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

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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

A surge in Satanism fuelled by the internet has led to a sharp rise in the demand for exorcists, the Roman Catholic Church has warned.

The conference in Rome has brought together more than 60 Catholic clergy as well as doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers and youth workers to discuss how to combat the dangers of Devil-worship.

Organisers say the rise of Satanism has been dangerously underestimated in recent years.

“There’s been a revival,” said Gabriele Nanni, a former exorcist and another speaker at the course.

In theory, any priest can perform an exorcism – a rite involving prayers to drive the Devil out of the person said to be possessed.

But Vatican officials said three years ago that parish priests should call in professional exorcists if they suspect one of their parishioners needs purging of evil.

An exorcist should be called when “the moral certainty has been reached that the person is possessed”, said Father Nanni, a member of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

That could be indicated by radical and disturbing changes in the person’s behaviour and voice, or an ability to garble in foreign languages or nonsensical gibberish.

While the number of genuine cases of possession by the Devil remained relatively small, “we must be on guard because occult and Satanist practices are spreading a great deal, in part with the help of the internet and new technologies that make it easier to access these rituals,” he said.

The Vatican’s chief exorcist claimed last year that the Devil lurked in the Vatican, the very heart of the Catholic Church.

Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron, scream, dribble and slobber, utter blasphemies and have to be physically restrained.

He claimed that the sex abuse scandals which have engulfed the Church in the US, Ireland, Germany and other countries, were proof that the anti-Christ was waging a war against the Holy See. He said Pope Benedict XVI believed “wholeheartedly” in the practice of exorcism.

Source: The Telegraph

The Pacific Northwest chapter of the Roman Catholic Church’s Jesuit order has agreed to pay $166 million to settle more than 500 child sexual abuse claims against priests in five states, attorneys have said.

The decision on Friday compels a payout by the Society of Jesus in the Oregon Province, and is part of an agreement to resolve its two-year-old bankruptcy case. Lawyers for the victims said it is also the largest ever payout by a Catholic religious order such as the Jesuits.

The Oregon Province is the Northwest chapter of the Rome-based Jesuit order and covers Oregon, Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Montana.

The victims, most of them Native Americans from remote Alaska Native villages or Indian reservations in the Pacific Northwest, were sexually or psychologically abused as children by Jesuit missionaries in those states in the 1940s through the 1990s, the plaintiffs’ attorneys said.

‘Lost childhood’

“No amount of money can bring back a lost childhood, a destroyed culture or a shattered faith,” Blaine Tamaki, a lawyer, who represents about 90 victims in the settlement, said in a statement.

“This settlement recognizes that the Jesuits betrayed the trust of hundreds of young children in their care,” Tamaki said. “These religious figures should have been responsible for protecting children, but instead raped and molested them.”

The Jesuits’ Oregon Province said the $166.1 million would be paid into a trust to “resolve approximately 524 abuse claims in a five-state area.”

Rebecca Rhoades, another attorney for victims of Jesuit abuse in the Northwest, said settlement negotiations began in earnest in October 2010 and were concluded this week.

She said the settlement, which has been approved by all parties, will be filed with the US Bankruptcy Court in Portland, Oregon, on March 29.

The Jesuits filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February 2009 as litigation over sexual abuse claims was mounting.

Source: al Jazeera

The Philadelphia archdiocese has suspended 21 Roman Catholic priests who were named as suspected child abusers in a scathing grand jury report last month.

Cardinal Justin Rigali, the archbishop of Philadelphia, said the priests had been removed from ministry while their cases were reviewed. The names of the priests were not being released, a spokesman for the archdiocese said.

“These have been difficult weeks since the release of the grand jury report, difficult most of all for victims of sexual abuse but also for all Catholics and for everyone in our community,” Rigali said.

The two-year grand jury investigation into abuse in the archdiocese of Philadelphia resulted in charges against two priests, a former priest and a Catholic schoolteacher who are accused of raping boys. A former high-ranking church official was accused of transferring problem priests to new parishes without revealing they had been the subject of sex abuse complaints.

Since 2002, when the national abuse crisis erupted in the archdiocese of Boston, US dioceses have barred hundreds of accused clergymen from public church work or removed them permanently from the priesthood. However, the archdiocese of Philadelphia has only taken action now.

The grand jury named 37 priests who remained in active ministry despite credible allegations of sexual abuse. After the release of the report, the second such investigation in the city in six years, Rigali vowed to take its calls for further reforms seriously.

In addition to the 21 priests placed on leave on Tuesday, three others named by the grand jury were suspended a week after the report’s release in February. Five other priests would have been suspended but one was already on leave, two were “incapacitated and have not been in active ministry” and two were no longer priests in the archdiocese but were members of another religious order that was not identified.

“The archdiocese has notified the superiors of their religious orders and the bishops of the dioceses where they are residing,” the cardinal said.

The remaining eight priests of the 37 named in the report were not being put on leave because the latest examination of their cases “found no further investigation is warranted”, Rigali said.

“I know that for many people their trust in the church has been shaken,” he said. “I pray that the efforts of the archdiocese to address these cases of concern and to re-evaluate our way of handling allegations will help rebuild that trust.”

In 2005, a grand jury said there was evidence of abuse by at least 63 priests and that church officials had transferred offenders to other parishes and dioceses. The Philadelphia archdiocese formed a panel to handle abuse complaints, but the 2011 grand jury found it mostly worked to protect the church, not the victims.

Rigali responded by appointing former city child abuse prosecutor Gina Maisto Smith to re-examine complaints made against the serving priests that internal church investigators had previously been unable to substantiate.

“Cardinal Rigali’s actions are as commendable as they are unprecedented and they reflect his concern for the physical and spiritual well-being of those in his care,” said the district attorney, Seth Williams. “We appreciate that the archdiocese has acknowledged the value of the report and seen fit to take some of the steps called for by the grand jury.”

Peter Isely of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said Rigali should have suspended the priests much sooner.

“There’s a simple reason that dozens of credibly accused child molesters have recklessly been kept in unsuspecting parishes for years, instead of being promptly suspended. It’s because Rigali and his top aides want it that way,” he said.

“They have taken and still take steps to protect, above all else, themselves, their secrets and their staff, instead of their flock. That’s what two separate Philadelphia grand juries, working with two prosecutors, after two long investigations, found over the last six years.”

Terence McKiernan of BishopAccountability.org said Rigali’s move to suspend the priests “was forced on him by the Philadelphia grand jury report, and is an act of desperation, not transparency”.

He said: “In Philadelphia, a Catholic official had to be indicted before the archdiocese finally began to comply with its own policies. We have no reason to believe that Philadelphia is unusual. In other US dioceses, credibly accused priests are no doubt still in ministry and review boards are protecting priests instead of protecting children.”

Source: The Guardian

The priest was so unhinged that officers decided to record him in his cell offering them oral sex and promising that Oprah Winfrey would rescue him. At one point, Kury even offered a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

This video is from Fox News, broadcast March 3, 2011.