A PRIEST has denied knowing how gay porn images appeared on a screen during a presentation he was giving to parents of children preparing for First Communion.

Fr Martin McVeigh was setting up the PowerPoint display when the explicit sex scenes flashed up on the screen.

He was about to give a talk to the parents of First Communicants but abandoned the presentation after the pornographic images appeared.

One of those present said the pictures appeared on the screen after the priest put a USB memory stick into the computer at St Mary’s School in Pomeroy, Co Tyrone.

“There were plenty of shocked faces. There’s a lot of parents very angry about it.”

School principal Sean Devlin is understood to have contacted the Armagh diocese about the incident, which is being investigated by the diocese child protection office.

The Church authorities also went to the police, who said no crime had been committed.

The Archdiocese of Armagh has refused to say whether Fr McVeigh has been suspended from duties or had restrictions imposed on his position while the investigation is under way.

The priest himself insists the pornographic images can be “legitimately explained”.

He told the Ulster Herald newspaper he had no knowledge of how the images appeared on the computer.

A statement from Cardinal Sean Brady said: “The archdiocese immediately sought the advice of the PSNI who indicated that on the basis of the evidence available no crime had been committed.”

A spokeswoman for the Council of Catholic Maintained Schools said they were aware that the principal of the school “immediately referred this matter to the diocesan authorities in accordance with the diocesan safeguarding procedures”.

An emergency meeting was held in the parish last night.

Source: Evening Herald

Driven by simple curiosity, Louis CK did some investigative reporting and found out some surprising things about the Catholic Church.

Beginning “It’s your moment of truth,” the ad asks: “Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs? You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.”

“As a member of the ‘flock’ of an avowedly antidemocratic Old Boys Club, isn’t it time you vote with your feet? Please, exit en Mass,” requests the ad, signed by FFRF Co-Presidents Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker.

Click on ad below for full sized view. 

The Vatican has for the first time appeared on the State Department’s list of money-laundering centers but the tiny city-state is not rated as a high-risk country.

The 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report was made public on Wednesday and Washington’s list of 190 countries classifies them in three categories: of primary concern, of concern and monitored.

The Vatican is in the second category, grouped with 67 other nations including Poland, Egypt, Ireland, Hungary and Chile.

It was added to the list because it was considered vulnerable to money-laundering and had recently established programs to prevent it, a State Department official said.

“To be considered a jurisdiction of concern merely indicates that there is a vulnerability to a financial system by money launderers. With the large volumes of international currency that goes through the Holy See, it is a system that makes it vulnerable as a potential money-laundering center,” Susan Pittman of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, told Reuters.

Last year, the Vatican adapted internal laws to comply with international standards on financial crime.

The Vatican is seeking inclusion on the European Commission’s so-called “white list” of states who comply with international standards against tax fraud and money-laundering. A decision on its inclusion is expected in June.

“Our aim is to make the ‘white list’ and we are happy that we have been put in the State Department’s less vulnerable category,” a Vatican official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The category of most vulnerable centers includes all members of the Group of Eight countries, including the United States, Germany, Italy and Russia, because the size of their economies and banking systems can facilitate money-laundering. It also includes small centers such as Britain’s Channel Islands.

The State Department’s methodology is different from that of the Financial Action Task Force’s International Cooperation Review Group (ICRG), which concentrates on a nation’s compliance with international law and money-laundering regulations.

VATICAN BANK HAS SCANDALOUS PAST

The Vatican Bank, founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII, has been in the spotlight since September 2010 when Italian investigators froze 23 million euros ($33 million) in funds in Italian banks after opening an investigation into possible money-laundering.

The bank said it did nothing wrong and was just transferring funds between its own accounts. The money was released in June 2011 but the investigation is continuing.

The Vatican’s new financial transparency laws set up internal regulations to make sure its bank and all other departments adhere to international regulations and standards, and cooperate with foreign authorities.

Two months ago, Italian newspapers published leaked internal letters which appeared to show a conflict among top Vatican officials about just how transparent the bank should be about dealings that took place before it enacted its new laws.

The Vatican Bank was formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR) and was entangled in the collapse 30 years ago of Banco Ambrosiano, with its lurid allegations about money-laundering, freemasons, mafiosi and the mysterious death of Ambrosiano chairman Roberto Calvi – “God’s banker”.

Source: Reuters

In France, an elderly man is fighting to make a formal break with the Catholic Church. He’s taken the church to court over its refusal to let him nullify his baptism, in a case that could have far-reaching effects.

Seventy-one-year-old Rene LeBouvier’s parents and his brother are buried in a churchyard in the tiny village of Fleury in northwest France. He himself was baptized in the Romanesque stone church and attended mass here as a boy.

LeBouvier says this rural area is still conservative and very Catholic, but nothing like it used to be. Back then, he says, you couldn’t even get credit at the bakery if you didn’t go to mass every Sunday.

LeBouvier grew up in that world and says his mother once hoped he’d become a priest. But his views began to change in the 1970s, when he was introduced to free thinkers. As he didn’t believe in God anymore, he thought it would be more honest to leave the church. So he wrote to his diocese and asked to be un-baptized.

“They sent me a copy of my records, and in the margins next to my name, they wrote that I had chosen to leave the church,” he says.

That was in the year 2000. A decade later, LeBouvier wanted to go further. In between were the pedophile scandals and the pope preaching against condoms in AIDS-racked Africa, a position that LeBouvier calls “criminal.” Again, he asked the church to strike him from baptismal records. When the priest told him it wasn’t possible, he took the church to court.

Last October, a judge in Normandy ruled in his favor. The diocese has since appealed, and the case is pending.

“One can’t be de-baptized,” says Rev. Robert Kaslyn, dean of the School of Canon Law at the Catholic University of America.

Kaslyn says baptism changes one permanently before the church and God.

“One could refuse the grace offered by God, the grace offered by the sacrament, refuse to participate,” he says, “but we would believe the individual has still been marked for God through the sacrament, and that individual at any point could return to the church.”

French law states that citizens have the right to leave organizations if they wish. Loup Desmond, who has followed the case for the French Catholic newspaper La Croix, says he thinks it could set a legal precedent and open the way for more demands for de-baptism.

“If the justice confirms that the name Rene LeBouvier has to disappear from the books, if it is confirmed, it can be a kind of jurisprudence in France,” he says.

Up to now, observers say the de-baptism trend has been marginal, but it’s growing. In neighboring Belgium, the Brussels Federation of Friends of Secular Morality reports that 2,000 people asked to be de-baptized in 2010. The newspaper Le Monde estimated that about 1,000 French people a year ask to have their baptisms annulled.

There is much anger across the continent by the recent pedophile scandals. In September, Germans marched to protest the pope’s visit.

Christian Weisner, who is with the German branch of the grassroots movement We Are Church, says Europeans still want religion, and they want to believe, but it has become very difficult within the Catholic Church.

“It’s the way that the Roman Catholic Church has not followed the new approach of democracy, the new approach of the women’s issue,” he says, “and there is really a big gap between the Roman Catholic Church and modern times.”

Back at the church in Fleury, LeBouvier stands by his parents’ grave. When asked if the case has ruined his chances of being buried in the family plot, he says he doesn’t have to worry about that. He’s donating his body to science.

Source: NPR

Listen To Mp3 from NPR

Sex Crimes and the Vatican is a documentary film by Colm O’Gorman, who was raped by a Catholic priest in the diocese of Ferns in County Wexford in Ireland when he was 14 years old. Father Sean Fortune was charged with 66 counts of sexual, indecent assault and another serious sexual offence relating to eight boys but he committed suicide on the eve of his trial. Colm started an investigation with the BBC in March 2002 which led to the resignation of Dr Brendan Comiskey, the bishop leading the Ferns Diocese. Colm then pushed for a government inquiry which led to the Ferns Report.

Holy See too slow on the draw.

The Vatican said on Wednesday an unknown buyer had snapped up the internet address vatican.xxx, a domain combining its name with an extension reserved for pornographic content.

“This domain is not available because it has been acquired by someone else, but not the Vatican,” Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said on Vatican radio.

It was not clear from his statement if the Vatican had tried to acquire the domain in order to prevent future misuse and had been beaten to the punch by the unknown buyer.

Lombardi denied Italian media reports that the Vatican had, like many other organizations including companies, universities and museums, registered the xxx domain to prevent its misuse.

The xxx domains are being launched this month for pornographic content and many organizations have preemptively acquired them so others cannot.

Source: Reuters

A new study suggests that one of Christianity’s most prized but mysterious relics – the Turin Shroud – is not a medieval forgery and could be the burial robe of Christ.

Italian scientists conducted a series of experiments that they said showed that the marks on the shroud – purportedly left by the imprint of Christ’s body – could not have been faked with technology that was available in medieval times.

Skeptics have long claimed that the 14ft-long cloth is a forgery. Radiocarbon testing conducted by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona in 1988 appeared to back up the theory, suggesting that it dated from between 1260 and 1390. But those tests were in turn disputed on the basis that they were contaminated by fibres from cloth that was used to repair the relic when it was damaged by fire in the Middle Ages.

The new study is the latest intriguing piece of a puzzle that has baffled scientists for centuries and spawned an industry of research, books and documentaries.

“The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin, has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining is impossible to obtain in a laboratory,” concluded experts from Italy’s National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Development.

The scientists set out to “identify the physical and chemical processes capable of generating a colour similar to that of the image on the shroud”. They concluded that the shade, texture and depth of the imprints on the cloth could be produced only with the aid of ultraviolet lasers producing extremely brief pulses of light.

They said the image of the bearded man must therefore have been created by “some form of electromagnetic energy (such as a flash of light at short wavelength)”.

Although they stopped short of offering a non-scientific explanation for the phenomenon, their findings will be embraced by those who believe that the marks on the shroud were miraculously created at the moment of Christ’s Resurrection.

“We are not at the conclusion. We are composing pieces of a fascinating and complex scientific puzzle,” the team reported.

Prof Paolo Di Lazzaro, who led the research, said: “When one talks about a flash of light being able to colour a piece of linen in the same way as the shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things such as miracles and resurrection. But as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes.

“We hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate but we will leave the conclusions to the experts, and ultimately to the conscience of individuals.”

The research backs up the outcome of tests between 1978 and 1981 carried out by a group of American scientists who called themselves the Shroud of Turin Research Project.

They conducted 120 hours of X-rays and ultraviolet light tests and concluded that the marks were not made by paints, pigments or dyes and that the image was not “the product of an artist”, but that at the same time it could not be explained by modern science.

One of Christianity’s greatest objects of veneration, the shroud shows the imprint of a man whose body appears to have nail wounds to his wrists and feet, pinpricks from thorns around his forehead and a spear wound to his chest. Each year it attracts millions of pilgrims to Turin cathedral, where it is kept in a climate-controlled case.

The Vatican has never said whether it believes the shroud to be authentic or not, although the Pope said the image “reminds us always” of Christ’s suffering.

Source: Montreal Gazette

Father Gabriele Amorth, who for years was the Vatican’s chief exorcist and claims to have cleansed hundreds of people of evil spirits, said yoga is Satanic because it leads to a worship of Hinduism and “all eastern religions are based on a false belief in reincarnation”.

Allegations of sexual abuse involving the Roman Catholic clergy in the United States rose sharply last year to nearly 700 from around 400 in 2009, according to a church report Monday.

The vast majority of the allegations, 653, involved alleged abuse that occurred decades ago but whose “victims/survivors are just now finding the courage to report” them, the study said.

Thirty accusations were made by current minors, but only eight were deemed credible, said the US church’s annual report on implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.

The number of victims was up sharply from 2009, when there were some 400 new allegations of clergy sex abuse in the United States.

Payouts were also up, rising from $104 million in 2009 to around $124 million last year.

Most of the allegations, 574, were against priests — nearly half of whom are already deceased. Some 275 of the accused priests had already faced earlier accusations, the report said.

Five allegations of sexual abuse of minors were made against international priests from Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico — accused of molesting two children — and the Philippines.

More than half the victims were between the ages of 10 and 14 when the alleged abuse began; one fifth were aged between 15 and 17 years, while another fifth were younger than 10.

Most victims were boys — 83 percent — and two-thirds of the alleged incidents occurred or began between 1960 and 1984, the report said.

That time period coincides with the “heyday of the sexual revolution,” Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said in a statement which ran as a full-page ad in the New York Times.

Donohue also denied what he called “a common belief fostered by the media that there is a widespread sexual abuse problem in the Catholic Church today.”

“The evidence is to the contrary… from 2005 to 2009, the average number of new credible accusations made against over 40,000 priests was 8.6,” he said.

Donohue also referenced research from a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Charol Shakeshaft, saying sexual abuse of children was 100 times more likely in schools than by priests, and adding that there “has been a slew of stories” detailing abuse allegations in the Orthodox Jewish community.

Most victims were not children but teens, he added, citing an article in the Boston Globe that said that because “more than three-quarters of the victims were post-pubescent… the abuse did not meet the clinical definition of pedophilia.”

The annual report is based on an audit of Roman Catholic dioceses and eparchies conducted every year since the archbishop of Boston admitted in 2002 to protecting a priest he knew had sexually abused young members of his church.

Days after last year’s report, a story in the New York Times accused Pope Benedict XVI of being aware, when he headed the church’s morals watchdog, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of at least one huge sex scandal involving a US priest, but doing nothing about it.

The alleged cover-up centered on the archdiocese of Milwaukee, where a now-deceased priest is accused of molesting hundreds of boys at a school for the deaf from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in January.

Last year, another US priest was arrested and charged with trying to hire someone to murder a Texas teenager who accused him of sexual abuse, and a widespread clergy sex scandal also came to light in Europe last year, further damaging the Roman Catholic church’s reputation.

Source: Agence France-Presse