only removed in 2017 when a student claimed to have seen him looking at a nude picture of a boy on his phone.


Mr Krankvich’s lawyers argued in a legal complaint that the Augustines “knew or should reasonably have known of Father McGrath’s dangerous and exploitative propensities as a child molester”.

The priest denied allegations he had ever engaged in “any unlawful, immoral or sexually improper conduct with any student” during the case, local media reported.

Asked if he had ever viewed child pornography, he did not answer, pleading the Fifth Amendment. Mr Krankvich died in April of addiction-related health issues.

‘No proper inquiry was opened’

Last year, three women claimed that Leo, as Cardinal of Chiclayo, Peru, had covered up for priests who had sexually abused them as children, according to the National Catholic Reporter.

When they made the claims to the Diocese of Chiclayo in 2022, no proper inquiry was opened, they said.

One of the alleged victims, Ana María Quispe, said that as a nine-year-old a Catholic priest called Ricardo Yesquén sat her on his lap and started kissing her, and that a second, Eleuterio Vásquez González, forced her to share a bed with him after a mass.

“I froze. I pretended to be asleep, I didn’t sleep at all,” she said. “And then I woke up a few hours later. I got up to vomit.”


Another alleged victim, identified as Lucía, said Father Vásquez also attempted to spend the night with her, but she managed to fight him off.

A third woman claimed Father Vásquez had forced himself on her when she was 13 before mass.

“In the homily, he started to say that priests are people, they commit errors, and we have to know how to forgive,” she said.

“It was like a homily totally directed at me.”

The allegations were sent to the Vatican’s body for investigating accusations of clerical sexual abuse.


The Diocese of Chiclayo later said it found insufficient evidence to prove their claims, and said reports that “Cardinal Robert Prevost covered up for the priest, Eleuterio Vásquez González, and that he remained silent in face of the complaints” were “not true”.

It added that Father Vásquez “accepted” the suspension of his ministry, leaving to reside with family in Santa Cruz province.

It described Father Yesquén as seriously ill, saying a case could not not be opened against him because “he does not have the capacity to defend himself… he has not exercised priestly ministry for years.”

THE TELEGRAPH

a man of the church involved in a cover up of kiddie fiddlers ?????
surely not

Sexual abuse is a cancer within the Catholic Church. Pope Leo must tackle it
For all the good he did, the late pope failed to adequately address the scandal of clerical sex abuse

Peter Stanford

09 May 2025 11:27am BST



Pope Leo XIV has previously denied any claims of mishandling abuse investigations Credit: Getty

Within hours of Robert Prevost’s election as Pope Leo XIV, his old friend from Chicago and fellow Augustinian priest, Fr William Lego, was asked about the challenges facing the new leader of the Catholic Church. He described clerical sex abuse as “the toughest”. It was also clearly an issue on the minds of the cardinal electors in the Sistine Chapel. The damage done to the moral authority of the Catholic Church by its decades-long cover-up of priests and monks abusing children reportedly featured prominently in the discussions the world’s 251 cardinals held in Rome before the 134 of them under the age of 80 went in to vote.

The dark shadow that clerical abuse has cast over the Church has already touched the new Pope (though he has rebutted all claims of mishandling abuse investigations). Campaigning group SNAP (Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests), which has a membership of 25,000, has alleged that while a senior figure in his Augustinian order in Chicago, Fr Prevost allowed one of his friars, accused of child sex abuse, to be housed close to a primary school. It also claims that, while a missionary bishop in Peru in Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023, he did not follow Church rules on the proper investigation of three of his priests around allegations of abusing children.

Another of those taking to the airwaves to talk about the new Pope since his election has been his older brother, John. He hailed him as “a second Pope Francis”. But if Pope Leo is to truly get to grips with the abuse scandal in the Church, his predecessor may not be the best role model.




A girl ties baby shoes to a fence as part of a protest to highlight sexual abuses in the Catholic Church during Pope Francis’s visit to Dublin in 2018 Credit: Gonzalo Fuentes/Reuters

Though loved as a “people’s pope”, with an easy charm, winning smile and refusal to hide behind the trappings of the papacy, Francis could also occasionally show flashes of anger, as during his January 2018 visit to Chile. There he was being publicly rebuked by victims of clerical abuse for appointing a priest, Juan Barros, as a bishop in the diocese of Osorno despite claims that he knew (from complaints by victims sent to the Vatican) of allegations that Barros had witnessed and covered-up what the Church itself had already formally judged to be sexual exploitation of young people by a popular priest, Fernando Karadima.

Francis’s response to being challenged was angry and unmeasured. “It is calumny,” he snapped. “Is that clear?”

It prompted demonstrations in Chile by loyal Catholics who would otherwise have been out in the street celebrating a papal visit. Barros denied any wrongdoing, but even Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who headed the Commission for the Protection of Minors, set up by Francis in 2014 to take “decisive action” on clerical sex abuse, publicly rebuked his boss. Francis’s words, he said, “abandon those who have suffered reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate survivors to discredited exile”.

In fairness to Francis – and much more in keeping with that popular image of him as a pope who encouraged the Catholic Church to change entrenched teachings on sex and gender – he subsequently sent an envoy to Chile on a fact-finding mission, then summoned all 31 Chilean bishops to Rome for a ticking-off and finally sacked three of them.


He also met victims of Karadima to apologise, and reportedly told them, “I was part of the problem”. He made a point of sitting down in private gatherings and listening to others who had been groomed and betrayed by clerics throughout his pontificate.

Yet in the years that followed, his promise to put the problem right did not translate into action. All experts advise that two changes are needed to ensure youngsters are safe around priests. The first is to agree to a wholly independent safeguarding process, rather than the current set-up where the Church acts as judge and jury. It is a demand the campaigning group the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) has already asked the new Pope Leo to implement in a six-page letter released yesterday.

The second – as recommended in 2017 by a Royal Commission on child abuse in Australia – is to introduce mandatory reporting of such abuse by any individual who sees or hears about it, including priests in the confessional. Francis refused to do either.

“The idea of Francis turning over a new leaf on all of this feels very hollow to victims and survivors,” the lawyer Richard Scorer told me in 2023. He has represented hundreds of victims of clerical sex abuse in the UK. “The harm caused [to them] by abuse is lifelong. Closure is generally a very glib word. I’m not sure people get it. They struggle to achieve it.”

Francis, of course, was not the only pope to fail in this crucial area, where the numbers involved are extraordinary, covering between 1.5 and 5% of all ordained clergy over the past half century according to Vatican officials’ own estimates. Indeed, he did considerably better than his two predecessors.

John Paul II (pontiff from 1978 to 2005) simply ignored thousands of reports of abuse sent to him by victims, and allowed both the disgraced American cardinal Bernard Law, who covered-up such cases in his diocese, and the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, a serial abuser, to escape justice by giving them sanctuary in the Vatican. Benedict XVI (2005-2013) did better – banning Maciel from taking services, but still not deporting him to face trial.


Yet to measure Francis against his pledge, soon after his election, to take “decisive action” quickly is to see him fail. The Commission for the Protection of Minors was his structural answer, established in 2014 as part of the Vatican bureaucracy, known as the curia. It even included on its board victims of clerical abuse. But one of them, Marie Collins from Ireland, first publicly criticised it for lacking sufficient funding in 2015, and then resigned in 2017, alleging that the continued presence of “men [at senior levels] in the Church who resist or hinder the work to protect children is just not acceptable.”

In 2023, she was followed by the highly regarded Jesuit priest Hans Zollner, who suggested the commission risked becoming an exercise in public relations.

Francis’s rhetoric on combatting clerical sexual abuse was certainly impressive. In 2018, in a letter to all Catholics, he acknowledged “the heart-wrenching pain of victims” which had been “long-ignored”. The next year he likened their suffering to child sacrifice in pagan rituals. But that tailed off latterly when he began to react defensively, telling a visiting group of safeguarding experts in September 2023 that abuse was a problem that isn’t restricted to the Catholic Church.

“The abuses that have affected the Church are but a pale reflection of a sad reality that involves all of humanity and to which the necessary attention is not paid,” he said. That is true up to a point, but there are also few bodies that claim moral authority to protect the vulnerable so strongly as churches.

And it is not just victims who were disappointed by Francis’s failure to match words with action. A report commissioned by the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales revealed a wider “crisis of faith” causing the pews to empty, while those still there felt they had “to keep their faith private” in their everyday lives, the very opposite of the gospel imperative to spread the Good News.

There are, of course, many reasons for a decline in church-going in developed societies since the mid 20th century. Francis’s legacy contains many attempts to tackle some of them, including putting more women in senior positions in the Church (though still refusing to ordain them) and undertaking a global exercise in asking Catholics their views.

Next to something so horrific as priests sexually abusing children, and other priests covering it up, however, all the good he did undeniably could struggle to cut through. The abuse scandal is the reason for lapsing that anecdotally comes up most. The English and Welsh bishops also acknowledged that it is also “constantly raised by non-Catholics who see it as proof of the failure of the Church to live up to what Christ called us to be”.

This broader damage to the Church’s reputation for answering to a higher set of God-given values has been gathering pace these past dozen years. There will be many issues in Pope Leo’s in-tray, but until the clerical sex abuse scandal is addressed with real vigour, as his old friend Fr William Lego has already gently reminded him, there will be more victims and the exodus from the pews in the West will continue.

Peter Stanford is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and a columnist in the Tablet

Originally Posted by david44

BLD you are in thoughts and Beers , better be Popeless than hopeless .
Wonderful the windy city of the wild garlic highlighted.
A city free from corruption , violins and intrigue.
Apparemtly around Vatican he's known as Pope Bugsy the Blower.

Totally rigged for sure. I was robbed

^^thanks for the articles, Tax.

It's true that there are kiddie fiddlers within the Catholic Church. I suspect that there are also many gay or if not gay, then sexually repressed priests. The Church must investigate these wrongdoings and punish them for their crimes, if need be.

However, there are still many good priests and nuns, and many good deeds done by the church. During Christmas season/four Sundays of Advent, the church in my hometown has a donation drive for food products. One weekend, people are asked to donate tins of sardines, for another it's cans or sachet packs of tomato sauce, etc. Before Christmas, they'll pack the goodies & distribute them to poor families so that somehow, the families can have ingredients for a Christmas meal. They also conducted a feeding program for small kids. During earthquakes or typhoons, they also initiate donation drives (in cash or kind). They help people who are in need - those who are sometimes not reached by govt officials.

*****
As an aside, there was this American priest who was assigned to my parish/ town when I was a kid. Let's call him Father John Mcdonald. (name slightly changed) I've wondered what happened to him and if he's still alive. A few years ago, my mom said that Father John left the priesthood to be with his Filipina wife. Tsk tsk... I was saddened by the news, since he was a good memory/ one that I respected during my childhood.

But then, looking at the situation with adult eyes - they are sexually repressed men. Protestant pastors are allowed to marry & have families, why not Catholic priests? But then, that's for the Church to decide...

Originally Posted by Looper

He is also fluent in Latin and is giving his first Latin mass as Il Papa in the Sistine as we speak...

Live stream





I wish they would bring back the Latin Mass. They changed it to English(or local langauge) after the second Vatican council in the 60s under Pope John XXIII. But the old Latin incantations feel more scintillatingly sacred to my ears, being millennia old.

Latin is obsolete..if they stuck to that nobody would know what the fuck they on about. Latino pussy . Yes. Latin from the pulpit. No

@looper - I like hearing/ singing the Salve Regina and the other incantations when they do some ceremonies (when they use the incense thingy). Yes, it sounds more solemn. However, I prefer the mass to be in English or local language so that it's more understandable. I've never attended a Latin mass (but my parents remember it). First pope that I remember was John Paul 2. He was pope for most of my childhood & his death was mourned greatly among PH Catholics.

The church in my hometown has 4 masses during Sundays (2 in morning, 2 in afternoon). One of those masses is in English and the rest are in Tagalog. I think that for those who like the Latin mass, parishes could offer a Latin mass & if people like their mass in Latin, then they have the choice to attend it. Whenever I attend mass (which isn't often nowadays), the church is still either jam packed or 3/4 full. Very different from the German-language church that I attended in Europe. I wonder how that parish is surviving now. They often sent envelopes (for donation) to my mailbox. Lol (I wondered how they were able to get my name & address but I think it was because I had to register my presence at the Magistrate/ Municipality.

In the form, I ticked the box for Roman Catholic - the Magistrate staff probably sent my details to the church.)

It's true that there are kiddie fiddlers within the Catholic Church. I suspect that there are also many gay or if not gay, then sexually repressed priests. The Church must investigate these wrongdoings and punish them for their crimes

Do you consider all of those things to be crimes?

Surely a lazer focus on the first abomination would be best?

And the sepps can't even agree about Jacko, so...

Originally Posted by BLD

Latin is obsolete..if they stuck to that nobody would know what the fuck they on about.

I am in the Latin groove at the moment. I just finished a 24 lecture course on the Rise of Rome, covering the Roman Kingdom from 750BC to 509BC and then the Roman Republic from 509BC to 27 BC

Now I am 3 lectures in to a 24 lecture course on the Roman Empire from 27 BC to AD 476 so I enjoyed watching the Latin Mass live-stream earlier.

Originally Posted by katie23

@looper - I like hearing/ singing the Salve Regina and the other incantations when they do some ceremonies (when they use the incense thingy). Yes, it sounds more solemn. However, I prefer the mass to be in English or local language

I would like them do the various incantations in Latin to add some mystical mystery to the proceedings and then do the readings and the sermon in English.

I am not sure how much of the original Latin Mass was in Latin but a mixture might be more mesemerising for the masses in the manner of a Harry Potter spell-casting vibe.

Originally Posted by katie23

Protestant pastors are allowed to marry & have families, why not Catholic priests? But then, that's for the Church to decide...

It is a fascinating history. I just finished reading Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland from 2019 which details the evolution of Christianity in minute detail.

Celibacy was originally a monkly and monastic practice. It was extended to the clergy in response to various unseemly and sordid sexual shenanigans, and also to head off heredity in diocesan affairs.

Although the merits of the move seem dubious these days.